Category Archives: Craft Essays>Creative Nonfiction Craft Essays

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

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

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.”

◊

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

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

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.

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

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

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?

◊

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.

◊

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.

◊

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

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

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.

◊

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.

◊

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.

◊

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

IT’S CALLED A DIRTY WORD: How a Contract Gig Changed the Course of My Book, a craft essay by Steph Auteri

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

IT’S CALLED A DIRTY WORD:
How a Contract Gig Changed the Course of My Book
A Craft Essay

by Steph Auteri

The first piece I ever published was a personal essay on workplace sexual harassment. The title alone— “Sexy or Sexual Harassment?”—made my intent clear. I was using my writing as a means of interrogating my own experiences. Of working out for myself what these experiences meant.

The one comment the piece received was from a woman indignant at my non-response to the harassment when it first occurred, some six months before. I had kept quiet for a number of reasons: I didn’t want to create an uncomfortable work environment. I didn’t want to jeopardize a career opportunity. I didn’t know if I was overreacting to the uncomfortable encounters I’d experienced. It didn’t occur to me that my silence might make me complicit in the continued behavior. It didn’t occur to me that the way I reacted could have a positive, productive impact.

In the same way, it didn’t occur to me that what I wrote about the experience could also have an impact. That it could be used to shine a light on important issues. For years, I wrote in order to work through my own experiences and later, to feel less alone. Back then, my writing was selfish. With every essay I wrote—about income disparity in my relationship or about low libido or about painful sex—I looked inward.

My mind-set and my writing stayed much the same for the next ten years. But in 2013, I was recruited to oversee the launch of an organization’s new website, lead an editorial committee of sexuality professionals, and create a monthly online newsletter. Though I had sometimes adapted clinical content for a more general audience, most of the writing I’d done previously used my own story as a jumping-off point. This new job would require me to schedule ten to twenty interviews per month so I could create longform articles for readers used to perusing academic journals. As an essay and listicle writer without a degree in the field of sexuality, the prospect made me feel like an impostor.

Still, I said yes. I had recently placed a book project to the side, resigned that it would never find a home. I felt adrift. It made sense to shift toward work that would pay my bills versus continuing to chase my elusive, writerly dreams.

The book in question was a memoir about how I had become a sex writer in order to fix what I saw as my own sexual dysfunction. That manuscript had grown out of my confessional writing, and incorporated lessons at the end of each chapter—my attempt to help people learn from the mistakes I had made. Publishers seemed to love my voice, but felt the approach was too bifurcated. When my agent and I threw around ideas for approaching the book in a different way, that moved me further away from the book I wanted to write. Responses from my agent became fewer and further between, until they stopped. It was time to move on.

And then, just a few weeks after accepting my new job, I learned I was pregnant. This news came after several years of fertility testing and treatment. At that point, the book seemed to recede even further. Here I was, finally accomplishing my dream of becoming a mother. Maybe it was time to let my other dream, my book dream, go.

Being a new mother and the senior writer and editor for a professional organization more than filled my days, with steep learning curves for both. I pushed myself harder than ever, and never felt more fulfilled. I was falling in love with my daughter. I was learning a lot at my job. And in creating content that allowed professionals to stay on top of their field, my work felt more meaningful than writing sexy short pieces on my waning libido and painful sex.

I threw myself into this work, letting my personal writing fall away. In writing about the ethical implications for therapists in cases involving domestic violence, I buried myself in state laws and case studies and spoke to therapists about their own approaches and responsibilities. When I wrote about medical advances in the understanding of genital pain disorders, while I was interested in how it related to my own experience, I remained focused on what researchers were discovering about the source of such pain, and what it meant in terms of diagnostics and treatment. When I spoke to sexuality educators about the evolving state of sex ed, I gained a deeper understanding of the moral argument behind the debate, the nuances of various types of curricula, the impact of funding decisions.

A few months into motherhood and almost a year into my new job, I realized that I missed writing my own material, missed connecting with readers outside that organization. I was unwilling to leave behind the job I found so fascinating, so I began writing in the brief spaces of time I was able to eke out between work and motherhood. Instead of falling back into the familiarity of purely personal essays however, I began to pitch more researched and reported work, tapping into the network of people I’d built on the job, keeping tabs on the latest peer-reviewed clinical studies.

I wrote about the metrics that don’t exist for measuring female sexual desire. I wrote about child development and early childhood sex ed. I wrote about the gender gap in medical research. I wrote about the pharmaceutical industry’s push for a “female Viagra.” My job had helped me develop my journalism skills, and I leaned into these new abilities, eventually weaving together the personal and the universal. As I reported more and more stories, I began to hone in on my passion points: sexuality education, the medicalization of female sexuality, rape culture. Instead of writing for myself, I wanted to use my writing as a tool that could dismantle years of cultural conditioning.

After reporting a number of these stories, I realized that the book I had put aside wasn’t really about me, about only me. It wasn’t about my own struggles in the bedroom. My story was only the jumping-off point to delve into larger issues.

A year and a half into my job, I went on a weekend writing retreat in Rhode Island and revived my book. There, tucked into wingback chairs, wrapped in chunky sweaters and fuzzy blankets, removed from the inexorable pull of motherhood, I rewrote my first chapters and outlined the remaining ones. Instead of a strictly chronological memoir, my book would be comprised of overlapping essays, each tackling a different Big Issue. This time, I wouldn’t lock myself in a room, relying only on my own history to fill pages. This time, I would have to do the research. Reach out to professionals and innovators. Go experience the empowerment self-defense workshops. The trauma-informed yoga classes. The fundraising efforts of grassroots sex ed organizations. This time, I would have to leave the cozy retreat house—and my isolated home office—and look beyond my own story.

I am no longer with the organization that pushed me to approach my writing in new ways. But the book that grew out of those lessons was recently published.  When I began my first iteration of this book seven years ago, and even when I returned to it nearly four years ago, the news cycle was the furthest thing from my mind. But as the book shifted and grew, as I looked outside of myself, outside of my own experiences, I couldn’t help but tap into its terrible universality. Which is what makes the book so much stronger than the one I originally set out to write. That one would have been a monologue; I want this book to be a conversation.

As the book shifted and grew, as I looked outside of myself, outside of my own experiences, I couldn’t help but tap into its terrible universality. Which is what makes the book so much stronger than the one I originally set out to write.

When people find out I wrote a book, they ask me the title. They want to know what it’s about. “Its called A Dirty Word,” I say.”It’s about the ways in which our culture treats female sexuality like a dirty word.”

They then inevitably mention how timely my book is. I always say, “Unfortunately, it’s always timely.” 

Steph Auteri is a writer and editor who has written for the Atlantic, VICE, Pacific Standard, the Establishment, and other publications. She is also the author of A Dirty Word. Learn more at stephauteri.com, and on Twitter and Instagram at @stephauteri.

YOU DON’T NEED AN ANNA MARCH IN YOUR WRITING LIFE to Know About Getting Burned, a Craft Essay by Anthony J. Mohr

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

row of matches on fire against black background

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