Drew Myron's Blog, page 74
March 20, 2012
Spring, says the calendar
Spring is like a perhaps hand
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere) arranging
a window, into which people look (while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here) and
changing everything carefully
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things, while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there) and
without breaking anything.
How did I miss the arrival of Spring? Here in the Pacific Northwest, rain and endless gloom have erased all memory of a hopeful season. Still, the calendar says March 20th, Spring Equinox. Is it spring in your world? Can you feel the hand changing everything carefully?
You've won a ride on the Glimmer Train
Congratulations Allyson Whipple!
You've won the latest issue of Glimmer Train, a literary journal, featuring the award-winning work of writer Stefanie Freele. Thanks for entering the drawing.
Thanks to all who took a chance and played with me. All is not lost. There's plenty of Stefanie to enjoy: Feeding Strays, a flash fiction collection; and her her new book, Surrounded by Water, will be published in May 2012.
Write on, and please return for another book giveaway in April.
March 15, 2012
Thankful Thursday: Is that you, gratitude?
It's Thankful Thursday.
Gratitude. Appreciation. Praise.
Please join me in a weekly pause
to appreciate people, places & things.
Gratitude is missing.
Some days the sky is gray, the mood gloomy and it's a fight to bring thankful and me together in a heartfelt hug.
Before you throw platitudes (or tomatoes) my way, please know I am grateful. I've got work, a house, good health. I love and am loved. I take none of this lightly.
But gratitude has a shiny appeal; you expect it from the new and unusual. It's more difficult, or perhaps less exciting, to express gratitude for the everyday routine. And, of course, this is exactly when and why gratitude is needed — to jolt us from expectation.
Things I'd like to feel thankful for:
Thrashing wind and heavy rain
(I'm not thankful, just weary and worn).
Cheery encouragements on Facebook
(In my grumbled state, cheer is annoying).
The lifting of self-awareness. I'd like to leave myself behind
(Note: I realize the irony in this statement).
Knowing proper use of the word irony
(I don't. Thanks a lot Alanis Morissette).
Things I'm actually thankful for:
The smooth glide of pen across page.
The sound of the ocean, like a bathtub filling.
A well-written horoscope.
The gift of a book.
Tom Waits
("a voice that sounds like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon").
Peanut butter.
The realization that gratitude is not complicated.
It's just one word, said true: thanks.
Enough about me. What are you thankful for today?
March 13, 2012
Dear Sir, I like words.
I like words.
I like fat buttery words, such as
ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady.
I like solemn, angular, creaky words,
such as straitlaced, cantankerous,
pecunious, valedictory.
A letter from copywriter Robert Pirosh to potential employers in 1934. As proof of the power of a well-crafted letter, Pirosh went on to write for the Marx Brothers and earned an Academy Award for his script Battleground.
Read the full letter at Letters of Note, a site paying homage to correspondence. Shaun Usher is the editor, and he offers equally entertaining and enlightening companion sites: Lists of Note and Letterheady.
The Letters of Note book will be available in November 2012.
March 10, 2012
Love that line!
Anna misses her husband
the way you miss gloves on
an October day only after you've
seen a nice pair on someone
else's hands.
March 6, 2012
Fast Five with Stefanie Freele
I like to make the middle
something sassy and meaty.
I like to make a fine ending
that swoops.
Welcome to Fast Five — short interviews with my favorite writers. Life may be short but who doesn't have time for five questions — and a chance to win a great book? (To win, simply post your name in the comments section. See details below).
Stefanie Freele's stories and flash fiction can be found in Glimmer Train, Quarterly West, American Literary Review, Pank, and many other literary journals. Her collection, Feeding Strays, was a finalist for both the John Gardner Binghamton University Fiction Award and the Book of the Year Award. Her stories have been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She recently won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, and her second collection, Surrounded by Water, will be published in May 2012. In addition, Freele is the Fiction Editor at the Los Angeles Review.
How did you come to writing?
As most writers, I have always loved reading. I never knew that I could become a real writer though until I decided to go for my MFA at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts: Whidbey Writers Workshop. Up until then, I thought there were readers, people who journaled a bit and then some very gifted folks over there that created their wonderful writing for us readers. Somehow a little whisper: write, grew to a yell: WRITE! and one finished story led to another led to a collection.
Your work is wonderfully distinct. Feeding Strays, a collection of 50 short (and short-short) stories, was a finalist in two prestigious contests, and has been described as loopy, sensitive and "full of strange, original invention." How do you describe your writing content and style?
I don't know if I can describe it, I may be too close to my own writing, it is like trying to describe yourself. I don't know if I could do that either. I like to not waste much time falling into the beginning, I like to make the middle something sassy and meaty, I like to make a fine ending that swoops. Okay, I'm being silly there, but truly, it is difficult to dissect one's own writing.
Some people say "first thought best thought." Others edit a piece into place. What is your writing process?
Usually a little something nags at me along the way, something someone said, or something I observed and it nags enough that I finally get down to write about it. The little something then somehow births a story. I don't truly know how it works, but for instance, the last story of Feeding Strays, called "Every Girl Has An Ex Named Steve" began from two incidences.
One: I found myself saying just that to a friend when we were dog walking, "Every girl has an ex named Steve" and immediately knew I needed that line, and extra proud because it came from myself and I didn't need permission to swipe it.
Two: I witnessed a teenager in a banana suit standing outside a store while stiffly handing out coupons. I'd never seen a more miserable looking fellow. He oozed misery. He hated that banana suit body-cast more than he hated anything else in his short little life. I was watching youthful disillusionment happening right before my eyes. I felt achingly painfully sorry for him.
Thus, the first line of the story, "We tell her not to date a man in a banana suit."
I edit later when I think the story is told. Then, I use a different part of my brain, one that organizes and chops and perfects.
As the fiction editor for the Los Angeles Review, what do you look for in a story? What do you love to see, and what makes you cringe?
Cliches make me cringe. Overused plots make me wilt. Flowery self-important writing makes my face do the just-ate-a-lemon. Over-reliance on dialogue has a confusedly queasy affect on me and I have been known to drift off during weighty segments of backstory. I love to see more humor, more wacky, more real crisis and conflict, more creative plots.
You are an accomplished writer, reader, poet and editor. What do you know now that you didn't know when you first started writing?
I did not know I would meet so many talented and genuine authors. I've had an enormous privilege, by being both the Fiction Editor of the Los Angeles Review, a former submissions editor with Smokelong Quarterly and speaking at various conferences, where I've been introduced to some beautiful and amazing writers. When you get a signed book from an author you've just met and you go home and love the book, that is a wonderful feeling. I thought being a writer would be very lonely, very isolated and curmudgeonlike but it doesn't have to be.
And, although I knew I loved words, loved stories, loved to read, I didn't know how much that love can just keep growing until you just want to shout about it. But, shout not too long, because hey, I've got a pile of books to read.
Bonus Question: I'm a collector of words and often have my students collect words, too. Do you have any favorite words?
The other day someone used the word bombastic and I found myself in love with that word. I don't think I've ever said it aloud, however I'm going to attempt to insert it somewhere, either in a story, or in an accusation. I really want to tell someone they are being too bombastic. And, I want to be right about it.
Win this!
Win a copy of Glimmer Train, the literary journal featuring While Surrounded by Water, the Stefanie Freele story that won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open and evoked the title for her forthcoming collection.
To enter the drawing, simply add your name and contact info in the comments section below. Feeling shy? Email me, with "Glimmer Train" in the subject line: dcm@drewmyron.com
A name will be drawn and a winner announced on Monday, March 19, 2012.
March 5, 2012
This Week in Books
If days after I've finished a book I'm still thinking of the story, characters, pace, or plot, I know it's one I need to shout about. This week I've got enjoyed three great — and very different — books.
The Penguin Anthology of 20th Centry American Poetry
by Rita Dove, editor
Remember those college English classes requiring the ridiculously heavy Norton Anthologies with onion-skin thin pages? The just-released Penguin Anthology is like that — but so much better. I'm not sure if it's age (it's been, ahem, many years since I was an English major) or my increased appreciation of poetry but I am loving this collection.
Thumbing through the pages is like seeing old friends: Anne Sexton, Walt Whitman, Amiri Baraka (in college I filled an entire wall of my studio apartment with his words: What can I say? / It is better to haved loved and lost/ Than to put linoleum in your living rooms? from In Memory of Radio). There's newer friends too: Kay Ryan, Adrienne Rich, Marie Howe, Billy Collins, and more. With both classic and contemporary poems, this collection deftly gathers 100 years of poetry and manages to shed the academic obligation and emerge refreshingly necessary.
Feeding Strays
by Stefanie Freele
In this collection of 50 short, and sometimes very short (flash fiction), stories, Stefanie Freele offers loopy and touching slices of life. Characters and plot are both sincere and silly, gritty and surreal. At the heart of each absurdity lies great sensitivity. We're all a bit broken, she seems to suggest, and that's what makes us whole.
Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America
by Helen Thorpe
In this engaging narrative nonfiction, Thorpe — a journalist long before she was wife to Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper — offers an insightful look at immigration policy through a moving (and evenhanded) story of four young women as they struggle to learn, grow and prosper. "Helen Thorpe has taken policy and turned it into literature," says Malcom Gladwell.
March 1, 2012
Thankful Thursday: Read and Misread
Everything Lush I Know
I do not know the names of things
but I have lived on figs and grapes
smell of dirt under moon
and moon under threat of rain
everything lush I know
an orchard becoming all orchards
flowers here and here
the earth I have left
every brief home-making
the lot of God blooming into vines
right now then and always
— Kimberly Burwick
As part of my new routine of reading and writing each morning, yesterday I read this poem from Horses in the Cathedral, by Kimberly Burwick, a writer living in Moscow, Idaho.
Despite its brevity, the poem is full, and well, lush. That first line is an immediate hook — I do not know the names of things — and the reverent details and tone transported me easily from the poem to my journal. Energized, I lifted a line — a lot of God blooming into vines — and started a freewrite.
This prompt produced pages of material. Later, I reread the poem and realized it was not a lot of God but the lot of God. But no matter, whatever unfurls the mind and moves the pen.
On this Thankful Thursday, I am thankful for poems that arrive and energize.
It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to appreciate the people, places, things (and poems) in our lives. Joy contracts and expands in proportion to our gratitude. What makes your world expand?
February 28, 2012
Try This: Morning Read & Write
What's your writing routine?
Influenced by Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, years ago I wrote Morning Pages — a freewwrite filling two full pages, every morning. Most days the pages filled fast, and I started the day doing what I do best and enjoy most: writing.
Poet Molly Spencer, who shares details of her writing life at The Stanza, recently shared with me her writing routine:
What I always do, no matter what, is what I call my morning reading and writing. I read someone else's work, then write something, anything. It's usually junk, but sometimes a jewel finds its way onto the paper. And even the junk feels like an accomplishment because it's writing.
I like this idea because it establishes a time and place for writing. In doing the same thing everyday, I am making an appointment and declaring the importance of writing in my life. And in reading the work of others, I am prepping my write mind.
With Molly's nudge, this morning I read Facts About the Moon, poems by Dorianne Laux, and then wrote fast and fevered, without thinking. What a great way to start the day! I was reminded how powerful morning writing can be. Reading and writing first thing sets a tone and pace for everything that follows.
Try a Morning Read & Write, and let me know it goes for you.
February 23, 2012
Thankful Thursday: Ikea
I don't even like to shop.
Still, last week I found myself trapped in the dizzy march of the Ikea maze. Sandwiched between screaming toddlers and dawdling adults is not my idea of a fun Saturday morning. Shopping in a concrete warehouse, under fluorescent lights, is really never a good time.
Except when it comes to paper and pens, I don't like a lot of choice. And Ikea, the behemoth of affordable housewares, offers choice after choice after choice. Smart design, clever ideas. And cheap! It's all too much. Saturated with sight and sound, I started snarling at youngsters (those who hadn't been plopped off at the kiddie corral) and glaring at shoppers who were inexplicably having fun.
When my husband not-so-gently asked if I had brought a book and pointed to an empty table in the cafe (Must everything involve food? I snapped), I jumped at the chance to escape the circus.
There, in the din of consumer overload, I wrote. Page after page in the loopy scrawl of the slightly mad. The rant turned inward eventually and slowed to a less charged pace. I wrote and wrote. Hours later, when the shopping was over and the car packed tight, I had written, rewritten, and polished a poem (one which had absolutely nothing to do with consumer waste, screaming children, clueless adults, or food court stench).
On this Thankful Thursday, I am thankful for Ikea — for driving me over the edge and into a poem.
It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to appreciate the people, places, things (and poems) in our lives. Joy contracts and expands in proportion to our gratitude. What makes your world expand?
