Category Archives: Craft Essays

ON AUTOBIOGRAPHIA: YOURS, MINE, AND OURS, a craft essay by Ian Clay Sewall

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ON AUTOBIOGRAPHIA: YOURS, MINE, AND OURS
by Ian Clay Sewall

1.

Writing stories and essays about the people I remember and the people I know requires stretching out moments, staring through a square piece of stained glass that’s purple and blue and orange, soldered a long time ago against strips of silvery-looking zinc. The stained glass is a few feet from my stained desk, and looking at it helps me remember that what I am writing, the colors I use, the tools of creative nonfiction, are many. And they’re both new and old.

At times, when I’ve wanted to explore further inside another person’s interiority, when I’ve wondered what those people wondered, I’ve written in a draft, “I imagine,” or “perhaps,” or “maybe.”

When I write about my memories, I’m a first-person narrator limited to my own experience. But when I speculate in these narratives, “maybe” is a round trampoline of possibility. It allows an excavation of what, for example, my parents, born in 1949, think about everything from the snowy weather to horses on the prairie.

When we, as writers of memoir or personal essay, look back at what someone might have been thinking, where their eyes moved, how their words connected or belied the content of a conversation, how nothing and everything telegraphed meaning—a speculative sentence or two in a story can reveal what could have happened and didn’t, what could have been said but wasn’t, what notes may or may not have been played.

Speculation in creative nonfiction is a moment where we come right up to the line of fiction—though we don’t cross. It’s that experience of being in the creative writing sandbox—a writing portage that picks the readers up and out of bustling narrative rapids, and then sets them down on the banks of the river story. The speculative gesture is an arrow of maybe; one that reveals new angles on the muscles of a story.

2.

And there is a danger, too, in all of that. And that’s the mythopoeic nature of writing about yourself. You become the hero. This certainly wasn’t the case in every remembered event. Many times, there were no heroes. Sometimes, others were heroes.

And yet, the very act of creative nonfiction means you are telling your own story. There is some sort of mythologizing of the moments.

I imagine that the people who love us, those who despise us, and those who are indifferent about us—everyone has myths, in which they are the ones who are seen or distorted or refracted.

My father wrote a book about folklore, and early in the text, he compares storytelling to a cowdog that’s been kenneled—and that cowdog begins to herd the birds he sees on a power cable. The story about the dog begins with the phrase “They say” and that makes me wonder who exactly is they? Who is saying this?

My father created a myth out of that cowdog; to me, the cowdog represents any story that’s told again and again. And there’s the paradox of what my dad is saying about narrative—the notion that it can be exhausting. The notion that telling stories can be fatiguing, on the surface, seems contradictory.

But maybe so. Maybe so.

My goal is to present images, stories, and the human beings I know and knew in a truthful light—a light framed in letters that relives and reimagines and retells. But what truth? Whose truth?

 

3.

As I write vignettes about rural Canada where I grew up, and stories of Los Angeles, where I live now, I’m often pulled towards the phone, towards my two Dunvegan Hill parents, as they sit at the oak table of their farmhouse overlooking the winding, crystalline Peace River. It sparkles from that table view.

The lively conversation begins with a textual primer. They’ve been given a page or two that I’ve written about our 160 acres or maybe about the farm animals. My parents come to the conversation primed and prepared. They come with insights and memories that might not precisely match mine—though there is plenty of overlap. They are young again in these conversations and now they are living in the topcoat. Often, they’re telling me stories about when they’re the age I am now. The story will last longer, I imagine, because of the primer coat they help provide. The words will stick better.

“Dad, could you tell me about our mule, Red Jenny?” I asked on a recent call. I can’t imagine what his response will be. All I can remember is Jenny’s single blinded pale blue eye, her slow and steady trot, her towering height against my brambly, skinny body.

“Jenny and her brother Jack were separated, son, after we bought her from a Nebraska jail.”

This detail surpasses any sort of textural note I suspected he’d supply—something about her coat or the way she once wintered with a moose during a particularly cold winter. There’s a bifurcation where both their voices begin to meander and split into streams. My mother added, “Jenny was in that prison to work with the prisoners.”

Truly, they are invaluable, these interviews with my parents, who are often the main characters of my collection. One might argue the subjects of a memoir should not be able to see the work as it is written. For me, their stories help deepen my own.

4.

While I write my collection of essays, on the freshly trodden side of my MFA at Antioch University in Los Angeles, I’m also peering into craft books on nonfiction like the lush flash nonfiction The Best of Brevity, edited by Zoë Bossiere and Dinty W. Moore. The concise and taut essays push their sentences. The essays are full. They are braided, graphic memoir, fragmented, hermit crab, lyric, micro, numbered—like this one—and researched. I feel as though I’m at the Getty, looking at art from all over the world.

In Christine Byl’s braided essay, “Bear Fragments,” she shares several bear stories from different locations, and then one patch of her essay includes fourteen instances of bear as a verb and lists a variety of expressions. How can one not be impressed?

In Jane Alison’s craft book, Meander, Spiral, Explode, she writes: “Super-short paragraphs and line breaks can aerate prose, throwing light into density, giving the reader space to think.” The notion that prose is something to be aerated—this gorgeous metaphor—how can a writer not be inspired to experiment in such literary soil?

I’ve gone from writing sentences to appreciating sentences to experimenting with the way sentences move and flow on the page.

5.

And what happens when my hopefully well-aerated vignettes and short essay story bits get published? There’s a family text message in Canada, where all sorts of text moves from Alberta to British Columbia to here in Los Angeles.

I see a thumbs up or a heart and congrats.

And then, back to the drawing board. I’m in need of more stories, I’ve decided, for this collection. I find new stories when I become more sensitive to narrative, more open to the sounds outside my window, more able to listen in a conversation. So, I begin my writing once again.

Coffee helps. Walks are good. Traveling is especially effective. I think back to Utah.

The car I’m driving there, then, is cold. The back window is covered with morning frost. Several inches of airy snow layer up in the parking lot. I remove the ice on the windows with a snow scraper. The plastic end pushes on ice that formed overnight. The ice flies off, scattering to the asphalt and my weathered cowboy boots. I flip the tool around, and the bristle broom feathers and fusses until the glass looks new.  A new story idea emerges about rural cars and trucks that need to be warmed for minutes before getting inside and driving. I have to write the idea down before it vanishes. The cold is just the tactile imagery needed for transportation and story mining.

There are thousands of these types of feelings and stories in me from Canada. The stories are in little containers, waiting to become words on a page. Waiting for a juxtaposed layering with Los Angeles.

So, I come to the typewriter. An old Olympia that was repainted locally, in Brentwood. The blue matches the California sky. The clacking sound of the keys makes me aware of each stroke, each moment the metal key collides with the inky ribbon. I study my hands, suddenly new, covered in rings. One ring is textured like the bark of a redwood. Another is silver like moonlight—blue with turquoise from an old mine in New Mexico, the shape of an eye. A gold signet on my pinky, a bear paw engraved.

Perhaps while I sit at my stained desk in Los Angeles, my parents are out on their deck, peering out at the Peace River, wondering what it all means.

A brown dog’s tail wags near my writing desk. Fresh coffee is about twenty feet away, ready to be poured into a worn cup. The stained glass does what it always does: lets the light in, acts as an inspiration, and leads the way to prose.

Ian Clay Sewall is a Canadian based in Los Angeles. He holds an MFA from Antioch University and his stories have appeared in The Malahat Review, Canadian Notes and Queries, Prairie Fire, and elsewhere. His films have won awards in both the US and Canada.

FROM DRAWER TO BOOKSTORE IN JUST TWENTY-FOUR YEARS: The Long and Worthy Journey to Publication by Ona Gritz

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FROM DRAWER TO BOOKSTORE IN JUST TWENTY-FOUR YEARS:
The Long and Worthy Journey to Publication
by Ona Gritz

The oldest version of my forthcoming middle-grade novel that I can access on my computer is dated 2010, though I know the drafts go back much farther. For one thing, these pages have equal signs where apostrophes should be, indicating that it was wonkily converted to Microsoft Word from WordPerfect. Anyone remember WordPerfect? I recall that the initial glimmer of the idea came to me soon after the release of my first book—and only other children’s novel—when my now twenty-six-year-old son was two.

As is often the case with fiction, the idea was born out of an image from my own life: me, as a little girl, staring at a childhood photo of my much older half-sister and noting the similarities in our faces, along with something else I recognized, something beyond appearances yet somehow there, even in a black and white snapshot. This wasn’t a sister I was close to. In fact, I barely knew her. For most of my childhood, my parents had passed her off as a distant cousin. Still, our resemblance was unmistakable and that fascinated me. Meanwhile, the sister I lived with and loved fought with our mother constantly and, the year she was twelve and I was six, she ran away. Back then, running away and general “incorrigibility” were illegal offenses for minors. My parents brought her to court and she was sent to reform school, a situation both heartbreaking and complicated.

Even in my thirties, when I saw that glint of a novel in the memory of a small, lonely girl holding a photograph, I barely understood the fraught dynamics of the house I’d grown up in and had no intention or desire to try to capture them on the page. What I was interested in was much simpler and more universal: a younger sister’s longing for an older one who is out of reach.

I named my fictional half-sisters Molly and Alison and separated them, not by the kind of family secrets and strife that kept me from my own sisters, but by mere distance and logistics. Ten-year-old Molly lives with her parents in upstate New York, while twenty-year-old Alison lives with her mother in London. I began a first draft in 1998 when email was still a rarity in homes and video calls were far in our future. Without these luxuries of communication, the sisters write letters on slender sheets of airmail paper. But technology wasn’t the only thing missing from my earliest manuscript drafts: so was a plot. If I had to sum up that original story in an elevator pitch, it would have sounded like this: Ten-year-old Molly begins to worry that she’ll ruin her older half-sister Allison’s long-awaited visit after Molly’s best friend complains that she finds her own little sister clingy and annoying.

A friend who is a literary agent read my first less-than-fifty-page draft and gently told me that more had to happen, and that without trouble there was no story. Fine, I thought, and threw in a necklace that Molly had stolen from Alison the one other time they saw each other, back when Molly was five and Alison fifteen. The truth was I didn’t really buy that such strife was necessary. While reading, I tend to wade through conflict the way I wait out chase scenes in movies, anxious to get back to the good stuff: beautifully rendered scenes and sentences, characters whose inner lives reflect and inform my own.

I should mention that my background is in poetry, which may be why my focus, as both reader and writer, has never been on action and tension, but on sound, resonance, and well-drawn moments. I say may because it occurs to me now—and perhaps you’re ahead of me here—that the very thing I became a reader to escape was the tension in my childhood home and the devastating actions of the adults around me.

That 2010 draft—the oldest salvageable attempt at my novel—ends abruptly in the midst of its one tense passage: Molly returns Alison’s necklace, meaning it as a kind of welcome gift, but is met with her sister’s hurt and fury that Molly had taken it in the first place. It’s an overblown response and a completely unbelievable scene, which I’m sure is why I stopped there and went back to poems and personal essays, genres where I felt sure of myself.

Yet I pulled that fragment of manuscript out of the drawer periodically through the years. I can see why. Molly has a captivating voice, even in her earliest iteration, and the pages contain lovely moments. And there was something necessary in that undeveloped story. While there was no lack of children’s books about divorce or newly blended families—the young protagonists living through the trauma of unexpected, unwanted, and often colossal change—I hadn’t found any that explored the unique but also common experience of being a child of a parent’s second or third family. I still haven’t, and I get why that situation is overlooked. Place a story years after the painful decision to divorce or the dramatic reshaping of a family, and you miss out on some good plot-driving, page-turning material. But what I know from the inside is that, if the children of those latter marriages have siblings they don’t live with or fully know, it’s likely they long to have them in their lives. And one thing that propels a more internally focused story is desire.

“What does your character want?” the gurus of story structure ask in the many books I read as I oh-so-slowly taught myself how to write this novel.

It’s hard to explain why in retrospect, since I had my desire line from the start, it took me so long to find Molly and Alison’s story. Especially given that I’d already written one middle grade novel and sold it to a big five publisher. But my first book, inspired by the quiet lyrical children’s novels I loved—Patricia MacLachlan’s Sarah, Plain and Tall, Cynthia Rylant’s Missing May—made it in just under the wire before most agents and editors would only consider books, especially for kids, that had Plot with a capital P.

Here are some notes from my agent friend after reading one of my many revisions: “Give Alison an inheritable disease, or let Molly discover Alison is a drug addict…Don’t just give Molly one big thing to contend with, make it five.”

I held the phone to my ear and wrote this all down, disheartened but not entirely surprised. In my day job as a librarian, I watched children’s fiction, by then frequently set in fantastical worlds, growing busier and more action-packed. Though I knew my novel needed higher stakes, when I thought of throwing one dramatic event after another at Molly, my mind grew cloudy, and I put the manuscript away yet again. What kept drawing me back were the exceptions to this trend— beautifully written, realistic, and compelling books by Jacqueline Woodson, Rebecca Stead, Rita Williams-Garcia. I read and reread them, trying to understand how they were made. I also continued to read craft books, including Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing, where I found this:

“Plot can be as intricate as a whodunit, or as simple as a character experiencing a small but significant shift in perspective. But invariably it comes from the people we create on the page.”

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By this time, I had inserted the Internet into my manuscript, not simply to bring the story up-to-date, but I had begun to see how its use could deepen the sisters’ long-distance connection. With video calls a regular part of their lives, their relationship can already be in place when the novel begins. Alison is no longer just an idea to Molly, but a person. As Molly puts it, “…what I am is worse than being an only child. Only children don’t have someone in particular to miss.”

Someone in particular. Plot comes from the people we create on the page. What does your character want?

Molly wants her sister. She wants her the way I wanted my own after she left our troubled family, the way I still want her (though she’s no longer alive). But after you ask what a character wants, the next question is: What is she willing to do to get it?

That’s where I was stuck. Alison lives thousands of miles away. She’s twice Molly’s age and has her own life. Molly could do no more about that than I could have done about what kept either of my sisters from me. This was the wall between me and my plot. Molly needed agency where she had none.

Unless…she thinks she has agency? Buried in my notes from that long-ago call with the agent is this: “Show Molly moving forward and fouling up.”

Make Molly foul up. That, at long last, was it.

I changed the opening so that when we meet Molly she’s operating under a misconception. Having learned that Alison is finally coming to visit, she assumes that Alison is moving in with the family. This makes sense to her because, in every other family she knows, siblings live together. Upon learning this isn’t the plan, Molly does everything in her meager power to try to make it so. As she attempts to bend things to her will and fit them into her deeply felt belief about what a family should look like, conflicts arise, along with enough twists and surprises that I found myself excited to know what would happen next. Also, because Molly comes to us flawed, she’s able to grow. Over the course of the story, she develops a fuller understanding of who Alison is and what she’s been through and finds her way to a compromise that serves everyone. Molly also comes to the realization that there are many ways to be a family.

By taking my time and uncovering my novel’s plot in my own way, I’d discovered its theme.

I am sometimes frustrated with myself and embarrassed that it took me nearly a quarter century to complete a hundred-page novel. But all along, I worked on writing projects in other genres, each informing the other: my ear for poetry evolving into an ear for dialogue, attempts at plotting the novel teaching me to add more movement to my essays.

“Things take the time they take,” as Mary Oliver says. Still, I’m startled to realize that the children I originally imagined reading August Or Forever are now all grown up. My hope is that they’ll pick it up anyway, to share with their own kids.

Ona Gritz’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Ploughshares, Brevity, River Teeth, One Art, and elsewhere. Recent honors include two Notable mentions in The Best American Essays, and a winning entry in The Poetry Archive Now: Wordview 2020 project. Her new middle-grade novel, August Or Forever, will be out from Fitzroy Books on February 14th. Find her at onagritz.com

 

 

 

ON AUTOBIOGRAPHIA: YOURS, MINE, AND OURS, a craft essay by Ian Clay Sewall

ON AUTOBIOGRAPHIA: YOURS, MINE, AND OURS, a craft essay by Ian Clay Sewall

FROM DRAWER TO BOOKSTORE IN JUST TWENTY-FOUR YEARS: The Long and Worthy Journey to Publication by Ona Gritz

FROM DRAWER TO BOOKSTORE IN JUST TWENTY-FOUR YEARS: The Long and Worthy Journey to Publication by Ona Gritz

CENTER OF AN IMAGINARY WORLD: Place in Fiction, a craft essay by Mandira Pattnaik

CENTER OF AN IMAGINARY WORLD: Place in Fiction, a craft essay by Mandira Pattnaik

THIRTEEN POTSHOTS AT THE PROSE POEM, a Craft Essay by Mike James

THIRTEEN POTSHOTS AT THE PROSE POEM, a Craft Essay by Mike James

GROWING SEASONS: On Plants and Poetry, a craft essay by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett

GROWING SEASONS: On Plants and Poetry, a craft essay by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett

SHOW, THEN TELL: Crafting Fiction with Alive Exposition  by Grace Evans

SHOW, THEN TELL: Crafting Fiction with Alive Exposition  by Grace Evans

A LESSON FROM MY THIRD-GRADE SELF: On Writing from the Heart, a Craft Essay by Vivian Conan

A LESSON FROM MY THIRD-GRADE SELF: On Writing from the Heart, a Craft Essay by Vivian Conan

COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS:  on Lewis Hyde’s Advice for Creativity, and How I Became an Artist in the Modern World, a craft essay by Geoff Watkinson

COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS:  on Lewis Hyde’s Advice for Creativity, and How I Became an Artist in the Modern World, a craft essay by Geoff Watkinson

WANTED: TWO WRITERS MUSE ON THE ART OF SAYING NO by Beth Kephart and Stephanie Weaver

WANTED: TWO WRITERS MUSE ON THE ART OF SAYING NO by Beth Kephart and Stephanie Weaver

REAL ROT: My Newfound Impatience with Antiheroes, a Craft Essay by Tom Gammarino

REAL ROT: My Newfound Impatience with Antiheroes, a Craft Essay by Tom Gammarino

HARNESSING WILDNESS: THE PRACTICE OF POETIC LEAPS , a Craft Essay by Kari Ann Ebert

HARNESSING WILDNESS: THE PRACTICE OF POETIC LEAPS , a Craft Essay by Kari Ann Ebert

BUILDING BOATS, WRITING POEMS A Craft Essay by James Diaz

BUILDING BOATS, WRITING POEMS A Craft Essay by James Diaz

THE ELEPHANT OF SILENCE, a poetry craft essay by John Wall Barger

THE ELEPHANT OF SILENCE, a poetry craft essay by John Wall Barger

YOU ARE A POET (Even When You Aren’t Writing) A Craft Essay by Mark Danowsky

YOU ARE A POET (Even When You Aren’t Writing) A Craft Essay by Mark Danowsky

SPECULATIVE MEMOIR: MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLEm a craft essay by Laraine Herring

SPECULATIVE MEMOIR: MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLEm a craft essay by Laraine Herring

RESEARCH AND WRITING: The Warp and Woof of Historical Fiction, a craft essay by Terry Roberts

RESEARCH AND WRITING: The Warp and Woof of Historical Fiction, a craft essay by Terry Roberts

EMBRACE THE NELSON: Going Beyond the Pretty Narrative Voice, a craft essay by Dena Soffer

EMBRACE THE NELSON: Going Beyond the Pretty Narrative Voice, a craft essay by Dena Soffer

NOTES TO A YOUNG WRITER: On (Re)writing, (Re)vision, Editing, and Other Random Terms, a Craft Essay by Gayathri Prabhu

NOTES TO A YOUNG WRITER: On (Re)writing, (Re)vision, Editing, and Other Random Terms, a Craft Essay by Gayathri Prabhu

THE FUNNY IN MEMOIR: Alison Bechdel, Dinty W. Moore, and Trey Popp, a craft essay by Beth Kephart

THE FUNNY IN MEMOIR: Alison Bechdel, Dinty W. Moore, and Trey Popp, a craft essay by Beth Kephart

RESONANT PLACES: Houses We Live in, Homes that Live in Our Writing, a Fiction Craft Essay by Ellen Prentiss Campbell

RESONANT PLACES: Houses We Live in, Homes that Live in Our Writing, a Fiction Craft Essay by Ellen Prentiss Campbell

MAKING THE READER FEEL SOMETHING. PLEASE. SHOW AND TELL, A Craft Essay by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood

MAKING THE READER FEEL SOMETHING. PLEASE. SHOW AND TELL, A Craft Essay by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood

QUEER (PRIVATE) EYE: Crafting a New Hardboiled Sleuth, a Craft Essay by Margot Douaihy

QUEER (PRIVATE) EYE: Crafting a New Hardboiled Sleuth, a Craft Essay by Margot Douaihy

AVOIDING / EMBRACING: Strategies for Writers with Anxiety Disorders A Craft Essay by Bailey Bridgewater

AVOIDING / EMBRACING: Strategies for Writers with Anxiety Disorders A Craft Essay by Bailey Bridgewater

What I Learned from Jennifer Egan’s Use of Sensory Detail, a Craft Essay by Sandy Smith

A woman browsing the fiction section of a bookstore

SISTERHOOD: How the Books we Both Read Helped Me Write My Sister’s Life into Fiction, a Craft Essay by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

SISTERHOOD: How the Books we Both Read Helped Me Write My Sister’s Life into Fiction, a Craft Essay by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

A BOOK BY ANY OTHER NAME: ON TITLES AND DATING: A Craft Essay by Melinda Scully

A Man and a Woman behind a fogged class window

HOW WRITING FICTION HELPS ME—AND MAYBE YOU—DEAL WITH PAST TRAUMA, a craft essay by Kelly Fordon

woman's hands typing

THE BIG WARM HOUSE An Essay on the Art of Becoming a Writer by Emma Sloley

THE BIG WARM HOUSE An Essay on the Art of Becoming a Writer by Emma Sloley

THE PROBLEM WITH SURFING AND WRITING: a Craft Essay by Nate House

Long exposure shot of man surfing

ON REVISION: From story to STORY, With a Little Help from a Doomed Vole and Robert McKee, a Craft Essay by Lea Page

a small rodent on a dirt path
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CENTER OF AN IMAGINARY WORLD: Place in Fiction, a craft essay by Mandira Pattnaik

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CENTER OF AN IMAGINARY WORLD: Place in Fiction
A Craft Essay by Mandira Pattnaik

Recently, while compiling my short stories and flash fiction for a possible collection, I was surprised by how many of those stories were based in the culture and climate markers of the place I live. Some place markers appear by explicit mention geographically, while other stories wore badges of a common identifiable whereabouts. I realized these references represented the center of my imaginative world, much like Calcutta does for novelist Amitav Ghosh. The same way James Joyce records his short stories upon the scaffolding of the city of Dublin:

In Westmoreland Street the footpaths were crowded with young men and women returning from business, and ragged urchins ran here and there yelling out the names of the evening editions… full of the noises of tram gongs and swishing trolleys and his nose already sniffed the curling fumes of punch. — “Counterparts”, from Dubliners

Consider the accurate sketch of Dublin, the stage is the city’s pavements: urban working class on the throes of change are characters, drama in a state of flux. Compare the above with a similar passage from Ghosh’s novel “The Shadow Lines”:

…he was a familiar figure within the floating, talkative population of students and would-be footballers and bank clerks and small-time politicos and all the rest who gravitated towards that conversation-loving stretch of road between Gariahat and Gole Park. 

It was while I considered my appreciation of this, that I began to examine the importance of place in fiction writing and how a work needs to be seen through the prism of the places themselves. Simultaneously, it also intrigues me why fiction should be strongly rooted in place anyway. Accomplished writers deftly use cities and hometowns, like wefts and warps, looped into their writing. The chosen locales, then, lend themselves to superlative imagery and metaphors, becoming the fabric on which character nuances are woven in, like a rich tapestry. Authors use the place’s dramatic historical upheavals and even mundane daily affairs. Remember Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine? The novel is set in the summer of 1928 in fictional Green Town, Illinois, based upon Bradbury’s childhood home in Waukegan, Illinois. The main character is a 12-year-old boy patterned on himself.

In writing drawn artfully in context and reference from places that flow in the veins of its authors, I find that writers are in love with those places, sometimes subconsciously, like soil before a seed takes root.

Looking at my own writing and that of others, I have noticed some patterns:

  • I tend to braid in references to rural India, where I spent my earliest years. It is with some effort, I might acknowledge, that I avoid cliches and focus on lived experiences, aided by observations of the nuances of life in miniature forms.
  • Drawing attention to diverse dialects, regions, and cultures pays richly, for they make for great story-telling. Blending in an author’s unique perspective can be charming to the appreciative reader. A pop culture reference—such as a popular song, actor or political figure associated with a particular region—often further enhances the link.
  • To highlight labor and love in peasant land is resonant to a wide spectrum of readers, particularly when writing traditional or classical fiction, something I hope to bring to new and urban readers, giving attention to a low-key but lived-in region. By doing so, I can incorporate references to markets, streets, parks, hills, brooks, and unassuming local folk, embellishing them with my sincere observations. This sort of approach shows up in the work of great poets and writers, including Rabindranath Tagore, (poet and Nobel Prize winner for the poetry collection Geetanjali), novelist and current International Booker winner Geetanjali Shree (for the novel Tombs of Sand), and cartoonist and short-story writer R. K. Narayan (winner of India’s second highest civilian award).
  • Finally, I like to intrude upon “Indian” folktales, myths and stories, every once in a while, retelling a favorite childhood fable, although the phrase “folktales from India” is a misnomer. There are scores of regions, and diverse stories broadly identifying as “Indian,” all different under the surface. In “Indian” tales, translations could include stories from places as varied as the Thar desert and the place with the highest rainfall in the world; from as many as twenty-two different regional languages, encompassing the harrowing and comic, sardonic and allegorical, mysterious and romantic. (Since so little of it has been collected, writers like me can learn a lot simply by reading these place-centric tales because there’s a treasure trove waiting to be explored.)

I realize writing should be tethered to roots and place, and should ooze both authority and authenticity. To fall back on origins and identity to build imaginary worlds seems natural. For example, I can easily recall the fragrance of rain-washed black soil, the bounty of nature as much as its ferocity, the warmth of a neighborhood where you knew what was cooking in others’ kitchens, and I write about those. I can effortlessly visualize childhood summer fairs, cobbled lanes, cattle sheds, and the weekly marketplace: these are now some of the recurring themes and images in my narratives. I hope to project these images like a series of frames, together with their unique sounds and experiences, through my work, bolstering and vivifying the narrative.

Writers may open tiny windows out into the places that are centers of their creative minds, and readers can glimpse a new, previously undiscovered world. This sort of place-centric approach piques the reader’s interest and helps enhance and expand character and plot.

Mandira Pattnaik is an Indian poet, fiction writer, essayist, and columnist published in more than two hundred magazines, journals, and anthologies, in fifteen countries. Learn more at mandirapattnaik.com

 

 

THIRTEEN POTSHOTS AT THE PROSE POEM, a Craft Essay by Mike James

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THIRTEEN POTSHOTS AT THE PROSE POEM
a Craft Essay
by Mike James

 

An alien lands at a city basketball court at night. He either lands inside a science fiction story or he lands inside a prose poem.

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Prose poems are the pulp fiction of poetry. They exist to be read with flashlights beneath wool blankets at night.

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Prose poems are kept in basements and attics. They are seldom invited to dinner parties and award shows.

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Howie Good, wrote, “The prose poem exists to challenge and provoke and to raise a defiant middle finger to all who would colonize consciousness.” Howie Good knows how to write a prose poem.

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Readers consider prose poems to be autobiographical at the same rate as they consider all other poems.  The introduction of aliens, mermaids, parrots, Bhutan, private detectives, or drag queens will not dissuade this tendency.

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A prose poem can start as a dream and end as a wish. The wish might contain quotes and letters, found objects and dreamscapes.

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Prose poems are not simply poetic prose, a la Thomas Wolfe. Prose poems are as far form purple prose as Mercury is from Pluto.

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Prose poems can trick the unsuspecting poetry hater into falling in love. The world is full of marriages consecrated by the prose poem.

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Because prose poems have a shorter history than free verse or blank verse or most traditional forms, they are not as burdened by history. Prose poems can exist in the circus of now.

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If a good poem is about the connective leap of language and images, a good prose poem creates a world where people leap instead of walk. Each line is a leap within a made up place.

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A prose poem can tell a story that doesn’t end. Abruptness can thrive within the confines of a prose poem.

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People look for a field guide for prose poems. The best advice is always to get lost.

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A prose poem might be a letter filled with facts. The addressee might be an antelope and the fact might be the weight of angels.

Mike James makes his home outside Nashville, Tennessee. He has published in numerous magazines, large and small, throughout the country. His many poetry collections include: Leftover Distances (Luchador), Parades (Alien Buddha), Jumping Drawbridges in Technicolor (Blue Horse), and Crows in the Jukebox (Bottom Dog.)

 

 

GROWING SEASONS: On Plants and Poetry, a craft essay by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett

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GROWING SEASONS: On Plants and Poetry
A Craft Essay
by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett

Like most things, it began with beauty: My first apartment after college overlooked the backyard of several Crown Heights buildings, which had become an unofficial dump with stained mattresses, twisted remnants of recliners, and an impressive pack of raccoons. I’d just escaped an abusive relationship with a woman who’d unraveled my self-esteem and told me I’d never be a writer, and was working at a pizza shop by Union Square. I’d climb onto the fire escape outside my bedroom window to smoke and look down on this compromised patch of wildness, snow-draped in winter and then bursting—if you looked hard enough—into blossom by spring. I didn’t have my own plants then, but as I tapped my cigarette on the rusted railing and watched ash dance toward the green tangle below, I had a building sense that I’d traveled damagingly far from myself, a child of the Tennessee woods, and that whatever healing I was undertaking would involve returning, somehow, to that self who could lose hours crouched above a creek watching crawdads skim the bottom.

It wouldn’t be until a year later, in a room that overlooked an air shaft, that an acquaintance gave me my first plant—a tiny aeonium. I’d just started grad school, something I wasn’t nearly stable enough for but desperately needed, so was waitressing at a cavernous Italian spot in the Met Life Building by day and taking classes at night, and in between, doing any self-destructive thing I could dream up. It was, to say the least, chaotic. So it was shocking that I managed not to immediately kill the succulent. I even constructed makeshift shelving in my sole window to hold what became a small collection.

I didn’t bring any of those plants across the country when I moved to Oakland after graduation, but I found a rent-controlled apartment (every New Yorker’s dream) beside a tidal inlet called Lake Merritt, which faced the courtyard of a church with a magnolia that bloomed twice a year, including—shockingly—in February, purple flowers almost obscene against bare grey bark. And that was where I became both a poet and a gardener.

See, I’d strayed from poetry too, which had also begun with beauty—acrobatics of Emily Dickinson, passion of Audre Lorde, cleverness of Elizabeth Bishop—and somewhere between getting an education, I’d lost the exhilaration of writing, the unfolding of something simultaneously you and beyond your understanding. I’d dug into the “tradition,” experimented with form, learned what the “New York School” was, while uncoupling myself from the impulse poetry arose from in the first place. In that Oakland apartment, without assignments and deadlines for the first time, I learned how to read for pleasure again and to write for it too. I was Emily’s nobody, and I was free.

I filled the kitchen with succulents, living room with woody greenery, hall with trailing pothos. The blank page and new plant—strange, challenging—drew me forward. I learned about light levels, fertilizer, and potting mixes. I went to a lot of therapy. I bought a moisture probe. I fell in love. I put one word in front of another, cleaned dust from leaves, tried not to overwater, repotted. Something remarkable happened, and very slowly, grew.

Leaves came as I wrote between shifts at a café and, later, during my lunchbreak at a desk job near Civic Center. I walked to Dick Blick to buy handmade green paper and pinned it over the cubicle’s gray, propped grow lights in each corner, and then covered the majority of desk space with vines. I scoured the farmer’s market for what was variegated and fenestrated, what twisted and climbed. I am alive, my little grove seemed to say, even here.

As a decidedly language-arts kid who doodled through biology, each unfurling leaf bore a message—something moves beyond conscious knowledge but is imbued, nevertheless, with vitality—and so, I was drawn back, leaf by solitary leaf, to my own mysteries, which I’d long ago put aside as childish things. Turns out, my genius (in the classical sense) and intellect were not as “universal” as I’d been led to believe, but deeply individual. And, more than that, what I found interesting and gave my attention to was purely my own. So, I turned the same eye that kept careful watch over my plants toward myself—what parts of my writing had I kept in a dark corner; which grown rangy; which overfertilized? I saw the ways I’d contorted, been pruned almost unrecognizably. I saw parts of myself, despite it all, reaching toward the light.

Everyone has bad tendencies as a gardener, and my most prominent echoed a larger flaw—impatience, which leads to overwatering, fussing to death. I wanted everything and I wanted it now, but my own fecundity, like that of my plants, couldn’t be rushed. Instead of pressuring each poem with perfection, I committed to stewarding it toward its own unique potential. The poems, unburdened, started to become wilder and more surprising, reminding me of what I’d written before I knew enough to fear being found out as the strange, obsessive, particular writer that I am. In the process, I slowly uncovered a joy that I thought lost, sloughing off my anxiety about what might come next—I was excited to find out. As pothos grows one leaf on the back of the last, hidden until branching beyond its brother, I put one word before another, trusting the next would come, and the next. And I let go of the desire to be a “great writer” I hadn’t even known I’d harbored, and instead, surrendered to simply being a writer, someone who wrote.

Of course, my plants sometimes struggled—tips of leaves browning or yellowing, peace lily wilting dramatically—and so, forced me to stop, to not just look, but to really see until I understood what was needed. Poems were like this too, each particular in its rhythm, structure, and voice, and all I had to do was to spend time in their presence, look closer, listen deeper. And isn’t that what perpetually impatient me came to these practices for in the first place—to test whether focused, careful attention would be rewarded with beauty. And it always has been. Yes, care coaxes beauty, but so does attention itself—it honors and transforms the attended-to thing, is another word for love. And love transforms not just the beloved, but the lover too. In it, I found what was left behind in the woods long ago—a private grove where I could listen to my own wildness, and for once, see it mirrored in the world around me.

The patience honed by cleaning leaves with a microfiber cloth and monitoring progress against fungus gnats, I turned to sending out my work and meticulously documenting it. Spreadsheet cells gradually filled from a dozen to nearly a thousand over the twelve years since grad school. As the money tree scooped up from beside a dumpster grew stately eight-inch leaves, despite branches not being tightly woven like all others I’d seen, those hours began to add up from a journal publication, to chapbooks, to—thrillingly—a full-length collection. And my plants, prophets of patience, looked on. They outgrew their vessels, flexed into their own singular shapes.

There were (and continue to be) failures, like the anthurium thoughtlessly repotted in heavy, all-purpose soil that succumbed almost instantly to root rot. But hope keeps elbowing its way in—having rinsed ruined roots under a hose, I pulled decayed strands apart, and a few shone white, so I reduced the plant to what clung to those roots, and set it in a vase of clean water. And it thrived there, long neck gracefully bent. Similarly, I learned to love my reams of half-finished poems, knowing it often took several attempts to arrive at the poem I’d been circling. And, even if those explorations came to nothing, there was frequently an image or turn of phrase worth rescuing to root elsewhere. Most importantly, I found that even the entirely wasted, half-finished poem was worth the time as a room to think inside of. So, I’ve come to find failure a friend, following behind, handing me cutting for propagation.

Most of my plants survive these days, reach the size where pruning is required. I can’t say the same for poems, but I at least can tell when the sap is running, strange energy coursing down my fingers and onto the page. And the individual poem or plant isn’t what compels me anymore. Instead, they are simply a language by which to interface with a greater unfolding mystery, an offering to whatever life force animates plants to unfurl leaves and writers to turn toward the empty page, watching their pen glide like a planchette.

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett is the author of Look Alive—a finalist for numerous prizes, including The National Poetry Series, and winner of the 2019 Cowles Poetry Book Prize from Southeast Missouri State University Press—along with seven chapbooks, most recently The Undead, winner of Sixth Finch Books’ 2020 Chapbook Contest, and Shadow Box, winner of the 2019 Madhouse Press Editor’s Prize. Her poetry can be found in Fugue, Five Points, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She also serves as Managing Editor of the Whiting Award–winning LGBTQ+ literary journal and press Foglifter.

SHOW, THEN TELL: Crafting Fiction with Alive Exposition  by Grace Evans

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SHOW, THEN TELL: Crafting Fiction with Alive Exposition 
by Grace Evans

While writing a first draft of a novel, I turned one scene and an economical one-paragraph description of a mother-daughter relationship into seven scenes dramatizing every aspect of their dynamic. Why? A writing craft book advised me to focus on plotting and crafting scenes, and that eventually I would string all my scenes together and find myself with a complete manuscript.

So, I stretched every idea into a scene that included conjuring an event, developing conflict, and fleshing out character. I invented beginnings, middles, and ends. My draft got longer and slower. It started to bore even me.

I didn’t end up with a decent manuscript draft, but with a realization: a novel should be some scenes, maybe even mostly scenes, but not every character detail or piece of information deserves a whole scene.

To be sure I wasn’t just exhausted from scene-writing, I started to notice large swaths of text in published novels that told. Like oral storytelling, like a folk or fairy tale. But summary or exposition like this is what we’re often advised to avoid. Yet I found that these sections were often where I felt most engaged. In-between is a place to process the previous scene, expand or compress time, show a character confront their feelings.

I noticed two distinct kinds of telling: Interiority: feelings, thought processing; and  Narration: compressed details, exposition that felt alive.

Sonya Huber’s excellent piece on LitHub, “The Three Words That Almost Ruined Me As a Writer: ‘Show, Don’t Tell’” delves into the merits of exploring interiority through telling; I recommend it. Here though, I want to talk about the second kind of telling I’ve identified–something that I’ve named “alive exposition.”

Let’s look t two examples of alive exposition. The first is the third paragraph of “Good Friends We Have” by Zilla Jones honorable mention for Room Magazine’s Fiction Contest 2020.

Ashdown was hell and I hated it. When I was younger, some of my classmates invited me to their birthday parties or played ponies with me at recess, but then we started junior high, and the other girls’ conversations changed from kittens and our favourite candies to rock stars, actors, and boys. I didn’t know anything about rock stars or actors because my mother refused to have a television in the house, and we were forbidden to listen to anything but classical music. My father was German and played Beethoven and Brahms obsessively, and we all played a string instrument – violin for me, viola for my brother and cello for my sister. As for boys, there was no chance of me meeting any. The other girls encountered them at their families’ clubs and summer cottages, or at dances with our brother school, St Alban’s, which of course I was not permitted to attend.

The main gist of the paragraph is this: My old school was hell and I hated it. When I was younger, I played with my classmates but as we got older, I was excluded from their interests. I never met boys because I never went anywhere and wasn’t allowed to. On their own, these three sentences are generic, express a familiar sentiment, but not interesting. Instead, Jones packed each thought with specific examples and sensory details for an effective telling paragraph of alive exposition:

  • When I was younger: kittens, candles, ponies, recess, birthday parties = inclusion, friends
  • but then we started junior high: rock stars, actors, boys, television = exclusion, rules, difference
  • I didn’t know anything: Beethoven, Brahms, violin, viola, cello, German father = stuffiness, educational, wholesome, restriction
  • As for boys: boys, clubs, cottages, dances = lifestyle, leisure, affluence

So many images and sensory details packed into this six-sentence paragraph! Reading it I feel close to the narrator because I understand how she feels: excluded, strictly guarded, outsider. I get a window into her young school life, teenaged years, homelife, and the lives of the more affluent students.

Jones could have developed these scenarios into multiple scenes, but she chose to set the scenes in the story elsewhere, such as an exchange between the narrator and the school’s mean girl, or the striking conversation where her mother balks at the narrator’s indifference to her school’s pretend slave auction for charity. These scenes are dramatic, memorable exchanges, and the reader is set up to understand the characters because of the telling that comes before.

Of course, if the whole story was told as alive exposition and no scenes appeared, I might feel outside the story. But here it works, and I can pull out themes that will reappear in the story, and that are reinforced and dramatized by the later scenes.

A writer can choose the places in their stories for scenes that offer the most dramatic tension and keep momentum in the story. Exposition allows the writer to compress time and necessary information, but alive exposition makes it vivid, tangible and compelling.

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Another work that made a difference for me features alive exposition is the first paragraph in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” by Alice Munro, first published in 1999 in The New Yorker (and republished in 2013):

Fiona lived in her parents’ house, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish. Her mother was Icelandic—a powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant far-left politics. The father was an important cardiologist, revered around the hospital but happily subservient at home, where he would listen to his wife’s strange tirades with an absentminded smile. Fiona had her own little car and a pile of cashmere sweaters, but she wasn’t in a sorority, and her mother’s political activity was probably the reason. Not that she cared. Sororities were a joke to her, and so was politics—though she liked to play “The Four Insurgent Generals” on the phonograph, and sometimes also the “Internationale,” very loud, if there was a guest she thought she could make nervous. A curly-haired gloomy-looking foreigner was courting her—she said he was a Visigoth—and so were two or three quite respectable and uneasy young interns. She made fun of them all and of Grant as well. She would drolly repeat some of his small-town phrases. He thought maybe she was joking when she proposed to him, on a cold bright day on the beach at Port Stanley. Sand was stinging their faces and the waves delivered crashing loads of gravel at their feet.

In her “telling,” Munro places so many sensory details that are specific and therefore exciting for the reader:

  • House: big, bay-windowed, luxurious, crooked rugs, cup rings on tables
  • Mother: froth of white hair
  • Father: absentminded smile
  • Fiona: little car, cashmere sweaters, loud music on phonograph
  • Suitors: curly-haired, gloomy looking, small-town phrases
  • Proposal: cold bright day on beach, sand stinging faces, waves, gravel

What might otherwise feel abstract and general – house, father, mother, daughter, suitors, proposal – Munro makes specific and tangible, and therefore meaningful. The reader might find these characters familiar or they might not, but the story becomes more concrete and compelling via the specificity.

Without revealing interiority or character feelings, Munro gives me a sense of Fiona’s place within her family. She probably antagonizes her mother. She is rebellious, entitled, and playful. The last sentence sends the reader into a half scene featuring Fiona’s proposal, and the casualness of the question mimics the pace of the set up for the scene. It’s quick and the story keeps going.

I found it helpful break down the first 25 paragraphs of the story to better see the balance of exposition and scene:

  • 1 Exposition: Fiona as a young person
  • 2-3 Scene: Fiona proposes to Grant on the beach
  • 4-9 Scene: Fiona cleans the floor before she leaves to live in an assisted-living home
  • 10-13 Exposition: Grant found notes indicating Fiona was experiencing memory issues
  • 14-16 Scene: dialogue between Grant and Fiona regarding her memory
  • 17 Exposition: Fiona’s memory issues continue
  • 18-20 Scene: dialogue between Grant and Fiona regarding her memory
  • 21 Scene: Grant speaks to doctor (contains some summary)
  • 22 Scene: A line of dialogue from the doctor
  • 23 Exposition: Fiona was picked up by police while wandering
  • 24 Scene: Dialogue from Fiona to policeman
  • 25 Exposition: Fiona had asked about long-dead dogs, seeding in hints of conflict within their marriage

While Jones went deep with conflict-packed scenes, Munro’s scenes are shallower, quicker, and act as bridges between exposition. Munro’s exposition in these first 25 paragraphs is where Grant’s point of view emerges, his feelings are explored, the conflicts are made apparent. She brings it alive with details about vitamins, little yellow notes stuck to cupboards, the long legs and silky hair of old greyhounds. Then Munro quickly illustrates the conflict and characters through half scenes and dialogue without stopping the momentum of the story to with long scenes.

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While revising my novel I ended up reducing entire scenes to their essence, slicing out events I’d conjured only to show aspects of character or relationships that didn’t propel the story forward. Now I’m choosing to set scenes with vital action, and trying to imbue them with revelatory details, rather than dramatizing descriptions.

I’ll save my scenes for the drama and tell the reader the in-between parts using alive exposition.

Grace Evans is a writer based in Hamilton, Ontario. Her work has been published in Broken Pencil, Shameless, The Antigonish Review, and Hamilton Arts and Letters. She is currently completing her MFA at the University of British Columbia.

A LESSON FROM MY THIRD-GRADE SELF: On Writing from the Heart, a Craft Essay by Vivian Conan

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A LESSON FROM MY THIRD-GRADE SELF
On Writing from the Heart, A Craft Essay
by Vivian Conan

I was fifty-two when I chanced upon the bright marigold flyer taped to a streetlight in my Manhattan neighborhood. The Writer’s Voice at the West Side YMCA, it said. One of the courses listed:  The Personal Essay. I had never heard that term, but it sounded like just what I’d been looking for.

From the time I learned to print, I’d wanted to be a writer, even though on a parallel track, I believed all the books that were ever going to be written had already been written. I got this impression from the pictures on a card game called Authors that I played with my brother. With old-fashioned hairstyles and names like Sir Walter Scott, authors were, most assuredly, all dead.

In third grade, I learned cursive, the grownup way of writing, and took up my pen. “Once there was a girl named Carol,” I wrote. “She lived in a wooden house. One day her house caught fire. After the fire, she could not find her mother.” The tension builds, there’s a resolution, and at the end of 579 words, “they all lived happily [ever] after.” I was on my way.

I don’t know at what point I realized books were still being written, but when I did, I despaired. How would I ever write anything that long?

At twenty-six, I became a librarian. My dream of becoming a writer went into hibernation.

But then, there was the marigold flyer.

For the past two years, I had been trying to write an article about my mental health struggles. After decades of unsuccessful therapy, I learned, at 46, that I had what was then called multiple personality disorder, or MPD. Because the diagnosis was often sensationalized in the media, I kept it under wraps. The more successful I was at hiding it, the more invisible and isolated I felt. I wanted to destigmatize MPD by showing that people like those in my support group were not freaks but ordinary people who had experienced childhood trauma and were trying our best to make it through each day—work, maintain friendships, shop for food, sleep. I had been rewriting the same few pages for months, unsure how to proceed.

I registered for the course.

Three weeks into the ten-week session, I got up the courage to bring in my draft. Comments were along the lines of “Fascinating, but too generic. We want to know about your experience.”

I never considered that my own life would be of interest. I had envisioned an article something like those in The New York Times Magazine, a level-headed overview of the clinical literature, sprinkled with just enough examples from my own experience to illustrate a point. I felt I needed the clinical theory for credibility. Yet in class, I’d listened to feedback on other students’ work and found there was a core of people I usually agreed with—the same people who felt my article wasn’t personal enough.

In my next draft, I put in more of myself but retained the theory.

“This is better,” the class said, “but we want even more of you.”

From the discussion that followed, I began to understand that there was a difference between an article, which I probably couldn’t get published because I didn’t have a platform—I was not a nationally known clinician or researcher—and an essay, which could come entirely from my own experience.

When the term ended, I reenrolled, and with each successive draft, I upped the me-content and removed some theory. The piece was becoming more personal than I was comfortable with. For the class, however, it was improving. “You should consider writing a memoir,” the teacher said.

The essay that appeared (under a pseudonym) in New York magazine on August 4, 1997, five years after I conceived it, was about 85% personal. By then I was in a class at the JCC of Manhattan called Advanced Nonfiction, working on a memoir, and with the help of the instructor, had acquired an agent. The essay led to an auction. Within a week I had a book contract. That was exciting, but scary. My completed manuscript was due in 14 months, less time than it had taken to shepherd one essay through its life cycle.

It took me six weeks to produce the first draft of a chapter. Workshopping and rewriting added another two. At first, this didn’t worry me. Shielded by tunnel vision, I was happy with the quality of the individual chapters.

No longer hesitant to reveal my insides, I wrote about how as a child, I created a fantasy world I called the Atmosphere, where kindly Atmosphere people gave me what I couldn’t get from my family. (My third-grade self had written about something similar, except it was a mother the girl had lost and a policeman who found her mother.) I wrote about how, as I grew older, the Atmosphere people became more real to me than real people, and about therapists who were flummoxed. Comments from the class showed me that though my story may have been extreme, it was also universal. Everyone related to my need to be seen and understood.

I continued putting my insides, unprotected and uncensored, into each chapter, until, all of a sudden, my deadline loomed. With something like whiplash, I snapped out of tunnel vision to assess the whole. Less than a third. My childhood dread rushed back: how would I ever write something as long as a book?

I submitted what I had, along with an outline of the missing chapters. The publisher granted me a six-month extension, then another six, then cancelled my contract. I returned the advance.

Far from being upset, I was relieved. My memoir would be finished whenever it was finished. Only then would I try to sell it.

If I had known it would take another twenty years, I probably would have quit. But I didn’t know, so I continued writing in the morning, going to work in the afternoon, revising in the evening, and re-upping for the workshop. Very slowly, chapters were accumulating. By the time I wrote “The End,” I was seventy-five.

It would be another three years before my book was published. By then I was comfortable going public with a very personal story: Losing the Atmosphere, A Memoir: A Baffling Disorder, a Search for Help, and the Therapist Who Understood. The only clinical explanation is in the afterword, written by my therapist.

In hindsight, I can see that I needed all that time. I was a work in progress, evolving not only as a writer, but as a person. Early on, I hadn’t felt entitled to comment on other students’ pieces or make conversation as we walked out after class. Gradually, from listening to feedback on my chapters, I discovered I was a person worth discovering. I grew more confident, began to contribute to the discussion, and became part of a writing community. All the while I was still in therapy, healing at the same time that I was writing about healing. If I had finished the book earlier, it would not have had the same ending.

When I think back to my very young self, I want to hug her and say, Yes, little girl, you can be a writer. Then I realize she didn’t need encouragement. She just sharpened her pencil and wrote what was in her heart. So instead, I thank her for showing me how to write what was in mine. Both our stories are about hungering for a mother, but I took 450 pages to say it, and she took 579 words.

A librarian and native New Yorker, Vivian Conan grew up in a large Greek-Jewish clan in Brooklyn, did a stint in the Bronx, and now lives in Manhattan. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, Lilith, Narratively, Next Avenue, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, and Ducts. Her memoir is Losing the Atmosphere. Learn more at VivianConan.com.

 

COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS:  on Lewis Hyde’s Advice for Creativity, and How I Became an Artist in the Modern World, a craft essay by Geoff Watkinson

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COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS: 
On Lewis Hyde’s Advice for Creativity, and How I Became an Artist in the Modern World
A Craft Essay
by Geoff Watkinson

During the fall of my senior year of college, I took my first creative writing class and began to think that I might want to be a writer. I was a history major, read hungrily, and chose electives like Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Film, Modern Speculative Fiction. I remember thinking that writers (and artists in general) were born. There was a mystical quality to Albert Camus, whose books I’d started reading at age sixteen and Jim Morrison, whose poster hung on my wall and records spun on my turntable. I wondered if I might have that quality, too. I idolized the artists that were altering my worldview one book and one album at a time but struggled with how I, too, could be an artist.

And then, along the way, I discovered Lewis Hyde.

Lewis Hyde, in The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, examines, among other things, creativity and the role of the artist. Hyde writes,

“Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art. The future artist finds himself or herself moved by a work of art, and, through that experience, comes to labor in the service of art until he can profess his own gifts.”

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This reminds me of a quote from musician Robert Plant that I heard a long time ago: “Every artist is a thief. The great artist is a great thief.” So, I modeled my work after writers I read and admired: I tried to write like Camus. Then Hemingway. Then Salinger. Eventually I developed my own voice. I wrote like me.

Still, I was fearful that I would never make it as a writer, and that trepidation continues to seep into my writing life now and again (even twenty years later)—that I’ll never write again. The truth is, for most of us there is no “making it.” I suppose, in the beginning, I had that spacey notion of publishing a book. I just wanted to get there, as if there would someday be a moment of arrival. I was ambitious without the necessary reflection and the labor to pursue a craft. But Hyde stays with me, reminding us that creating art (writing, in my case) depends greatly upon effort. “Once a gift has stirred within us,” Hyde writes, “it is up to us to develop it. There is a reciprocal labor in the maturation of a talent. The gift will continue to discharge its agent so long as we attend to it in return.”

To be a writer, I had to write. Imagine that! And so, I did—one poor sentence after another until after thousands of attempts—thousands of pages—I indeed improved. I still try to think about writing just one word, sentence, page at a time.

The writing process is a strange amalgamation of labor, will, and spirit. My MFA thesis advisor at Old Dominion University told me, “Just keep writing. Most people quit. If you keep writing, you’ll have a wonderful career.” This not uncommon bit of wisdom remains the most useful about writing I have ever received.

“Work,” Hyde writes, “is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will. A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor. Beyond that, labor has its own schedule. Things get done, but we often have the odd sense that we didn’t do them.”

I know this feeling. I’m often surprised when I finish an essay. I know, generally, what I want to write about at the onset, but a piece takes on a life of its own. The result is always unexpected. I have had the sense, as Hyde describes this experience, noting that few artists “have not had this sense that some element of their work comes to them from a source they do not control.”

Despite reflection, labor, and continuity, Hyde seems to be suggesting a muse of sorts—a creative spirit that “moves in a body or ego larger than that of any single person.” There are no shortcuts to accessing the collective space, he declares, “no technology, no time-saving device, that can alter the rhythms of creative labor.” There is simply the imagination to lean on once an idea has come to the surface. This has taken me a lot of practice.

Tapping into creativity is a learned skill. Several years ago, I had a month-long writing residency in Nebraska. I arrived with a notion of writing an essay about the history of photography, but little plan of how to go about it. I knew that there would be some photographers in residence with me, and so I sought them out and we talked photography. They showed me their work. I read essays about photography. I started writing. The first draft was academic in nature. And then I began interweaving my personal history with the art of photography. A mirroring took shape. By the time I got on a plane to fly back to Virginia, where I called home, I had a 5000-word draft of the most complex piece of writing I had ever assembled. At the time, I couldn’t quite articulate how that happened. That essay, “Light Drawings,” was later published in the literary journal Ascent.

I have to remember to have faith, be honest, and take action. And I keep going back to Hyde, who quotes Allen Ginsberg: “You really have to make a resolution just to write for yourself…, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying.” I must be resolved, devoted to doing this work, allowing the gift to take hold when it’s ready. And when it comes, I must pursue it, down the rabbit hole of a creative life.

“Having accepted what has been given to him—either in the sense of inspiration or in the sense of talent—the artist often feels compelled, feels the desire, to make the work and offer it to an audience,” Hyde has written.

The artistic process then is one that requires peeling back the onion, exploring the depths of one’s consciousness—often painfully so—and sharing it, shedding the transparent self that has been created. Hyde’s advice is that “…to bestow one of our creations is the surest way to invoke the next…Bestowal creates that empty place into which new energy may flow. The alternative is petrification, writer’s block, ‘the flow of life backed up.’”

Petrification is also a part of artistic life. But I don’t have to like it. And so, I find myself on a continual journey, and remind myself to accept my artistic pursuits, on a daily basis, allowing the gift of cosmic consciousness to work its way through me. We all have this gift if we want it.

Geoff Watkinson has contributed to Guernica, storySouth, Brevity [Blog], The Humanist, The San Diego-Tribune, The Virginian-Pilot, and Switchback, among others. His first nonfiction collection, Have Some Faith in Loneliness & Other Essays, is scheduled to be published in 2022. He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Green Briar Review. Read more of his work on his website.

WANTED: TWO WRITERS MUSE ON THE ART OF SAYING NO by Beth Kephart and Stephanie Weaver

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WANTED: TWO WRITERS MUSE ON THE ART OF SAYING NO
by Beth Kephart and Stephanie Weaver

They want you.

They want you for free.

Because you are wise, they say. Because you know things. Because they want their people to know your person, to learn from you, with pleasure. They will, of course, be keeping all the cash, but you should focus on the pleasure.

Just an hour of your time, they say.

Then (a few days later): Two?

You say yes because you are conditioned for yes, because isn’t this what you, playing the writer, do—yield what you know and who you hope to be? You wish to be part of the conversation. You wish to be helpful, hopeful, a strike of winter sun or a jar of daisies, a puff of buoyancy. Amenable, in other words. At the very least, not nasty.

Yes, you say, and then (a few days later), they say: Three?

You should stop right there, when they say three.

When have I paid my dues, had enough exposure? Am I—aren’t I—sufficiently exposed? Isn’t my light, my bouquet, the breath of words trailing from my fingertips onto the page enough to get paid for my time and my thoughts and my wisdom and my labor?

What impels you, what compels you, what are the general regulations surrounding matters such as these? You do not write in pursuit of wealth. You crave stories, language, patterns, the sudden transcendence of the consummate detail. The joy you take from this writing thing is the actual writing thing. So that the memories come, the chimeric dreams, the beguiling assonance of a few adjacent words, and then (only maybe, only sometimes) a book you hope will breathe.

You want someone to notice.

You want someone to see.

So, look at this. You are an invitee.

It’s an honor just to be nominated.

They want me, they’re asking, finally I’m seen. And yet, in flits that unsettled feeling, that not-quite-butterfly in my stomach. I know that feeling. I’ve worked for years to trust it. And I know it’s saying, “They’re taking advantage of you.” I look in the mirror at my unfiltered face and wonder how is it that the platform I stand upon, the one that feels crafted, sturdy underfoot, shrinks to a postage stamp in their eyes? Allows them to ask for all three?

And honestly? Aren’t you being inconsistent here? Haven’t you wished for other overtures? Haven’t there been podcasts, panels, workshops, anthologies, conversations you would have gladly done for free? To promote a book? To engage? You have yearned and not been considered. You have wanted and not obtained. You have been ignored and didn’t that, at the time, feel like a minor tragedy?

You need to do some work on yourself. You need to understand why this particular request for the one hour, the two hours, and now the three reminds you of something you don’t like about yourself—how you lean toward yes, how you struggle with no, how you feel downright lousy, and for days to come, when you acquiesce to the unmitigated ask.

You need to find out, about yourself, why you do not have a good answer for your son when he asks you where you think your value lies, or what you think your value is, if you perpetually say yes to those who simply expect you to work for free.

I used to think my value lay in my bottomless to-do list of tasks for others—showers planned, meals delivered, errands run. Until illness made me sit in the garden with the butterflies in the winter sun. To survive I whispered no in sandboxes, spoke it in conference rooms, shouted it in arenas. Every time feeling like the first. This no will end the world, rain down consequences so dire they’ll end my career.

And yet they don’t.

I counsel others to hold the line. Every time I do it, I remind the mirror, it’s been fine.

You must respect yourself to be respected. You must turn your wisdom upon yourself. You must let it be known what you want from those who want (one, two, three) from you.

Because you are not (just and only) an invitee. You are a writer, representing Writers, acting on behalf of Writers, and if you say yes when you know (your son knows) you should never say yes, when you agree to be used for another’s undivided gain, when you allow your ideas and ideals, your reputation, even, to be jammed inside another’s non-negotiable plan, you are not just setting yourself up to fail; you are devaluing every other Writer in the process. You are contributing to a system you don’t believe in, bequeathing all power to the people who ask (one, two, three), the people who would have no gains if we all decided, finally, to speak of our own needs—kindly, of course. And unwaveringly.

We have learned to own the flash of our brightness. We have learned that holding boundaries, asking for clarity, and saying no paves the way to sanity. We refuse to allow the one-two-three-ers to give us our value.

We have learned that standing up for other writers, shining our light on their gardens, is the kind of integrity we want to grow in ourselves. When we hear—any of us—“One, two, three?” we can say, “No, no, no,” most happily.

Beth Kephart is a writer, teacher, and book artist. Her new books are Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays and We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

 

 

 

 

Stephanie Weaver is the host of The Blue and Yellow Kitchen and The Resilience Series. Her fourth book, The Migraine Relief Plan Cookbook, will be out in summer, 2022.

REAL ROT: My Newfound Impatience with Antiheroes, a Craft Essay by Tom Gammarino

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REAL ROT: My Newfound Impatience with Antiheroes
A Craft Essay by Tom Gammarino

Something is wrong with me. Last week, when I tried to re-watch one of my favorite TV series of all time, Breaking Bad, I made it through just two episodes before calling it quits. The writing still struck me as masterful, but I just wasn’t in the mood to follow an essentially good man into hell.

This was quite a shift. I’ve always felt bored by conventionally likable characters, preferring the knottier psychodramas of antiheroes who do good things for bad reasons or bad things for (what they take to be) good reasons. In books too, the darker things got, and the more twisted and confused a story’s moral calculus, the more I felt invested in the stakes. Not for me was the wholesome do-gooder; I wanted Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Bigger Thomas in Native Son, Bird in A Personal Matter, even Humbert Humbert in Lolita.

Once I became a writer myself, my output resembled my input. I’ve written six novels to date and published three. Each is the outgrowth of some obsessive intellectual interest I had at the time, but what’s consistent through all of them is the way the inflexible romantic ideals of the protagonists end up transforming them into something like monsters.

I suspect this affinity for antiheroes had something to do with my twelve years of Catholic schooling, when my young imagination was steeped in the moral rags-to-riches tales of figures like Augustine of Hippo, who found many a brothel en route to finding God. I’m sure, too, that it had something to do with the conservative, blue-collar milieu I grew up in.

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Except for the time my mom read me a book called So That’s How I Was Born, we never talked about sex in my house, so I did what kids do and sublimated my developing libido into things like bikes and rock music. In sixth grade, I wrote a book report on Hammer of the Gods, a biography of Led Zeppelin, and learned that John Bonham had once penetrated a groupie with a fish. I admit I gave very little thought to what that woman’s experience was like, but then I didn’t give much thought to Bonham’s either. All I knew was that the scene was outrageous, that it shocked me, and that this wasn’t an altogether bad feeling. In fact, it was sort of exhilarating. Most books put me to sleep; this one had woken me up.

A little later, I discovered heavy metal, and sure enough, the scarier and more intense the music got–the greater the juxtaposition between high and low, light and dark, sacred and profane–the more it appealed to me. I found it, in a word, stimulating.

It was only natural, then, that when I became a serious reader and writer my gut and scalp chased after some of those same aesthetic pleasures. It wasn’t enough that the forces of darkness be outside the protagonist either; I wanted light and dark to duke it out right in the crucible of the main character’s skull. I never had any doubt that the most compelling character in The Lord of the Rings was Gollum, or that brooding Batman was more interesting than Superman.

From a craft point of view, I regarded inner turmoil as a sort of shading, dissonance, spice. Of course, I understood that writing fiction meant playing God to some degree, and that part of the job was to reward and punish characters’ behavior. But while the moral frameworks I created may have rhymed with those I took to exist in reality, they were essentially constructs, sealed off, and self-contained. There’s a moment in my novel King of the Worlds, however, when the narrator breaks the fourth wall to hint at a relationship between reality and the fiction of a writer suspiciously like me: “…maybe that, in the last analysis, is what your work is all about: creating a more beautiful, more coherent world than the one we are met with, compensating in whatever way you can for the junk heap of broken dreams signified by the word ‘America’.” It may be somewhere in that dialectical relationship between word and world that my sudden impatience with the antihero lies.

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Over the last four years, I watched some of the most antiheroic humans in history run the United States, and their antics were so craven, and so horrifically consequential, that I simply lost any interest I might otherwise have had in how they had gotten to that point in their lives. It’s possible that this contraction of my empathy is a symptom of the dangerous polarization of our politics and that I should be pushing myself harder than ever to stretch my imagination across the proverbial aisle. Even from a purely aesthetic point of view, though, I never felt especially interested in those elected leaders and self-styled patriots responsible for pulling the US out of the Paris Accord, for putting kids in cages, for smashing their way into the US Capitol. Instead, I felt something like what Hannah Arendt, in her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, called the “banality of evil.” As she put it in a letter:

It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has a depth that can be radical.

I’m guilty of having once believed that goodness had something to do with simplicity, that unalloyed virtue was inherently boring. Nowadays, I am far more interested in, say, Greta Thunberg, an essentially good person doing good things for good reasons, than I ever was in the man-child who punched down at her from his bully pulpit. Greta is no less complex or interesting for being heroic; I dare say she’s all the more so.

One reviewer of my first novel, Big in Japan, wrote in Seattle’s The Stranger, “Gammarino shows real promise as an author who can crack open the head of a warped individual and show us the rot inside.” I was grateful for that at the time—confirmation that I’d achieved my aims—but having seen enough rot for a while, I’m wondering what else I can do.

Tom Gammarino is the author of the novels King of the Worlds and Big in Japan, and the novella Jellyfish Dreams. Recent shorter works have appeared in Bamboo Ridge, Entropy, The Tahoma Literary Review, and Hawai’i Pacific Review. Originally from Philadelphia, he lives on Oʻahu, where he teaches literature and writing to high school kids. You can find him online at tomgammarino.com

HARNESSING WILDNESS: THE PRACTICE OF POETIC LEAPS , a Craft Essay by Kari Ann Ebert

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HARNESSING WILDNESS: THE PRACTICE OF POETIC LEAPS
A Craft Essay by Kari Ann Ebert

To avoid stagnation and cliché, one of the tools in a poet’s arsenal is to conjure associations that bring energy to the poem and add complex layers. These associations can show themselves as metaphors, changes of perspective, or wild unfettered leaps. Carl Phillips identifies associative poetry as, “poetry that works almost entirely by means of association— no connecting narrative pieces, often no syntactical connection, poetry that is characterized by leaps not just from stanza to stanza, but from one image to the next in ways that do not immediately make sense…”

Robert Frost’s adage, “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader” is so familiar that we often lose its urgency, but without something fresh and new, why even read poetry? If we’re regurgitating the same form, the same imagery, the same metaphors, why even attempt to write a poem? A disruption is needed to engage the reader (and the writer) when we find ourselves falling into a familiar or even formulaic pattern. Christopher Salerno challenges us to startle and be startled: “I really want to read (and write) poetry that has the ability to startle—startle by getting beyond the automatism of commercial and habitual and unconscious language.” One of the ways we can accomplish this is through associative leaps, and often these leaps are wildly unexpected.

Take, for example, the first eight lines of Salerno’s poem “Wild Lemons”:

We wake like bees and peel a lemon.
Then there is a glowing.
Do you want to eat it wedge by wedge?
Pull the pith off, keep the seeds.
Lift a blue crayon, ring
each other’s mouths in blue.
We all live under a rule—
a lemon law for what’s beyond repair:

Right away in the first line, there’s a small jump: “We wake like bees and peel a lemon.” We don’t associate bees with lemons, but a link exists perhaps in the yellow of the honey/lemon or the singularity of honey/lemon tastes. Another link exists between “wedge by wedge” and the segmented honeycombs made by bees. Those two associations work to store up a bit of kinetic energy leading to a larger, wilder leap. In the lines “Lift a blue crayon, ring / each other’s mouths in blue”  the reader is propelled into the speaker’s / lover’s bodies and emotions. We’re startled by the blue crayon, drawn into a closeup of their mouths. Up until this moment, we had no hint of a blue crayon popping up in this bee and lemon poem. Perhaps we could make a connection because crayons are made from wax, and honeybees produce wax. But that’s just in retrospect. This leap is highly unexpected. Its appearance is unsettling almost wild, but it sets the emotional tone. Blue connotes sadness, and the lovers are coloring each other’s mouths blue. They are together in (perhaps) despair. I can’t help but think of what blue mouths could mean: freezing, oxygen-deprived. The image feels deadly, but the action of ringing “each other’s mouths in blue” vibrates sexual energy. Salerno then makes another leap to this idea of “a lemon law for what’s beyond repair.” This seems to be the crux of the poem, a statement of what is at stake for the lovers and their world. Is there some sort of restitution when things are doomed from the start? From there the poem leaps from wallet pictures to Reader’s Digest to dreams of dead souls to a hunger developing. Finally, the poem ends focused on the lover’s body, and we’re left to wonder if the lemon law will be revoked or if it will be upheld.

Another example, Kaveh Akbar’s poem “Portrait of the Alcoholic Floating in Space with Severed Umbilicus” , builds up the energy of leaps even in the title. Three seemingly unrelated images are presented. Akbar woos us with our own curiosity. How could we not read on? He continues the leaping as the poem weaves in and out of sensory moments, childhood memories, observations of the natural world, and the speaker’s perspective from space. It’s a dizzying mélange of moments propelling the poem more and more feverishly toward the ending lines referring to the speaker’s brother “I wish / he were here now / he could be here  this cave / is big enough for everyone / look at all the diamonds.” The wild leaps leading up to it make the ending sing as it circles back to the title. The energy generated gives this poem a distinctive sense of movement and also pulls it away from the ordinary and banal.

We could look at so many examples of this in poems that excite and intrigue us, but how can we infuse our own poetry with leaping energy? Robert Bly gives us a hint where it originates: “a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known.” (Leaping Poetry: an Idea with Poems and Translations). But how do we initiate our own mind-leaping? In his essay “Leaps of Faith,” Gerry LaFemina gives this advice, “when writing we have to return to a sense of play, to a sense of possibility, to a sense of exploration.” It seems we must strip away our rigid idea of how a poem acts and somehow ignite the hidden parts of ourselves.

One way to fire up the subconscious is by adding variety and surprise to your poetry practice. Carolyn Forché compiles notebooks full of lists, images, and notes. She calls these “gleanings from the world” that may ultimately become “repositories” housing parts of a future poem inside. Mary Ruefle has transformed over 92 18th century books into full volumes of erasure poetry. Even though she doesn’t have a writing ritual or practice before she sits down to write, these books are her artistic fuel. In an interview with Lauren Mallett she said:  “So I do have a daily ritual, that is my life as an artist, and it’s making these erasures” (Sycamore Review). Surely this practice infiltrates her consciousness and brews up surprising associations and ideas when she sits down to write. In my own poetic practice, I make myself write without stopping for at least 15 minutes. Sometimes it’s lists, sometimes stream of consciousness nonsense, sometimes I pick a rhythm and write phrases with rhyming words that fit that rhythm. In this case, it doesn’t matter if I produce anything with meaning. It’s all about the rhythm and sound of the words. I may never use any of this writing, but in these ways, I prime the pump of my subconscious.

A wilder approach comes from poet C.A. Conrad who developed a ritual-based practice called (soma)tic writing which is a fully immersive experience of the present, whereby the poet investigates and applies sustained concentration on any “thing” and the sensations of the body while taking detailed notes. The poems are brought to fruition through these very specific rituals. For example, one of Conrad’s exercises they have given to students is as follows: “The possibilities of the fridge and freezer are endless. You could hold an empty drinking glass against the side of it and study the sound of its motor. Use a magnifying glass to examine the exterior and interior in ways you had never done before. Use binoculars to sit across the room to look at it very carefully while far away. Close your eyes and smell the inside. With your eyes closed feel the contents, taste them. Take notes throughout the process of a daily exploration of the refrigerator.” More of their (soma)tic poetry exercises can be found here: http://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/somatic-exercises.pdf

Finally, revision presents ample opportunity to look for moments that lack energy. This is the very ground upon which we can propel the poem through a startling leap. In a Dodge Poetry Festival craft talk, Carolyn Forché advised poets to “Read every word, every line. Interrogate them.” She says that every line, stanza, and final ending should lift off into “implication not explanation.” Two revision techniques she uses are to cut apart the poem into strips of each line, then rearrange them and try to rewrite a “finished” poem from memory. Tyehimba Jess reads his poems backwards to see if he should rearrange the flow.

Whatever the approach, the craft of creating startling poetry through wild leaps is really a practice in experimentation. With a little imagination and willingness to reject stiff formulaic patterns, we can write poems that bring our readers (and ourselves) great joy. In the words of Robert Bly, “The real joy of poetry is to experience this leaping inside a poem.”

Kari-Ann EbertKari Ann Ebert is the Poetry & Interview editor for The Broadkill Review. Winner of the 2020 Sandy Crimmins National Prize in Poetry and the 2018 Gigantic Sequins Poetry Contest, Kari’s work has appeared in journals such as The Night Heron Barks, Mojave River Review, Philadelphia Stories, The Main Street Rag, The Ekphrastic Review, and Gargoyle as well as several anthologies. Her honors include a residency at Virginia Creative Center for the arts (2021), Individual Artist Fellow in Literature: Poetry, Delaware Division of the Arts (2020), and fellowships from MidAtlantic Arts Foundation (2021), The Shipman Agency (2020), BOAAT Press (2020), and Brooklyn Poets (2019). Her limited-edition chapbook Alphabet of Mo(u)rning is forthcoming in 2022 from Lily Press. Kari lives in Dover, Delaware and is an active member of the arts community there.

 

BUILDING BOATS, WRITING POEMS A Craft Essay by James Diaz

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BUILDING BOATS, WRITING POEMS
A Craft Essay by James Diaz

When building boats, we try to craft something that will hold us aloft, a durable vessel that can bear and balance the weight, and hold out against the waves. Some boats are perhaps more beautiful than others. Some just do the job. When you’re in a jam and need to cross whatever inner seas need crossing, you work with whatever you have to work with. It’s important to write against the grain, it’s important to fuck up, fall flat, rip your pages apart, regroup, keep dreaming into the agony. Writing is agonizing. Organizing agony, categorizing wounds, sorting old stories, finding new insights buried beneath the familiar ways of seeing our life.

How did I become the writer that I am today? Therapy. Lots and lots of therapy. Sitting in a room with another person who holds your story and then returns it to you in a different way. It might sound strange but give me a moment to explain. For most of my writing life, I had no voice that I could truly call my own. I was always writing because I knew if I didn’t something bad would happen. Bad things happened anyway, most of them self-inflicted. Quite simply: I wrote to not die. I wrote because it was all I had. Mostly, it had me. I had no idea what to do with it. When I read old pages from my twenties I wince at how little I really knew. And then I think: how beautiful, kid. You did what you could and you didn’t stop there.

I’ve always heard that we write what we know, we write from experience. Well, what do you do when you’re somewhat cut off from your own experience? It can be dangerous to know where you’re really at sometimes. So, you disassociate, separate rooms for different emotions. The right poems never find each other. Sometimes they put cups to doors and listen in. Sometimes they catch a glimpse. It’s a frozen wasteland for a while.

I don’t know why, but I always believed in the power of psychoanalysis. It wasn’t enough for me to be diagnosed and medicated, I needed to know what the deeper story was, because maybe, just maybe, if I could find it, I could retell it. I didn’t have access to it for a long time. But I had access to the rooms of 12-step recovery fellowships. And what I heard there were stories, so many stories. Us addicts can tell a good story. At some point, I began to realize that healing and narrative were kindred forms. The books I loved most were all about people just trying to heal. Like we all are, I suppose. But are we all writers? Maybe. I don’t know. Joyce Carol Oates says that everyone has at least one good story in them. I’d like to think that’s true. I’d hate to think it weren’t. What I do know is the people I’ve known needed it to be true. They needed to be able to tell their story. If you think not everyone has a good one in them, I think you should check out an open 12-step meeting sometime.

By the time I found myself in a psychotherapist’s office at the tail end of my twenties, I was at a place in my life where I just knew that if I didn’t learn what my deeper story was, I wasn’t going to make it. I got lucky, I guess. I found the right person. Someone who sat for years with my numb and frozen states, my painful unknowing, until eventually the ice began to crack. I don’t know how to explain it exactly. But when you’re sitting in a room with someone every week who is listening for all of the things you don’t say, who gives you time to find what those things are, and to speak them aloud for the first time, in your one and only true voice, there is a poem in that that just sort of happens.

What we all do is we tell stories. “My childhood went like this. My father was explosive, my mother was cold. This person said that and then I felt this way. I’m scared. I’m angry. I don’t know what I’m feeling. I don’t want to talk about feelings today. I just want to sit here. Is that okay?” And you do. You sit there and most of the time you can’t even hear yourself talking. You talk and talk until one day you hear parts of yourself getting through. You hear and feel someone hand you back parts of what you’ve just said in a different way. You become curious. You become open. All those doors you locked emotion behind, they too begin to unlock. The more I knew about myself the more I was able to enter into a poem in a real and embodied way.

“Where are you feeling what you’re telling me right now? Is it in your chest, in your gut, in your head? How do you locate your words in your body?” It’s terrifying to get inside of yourself like that. Over time, my body and my words began to meet at a kind of crossroads. “Listen here,” they’d say to each other, “we’re in this thing together or not at all.” Write the body, and the poem really begins to sing. Maybe the only way we become anything at all is by letting other people into our story. We’re changed by others, they’re changed by us. Any therapist will tell you, their patients made them better therapists. Therapy made me, not a better poet, but an open one. Open to the song I don’t always know all the words to, but I’ll sing it anyway. Ugly boat, beautiful boat. Sometimes you just have to build a boat.

I’d imagine there are many ways to find our deeper story. And if everyone has at least one good one in them, I think it’d be a shame not to share yours with someone, somewhere, at some point. Who knows, you might just find you’ve a few more in you somewhere. Where are you feeling it? Head, chest, gut, heart? That is art, location. Compass. Honing in. It takes time to find what kind of state you’re in. But once you do, there is a kind of basic rhythm that begins to take shape. We each have our flavor, our emotional psychic taste buds.

How do we become better at our craft? For me, personally, it was by getting to know myself better. Getting to know myself better through others. Listening to myself through them. Sharing out who I was to get to who I am. A good friend can do that for you as well. Or a fellowship of recovering addicts. Any place where people come together to try and make sense of who they are is an opportunity for, and invitation to, a kind of poetry. All I know is you have to start at the place you’re at. And that place does not always offer you the best harvest. There are seasons and there are seasons. You just have to walk through the not-knowing until you do. Some days you have nothing to say, some days you have too much to say. The good poem, if such a thing exists, is probably somewhere in between. Like they say in the rooms: more will be revealed. Don’t give up five minutes before the poem happens.

In a world so often low on kindness, James Diaz is trying to refill the tank. Poetry is his imperfect medium. Author of two full-length poetry collections, This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) and All Things Beautiful Are Bent (Alien Buddha, 2021), Diaz is the founding editor of the online journal Anti-Heroin Chic. He currently resides in upstate New York.

THE ELEPHANT OF SILENCE, a poetry craft essay by John Wall Barger

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THE ELEPHANT OF SILENCE
by John Wall Barger

Je suis maitre du silence
—Rimbaud, “Enfance”

I.

At fifty, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, I drove my 1989 BMW motorcycle from Philadelphia to The Hambidge Center in the mountains of northeast Georgia for a three-week writing residency. They provided me with a cottage in the forest, with floor-to-ceiling windows and enough space for a person to spread out their work. My first feelings, when I’d taken off my jacket and sat down, were—as Wendell Berry describes it in “Stepping Off”—“along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement / a little nagging of dread.” It was so damn quiet.

I’ve always felt an aversion to quiet. I was a hyper only child. The kid with the firecrackers and toy soldiers. The teenager with the boombox. As an adult, I am a talker and—I wince to admit it—a loud one. “Silence,” as William S. Burroughs said, “is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.”

In my humble opinion, I’m qualified to write an essay about silence precisely because I compulsively verbalize. I’m the least silent person in the room. I observe silence from the outside looking in. With the least “natural” perspective on the matter of anyone you know.

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The Elephant of Silence built a house beside the sea. It contained all you’d need, including a bed and fine teacups. He liked to wash teacups and stare at the sea out the window. His radio cackled, “The Last Forest contains 8,609 trees. A great number, albeit less than last year.” As he replaced his dishrag, he noticed an odd scene out the steamed window: a bride in white washed up on the surf.

There came a knock. He opened his door. The bride stood there dripping wet beside her pet pig. He invited them in. The bride burst in and, with effort, lifted the Elephant of Silence as if he were her groom. Her legs trembled. She moaned. Held there, feet off the ground, the Elephant of Silence waited patiently as the sun set. The pet pig stared at them with open admiration. Soon the bride was pancaked under the Elephant of Silence.

The pet pig butted him with his snout for pure joy. “Shall we go for a walk?” he asked. The Elephant of Silence packed them a picnic lunch. That night they slept in the Last Forest and their dreams were tinted spinach green. Next morning they began climbing the mountain. It took them 2,000 years. Dynasties fell. The forest vanished behind them. They might have been the last two creatures in existence, for all they cared.

At the peak of that foggy mountain, the Elephant of Silence spoke, at last, with reverence: “I have never met anyone as silent as you.”

 

I wrote this poem in 2012, soon after I started living with my wife, Tiina. The Elephant of Silence is her, I think. I didn’t mean it that way, but it’s unmistakable. She’s from Finland, where folks value calmness and tranquility over storytelling and arrogance. I’ve been to “parties” in Finland where a group of friends sit for extended periods in complete silence. I’ve sat with men in saunas where none of us say anything; they just sip beer, happy as the day they were born.

When there’s a gap in a conversation, I’m the one who panics and fills it with small talk. It’s taken me years of marriage to grasp the importance of leaving space while talking, for everyone to gather their thoughts. What’s more, Tiina is a philosopher. Smarter than me. Far more logical. It might be clear to you already, that in my poem I’m the pet pig, following along beside her, learning from her.

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Being by myself in the forest at Hambidge reminds me of another writing retreat I went on at twenty, in 1989. I—living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I grew up—had just decided that I was a writer, and figured that meant I should have some alone time. So I borrowed my father’s 1975 Ducati motorcycle and drove four hours to our old camp in Bear River, Nova Scotia, where my parents and I lived for a year when I was a kid.

The camp, five miles from town and a quarter-mile in the woods from a dirt road, was no longer the cozy candle-lit gingerbread house of my childhood. It had been adapted by neighbors into a hunting shack. They’d shoved the stove under my parents’ old loft and sat at the window, leaning their rifle on the sill. When a deer showed up, alert and beautiful, they shot it. The spirit of the house was gone.

Nevertheless, I arrived full of gusto, with a pen and a sheaf of empty pages to fill with poems. I was set on finding inspiration deep in the forest. What I found, instead, was silence. And loneliness. I was alarmed. I felt aversion, and wanted to escape.

Pure stubbornness kept me from jumping back on the bike and riding home that very day. I had, after all, bragged to my friends about the writing retreat I was going on. So I sat in the armchair, read a long terrible novel a girl had lent me (Sidney Sheldon, If Tomorrow Comes), wrote a poem, slept, and sped home promptly the next morning.

That might have been the longest day of my life.

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I always knew that there was value to being quiet. But it’s hard. I resisted.

Despite the noise I generated, I did grow up in a culture of silence, of a sort. My parents were hippies and meditators. Our house contained walls of books on Eastern mysticism, Buddhism, Sufism. Novels, nonfiction, my dad’s math books, comic books. They were readers. There was space in the house for contemplation and curiosity.

I was an only child, used to creating my own games. I was often in my room playing chess by myself; reading comics; playing with toy soldiers. Was I quiet at those times, or perhaps humming and singing to distract myself? I don’t know.

When I became a writer I didn’t think it would have anything to do with silence. But it does.

◊

Over the days at Hambidge I settle into a routine, making my peace with the quiet. Since it’s my weakness, I sit with it. I meditate. I walk slowly in the forest, staying alert but trying not to obsess about ticks and bears and rattlesnakes. I stare at the ceiling. And, slowly, as the dread diminishes, I feel calmer. My focus deepens.

I love the feeling of quiet pooling, when I give it space. I get hungry for it. After days full of such quiet, even the calm communal dinners—populated by seven polite artists, the banjo player from Atlanta, the sculptor from Arkansas, the painter from Spain—seem jarringly noisy. Then I walk briskly back to my cottage in the semi-dark, shut the door behind me, and lie on my back staring into nothingness, until I feel like myself again.

◊

One morning, while I’m lying on the couch puzzling through a poem, I see a movement. A deer at the edge of the deck. Brown on green. Infinite gentleness.

I sit up straight, she sees me, goes still.

Ears high and aimed at me.

◊

When I try to listen in the Hambidge cottage, I realize it’s never really quiet. The house creaks and tics. There are birds outside. The fridge, every hour or two, hums for a while. Cars on a near road make an oceanic whooshing. And of course my tinnitus: a constant buzzing in my left ear from all the rock concerts and discos I went to in my 20’s.

Quieted, other quiet memories from my life, as if on an ice floe, drift by.

Waiting tables in a packed restaurant in Temple Bar in Dublin, August 1998, at noon the day after the Omagh bombing, we were quiet an entire minute. Not a glass clinked.

Sitting by myself in the desert sand outside Las Vegas in 1992.

Hanging upside down from a tree in Bear River in 1977.

Sitting to dinner with my parents, thousands of times, holding hands before we ate.

◊

It’s more about trying to be quiet—that intention, active listening—than a lack of noise.

Or perhaps, my wife who loves neuroscience might say, the poems come from synaptic firings, which occur in a kind of silence.

All I know is, when I’m quiet the poems happen.

When I allow myself the luxurious time and space to slow down and focus, poems spring up out of the cobwebs. The Elephant of Silence is seated in the middle of the room, his great trunk wrapped around my chair. The Elephant of Silence is the room.

I did not say the poems spring up out of myself, for I, and my feeble psyche, don’t feel like the wellspring. Poems arrive like deer. If I’m quiet, they sometimes surprise me with a visit. If I run up to grab them, they bound away.

II.

Silence is, rather than the negation of sound, quiet.

But is consciousness ever quiet? Not mine!

The mind is a noisy intersection between internal thoughts and external environment. Many of us search our entire lives to find a balance between internal and external, which compete incessantly. We use external stimulus, like music, to distract ourselves from unpleasant internal thoughts. Some drugs, like Adderall, treat this process as an imbalance that can be corrected chemically.

Some religions, like Hinduism and Buddhism, suggest we use a mantra—a “sacred” utterance (like Om, or ॐ), considered to possess mystical qualities, repeated with eyes closed—to calm down the internal.

To some extent, I think, the good relaxing feeling derived from mantras, or creating in any form, comes from minimizing internal thoughts and external stimulus, and maximizing focus.

◊

 

Where does a poem come from? Quick answer: the consciousness of the poet.

Long answer: silence (as I define it), which includes quiet, contemplation, focus, oblivion.

Silence:

1. Absence of sound; quiet
2. Stillness; calmness; meditation; contemplation; imagination; dreams; the inner world
3. Fascination; sustained absorption; focus
4. Oblivion

First comes our intention to be quiet. With luck, we find it. I shut my eyes. I find a spot under a tree. I quit my job pouring drinks in a disco (Dublin, again). I buy earplugs.

Once I want quiet, it walks beside me. Nearer than I’d thought.

Stillness follows. Now I’m sitting, facing the window, not tapping my foot, not fidgeting. Breathing deeply. And with stillness comes images, the inner cities flashing with lightning.

Contemplation, or reflection, is the impulse toward stillness, and vice versa.

I’m no longer running through a crowded market just to get through it, but walking slow and breathing and pausing to look at the bearded man on a unicycle. I’m riding a bicycle rather than driving. I’m sitting by a lake rather than riding a bicycle.

I am the dreamer. The source of all poems.

With contemplation, images percolate, formlessly. Focus brings discipline to stillness. Focus brings form.

I’m sitting by the lake, a cloud catches my eye. Rather than just looking at the next cloud (or my phone), I hold that cloud in the mind, let it pool, see where it leads. Does it look like a fractured ship sinking into the blue? Is it Coleridge’s “painted ship”? Or Franklin’s ship, trapped in the blue ice of the Northwest Passage?

◊

I want quiet, it comes. The body goes still. The inner world shivers awake. I’m suddenly absorbed in my external environment. Objects pool, morph, go meaningful.

These states of mind can blend, occur in different order. Stillness might happen before quiet. Contemplation and focus might mean the same thing. Some dream, others “think.”

And, it’s worth repeating, by silence I don’t really mean the absence of sound. One can contemplate on a noisy street, with focus. Silence is possible within noise.

John Cage’s composition, 4’33” (1952), is about silence but not the lack of noise. His score instructs performers to take their places and not to play their instruments for four minutes, thirty-three seconds. As a result, the piece consists of the sounds of the environment that listeners hear while the performance lasts.

If we foster contemplation and focus, we can find form. Every artwork—no matter how vers libre it seems—has form. In Cage’s piece, the form (albeit malleable) is the length of time (4’33”), the performance space, the musicians, the audience, the time of day, the light.

◊

Oblivion is the limbo-feeling I sometimes get if I stare too long into the forest or night sky. It says that I am an insignificant speck on the face of the earth, and that my life and my poems are meaningless.

This is, I think, the feeling that scared me at twenty in the forest of Bear River. A feeling of lonesomeness bordering on worthlessness.

But if we hold the feeling of oblivion, and don’t resist it, its value emerges. Because the truth is, of course, we are insignificant specks on the face of the earth.

John Donne liked to imagine himself “coffind”: he posed for his own funeral monument, and slept in his future coffin. Such a reminder of death, putting our brief lives into perspective, is surely healthy.

But we should not stay in a coffin for a week. It’s like a whirlpool that sucks us down in the flesh and heaves us out a husk.

◊

The 1968 spaghetti western, Il Grande Silenzio (The Great Silence), directed by Sergio Corbucci, animates this idea of oblivion.

It’s a sublime revenge narrative. The main character, called Silencio, is the fastest draw in the West. As a child, bandits cut Silencio’s throat and kill his parents. During the film he, the “hero,” hunts them down. And falls in love with a Black woman named Pauline.

Il Grande Silenzio is set in winter, with great white vistas swallowing up the tiny towns. People freeze in snow, drown in frozen lakes. Everyone shivers. Death is close.

Corbucci leads us to think that the great silence is God, in the form of Silencio the savior. But at the end, the gang of bad guys (led by Klaus Kinski, with nasty charisma) murder all the good guys, including Silencio.

How refreshing! And uncomfortably realistic. The Great Silence, it turns out, is death, coming up the driveway for the good folks and the bad.

III.

By silence, I don’t mean secrecy or censorship; the silencing of voices. I’m not talking about passivity, or what Audre Lorde meant when she said, “Your silence will not protect you.”

Rather, the silence that encourages the opposite: the quiet that allows us to know ourselves. That lets us become more ourselves; more of whatever it is we are already.

◊

Allowing our wounds to surface (contemplation), holding those wounds long enough to write them down (focus), and deciding which wounds will stay in the poem (extended focus as editor), all require a degree of stillness and quiet and patience.

If we are telling the poem what to say, impatiently (viz. noisily), then the good parts (the cloud “magically” turning into Franklin’s ship) might not have a chance to evolve.

We artists love the accolades and the recognition of art, what little comes to us. But the crux of making artwork happens in moments of silence when we are alone. Or moments—among people, with or without noise—when we, like turtles, have withdrawn and found focus, which is an aspect of silence.

Such silence is the source of the work, its theater, its portal of transmission to the reader.

David Lynch describes, in his non-fiction book Catching the Big Fish, how meditation has been a tool for him to become the person and artist he is. The big fish, he says, is the great idea, the film, the line, the vision. We bring ourselves to the water and wait for it to break the surface.

We cannot force the big fish to come. All we can do is live a life that best allows us to glimpse it, when and if it comes.

◊

A simple and ancient idea. When we’re still and calm, the work appears to us. For an artist silence is, as Lao-Tzu said, “a source of Great Strength.”

Rumi summed it up well: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing / and rightdoing there is a field. / I’ll meet you there. // When the soul lies down in that grass / the world is too full to talk about.”

Where does art come from? That field “beyond ideas of wrongdoing / and rightdoing.”

◊

The deer visits me again. This time I’m reading, facing the big window.

I watch her, but do not move. I don’t even lower the book.

We are both completely still.

John Wall Barger’s essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Hopkins Review, Mississippi Review, Poetry Northwest, Literary Matters, The Rumpus, Rain Taxi, Jacket2, and elsewhere. His fifth book of poems, Resurrection Fail, is coming out this fall with Spuyten Duyvil Press. He’s a contract editor with Frontenac House, and teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. (johnwallbarger.com)

YOU ARE A POET (Even When You Aren’t Writing) A Craft Essay by Mark Danowsky

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YOU ARE A POET (Even When You Aren’t Writing)
A Craft Essay by Mark Danowsky

In Poetics, Aristotle essentially defines a poet as someone who has “an eye for resemblances.” This is a nice reminder to look up, both literally and metaphorically, look around, look within, simply look. We are all trapped in our physical bodies while also inhabiting external spaces. What are your spaces? What is in these spaces?

People say, “Life happens while you’re busy making other plans.” Sometimes, in order to return to your writing, you need to live a little. This is not because you lack content. Flannery O’Connor famously says, “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” Writers each have their own metaphor for “waiting for the well to refill” so that their ability to approach the page becomes feasible.

When you’re not actively writing, or you feel like you’re not writing as much as you should, maybe you’re doing exactly what you need to be doing. Maybe what you need is a period of reflection. There are times for simply living life and times when you need to write to make sense of the world.

I used to believe all writers need a day job. What I really meant but did not yet understand was that writers need stimulation to encourage them to put pen to paper. It’s not necessarily what you do, it’s that you’re subconsciously soaking in data. In Robert Bly’s Leaping Poetry, he writes, a good poem has an “arc of associations which corresponds to the inner life of the objects.” Basically, poetry is all about associative thinking. This is part of the reason I encourage cherry-picking material you enjoy from the various types of data foisted on us 24/7. Pay attention to the different environments you move through; watch how people in, around, and outside your bubble go about daily living; notice repetition and variation; reflect on the particular way your mind and your body move through days that are short and days that seem to go on forever.

A misstep is believing that living wild brings wildness to the page. Going to bars too often and driving Uber/Lyft may be the source of a few of my most entertaining stories, however, these are not the source of my better writing. The times in my life when I’ve been most productive are the times in my life when I’ve had structure and routine.

Writers have notoriously odd habits and routines surrounding their writing. Goethe had his thing with rotten apples; Auden kept a strict schedule (common) which included a daily dose of amphetamines (less common, not recommended); Dr. Seuss turned to hats (not surprising); Haruki Murakami maintains a strict schedule (common) that includes a considerable amount of exercise (also fairly common). Most writers have little practices that are a bit like superstitions.

I’ve heard variations on reasons why writers leave their daily work purposefully unfinished. I find this concept interesting; although, it is not part of my own writing practices. There are writers who say they stop in the middle of a sentence; who begin the new day’s writing by rewriting or re-typing the previous day’s work; who stop writing in the middle of a section because they know where they’re going (so it feels easier to get started the next day); who make a point of stopping while they still feel the urge the continue writing. It is almost exclusively writers who do not write poetry who I have heard speak in this way.

Ask a poet about The Muse and, whether or not they believe in this concept as beyond themselves, they will usually tell you that they write until the words stop coming. Most poets bleed themselves out. A notable exception, Mary Ann Saymn has said that her most notable strength as a poet is her ability to walk away from the page. You can feel it in her poetics. There is a very real distance between lines. The poet has deliberately chosen to let lines sit, to let the poem rest incomplete, to wait for the next best words to arrive.

Stephen Dobyns wrote a poetry craft book called Best Words, Best Order and then went on to write another craft guide called Next Word, Better Word. I find this both interesting and funny. The best words are only the best words for now. This is why poets and writers are often wrongly accused of writing “the same” thing over and over again. It’s not that Stephen King is writing the same book again, it’s that he’s still trying to write to best version based on his original intention.

Matthew Zapruder says, in Why Poetry, that “The poem is an experience of continual speculation and wondering.” To me, Zapruder is saying the poem is incomplete. Incomplete because it requires a reader to bring all of the reader’s experience and thoughts and beliefs to the table while in the act of reading the poem. Each time we encounter the poem, we bring a new version of ourselves. And so both the poem and the reader continues to evolve.

A great poem, a lasting poem, is both good now and good later. In his essay, The Figure a Poem Makes, Robert Frost encourages us to aim for a poem that we can reread over and over without it losing its power. In Frost’s words, “Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance.” Frost focuses attention on the importance of surprise in a poem. Famously, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” By contrast, Linda Gregg says, “Don’t make the reader do too much guesswork.” You always to have to work to find the sweet spot. The greatest Confessional poets were skilled at walking a tightrope of sentimentality. Too sentimental? You fall off an emotional cliff. It’s hard to do it right but so is anything worth doing.

Mark Danowsky, Poetry Craft Essays Editor, is a Philadelphia poet. He is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Senior Editor for Schuylkill Valley Journal, Poetry Craft Essays Editor for Cleaver Magazine, and a regular contributor for Versification.

SPECULATIVE MEMOIR: MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLEm a craft essay by Laraine Herring

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SPECULATIVE MEMOIR: MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE
A Craft Essay by Laraine Herring

I was eight years old when the tree spoke to me. My dad had just gotten out of the hospital after a near-fatal heart attack, and I would ride my bike down to my elementary school to escape the new person who’d replaced the father who told jokes and let me walk across his back. I always brought a book. I’d lean up against the massive oak’s trunk, nestling in among the raised roots, and let the tree hold me. When she spoke, I thought it was the wind. When she spoke again, I thought it was birdsong. The third time, I knew I was both losing my faculties and gaining something magical. Her bark scratched at the place I couldn’t reach on my back. Her voice crept around the edges of my eardrums.

I won’t tell you what she said because it’s private, and because she’s dead, her voice alive only inside me. She was bulldozed down to make space for more classrooms sometime after we left North Carolina for Arizona in the early 80s. I tried to take my husband to meet her on a trip back home, but I found only concrete and steel, no hints of her whisper in the thick air. I cried on the new playground in the noon heat. She was gone. How had I not felt her leave? How it must have hurt to be rooted and unable to run when the saws came.

When I was undergoing surgery for colon cancer in 2017, I was pinned to a table, breathing anesthesia, unable to move when the knives came. Unlike my tree, I didn’t die, but part of me was sacrificed so I could continue to live. I don’t remember what happened in the operating room, but my body remembers I was not there to protect her when the surgeons drew out my blood. I still feel her fear when I touch the scars on my belly. My skin speaks to me, not in English, but in colors and sounds.

◊

What language should a writer use for these liminal moments? How do we express a truth that is outside of linear time and dimensional space?

The colon’s function is similar to that of a tree’s roots. They both absorb the necessary water for the organism to survive and create a microbiome that helps all the other systems thrive. When roots rot, when the colon gets cancer, the future is unsteady. When I emerged from treatment, the edges of my world had blurred. My borders had shifted, and the story I wanted to tell was pulled from experiences I couldn’t point to on any map. Reality had become fluid; perceptions opening and closing like a fish gasping for air. I was in two worlds, grasping for footing.

I understand my world through what lives on the edges—the whispers of a tree, the energy in an object, the ghost in the kitchen. They are more real to me than rock, steel, and brick. When I write my stories, I infuse them with what I know: sentient places, hauntings, and dreams.

◊

Was there room in literature for me and my story? A fractured person with a severed root system? And if so, what form would best reveal the truth?

I wanted to explore what happened internally after my cancer diagnosis. I wanted to write about my dead father and his dead parents, and I wanted to write into the ghostly arms of grief. My hauntings are my companions. You can’t see them, but I meet them every day. We break bread beneath my tree, and we trade stories of the dark.

“Write a novel instead,” I was told by more than one writer-friend. “Readers of memoir won’t accept that this is real.” I thought about it. I’d written novels before. I love fiction. But calling my inner journeys fiction would be the lie—a disservice to a lived experience. If I denied my tree’s voice, what kind of friend did that make me? If I still feel her, solid trunk, scratching branches, why would I disrespect her by dismissing her presence?

Speculative memoir allows for an explosion of the inner landscape. By utilizing speculative elements to dramatize an internal transformation, a work becomes elevated and opens to stories that transcend the five senses. Through speculating, we gain new vision.

◊

The day after my diagnosis, I started drawing again for the first time in thirty years. At the time, I only had an iPad and my finger—no stylus—but I enjoyed playing with color and shape, and my touch on the screen soothed me. The first piece I created was a silhouetted witch holding a lantern, walking with her black cat on a bright orange background. I knew that no matter what happened with cancer, I was about to go somewhere unfamiliar. I was going under. I was going in.

I printed that piece and pinned it above my computer, and it served as a guide for my forthcoming book, A Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens. The journey of the book wasn’t cancer, though that was certainly something I experienced. The story of the book, the truth of the book, was how cancer triggered an exploration of unresolved grief and intergenerational trauma. The external period of that year of my life was spent mostly indoors, mostly in the bathroom, and mostly in bed. But the landscape of my interior lit up, and on that velvet-curtained stage, my dead father appeared to me as a raven and began to speak.

Raven brought me a book. Raven brought me a voice, and he brought me here to you, on a bridge made of marks on a screen, suspended on the trestle of magical, invisible Wi-Fi.

We can’t see it or touch it, but we all know it is there.

Laraine HerringLaraine Herring’s latest book, A Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens, will be released in October 2021. She’s the author of a trilogy of writing books, including Writing Begins with the Breath; a tenured professor of psychology; a book coach for women over 40; and the founder of Hags on Fire, an online ‘zine for women writing about menopause and aging.

RESEARCH AND WRITING: The Warp and Woof of Historical Fiction, a craft essay by Terry Roberts

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RESEARCH AND WRITING
The Warp and Woof of Historical Fiction
A Craft Essay by Terry Roberts

When I stand before a crowd of curious readers and talk about my novels, which are generally understood to be “historical fiction,” invariably someone asks a version of the following: “How much research do you do before you start writing?”

Sometimes that question is followed by more detailed queries about the kind and type of research: “Where did you go to find information?” and “Do you interview the experts?” and “How do you know when enough is enough and it’s time to start writing?” And one of my favorites: “To what extent are you constrained by history?”

I understand the motivation behind all those questions, especially when asked by true historians (amateur or professional) or nascent fiction writers. But the truth is that I have never tackled the process of research and writing in the linear way most readers seem to expect. One process doesn’t end and the other begin on some magical date when it feels like I’ve learned everything I need to know and I’m ready to put pen to paper.

◊

My grandmother, Belva Roberts, was a mountain weaver of some renown, and the motif of weaving runs throughout my second novel, That Bright Land. And, perhaps the best metaphor for what I do as I’m researching and writing every book, is weaving. Understood in that way, research and writing are more like the warp—threads that run lengthwise—and the woof—threads that run across—that make up the fabric of the story.

Let’s look at my most recent novel, My Mistress’ Eyes Are Raven Black (Turner, July 2021), a noir thriller set on Ellis Island in the summer of 1920. I had the idea for a murder mystery set in the hospitals on Ellis Island long before I ever visited the location. I imagined that the narrative would take the form of a hardboiled detective story in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Walter Mosley. And I thought the murders at the heart of the story would have to do with our apparently innate tendency to hate and fear the other. Xenophobia played out on a fictional stage where the other—“your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”—famously sought entry into the United States.

(It is worth noting that all my thinking and note-taking took place before the Presidential election of 2016, and the political events that followed only served to shine a hot light on immigration in general and racial profiling in particular. By that point, I was busy writing the novel, and it was too late to even consider turning back.)

I had begun to think about the characters who might inhabit this fictional world, and that’s when it became increasingly obvious that an old friend, Stephen Robbins, the narrator/protagonist of my first novel, A Short Time to Stay Here, was waiting in the wings. When last we saw Stephen, in the closing pages of that novel, he was in New York and apparently meant to stay there. Here was my detective, and the rest of the cast took shape around him, in particular the wicked being who prowled the island.

◊

So, when did research enter the picture?

As I worked on the early chapters, I had been reading everything I could find about Ellis Island, and was gratified to find that 1920—when Stephen would be in New York—was an especially telling year in the history of the island. A decision about character led to a decision about the time as well as the place, and so my reading and research increasingly focused on the years immediately following World War I. The library is full of both narrative and visual history from the period, which fed the story as it grew.

Then I found a collection of photographs by Augustus F. Sherman subtitled Ellis Island Portraits 1905 – 1920 (Aperture 2005). I am a profoundly visual person, and though I love words, photographs are often what inspire my writing. This was true of the first Stephen Robbins novel, fed by The Appalachian Photographs of Doris Ullmann (The Jargon Society 1951), which also helped illuminate this second installment. Sherman’s images reveal the incredible variety of immigrants who passed through the island, and along with the insightful introduction by Peter Mesenholler, blew my story wide open. Suddenly, I had the visual texture I was looking for, and Mesenholler raised the issue of racial and ethnic characteristics both in the photographs and in the immigration policies of the day.

It was at that point that I was able to begin weaving the tight fabric of historic detail and narrative pace that I wanted. But I still hadn’t visited the island itself.

◊

Place is vital in my imagination, as is the setting in my novels. Finally, my wife Lynn and I had the chance to visit Ellis Island for the first time, and we took full advantage, trekking along with the hard-hat tour of the abandoned hospitals on the island. This experience came at the perfect point in the creative process because by then I knew enough about the story and the characters so that every hallway and every room was flooded with significance. While we were still on the tour, the historical and narrative threads—research and writing—began to weave themselves into complex and compelling patterns in my imagination.

And then it happened. We followed the tour guide into a room that probably meant little to the others present, and he told us about the mysterious implement on display there. I turned to Lynn, and said, “That’s it. It’s perfect.”

She looked sideways at me. “That’s what?”

“That’s how the murderer does it,” I whispered and pointed.

And yes, it is how the murderer does it.

That moment felt like a research gift that arrived at the perfect point in the narrative process. Which illustrates my point. For me, there is never a juncture where research ends and writing begins. In fact, on the rare occasion when I am stuck in terms of the history (research) or the story (writing), I turn to the other for answers, and invariably, they’re there. Waiting…

Terry Roberts is the author of three novels: A Short Time to Stay Here (winner of the Willie Morris Prize for Southern Fiction); That Bright Land (winner of the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award); and most recently, The Holy Ghost Speakeasy and Revival. His new novel, My Mistress’ Eyes Are Raven Black, and his other works are available here.

EMBRACE THE NELSON: Going Beyond the Pretty Narrative Voice, a craft essay by Dena Soffer

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EMBRACE THE NELSON:
Going Beyond the Pretty Narrative Voice
A craft essay by Dena Soffer

In my first graduate writing workshop, David Gates told a true story about Raymond Carver working on a piece of writing that wasn’t going well. Carver worked and worked, experiencing the feeling that all of us writers have felt—the piece was going nowhere. All of a sudden, the phone rang. He picked up, and the voice on the other line asked to speak to someone named Nelson. It was a wrong number, but this timely interruption made Carver think that maybe what his story needed…was Nelson. He inserted a new character by that same name into his story, which soon became “Vitamins,” and this proved to be the exact change the narrative needed. In a craft lecture at Muse and the Marketplace Literary Conference, Charles Baxter called this type of character a “Captain Happen,” someone to insert into a story to destabilize it on purpose.

In workshop, Gates encouraged us to make trouble happen in our fiction in a variety of ways, one of which was by using this exact technique. When I had somehow forgotten this advice halfway through the term, he reminded me. “Maybe you want to drop a new character into this mess,” he suggested in a letter about a story of mine that wasn’t quite there yet. My first-person narrator was dreamy and quiet. Not much happened to her, though the sentences did sound pretty. Rather than writing fiction, I was perfecting prose; readers came away from my work asking the exact question that no writer wants to hear: “so what?

 ◊

Narrators like mine were everywhere in literature – wallflowers, idealists, poets. So why wasn’t mine working? I found a solution, as always, through reading. In “Glow Hunters,” a story from Kimberly King Parsons’ Black Light, the narrator, Sara, is a teenager with a tendency to ruminate. She is a thoughtful, introverted type who believes humans are “always in between tragedies, that anything good is a lull before the next devastation.” A narrator like Sara is without question a good writer, but also provides such a great deal of interiority that she risks infecting the story with passivity. Parsons breaks up Sara’s gorgeously reflective, yet potentially bleak first-person voice by looking to another character to take the lead for action: Sara’s best friend (and crush), Bo.

Bo gives Sara an active purpose right from the outset, declaring that the girls’ summer will be defined by their quest for psychedelic mushrooms. During their days on the road searching in cow fields, Bo tells outrageous lies to cashiers at truck stops and insists that Sara is the “designated [mushroom] gatherer.” Without a character like Bo, Sara might very well spend her entire summer indoors, fearing life before it can happen to her. Parsons knows that if we’re inside Sara’s head the entire time, we must at least have interesting things going on outside of it in order to carry a story.

Sara is aware of Bo’s magnetism. “Bo’s more brightly lit than the rest of us,” she notes in the very first sentence of the story, and soon becomes aware of the fact that her friend is bringing out something in her, too. “What Bo and I have going on – this electric something – I’m not sure either of us knows exactly what to call it.” Halfway through summer, Bo wakes Sara up in the middle of the night for sex, and the rest of the story is propelled by Sara’s hope for it to happen again. Here, Parsons has inserted a character that is doing quite a bit of work on the page, both prompting all the action while also serving as an object of desire. Bo is unafraid to make a scene, contrasting Sara’s passivity, and so because of her we have scenes, and the girls’ journey moves along much more speedily than it might otherwise. Readers have someone interesting to watch from the start, but the plot is truly propelled by the love scene in the middle, after which our narrator starts to want.

Desire becomes the main driver giving the story its shape, and Parsons knows to stretch this out, making us wait. Like Joyce bringing the perverted man forth and taking him away in “An Encounter,” Parsons has teased her readers with this middle scene. The day after their rendezvous, Bo doesn’t even acknowledge that anything has happened, which tortures Sara, and readers ache right alongside her. This is when the author’s choice to include such an internally-focused narrator makes most sense; Sara’s strengths shine brightly in these next sections, when she articulates her thoughts on the anguish of unrequited love quite clearly, despite being unable to say them aloud. These words nourish readers, who have of course felt this too. Not another inkling of intimacy appears again until the very end, when finally, Bo straddles Sara in the back of the car, “and it’s bliss.” Sara has gotten what she wanted, so the story is over, but she is still her same introspective self. “It’s the kind of sex so good you want it to hurry up and be over so you can talk about it for the rest of your life,” she thinks. “That’s something I think of while I’m having it, some way I might describe it later.”

 ◊

There is great power in the narrative voice that sounds pretty, and perhaps even more in the gritty voice, the one that tells the same truths as the voice inside our heads. Dialogue can achieve this too; in Carver’s “Vitamins,” the narrator’s wife discovers her job selling vitamins isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. She says, “Vitamins…for shit’s sake! I mean, when I was a girl, this is the last thing I ever saw myself doing. Jesus, I never thought I’d grow up to sell vitamins. Door-to-door vitamins. This beats all. This really blows my mind.” There is a seduction in reading other people’s voices and realizing they sound like our own. Still, the voice can’t do all the work, no matter how good it may be. In fiction, we need surprises to push against our characters, challenging them. In fiction, something must always intrude: Nelson arrives, carrying with him a severed human ear from Vietnam. This changes the scope of the story, forcing readers to compare the vitamin-ridden, middle-class existence to the horrors of war.

It seems ludicrous now that I didn’t see it before: the essential shape of a story typically includes the introduction of something new into a character’s life. This something new could take on many different forms; writers may find their Nelsons in long-kept secrets, or a lacy underthing, or anything, really, that causes characters to react. These intrusions mold the plot, putting characters in situations where they have no choice but to change, bringing readers to a conclusion that does not just sound nice but brings the gut punch we are all looking for, the one that happens when a page of words manages to capture a precise emotion from real life. Only artists can do this. We know it when we see it, cutting across time and place, connecting writer to reader: that feeling you describe; I’ve had it too.

So, let some social misfit walk by your characters, or set roaches loose inside the house. See what happens. If you’re like me, you might not fully succeed, at least not yet. But in the words of a wise mentor of mine, “who knows, you might actually end up with a plot.”

Dena Soffer is a writer and literacy coach from St. Louis. She earned her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a 2021 recipient of an Author Fellowship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, the Chicago Review of Books, and the Cleveland Review of Books. She is working on a novel.

 

NOTES TO A YOUNG WRITER: On (Re)writing, (Re)vision, Editing, and Other Random Terms, a Craft Essay by Gayathri Prabhu

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NOTES TO A YOUNG WRITER
On (Re)writing, (Re)vision, Editing, and Other Random Terms
A Craft Essay by Gayathri Prabhu

The young writer asks me, the mentor whose name is vertical on book spines, a question about writing they wish would go away. No doubt they can write, they know that, they love that, but the question is really about rewriting. What they seek is vigor and inspiration in writing, the kind of dazzling force that they believe only spontaneity can create, and none of that squares up to my advice about reflection, revision, and molten sentences constantly recast. Yes, yes, they agree with me about the demands of crafting, of sentences that need trimming or ideas that need extending, but what does one do with the air of drudgery and scrutiny that is evoked by rewriting? The young writer would like to believe in something that is complete in the incompleteness of the first draft, its creative ferment and immediacy, not to mention the freshness of a mind just churned. How does one retain such immediacy and force if one submits to the exhaustion of more drafts?

I take recourse in an anecdote about two books written simultaneously by a writer who only intended to publish one. The Nobel laureate John Steinbeck wrote East of Eden in black pencil on blue-ruled paper notebooks that were supplied to him by his friend and editor, Pat Covici (to whom the novel is dedicated). While Steinbeck wrote his manuscript on the right-hand pages of these notebooks, he would unfailingly jot down ideas, comments, resolutions and verbal snapshots of each working day on the left-hand pages. These parallel writings became the book Journal of a Novel, published in 1969, a year after Steinbeck’s death. To dip into its pages is to have the privilege of looking over a writer’s shoulder, to know something about the contours of their thought process, the best demonstration I know of the continuum of writing and rewriting. While Steinbeck’s informal entries are often explicitly addressed to Covici, there is no doubt that Steinbeck is in dialogue with himself about his craft; at each step is the implication that the terrain of imagination and writing must be revisited several times.

◊

The first edition of Journal of a Novel includes a Publisher’s Note confirming that Steinbeck made “extensive revisions, omitted whole passages and rearranged some of the chapters” to the first full draft of East of Eden. However, unlike the celebrated novel, the collection of writings that finally became the precocious Journal of a Novel was “never revised in any way” since its author never intended it for publication. On the contrary, “its repetitions, even its seeming irrelevancies, are a part of its documentary interest.”  In the first entry in this journal, dated January 29, 1951, Steinbeck reflects on the inexplicability, the clumsiness and difficulty of a craft that tries to “find symbols for the wordlessness.” And then as if to rouse himself to get to work for the day, he writes, “A good writer always works at the impossible.” In this very private word of encouragement that a writer gives his hesitant self, we understand that while the aspiration may seem impossible, it is the constant (re)writing that brings our words into the realm of plausibility, and then, finally, to bounteous possibility.

Could it be then, I ask the young writer, that rewriting is not an appendage to writing, but is the unavoidable heart of the matter? When we start to write, if the sentence has to shape up for any reader’s comprehension, we are already in the realm of rewriting. Rewriting is not the aftermath or the consequence or the cosmetic surgery to early writing. And most importantly, writing does not come before rewriting. To rewrite or to re-vision, one begins with the awareness that writing is a process and that there is a constant negotiation during that process between the thought or idea and the words that accompany it in the first iteration.

Therefore, to be a writer is inevitably to be a rewriter.

◊

The young writer clarifies with alacrity: of course, they agree, and in no way would they imply that readers must be inflicted with their writing angst, but if writing and rewriting are indeed simultaneous and continuous, what do we make of editing? Is it different from rewriting, or is it just a matter of fussy nomenclature?

Thus, our discussion turns to in-built editors—all writers come with one. This in-built editor is the voice in our head that can spy a sentence taking flight or berate the use of the same fraying connective for the seventh time in five pages. But to think of our writing selves as creating and our editing selves as tidying, one as before and the other as after, is to cleave the creative life for no good reason.

“Thought was never an isolated thing with me” reveals William Carlos Williams in his autobiography, “it was a game of tests and balances, to be proven by the written word.” A game, playful, even joyous perhaps, that is not linear, but concentric – thought, written word, and tests and balances (the craft of composing, rearranging, tuning) form the composite of a writer’s work.

It may be helpful, I say, to think in terms of drafts, the many versions of a work as it morphs from first idea to the published text. For instance, when I have to make significant changes to my manuscripts—these may be of structure, language, voice, tone, tense, plot, or even genre—I start a new draft, a blank document into which I transfer or rework relevant parts of the previous version (a copy of which is saved somewhere). Editing, on the other hand, is when one is content that the draft is now more or less stable and changes will be much more geared towards tweaks of clarity, punctuation, lexicon, grammar, and syntax. When I edit, unlike when I rewrite, I do not clone any further versions or files but make the corrections within a draft that I now think of as done. However, I do feel obliged to tell the young writer, as I have heard it remarked elsewhere, that manuscripts are never finished, but published.

◊

We are of the same tribe, the young writer and I, a tribe that obsessively count words, lines, pages, hours at the table. If we have slaved for days on a few pages, we are loath to discard it, or even to recast it. We grow attached to bits that other readers (those we dare trust) will tell us to let go. We cling without shame because good writing is hard-fought and it takes courage and humility to finally accept that much of what we put on the page may not be good enough to make it to the next draft. As painstaking as knowing what to take out of our drafts is the finding of parts that we can sense are missing, to write and fit them in without the whole edifice taking a tumble. The grand sweep of ideas might conjure an essay, a poem, a book, but it will begin to breathe to another pair of eyes (outside our heads) only through the integrity of the details that we carefully bead together.

And so, we agree that it does not matter what we call any step in the writing process, so long as we are able to think of steps or progressions that include all kinds of nurturance and hindrance, because it takes us closer to being better at the craft. I may have written more pages and for more years than the young writer, but our struggles at the writing table look the same. Word has to follow word, some to be deleted, others to change, a few more to add, and yet resolutely, word after word, till, the end.

Gayathri Prabhu is the author of four novels, a memoir, a novella in prose poetry, and a book on black and white Hindi cinema. She teaches literary studies at the Manipal Centre for Humanities. Her work can be seen at her website.

 

THE FUNNY IN MEMOIR: Alison Bechdel, Dinty W. Moore, and Trey Popp, a craft essay by Beth Kephart

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THE FUNNY IN MEMOIR: Alison Bechdel, Dinty W. Moore, and Trey Popp
A Craft Essay by Beth Kephart

A few years ago, a friend who had first come to know me through my books and was slowly coming to know me through myself—our emails, our occasional actual conversations, our letters, our back-and-forth gifts—sent a note my way that included (I’m paraphrasing here; none of my friends speak as strangely as I write) this question:

How is it that I’ve known you for all these years and I’m only now learning that you are funny? Why have you hidden your funny?

I wondered then, I wonder now, what frees me to precipitate the giggle. And why I so rarely feel so free. And why funny isn’t in most of the books I write, why I tend, on the page, toward the not-hilarious me.

Writing funny, especially in memoir, is a surprisingly recherché talent. Every spring semester at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach memoir, the ratio of funny submissions to not-funny submissions is, on average, one: everything else. This semester our funny was the work of Jonathan, who had me choking on my chortles at 4 a.m., as I read lines like these:

My mother dresses me. Everything from purchasing the clothes to what I’d be wearing that day is her decision. I don’t particularly care—after all, I have something to wear and it’s comfortable and so be it. I imagine though that this becomes a chore for her: young children grow quickly, which means that old clothes became too small, too quickly. The solution, obviously, is to buy a size or two larger and let the kid grow into it. My shirts get so big that at times they stretch to my knees. This stroke of insight and ingenuity is well received by my peers and classmates alike.

“Why are you wearing a dress? Are you a GIRL?”

Jonathan is an unassuming writer—a non-writer, he claimed, choosing (for reasons that remain beyond my reach, since he did all the work and then some) to audit the class. But he had made us laugh out loud during COVID lockdown, inside our Zoom boxes, where he appeared against a borrowed backdrop so that we would not be exposed to the ramshackle of his purportedly unkempt habitat. Nothing non in achieving comicality, I tried to tell him. I hoped he could hear me through the ether.

I recently read three funny memoirs, back to back to back. The first, Black Mountain, Blue Field: A Journey Through Montenegro, is a small-press glory by Trey Popp. It retraces the journey Popp took, years ago, as a 26-year-old whose every job up until that point “had been aimed at piling up just enough money for a plane ticket away from the confinement of an actual career.” His destination this time was Montenegro, a country that held some keys to family history. His traveling companion was his 82-year-old grandfather—hard of hearing and gabby, opinionated and generous, silently displeased with the Yugo Popp rents to carry them forward on their journey:

It looked like a very slightly upgraded go-cart. Inside was a steering wheel the size of a salad plate and, quite close to it, the upright back of a nonadjustable driver’s seat. (I’m six feet five inches and all of it is legs.) Like the rest of the interior, the seat was upholstered in a black fabric that was several degrees Celsius shy of spontaneous combustion.

Popp is an exquisite writer—as capable of explicating complex political and ethnic histories as he is of limning landscape, as at home in the long twist of a lyric sentence as he is with the ping-and-pong of transcribed dialogue, as good at rendering silence as he is as crafting ambient noise, and, most importantly for our purposes here, as adept at the absurd as the sublime. It helps that Popp’s grandfather is one of the most fabulous characters to ever cross a memoir page. But we wouldn’t know that if Popp hadn’t written him with such acute and tender-hearted prose:

His natural charm cloaked a mind that old age was calcifying. He was attuned to his children’s lives and his grandchildren’s march from one milestone to the next. But otherwise it seemed as though the last decade’s worth of experiences had been deposited in his memory like loose sand exposed to a constant wind, which would begin to erode deeper recollections—if that process hadn’t already begun.

Popp took a tape recorder along for the ride. Much of the funny arrives by way of tape transcriptions—bursting conversations, misdirections, accusations, revelations—that are all fastidiously well-framed. Funny, too, are the scenarios this grandkid and his grandfather find themselves in—the unforced errors of preposterously inadequate lodging, the surprising surround sound of newly discovered relatives, the endearing determination of Popp’s grandfather to find Popp a girl to love.

But all this funny would remain just and only funny were it not for Popp’s gorgeously rendered moments of self-reflection and -discovery, the sublime that I alluded to earlier. Like this:

As I thought about the profound leap of faith he had taken to say yes instead of no, it dawned on me that somewhere along the line I’d gotten love backwards. I’d imagined it purely as an outcome. But that’s only half of what it was, and the lesser half. What made love sublime was its power to bloom from mere intention. Love was a premise, not a consequence…. Love above all was a choice, a determination made without regard to conditions met.

The best of funny stirs us beyond laughter. It rattles around in our bones, and hearts.

My second foray into memoiristic funny was Dinty W. Moore’s To Hell with It, a book whose subject matter, range, and tone are announced in the subtitle—Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-Inducing Inferno. Moore suggests (funnily) that Dante’s infamous guided tour to the afterlife might just as easily be titled The Medieval Traveler’s Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: Where to Eat, Where to Stay, What to See.

Moore also suggests (in all seriousness) that the ways that we hold fast to baked-in notions about “our inherent sinfulness and the idea that we might suffer mightily at the end, not just for a while, but forever” do not “make our lives more tolerable, more productive, more worth our limited time.” Raised a Catholic in a family burdened by a dark history, the son of a sweet and charming man who drank excessively, a writer and teacher whose life has been marked by depressive episodes, Moore uses scholarship, humor, personal stories, and personal confession to underscore his considered belief that we are not all inherently bad people. That maybe, while we are alive, we should less burdensomely live.

Moore, for example, takes on Dante’s Third Circle of Hell—gluttony—by registering for the Twenty-Sixth World Chicken Festival’s 96.7 FM Kool Gold Hot Win Eating Contest of London, Kentucky. He has his qualms. The competition is fierce. He ultimately cedes to the moment:

Finally, the DJ shouts “One minute left,” and I experience a sudden burst of gustatory endorphins, chomping down more chicken in sixty seconds than I probably did in the previous four minutes, shoving and biting and pulling chicken apart with my hands, seeing that bucket empty out a bit, and hearing an unexpected voice in my head that says, “You’re gonna win this thing. You’re some kind of animal.”

Does Moore’s foray into competitive chicken-wing consumption underscore his innate sinfulness? He doesn’t actually think so:

I didn’t win the hot-wing-eating contest, but maybe I didn’t come in last either. While the gustatory rapaciousness exhibited by my fellow chicken-chomping competitors was unquestionably gross, it was also fun, and I don’t at this moment feel particularly sinful. Not enough to condemn me into the jaws of Cerberus, in any case.

It’s funny, of course—the scene, the language. But it wouldn’t be nearly as funny if Moore were not equally intent on exposing the perils of living with guilt, of imagining ourselves sinful, of nearly giving way to darkness. If Moore didn’t undergird the funny with naked honesty: “As I write this, I am one year older than my father was the year he died, and looking back, I see my life so far as one attempt after another to seal the void, plug the crater, erase the absence that defined me.”

The third book of my three was The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel. A graphic memoir, the book bills itself as “a deeply layered story of [Bechdel’s] fascination, from her childhood to adulthood, with every fitness craze to come down the pike.” Which is to say that the book is obsessed with Bechdel’s obsession with self-improvement and possible self-transcendence, the desire, as she writes for the “slackening of the ego’s grip.” We see Bechdel skiing, running, climbing, biking, weight lifting, yoga-ing—faster, longer, higher, more—as one would expect from an exercise-centric book. But we also meet historical others who sought to outpace themselves, to “solidify” themselves, to quiet the noise in their heads by pushing their bodies to bodily limits—people like Margaret Fuller and Dorothy Wordsworth and Jack Kerouac. Bechdel uses history the way other memoirists use flashbacks.

Bechdel pins deadpan prose to waggish art. She is sly and wry inside her captions. She draws the cartoon version of herself with astute exaggeration—swinging from New York City subway car straps, throwing off monsoon-quantity sweat, cycling upside down on snaking, climbing roads. The simple lines in her drawn face convey a colossal range of expressions—curious, confused, smug, enraged, meditative, epiphanic, in the zone and very much out of it. Her depicted postures—ranging from slumped to truly superhuman—are both self-effacing and hysterical. And when the words and the captions and the dialogue bubbles and the images aren’t quite enough to produce the intended result, there is, often, a nearby cat that makes its own silent but pithy commentary on the moment.

In Bechdel’s hands, the graphic memoir form, with its multitude of layers and convolutions, dissects humor into its daedal parts—the words said and not said, the self-aggrandizing and negating, the ambitions that provoke and pierce, the serious stuff of trying to outrun ourselves and the funny-sad-too-true consequences. She achieves all of this while grounding us in the history of brilliant people being both brilliant and profoundly hapless.

This, then, is what funny inside the memoir is—a layering of light against dark, habit against hope, goofy against just being human. Goofy, because goofy is being human.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning writer of more than thirty books in multiple genre, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a widely published essayist. Her new memoir in essays is Wife | Daughter | Self. Her new craft book is We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RESONANT PLACES: Houses We Live in, Homes that Live in Our Writing, a Fiction Craft Essay by Ellen Prentiss Campbell

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RESONANT PLACES
Houses We Live in, Homes that Live in Our Writing
A Fiction Craft Essay
by Ellen Prentiss Campbell

Memory and imagination cast spells. Fiction is inspired by places as well as temps perdue. Many of us have dreamed last night that we went back to—well, not Rebecca’s Manderley but to a place from our past, one that resonates. Some places are lost to us even if the building remains because we can never again enter and live there. Perhaps we can peer in, but we cannot look out the windows again, never see the way the world is framed from within that particular shelter again. Sometimes indeed an entire small world is lost to us. Although years later we may wander through a campus again, a neighborhood, the people are gone or so changed as to be unrecognizable. Without our remembered familiars, it’s empty as a stage set.

But story-telling, imagining, can open the portal to the lost place. Writing fiction, just as we can write from the point of view of people we have never been, we can inhabit resonant places we’ve never actually lived in. We can step over the threshold of the real or imagined house, into the skin of the house’s real or imagined occupant. Resonant homes contain lives, shelter, hide, even expose, the hopes, dreams, sorrows, and joys played out beneath the roof.

Such places for me are often the initial wellspring for a story. Sometimes, I re-inhabit a truly remembered place—a former home of mine. Sometimes I visit, I take a long-term lease, to a place I have never lived.

I’ve always loved, and frequently visit “house museums” and I’d argue that, in a way, all houses are museums. Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House was first on my list, Emily Dickinson’s not too much further down. Perhaps a personal best day of sightseeing was visiting the white garden Vita Sackville West designed to be seen by moonlight, followed by the coziness of Henry James’ Lamb House in Rye. A close second would be the evening on the patio of Edith Wharton’s house in Lenox, Massachusetts, hearing one of her stories read aloud by an actor from the theater down the road.  I “collect” house museums the way some collect bird sightings.

A couple of years ago, I stood in Herman Melville’s study—the only comfortable, light-filled room in the awkward rambling house. Looking out the window—at fields, not waves—was to imagine looking through his eyes, at what he saw (or blotted out) as he wrote.

But it was a visit to a different kind of house, one empty of furniture, in the midst of restoration, not a museum of the famous former occupant, that spurred the process of writing my novel Frieda’s Song.

For years I lived a couple of blocks from the Chestnut Lodge Hospital in Rockville, Maryland. The Lodge had once been renowned for innovative treatment of severe mental illness, and the psychiatrist who put the sanatorium on the map was Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Frieda, as everyone including her patients called her, came to the Lodge in 1935, fleeing Nazi Germany, losing her home, losing the hospital she had founded there, losing her family, colleagues, friends. She soon proved invaluable to The Lodge, and other envious institutions wooed her. A competing hospital offered her a house. How tempting, especially to a refugee who had been dispossessed of everyone, of everything.

The Lodge’s director did not want to lose her, so he counteroffered—promising not just a house, but one custom-built to her specifications. She accepted, took active part in designing the house, and remained to live and work in what is still called Frieda’s Cottage for the rest of her life, dying in her home in 1957.

About thirty years after her death, I moved to the neighborhood, where I practiced psychotherapy at a community clinic. I attended the annual symposium for mental health professionals on the expansive green lawns of the Lodge. Many of us had read Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy, authored by Frieda, who remained an iconic absent presence. Her Cottage was by then shabby, used as office space.

The Lodge itself declined and in the latter days of the twentieth century, the hospital closed and stood empty as attempts to repurpose it failed. But the local historical society purchased Frieda’s Cottage, and began restorations. Visiting the Cottage during its renovation, I felt a tug: a resonant place, a resident ghost, pulling me toward story. Restoration complete, the Cottage was rented; Frieda’s Cottage was once more a home.

The remaining hospital building went up in flames one night in 2009 and its rubble was bulldozed, erased. But—miraculously it seemed—Frieda’s Cottage, just yards away, survived.

The invisible shadow of the vanished Lodge, the mysterious fire, the resilient Cottage, all pulled me in. I researched, I imagined. I began to write a story, from the point of view of a current-day psychotherapist living in Frieda’s Cottage. The therapist’s teenage son demanded his say, and soon Frieda herself—rather my Frieda, my imagined Frieda Fromm-Reichmann—demanded hers.

In strange parallel progression, my novel was finished and then accepted for publication almost precisely as Frieda’s Cottage was nominated and then designated as a National Historic Landmark. (I had testified before the Landmark Commission along with Frieda’s biographer, historians, architectural historians—a rather surreal experience for someone who makes things up.)

Not too long ago, the Cottage was available for rent again.

Tempting, I’ll admit, to imagine, living and writing in Frieda’s Cottage.

It is time for me to move again. But not to move homes. It’s time for me to move on again, move in again, to a different resonant home. I’ve already found my next story abode, though it’s vanished. A truly lost house this time, though once a real house, once inhabited by a local artist’s family. House, artist, and family are all gone. Which makes the place perfect for me in some ways: free-range. I’m just opening the door, looking around. Seriously considering a long-term lease.

Ellen Prentiss CampbellEllen Prentiss Campbell’s new novel is Frieda’s Song. Her debut novel The Bowl with Gold Seams received the National Indie Excellence Award for Historical Fiction. Her story collection Contents Under Pressure was nominated for the National Book Award. Known by Heart: Collected Stories appeared in May 2020. She lives in Washington D.C. Learn more at her website.

MAKING THE READER FEEL SOMETHING. PLEASE. SHOW AND TELL, A Craft Essay by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood

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MAKING THE READER FEEL SOMETHING. PLEASE. SHOW AND TELL.
A Craft Essay
by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood

 

“Show, don’t tell.”

An old piece of writing advice, generally good advice, but sometimes hard to know how to do it well. Also, confusing, because telling is often part of the showing, especially when writing personal essay and memoir.

The advice stems from how writers can best help readers understand what they are trying to convey—everything from emotions and mental state to the tone of a situation, the nature of a person or relationship, the look and feel of a setting. And much more.

What if I wrote, “I’m so mad!” Do those words and the exclamation point make you feel my anger? They just aren’t enough.  I must work harder to convey my anger.

Writing how an emotion makes us feel in our body or how it looks sometimes works. But it, too, might not be enough. Writing “my face turned red” tells you what I looked like (and it is probably better than “I’m so mad!”), but showing by using such a predictable, overused description probably doesn’t help you feel my anger. And I want you to feel it, not just know about it.

There are many other techniques you can use to show and tell. Here are a few:

  • Share the narrator’s thoughts and internal dialogue with herself.
  • Write a scene when a scene is more effective than a summary.
  • Describe a character’s (the narrator’s or someone else’s) behavior/action and/or reaction.
  • Use dialogue (indirect, direct, summary, inner) as well as show what is not said, or show silence.
  • Bring the senses, details, and description to the page.
  • Find strong verbs.
  • Give an example. Be specific.
  • Choose sentence length to match the emotion/tone.

Now let me show you a few examples where writers have done show and tell well.

EXAMPLE #1:

In Ross Gay’s essay “Some Thoughts on Mercy” (The Sun, July 2013), he discusses racism and writes about a night when he was driving home from work late at night and a cop pulled him over. Gay writes, offering the reader his thoughts, “I wasn’t perturbed by the cop. I had made a decision in the recent past no longer to be afraid of the police.” This is the scene he gives us:

And so, for the first time in my life when a cop came to my car window, I looked him in the eye and asked as gently and openheartedly as possible if he could tell me why he’d stopped me. “After you give me your license and registration,” he said. I handed them over, and he told me simply, “Your license-plate light is out.” I’d had no idea there was such a thing as a license-plate light, and I told him as much, laughing to express my good-natured confusion and gratitude: He wants to do me a favor.

And he smiled—just for a second—then asked if I had any drugs in the car. When I said no, he asked if I had any guns in the car. When I said no, he asked if I’d been drinking. When I said no, he asked again, “You don’t have any weapons or anything illegal in the car I should know about?” (Strange, you might think, for such questions to arise from a burned-out license-plate light.) And I said, looking straight ahead through the windshield, “No.”

Look at all he accomplished in this short scene. Gay “looked the cop in the eye” (behavior/action)—showing a wish to connect and also animating his decision to feel no fear. Ross describes how he asked the cop “as gently and openheartedly as possible” why he’d been pulled over. He could have written about using a sharp tone or asking matter-of-factly. But “gently” and “openheartedly” help us understand the author’s mindset. The cop doesn’t answer the question—he tells Gay he wants license and registration first (direct dialogue). The tension starts. By the time I get to the cop’s questions in a row (first two are indirect dialogue)—and the nature of the questions themselves—the tension escalates more. Having that third question written in direct dialogue—“You don’t have any weapons or anything illegal in the car I should know about?”—ups the tension even more. And then that last moment—of Gay no longer looking at the cop (action/reaction) but “looking straight ahead through the windshield” when he answers no (that is all he says, so note what is not being said/silence—and that’s a short sentence, just “no,” which is also effective at showing mindset). This makes me feel that any hope of change in that moment is gone.

EXAMPLE #2

In Sam Bell’s essay “The Empty Set” (The Sun, April 2020), she writes, “I dated a lunatic in college.” But what does that mean? He had outlandish ideas? He liked to speed on the highway? A label is not enough, so she follows with:

Here are some of the things he did: lit a cigarette as we deplaned on the tarmac and, after he was asked to put it out, flung the butt into the circular engine intake, causing chaos, then ran from the attendants, leaving me behind; kicked in car doors with his steel-toed boots in a very expensive neighborhood; came after me with a hammer; stole all my money. You know what? He’s not worth talking about.

She gives examples of his behaviors (with great details), and by the end of the list (even before the end), I agree and understand what she means when she calls him “a lunatic.” Let’s note the strong verbs: “flung,” “kicked,” “stole.” And then those last two sentences—“You know what? He’s not worth talking about” (not just what they say, but also the sentence length)—convey she’s tired of the mental space he has taken.

EXAMPLE #3

In Sophfronia Scott’s essay “Why I Didn’t Go to the Firehouse” (Timberline Review, Fall/Winter 2019), she writes about being newly pregnant:

I loved that time of walking newly pregnant through New York City as the days were getting colder. I liked knowing I harbored my own bit of heat, a tiny ball of sunshine growing within me and waiting to warm its own universe. I lived in a realm of possibility and I remember being acutely conscious of it, of soaking up life and magic all around me—savoring the sugar of a Krispy Kreme donut melting in my mouth, my steps touching down on pavement that seemed gentle beneath my feet. I walked down Columbus Avenue and I saw a dual face, my own mingled with some aura of my unborn child, reflected to me in the smiling faces of strangers who couldn’t possibly know I was pregnant. But in that strange law of nature, life attracts life, recognizes itself and feeds there. Every face seemed like a harbinger of grace, of the potential held by the being growing inside me. I felt a strong sense of the whole experience being a gift and I was grateful. I loved being in that golden bubble. It felt like where I was supposed to be. It felt like home.

Then suddenly—blood.

Scott begins by describing what is going through her mind (thoughts), how it felt to be newly pregnant—not the physical sensation, but her emotional and mental state. She picks out sensory details and specifics that reflect a sweetness and peace: the donut melting in her mouth, the pavement “gentle,” and every face “like a harbinger of grace.” I was with her in a glowing, happy picture.

Then that single three-word sentence. Jarring? The blood was jarring to her, and she wanted to convey that. She did in one, swift (short!) sentence—not just by the words, but because the sentence is set in its own paragraph.

EXAMPLE #4

Here’s a paragraph from Natalie Lima’s essay, “Snowbound” (Brevity, September 2019), about her leaving Florida to attend her “dream school” in Chicago, only to experience disillusionment at what she finds. Let’s look at how she uses strong verbs. (Basic verbs describe a general action—like “I walked down the hall” and “I sat in my chair”—versus a more specific and stronger verb such as “I shuffled down the hall” or “I slumped in my chair.”) By interspersing basic verbs with strong verbs, Lima’s prose is more effective; an entire paragraph with all strong verbs might be too much. Here I have bolded the stronger verbs.

The inside of your dorm room is muggy when you plop onto your bed. The heat suffocates your skin, so you unzip your North Face and throw it across the room. It lands on your roommate’s desk, almost knocks over her laptop. You want to get up and grab the jacket but your body can’t seem to move. You sit still, sinking into the mattress, trying to remember what it felt like to float.

EXAMPLE #5

In my own memoir, The Going and Goodbye, I was writing about a love I’d experienced with someone when we were both young and I did not yet understand the difficulties that could come in a committed relationship. Instead of saying that, I tried to show it with this scene in which I had asked him to go with me on a ride in an amusement park:

The ride threw us up, up, and down, down, and our bucket spun so fast we slid into each other, smashed skin to skin, and the fair and everything we could see blurred and washed together in an uneasy glimpse, again, again, and neither one of us laughed as the pace quickened, as we spun so fast everything I had ever eaten tossed in my gut, and round and round we went until the sky was in our laps and our bodies felt as if we could not press harder against the bucket’s edges, and up we tossed and down we came and up again and down and up and down and up and down until the dizziness felt like failure.

The ride slowed and stopped. The man ambled over. He lifted the metal rod and let us loose, and we staggered off the ride for which we had paid. We held our stomachs and could not bear the scent of sizzling meat, nor could we look at the fruit in market stalls, their peels broken and the flesh sweltering through. We could not have glanced at scarves swaying in the breeze nor born the sound of water beating against the shore.

We returned to our hotel room and lay on separate beds. We turned on our sides and on our backs, but nothing kept the world from free falling.  

I tried to select strong verbs like “smashed” and “blurred” to create an uncomfortable feeling, and I used a long sentence in that first paragraph to show how the ride went on and on. I also tried to use the senses (e.g., “scent of sizzling meat”) to evoke nausea.

Most of this kind of work doesn’t happen for me on the first draft. My first drafts get my ideas on the page, and later drafts are often when I try out the sort of techniques I listed to see what works best for the piece.

If you look at your own writing drafts, you might see where you can revise, using one or more of these techniques. With enough practice and use of these, you won’t need this list. Your writing will show you where it needs to go to make the reader feel what you want them to.

Shuly Xóchitl CawoodShuly Xóchitl Cawood is an award-winning author. Her books include the memoir, The Going and Goodbye (Platypus Press) and A Small Thing to Want: stories (Press 53). She teaches memoir and personal essay workshops. Learn more at her website.

QUEER (PRIVATE) EYE: Crafting a New Hardboiled Sleuth, a Craft Essay by Margot Douaihy

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QUEER (PRIVATE) EYE: Crafting a New Hardboiled Sleuth
by Margot Douaihy

“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
—Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

There’s arguably no writer more emblematic of the hardboiled experience than Raymond Chandler. On the mean streets of Chandler’s fictional Los Angeles, his private eye character, Philip Marlowe, expresses infuriating bravado and self-annihilation in equal measure. It was PI Marlowe who ignited my interest in, and enduring love for hardboiled crime fiction. His lyrical musings about fine whiskey, his tireless dog-with-a-bone persistence, his suit, hat, and gun—it all entranced me.

As a closeted queer growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, during the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era, searching for headstrong characters in books felt safer than getting to know myself. I was in awe of Private Investigator Marlowe’s freedom, his devil-may-care brio, unaware that his swagger was probably shaped by his white, heterosexual, cisgender male privilege. Even if the hardboiled dick (yes, that’s the colloquial term for detective) is pistol-whipped, he is never afraid to throw a punch, snark at cops, or chase a lead down a shadowy alley.

Besides the PI’s barbed charms and Chandler’s dexterity at the line level—evocative neon-lit atmospheres, seductive metaphorical turns—Marlowe’s sadness thickens his characterization and the psychological texture of the mystery. In The Long Goodbye, Marlowe readily admits he is “depressed.” Marlowe is a damn good PI who can work a case, but crime writer and critic Megan Abbott observes in a LitHub interview how he “feels control over nothing, not even himself.” The canonical sleuth’s melancholy and cynicism complicate his whiskey-drinking machismo, letting readers see his human frailty, deepening investment in both him and his investigations. Will he fall off track? What’s at stake for him?

Marlowe’s hard to stomach when he demeans and abuses female characters. In The Big Sleep (1939), he slaps Carmen Sternwood to rouse her from a drug-induced haze, repeating the word “slap” four times within the span of two sentences, creating a strong rhythmic effect. The cadence intimates a pleasure in—or fixation with—the act of hitting a woman. Marlowe declares that the opposite sex gives him a hangover.

It’s impossible to deracinate a text from the time and place in which it was written, and Chandler’s craft innovation is undeniable. But as a creative writer who savors the sumptuous rituals of reading—pouring a cup of black coffee, laying on the sofa, and devouring a book in a day—Marlowe’s sexist, racist, and homophobic escapades repel me.

Reimagining the Hardboiled Hero
Inspired by gifted hardboiled writers and interested in crafting intersectional queer mysteries, I developed my own critical-into-creative crime-fiction methodology. The first book in the series is The Scorched Cross, and the sleuth is not a trench-coat-clad PI but a tattooed queer nun named Sister Holiday. If that seems rather wild, it should.

At the heart of my practice is a close engagement with foundational hardboiled texts published primarily in the ‘40s and ‘50s in concert with their feminist counterweights—mysteries by Sue Grafton, Katherine V. Forrest, Laurie R. King, and Sara Paretsky, published, largely, in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The feminist hardboiled and neo-hardboiled authors include women writing mysteries in the context of gay liberation and second-wave feminism, and the politics of these movements informed their narratives.

What I discovered through my analysis of early feminist hardboilers was a startling array of methods for leveraging social identity (re)construction to intensify and sustain narrative suspense. For instance, Sue Grafton’s PI Kinsey Millhone is an ass-kicking, wisecracking straight woman who, in A is for Alibi, smokes out the homme fatale (male version of the femme fatale) in a dramatic flip of the script. Katherine V. Forrest’s Kate Delafield is a fastidious detective and butch lesbian who battles crime and homophobia—internalized as well as externalized—in seedy Los Angeles.

Social comment is not extraneous but an inherent element of the hardboiled tale. In Talking About Detective Fiction, PD James points to hardboiled novels as stories of “social realism and protest.” Similar to the way in which the political tumult and socio/economic ideologies of Chandler’s Los Angeles informed his crime fiction plots (mobsters, for instance), feminist and queer crime fiction authors regularly weave topical themes and identity politics into their projects. Harsh social conditions, such as racism and violence, that threaten queer sleuth characters like Detroit-based PI Charlie Mack in Cheryl A. Head’s brilliant Catch Me When I’m Falling: A Charlie Mack Motown Mystery (2019), indicate some of the hostilities queer and BIPOC women experience on a daily basis.

Examining myriad strategies for weaving social critique into mystery plots helped me devise ways to narrativize contemporary polemics and tensions I find interesting. Accepting that the sleuth genre is both fluid and stable—a living art form that evolves as attitudes evolve—I set out to craft tales that read like satisfying whodunits while centering queer theory, queer spirituality, and queer phenomenology.

Subverting the Lone Wolf Trope
In my wise-guy reversal, I recast the hardboiled sleuth as a thirty-three-year-old tattooed queer nun named Sister Holiday who, as she tries to solve an arson-and-murder case, interrogates herself and her own interleaved identities. The Scorched Cross interlaces multiple mysteries and introduces the queer sleuth as both an investigator and instigator. Intrigued by Lisa Duggan’s suggestion that queer theory holds space for “radical potentiality,” my nun-sleuth rejects fixed binaries and tidy categories of any sort. Sister Holiday breaks the rules and bucks convention as she seeks redemption.

In The Long Goodbye, PI Marlowe describes himself as “a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich … I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things.” Sister Holiday is also a lone wolf of a kind; an out queer woman when she lived in Brooklyn who took a provisional vow of abstinence as a novice nun in her New Orleans convent, but she still considers herself to be “extremely gay.” Like Marlowe, Sister Holiday has a penchant for liquor and women, and her relationship to “vice” is as cerebral as it is corporeal.

Queer “I”
I anchored my novel within the contours of a first-person point-of-view. The opening scene establishes the cynical voiceover as the camera eye. My goal is for the raw energy of the first-person voice and the plot points to dovetail to propel the narrative forward. First-person POVs can be challenging in mysteries because of the expectation for forward motion. Lyrical and metaphorical meditations can vivify the sense of place and intensify character immersion, but they must be used judiciously to keep the story cranking along.

Beginning on page one of The Scorched Cross, Sister Holiday’s voiceover foreshadows the narrative centrality of seeing and introduces the New Orleans heat as its own formidable character in a city of curses and miracles:

A good mystery never starts where you’d think. A sleight-of-hand trick begins off to the side, in a blind spot, like the alley behind my school. The alley was the only place I could smoke. I had no money for cigarettes, of course, but what I confiscated from my students was fair game. Waste is a sin. Not a deadly sin but sinful all the same. So, there I was on the stoop, minding my own business, roasting in the heat that never broke, not even at dusk. I had my goddamned gloves and scarf on, as Sister Augustine demanded. It was a rare moment alone, with one precious cigarette, before I slipped into the convent for supper.

Sister Holiday’s (often obnoxious) attitude and observations—and what she chooses to ignore—expose vital paradoxes that drive the story.

Queer Crime & (In)Justice
The LGBTQ community is not monolithic, but people at the margins often learn skills that prove to be valuable for detection: code-switching, people reading, encoding, decoding, reading between the lines, and inference. Queer people are fighters; from Stonewall to Obergefell v. Hodges, the community has shown resilience. PIs and queers also share more nuanced, unconventional views on crime, punishment, and fairness—knowing how to locate the gaps in systems of power.

To craft a female sleuth figure who capitalizes on her inside/outsider status and her queerness to advance her sleuthing, I needed to codify Sister Holiday’s sexuality in the context of her religiosity. As I began composing my novel, I inquired: would self-selected celibacy and abstinence delegitimize Holiday as a queer sleuth?

According to critic Faye Stewart, the answer is no. In a study of German queer crime fiction, Stewart posits that queer mysteries bring a “socially critical perspective together with boundary-crossing genders and sexualities, inviting readers to interpret queer figures and themes as literary incursions into cultural traditions and political discourses.” Within my crime-fiction framework, a religious lesbian sleuth uses the otherness of her experience and viewpoint to make surprising syntheses, look in unexpected places, connect disparate clues, and take unconventional approaches.

Genre Evolution
The market for queer private-eye tales continues to grow. Just a few of the exciting LGBTQX inheritors of the gumshoe tradition include Nikki Baker’s Virginia Kelly Mystery Series; Cheryl A. Head’s Charlie Mack Motown Series; Kristen Lepionka’s The Roxane Weary mystery series; Penny Mickelbury’s Mimi Patterson/Gianna Maglione Mystery Series; J.M. Redmann’s PI Michele (Micky) Knight; Sarah Schulman’s Maggie Terry; and my own Sister Holiday novels. The Sisters in Crime website offers more about these books and other queer sleuths who doggedly work the mean streets for their clients, who aren’t afraid to shake up their narrative worlds and expand the genre.  

I believe we need more than new hardboiled heroes following the same old formula. Now is the moment for new paradigms and queer hardboiled heroes who foreground queer storylines. The pedagogical implications are exhilarating: What might contemporary queer hardboilers illuminate about seminal novels by James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett, and vice versa?

There’s a singular thrill in experiencing the new within the familiar, to disenthrall from tradition and mint a bold new code. It’s the delicious challenge of writing “genre.” In this generative spirit, I strive to push the boundaries of the ever-evolving PI genre with my mysteries led by a flawed, stubborn sleuth with a queer identity all her own that informs her passion for revelation as well as her taste for vice.

Margot Douaihy, PhD, is the author of Girls Like You, a Lambda Finalist, and Scranton Lace, both published by Clemson University Press. Her work has been featured in PBS NewsHour, Colorado Review, The South Carolina Review, The Madison Review, The Florida Review, and Wisconsin Review. Learn more at her website.

 

AVOIDING / EMBRACING: Strategies for Writers with Anxiety Disorders A Craft Essay by Bailey Bridgewater

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AVOIDING / EMBRACING:
Strategies for Writers with Anxiety Disorders
A Craft Essay by Bailey Bridgewater

Ah, writing and mental health conditions—a power couple in the collective imagination of what influences how artists create. Biographies, movies, TV shows, and even books have reinforced the idea that psychological ailments produce the very best writers. It’s hard not to over-emphasize Edgar Allen Poe’s alcoholism, Sylvia Plath’s suicidal ideation, Emily Dickinson’s agoraphobia, or David Foster Wallace’s depression because we have been lured to focus more on these writers’ diagnoses than their process or even personality.

I’ll admit, I fell for it. I have suffered anxiety my whole life. As a child, it manifested itself in nervous ticks like picking my lips and severe panic around people I didn’t know well. Despite being the most advanced reader in my class, I would count paragraphs and figure out which passage I would be asked to read aloud, then practice in my head until the teacher called on me.

My condition severely hindered my writing process. I could dash off flash fiction in something near panic, but I could never finish a longer piece that required me to focus on it for multiple days. When I could, inevitably, I would re-read what I had, decide it was trash and I was a fraud, then not write anything for months or even years. Nevertheless, I avoided even thinking about medication. Wasn’t my anxiety what made me a writer? Wasn’t my ability to craft strong dialogue caused by my need to replay conversations over and over in my head? Weren’t my obsessive thought patterns what led to my best story ideas?

It took a weeklong residency in the middle of Alaska to help me discover the strategies that could make me a productive writer even with severe anxiety. Turns out, these techniques work for me whether my condition is medicated or not, and I suspect they may work for other writers struggling with the same challenges.

Alaska Changes Everything

When I accepted the residency at Chulitna Wilderness Lodge in remote Lake Clark, I planned to write a collection of short stories during the single week (all I could take off work). I thought constantly about the stories before I left. I jotted notes about characters and plots and settings. I outlined each one. But a strange thing happened when I arrived at my tiny cabin on the beach – I couldn’t write a single story. I started four of them, and each fell as flat as me on black ice. I panicked. I only had seven days. I had to have something to show for myself.

What if I had nothing to show and the organizers told everyone in the writing business that I was a fraud and I was never published again? What if they canceled my residency and made me pay full price for the time I had spent there because I had not written anything? What if at the end of the week I had to stand up for my presentation empty-handed and all the other artists laughed at me?

As I sat at dinner one night, too stressed to eat my fresh salmon, listening to the other artists talk about the wonderful things they had accomplished that day, I considered packing my bags and saving myself the humiliation. Then the lodge owner told a story about the pioneering woman who founded the lodge. It was captivating. This, I realized, was the story I had come here to write!

My immediate instinct was to research. Oh, how my academic brain wanted to find every book on female pioneers, about Lake Clark, how to build a log cabin, the social context of the time period, what people wore in the early 1900s, and period-appropriate vocabulary. But I knew I couldn’t. I didn’t have time. I devoured that delicious salmon and rushed back to my room to start the first novel I would ever completely draft.

My anxiety, task-master that it is, told me that I had to finish the entire book before I left Lake Clark, or I would never be able to complete it – so that’s what I did. For 6 days I did nothing but sleep, eat, and write. I finished on the last morning with 65,000 words and a manuscript that, in retrospect, was awful, but which taught me the key to finishing a novel while anxious: speed writing. The compulsion to finish that novel before I left residency, though obviously rooted in my disorder, led me to nearly all the writing strategies I use today, four completed novels later.

How I Recreated a Residency

Though the novel I drafted in one week was not particularly good (surprise!), an article I read on my way home from Alaska about missing men in the Kenai Peninsula offered the inspiration I needed to write my next book—a police procedural that has garnered positive feedback from several agents. I knew that if I wanted to write that book while back at home and working full time, I was going to have to try to write the way I did in residency. Here are the strategies I adopted.

  1. Open the work-in-progress document, but do not read it.

In residency, the first thing I did upon waking was sit at my desk and open my draft document. Even now, the first thing I do on a weekend is open my document before I’ve even made coffee. I use the notes I made the night before and write forward at least a few paragraphs, just to get my head in the right space. This ensures that, after making breakfast, I will immediately come straight back to writing.

I am careful not to let myself read what I have already written, because reading all the previous pages only sows self-doubt, and the temptation to begin editing what is already on the page is overwhelming. Self-editing while still drafting is a black hole that can kill a novel faster than anything else for me.

  1. Don’t be a librarian!

Just as I must be careful not to read what I’ve previously written, I also consciously stop myself from researching while I draft. I did not have WiFi in Alaska, and I don’t turn it on while writing now. In residency, the only historical information I had to go on was the lodge owner’s story, a two-minute video of the woman who became my main character, and a book about the region that mentioned her death-by-plane-propeller. I could not possibly fall down the research rabbit hole.

A major feature of my anxiety is obsessive thought patterns. What might start as a simple search to find the population of Seward can easily end five days later with me reading the training manual for Alaska State Troopers, memorizing the organizational structure of their reporting lines, and fretting over how to convey every detail about what they would carry in their SUVs. Even if I do find my way out of this thought-spiral, my writing can suffer because I feel the need to prove to the reader that I’ve done my research, which results in the inclusion of far too much irrelevant detail.

  1. Duly noted. And noted only.

While drafting, I keep a running list of facts I need, such as what time the sun sets in Anchorage at the end of November. Jotting them down prevents me from getting hung up on them (or worse, starting to research) while writing. Only once the entire novel is fully drafted do I look those facts up and insert them. Then I have beta readers tell me what still needs more exploration, and only then do I research, with the aim of addressing their substantive concerns only – not checking whether my description of the texture of snow falling after a solar eclipse over the water at the end of December is realistic.

  1. Don’t get out of that bed.

End-of-day notes have also become a permanent feature of my writing process. When I save my document and close my laptop, I make notes in a paper notebook about what scene I plan to begin next, and place that notebook on the nightstand when I go to bed. If left unchecked, I would jump up 20 times and stumble to my laptop to add a detail or make a change to the manuscript. Instead, I jot those thoughts in the notebook, so it’s all in one place when I’m ready to revise. Plus, I sleep better.

  1. Kick a friend out of their own home.

For myself, and likely for many people with anxiety, writing at home is extremely difficult. Anxiety is often accompanied by obsessive compulsions and/or attention deficit disorder, and it is easy to get distracted by the dust on your desk, or the cat, or what you’re going to make for dinner, or that nitpicky project you meant to do six months ago, but suddenly needs to be completed right this very instant. I cannot write in coffee shops – being surrounded by other people talking and watching videos and, God forbid, looking at me, is a recipe for disaster. Remote Alaska was perfect, but I can’t exactly go live off the grid.

My solution to this problem came accidentally when a friend asked me to watch his dog three nights a week while he attended class. (His dog, ironically, has severe separation anxiety.) Sitting in another person’s house for hours at a time, for me, provides the perfect opportunity for uninterrupted writing. I feel strange watching other people’s televisions, so I bring my laptop and use those 4-hour blocks to work. Since the house is not my own, I’m not tempted to clean or cook. If my friend ever completes graduate school, I may have to just regularly kick him out of his own home.

  1. Take ownership of your anxiety.

While the relationship between anxiety and writing may be problematic, it can also be symbiotic. Anxiety can compel writers to speed on, rushing toward a deadline no one but they themselves imposed. Writing can also worsen anxiety if the process is not handled with care. Every writer is affected by the condition in different ways, but here’s the truth – leaving a serious health issue uncontrolled does not a better writer make.

What worked for me is accepting this aspect of my mental health, and finding workable strategies. All I needed to get started was as simple as applying to 20 residency programs, biting my nails while I waited to hear, getting on two jets and then a 3 passenger prop plane, taking an hour-long boat ride across a lake, cutting contact with everyone I know, and letting other people cook and clean for me while I wrote in the most remote part of the country where bears lurk around every corner. Talk about facing your fears!

Bailey Bridgewater’s fiction appears in Crack the Spine, As You Were, Fiction on the Web, and many other places. Her collection, A Map of Safe Places, will be published by Red Bird Chapbook this year, and a short story “In Silence, The Decision” is forthcoming from Hoosier Noir. Read more at her website.

 

 

 

What I Learned from Jennifer Egan’s Use of Sensory Detail, a Craft Essay by Sandy Smith

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A woman browsing the fiction section of a bookstore

What I Learned from Jennifer Egan’s Use of Sensory Detail
A Craft Essay
by Sandy Smith

On a friend’s repeated urging to read Jennifer Egan’s 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Visit from the Goon Squad, I went to my small local bookstore. They had no copies of Goon Squad in stock, but there was a single copy of Egan’s 2006 title, The Keep. Since Egan is a well-respected author and the flap copy looked promising (“…relentlessly gripping page-turner…rich forms…transfixing themes”), I took it home and dove in. I didn’t expect to be as engaged as the hyperbolic blurbs promised, but I found myself fully immersed almost immediately. When I came up for air nearly an hour later, I asked myself how The Keep had managed to pull me in so quickly and so thoroughly that I’d missed the ding of the microwave and the beguiling aroma of leftover lasagna.

Over a dish of sadly steam-logged pasta, I went back to the beginning to re-read, paying closer attention to try and suss out what was so gripping. It hit me that Egan was using sensory description in a way that allowed me to subconsciously ground myself in the novel’s world. And her sensory cues were so masterfully deployed, they’d superseded the sounds and smells of my own kitchen (a rarity).

At first read, I didn’t know what it was about the opening pages that had hooked me or even that I was hooked. Nothing much was happening in the story yet, and the only character introduced at that point was neither likable nor unlikable. Nevertheless, I’d lost track of time (and dinner) because I was so absorbed.

Right away, in the first two paragraphs of page 1, Egan incorporates descriptors affecting all five senses: sight (“the towers had those square indentations…  that little kids put on castles when they draw them”—an especially effective use because we have to dig into our own recollection of kids’ drawings to access that image); sound (“he heard [the falling leaves] crunching under his boots”); smell/taste (“the air was cold with a smoky bite”—we can smell the burning leaves but the word “bite” here evokes taste as well); touch (“Danny felt [the leaves] landing in his hair”).

Jennifer Egan

Egan’s particular genius in utilizing descriptors this way lies in her subtlety. At first read, I didn’t know what it was about the opening pages that had hooked me or even that I was hooked. Nothing much was happening in the story yet, and the only character introduced at that point was neither likable nor unlikable. Nevertheless, I’d lost track of time (and dinner) because I was so absorbed. Once I started paying attention though, it leapt out at me like one of those hidden pictures that emerges in 3D from a seemingly random pattern of shapes: Egan doesn’t avalanche the reader with a surfeit of showy adjectives and adverbs. That kind of showboating is tempting, and I’ve been guilty of it in my own work (and consequently grateful for editors), but being heavy-handed with spurious details comes off more as tedious than captivating. A deft writer like Egan knows restraint pays off, and instead she salts the text with sensory cues that dwell below even normally perceptive (as opposed to critical) reading, serving as a means of connection rather than distraction.

The sensory description continues throughout the narrative. Even brief passages contain elements of touch, smell, sight, and taste: “Danny picked it up and smelled: mold, wet wood. The glass was thin and hand-blown, colored bubbles around its base. The taste was outright freakish: a reek of decay mixed with some sweet, fresh thing the decay hadn’t touched.”). Sensory reference points not only engage the reader viscerally in the moment, but they create the collective ambiance of the book, which lingers between reading sessions and helps the reader re-engage the next time they pick up the book. And wouldn’t this be an efficient way to add depth to a piece of short fiction too, where economy of language is especially important? I tucked this lesson into my craft toolkit as well.

Familiar sensory details take on additional significance when the narrative gets tricky, a consequence of varying settings and personas. The Keep’s narrative voice switches between close third person POV and first person. For long portions of text, these are distinct and easy to follow. But as the book reaches its climax, these voices blur and intermingle, as the story lines themselves do, so that the identity of the first-person narrator is eventually revealed through the third-person narration in a contextual flip-flop. This fairly complex structure is made navigable by a breadcrumb trail in the form of relatable sensory cues. Whether the text drops us into the dungeon of a decrepit European castle or an American prison cafeteria, we can orient ourselves in the foreign landscape by the smells, tastes, textures, and sounds that are as close as the dinner plate on our kitchen table.

At the castle, Danny observes the neglected pool: “Its water was black and thick with scum . . . a smell of something from deep inside the earth meeting open air, full of metal and protein and blood.” In prison, Ray describes the “smell that gags you when you first walk into the prison building . . . cigarettes, germ killer, sweat, chow, piss.” The details are so richly evocative, I had no trouble switching between the two wildly different locations and narrative voices. I stayed connected with the text because although I’ve never been in prison or fallen into a hell-mouth pool, I’ve smelled these smells, so my personal catalog of sense memories helps bridge the gaps in my experience.

Regardless of whether I believe in the possibility that an ordinary castle of stone and wood may be haunted, I’m willing—and, more importantly, able—to accept that it is because Egan doesn’t just tell us it’s haunted. She lets us smell and hear and taste how natural the keep is before hitting us with the supernatural. The jarring disconnect is what makes it scary, and I didn’t have to work too hard to suspend my disbelief. Even though there were a couple of implausible plot points that might otherwise have derailed my interest, I kept right on reading.

Though sometimes we do want readers to work a little harder, to penetrate the surface and mine for meaning on their own, I saw in The Keep that the more layered the detail, the better and faster the connection—the buy-in is achieved without making readers labor over it.

In Egan’s hands, sensory detail is revealed as a significantly useful implement in the writer’s toolbox. This turned out to be a critical takeaway for me, as I sometimes ask a lot of my readers. Leonora, the narrator of my slightly fabulist literary novel, is the ghost of a chimpanzee. When I set about revising my first draft, guided by the way Egan creates accessibility in The Keep, I paid extra attention to the sensory details that would help readers empathize with Leo, who’s not only nonhuman, but nonliving. This was important because as a character-narrator, she does the heavy lifting of the story. Although in her afterlife she’s anthropomorphized, Leo’s still a chimpanzee. To establish her humanity, I gave her memories (she has a nostalgic fondness for monkey stink); desire (for the taste of hardboiled eggs and fresh mango); and dread (she can’t bear the sound of children’s laughter), all tied tightly to the senses.

Though sometimes we do want readers to work a little harder, to penetrate the surface and mine for meaning on their own, I saw in The Keep that the more layered the detail, the better and faster the connection—the buy-in is achieved without making readers labor over it.

In the end, my bookstore’s failure to stock Goon Squad was serendipitous. I would have missed out on Egan’s object lessons in forging robust reader-text connection right away. When you need your reader to seamlessly acclimate, not interrogate, the skillful use of robust sensory detail delivers every time. That’s a lesson I didn’t know I needed, a keeper.

Sandy Smith author photoSandy Smith is a writer and editor whose short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of journals, including Brevity, Sky Island Journal, Gravel, and The MacGuffin. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside, and is currently at work on her second novel. Visit her website to learn more.

 

 

 

Cover Photo by Becca Tapert on Unsplash

SISTERHOOD: How the Books we Both Read Helped Me Write My Sister’s Life into Fiction, a Craft Essay by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

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SISTERHOOD
How the Books we Both Read Helped Me Write My Sister’s Life into Fiction
A Craft Essay by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

When my sister, Susan, was still in elementary school, a family friend gave her a book for her birthday, The Wizard of Wallaby Wallow, by Jack Kent. Dyslexic as a child, Susan wasn’t much of a reader, so the gift was unusual. In time though, she overcame her disability, it seemed, because she wanted to read the instructions for building things.

Even after she managed to build her crystal radio set, or her darkroom, or teach herself how to play guitar, words and language were never Susan’s forte. Her conversations with friends and family often ended in arguments, and she could be cruel—prompting friends not to speak to her for years at a time—without meaning to be. During one of her lowest periods, when she was anorexic, my mother could not talk to her without the help of puppets. Mickey Mouse became her favorite interlocutor.

For years, I knew I wanted to write a novel about Susan’s life and death. She grew up gay in a straight world, but as a musician found somewhere she could be comfortable: at the center of the punk rock movement in Los Angeles. Singled out early in life as a genius—despite her difficulties with reading, she aced mathematics and figured out word problems by studying their patterns—she felt forced to succeed academically and professionally, though her desires lay elsewhere. Susan eventually forged a career as a software engineer in the dot-com boom, before her death from breast cancer. But how to render her into words, which had often defied her? How could I express her unique perspective on the world in her own language, when our relationship, like so many others, was marked by the failure of language, of communication?

When I began work on Sisterhood of the Infamous (forthcoming from New Meridian Arts Press, February 2021), I told myself I’d avoid this problem through the usual routes: research and interviews. I researched the causes that most inspired her adolescence (punk rock and gay liberation in the 1970’s), and interviewed several people. But Susan’s friends were as mystified by her sudden bursts of anger, crying fits and long-held grudges, as I was. They too did not understand what had made her so inconsolable, volatile, and why her favored target for that volatility was often herself. (“She was a raw nerve,” one woman explained. Another said repeatedly, “because that’s the way she was.”)

When I tried to mold the facts of her life and times into fiction, all I got was exposition: a mini-history of the L.A.’s punk scene, for instance; or a listing of the real-life slights and insults she suffered as a child and teenager. I realized I had yet to find her language, the rhythm and tone of how she spoke and thought; the linguistic framework that enabled her to always depict herself as an outsider, rather than the protagonist of her own story. Stumped, I thought back over the words we did share during her lifetime. And that’s when I realized: that language, Susan’s language—the characters it might animate, the conflicts it would alternately create and resolve, the subject matter it would be most concerned with—had always been available to me, in the form of books that she read.

Going back over the books we had in common—from picture books to children’s novels to the works of Kathryn Harrison and Dorothy Allison—I began to see a set of “instructions” for depicting a character with her life history, her passions, and her disappointments. Although the characters in these books did not have exactly the same problems Susan faced, nor necessarily speak or think in a way she might have, each of those authors had figured out a way to make those characters seen through language.

When I talk about the language of these books, I mean more than vocabulary, syntax, or style. I’m talking about the possibilities these books verbalized, the propositions they expressed about the world: Would you really want to change everything about your life, when that everything is all you know? How should a girl, or a woman behave, when burdened by a past that is unfathomable to others? Somehow, Susan had come to trust the characters and their circumstances in these books as authentic and deserving of her curiosity and sympathy. They also taught me about what could be credibly illustrated or interpreted of my sister’s life: how if she were to read a book about herself, what would it cover, and how might it sound.

The first book Susan and I shared was The Wizard of Wallaby Wallow that she received at age seven, about the perils of imagining a different life for yourself, and realizing something valuable about your current situation. This picture book apparently remains popular (according to Amazon’s sales figures), so no more spoilers here. But The Wizard of Wallaby Wallow has a winning message and a happy ending. My sister did not read the book for years, although I wish she had earlier. What impresses me now is what an adept choice it was for her, even at that young age. She had always wanted to belong somewhere, or to someone, a longing that’s addressed in another book she was given on a different birthday: Mandy, by Julie Andrews Edwards (yes, that Julie Andrews, now a frequent children’s author).

As a chapter book with pictures, Mandy is a bridge between reading levels. Susan was particularly possessive of this book (because I stole so much of her stuff, she had to be!), and I was allowed to read it only if I didn’t take it into my own room. So, read it I did, on the floor of the hall, next to the bookcase. I would return to it many times, for its fairy tale lyricism and the audacity of its protagonist. Mandy is an orphan story; orphans are common in children’s literature because they reflect a paradox about childhood. Children love and depend on their parents, but also feel encumbered by them; an orphan is a vehicle that enables readers to explore this conflict.

My sister wasn’t an orphan, of course, but she always felt unable to crack the code of friendships. More important to my sister’s story is the conundrum Mandy makes for herself as she pursues her heart’s desire. That Mandy may not know exactly what she truly wants is not some pedantic lesson, but a consequence of Mandy’s journey, her maturation. She is a good girl, much as Susan was. Nevertheless, Mandy surprises herself by lying and stealing to fulfill her quest.

This reflects the predicament I believe my sister often found herself in: she felt that her ethics were being tested by her friendships, or the actions of those she called friends. She struggled over how to honor those friends without losing her sense of self. Eventually she decided to do the right thing, or so she said, and it cost her dearly, and she became a loner afterward, pining for real connection.

Yet Susan was not friendless. At the time of her death, she had several friends in her own age group, and also counted some of their parents and even their children as friends. But she was often reclusive, preferring to stay home and sticking close to our mother. Our father was a complicated, charming but ultimately incompetent husband and parent (our parents divorced as Susan began college). She refused to speak to him for close to thirty years, and gravitated toward books that documented the sundering of the parent-child bond. Through these books I came to understand the physical and emotional fallout she endured because of that break.

I hadn’t read Kathryn Harrison’s novel Exposure when I noticed it on the floor of her bedroom as I watched Susan sort through her laundry one day. But I knew its premise and immediately recognized why Susan would be interested. Its depiction of a twisted father-daughter relationship, and the self-destructive path the daughter takes as a result, is still shocking two decades after it was published. Our father, for all his faults, was not the self-absorbed artist who alternately neglects and exploits his daughter, as is the father of the book, and my sister did not have juvenile diabetes, like the daughter, Ann, had. But as I read the book, I realized that like Ann, Susan found herself trapped by certain physical circumstances that deeply scarred her mentally. She became a prisoner of her body, its demands and aspirations. In Exposure, Ann’s body seems to drive her deadly fight or flight response. Susan’s size, her physical and emotional weaknesses, framed her conceptions about what is normal, beautiful; to a degree, even what is wrong and right.

Similarly, Dorothy Allison’s novel Bastard Out of Carolina is another tale of bad parenting; this time, the mother is the culprit. Set in crushing poverty that begets stunning violence, Bastard could not be more different than the world in which my sister and I were raised. But Allison’s brutal vision of growing up unwanted was a reminder that the elements of our upbringing that were merely rueful and regrettable to me were devastating to Susan. The long, slow breakup of our family amounted to a full-bore assault on her confidence and self-image. She also might have imagined redemption—in some form—in a similarly transgressive way as Allison’s alter ego in the book, Bone, accomplishes.

I gave Allison’s Cavedweller novel to Susan for one of her birthdays, because its lead character is a rock ’n roll singer. I thought she would appreciate the story of a rock ‘n’ roll singer, though I worried she’d misinterpret the gift. Cavedweller celebrates a quiet, nearly anonymous life over the supposed perks of stardom. I was not necessarily recommending the same for her, but hoped she’d be taken by the novel’s epic exploration of mothers, daughters, reconciliation and second chances. It turned out that Susan had already bought and read the book.

This was when we were both in our early thirties, both frustrated with careers and relationships. In the decade that followed, both of our lives changed in ways we couldn’t have anticipated, much like the sprawling destinies of the characters in Cavedweller. After that birthday, I stuck to safe gifts, like CDs or fancy dinners, or a T-shirt featuring her favorite concert venues or musicians. For her last birthday, which she failed to make by three days, I mailed her an early present of a hoodie that said, “Central Park Zoo,” guessing she could still appreciate the private joke (she was the keeper of a legion of stuffed animals) .

In fictionalizing my sister’s life, my job was not to imitate the scenarios or style of these books, but to remember them as a foundation. Once I’d re-read them all, I no longer wondered how my sister would like to be depicted as much as what would be plausible and how she would react in certain situations. In the novel I eventually wrote, there’s still much I did not include because I could not figure out how to make some situations believable, or relevant to the plot powering the narrative.

Though I had moved closer, I think, to rendering my fictional character, Barbara, into language and situations that honored Susan’s life and her own words, in the end, the book embodies, as of course it must, my own language. No matter how well informed I became, no matter how much I tried, in many ways I still failed to capture on the page Susan’s playfulness, what some might consider her best quality. But I believe in the character I created out of her life, fashioned from the hurt she could not forget and how it skewed her vision and prospects. The dilemma that my novel’s characters face is the one my sister tried to solve. Then she ran out of time. I hope, through yet another shared book, I was able to give her a little more.

Jane Rosenberg LaForge is a poet, novelist, and occasional essayist in New York. Her first novel, The Hawkman: A Fairy Tale of the Great War (Amberjack Publishing), was a finalist in two categories in the 2019 Eric Hoffer awards. Her memoir is An Unsuitable Princess: A True Fantasy/A Fantastical Memoir (Jaded Ibis Press 2014), and her next collection of poetry will be Medusa’s Daughter (Animal Heart Press, 2021).

 

 

 

Cover Photo by Max Goncharov on Unsplash

A BOOK BY ANY OTHER NAME: ON TITLES AND DATING: A Craft Essay by Melinda Scully

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A Man and a Woman behind a fogged class window

A BOOK BY ANY OTHER NAME: ON TITLES AND DATING
A Craft Essay
by Melinda Scully

Imagine a reader is on a blind date with your book or short story. Maybe a friend set them up, or they ventured out for a local singles speed-dating extravaganza. The specifics don’t really matter. The point is, the reader is on the hunt for a new story to love, and it could be yours. How exciting!

Your story walks up to the table, and in mere moments, the reader subconsciously asks and answers about seventeen questions in their head, maybe starting with…

  • What is your story wearing?
  • Did it walk up confidently?
  • Is it smiling?
  • Does it smell weird?

Did your story pass the test? Did you even know you were being tested?

Let’s hope so, because by this time your reader already knows whether they want to proceed with the date. Readers are ruthless. If they don’t like your first-date disco suit, they’ve already rung the rotation bell and moved on to their next option.

That is the power of first impressions. In fiction, that is also the power of titles. Readers are supposed to judge a title. The author knows that you’re doing it, so theoretically, they’ve chosen that title with love and care.

Except… when they don’t. How often do we type “STUPID DRAFT #3” and hope a title will eventually manifest (and if it doesn’t, we resort to using the jazziest simile our story has to offer)? Or, we start the page with a title that sounds snazzy, and we never think about it again? Too many of us forget that the title should be a selling point—not an afterthought. We must craft it as an honest, interesting representation of our work that smacks the target audience right in the face. It should intrigue the reader. Flirt with them.

We could talk about what makes a title fantastic, but a great title is like a great date: there’s not a single formula, but you’ll know it when you see it. Bad titles, though? We immediately identify them on others’ work; unfortunately, we aren’t so good at recognizing our own. Can you confidently say you’ve never made a bad first impression without knowing it?

So, for all of our edification, behold—an incomplete list of weirdos you don’t want to show up on your blind date:

The Catfish

Wasn’t she supposed to be a 5’11” volleyball player?

Ever read something and think wow, that is not what I thought this was going to be about? You got book-baited. I know sometimes it is fun being fooled by a title: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and To Kill a Mockingbird are fortunately not about birds. So, what’s the difference? If your title is misleading, ask yourself whether the deception serves a specific purpose. If not, please reconsider bamboozling your readers.

(Fake) Bad example: Boys Gone Wild

(Real) Good Example: The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

Bland-as-Toast Man

He’s wearing khakis, works in accounting, and good god, he has nothing interesting to say.

Unless your title is ironically boring, you probably don’t want your reader’s eyes to glaze over before the first paragraph. Come on! Your story isn’t tedious, so why should your title be?

Bad Example: Watching the Green Light

Good Example: The Great Gatsby

 

Lady of Mystery

“So, what do you do?” “Why do you own a Ouija board?” Ask away. She won’t tell you squat.

A title should at least hint at something interesting the reader will experience in the story. What’s the tone? Where is it set? Who’s it about? Can I have one teeny tiny little mental image? Give your reader something to react to.

Bad Example: Regrets

Good Example: The Kite Runner

 

The (Figuratively) Naked Lady

She has no boundaries. In fact, she already mentioned her raging yeast infection. Do you even need to know more?

I know, this doesn’t seem fair. You just told us not to be mysterious! Well, it’s a balance. If you share all of your secrets upfront, then what is going to keep the reader interested?

Bad Example: Death of the Southern Dream

Good Example: Gone with the Wind

 

The Philosopher

He’s soooooo deep. Too deep. He should really introspect introspectively. 

This is when the author uses the title to make an unnecessary value statement (probably one that the text already makes for itself). Or, the author chose the title for their own personal or sentimental reasons (ones that the reader will never understand). Remember, the title is for your reader and the betterment of your story. Not for you.

Bad Example: Murdering Misogyny

Good Example: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

 

Wait, what’s his name?

It definitely started with a K. Or… a Q. Is it tacky to ask for his business card?

These are the titles that sound clunky, are hard to remember, or are exceptionally difficult to pronounce. You need people to be able to say the name of your story out loud. As a test, try saying it five times fast. If you can’t manage it, your readers won’t be able to either.

Bad Example: Oliver Oglethorp

Good Example: Oliver Twist

 

He’s Wearing a Literal Disco Suit

Trying hard, but not in the right ways.

Mid-workshop: “I picked the title because it sounded cool.” Yeah, we can tell.

Bad Example: A Hodgepodge Monster Called Prometheus

Good Example: Frankenstein

Do these guidelines always apply? Well, no. There are a handful of situations where a disco suit might be the right choice—for example, if you’ve got sweet dance moves, and you’re headed to a Halloween party. The point is that first impressions matter, and also, there is a lot of room for error. Avoiding common pitfalls will maximize your chances of a second date with the reader. When in doubt, ask a brutally honest friend for an opinion. They’ll tell you if your suit has too many sequins.

Melinda Scully HeadshotMelinda Scully is a fiction writer and operations strategist based in Dallas, Texas. Besides writing, her skillsets include math, competitive swing dancing, and spreadsheets. She is working towards her MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Find her on LinkedIn or on Instagram @melindascully.

 

 

 

Cover Photo by Jack Finnigan on Unsplash

 

 

HOW WRITING FICTION HELPS ME—AND MAYBE YOU—DEAL WITH PAST TRAUMA, a craft essay by Kelly Fordon

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woman's hands typing

HOW WRITING FICTION HELPS ME—AND MAYBE YOU—DEAL WITH PAST TRAUMA
A Craft Essay
by Kelly Fordon

In her essay “Nine Beginnings,” Margaret Atwood answers the question, “Why Do You Write?” nine different ways. In her honor, while completing my recent short story collection, I Have The Answer, I challenged myself to answer the question: “How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?” nine different times.

Honestly, I probably could have gone on even longer.

  1. How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

I write about trauma to stop dissociating.

After I was sexually assaulted in high school, I did not initially understand what had happened to me. I was Catholic, raised in a strict household. My mother told me that if I went into a room alone with a boy, anything that happened after that was my fault. For that reason, when I decided to make out with a boy in high school, and things went south, I blamed myself, froze, and waited for it to end. When I first wrote about it, I had no choice but to fictionalize the event. I didn’t remember anything about the house where I was assaulted, the bedroom, or even who else was at the party. The only thing that stuck with me was the name and actions of the perpetrator. Fiction allowed me the space and leeway to set a scene to replace the one my mind had erased.

  1. How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

I write about trauma so I can hear my own voice.

After you are traumatized, and you go to therapy and you spend months working through it, you very hopefully have a few voices in your head. You have the voices of your family and friends all telling you (again, hopefully) that what happened wasn’t your fault. You have your therapist’s voice in your head, again, hopefully telling you it wasn’t your fault. If the traumatic incident was experienced by others on a large scale: a mass shooting at a concert, 9/11, a car crash, you will read essays, letters, newspaper accounts of the event, telling you exactly what happened from many different angles and probably how you should feel about it.

But only you can write your own story, and your deepest feelings. Only you know what happened specifically to you. In order to hear that voice, your inner voice, the most important one, you must silence everyone else and write it down.

  1. How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

Fiction allows the writer to tell the truth, but tell it slant. To taste the fear, but not get too close. Fiction allows the protective armor of distance. When I wrote the fictional story, “The Devil’s Proof,” loosely based on my own experience of assault, I just wanted to blur reality a little bit to figure out how much reality I could stand.

  1. How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

Fiction provides additional protection from judgment—both your own and other people’s.

Writing “The Devil’s Proof” allowed me to explore my feelings of violation and frankly, horror, and share that moment with other people without the risk of having to name the actual perpetrator or be judged by friends or family members. Later I wrote about the assault in nonfiction, but for the first run through, it felt more comfortable to be able to say, “No, no, this is just a story.”

You may find you have more empathy for the protagonist in your “fictional” story than you do for yourself.

Sejal Shah, author of This is One Way to Dance, in her essay, “Craft Capsule: Breaking Genre” writes, “There is magic in fiction, in not having everything you write be attached directly to you. In my stories, I draw from a wider field, and I’m not worried about how something sounds, if it would make my public self cringe. If you grow up in a deeply private, Hindu, conservative, traditional family as I did, fiction and poetry offered a different code, a cover.”

  1. How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

You may find you have more empathy for the protagonist in your “fictional” story than you do for yourself.

For years after, I blamed myself for initial assault, and for going out with the boy a second time, a mistake which led to my rape. But then I created a character who was my age, went to the same school, and was every bit as naïve as I had once been, and I found that I was crushed by the decisions she made, because she was so innocent. I had complete empathy for her and by then understood the complexity of what had happened to her (and the societal complicity) in a way I simply would not have allowed if I had been talking about myself, or my own decision-making process.

In short, I would have been harder on myself, and discovering that taught me about the insidious nature of shame, how debilitating it can be. Conversely, the empathy I felt for my protagonist helped me heal.

  1. How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Writing fiction allowed me to create a new—better—storyline. In the hero’s journey I created for my character in “The Devil’s Proof,” she has the last word. I did not.

Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey has been used as a powerful metaphor and descriptor of the recovery path for survivors of trauma. In “Trauma Recovery: A Heroic Journey,” authors Brenda Keck, Lisa Compton, Corie Schoeneberg and Tucker Compton advocate studying and implementing the hero’s journey in order to take back some power, “Writing the story of the assault helps the writer move from injured to transformed…Survivors have been unexpectedly thrust into a storyline they did not choose nor are they offered the option to decline.” Conversely, in the Hero’s Journey the protagonist starts out with no power, sets out into the unknown, confronts their demon, so to speak, and return victorious.

  1. How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

Making art is transformative.

In her Poets & Writers Magazine essay, “The Heart-Work: Writing about Trauma as a Subversive Act,” memoirist Melissa Febos explains: “Transforming my secrets into art has transformed me. And I believe that stories like these have the power to transform the world. That is the point of literature, or at least that’s what I tell my students. We are writing the history that we could not find in any other book. We are telling the stories that no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of our survival to one another.”

Making art is transformative.

  1. How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

Fiction writing allows the writer to create the story that fits the feeling.

When we are writing fiction, we don’t have to tell anyone exactly what happened, instead we can create the circumstances on the page that reflect how an experience felt. Sometimes the “true” circumstances will not feel equal to the reaction.

My story “Superman at Hogback Ridge” is based on a real event. One summer day, a young, skinny, tattooed man who was clearly very angry, and acting erratically, startled me when I was sitting in my car after it had stalled out. He jumped out of his car, screamed some vitriol at me, and then drove away.

That was not a very exciting story and it feels like a pathetic reason to be “traumatized,” but I was going fishing, it was a beautiful day, and ever since then, I can’t get over the feeling that anything can happen at any moment.  I wasn’t traumatized, but the incident haunted me, so in the story, I made the man a meth addict and handed him a gun. My fictional story reflected my fear (which was outsized) in a way that the actual “true” event did not.

In other words, I took control of the story and changed it in order to convey an exact level of terror. By writing that story, I was able to figure out where my own fear was really coming from—my own lack of control.

  1. How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

In study after study, expressive writing has been proven to have a positive effect on both mental and physical health.

Studies by James W. Pennebaker, the Regents Centennial Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, show that by putting emotional upheavals into words, we start to understand them better. Once we have a better handle on our problems, we can move forward and get on with life.

After I described the feeling of being assaulted in “The Devil’s Proof,” I was able to go on and write the true story in the 21.2 issue of River Teeth. Writing fiction helped me circle the experience and poke at it tentatively with my stick. Later—35 years later to be exact—I was able to face it head-on.

Better late than never.

Kelly Fordon author headshotKelly Fordon’s new book is the short story collection I Have the Answer (Wayne State University Press). Her work has appeared in The Florida Review, The Kenyon Review, River Teeth, and other journals. Her novel-in-stories, Garden for the Blind, was chosen as a Michigan Notable Book, and other honors. Other publications include a full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House (Kattywompus Press) and three poetry chapbooks. She teaches at Springfed Arts, and InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit. Visit her website.

 

Cover image by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash

 

 

THE BIG WARM HOUSE An Essay on the Art of Becoming a Writer by Emma Sloley

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Miniature two-story house on patterned rug

THE BIG WARM HOUSE
An Essay on the Art of Becoming a Writer
by Emma Sloley

I’m thinking of a particular house, a house whose characteristics vary but whose essential nature remains unchanged. Let’s call it The Big Warm House. I’m not saying this very literary house is benign, necessarily. In some stories, the warmth is a trick, a fatal illusion from which the protagonist must eventually flee. The walls are so thin you can hear every burst of laughter or weeping, or else they’re as thick as a medieval prison. The size is also unreliable. You might assume a big house implies wealth, a certain level of bourgeois status, comfort. But sometimes the house is big because it has had to expand to contain all the terrible secrets.

As a baby bookworm, I spent hours out of sight and hearing of my family, tucked away in some dusty corner of the house, frantically reading as if words were a finite resource and I was close to finishing my ration. I was a slightly odd child, not eccentric enough to be noteworthy, just slightly withdrawn and socially awkward, waiting to grow into my forehead and teeth and the colt-like legs my sisters and I all inherited. My favorite books were about houses. Well, they were ostensibly about the people who lived in the houses, but it was in the corners of the houses that the true drama lived.

I appreciated the cursed fantasy world of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, but secretly I was far more interested in the wonderfully gloomy house through which the children entered that world. They had the run of the place without any functional grown-up interference, which struck me as the height of decadence. Though the descriptions of the décor were sparse (I mean, everyone was eager to get to Narnia, understandably), I loved reading about the faded English splendor of the rooms, the gardens, an oak wardrobe big enough in which to get truly lost.

I loved the escape these fictional homes provided, but I also thrilled to their familiarity. I had no trouble imagining the big warm house because reading about it transported me there; I lived inside those houses.

Children’s literature has no shortage of great houses: the chaotic, come one-come-all cheeriness of the Weasley’s Burrow in Harry Potter; the Moominhouse in Tove Jansson’s enchantingly oddball Moomintroll series; the cabin in the Little House on the Prairie books, which in spite of the titular adjective doesn’t feel small at all. Even Bilbo Baggins’ house, though diminutive, fits the paradigm: the hobbit hole from Lord of the Rings is a source of hospitality and comfort, an ad-hoc meeting place for the community where there’s always a kettle on and a pipe to be smoked (if you’re into that kind of thing).

I loved the escape these fictional homes provided, but I also thrilled to their familiarity. I had no trouble imagining the big warm house because reading about it transported me there; I lived inside those houses. My real family’s ramshackle Edwardian family home was a warren of oddly-shaped rooms and surprise doors, of chimneys that went nowhere and chimneys so cavernous the cat sometimes got stuck in them, her plaintive mewling reverberating eerily through the walls. It was a place of dinner parties that never seemed to start or end. Of projects never quite finished, test swatches of paint on walls and windows propped open with books. As a child, I learned early that the temporary can become permanent.

Perhaps that’s partly why I felt an instant kinship when I encountered characters like Cassandra and Rose Mortmain from Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. We didn’t bathe in the kitchen sink, but we weren’t too far off during the many years in which our house was a DIY work-in-progress, our lives a kind of architectural progressive dinner party. Each of us—my parents, me, my three sisters— would live in a room designated our own until the time came to renovate it, then we’d move into another room, and so on until normal meant camp beds in the corner of the lounge room, a piano in the bedroom, piles of scuffed shoes in the walk-in pantry. There were always raucous communal meals and a stream of visitors, and plenty of suitors came to call, even if they were never for me.

Like the ill-fated Berry family of John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire, I grew into adolescence nodding knowingly at the many iterations of the titular hotel because the salient aspects of that life felt familiar: how frustrating to mark out a territory as one of multiple siblings; how bourgeois ideals of normality could warp a child’s developing identity; how the roof under which you all lived could come to feel like both sanctuary and prison. All those early Irving sagas—The Water-Method Man, The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Cider House Rules—to some degree fixated on houses as a locus of comfort, desire, and betrayal; the bricks-and-mortar manifestation of a hero’s longing for home always too slippery to grasp.

The big warm house represents a bulwark against that pressure, but of course bricks and mortar are no defense against a civilization in peril. Houses might represent civilization, but they are also the first totems of civilization to fall.

During my Brontë years, I loved Jane Eyre madly, but I loved Rochester’s house even more. Even a literal madwoman in an attic can’t dampen the dangerous romance of a home in which you could lose yourself both literally and figuratively. This is the big warm house as liminal space. Standing on the threshold, the reader is suspended between two worlds. Ahead of you, a life of fulfillment and happiness glimpsed through a golden crack in the parlor door; behind, the cold loneliness of the moors where pariahs are doomed to wander forever. Visiting Wuthering Heights was even more treacherous. On the one hand, the promise of a roaring hearth fire and some juicy gossip: on the other, melodramatic ghosts and a host who’s extremely fucked-up, emotionally speaking.

Later, I developed an appreciation of the houses under whose roofs Edith Wharton’s gilded unfortunates played out their fates. They were more like big cold houses, their opulence and prestige a poor trade-off for the chilly inhospitality and betrayals that took place within. There was a constant stream of visitors—a classic hallmark of the big warm house—but chief among the visitors was class anxiety, who always proved a total bitch to evict. The only way to escape those rooms was via death, either social or literal. But they were so lavish and beautiful, the time spent there was almost worth it!

The big warm house doesn’t have to be a mansion. In Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, the “residence” is a ramshackle lot called the Pit in danger of being swept away in a hurricane, but it’s nevertheless where familial love and loyalty live, at least temporarily. Abject poverty is recast as a chance to catch up with the whole fam in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where Charlie’s home is both a haven and a disturbingly privacy-free zone.  In Anne Enright’s The Gathering, the Irish working-class family home is a fulcrum around which its many damaged members revolve, a place where siblings can’t seem to help returning even when they know grief awaits, because something else lives there too—the chance to forgive one another and oneself.

In life, I crave the comfort of the big warm house, but I also need to get away from its demands in order to write. I think many writers are like this, building the house into their stories instead of trying to live in it. To properly capture home, we must leave. 

Before I’d even put pen to paper to write my first novel, Disaster’s Children, the fictional house was already built, existing even before my characters did. I knew the survivalist ranch on which these people lived would be a wonder of design, because they were building a utopia, and utopias are always beautiful. The main house is both an architectural triumph and a convivial gathering place. How could a utopia exist if it didn’t involve the comfort of walking through chilly woods at dusk and spotting the golden glow of a house wavering through the trees? The promise of camaraderie, of food and drink, of refuge, of people who finally understand you, of rest.

In life, I crave the comfort of the big warm house, but I also need to get away from its demands in order to write. I think many writers are like this, building the house into their stories instead of trying to live in it. To properly capture home, we must leave.

My stories are often about a world coming apart. The big warm house represents a bulwark against that pressure, but of course bricks and mortar are no defense against a civilization in peril. Houses might represent civilization, but they are also the first totems of civilization to fall. Houses can be flattened, burned down, bombed, swept away. They can squash witches, sure, but they can in turn be squashed. Marlo, the protagonist of Disaster’s Children, understands on some cellular level that in order to become her best and truest self she needs to flee the binds of the ranch, her beloved big warm house.

The thing I believe writers (and perhaps also readers) need to know about the big warm house is that it’s built on a foundation of contradiction. Everyone who lives inside must crave solitude but instead find themselves bumping up against furniture, beds, each other, themselves. They must be forced into intimacy and driven apart by failing to understand one another. The fictional house must always be full of people but also profoundly lonely. The house must represent safety but also danger—a waystation between two worlds, though never exposing in which direction lies folly and which salvation. Most importantly, the inhabitants of the story house must be torn between desperately wanting to get away, and wanting never to leave.

Emma Sloley author photoEmma Sloley’s work has appeared in Catapult, Literary Hub, Yemassee Journal, and the Masters Review Anthology, among many others. She is a MacDowell fellow and her debut novel, Disaster’s Children, was published by Little A books in 2019. Born in Australia, Emma divides her time between the US and the city of Mérida, Mexico. You can find her on Twitter @Emma_Sloley and visit her website to learn more. Her novel can be purchased via BookShop.

THE PROBLEM WITH SURFING AND WRITING: a Craft Essay by Nate House

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THE PROBLEM WITH SURFING AND WRITING
A Craft Essay
by Nate House

Long exposure shot of man surfing

Last summer I was supposed to finish a novel. But there were waves, so many waves. I did my best to try, to write.

Woke up at 4:30 in the morning, took the dogs out under the stars in our yard, smelled the oysters and salt from the Delaware Bay two miles to the south. Went back inside to attempt to write a few hundred words before the sun came up. Often, I wrote nothing worth a damn, gave up, put a few boards in the van, drove to my favorite break in South Jersey, one my wife and I loved. Got into the water and wondered how it was possible to surf perfectly glassy, waist-high waves all to ourselves in the most densely populated state in the country. When a wave came my way I turned, paddled, stood, walked to the nose of the board and lost myself in that magical moment where nothing else in the world mattered. Nothing, except catching another wave.

Herein lies the problem: being a writer who surfs, a surfer who writes. When there is a wave to be ridden, everything else in life—dogs, loved ones, deadlines and writing—gets put on hold. To make matters worse, once you’re completely and totally stoked from the waves, writing a coherent thought, especially one that attempts to describe the sublime experience of riding waves, becomes virtually impossible.

This could be why there are so few books about surfing that have been able to adequately capture the experience of walking on water. Yes, Daniel Duane’s Caught Inside, William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days and Alan Weisbecker’s In Search of Captain Zero paint colorful portraits of the surfing life, and are filled with beautiful descriptions of the ocean, dolphin, and waves. Yet, the true experience of surfing itself seems to elude even the most talented surf-writer.

One could argue that all writers struggle to describe our most intimate and intense moments, agonizing over sentences that allow the reader to experience the love, sex, and heartbreak of their characters—but writers of those topics know that we all (hopefully) have likely brushed up against all three, and uses our knowledge and shared metaphors to put us into the mind and body of the character so we can feel or at least understand what they feel. Love, sex, and heartbreak can be put into a language we all speak. Surfing, I’m convinced, cannot.

Instead of writing about surfing, the best we surfers can do is try to use the experience of the sport, the pursuit, to open our minds in the same way jogging does for writers like Joyce Carol Oates or Haruki Murakami. While it may be impossible to write after surfing, what often happens—at least for me—is that a few hours in the ocean creates an intense awareness to my surroundings, be it the ocean, people, or even the traffic. It is during these moments of heightened sensitivity where we humans become aware of the smallest details—the old man in a brand new Mercedes at the gas station sitting alone, frantically scratching lottery tickets; the dead cat on the side of the road; the laughter from a group of teenagers smoking pot on the beach.

After some of the best surf sessions of the summer, I’d often find myself tearing up while watching videos of Bruce Springsteen bringing audience members up on stage. This increased sensitivity, when properly harnessed, might, I think, expose the writer—or at least this writer—to all the small details that make us human. The same details that make for good writing.

Here in Jersey, we had one of the hottest summers on record. The sand on the beach burned our feet. Cases of flesh-eating bacteria along the coast increased, most likely due to global warming. The flies, brought from the back bay to the beach in the light west winds, sawed through any exposed piece of flesh. The news incessantly pointed out the moral failings of our president, and yet his supporters still backed him. We surf to escape all of this, and yet it sometimes makes all that news all the more devastating because of our enhanced sensitive state.

I’ve been surfing for over twenty years, writing for thirty. I still struggle with each of them, trying to figure out how to make the two activities, my two passions, work with all the other parts of my life. When I’m at my worst, struggling with life, with surfing and writing, my wife kindly guides me back to Percy Shelly:

All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. ‘The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’ But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being.

Surfing is its own form of art. It “spreads its own figured curtain” and “withdraws life’s dark veil,” leaving its victims unable to find the words to describe a single moment in time, shared by  board, mind, body, wind, tide and sand, that connects us to all the beauty and suffering that exists in the universe. Surfing and writing keeps us searching for that perfect wave, sentence, or poem so we can experience that moment again and again and again and again.

Nate House Author PhotoNate House’s fiction has appeared in Armchair Shotgun, Kudzu House, The Bicycle Review, Monday Night Lit, The Schuylkill River Journal, and other publications. His columns have appeared in both local and national newspapers. He worked as a reporter for The Philadelphia Tribune and currently teaches at Community College of Philadelphia.

 

 

 

Image credit: Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

 

ON REVISION: From story to STORY, With a Little Help from a Doomed Vole and Robert McKee, a Craft Essay by Lea Page

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ON REVISION:
From story to STORY, With a Little Help from a Doomed Vole and Robert McKee

a small rodent on a dirt path

A Craft Essay
by Lea Page

If memoir is sculpture, where writers must strip away the unnecessary to find the shape of the story, then it is my memory that wields the knife. Memory chooses certain scenes and impressions. Memory snips and stores fragments and shadows. Memory does not follow the rules of chronology or of rational cause and effect. Memory puts any old thing next to another for its own reasons and may preserve for example, the dance of a courageous vole in perfect detail, while jettisoning a crucial conversation with a friend who is now gone. Try as I might to recall that moment with my friend, memory carved it away, leaving only shavings on the floor, which I crushed into ever smaller pieces as I paced back and forth, studying what I had left to work with.

A freaking vole? What was I supposed to make of that vole?

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I am still new enough to writing to laugh in delight when I hear myself say I am a writer. And, I am also one of those writers who drafts the whole book before I know what the story is. It’s worse than that: I write the whole memoir before I know what the story is, even though I know what the story is because I’ve lived the story.

Because there’s story, and then there’s capital-S Story. It took working through several manuscript revisions before I understood the difference.

My first draft, which included the dancing vole, was the story. It was 100% accurate—everything I wrote about was what I remembered happening. There were no embellishments, no composites, no made-up dialogue, even. What I brought to the page had been seared onto the skin of my soul. I had been branded by the story. It owned me. So, I was surprised when my writing group flipped my manuscript onto the table (proverbial table—we met by video conference) and leaned back in their chairs and said, “We love your scenes and your language, but we’re not convinced.”

But, I told them, it all happened.

“That’s not enough,” they said, “to make us care.”

Damn. That stung.

“Don’t take it personally,” they said. “Literally, this isn’t about you. That’s the problem. Right now, the story is only about you.”

They explained that I needed an underlying current, an emotional logic. I needed the big picture. I needed to answer the “why” and the “who cares,” as well as the “what” and the “how.” I needed a thematic arc to match the arc of events. In other words, a capital-S Story to go with my story.

Shortly after I received this humbling advice, my husband, a lawyer, surprised me with the audio version of Robert McKee’s Story for us to listen to during a six-hour drive. “Maybe this will help you with your revision,” he said.

I was grateful, but worried he’d be bored. “Oh, no,” he said. “My final argument in any brief or trial is only as convincing as the story I’ve told.” As we hurtled south down the highway, we listened to McKee describing his thematic array of values that forms the foundation of a complete story arc.

Start, he said, by nailing down the basic value at stake in your story.

What had I really been after, I asked myself, moving my young family to a small town in rural Montana? A simple life, lush scenery, sure. But what else?

Belonging, that’s what I had been looking for.

And what, asked McKee, is the opposite of that basic value? What negates it?

That’s easy: being bullied, ostracized, shunned. When your daughter is bullied for years and you cannot stop it, no matter how desperately you try. When people avert their eyes, turn their backs and close door after door, all the while telling you that there is “something” about your daughter, “something” about you. You are to blame, they mean, but just why is unnameable, unknowable, and therefore impossible to change or to fix.

And what, asked McKee, is the opposite of belonging but is not negative?

Who knew, as I was living my story, acting and reacting, that my solution would so neatly fit into this man’s formula? But the structure of stories is what it is because life is what it is, and my choice, when I was faced with the impossibility of our ever belonging in our tiny town, was self-sufficiency: the opposite of belonging, but not necessarily a bad thing.

Not a bad thing at all. Our retreat into the community of wild and domestic animals, into the rhythm of the seasons and the sanctuary of our home and garden, was understandable, given our circumstances.

But, said McKee, even that is not enough. In any story, there are obstacles. Challenges to overcome. Villains. What, he asked, is the worst possible manifestation of the negative? What is so savagely awful as to threaten one’s existence? McKee called it the “negation of the negation.” Take the negative, the opposite of your positive value, and turn it on itself, so that the negation, the challenge to your soul, is exponential.

What was the negation of self-sufficiency, of ostracism? What would be exponentially more damaging than mere shunning? How could that harm be magnified?

The “negation of the negation” was that voice that woke me in the small hours of the night and whispered, “Maybe there is something about you.” The negation of the negation was my belief that that voice was speaking the truth: that we deserved it. I didn’t need anyone to ostracize me or to destroy me. I was doing it for them. I felt a sense of triumph for identifying that last piece of the puzzle. But I also felt despair. This wasn’t fiction, after all. It was my life.

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When I was forced by the gods of revision to weave a more expansive and emotionally resonant capital-S Story to justify the inclusion of every word, event and character—even that dancing vole—I began to understand that my story didn’t just happen. That even if I felt a bit victimized by events, once I was inside the revision process, there were no more victims and no more villains. There were only choices. I saw that my main character (me) wasn’t simply the target of relentless persecution. My protagonist had made a series of choices—good ones and bad—rendering the larger Story believable only when I set the events afloat on a thematic current.

By examining the big Story, I came to understand my villains through their choices as well. There were reasons they acted as they did—as badly as they did. Their actions reflected their own limitations and misery. I wasn’t responsible for what they had done, any more than the vole was, the one that fought valiantly when my cat caught it, the one that made her jump back in surprise as it bared its tiny rodent teeth, the one that died because, despite its courage, it was after all, a vole, and she was a cat, and that is the nature of things.

And here is what I discovered as I wrestled again with those scenes— I was not that vole. I had a choice in the end, while the vole had none, and I had chosen, and survived.

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It wasn’t until after my husband and I were in the car again headed home that I understood there was a fifth and final element in McKee’s thematic array: the bending of the arc into a circle, the redemption. Without redemption, the story—my Story—would be a tragedy, starting at a positive value, belonging, and ending with a negative one, self-nullification.

Regardless of whether anyone would want to read a tragedy, I didn’t want to have lived a tragedy. When we fled the Montana town where we had dreamed of making a life, we left behind a home we had designed ourselves, drawing my grandmother’s kitchen table on a piece of graph paper and working out from there. We left our work, our animals, our trees—we had planted so many trees! It was hard to deny the sacrifice.

But memoir is truth. You can’t make up a better ending, one that you would prefer. When you have experienced the negation of your negation, when you have possibly had a hand in creating it, how, I asked the wise voice coming from the car speaker, how do you redeem yourself?

The answer dawned on me only because I had written it: the act of writing was itself the answer. The opposite of self-nullification is self-expression. It is even more than that: self-expression is an exponentially higher, more positive value of belonging. It is an affirmation of the affirmative: belonging to oneself. And I have revision to thank for it.

Lea Page Author PhotoAn avid walker, gardener and dog-snuggler, Lea Page lives in Montana with her husband. Her essays have appeared in The Rumpus, The Washington Post and the Brevity blog, among others. She is the author of Parenting in the Here and Now: Realizing the Strengths You Already Have. Visit her at www.LeaPageAuthor.com.

 

FROM PLAY TO PERIL AND BEYOND: HOW WRITING CONSTRAINTS UNLEASH TRUER TRUTHS, A Nonfiction Craft Essay by Jeannine Ouellette

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FROM PLAY TO PERIL AND BEYOND: HOW WRITING CONSTRAINTS UNLEASH TRUER TRUTHS
A Nonfiction Craft Essay by Jeannine Ouellette

silhouette of children playing on a hill

“There is neither painting, nor sculpture, nor music, nor poetry. The only truth is creation.”

~Umberto Boccioni, Italian painter and sculptor

Writers seek truth—truth that makes a reader’s hair stand up and speeds our hearts with recognition. But that kind of truth is elusive, both from the perspective of craft and brain science. I spent two decades unable to write an essential truth of my own life, one rooted in my childhood, during which I experienced several years of sexual abuse by my stepfather, beginning when I was four. Not surprisingly, this experience shaped the person I am—and, as a writer, I sensed the importance of weaving this early trauma into some kind of narrative. But my attempts to do so were consistently ineffective and inartistic. Dreadful, really.

So, I wrote other things. From my twenties through my forties, I published narrative journalism, a couple of nonfiction books, a children’s book, plus dozens of essays. Some essays were intimate and a handful took risks. But this one true thing tugged—and persistently evaded me. The problem wasn’t the material itself, which was neither buried nor inaccessible. The problem was my inability to transform it. In print, my life started around age twenty. Meanwhile, that blocked childhood truth coursed beneath, like an undertow that kept my writing from its full potential.

Writing constraints help us discover the truth rather than recite it.

The turning point came in 2010, when I was working full-time as a Waldorf teacher and impulsively enrolled in a three-week writing workshop with Paul Matthews, a Waldorf mentor and author of several books of poetry and two craft books, Sing Me the Creation and Words in Place. Paul teaches writing with constraints—a literary technique that involves requiring or forbidding certain elements, or juxtaposing various incongruities, or imposing one or more patterns. Constraints are so common in poetry that you need only think of the rules for sonnets or sestinas or villanelles to understand how they work. But as a writer of prose—at the time, primarily nonfiction—my first response to Paul’s workshop was alarm. His lectures were riveting, but his prompts were preposterous. Many were collaborative and involved “activities.” We made up nonsense languages. Spoke to plants. Wrote nursery rhymes in iambic pentameter. We blindfolded ourselves and tossed beanbags back and forth as a means of wordless communication.

If I had, that first day, been seated closer to the door, I’d have run through it. I was a “serious writer,” there to write, not babble. I was not near the door though, and that was lucky. Because my writing began waking up almost immediately in all kinds of exciting ways. First, I laughed more than I had in years. I entered into what the comedic actor and creative genius John Cleese heralds as the most essential condition for creativity—“open mode”—a loose, playful state of mind most easily achieved through laughter. Second, and this is related to the laughing, I learned invaluable craft lessons, including the paradox that if I wanted to write dark and serious things, I needed to lighten up. I needed to play.

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Playfulness, Paul told us, is the portal to the profound: the English word “silly” comes from the German selig—which means, according to the Babylon German-English Dictionary, soulful, full of feeling, blessed, late, deceased. These opposites work synergistically. As eighteenth-century philosopher Frederich Schiller wrote in his aesthetic letters, “Humans are fully human only when we play, and we only play when we are human in the fullest sense of the word.” Schiller also said art belongs in the same realm of total freedom as play. Both offer the possibility of becoming childlike, of losing ourselves in experience and—according to Matthews—“healing the division in our consciousness.”

My problem is that I am quite unnerved by free, undefined play. The same is true for most people who have endured childhood trauma. But even the untraumatized are not exempt. Most adults experience at least some discomfort in the face of a game with unfamiliar rules—or worse yet, a game with no rules. We shrink back from the innate risk of freedom. Twelfth-century troubadours in the South of France understood this risk. They played a literary question and answer game called the jeu-parti—the divided game. From this root comes our English word “jeopardy,” meaning danger. What an idea! That in the midst of word play we might be confronted by a real question, a creative risk, a jeopardy, to be faced directly or shied away from. According to Paul Matthews, such moments almost always hold the hidden question: Who are you?  What could be scarier—or richer—than that?

Paul’s workshop gave me my first glimpse of what my failed childhood stories were missing, which was joy. Of course, more joy in the process of writing doesn’t—and probably shouldn’t—turn an incest story into a comedic romp. But more joy in the writing will leak into the work. It will add light, not in a way that diffuses the story’s darker truths, but illuminates them more completely, slanting them in a way that surprises us even as we write. This slant, as Emily Dickinson understood, makes all the difference. After all, if I tell exactly the story I’ve set out to tell, I’ve failed. The truer story exists somewhere outside the margins of consciousness. Writing constraints help us discover the truth rather than recite it.

This theory also underlies the work of the Oulipo, the French “workshop of potential literature.” The Oulipo is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians founded in 1960. They create works using constrained techniques, and define potential literature as “the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy.” Note the emphasis on new and patterns and enjoy. The group advocates the use of severe, self-imposed limitations during the creative process, seeing themselves as “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they propose to escape.” One of the most famous members of the Oulipo, Italo Calvino, wrote an entire 300-page novel without the letter “e.” The Oulipo is recognized as one of the most original, productive, and provocative literary enterprises to appear in the past century.

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As for me, the more I experimented with constrained writing, the more I came to see its value. Still, I wondered why devices like writing constraints are so useful for accessing sharper angles on certain truths, even in cases when those truths are not particularly traumatic or difficult to tell. The answer stems from brain science, which confirms a sad fact: we’re wired to see and say (and write) the same versions of our various stories over and over, even if those versions are not essentially true—or interesting. Meanwhile, the big truths about our own lives march by unrecognized. The simple term for this is “confirmation bias,” a deep and debilitating hardwiring against seeing virtually anything we haven’t already pictured or that we don’t expect to see.

One of my favorite sources for understanding this conundrum is the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which explores the dichotomy between our two modes of thought: “System 1” and “System 2.” System 1 is fast, instinctive and emotional. It’s the system we use the vast majority of the time. System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and logical, the system required for solving calculus problems and working out difficult code. System 2 is taxing, and we avoid it; it raises our heartrate and makes us sweat, so we default to System 1. But there’s a hack for getting past System 1’s hold on us. All we have to do is intentionally engage System 2, which effectively disables System 1 and thereby allows us to see beyond our pre-existing beliefs.

Constraints are like puzzles. We use System 2 to solve them, which quiets System 1, and suddenly, as if by magic, we write something newer and truer.

This is exactly how writing constraints work. Constraints are like puzzles. We use System 2 to solve them, which quiets System 1, and suddenly, as if by magic, we write something newer and truer.

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One of my literary heroes, the poet and memoirist Nick Flynn, writes and teaches with constraints. In 2005, he described his process in an interview with the University of Arizona Poetry Center:

Well, when I’m walking in a strange city I have this ritual, which is to find three bits of ephemera, usually scraps of paper, usually something torn from advertisements, or maybe a ticket stub, or discarded cigarette pack, trash really, but it has to have some element in it that catches my eye, that interests me, or reminds me of something. I like pages torn from children’s notebooks a lot, with drawings on them, though they don’t always mix well with other images. Once I find one it might determine what comes next, one that somehow either adds to the one I already have or else works against it, creating some tension or juxtaposition, though if it feels too limiting, I’ll throw it away and start over. Eventually, over the course of a day, I’ll settle on the three scraps of paper, and then I’ll force myself to make a collage. I make a collage a day, always from only three scraps, because anything more becomes chaos, and I try to only use things I found that day, and to date the final collage, also finding the “canvas,” usually a weathered piece of cardboard, a technique I learned from Bill Traylor. So I have to carry a glue stick, or buy it in a stationary store once I land, which is even better, because I like stationary stores, especially in other countries. I write the same way.

I write that way, too—or I have since studying with Paul Matthews. I first tested the methods soon after Paul’s workshop, in a memoir class at the University of Minnesota, when we were asked to write a scene from childhood. Totally frozen, I gave myself a restrictive constraint using Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood—a book that beautifully chronicles a sunny childhood vastly different from my own. I opened Dillard’s book randomly to page 185 and forced myself to copy her sentences, replacing Dillard’s words with my own, part of speech for part of speech and syllable for syllable. I quickly gave up on the syllables, but stuck to the parts of speech until I bent that rule also, before finally tossing off the rules altogether when I realized that the first line of the exercise had altered my whole story, shifted it what Nick Flynn calls “five degrees to the left.”

Previously, I’d always viewed the abuse I experienced as a child through a lens trained on my stepfather and my mother. But when I revised Dillard’s first sentence, “The boys were changing,” to “My sister was changing,” and, later, to, “Mary is changing,” my lens focused itself more clearly on the world of the child. That shift was fundamental to unsticking my stuck story and opening it up in unexpected ways. I continued the piece, which I called “Tumbleweeds,” long after the class was over, forcing myself to include several new and incongruous elements, such as fragments of the text of Jimmy Carter’s 1977 inaugural address, facts about the breeding and parenting behavior of the Western Meadowlark, the botany of tumbleweeds, the myth of the jackalope, and the archetype of the mother in fairytales. I was writing about some very traumatic events—which was hard and scary at times—but I was also enjoying myself. It felt almost wrong, really, that writing about incest could be fun. Yet, in order to follow my own rules, I had to be playful. I had to explore new angles on a story I knew by heart, but that was actually far more complex and nuanced than I had understood.

“Tumbleweeds” was a finalist in several writing contests and eventually selected by Joyce Carol Oates as the second-place winner of the 2015 Curt Johnson Prose Contest, published in the journal december, reprinted in Nowhere, and subsequently selected for the Nowhere Print Annual alongside work by none other than Nick Flynn himself.

◊

With that kind of encouragement, especially after so many years of failed attempts, I was more than sold on using constraints to break open difficult new material. Now, I’m always grateful when someone gives me a good constraint, which is exactly what my former MFA advisor, Brian Leung, did during a workshop at Vermont College of Fine Arts shortly after “Tumbleweeds” was first published. Brian’s constraint had ten rules and options, one of which was to include the necessary building of unnecessary stairs. I threw myself in, and months later my short piece eventually grew into a 6,000-word essay, “Four Dogs, Maybe Five,” a winning entry in the 2016 Proximity contest. Eventually, this material coalesced into a novel manuscript, the first chapter of which was published last October as Narrative Magazine’s story of the week.

Of course, in the end, art is art, and art is mystery. For every constrained exercise that’s worked, I’ve produced many nothings. But even those nothings are flexing my creative muscles and keeping my mind playful and limber by turning my own stories sideways. As the late scientist Stephen Gould said, “The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best—and therefore never scrutinize or question.”

Ultimately, the pressure and limitations of writing constraints open doors to truths I can’t see otherwise, especially the hardest truths that hide behind the ones I believe about myself.

Jeannine OuelletteJeannine Ouellette Author Photo has authored several nonfiction books and the picture book Mama Moon. She is a fellow of Millay Colony and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and teaches through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She is also founder and creative director of Elephant Rock, a writing program based in Minneapolis.

 

 

 

Illustration credit: Val Vesa on Unsplash

LISTEN, STORY, TELL. (NOT ALWAYS TELL) A Nonfiction Craft Essay by Aileen Hunt

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LISTEN, STORY, TELL. (NOT ALWAYS TELL)
A Nonfiction Craft Essay by Aileen Hunt

Two women talking, cropped in close

I

The other night I was waiting for my daughter to finish a class. The father of a classmate sat beside me and we chatted about this and that. “How’s work?” I asked, and he began to tell me that he’d been driving his bus one morning when a man ran onto the road and jumped into his path.

“His face stuck to the window,” this dad said. “He was looking straight at me until he started to slide down and onto the road. The counsellor told me it wasn’t my fault. She asked if I wanted to see a video of what had happened. ‘Why would I want to see a video of what happened?’ I asked her. ‘Don’t I see it every night when I go to bed?’”

I wasn’t sure how to respond.  I don’t know this man well; I was just being polite when I asked how he was.  Yet he told me this story, clearly and carefully, as if it was important to him that I hear it, as if it was important to him that I understand.

 

II

People tell me things.  I meet people I haven’t seen in a while and ask them how they are and before I know it, they’re telling me their kid has been expelled from school or their husband is in an existential funk.

They tell me about friends dying and sons selling weed; about partners cheating and children lying; about crises of faith and black nights of the soul. They tell me how hard life is and sometimes, the brave or deluded ones, tell me how lucky I am not to have such problems.

People tell me things.  I meet people I haven’t seen in a while and ask them how they are and before I know it, they’re telling me their kid has been expelled from school or their husband is in an existential funk.

I don’t ask for these revelations, at least not consciously. I’m not the type of person who instinctively knows the right thing to say when I hear something painful or traumatic. Nor do I cry in public. I’m more likely to think of a comforting remark hours later; more likely to cry in private, days or even weeks later.

Instead, I sit quietly and awkwardly, blank-faced, too dim-witted to head off a confession, too polite to be rude, and people take my silence as encouragement and tell me things.

 

 III

I work in adult literacy. This year, I have two especially weak students. When I ask them how their week was or what they did at the weekend, they can’t tell me. They cannot tell a story.

 

IV

My youngest daughter is hearing impaired. She’s been going to speech therapy since she was a baby to work on speech articulation and language development. More and more, the language development work revolves around narrative and the ability to tell a story. More and more it’s seen as essential to social success.

Last week I sat in on a therapy session. The therapist had a stack of twenty picture cards. She put the cards on the table one at a time then read an accompanying story from a script. When she’d finished, she asked my daughter to retell the story using the cards as a prompt. My daughter  went through the cards one by one, but when she came to the last card, she ran out of steam.

The therapist looked at my daughter expectantly and my daughter looked at the therapist. She knew something more was required, but couldn’t think what to say. Then, in a moment of inspiration, she smiled, and announced, “They all lived happily ever after.”

 

V

What to do with all the stories you hear?  Especially the stories you didn’t ask to hear?

 

VI

Once I was at a parent-teacher conference and my daughter’s teacher broke down and told me her three children were going blind.

 

VII

I’m not sure when I realized I didn’t just want to listen to stories; I wanted to tell them, too. Maybe it was when I was living in America. I was going through a stressful time and decided to see a therapist. I sat and talked about myself for an hour every week, and the therapist was a perfect audience, interrupting only to tell me we were out of time. I enjoyed telling my story. I played around with it during each session, adjusting the mood, the plot, the payoff. Nothing really changed in my life, but I took great pleasure in being a storyteller, once a week for one hour, until my insurance benefits eventually ran out.

 

VIII

The first time I told my story to a stranger was in the waiting room of the emergency department at a Cincinnati hospital. I’d gone there, pregnant and bleeding, naively believing in the power of medicine to halt the inevitable.

When the doctor shook his head and finally discharged me, I stumbled into the waiting room. A woman approached and put her hand on my shoulder. She was older than me, in her forties, perhaps, and had a kind face.

“Are you ok?” she asked, and her unexpected gentleness had the force of a battering ram. I told her everything, right there and then, the words spilling out of me in great, heaving spurts. She grabbed my hand and began to pray, asking Jesus to welcome my baby into heaven, to comfort me in my hour of need. And as she spoke, I grew more and more distressed, not because I’d told a stranger about my miscarriage before I’d told my husband (although that would haunt me later), but because the stranger had misunderstood me so completely. I had no belief in Jesus, no concept of him rocking my baby to sleep, no concept of a baby at all. The stranger had it all wrong.

She thought I was crying for something I’d lost, but I knew I was crying for something I’d never have. I couldn’t explain the difference that night in the waiting room, but instinctively, I knew it to be true.

I had told my story too soon. And I had told it to the wrong person.

 

IX

I don’t have much of an imagination. I don’t mean I can’t enter into imaginative worlds or respond imaginatively to life or art. I mean I can’t make up stories. I can only tell stories that have already happened, that I’ve already experienced, which would be fine, except nothing happens in isolation and every story involves someone else.

 

X

Years ago, one of my children was very ill, and spent months in the neurology ward of a large hospital. I stayed at her bedside all day, and every night after she fell asleep, I’d make my way down the corridor to the parents’ dorm where I’d crawl into bed, exhausted and frayed. One night I walked into the dorm and saw a woman I hadn’t seen before sitting on the edge of her bed. I said hello and she looked at me blankly.

“My daughter has cancer,” she said, and I sat down opposite her and listened.

 

XI

I read a first-person account of a woman’s destructive behavior. The writing was harsh and forensic and probably cathartic for the writer. But the story she recounted included her betraying her husband, a man that she insisted was kind and blameless. I wondered how he felt about her public account of their marriage and break-up.

When does being honest and unsparing with yourself become a further betrayal of others?

 

XII

Every family has its stories. Some are good and fine and admirable. But others are grubby and distasteful. Who has a right to tell these stories?  And what responsibilities does the teller have in telling them?

Every family has its stories. Some are good and fine and admirable. But others are grubby and distasteful. Who has a right to tell these stories?  And what responsibilities does the teller have in telling them?

My nephew was involved in a serious car crash. He was driving on a country road late at night and his car left the road and hit a tree. The car was a write-off and my nephew was lucky to escape with his life. My brother, my nephew’s father, told the story over and over again, showing us photos of the mangled car. As he repeated the story, a hint of admiration entered his voice, a hint of excitement. “Look at the car,” he told us. “How did he ever get out?” The story is on its way to becoming a great adventure in this father’s mind, a great escape, but a different narrative runs through my head whenever I see the photo.

“Jesus,” I think. “What speed was he going at?”

 

XIII

I have a story. Some of it is mine alone to tell; some of it belongs wholly or partly to others; and some of it is so intertwined with stories I’ve read or been told that it’s impossible to know where one begins and the other ends. It will require patience to untangle everything. To decide how I should tell it, or if I can tell it.

 

IV

Once upon a time, there was a woman who lived with her husband and four children in a nice house on a nice street. One day, the woman looked at her family and asked: “Who will tell our story?”

“Not I,” said the husband. “I’m too busy.”

“Not I,” said the oldest girl. “I’m moving out soon.”

“Not I,” said the son. “Nobody listens to me.”

“Not I,” said the youngest girl. “I don’t have enough words.”

The woman looked around her crowded kitchen and took a deep breath. “Very well then,” she said. “I’ll do it myself.”

 

Aileen Hunt Author PhotoAileen Hunt is an Irish writer with a particular interest in lyric essays and compressed forms. Her work has appeared in various print and online journals, including Hippocampus, Sweet, Entropy, and Compose. She is currently working on a collection of historical flash fiction. You can read more of her work at aileen-hunt.com or follow her on Twitter @HuntAileen

INTO THE WOODS: What Fairy Tale Settings Can Teach Us About Fiction Writing, a Craft Essay by Dana Kroos

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woman in red dress and green coat standing in forest, looking to the side

INTO THE WOODS
What Fairy Tale Settings Can Teach Us About Fiction Writing
A Craft Essay by Dana Kroos

Consider the phrase, “We’re not out of the woods yet” meaning “we are still in danger.” This phrase can refer to innumerable types of danger. A doctor may say to the loved ones of a sick patient: “She’s not out of the woods yet;” or in the middle of a trial that seems to be going well the lawyer may say to his client, “We’re not out of the woods yet;” in a traffic jam that seems to be moving again, a driver may say to a passenger, “We’re not out of the woods yet.” The insinuation is that those involved are thinking about being out of the woods—there is a light at the end of the tunnel, a glimpse of something safer, better, or in their control—but it is not yet certain that they will reach that light; there is still a chance that the threat—the woods—will overcome.

In fairy tales the woods is often a manifestation of the unknown that is contrasted with the safety of the village, or home, where the protagonists feel in control of the setting and situation.

In fairy tales the woods is often a manifestation of the unknown that is contrasted with the safety of the village, or home, where the protagonists feel in control of the setting and situation. Protagonists in these fairy tales leave the comforts of home for the unknown element of the woods for different reasons—at times in flight, and at other times in quest: Little Red Riding Hood goes into the woods in order to attend to her sick grandmother; Hansel and Gretel are led into the woods and abandoned by their parents; Snow White hides in the woods to escape her evil stepmother; Jack travels up the beanstalk (his version of the woods) to seek wealth and adventure. The woods represent the world over which the people of the village and the protagonists have no control. Here the characters are literally and figuratively out of their elements. The story then becomes about a struggle to gain control over the unknown, to triumph by learning the ways of this other world, or to simply survive and escape: Little Red Riding Hood discovers the wolf’s trick and is saved by the hunter who has knowledge of the woods; Hansel and Gretel use ingenuity and cunning to escape from the witch; Snow White finds unexpected assistance and power from the woods that she uses to return home.

If the woods represents the unknown world, then the village, or home, represents the place where the characters have control over their domain: they live in town (or sometimes kingdoms) governed and tamed by people, protected by both physical and social structures. The opening scenes establish the world where the protagonists feel secure and make the reader aware of the contrast between this known world and the unknown world where the tale will reside.

The idea of the village and woods in fairy tales corresponds to Joseph Campbell’s research about the Ordinary and Special Worlds in the monomyth, or Hero’s Journey.

The idea of the village and woods in fairy tales corresponds to Joseph Campbell’s research about the Ordinary and Special Worlds in the monomyth, or Hero’s Journey. In Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, the protagonist begins in what Campbell describes as the Ordinary World and ventures into the Special World where he or she is faced with new challenges and must develop new skills accordingly. The accumulation of skills and knowledge prepares the protagonist for a final climactic trial. Having succeeded in gaining command of the Special World, the protagonist returns to the Ordinary World and must learn to integrate his or her new skills with ordinary life.

Most fairy tales follow Campbell’s Hero’s Journey to some degree, including the  “refusal of the call”: the stage where the protagonist resists journeying into the unknown; and the “refusal of return”: the stage when the protagonists resist returning to the known or Ordinary World once they have become masters of the Special World, or woods. In the Grimm Brothers’ version of Hansel and Gretel, Gretel refuses the call to adventure in the unknown by expressing her fear of being left in the woods, while Hansel strategizes to avoid this fate—dropping flint stones, then bread crumbs so that they can find their way home. After a series of trials that end with Gretel killing the witch, the two protagonists begin their journey home, but are met by an impassable river that represents the refusal of return. It is when Gretel exerts her newly learned skills and independence to call upon a white bird to help them cross the river that the brother and sister are able to make their way home to their village with the treasure, symbolizing knowledge, they have stolen from the witch.

This schema can be a useful way of conceiving of plot. In present-day settings our fictional characters can venture out of, or be forced from, their comfort zones: graduating to a new grade, leaving a job due to downsizing, moving to an unfamiliar city or state for the promise of better opportunity, missing the bus and testing a new type of transportation. We grow-up, leave the comfort of our parents’ homes, trade roommates and lovers, settle homes, adapt to new co-inhabitants, grow stir-crazy again and flee comfort for independence. Or sometimes we progress more intentionally to seek adventure, or because we need a change, or are looking to find someone or something in particular. We are constantly advancing to master our situations only to decide to move on or to be pushed into new situations where we are again novices. Some people find these moves easy, while other people struggle with even the smallest shift from a known and comfortable state to something unknown and challenging. Either way, we often initially refuse the call to change or find obstacles or other people opposing our advancement; this type of resistance makes sense for our characters and reveals their vulnerabilities.

Eudora Welty’s short story, “A Worn Path,” combines elements of the fairytale and hero’s journey structures including a refusal of the call and return. The story follows Phoenix, “an old Negro woman” on a journey from her home, through the woods, to the big city to retrieve medicine for her grandson. She comes from “far out in the country” and is not accustomed to the big city, making—for her—a fairytale-style woods of the city where she is going. As with “Little Red Riding Hood”, Phoenix’s journey through the wood shows her character’s strengths and vulnerabilities; and as with the hero in the hero’s journey, Phoenix also learns from the trials she faces along the way and is ultimately able to use her new skills once she arrives in the city.

Phoenix’s Call to Adventure is the need to get her grandson’s medicine. The Refusal of The Call is “a quivering in the thicket” in the woods, something undefined and ominous that shows her fear. But Phoenix says to the unknown sounds, “Out of my way, all you foxes, owls, beetles, jack rabbits, coons and wild animals,” both announcing what she fears and denouncing it at once before she continues with her journey.

On her way she faces different tests: a “ghost” that turns out to be a scarecrow and a dog that comes out of the woods and scares her, causing her to topple over and fall into a ditch. While she is stuck, she reflects on the situation and learns a lesson: “’Old woman,’ she said to herself, ‘that black dog come up out of the weeds to stall you off, and now there he sitting on his fine tail, smiling at you.’” The man who saves her tries to discourage her from continuing with her journey: “‘Why, that’s too far! That’s as far as I walk when I come out myself, and I get something for my trouble . . . Now you go on home, Granny!’” At this moment Phoenix turns the tables on the man: she distracts him by sending him after the dog that initially scared her so that she can steal a nickel he dropped. When he returns wielding his gun, she is not afraid, “I seen plenty go off closer by, in my day, and for less than what I done.” Here, Phoenix succeeds in overcoming her fear, defying the man’s discouragement, and tricking him out of his nickel.

When Phoenix arrives in the city she is fully in an unknown world—the woods. The first thing that Phoenix does is ask a passerby to tie her shoe: “’Do all right for out in the country, but wouldn’t look right to go in a big building.’” Here she acknowledges the new setting and its requirements. Nevertheless, the new setting is overwhelming, and in the hospital Phoenix is rendered mute and can’t remember why she has come when asked by the nurse. Then: “At last there came a flicker and then a flame of comprehension across her face, and she spoke. ‘My grandson. It was my memory had left me. There I sat and forgot why I made my long trip.’” Phoenix has mastered this new world and gotten the prize of medicine for her grandson that she sought. But before she can leave she has a refusal of return. She persists in practicing the skills that she has mastered and which are only applicable in this new world: successfully manipulating the nurses into giving her another nickel. But she must return home to be triumphant, bringing with her the medicine and both nickels.

The village and woods can also be defined through a-stranger-comes-to-town stories. In this case, the village is transformed into the woods, or the known situation changes, undoing our careful cultivation and making that which we once controlled and understood foreign and overwhelming—the new boss restructures duties at work, the substitute teacher assigns a different seating arrangement, the neighborhood evolves and our favorite haunts are replaced by new establishments. In this way fairytales also speak about the ways that elements intrude upon the comfort of the village or the home, making the known world ominous and unknown. In “Peter and the Wolf” a wolf enters Peter’s yard and Peter must think quickly of a way to save his friends; in the “Pied Piper of Hamelin” a stranger appears to offer help to a village and later seeks revenge when they do not pay him, in “Sleeping Beauty” the forest grows around the castle encasing the kingdom in sleep; in a strange twist “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” presents an intruder from the village who both seems to be in jeopardy and menacing as she makes her rampage through the bears’ house in the woods.

In a Melanie Rae Thon’s retelling of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” entitled “X-mas, Jamaica Plain,” two homeless teenagers break into a house where the family is away. These homeless teenagers have been cast into the woods for so long that they have become a part of the dangers of the woods: “I am your worst nightmare,” the unnamed first-person narrator begins the story, talking to the reader, and perhaps the family, as she describes sleeping in the family’s beds, eating their food, trying on their clothes. The narrator and her friend resent the family for having what they lack but also desire the family life represented by the house. As with Goldilocks, the narrator especially fixates on the belongings of the little boy, a child whom she understands is protected and loved. Their youth and desperate situations make them sympathetic and complex: they are at once the Big Bad Wolf and the child protagonists of the fairytales.  Temporarily inhabiting that domestic space reinforces for the two teenagers that they do not belong in the home—or the village. Like Goldilocks, the narrator flees in fear.

Fairy tales use setting to present physical, emotional, mental, and psychic tensions as concrete places, characters, and situations. In many of the best-known stories young protagonists face dangers.

Fairy tales use setting to present physical, emotional, mental, and psychic tensions as concrete places, characters, and situations. In many of the best-known stories young protagonists face dangers (what Joseph Campbell would label “tests”) in the woods that force them to learn and develop skills: Hansel and Gretel are at first in danger of being lost and starving, then in danger of the witch who hopes to eat them, then in danger of not being able to find their way home. The characters must grow to meet each of these challenges in order to survive.

In many of these stories the protagonists encounter other characters native to the woods: the witch, the wolf, the hunter, the giant. This is to say that although the woods is an unknown place to the protagonists, it is a well-known place to the characters who hold dominion there. This creates an imbalance of power. Characters who are masters of the woods often use this advantage to trick the young, naïve children who are out of their elements.

Fairy tales raise the stakes of ventures to the unknown world by positioning children—who are or should be cared for at home—as their protagonists. The protagonists are almost always at an age where they are on the brink of independence.

Fairy tales raise the stakes of ventures to the unknown world by positioning children—who are or should be cared for at home—as their protagonists. The protagonists are almost always at an age where they are on the brink of independence. The known place—the village, the family home—is a place where the wellbeing of the child protagonists is the responsibility of adult characters—a place where the child can be a child. The inciting incident is one that removes the characters from this place of comfort, either by force or choice: to save themselves, help their families, or seek adventure. The child is thrust into a world where he or she must accept and conquer adult skills or knowledge in order to survive, symbolizing a movement from the safety and security of a protected childhood to the liberation and dangers of the adult world. In the adult world the child must come into his or her own, gaining skills and ultimately becoming the master of his or her new environment—coming of age.

In addition to the obvious and direct threats that the young protagonists face, thoughtful readers sense deeper conflicts that are not mentioned by the distant narrators of these tales. While these children gain the knowledge and skills of an unknown world, they do so at the cost of their innocence and childhoods, for what child can be the same after pushing an old woman into an oven and watching her burn; or knowing that she was betrayed by her parents; or living in a world with those who wish her deep and unspeakable harm?

These stories captivate us because they make physical the internal and emotional struggles that we face throughout our lives. The situations and settings transcend metaphor to become tangible threats that the characters can describe and the reader can name. In good fiction the tensions, emotions, and fears felt by both the characters and reader are more complex than this, multi-layered, and amorphous; however, by analyzing the characters, plots, and conflicts of fairy tales, we can discover the tensions that excite and enlighten the reader: the power dynamic of a parent-child relationship in a fairy tale could easily be represented as a relationship between a boss and employee, or coach and player; the vulnerability expressed as youth in a fairy tale could also be the vulnerability of coming from a lower socio-economic class, suffering an illness, or entering a situation with less information than your peers; the tensions of risk, sacrifice, vengeance, pity, abandonment, betrayal, loyalty, and desire are tensions that also happen when spending time with family, participating in social clubs, and during mundane shopping trips. As the village is all around us all of the time, so the woods is there too, lurking beneath the surface.

Studying fairy tales that overtly represent the hardships and triumphs that make life meaningful can help us to understand what interests us about stories, the emotions and tensions that we want to explore, and the ways that we can reveal internal and social conflicts in our own fiction.

Dana Kroos Author PhotoDana Kroos received a Ph.D. in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston and an MFA in fiction writing from New Mexico State University. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her short stories and poems have appeared in American Short Fiction Online, Glimmer Train, The Florida Review, The Superstition Review, Minnesota Monthly and other literary publications. Her work is frequently influenced by her travels in Africa, Asia, South America and other places, and by her studies in art through which she also holds a MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MA from Purdue University. More information can be found at www.danakroos.com.

 

Image credit: Manja Vitolic on Unsplash

BUILDING MY AUTHOR PLATFORM WITHOUT A SMARTPHONE A Craft Essay by Mallory McDuff

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old-fashioned telephone receiver with coiled cord

BUILDING MY AUTHOR PLATFORM WITHOUT A SMARTPHONE
A Craft Essay
by Mallory McDuff

“I hope you’re working on your platform,” wrote my agent last year after I sent a substantive revision of my manuscript. I had previously published three nonfiction books with small presses, but I typically spent more time following other writers on social media than promoting myself. That might not be unusual, but I did have one unique challenge: I needed to build online visibility, but I didn’t have a smartphone—a conscious decision. I wasn’t sure how to boost my social media presence without carrying a screen in my back pocket. But I was determined to try.

It’s not like I’m a Luddite with an off-the-grid, back-to-the-land lifestyle. From my laptop and iPad, I obsessively followed writers I adored. On Facebook, I’d reposted a link to nearly every Rebecca Solnit essay since the Kavanaugh hearings. I watched the sunrise in Dani Shapiro’s Instagram stories before reading her new memoir, Inheritance. I relished Kiese Laymon’s true-to-life tweets about Trump. But I was a perennial stalker, not much of an original poster.

When my own essays were published or I taught workshops, I shared those links on Facebook, but I rarely posted personal photos or anything else that might allow readers to get to know me. My profile picture was ten years old, which I didn’t even realize until I got my hair cut before the holidays: “I can’t believe how blonde you used to be!” chirped my hip hair stylist when she saw my photo online.

I know writers capture snapshots of their everyday lives and post to a variety of social media—Instagram, Facebook, etc.—using their smartphone cameras and web apps. And many people can’t live without those phones for viable reasons. But my routine was to carry a cheap prepaid phone when I traveled, much to the embarrassment of my two teenagers. Since I wouldn’t purchase smartphones for them, my daughters found babysitting jobs to buy their own devices, an iPod Touch in middle school and a phone in high school.

Perhaps my aversion to portable technology was a product of my upbringing. I had grown up in Fairhope, Alabama with a family that tried to minimize their impact on the natural world, which meant using the least costly, most functional item that could do the job.

Perhaps my aversion to portable technology was a product of my upbringing. I had grown up in Fairhope, Alabama with a family that tried to minimize their impact on the natural world, which meant using the least costly, most functional item that could do the job. From the late 1960s, my father sold IBM mainframe computers to hospitals and universities, but we didn’t have a computer in our home until I left for college in 1984. During high school, when a few classmates were using their family’s first desktop computers, I typed papers on an IBM Selectric typewriter, using Wite-Out to erase mistakes. That should have been a clue to the lifestyle my parents were slowly adopting, one of needs versus wants.

And since my parents were the focus of the book I was writing, it felt incongruous to purchase an iPhone to promote a book about living a life scaled for a changing climate. As a single mom, I was happy to save that money too. I told myself the other technologies I already had available would do the job. My challenge then was to figure out how to accomplish that.

In North Carolina, I teach environmental education at a small liberal arts college, where I live on campus in a 900-square foot duplex about a five-minute walk from my office. So, it usually wasn’t hard to reach me. Even without a smartphone, I was already online too much of the time. My students marveled that I answered e-mails faster than many professors on campus, but my responsiveness was a deterrent to a focused writing life. I was addicted to social media and e-mail, even without the constant companion of an iPhone. If I had a mobile device, I was afraid I would take it everywhere. Leaving my house and office without one gave me freedom from being tethered to The New York Times and Facebook when I ran on the trails or listened to my daughter’s middle-school band concert.

Maybe the challenge was to live in a digital world without being consumed by it. I recognized many writers depended on their phones for work and family. But in the acknowledgements for her novel NW, Zadie Smith paid tribute to the apps Freedom and Self Control for blocking Internet distractions. From a different generation, Wendell Berry famously wrote longhand and presented his reasoning in the essay “Why I am not going to buy a computer.” His rationale to farm his land with a horse and use pen and paper to construct an argument seemed both poignant and prescient.

I also knew the point of creating an author platform was to connect my writing with its potential audience, what Forbes Communication Council calls “the extended friend group.” My last two books, published with small presses without an agent, focused on the intersection of faith and climate change, topics I continue to write about. But this manuscript was more intimate: It was a memoir about my parents who, among other acts, used the forty days of Lent to give up trash and driving to decrease their impact on the earth.

As a family of six, we aimed for a zero-waste household before recycling ever came to my hometown. However my folks weren’t earthy hippies or radical activists: my mother had a bridge group, and my father sang in the church choir. After we were grown, they learned to live with even less stuff as they walked thousands of miles to complete the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail and most of the Continental Divide Trail, with backpacks weighing about 10 pounds each.

The narrative was about their deaths as much as their lives, as they were killed in mirror-image cycling accidents, two years apart, both hit by teenage drivers. The book confronts the question of how we learn to carry the love of people who have died. The lessons from my mom and dad—learning to live with less because they could—would be critical to my daughters who face a changing climate. Here in the valley where we live, summer temperatures have lingered into winter, and floods have resulted in the wettest year on record. My oldest daughter said the world was turned upside down. My girls would need the story of my parents to help navigate the enormity of an uncertain world.

To address the challenge of building my online platform without a smartphone—and in a way that honored the book—I started with the simplest of actions: I updated my Facebook photo. Within one day, more than 200 of my 750 friends liked the photo and many commented with supportive notes: “That picture captures your spirit!” one friend said. While I discourage my teenagers from “counting likes,” it was uplifting to know my Facebook contacts were glad to see the new-but-old me.

To address the challenge of building my online platform without a smartphone—and in a way that honored the book—I started with the simplest of actions: I updated my Facebook photo. Within one day, more than 200 of my 750 friends liked the photo and many commented with supportive notes…

Next, I needed a website: My 13-year-old whipped up a sample draft on Wix within minutes. Yet, I chose to use modest professional development funds from my college to hire someone who understood my desire for a simple and clean aesthetic. A photographer who is a generous friend offered to take pictures in exchange for a six-pack of IPA, some good bourbon, and a gift certificate to a taco shop. After my initial awkward smiles at the camera, I began to grow more comfortable as the focus of attention. As a single mother, I’d been behind the camera for most of my adult life. Now my story—and my parents’—would take center stage.

Last I signed up for an Instagram account. At first, I had to connect my camera to my laptop, download the images, and then upload them to Instagram via Facebook messenger. By that time, I could have graded several student papers or started cooking supper for my children. The process grew infinitely less cumbersome when I used my iPad to take photos and upload to Insta (yes, I started using the shorthand). Rather than just stalk other people’s stories, I began by posting pictures of the donkey Tallulah in the pasture in front of our house. I tried to share a picture or story daily, and found even my old iPad did the job just fine. Only I would know that I’d forgone an entire decade of Apple updates.

When I perused the photos I’d posted, I saw the small perimeter of the life I’d documented showed me as writer with a life beyond her books. The images reflected the area around my house: the stubborn donkey who grazed in the pasture, my Mom’s wine glasses in the dish rack after book club, and my coffee mug with the inscription: “And also with y’all.” I didn’t have videos of hilarious conversations with Uber drivers headed to the airport or footage of hikes in exotic locations. But even my clunky iPad, which won’t fit in my pocket, could capture the immediacy of my very ordinary life on this small college campus.

My two teenagers were following along: “You should stop posting pictures of the donkey,” advised my youngest. “You went overboard when you called Tallulah your ‘spirit animal’.” My 19-year old religiously liked each photo: “I asked some of my friends to follow you,” she said, feeling sorry since I only had a fraction of her 600 followers.

Now I could also do more of what I cherished online—sharing the stories of others. I got an adrenaline boost from posting on Facebook about my former students who were doing work in line with my writer platform: Kelsey Juliana, suing the federal government to protect youth from the impacts of climate change; Jamie DeMarco, promoting state-level policies for climate action with Citizens Climate Lobby; and Danielle and Mikey Hutchinson, growing organic food on a farm just down the road.

These are small steps I’ve taken, but significant ones for me. By creating my website, using Instagram to share visual glimpses of my life, updating and expanding my Facebook footprint to include more of my life and to shine spotlights on others, I’ve begun to carve out a presence, a platform perhaps. It’s one that doesn’t rely on a smartphone, or I think suffer from the lack of one. From here, I see that I can do more even without a device in my pocket: I just sent out my first e-mail missive and plan to video-chat with followers on Instagram. (Someday I might tackle Twitter, although I worry about my possible addiction to that tool.)

While I recognize building a platform is about using a diversity of strategies to become known and sell books, ultimately to me, it’s about elevating the work of others for a better world, magnifying voices to lift and connect us all.

While I recognize building a platform is about using a diversity of strategies to become known and sell books, ultimately to me, it’s about elevating the work of others for a better world, magnifying voices to lift and connect us all.  This seems especially true when our current times call for despair. The key seems to be integrating technology in a way that is true to my life, even if the outcome is a scaled-down version of what it could be. In the end, I think my parents would approve.

Mallory McDuff Author PhotoMallory McDuff teaches at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC, where she lives on campus with her daughters. She is the author of the books Natural Saints (Oxford University Press, 2010), Sacred Acts (New Society Publishers, 2012), and co-author of Conservation Education and Outreach Techniques (OUP, 2015). Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, The Rumpus, Sojourners, and more. Find her at: https://mallorymcduff.com/

THREE SECRETS TO CREATE THE WRITING LIFE YOU WANT, a craft essay by Lisa Bubert

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THREE SECRETS TO CREATE THE WRITING LIFE YOU WANT
by Lisa Bubert

The question is a familiar one, full of angst and hand-wringing, one I often asked myself but never out loud: How do you do it? How do you become a writer?

There are more questions contained in this question—Where do you get your ideas? What should I write about? Where should I start?—and all these questions lead to the ultimate question: Is there a secret to this thing that I am not privy to?

Yes and no. Yes, there are secrets. It wouldn’t be an art if there were not. But no, they are not secrets you couldn’t be privy to. It only takes knowing who to ask and learning that the person to ask is ultimately yourself.

◊

Almost five years ago, I decided to write for real. I had always written in journals, blogged, tried my hand at stories, poems, even a novel that never got past ten thousand words—but on May 24th, 2014, three weeks after my wedding, I decided that I would not feel whole if I did not make the writing a thing that I did for real. I had an idea for a novel, a very basic one. My grandmother had died the previous year and I was in grief. I had suffered the panic and anxiety attacks of the early “what am I going to do with my life” twenties and had started seeing a therapist. I wanted to write. More specifically, I wanted to be a writer, if only because I didn’t want my life to come to its end without having really tried for it.

So, I started to write. For a year, before the sun came up, 500 words before my day job at the library. My novel stayed very basic. I wrote, re-wrote, tore up pages, re-wrote again, read about false starts and gnashed my teeth. The story changed and changed again. I was learning—but I was also completely and utterly alone.

No one knew how important this was to me. Why I couldn’t stay out late with friends because I needed to wake up early and work on this project no one knew about. I didn’t even really tell my husband what I was doing—oh, the shame of him knowing I was trying at this! And that was exactly it—that I was trying. I was unsure of my work. Nothing I produced felt like it was that great, though it definitely felt good in the making-my-life-whole sense. But if I were really to make my life whole, I needed someone to know I was doing this. So after a year of writing alone, I joined a local critique group.

My first shared reading was a nerve-wracking one. I could see all the imperfections in my work. They were judging me on this one piece. All of this had been private and if I failed, I failed silently, with no one watching. (Of course, it hadn’t occurred to me to define what this failure was—being rejected? Never having my work shared? If that was the case, I was already failing.)

Nauseous as I was, they finished the piece and declared it worthwhile—beautiful even. Sure, it had some things to improve on—all drafts do. But the bones were there and that was what mattered. I was hooked.

All of this is to tell you the first secret of becoming a writer—put yourself out there. Find your fellow writers and share your work. Get used to sharing things you know are not ready because you need to learn and you must be in the student’s seat to do so. Tell your loved ones this is a thing you want and that it is important. Because until you can admit this to the world, you won’t be able to convince yourself.

After a year of struggling alone with the book, I declared to my husband and my closest friends that I was writing. I finished the first draft mere months after joining the group.

◊

Finishing a draft is well and good. So is editing that draft. But if a novel is to become published in the traditional sense (which is what I wanted), then I needed to do more. I needed to know how to query agents. I needed publishing credits. I needed to expand my network (we had just moved to Nashville so my lovely critique group was now gone). I needed to become a professional. And to do all this, I needed to become accountable.

Here is where knowing yourself really comes in handy. What I knew was this: I liked goals, lists, checking things off those lists, calendars, spreadsheets, and I was a morning person. (Yes, I am that person.)

Before, I threw my organizational prowess into my job at the library, other projects at home, and everything that wasn’t my writing (because my writing was art! you can’t organize art!). But I wanted this. So when January rolled around, I took an index card and wrote down the goals for the year:

  1. Finish the novel and begin querying.
  2. Submit three new pieces to journals.
  3. Receive more than 100 rejections.

Each of these goals required planning. Finishing the novel required I actually work on the novel. Submitting new pieces required I write them. Receiving that many rejections meant I needed enough pieces to submit widely.

I came up with two ways to remain accountable to finishing my novel and completing the other goals on my list. 1) Stick to a daily word quota (500 words), or 2) stick to a daily time quota (an hour and a half five days a week). When I was drafting, the word quota was the best goal to shoot for. When I was submitting or editing, the time quota worked best. The point was to close out each day being able to say that I accomplished my duty, whether it was the 500 words and/or the time spent at the craft. (Gold stars on a calendar help. As does an internet blocker.)

Let me digress here to share a real trade secret: Duotrope, an international database of publisher, agent, and literary journal listings and statistics.

None of us come with a head full of great journals perfect for our work. We may have a few dream places—Glimmer Train and Tin House to name my two, and yes, I am still grieving the announcement of their upcoming closures—but everybody must start small on their path to greatness. There are literally thousands of wonderful journals out there just waiting for your work. The world is your submission oyster—and Duotrope is your path to the acceptance pearl.

It will give you the low-down on each participating journal—if they’re open to submissions, what kind of work they publish, word limits, editor interviews, how long the wait is for responses, and (the best part) comparative listings of similar journals. So if you’re submitting that weird, experimental piece you feel would only work for Conjunctions, Duotrope can suggest other journals to check out based on where other writers who submitted to Conjunctions have also submitted. And the other best part is Duotrope’s list of top 100s. Top 100 most approachable journals, most exclusive journals, most likely to send a personalized response, most likely to not respond at all. It takes some of guesswork out of submitting and is a godsend when you’re getting started and learning the literary landscape. It does require a paid subscription to access the listings but it is beyond well worth it. I’ve used it for the past three years and it is the singular reason I have been able to submit as widely and as accurately as I have. (I promise they’re not paying me to say this. I just really love Duotrope.)

I got obsessive about my goals. Probably too obsessive. I noted daily word counts and watched them grow. The more I worked, the more I wanted to work, the easier the words came, until the end of the year when I had a novel on query and stories on submission. The rejections came on their own. I finished out the year with 99 rejections, seven requests on my manuscript from agents, and three published pieces in journals I was extremely proud to be in.

Secret, the second: understand that art is work and work is art. It’s magical, it’s allowed to be—but it requires professional diligence only earned by committing time to the task. You have to do the work every day, even on the bad days, and even on the really bad days. All the talent in the world can’t override the fact that you must get up early or stay up late, you must forgo seeing friends, watching TV, you must keep your mind clear, you must put your hands on the keyboard and type. The more time you invest in the work, the more inspiration can find you. Like Pavlov’s dog and the ringing bell, only your work is the bell and you, my friend, become the drooling dog. This is the magic of the work­. This is how you welcome the spirit.

◊

Fun fact: Publishing is hard and there are plenty of other writers trying to do it. Being successful has very little to do with talent and everything to do with how you hustle (although talent helps.)

The thing about hustling is that the personal becomes professional. Creative writing of any kind means the world sees you very intimately. You have to be okay with people you don’t know and people you love dearly seeing you in a vulnerable state on the page. Which is why it’s so hard to be rejected.

But that’s why hustling is so important. That thick skin they talk about only callouses up when more rejections and more edits are received. It doesn’t make you love the work any less. I’ve found it makes me love it more because I care about it enough to advocate for it. That’s all hustling is anyway—advocacy.

Which brings me to secret number three: Advocate for yourself by showing up.

The single most important thing I do for my writing is to show up, especially when I don’t want to. I showed up when I joined that first critique group. I showed up when I made my writing public. I showed up every morning in front of the keyboard, when I submitted work, when I went in search of a new writing community once we moved.

In this singular year of showing up, I have become known in my community as a writer to be respected, someone who can be counted on, as capable and competent, as talented, yes, but also as a hustler.

Ultimately, this is a business. Only you are going to bring yourself success (as you define it). Only you are going to advocate for yourself. The more you produce, the more you submit. The more you submit, the more acceptances you will receive. The more acceptances, the more confidence you gain. The more confidence, the more you will produce. And so on and so forth. It’s a vicious cycle. Vicious and delicious.

So show up. Hustle. Tell the world what you want. Ask for help. Ask for celebration. Give help when asked. Give help without having to be asked. Your dream writing life awaits—no special instructions required.

Lisa Bubert Author PhotoLisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Washington Square Review, Carolina Quarterly, wildness, South 85, Barnstorm Journal, Spartan, and more. Her story “Formation” was named a finalist in the Texas Institute of Letters Kay Cattarrula Award for Best Short Story. She is the leader of Lit Mag League, a literary journal reading club organized though The Porch, Nashville’s lead writer’s collective, and now also leads Draft Chats, the Porch’s new group for critique and writer support. See more of her work at lisabubert.com.

IN DEFENSE OF TELLING, a craft essay by Scott Bane

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IN DEFENSE OF TELLING
A Craft Essay
by Scott Bane

Almost anyone who has taken a writing class has encountered the sacrosanct dictum: Show; don’t tell. The late Wayne C. Booth, Professor Emeritus of the University of Chicago led me to question this doctrine in his influential book, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). I like books about rhetoric, so when I came across the book at my local Barnes and Noble, the title hooked me. Professor Booth is a warm and clear-eyed guide. And while he occasionally feels compelled to cut through thickets of scholarly debate, he always manages to keep his focus on the rhetorical devices that make fiction work.

Professor Booth advances the idea that many novels, especially those from the 18th and 19th centuries, have what he terms an “implied author,” an authorial presence that guides and modulates the reader’s reactions, sympathies, and expectations. Implied authors are hybrid creatures, combining the voice of a fictional character with the point of view of the author. But for Professor Booth, the voice of an implied author can’t be equated with the actual author; it’s a rhetorical mantle that the author dons for each novel or story.

In their most straightforward form, implied authors are created when the writer speaks directly to reader about the action or characters of the story. It was a favorite device of earlier centuries, and accounts for much contemporary impatience with slowly-paced thick, thick novels by Henry Fielding, George Eliot, and others. By the time the novel fell into the hands of a writer like Henry James, implied authors had become more subtle, created through word choice, emphasis on specific details, and arrangement of action rather than direct commentary. But an implied author is still there in the text, lurking behind the words, guiding readers.

Today, implied authors are often scarce. I attribute this disappearance to the association between implied authors and “telling,” as well as the ascendancy of “showing.”

What exactly is meant by “telling”?

In the eagerness to “show,” the nuance of “telling” is threatened with extinction. But there are exceptions. In my story “Light Refracted through Water” the first person narrator is trying to decide whether a high school buddy is making a sexual advance to him.

Was desire or fear stronger? But it wasn’t really a question. After years of taunting in school, I didn’t dare dream of acting on my desires with other boys, and so they were relegated to the world of private fantasy. It never occurred to me there was any other choice. Gradually a split arose between how I acted and what I desired, so that with time, I didn’t even recognize my own desires. Or so I thought. In reality, though, they were like light refracted through water. The beam of my desires shone through my actions, but bent at various angles, sometimes obtuse, sometimes acute, that weren’t immediately recognizable to me.

Here, “telling” portrays how we narrate the world and our own experience to ourselves. The implied author is subtle and comes in at the very end in the use of the visual metaphor of light refracted through water. While some people may spontaneously think in metaphors, up until this point in the story, the closeted, gay teenage narrator from a rough and tumble background has not shown himself to be such a person. The narrator gets an assist from the author. That the narrator is interpreting his experience using a visual metaphor is also an example of telling and showing working together.

Or take the late Philadelphian writer Mark Merlis who used “telling” to excellent effect. In his 2005 novel Man about Town, the main character Joel Lingeman is inexplicably drawn to a photo of a man in swim trunks in a magazine ad. While the photograph triggers Joel’s reflection, the depth and significance of the photograph is conveyed by “telling.” Merlis writes about the character:

He knew it was a crime, looking at that picture, even having it in the room. Not just the obvious crime. Perhaps he already had some vague intuition that a good boy wasn’t supposed to be quite so profoundly interested in a picture of a handsome guy in swimming trunks. But there was something else about the picture, something seismically subversive.

In his reflection, Joel’s character is imbued with Merlis’ preternaturally wise and articulate voice, making fine-grained distinctions about obvious and subtle crimes, how too great an interest can imply a kind of guilt, or how something can be “seismically subversive.”  “Telling” brushes into a story’s frame the presence of a mature writer capable of assessing human experience and ascribing words to it. For Professor Booth, this “writer” may be one of a story’s greatest fictional creations, but it’s a necessary one that underlies and reinforces the overall aesthetics of any given piece.

I can already hear the impatience: You’ve got to be kidding. In the early 21st century, we like our stories cool and ironic, and irony abhors “telling” or commentary of any kind. We like to have a character or scene presented directly, because we’re quite capable of inferring the meaning for ourselves. We don’t need to be told. We like the sense of privacy, privilege, and power that judging in the wings alongside the author brings. Any comment from the author, implied or otherwise, destroys the spell of direct presentation.

The other competitor “telling” has is film, a medium that for obvious reasons is predisposed to “showing.” “Telling” or commentary by a character in film must be done with a light touch or its effect usually verges on silly. Think of Sonny von Bulow’s mind talking to the viewer from the depths of a coma in Reversal of Fortune. Directors also almost never speak in their own voices. So film, too, in which the director/author is very nearly always obscured, also creates a general taste for visual representation, direct presentation, and no “telling.”

Yet despite contemporary cultural inclinations toward coolness, irony, and visual representation, it’s strange that the many nuances of “telling” should be lost. There are instances when “telling” is “showing,” such as in Tristram Shandy, where the sheer power of the voice, the voice that tells and tells and tells some more, is the most vivid presentation of a character imaginable. Coolness, irony, and visual representation tip the scale in the direction of “showing,” but it doesn’t mean that “telling” is an ineffective or less valid literary device.

In each work of fiction, “telling” and “showing” interact to advance plot, shade characterization, and explicate meaning in a way that is as unique as each writer’s fingerprints. Neither “telling” nor “showing” can be held out to writers as theorems that hold true under any and all circumstances, although just such a magic key is alluring. But rigid application of “show; don’t tell” drains art’s reflective pool and hinders its ability to mirror our lives back to us in all their complexity and nuance. And this being the case, I’m always ready to be told a good story.

Scott Bane Author PhotoScott Bane’s work has appeared in number of journals and newspapers, including Christopher Street, The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Huffington Post, and Poets & Writers. He lives in New York City.

 

 

 

Image credit: DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash 

THE BELL DINGS FOR ME: On Writing with a Typewriter, a craft essay by Toby Juffre Goode

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THE BELL DINGS FOR ME
On Writing with a Typewriter
A Craft Essay
by Toby Juffre Goode

I pack up my laptop and some comfortable clothes and pull away from my mile-high mountain home in Northern Arizona to drive hundreds of desert miles. I’m headed for the women’s writing retreat I attend every January in Palm Springs, California. I’m anxious. The five-hour drive facing me isn’t the problem. It’s the slump I’ve languished in for too long. I haven’t touched my memoir manuscript in months. A few essay ideas poke at me, but I ignore them. My heart isn’t in it. If not for the women I look forward to seeing and the money I paid up front to attend, I’d sit this one out.

I pass through Skull Valley and Yarnell, and keep going beyond Hope. I cross the California border into Blythe and drive on through mind-numbing miles of dry dirt, desert scrub, and sporadic crumbled foundations.

Stuff the anxiety, I tell myself. I’m tired of it. Inspiration will find me.

I arrive at the historic Casa Cody Inn and go in search of Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, author, teacher, mentor, and my friend who leads these annual retreats. Over the past year I observed this woman of many passions delve into yet another: typewriters. I’ve lost count of the prized acquisitions she posts on Instagram. Where the hell is she putting all these typewriters? Barbara lives in a tiny cottage by the sea in Southern California. Has she gone off the deep end?

I find her in her room at the Winter’s House where she has three typewriters set up and ready to fly. Barbara points out her prized Olivetti Lettera 32, a Royal Aristocrat, and a Smith Corona Classic Electra. She tilts her head and grins.

“You’re welcome to try one out while you’re here,” she says. “If you want.”

I’m rooming next-door to Barbara. During the day I hear her typing. And I love the sound.

One particular night she’s typing while I read in bed. Rhythmic and meditative, the sound soothes me. I want to fall asleep listening. I shut my light. She stops typing. I’m disappointed.

The next day Barbara mentions that she has a Smith Corona electric in the trunk of her car that I can play with. “I’m selling it on Craigslist,” she says. “I can’t keep them all.”

I humor her. I lug the portable typewriter in its case to my room. It reminds me of a bowling ball. My father’s bag and shoes waited for him by the front door every Thursday night—his bowling night with the Knights of Columbus. I’d always try, but I wasn’t strong enough to lift it.

I hoist the case up onto my desk and struggle to release the typewriter. I don’t remember my portable typewriter in college being this cumbersome. Plug it in, feed a sheet of paper through the roller thingy, and flip the switch. Oh yeah—I’d forgotten that motor sound. Do I remember how to use this thing? I consider the keys. My fingertips find home row. Like getting on a bike again. The next thing I know I’m typing. Energy flows into my fingers. I can still do this! Even though it’s been more than thirty years. Through the serial number, Barbara confirms that this typewriter was manufactured in 1964. I was only eight years old then, trying to pick up Dad’s bowling bag. Talk about a time machine.

During the four-day retreat I write on the Smith Corona instead of my laptop. I work on one of my essay ideas, but after a rough page or two I’m compelled to bang away about this infatuating typewriter experience. Hitting the keys takes effort and discernment. Too little pressure delivers a faint h; too much and a sputter of hhhhhs spit onto the paper. But once I get the touch, it’s fun. I type. I’m warming up. Thoughts sizzle.

During the four-day retreat I write on the Smith Corona instead of my laptop. I work on one of my essay ideas, but after a rough page or two I’m compelled to bang away about this infatuating typewriter experience. Hitting the keys takes effort and discernment. Too little pressure delivers a faint h; too much and a sputter of hhhhhs spit onto the paper. But once I get the touch, it’s fun. I type. I’m warming up. Thoughts sizzle.

By day two I’m more than smitten. I peer into Smith Corona’s open heart where metal typebars wait to slap letters on the platen (the roller thingy has an official term, I learn), the way piano keys send hammers flying upward to strike strings. A musical staccato sings out: you’re writing! Inspiration has come—in the form of a Smith Corona Coronet electric typewriter.

“I want to buy it,” I tell Barbara.

I wonder about who played on these cream-colored, black-lettered keys before I came along. Did their fingers peck their way, or dance with abandon over the keyboard? Maybe they explored reams of poetry, or stalked stories that were going nowhere yet eventually arrived. I imagine letters of friendship, apology, or long-overdue explanations of love lost. Were pages pulled from the typewriter, crumpled in a ball, and thrown across the room? Or sealed into an envelope and mailed far away? Both actions more gratifying than the lifeless computer functions delete and send.

I study the blue-gray metal housing and once-creamy-white, now-yellowed keys. I’m the new proud owner with a zillion questions. You’d think I was taking home a newborn baby. How do I change the ribbon? What size ribbons do I need, and where can I possibly buy them? What paper do I use? Should I clean the metal levers? If it breaks, do typewriter repair shops still exist?

In college I wrote essays and term papers on my typewriter. Nothing about it seemed complicated and I never worried that I might break the machine. Now the same simple functions bewilder me and I’m afraid I’ll damage it. I study the blue-gray metal housing and once-creamy-white, now-yellowed keys. I’m the new proud owner with a zillion questions. You’d think I was taking home a newborn baby. How do I change the ribbon? What size ribbons do I need, and where can I possibly buy them? What paper do I use? Should I clean the metal levers? If it breaks, do typewriter repair shops still exist?

I’m bringing this vintage baby home. I’m excited. The five-hour drive back is a breeze. That night I don’t mention my new typewriter to my husband. I park Smith Corona on the desk in my office and wait for his reaction.

“Is that a typewriter I’ve been hearing?” Phil says a few mornings later. There’s a twinge of amusement in his half smile. He thinks it’s cool, I can tell. He’s not a writer, but I bet the typewriter evokes memories for him too.

Now an integral tool in my writing practice, Smith Corona welcomes me, idea-filled or empty. Of course you’re going to write, it says to me. Why else would you sit here? So, I act as if. I slap keys. Words splay across the paper, add up to sentences, and run into paragraphs. Prompts and free writes still help me, but my typewriter gets me moving out of my own way. Blank whiteness begs for more—good or bad makes no difference.

When I write on my laptop, I revise—to a fault. The trained copyeditor/proofreader in me wants every sentence perfect. Tempted by the online thesaurus, and cut and paste functions, I’m seduced into premature editing. I wander the Internet in the name of research, or more likely in a search for those boots I’m coveting. My creative flow is choked like a gutter full of leaves.

But my Smith Corona sentences read perfectly imperfect, as they should at this point in the process. The snap-snap of the keys scores my mantra: write freely, write freely. My inner critic quiets.

I type away. The bell dings and cheers me on: another line! I may not have a page worth saving. But I love the physical effort required, and I’m proud of the wadded up white paper balls collecting by my feet. They validate that I showed up. I’m in the chair, thrashing in a pool of possibility. I hate my writer self a little less.

A painter layers color with brush strokes. A weaver threads weft through warp on her loom. Artists explore and create with their tools. On my Smith Corona I compose with jazz hands and a cacophony of sounds to silence the controlling, demeaning, perfection-demanding voice in my head. I type through it. Critics be damned, I say. The bell dings for me and I keep writing for the love of it.

Toby Juffre Goode Author PhotoToby Juffre Goode lives in Northern Arizona where she writes creative nonfiction and memoir. Her advertising writing career has taken her from the NBC affiliate in Boston to Playgirl Magazine to the Walt Disney Company in Southern California. She owns one manual and two electric typewriters, and counting.

 

 

 

Featured image by Nirzar Pangarkar on Unsplash
Author photo by William Sulit

 

YOU DON’T NEED AN ANNA MARCH IN YOUR WRITING LIFE to Know About Getting Burned, a Craft Essay by Anthony J. Mohr

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YOU DON’T NEED AN ANNA MARCH IN YOUR WRITING LIFE
to Know About Getting Burned
A Craft Essay by Anthony J. Mohr

Seth Fischer writes beautifully, and publishers are taking notice. He’s in PANK, The Rumpus, Guernica, and elsewhere. The Best American Essays 2013 listed one of his works in their Notables section.  I’ve met Seth Fischer and have taken several of his classes at Writing Workshops Los Angeles.

Anna March and I never crossed paths, but she and Seth Fischer did. According to the Los Angeles Times, March, who apparently posed as a writing mentor, organized eleven workshops during 2016 and 2017, including one slated for Positano, Italy. Fischer signed up and bought a cheap ticket to Italy, but two days before the program’s start, March canceled it—an apparently frequent move. Fischer and some others traveled to Italy anyway, since his ticket was nonrefundable and he figured he already had a place to stay. Wrong. Says the Times, “They learned when they arrived that no rooms had been booked for the workshop at the advertised hotel.”

The article upset me, not just because Anna March grifted someone I know, but because she could have done the same to me had she come across my radar.

The Times reporters painted a picture of a woman who has canceled numerous workshops, has not delivered the coaching, editing, and mentoring writers have paid for, has gone by four different names in four different cities, has judgments against her, has been placed on probation, and has been ordered to receive psychiatric care.

The article upset me, not just because Anna March grifted someone I know, but because she could have done the same to me had she come across my radar.  Mostly, I have limited my ambition to attending reputable conferences and workshops other writers I know can vouch for—HippoCamp, Squaw Valley, Kenyon Review, and Sirenland. (Sirenland takes place in Positano too, but when you arrive, the hotel does have a room for you.) But other possible Anna Marches ping my inbox, show up in social media streams, and remind me of the flakes who, before I started writing, weaseled their way into my life over two decades ago, when I practiced law.

◊

At times back then I was so hungry for clients that I took on a few who played me for a fool.  Like writers and so many others in the arts, newly minted attorneys can also fall prey to charlatans—clients who skewed the facts dangled big numbers before me, and showed up in my office close to the statute of limitations expiration, giving me no time to investigate before agreeing to represent them. These were the folks who called me all day long, and on nights and weekends, but never paid their bills. They wounded my self-image and made me feel less than competent. I wish I’d sued them, won, and chased their assets until the pips squeaked, but I didn’t muster the courage. Like many who were conned by Anna March.

Where did these people come from?  You might as well ask how ants find a picnic.

Finally, one of these swindlers telephoned me on New Year’s Eve and demanded we meet. “You have to cancel your plans. This is important,” he said. By then I was getting wiser. I said no and, on January 2, told him to get another lawyer. It was bracing to throw him out, a boost to my self-esteem.

Where did these people come from?  You might as well ask how ants find a picnic.

◊

Anna March lured in equally hungry writers and failed to deliver services she promised. In a tweet, Seth Fischer gave a good description of her modus operandi: “This is where Anna thrived—not in taking advantage of people who didn’t deserve it, but by taking advantage of really hardworking people who do deserve it but just aren’t getting the mentorship they need to succeed.”

I understand why some writers who encountered March and became her victims haven’t done anything. It wasn’t worth the time, mental energy, and possible expense to recover their financial losses. (I’m sure some also took a blow to their confidence as writers.) The problem is serious, especially among the most vulnerable artists among us, people who want so badly to get that part, record that song, sell that book. I’ve heard of writers paying agents who are not agents and others who’ve submitted to literary journals that are not journals. One of my first acceptances was from a “literary journal” which never appeared. After waiting for over a year, I pulled the essay and managed to place it in a real editorial home.

I closed my law practice twenty-four years ago when the Governor appointed me as a judge. I started writing on the side, and while you’d think a judge may be too savvy to fall for a literary scam, who knows? I want to get published, get access to top mentoring, get a leg up in this fickle literary world just as much as the next writer. Thanks to the recent Ms. March debacle, however, I’ve decided to redouble my efforts to keep the fabulists and snollygosters out of my life—but not my vocabulary. Before signing up for that workshop in Antarctica, you can bet I’ll do a thorough Google search, run an online litigation check, and ask writer friends to weigh in. If the feedback feels ambiguous, I’ll run like hell. Every one of us in the literary community needs to take care of each other, starting with protecting ourselves and others from those who’d do us harm by taking our money and doing nothing.

◊

When they sailed past the Island of the Sirens, Odysseus was smart enough to order his crew to stuff their ears with wax. But because he wanted to hear the siren songs, Odysseus didn’t plug his ears, instead commanding the crew to tie him to the mast.

When they sailed past the Island of the Sirens, Odysseus was smart enough to order his crew to stuff their ears with wax. But because he wanted to hear the siren songs, Odysseus didn’t plug his ears, instead commanding the crew to tie him to the mast. The moment the music reached him, Odysseus screamed and ordered his sailors to let him go, but instead, they roped him in more tightly, saving his life.

If you think someone you know is falling for a scam, say something. Sometimes it takes rough measures to avoid disasters. That can be hard for us. We writers are a sensitive group, but one Anna March in a lifetime is too many.

Editor’s note: Melissa Chadburn, lead reporter on the Los Angeles Times story mentioned above, is planning a follow-up and wants to hear from others who are owned money by Anna March. You can get in touch here if you fall into that category.

Anthony J. Mohr Author PhotoAnthony J. Mohr has studied craft with Bernard Cooper, Rebecca McClanahan, Dinty W. Moore, Dani Shapiro, and Al Young. His work has appeared in, among other places, DIAGRAM, Compose Journal, Hippocampus Magazine,  Superstition Review, and ZYZZYVA, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize four times.

 

 

 

 

Image credit: Jamie Street on Unsplash

SHOWING AND TELLING: Seven Ways to Help Your Writing Breathe, A Craft Essay by Billy Dean

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SHOWING AND TELLING:
Seven Ways to Help Your Writing Breathe
A Craft Essay by Billy Dean

“Show-don’t-tell” is fine advice—unless you apply it absolutely, as if you should always show and never tell. But there are no absolute rules in good writing. Here are seven ways your prose and poetry can breathe with both showing and telling.

#1 Body & Mind
We know more about the world with our bodies than with our minds because we are more directly connected to reality through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. When you want readers to participate with their imagination, engage their senses with words aimed at their bodies.

Penny watched a rabbit hop under the snow-covered rosemary, ears down and alone.

Stories with nothing but imagery, however vivid and beautiful, can be boring and pointless unless you give readers a context for what you are showing them, and why. When you want readers to participate with their intellect, engage their understanding with words aimed at their brains.

Penny glanced at her cell phone. Five bars. Why hasn’t he called?

#2 Peaks & Valleys
Exploit the distinction between words aimed at the mind and words aimed at the body with “peaks” of showing and “valleys” of telling. Peaks are high points when your readers are holding their breath, and valleys are low points when they are pondering what they saw on the peaks. Juxtaposing peaks and valleys grounds images in information.

Jim pulled the pistol out of the glove box and pushed the barrel under his chin.

Doctor Evans had told him there was no cure, but Jim had a cure. Life sucks, then you die—alone, angry and full of regrets.

#3 Scene & Summary
Your setting will be a boring, irrelevant background for the action and the dialog unless it merges images and information to set the stage for your plot, your character’s mood, and what can happen.

Most stories alternate “scene” writing—which shows readers what happened—with “summary” writing—which tells readers what happened. The trick is to balance scene with summary, showing with telling, facts with feelings, and imagery with information.

The sky was filled with dark, threatening clouds. In the distance, lightning could be seen but not heard. Like small children, the men huddled near the fire, seeking its warmth and familiar glow. Hank looked up. The storm was moving their way. He reached forward and poked the smoldering fire with his cane.

He would tell the story again, tonight, because, in the story, the world promised what might have been. Outside the story, the world closed in again, actual, bare and unyielding.

#4 Brevity & Presence
Showing can be more precise than telling, whereas telling can be more concise than showing. Precise details give your readers more sensory-oriented information to enhance their presence in the story, as in example A, below. By contrast, a concise telling gives your readers fewer details to compress time so they are not burdened with every aspect of a character’s preparation for the real action ahead, as in example B.

A) Sharon pulled into her space at the Oak Knoll Apartments, turned off the engine, got out and heard the satisfying beep as she tapped her remote. She climbed the stairs to her apartment, unlocked her door, and closed it behind her. She tossed her purse on the dinner table, kicked off her shoes and threw herself onto the bed. Lying there with her face buried in the soft, pillowy comforter, a dark wave came over her.

Remembering she had forgotten to lock her door, she rolled off her bed, walked to the door and felt, as much as heard, the snick of the deadbolt as it slid home through the strike plate of the sill. Would she ever feel safe again?

She poured herself a drink—vodka without the rocks. She opened her purse and saw the canister of pepper spray Anthony had given her. She resisted the urge to grab it and pretend to point it at Jack’s face. Instead of seeing the spray transform his arrogance into anguish, she saw a guard, hairy and huge as a gorilla, his black eyes boring into her under his ape-like brow, and his voice mocking her with a growling, “You brought pepper spray to a gunfight? Want me to break your neck or just shoot you?”

B) Sharon was afraid the compound would be guarded by dogs. So she tossed a canister of pepper spray in her purse before leaving the house.

You noticed, of course, that we don’t know what’s bothering Sharon. The first example doesn’t tell us why she no longer feels safe, and the second omits her reasons in the interest of brevity. Both are missing context, which is neither necessarily good or bad. It all depends on your motives for keeping your readers in the dark. Perhaps you want to enhance suspense or save a surprise for later in the story. Whatever the reason, keep in mind that showing without telling and telling without showing can be boring, pointless and confusing unless you give readers a context for what you are showing or telling them, and why.

Too much or too little of anything is unbalanced. When it comes to showing or telling, we can balance our writing with a combination of both to enhance both presence and brevity with context. Below is a third example demonstrating how to alternate scene and summary to move your readers from imagery to information:

C) When Sharon got home, she kicked off her shoes and poured herself a drink—vodka without the rocks. A wave of fear washed over her. In her mind’s eye, she saw a guard, hairy and huge as a gorilla, his black eyes boring into her under an ape-like brow, his hand on his gun. [Scene]

Anthony was asking her to risk her job, her career—maybe even her life. For what? The cause? Him? They hadn’t even slept together. One date, two drinks, and a kiss on the cheek as they said goodnight. She was a legal secretary, not a spy. And how would she get into the place? Even if she got past the dogs, the guards, and the locked doors, how would she know which disk had the data that Anthony needed to put Jack and his crooked buddies behind bars? [Summary]

#5 Convey & Evoke
Telling can move your story forward, speed up the pace, and spare your readers from long, boring passages. But, as we have seen, it can also leave your readers standing outside your story like spectators. Telling readers how a character feels is trying to elicit an emotional response with words rather than with sensory clues. Think of words as handles to carry the idea of a feeling from writer to reader, not the feeling itself. Instead of directly informing your readers about a character’s feelings, as in the first example below, show them the symptoms so they can participate with their own emotions, as in the second example.

A) Shirley was so sad she wanted to die.

B) Shirley stood on the cliff watching the waves crash against the rocks below.

Let’s examine these differences in greater detail. In example A, above, readers are limited to what the narrator is telling them about the character’s feelings. But it’s merely a description of the character’s inner thoughts—as if the narrator is pointing at the character from a distance. The narrator becomes more present than the character. And that makes it more likely that the readers will not identify with the character in a personal way because they, too, feel distant from the character.

In example B, the narrator has all but disappeared because the narration, not the narrator, is showing the character in a particular situation. And that increases the likelihood that readers will feel little or no distance between themselves and the character in the scene. Most are likely to feel as if they are standing on that cliff with the character.

#6 Clarity, Curiosity & Closure
Showing can be more subtle than telling. But you don’t want to be so subtle that your readers feel like they’re working a crossword puzzle without the clues, as in example A, below. You can be both subtle and clear, as in example B. And you can achieve clarity by igniting your reader’s curiosity, then satisfying it with closure, as in example C:

A) With every step across that furrowed field, Sylvia heard the rumble hammering her ears get closer, louder—more like a mongoose circling a cobra than the moon orbiting earth.

B) Sylvia watched Jake drive away with Jean, her best friend, in that truck they painted three summers ago—the one his dad gave her to repair so Jake could drive it when he turned 16. He’d never know how much she loved that truck, the rust bleeding through its other color.

C) Her gold ring tossed on the tracks was no match for iron wheels rolling into the station. She would leave Jake and buy a ticket to tomorrow, where she would go, with alacrity, alone.

#7 Walking the Dog
My goal has been to convince you that your best writing will result from asking yourself, How do I want my readers to respond to that sentence, this scene, my story? rather than, Did I follow the hallowed rules of writing?

Even my show-and-tell suggestions might keep you from your best writing if you follow them absolutely. So let’s examine another rule some writers apply absolutely, a rule they justify by saying that Anton Chekhov told us to avoid all adjectives and adverbs because the use of modifiers constitutes telling. He didn’t say that. He said, Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can.

Chekhov advised us to use adjectives and adverbs sparingly. Being too specific is like walking your dog on a short leash: your readers won’t be free enough to bring your words to life with their own imagination and intellect. Being too is like walking your dog on a 30-foot leash: your readers will wander off the path you want them on. In the first example below, I haven’t crossed out all my adverbs and adjectives. I’ve crossed out as many as I could to ensure my readers will respond as I intended:

Little Tommy pedaled his younger sister’s old JC Higgins bicycle to her elementary school as quickly as he could, hoping he’d get there before any of his friends saw its girly-pink seat and sissy-blue ribbons twirling conspicuously from the bent handlebars.

The second example, the same text minus extraneous modifiers, gives my reader freedom to imagine a vivid scene—without wandering off the path I’ve chosen:

Tommy pedaled his sister’s bicycle to school as quickly as he could, hoping he’d get there before his friends saw its pink seat and the blue ribbons twirling from the handlebars.

Billy Dean Author PhotoBilly Dean is a retired technical writer with degrees in English and Engineering. His essays, how-to guides, poems, and stories have been published in trade journals and magazines, and on the Internet. His goals are to craft prose and poetry loaded with clues for shaping and navigating the sticky web of real life.

 

 

 

 

Image credit: Tim Wright on Unsplash

FOUND IN TRANSLATION: How my Memoir of Life Overseas Turned into a Novella, a Craft Essay by Ele Pawelski

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FOUND IN TRANSLATION
How my Memoir of Life Overseas Turned into a Novella
A Craft Essay
by Ele Pawelski

Fresh from having left my international development career and moving home to Toronto in 2009, I wanted to write a memoir. Browsing through the periodic emails I’d sent home over my twelve years away, I pieced together funny stories about life in Afghanistan, South Sudan, Bosnia, Kenya, Uzbekistan, and Kosovo. But the longer I was home, the harder it became to recall events without notes or a journal from that time (this kind of record-keeping isn’t my thing). Instead, with encouragement from the writing group I later joined, I fed these remembrances into a novella set in Kabul and found my footing as a fiction writer.

My love for factual writing began back in university where I wrote film reviews for my college newspaper. Overseas, I drafted project proposals and implementation plans, and occasionally helped create communications products. A couple of my real-life stories were printed in Canadian national newspapers, and in the past ten years, I’ve published two academic papers. I definitely enjoy putting together a solid premise or argument based on research and evidence: in some ways, the antithesis of creative writing.

So it was natural to land on a memoir as my story-telling vehicle. I’d read enough to know that successful ones needed a recognized author or a gripping, dramatic story. I’m definitely not the first and while I’d had many interesting encounters and was once almost evacuated from South Sudan, I didn’t think I had enough for the second. Nor could I come close to the riveting tales of working for the United Nations recounted by Heidi Postlewait, Kenneth Cain and Doctor Andrew Thomson in Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures. In this memoir, the three use intersected stories to relate their experiences on the front line of increasingly dangerous and dysfunctional UN missions.

While passing time before a speed-dating event (that’s a whole other story), I wrote down as many comical chapter titles as I could think of that evoked the satirical side of development work: “Airports, Airplanes and Goats,” “Where Taxis Go to Die” and “The Way of the Tea.” Instead of a linear storyline, my plan was to write a series of humorous anecdotes in the style of Bill Bryson. Readers would not be taken through the countries I’d worked in but rather experience my world through scenes tied together by a common topic. For each chapter, I would gather an inventory of my stories and then string them together into a cohesive depiction of life in aid-receiving countries. In my head, it worked. And I thought the chapter ideas were laugh-out-loud funny.

With the outline of a memoir in hand, I joined Moosemeat Writing Group in 2010, a writing group I found online. While its focus was fiction, non-fiction writers were welcome too. This group would form the backbone of my writing existence and transition to fiction writing.

green and white sign saying 'the finest supermarket in kabul' against cloudy sky, silhouette of city with white text saying 'ele pawelski' at bottomAbout three months in, I presented my first memoir chapter. The critiques were sharp but honest. The biggest was that the piece contained too much wit to be funny. Sort of like a stand-up comedian delivering too many jokes, who eventually isn’t funny because everything is funny and there’s no downtime to process anything. Also, while colleagues with whom I’d worked featured in the narrative, their appearances were too brief. These were fascinating individuals, trying hard to improve things in their home countries, and I’d given them too little airtime. But the most important feedback I received was that without a subject continually present (i.e. me) it was hard to become invested in the story. I needed a narrator to give the story more depth.

So I regrouped, shifting my thinking back to a linear and more serious approach. I reread Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries and a fellow writer lent me Another Quiet American by Brett Dakin. Both are memoirs of time spent abroad and reflections on the unfamiliar. I developed my stories in the order they happened and renamed my chapters by the country I’d lived in. Instead of writing around topics, I would offer glimpses of my life in each place.

In the meantime, I absorbed more and more fiction scribed by the Moosemeat writers.  Each year, Moosemeat publishes a chapbook collection of flash fiction pieces written to a theme. Six months after I’d joined, a call for submissions went out. With a bit of cajoling and an idea about a satirical take on a real event, I wrote my first fictional story, “A Tale of Two Summits.” At 500 words it was short—but completely imagined.

As part of the process, Moosemeat members critiqued my story. Perhaps because it was fiction, I didn’t endure the stress I’d felt when presenting my memoir chapter. In fact, I felt invigorated by some of the suggestions that I knew would make this piece better. With fiction, I wasn’t invested in trying to squeeze out all the details from my not-so-great memory or figure out how to make my true stories more engrossing. How freeing!

Later, at our chapbook event, I read my flash fiction aloud to a room full of family, friends and a hell of a lot of strangers. Here, I was most definitely nervous. But another part of me was intrigued by how the story fit with the other ones. Or least, wasn’t remarkably (or terribly) different. Perhaps, just maybe, I could write fiction…

In the back of my mind, I remembered years earlier attending a meet-up hosted by Quattro Books, a small publisher in Toronto that would eventually publish my novella. Would-be authors were walked through what made for a good story, and what the publisher looked for when selecting a manuscript: a character with a goal, a crisis from mounting tension, and an epiphany at the end. Yet, it still seemed daunting to write a novel. But then, I read a very personal news story.

In January 2011, a suicide bomber targeted a convenience store in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital where I worked in 2007-2008. It was a place where I’d frequently shopped when I lived there. From online photos of the incident, I recognized the ads in the shop windows and could visualize the aisles filled with sugary drinks and snacks. Thankfully I didn’t know anyone who’d been hurt in the attack. But it felt like I did.

And, just like that, I knew the story I wanted to write: the book would happen over that one day in January 2011. There would be three characters, a local politician, a reporter and an aid worker, and each would tell their experience of the bombing, one after another. Through their eyes, readers would see the intensity but also the beauty of life in Kabul. As with my now-put-aside memoir, the story would encompass themes of challenging injustice and doing good as well as the importance of family.

I would aim for a word count in the territory of a novella. This all was manageable for my first attempt at longer fiction. Excitedly, I shared my idea with a writer friend, mainly as a commitment to writing it. But she also thought it was a good premise for a book.

To begin, I sifted through the comical chapter titles and finished stories that I’d crafted for my memoir, looking for bits that could be part of my new story. I also made notes on other remembrances and encounters I’d had which I could envision happening to one of my characters. If I didn’t quite recollect something, it didn’t matter because I could embellish or cut out as much as I wanted. This story was mine to own and shape just so.

As I wrote the politician’s story, I realized that fiction was providing distance, which allowed me to write in a more serious way. My memoir had been all about poking fun at my experiences and the places I lived, which partially reflected my personality but also kept me from being vulnerable in exposing my thoughts and reactions. The truth was, I wasn’t ready (and, in hindsight, I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready) to let the world inside my head and heart. But I could explore and exploit vulnerabilities I created in my characters, vulnerabilities that could mimic my own.

Slipping my reality into fiction was not overly difficult for two reasons: first, the story was taking place some years after I’d left Kabul. While I could picture the Kabul, I’d lived in, I also knew it had changed as the Taliban continued to creep up and in. Second, once I attributed a personal anecdote to a character, I found I no longer owned it. Rather, I sought ways to transform it, playing with the facts to fit the narrative. This was the case for all the characters, including the aid worker, who I fashioned after myself. In most cases, I wanted to add details that I didn’t remember to enrich the descriptions or create tension.

Four months later I presented the first chapter at Moosemeat. Many were surprised at the story’s grave tone and substance. This time, unlike my memoir piece, I received a good dose of positive feedback. Enough to convince me that the story had legs.

I’m still astounded at how relatively easily I moved into writing fiction. Well, I worked hard at it. But I’m a more creative writer than my twenty-something self ever envisioned. My novella, The Finest Supermarket in Kabul, was being launched in January 2018. I already have ideas for my next three novels. And all are grounded in true stories.

Ele Pawelski Author PhotoEle Pawelski has lived in Afghanistan, South Sudan, Bosnia, Kenya, Uzbekistan, and Kosovo. She has climbed in the Himalayas, walked the Camino and hiked in Newfoundland. Now living in urban Toronto with her husband, she’s always planning for her next travel adventure. Her stories have appeared in magazines, journals and newspapers. The Finest Supermarket in Kabul, published December 2017, is her first novella.

 

 

 

Cover image credit: Thought Catalog on Unsplash

WORKING FOR SURPRISE: On Running, Prescriptive Teaching, and the Language of First Drafts A Poetry Craft Essay by Devin Kelly

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WORKING FOR SURPRISE:
On Running, Prescriptive Teaching, and the Language of First Drafts
A Poetry Craft Essay
by Devin Kelly

For many writers, the first draft of a work can be either something magical or something they just have to step over to get to the next draft, and the next one. Devin Kelly celebrates the first draft and questions the fetishism of revision.—Grant Clauser, Editor

There are two things I do nearly every day without fail: write and run. I like to talk and think about them together because, to me, they are twin feats of both discipline and imagination. Growing up a competitive runner, never very good compared to the other people I competed against, I learned to value the sport as a way to keep me both grounded and honest. Your body has a way of letting you know how well you’ve treated it. Or how poorly. Lining up for an ultramarathon, I view the months of training prior as a succession of drafts. Practice gives me an idea of what to expect out of a race, but I like to leave room for surprise because the body, like a poem, holds more wonder than we can grasp. One of the reasons I race these long races is less because of some feeling of accomplishment that comes with finishing, but more for the strange and wondrous moments of mental and bodily access that arrive without any warning.

A few days ago, I posted a thread on Twitter that began with the idea that sometimes your first drafts can be your best drafts. I was responding, in some ways, to a sort of celebration of the masochism and self-deprecation of writing that often gets circulated on social media. It’s not surprising to see people talking about how bad their first drafts are. “Write an incredibly shitty, self-indulgent, whiny, mewling first draft. Then take out as many of the excesses as you can,” Anne Lamott writes in the canonical Bird by Bird, a seminal work on the craft of writing. Such a narrative is familiar: you write something you might think is wonderful, you put it away, and then you return to it and realize that it is a god-awful pile of shit. I don’t have any real qualm with this kind of narrative other than…well, maybe I do. I’d like to see another narrative celebrated (at least alongside it!): that of the surprising and wonderful first draft.

Before I go on, I want to say that there are different kinds of work, and that both discipline and work can look like many different things. Sitting down to write at 6 in the morning every day can be a kind of discipline. Writing a stream of conscious narrative can come from a place of discipline. The ability to structure and offer discipline to your life can come from privilege, whether that’s the privilege of money, or time, or job security. Some people create discipline out of lives that are filled with work.

About 23 miles into a recent 50-mile race last November, I began walking. A few miles prior, I had entered the marathon-long stretch of canal towpath that twirled and rolled alongside the Potomac River. I was in roughly thirtieth place in a field of close to a thousand and positively geeking out, excited for the soft and flat surface that extended outward like a dream for miles upon miles. Once on the towpath, I settled into a rhythm and tried to quiet my breathing. A few miles rolled by right near seven-minute mile pace and then, with the sudden sharpness of a bird’s quick descent from sky to ground, I stopped. No reason. No labored breathing. I just did. Other racers appeared behind me, emerging from the misty air, and passed me by. First one, then more. I was doing calculations in my head, trying to figure out how much time I had lost, how much I would have to salvage. And then I stopped this, too. I breathed. I walked forward. And then shuffled. And then one foot became two and those feet became meters and then, finally, those meters became miles.

There was a moment in that time of stoppage that was full of self-pity. I looked back on all I had done in preparation, this series of little drafts, and then looked at my not-moving feet, and felt this looming sense of anger and desperation and pity, that this event was not turning out the way I planned. I don’t know how you move on from those feelings other than by simply moving. As I shuffled back into the race, I began to create new goals for myself, to let myself be surprised by the present moment – the ache lifting from my legs after a warm cup of broth, the man and his dog knee-deep in the shallows of the river, a kindness-mirage.

I’m comparing running to writing here because each is a kind of work that offers access to different kinds of presents, in the sense of both time and gifts. And it takes work. How that work looks, though, and the effects of such work, can vary from writer to writer. When I brought up some thoughts about this via twitter, Natasha Oladokun, one of my favorite contemporary poets, mentioned how Li-Young Lee sometimes asks himself, “What impulse was I privileging in draft #2 that’s been killed by draft #17?” What a generous and self-interrogating thought, to understand that the work of working on something doesn’t always make that something better. Runners face a similar kind of problem in the build up to high-endurance races. A succession of heavy-mileage weeks can burn out one’s legs and leave one in worse shape, even when they’ve been running more. It often takes a kind of generous and inquisitive listening to one’s body in order to perfect that type of long-distance training.

Years ago, I arrived at my MFA program without having taken a single creative writing class in college. Unfamiliar with the rhetoric and dynamics of workshops, I grew to lament the idea of process. I looked at the specific edits fellow students gave me for my stories and knew that if I took each one, I’d have some jumbled mess of prose that hardly resembled me. I looked at other students who carried around the same story from workshop to workshop, and how it morphed and changed but never grew to be anything that resembled what the carrier wanted. I shook myself repeatedly, trying to remind myself that it’s not always about the story we tell but rather about how we come to it, and what we open ourselves toward, and what reveals itself to us in the process. I don’t really write to understand so much as I write to accept my own fundamental state of misunderstanding.  Likewise, I don’t run a race to finish it. I run a race to dwell in the forever-encounter with the mystery of my body and my body’s place in this world.

So what now? I guess what I am trying to say is not that our first drafts are always absurdly beautiful, or that we should all stop revising, but rather that there is a language of surprise and generosity that exists within the confines of the first draft that can, at times, be beneficial to us as writers and people. And I think that what you want from your own writing depends on what you want from the world of writing. Sometimes the publishing world doesn’t celebrate the intrinsic adulations that writing for the self often brings about. Those feelings of surprise, inventiveness, generosity of self. “When you are excited about something is when the first draft is done. But no one can see it until you have gone over it again,” Hemingway writes in On Writing. National Book Award winner John Casey literally titled his advice-for-writers book Beyond the First Draft. In a 1963 conversation with David Ossman, Denise Levertov said, “When one has written a first draft one may be elated, and one may wrongly think that it’s right as it stands.” Debating whether these statements, Lamott’s earlier one included, are right or wrong is a fruitless hill to die on, but it bears questioning why, for so long, successful and established writers and teachers have often privileged the final draft over the first. There is a long list of teachers I’ve had or listened to who repeatedly told me or an audience that the key to writing is revision. But how? And why? And is it possible for revision to look different for different people? And isn’t it just a little weird that, often, the people who talk so frequently about the tedious work of writing are people in relative positions of power? And why, finally, does revision have to prescribed as work, when, often, there is a pleasure in diving back into that heady water?

In the first few miles of the 50-miler that November, as fellow racers and I were all working out of our shuffles and tentatively making assessments about the state of our legs and their prospects for the future hours, we talked. It’s one of my favorite things about long races. You’re racing, and yet, in those early miles, you’re going slow enough to hold a conversation. What’s interesting, though, is how those conversations hardly ever are about the work done prior to the race. Rather, they’re almost always centered on stories of the joys of long races, and the failures, and the oddities we’ve encountered along the way. For all my competitive running life prior to these longer races, all my starting lines were filled with conversation about the work needed to get to those start lines. But when I started running far enough, into the reaches of the why-the-fuck-would-you-do-that, I don’t think anyone cared. I think everyone knew it was a given.

Poetry, to me, is that far reach, that ultra-marathon of writing. That wonder-world of experience and language. And, as such, this is how I approach a poem: knowing there is labor involved but instead choosing to privilege the moments of revelation that such labor provides and the moments of surprise and joy that, sometimes, possibly, excessive labor eliminates. I believe, then, in the unlimited possibilities of the first draft. I don’t believe that anything can possibly be a finished thing. And, as an aside, why the fuck would I want to finish anything? I am already tremendously scared of finishing this thing we call life. I believe that we are always a working-toward, a working-against, a working-with. Always a working, never at rest. Always aware of how little our knowing takes away from the sheer depth of our unknowing. Understanding this, I believe a first draft can be an accurate replication of whatever a poet might be working toward, simply because I believe that a first draft contains within it so many things that do not look like work but, in fact, are. A thought struggled with for weeks. A moment observed and then held. A long walk taken through the night. Why not privilege this kind of thinking about poetry alongside, not instead of, our thinking of craft, and work, and structure, and time? Why do some teachers prescribe a craft that only works toward some or one of these things? Why not privilege surprise too, a labor that does not look like writing, a generosity of self-belief? Is it because these things are not as teachable as form?

I don’t relate to any sort of prescriptive advice about poetry, mainly because I don’t think there is such a thing as a good poem, especially in relation to the world outside the reader. I think a poem can be good at things that we prescribe as certain aims of poetry, and can, more importantly, be of a sort of intrinsic good for the poet. But to privilege the value of re-writing a poem toward a more prescriptive and extrinsic goodness over the value of simply discovering and expressing that poem within and through the self in the first place is, I think, a dangerous thing. I’ve heard and read discussions of craft that prioritize the extrinsic value of publishing rather than the intrinsic value of writing a poem that helps one move through one’s life, or memory. This is the dangerous and beautiful nature of the poetry world. It is an art form that exudes its limitless and boundless opportunity. A poem can be as tightly-wound as a sonnet and as excessive and explosive as a free verse poem whose lines run off the page. And even a sonnet can move through many iterations and experiments. Read Petrarch next to Bernadette Mayer and see this. It’s a beautiful thing.

When I do teach poetry, I focus on aspects of permission and surprise. I want students to understand that those small, hard-to-grasp moments when you write yourself through a door you never could have opened before into an exact description of a feeling are small miracles. I want to help students create a space within themselves that is permissive and generous, that gives them the access to move through moments that might be harder to move through without poetry. How this looks is different for each student, and that, I think, is the beautiful hardship of teaching poetry. There are a lot of wrong ways and few right ways. But I can say this: Ask me how to write a “good poem” and I will ask you to look out a window at the setting sun and make up words for the vast spectrum of ever-changing colors you see. Ask me how to write a “good poem” and I will ask you to think of the first time you felt deeply scared that the sky would suck you from the ground and how that feeling grew in you, unprompted, a land-swell of fear. Ask me how to write a “good poem” and I will ask you to gather your vegetables and neck bones and chicken stock and come to the next class with a stew for all of us to eat.

Devin Kelly Author PhotoDevin Kelly is an Interviews Editor for Full Stop and co-hosts the Dead Rabbits Reading Series in New York City. He is the author of the books Blood on Blood (Unknown Press), and In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen (CCM). He works as a college adviser in Queens, teaches at the City College of New York, and lives in Harlem.

 

 

 

Image credit: Running in Central Park, by Chanan Greenblatt on Unsplash

POETRY AS PRACTICE How Paying Attention Helps Us Improve Our Writing in the Age of Distraction A Craft Essay by Scott Edward Anderson

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POETRY AS PRACTICE
How Paying Attention Helps Us Improve Our Writing in the Age of Distraction
A Craft Essay
by Scott Edward Anderson

In this lyrical essay on the writing life, Scott Edward Anderson shows how poetry can be more than a formal approach to writing, more than an activity of technique, but a way to approach the world, which is good for both the poet and the poem.—Grant Clauser, Editor

Walking in Wissahickon Park after dropping my twins at their school in Philadelphia, I find muddy trails from the night’s heavy rains and temporary streams running along my path. The fuchsia flowers of a redbud tree shine brilliantly against the green of early leafing shrubs. A few chipmunks scurry among leaves on the forest floor. Birdsong is all around me: I note some of the birds—if they are bright enough and close enough to the trail or I recognize their song—the red flash of a cardinal lights on a branch nearby; a robin lands on the trail ahead, scraping his yellow beak against a rock.

Observation like this helps feed my database of images, fragments of music, and overheard speech, which prepares my poetry-brain for the work of choosing words, putting them in a certain order, and forming phrases into lines, stanzas, and eventually entire poems.

Remembering a line I’m working on, I worry it like a dog with a bone, gnawing on the words, their syntax, imagery, sound or feel in my mouth and mind. Playing with the line, I’ll follow it until it leads somewhere or dumps me in a ditch, when I’ll file it away for another day. I’m paying attention to where the poem wants to go.

◊

Paying attention in the age of distraction is hard. At any moment, there is a myriad of distractions tempting us away from our writing: the latest bombastic tweet by our deranged president; someone posting a delicious plate of food on Instagram; or the steady stream of Facebook posts showing all my poet-friends and acquaintances meeting-up at AWP.

Paying attention in the age of distraction is hard. At any moment, there is a myriad of distractions tempting us away from our writing.

In many ways, the writing life seemed easier in the age of the typewriter—nothing but a blank page staring back at me, waiting for my fingers to move. No smartphone at the ready buzzing with the latest text from my wife, my kids, that Amazon.com delivery. “Let’s just take a minute and see who it is,” I say to myself. “I’ll get back to the writing.”

Consequently, it’s worse when writing on a computer, especially if it’s connected to the Internet. Writing something about a bird I heard singing on my walk this morning, I wonder—are they found here? At this time of year? Is that the song I heard? Let’s just take a look at the Cornell Bird Observatory website and verify…wait, is it the Bird Observatory or Center for Ornithology? (Minimizes Word document and clicks open browser…ah, it’s the Cornell Lab of Ornithology…I feel better.)

Poetry, the late Mark Strand wrote, “allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, poetry permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.”

If we’re paying attention, however, we can put our busy lives in perspective, create a context for what we’re doing on this planet. Lived like this, life is not about going through the motions; rather, we actively participate in life, in all its facets. And for poets, this means approaching life with eyes open and taking notes.

“I have no clear goal in mind for the notes I take,” poet and essayist Alison Hawthorne Deming writes in Writing the Sacred Into the Real. “Other than to help myself remember the intensities of the day, the mix of sensation and thought as it rises and falls with the swells.”

For me, note-taking happens sporadically. Ordinarily, I work on poems in my head for a long time before I put anything on paper. As I get older, however, I find taking notes helps—especially if I’m busy with daily life—work, family, getting the dry cleaning. The “Notes” app on my iPhone is one repository; notebooks and the occasional scrap of paper are another.

As with Deming’s, my note-taking may or may not lead to a poem or an essay or much of anything. Yet, as she imparts, “taking them forces a kind of attention that makes the experience richer, and attention is central to both artistic and spiritual practice.”

Practice. That word speaks to me: poetry as practice feels right. We are amateurs of a sort at translating the unsayable, doing so requires attention and practice. While we must pay attention to fleeting moments of inspiration, more often we’re slogging away at draft upon draft of a poem, trying to find where the poem really wants to go.

And for this we need daily practice. Ezra Pound suggested poets write 70 lines a day; novelist Graham Greene stuck to 350-500 words per day and would quit as soon as he hit that limit. Counting it out, I find it is close to the same amount, given a typical line-length in contemporary poetry. (Accordingly, this being the age of distraction, I don’t trust my memory of Greene’s word-limit, so, I double-check. There are conflicting numbers even from Greene himself, so I’ll stick with this range.)

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Working the poetry-brain in this way makes it easier to pay attention, not only to our surroundings, but to our words and what the poem is trying to say. Moreover, this is a reciprocal act, regenerative: paying attention is what poet Mary Oliver calls “our endless and proper work.”

The practice of poetry, like yoga, meditation, exercise or any other practice prepares us for paying attention. Consequently, attentiveness leads to a richer poetry, grounded in place, specificity, and real-world observation that can make a poem come to life and help the reader see the world in a different way.

As with Alison Deming’s note-taking, whether we get anything “done” or accomplished in terms of a draft or a finished poem is beside the point. The act of practice alone makes it easier to get work done and makes us more receptive, more available to the poems we must write. In turn, practicing our writing, through note-taking or drafting, makes observation easier. Through this practice, we become more attuned to the world around us and the poems tend to come easier. (Well, at least the bad first drafts!)

For me, the practice of paying attention is part of the practice of poetry, as the practice of poetry is part of paying attention, a cyclical, symbiotic relationship. This type of attentiveness I’m writing about is akin to what Zen practitioners call deep listening.

As the Zen practice implies, deep listening requires complete receptivity—an openness and attentiveness to what’s possible and to asking questions. If we have a question to answer through poetry, we need to ask it. Nevertheless, it sometimes seems like our minds are on auto-pilot and we are not truly paying attention, causing us to miss both questions and answers.

This deep listening and acute attentiveness is a form of tuning to the right frequency.

This deep listening and acute attentiveness is a form of tuning to the right frequency.  Like the dial on a car radio, if you turn a little too much to the right or left, you lose the signal. Through the act of paying attention, we fine-tune our ability to find the right frequency. Think of a new violinist searching for the right notes with bow to strings—it takes practice to make melodious music.

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One winter a painted bunting shows up in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park near where I live. He’s lost his way and finds refuge for several weeks foraging among the native grasses and shrubs behind the ice rink.

I’ve seen painted buntings before, in their southern, native habitat, so I want to see this Brooklyn visitor who strayed far from where he belongs. Finding his general location is easy; I look for a large group of birders: scopes and field glasses and big-lensed cameras trained on the spot. Even with his bright, variegated plumage, however, it proves hard to make him out among the reds, greens, and yellows of the meadow floor. Watching me stare at one spot for five minutes, my dog grows impatient.

Then, a flash of movement to the left catches my eye and I notice a bit of cobalt blue where that color can’t be. There he is, the painted bunting, as resplendent as I’d imagined: worth the wait, worth looking hard for, worth the patience and effort.

A poem can be like that bunting: elusive, hard to pin down, but once you’ve got it, you can’t let go. Paying attention to the colors hiding deep within the grasses, we find the kernel of a line or a phrase that leads to another line, and another. Sometimes obscured, sometimes difficult to extract.

As a poem takes shape, it requires attentiveness too. Am I using the right words to say what the poem wants to say? Are my line breaks speeding up or slowing down the reader? What is the cadence, tone, and sound of the poem saying and is it appropriate to the subject matter? These are all questions I ask myself while revising my poems, being attentive to what is happening in the poem and how I can help make it clearer—to get out of its way and let the poem tell itself. This kind of attentiveness to the poem, tuning the dial up or down to hone-in on the frequencies allows the poem to cut through the noise.

◊

Looking at the world more closely requires a twofold approach to paying attention: outward and inward. Outward: what’s going on around you and what you see, what you notice. Inward: what’s going on within you and your reactions to what you notice. Combined, this inward and outward focus develops our ability to see things others do not see and allows us to call attention to those things in our writing. Inward-focused attention also helps turn observation into a poem, aligning the frequencies and images into metaphor through a complex process of our own devising.

Not to overplay the spiritual aspects inherent in this level of paying attention, it is, in part, a form of showing up, of being present, that can’t quite escape a spiritual element. Distractions govern so much of our lives—from social media to work-life—we so rarely allow time for a deep attentiveness. If we make it a practice, however, we can begin to form insights and become more receptive to the poetry even in our everyday lives.

Perhaps paying attention helps us uncover the unsayable, the unseeable, what needs seeing and saying in our poetry. Of course, paying attention in this age of distraction requires retraining ourselves in many respects. From my own practice, however, I find the more time I put into being attentive—inwardly and outwardly—the more often it leads to better poems.

Writing poetry may be an unnatural act, as Elizabeth Bishop once said, but through daily practice and paying attention, it may become a bit more natural or at least it appears that way to the reader.

Scott Edward Anderson Author PhotoScott Edward Anderson is the author of Fallow Field (Aldrich Press, 2013) and Walks In Nature’s Empire (The Countryman Press, 1995). He has been a Concordia Fellow at the Millay Colony for the Arts and received the Nebraska Review Award. His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, The Cortland Review, Many Mountains Moving, Nebraska Review, Pine Hills Review, Terrain, Yellow Chair Review, The Wayfarer, and the anthologies Dogs Singing (Salmon Poetry, 2011) and The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2013), among other publications. You can read more about his work at his website and follow him on Twitter @greenskeptic

 

Image credit: Francisco Moreno on Unsplash

MY WALK ON THE BEACH WITH ANTON A Craft Essay on Connecting the Body to the Brain by Billy Dean

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

brown and white seashell on sand with ocean in background

MY WALK ON THE BEACH WITH ANTON
A Craft Essay on Connecting the Body to the Brain
by Billy Dean

He put his book down and looked at me over the top of his glasses. “I never said that, Billy.”

“Said what, Anton?”

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining. Show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

“Oh, that. Yeah, someone turned what you actually said into a show-don’t-tell rule. On behalf of all the writers who should know better, I apologize. If they’d read your stories, they’d notice how skillfully you balanced showing and telling.”

“Well, I’m not turning over in my grave about it. It’s human nature to follow rules absolutely and to take things out of context. But I wish I had said that. Applied skillfully, it’s good advice.”

“And less absolute,” I said, “than Ezra Pound’s ‘Go in fear of abstractions.’ or Wallace Stevens’ ‘No ideas but in things.’ Both imply that we should always show and never tell.”

Anton cocked his head.

“Oh, of course, you didn’t know Pound or Stevens. They started a movement in the early 1900’s that shunned abstractions in favor of concrete images.”

“Not necessarily a bad idea, Billy.”

“True, and their poetry was highly regarded, but can you imagine Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” without the word hope?”

“No, and it gave wings to original thinking because Emily shunned writing about an experience in favor of giving the experience to her readers.”

Anton saw the confusion on my face. “You like the word ‘hope’ in Emily’s poem. Do you know why?”

“Not really, it just seems to fit perfectly with everything else in her poem.”

“It fits because Emily grounded a meaning-oriented concept in a sensory-oriented experience. A bird is something. Hope is merely about something.”

“But everyone knows what hope means, Anton. How does Emily’s bird change that?”

“You won’t find the meaning of a word in its definition, Billy. You find it in the context of something real and specific. Until then, a definition is just words floating in your head. Emily’s poem doesn’t define hope. It shows us what hope means by connecting it to a bird.”

“Ah,” I replied, nodding my head, “a bird that keeps on singing and flying despite the ups and downs of life.”

“Exactly. And her poem works both ways. Without her bird, hope would just be a word. Without hope, her bird would just be a bird. But Emily weaved them together so elegantly, so intricately, that her poem takes us beyond a mere sum of a word and a bird.”

Anton paused, waiting to see if what he had said was sinking in. It was.

“And that moves the word ‘hope’ and the word ‘bird’ from our heads to our hearts.”

Anton pointed up at his head, then tapped his chest with his fingers. As he did, a deeper understanding of what writing is came over me, and what writers must do for their readers.

“Keep in mind,” he continued, “that every word of a story is just an abstract handle to carry the idea of something to your readers. We do not want our readers to know they are reading words. We want them to experience the meaning of our words. So choose words that will evoke thoughts and feeling in your readers by not restricting yourself to showing or telling, abstractions or imagery.”

◊

“You see things so clearly, Anton.”

He stood and smiled. “Let’s go down to the beach where we can discuss this without disturbing the others here in the library.”

We took our books to the main desk. Mine was a collection of his short stories. His was “War and Peace” by Tolstoy. He must have read the surprise on my face because he grinned, and said, “I never found the time to finish it.”

At the beach, he removed his shoes, rolled his pants over his knees, and walked into the sand glistening with the coming and going of waves. I watched him pick up one seashell after another, then tossed each back into the churning surf.  He reached down, picked up another shell, and waved me over.

“These shells,” he began, “abandoned here at the water’s edge, were once homes for mussels, periwinkles and mollusks. This one is a nautilus, one of nature’s most elegant, ingenious designs.”

“Yet odd,” I replied, “that the shell and the creature are so different. The spiral pattern is so naturally beautiful, but the creature, well, its tentacles come out of its head.”

Anton nodded, then got a faraway look in his eyes. “And odd that we treat the other animals here on Earth as aliens, as if they were creatures from another planet.”

He placed the nautilus in my hands. “How would you convey the fact that this was home to a creature very different than us? More importantly, how would you evoke the feeling of being the creature who lived in this shell?”

I looked down at the nautilus, knowing he had transferred the problem and its solution to me.

“Some mix of showing and telling, right?”

Anton didn’t say anything, so I assumed I was on a roll.

“Show readers things they can see. Tell readers about things they can’t see. Show important things with dialog and action. Tell less important things with descriptions and settings.”

“Let me give you some advice, Billy.”

“I’m all ears, Anton.”

“You will need more than your ears. Definitions tend to polarize issues into one category or another. So writers tend to think in terms of showing or telling, as if they were mutually exclusive kinds of writing, and that leads to the erroneous conclusion that telling is for ears and showing is for eyes.”

“Erroneous?”

“We have six senses. Five for the body. One for the brain.”

“Six? Oh, you’ve added our spiritual or intuitive sense.”

“No, I am referring to the sensory nature of our bodies and the semantic nature of our brains. Do you recall earlier at the library when we talked about grounding concepts in concrete things?”

“Yes, you opened my understanding by explaining the difference between a meaning-oriented concept and a sensory-oriented experience.”

“Images versus abstractions. Body versus brain. Let’s do a little experiment to clarify the difference. What color do you think of when I say fire truck?”

“Red,” I answered.

“Grass?”

“Green.”

“Now what color do you see?” Anton reached into the pocket of his shirt, and, like pulling a rabbit from a hat, held up a card with the word ‘BLUE” written on it.

“Blue, of course.”

Anton couldn’t hide the ‘Gotcha!’ look on his face. “What color do you see?” he asked, with an emphasis on the word color.

“Oh boy, I’m an idiot. The word is blue but the color is red.”

“You’re not an idiot. Your brain, like most people’s brain, including mine, is strongly influenced by what something means rather than what it looks like.”

I stood there thinking how my brain had dominated my body for years, perhaps since birth.

“That doesn’t mean our writing should reflect the body’s focus on senses rather than our brain’s focus on meaning. That would make our writing all showing and no telling. Better that our writing breath with all six senses so our readers are both involved and informed.”

I nodded my head but knew my brain was nodding too.

“First, however, you must be involved and informed. Do you recall me saying earlier that we tend to think of the non-human creatures here on Earth as if they were aliens, creatures from another planet?”

I nodded again, wondering where he was going with this.

“Let’s pretend a flying saucer–”

Anton stopped to watch my jaw drop and my eyes widen.

“People have been seeing strange objects in the sky for thousands of years, Billy. Even in Russia. So let’s get on with this one. It lands here on the beach, and an alien debarks from his craft and asks, ‘What is a nautilus, Earthman?’ How would you answer him?”

“That’s ingenious, Anton. Shiny nautilus. Silver saucer. Creatures from the sea. Aliens from the sky.”

“Thank you, but let’s get on with your answer.

“I should put it in the alien’s hands, right? As you did for me?”

“That would be a good place to start. Give your readers the thing itself with word pictures they can complete with their body and their brain.”

“Word pictures.” I said, “That sounds… I mean, looks like showing.”

“You want your readers to be involved and informed, not consciously aware that they are reading words. So don’t tromp through your story trying to identify whether you told your readers something or whether you showed them something. Focus on the effect you want your writing to have on their imagination and their intellect.”

He paused to lock eyes with me, as if to measure the effect he was having on me.

“And before your readers can complete what you began, you must have something to begin with, something grounded in all six of your senses. Start with this nautilus. Let it touch your body and your brain. Do you see it creeping up on prey? Can you smell the seven seas? Is it whispering something strange and wonderful? Can you hear its angst and ecstasy?”

Anton turned abruptly and walked into the waves lapping at the shore. Nearby, a reef bell began clanging, as if it were calling him into the sea. And then its clanging became my alarm clock calling me out of the dream.

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes but knew I couldn’t rub this dream from my memory. Unlike most dreams, which disappear, as Anton did, it would remain a lucid lesson that readers will be involved and informed if our writing breathes with showing and telling–showing to stir the imagination with sensory images aimed at the body, and telling to engage the intellect with information aimed at the brain.

I pulled the blankets back to roll out of bed, but suddenly, in my mind’s eye, I saw a Martian standing on the beach holding a Nautilus in his hands. I was no longer asleep and wanted to get on with my day. But my dream had ended without answering Anton’s challenge to evoke the feeling of being the creature who lived in the shell. So I embraced the vision as an opportunity to build a word bridge between myself and this alien; this is the same chasm that separates writers and readers until they connect their hearts and minds in a meaningful way. I would indulge myself in another dream to answer the alien’s question…

◊

“What is this, Earthman?” he asked, pointing to the shell in his hands.

“That’s a N-a-u-t-i-l-u-s,” I said, struggling to pronounce the sound of each letter.

“No. I mean what is it?”

I felt the distance between him and me shrink. He wanted more than a name or pronunciation. He wanted to experience the thing itself.

He only had three fingers, and one of them was much longer than the others, so I hesitated slightly before saying, “Well, you could touch it with your, uh, finger.”

He ran that long finger along the shell, tracing the spiral from end to end. He said nothing but his face, despite being from another planet, had a perplexed look.

“As the nautilus grows,” I explained, “it builds new chambers for itself, always in a spiral pattern.”

He held the shell up to his face and looked inside as if trying to see the chambers.

“Are you saying a creature lived in this shell?”

“Yes, the shell is empty now, but it was home to the creature who lived in it.”

He cocked his head as if in thought. “So the shell and the creature, when they were together, is called a N-a-u-t-i-l–u-s?” He pronounced every letter as I had done.

I felt the distance between us shrink even more.

I touched my hand to my ear and said, “Put it next to your ear and tell me what you hear.”

He did, then pointed that long finger of his at the ocean. “I hear that.”

“Yes,” I replied, “and they lived together out there.”

He turned abruptly, as Anton had, and walked through the waves lapping at the shore and into the deeper water swirling with foam and kelp. He had no shoes to remove or pants to roll up, so I didn’t bother with mine, and joined him in the water.

I placed my hands on the Nautilus. He looked up and locked eyes with me. “I’m not trying to take it away from you. I want us both to see and feel where it lived, and how it moved and captured prey.”

“This is good, Earthman. Together we will pretend that we are the creature who lived in this shell.”

We were truly on the same page now–perhaps the same paragraph.

“The creature propelled itself like this.” I leaned forward and blew my breath into the alien’s face as I moved the shell towards him. He rocked back, then recovered and blew his breath at me. We took turns blowing air out of our lungs while moving the shell forward in the water.

“The nautilus moves through the water using a kind of jet propulsion. He pulls water into his shell to move forward and blows it out through a tube below his tentacles to move backward.”

“Tentacles?”

“The Nautilus is kind of ugly compared to its shell. It’s got dozens of long spidery legs sticking out of its head to grab things it wants to eat.”

I moved the shell toward the alien’s legs and made a growling noise.

“Ah, you are making funny with me, but I can see the creature grabbing its prey.”

Neither of us said anything. After a long but pleasant pause, the alien turned his face toward mine. Despite the differences in our faces, I could tell he was looking more through me than at me.

“I am sad the creature no longer lives in its shell. Perhaps that was what I heard when it was against my ear. Not the sound of your ocean and its waves, but the creature’s lament.”

We were no longer just on the same page, or the same paragraph. We were walking through the same words of every sentence in the book. Our connection had moved from our bodies and brains to our hearts.

“Yes,” I said, “and the creature left his lament in this shell when he departed to swim in other seas.”

“Other seas?”

“Here on Earth, there are seven of them, and I sometimes embrace them as worlds beyond this one. You, my Martian friend, are evidence there are.”

“On Mars, there are no seas, but I will not forget yours, the creature who lived in it, or you and your dream of other worlds.”

Billy Dean Author PhotoBilly Dean is a retired technical writer with degrees in English and Engineering. His essays, how-to guides, poems, and stories have been published in trade journals and magazines, and on the Internet. His goals are to craft prose and poetry loaded with clues for shaping and navigating the sticky web of real life.

IS MEMOIR AUTOMATICALLY THERAPEUTIC? A Craft Essay on Writing About Mental Health by Leslie Lindsay

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IS MEMOIR AUTOMATICALLY THERAPEUTIC?
A Craft Essay on Writing About Mental Health
by Leslie Lindsay

I recently finished a memoir manuscript about my bipolar mother and her eventual suicide.

Light, easy writing, right? When I tell strangers about my manuscript, they cock their heads in sympathy as if to say, “You poor thing. ” Some even suggest I’ve misconstrued the events in my own life. Surely your mother wasn’t really mentally ill. You must have it all wrong. Others lean in as if they are about to hear a juicy story. But the majority recoil: Mothers. Daughters. Mental illness. Who would touch such a topic?

Me.

My father-in-law said, “It must have been therapeutic to write about your mother.” There was a lilt at the end of the sentence, which led me to believe this was a question. He’s eighty, and it’s not the first time he’s said it: “It must have been really therapeutic to write about your mother?” Every time he does this, I answer the same. “I took a clinical approach,” I assure him. Then he makes one of those “huh” looks, pushes his glasses up on his face, and buries his nose in the newspaper.

But I have also asked myself: was my memoir therapeutic? It all comes down to how you define “therapeutic.”  For me, that’s relating to, involving, or used in the treatment of disease or disorders.

Many years ago, when I first began this project, I took drafts to my writing group. “More,” they demanded. “Go deeper.” They wanted the odor of the psychiatric ward, the texture of the cinderblock walls, the color lipstick my mother wore. They wanted the bizarre things she said when she was psychotic.

So I made notes and revised. At the time, I was twenty-five years old and my mother was still living. Soon, the memoir draft was abandoned.

These days,  I’m a Child/Adolescent Psychiatric R.N. Hence, clinical. You’d think by now I’d have this all figured out. I’m older. My mother is gone and I don’t have to worry how she will react to what I write. But still, somehow, I worry that by writing I dishonor her memory.

So I use my clinical approach. I scour her medical records. I flip through every doctor’s note, administrative profile, nurse’s note,  social worker’s entry. I examine flow charts and vital signs and lab results. I skim mental status exams and even retype admission and dismissal notes. My dad has graciously passed along his thirty-year-old spiral leatherette calendar, the contents of the days scratched-in with his familiar scrawl.

Lynne says she’ll go to the Day Hospital, just to “play the game.”
Intentionally decided against taking the girls to church for a year following Lynne’s psychotic break in which she talked about being God.
Lynne thinks the lamp will give her energy. She laid underneath it for hours
Made spaghetti for dinner for the first time. It was good.
Received credit card bill in the mail. Lynne has charged over a thousand dollars in lingerie and perfume.

I am struck by the severity of my mother’s illness. My heart aches. I trudge on, donning my psych-nurse hat, looking at black squiggles and digits with a critical—clinical—eye. When I read portions of my work-in-progress to my family, my dad, who is not a writer, says, “I wonder what the story would be like if it were told from your mom’s point-of-view. Or her mother’s?”

I find his observation quite astute.

For the next day or so, I practice retelling portions of The Story, through my (imagined) mother’s lens.  The possible first line:

I keep hearing the voice of God, deep and sonorous, telling me that I must accept His mission.

There is no second line.

You’d think that, as a writer, I’d be able to shift POVs and fall into my mother’s skin as easily as I had been cleaved from her nearly forty years ago. But I can’t. I can only tell my story. And I realize now that there’s nothing wrong with that.

Is my memoir a tale of loss? Yes. Is it a story of serious mental illness? About the struggle between mothers and daughters? About grief? Yes, yes, yes.

But is it a tragedy? That’s subjective.

My first reaction to my father-in-law’s comment about the writing process being therapeutic was irritation, fueled by the realization that perhaps I had spent needless hours, weeks, and months in a state of mere ‘therapy.’ I’ve had scores of therapy sessions where my mother is concerned, from her very first psychotic break when I was ten, to the sessions following her death. I know what “therapeutic” is, and writing was not therapeutic. But it was necessary.

A man in my writing group says with a smirk, “Just who do you think is going to read this?”

Well, maybe not you, I want to retort.

Another man in that group says, “Keep going. This is solid.” He pokes at the paper with his finger, “This line, the one where you talk about the miniature stove not cooking even a morsel of hope, that’s powerful.”

I tell the smirking man that I understand what he means. There can be a sameness to tales of loss, perhaps even a whiny, self-indulgent, victim quality. The key is to make these tales of seem fresh.

◊

And then it comes to me.

In the next draft, I tell my story from a little girl’s POV.

Mine.

This little girl clamors onto my couch, knobby knees angled, hands intertwined and tells me her story.  I take notes, good therapist that I am, churning them into a manuscript. I offer her feedback and suggestions.

I marvel at the little girl’s tenacity, her resilience, and her perceptive observations. I find—and appreciate, perhaps for the first time—her sense of humor and her introspection.

At times I want to fold the little girl into my arms and cry with her, whisper in her ear. I want to say, “You are more than your mother’s mental illness; please don’t let that define you.” But I can’t get emotionally entangled in this little girl’s life. That would be countertransference—and definitely not therapeutic.

In the end, I pat her on the back and tell her, “Thanks for sharing your story. It’s important.”

She nods and says, I know.

Leslie Lindsay Author PhotoLeslie Lindsay is the author of Speaking of Apraxia (Woodbine House, 2012.) Her work has been published in PsychCentral, The Nervous Breakdown, and International Bipolar Foundation; and is forthcoming in The Manifest-Station and Common Ground Review. Leslie, who recently completed a memoir, Model Home, about her mother, reviews books and interviews authors at her website. She is a former child/adolescent psychiatric R.N. at Mayo Clinic. She lives with her family in Chicago.

 

SHOULD YOU REALLY BE WRITING THAT? A Craft Essay on Writing Diversity in Fiction by Sawyer Lovett 

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A Craft Essay on Writing Diversity in Fiction
by Sawyer Lovett 

As a queer, relatively progressive woman writing things on the internet, I thought the conversation about diversity in publishing was pretty well established. That we were all looking hard at the world around us and trying hard to implement best practices. But we still have a long way to go. I’ve gotten spoiled by keeping good company and while there are tons of other people speaking more eloquently about the importance and need for diversity and inclusion, I hope this will be a good starting point for writers looking to write outside their experience.

Are you the best person to write what you’re writing? Does your lived experience complement the story you’re trying to write? Real talk: The conversation about diversity and inclusion is a relatively new one and books and publishing are stronger because of it. Organizations like VONA (workshops for writers of color), Lambda (amplifying queer voices), and WNDB (children’s book advocates for changes in the publishing industry) are doing an awesome job of helping create and inspire books that more accurately reflect the world we live in. Part of that conversation is about the difference between compulsory diversity and own voices (books written about marginalized people by marginalized people—in their own voices).

Compulsory diversity reads like a checklist: one character of color, one queer character, one character with a disability. Ta-da, instant diversity, just add water and stir. Predictably, this shallow formula reads pretty false. Black characters written by black authors are always going to be more real. Bookish people on twitter have been talking about this for a couple of years now and a phrase that I’ve seen pop-up a couple of times is “stay in your lane.” I love this analogy. We’re all readers and writers on the same highway. We all want to do good art that reflects the world around us. We should be aware of all the cars on the road. We shouldn’t merge just because that’s where all the traffic seems to be going: changes to our destination can be dangerous. Your writing and your perspectives are important.

If you believe sprinkling diverse characters into your work will help you break into traditional publishing, you are in danger of potentially reinforcing stereotypes or creating a negative image of a community to which you don’t belong. You should consider that the narrative of slavery belongs to black people, transitioning is specific to trans and gender non-conforming people, and coming out is primarily something that queer people have to do. You can read every book on the subject ever written, but you do not have that well of life experience to drink from and your writing will reflect that. That being said, there are white, cisgender, straight writers who do diversity well. Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin gave depth and dimension, sorrow and joy to black and Latina sex workers. Becky Albertalli’s Simon Vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda was a gorgeous love letter to the queer kids she worked with. Those authors put in the work. They spent enough time in the communities they were writing about to get it right.

Writers have a lot of wiggle room when it comes to what they can write about. Not all mystery writers are murderers, lots of science-fiction authors are not aliens. (I would love to see those Venn diagrams, especially.) But murderers aren’t especially ignored in fiction and as far as I know, no aliens have yet spoken up about appropriation, so I think it’s fair to assume that as writers our primary concern should be in preventing harm to communities that are already marginalized.

Are you guilty of tokenism? Your work-in-progress probably has a cast of characters. Take a look at the demographics of that list and be honest with yourself. Did you change someone’s name from Dave to Davon to make it more diverse? Is Davon the only person of color in your cast? If so, there needs to be a good reason for that.  Code-switching and tokenism are exhausting. No one does it by choice. Davon might go to prep school with a bunch of white kids, but that isn’t his whole story or peer group. His family, neighborhood, or church community that mirror his socioeconomic demographics are probably much more comfortable for him. If there is only one marginalized character (or worse, two marginalized characters from different communities—for example, a gay kid and a Latina kid), be aware that maybe you’re adding them in to break up an otherwise white landscape. Ask if there’s a reason to do that and most of all, what point someone reading these characters might think you’re trying to make. For example, if you’re trying to diversify an all-white cast of unruly teenagers and you make the nerdy kid Chinese, are you feeding into the trope of Asian nerds? If you make the murderer in your psychological thriller a cross-dresser, are you adding fuel to the mythos of Jame Gumb from Silence of the Lambs? Which brings us to our next point …

Avoid stereotypes and clichés. Be aware of how you’re using your diverse characters. Are they an active part of the story or are they accessories that prop up your main character? Are all of your black characters around just to teach the white kid how to dab? Does your First Nations character take your group on a spiritual journey? Is the gay best friend around to pick out clothes? You can avoid these (and many other really outdated and offensive ideas) by googling racial stereotypes. Tvtropes.com is a really good resource for that.

Watch how you describe your characters and please avoid using culinary terms. People are not food. Describing someone as chocolate-colored, caramel, honey, or cinnamon is just lazy racism. Don’t describe your characters as “ethnic” or “exotic.” (As in Memoirs of a Geisha or Madame Butterfly). This is super racist because it identifies people of color as an “other” to white people and moves the margins farther away.

Do your research. If you’re writing outside your experience, you owe it to the characters and the communities you’re trying to represent to be as authentic as possible. Internet research costs only time, and meeting and learning about new people will make your stories better and your worldview wider.

Don’t ask marginalized friends to read your work. There are so many reasons to avoid this, not the least is that we’re all busy people and your work is probably not high on your friends’ priority list. Asking your friends to do unpaid work is weird at best and manipulative at worst. Putting them in a position where they’re not sure how you will respond is awkward and could potentially damage the relationship.

A good alternative to this is to hire a sensitivity reader to weigh in on issues of bias, cultural sensitivity, and appropriation. If that isn’t a feasible, consider a writing group or workshop.

In the end, do what you will. There are exceptions to everything and ultimately your work is your own, and (for the most part) you control what goes out into the world. But, once it’s out there, it’s no longer solely your own. Readers, bloggers, editors, and agents are all going to have thoughts and feelings about your writing. Put the best of yourself out there, do work you’re proud of, and aim to write well and responsibly. A lot of really good discourse is happening on social media. Look to twitter especially—writers like Justina Ireland and Mikki Kendall and Ellen Oh are doing good, important work. And keep reading about diversity and inclusion! There are so many resources available and reasons to reflect the world around you.