Lee Martin's Blog, page 56

My Mother Was My Teacher

My mother died on a brutally cold day in January in 1988. She was a grade school teacher for forty-one years, starting at a small country school when she was eighteen and retiring at the age of fifty-nine, the age I am now.

Nights, when I was a small boy on our farm, I sat at the kitchen table with her, and I did my homework while she graded papers and made lesson plans for her third-grade class. She used a red marking pencil and wrote in her lovely hand. When I was older, she sometimes gave me the key to an exam and let me check the answers her students had missed. She often let me read the scores to her so she could record them in her grade book. It occurs to me now that she must have gone back later, after I was asleep, to make sure I’d read the grades properly, to make sure she’d recorded the right marks for the right students. She let me do these things because she knew they gave me pleasure. I’m not sure whether she ever knew that they also gave me a vision of what might be possible for my life. Because she took the time to indulge me, she made me want to be a teacher.

Depending on the time of year, my father might be figuring crop yields, studying farm equipment manuals or seed catalogs. He might be out to the farrowing house if a sow was about to deliver, or in the barn if he had a sick calf. Sooner or later, he’d come to us, showing my mother how many bushels to the acre our beans or corn or wheat had made, asking her opinion of a certain variety of pole bean for the garden come summer, or needing her help with the livestock.

My mother wasn’t just a teacher; she was a farm wife, too, and I’ve come here now to praise her and all the other women like her who somehow manage families, and work alongside their husbands on their farms, and keep impeccable houses, while teaching all day and catching up on schoolwork at night. My mother drove grain trucks, milked cows, crawled under combines to grease fittings. She prepared reading lessons, did artwork to use on her school bulletin boards, stayed up long after I’d gone to bed to make sure she was ready for her students the next day.

She taught me that teaching was work, all done for the sake of someone else. She taught me to love that work as well as the necessity of sacrifice. She taught me how to give what would benefit the whole without any expectation of receiving anything in return.

When she died at age 77, more than one person at her visitation—men and women whose hair had gone to gray, whose skin had wrinkled, who had lived past the time of their school days—took my hand and said to me, “Your mother was my teacher.”

What sweeter words, for she was my teacher, too. Such a life she gave me, and countless others as well. No one moves through this life without the influence of those who teach us, who put in the long hours, the hard work, while meeting the obligations of their day-to-day living, who take the time to love what they do, to care enough to make a difference even if they never know down the sweep of years what they may have helped make possible.

My mother was my teacher. I feel her spirit moving with me every day.

 

Looking for a Workshop in Novel Writing?

I’ve been asked to offer some further thoughts on designing and leading a creative writing workshop, and to respond I thought I’d talk a bit about how I do the novel workshop that I’ve been teaching in the summer at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Conference. This will give me a chance to talk a bit about general strategies that I think work well in any workshop while also extolling the virtues of this particular writers’ conference, which is enrolling students now for this summer.

The workshop size at Vermont is small—five or six people. Some of them have completed a draft of a novel, some have written a first chapter, and some have written a short story that they sense can be the basis of a longer work. We all read 20-30 pages of each person’s work before we gather for our week-long workshop in Montpelier, VT. I also usually ask each person to read The Great Gatsby, a short novel that makes it easy to talk about structure while also providing examples of other techniques—characterization, point of view, detail/setting, and language/dialogue/tone. In other words, Gatsby gives us a way to talk about technique—a conversation that I weave into our discussion of each participant’s pages. In an ideal workshop, we think about craft by reading the work of those writers who have been thinking about it longer than we have. We use this as our basis for our critical analysis of our fellow-writers’ work as well as our own as we continue to practice our craft.

At Vermont, I might lead the people in the workshop through some writing exercises meant to address some of the weaknesses that I’ve identified in their work. And, of course, this gets extended in the craft classes that are offered alongside the workshops. Each is an invitation for people to generate new work while also practicing a technique that may need to be sharpened. The exercises may also turn out to be crucial to revision.

When we talk about the first pages in that novel workshop, we try to give the writers a good sense of what they’ve set in motion that we want to see carried through in the novels. I invite people to talk about what most engaged them, to talk about where in those pages the writing has the most heat. We also talk about interesting character relationships, what seems to be in flux as the novel opens, and what we’re dying to know more about. We also talk about the potential for interesting complications, and we think about how the main characters can be looked at as a complication of interesting contradictions. Then, after we identify the heart of the novel—that element that forms the center—Jay Gatsby trying to reclaim his lost love, Daisy, for example—we talk about how the other elements of detail/setting, point of view, language contribute to the organic whole. How does the time period and setting in Gatsby, for example, help create the storyline? How is the first-person point of view essential to the story being told? How does imagery work? How is this novel created from wise choices in all the elements of fiction?

I end our week together by asking people to bring a revised section of the novel to our last meeting. That might mean they decide to improve on something they’ve already written, or it might mean that they create something new that needs to be in the novel. Sometimes I suggest revision strategies, and sometimes, if the writer wishes, I make specific revision assignments. The key is to invite the writer to put to use something that has resonated with them from our workshop sessions.

In a nutshell, this is a writing workshop: outside reading, considerations of craft issues, writing activities, workshop discussions, and revision activities—all done in scenic Montpelier, Vermont, in mid-August. This conference is notable for its accessible faculty, its supportive atmosphere, its rigorous and yet kind workshops, its stimulating craft lessons, readings by faculty and participants alike, its grand community of writers. There’s even music and dancing! If you’re interested, or know someone who might be, feel free to have a look at:

http://vcfa.edu/writing/pwc

 

 

My Promises to My Workshop

This week’s request to talk a bit about leading a writing workshop is timely because the Spring Semester begins at Ohio State today, and this evening, I’ll be meeting with my MFA fiction workshop for the first time. Here are some things I promise to do as I lead this workshop. I offer them here for anyone who may be thinking about teaching a workshop or for those who may want to think about how to be productive members of such a workshop.

I promise:

1.  to set a tone of mutual respect, generous inquiry, collaboration, and good humor.

2.  to not take myself too seriously and to encourage others to check their egos at the door.

3.  to create a safe environment in which writers can know their opinions will matter and where they can try the sorts of things they need in order to tell the stories only they can tell.

4. to invite opinions other than my own, no matter how aesthetically divergent; to make sure the students have their chance to be heard and to know that their opinions matter.

5. to do my best to zero in on what each writer is attempting in each piece given to the workshop and to offer my best suggestions for helping the piece more fully realize its intentions.

6. to stress that any piece is the result of a series of artistic choices and the effects they create and to invite students to talk about what’s working in a piece and to point to those places where they felt really engaged.

7. to offer direct criticism in a tactful and questioning way as I invite students to wonder along with me what might happen if a different artistic choice were made.

8. to emphasize to my students that our first drafts are always smarter than we are; they know where they want to go and what they want to be, and mutually supportive conversation along with constructive criticism can help us become more aware of how the piece is trying to work.

9. to sum up the important points at the end of the discussion, so the writer can formulate a more specific revision plan.

10. to forgive myself and others on the occasions when we fall short of our obligations to one another; to remember we are all flawed individuals doing the very best we can.

 

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Old Photographs and the Memoir

I remember on New Year’s Eve, when I was a boy, my father’s side of the family would gather for a supper of oyster soup and games of cards—usually either Pitch or Rook. This was in a day when we didn’t have cell phones that took pictures, when we didn’t live in a society that immediately documents every moment. On occasion someone would have an instamatic camera or a Polaroid, so sometimes there would be a few moments frozen in time—people sitting around a kitchen table, cards fanned before them, my cousin reaching out to gather in a trick, or my mother in the midst of conversation, her head tossed back as she laughed.

These days we take countless photos and post them to social media or just leave them on our cameras or erase them, and it seems to me that we’ve made our experiences fleeting and disposable. In the days when photos were fewer, they meant more, particularly for the memoirist who years later studies these pictures for the stories they tell or the ones that they don’t.

When beginning to write a memoir, it’s often a good idea to gather photographs from the time in question. Looking at these pictures not only immerses you in the time period, it also provides an emotional connection between you and the people about whom you’re writing.

Here are some things that can happen while looking at old photos:

1.  A photograph can suggest a scene. You look at the clothes people wore, the way someone held his or her hands, the things on the wall of the kitchen, the radio on top of the refrigerator, the old percolator in the corner, etc., and suddenly from these details people begin to move and talk.

2.  A photograph can suggest other scenes. You look at the picture and remember the night of the New Year’s Eve party, and that memory triggers other memories, and the next thing you know you’re constructing a narrative.

3.  A photograph can make you curious. Why did your father’s eyeglasses never fit properly? Why didn’t he take the time to get them adjusted? What does that one detail say about the story of your family?

4.  A photograph can suggest the secrets your family tried to keep. What does that pained smile on your mother’s face try to cover over? What do you know about her that’s there just below the surface of the photograph?

5. A photograph can carry you forward into the present. What would that New Year’s Eve party be like now if everyone would have been allowed to live and you could interact with them as the adult you are? How does that moment from years ago connect to the person you are now?

For the memoirist, old photos can be keys to making your writing a vivid inquiry into past, present, and future. Meaning resides in those photos. If we start with them, we’ll be well on our way to finding what they contain. Photos can document experience while also sparking our imagination. Take the time to look, to remember, to question, to think, and to imagine.

Happy New Year, everyone! I wish you all a prosperous 2015 full of love, and health, and good words.

Organizing the Memoir

Feeling a little disorganized around the holidays? Imagine the way writers of memoirs must feel when faced with the task of giving shape and structure to the experiences that they’re trying to render on the page. I’ve had a request to talk about such things, so here goes.

When writing a memoir, we’re faced with issues of selectivity as we decide what to include and what to leave out. It seems to me that it’s a mistake to try to include everything from our lives; that’s what autobiographies are for. Memoirs are different animals. They work best when focused on a specific arc of time or when they’re organized around a particular consideration. Think of Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life with its narrative beginning at the time immediately following his parents’ divorce and ending with his escape from his abusive stepfather and on his way to prep school in the east. Consider, too, the fact that Wolff later wrote another memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army, which focused on his service in Vietnam. Each book has a clearly defined arc of time.

Then consider a book like Matthew Gavin Frank’s Preparing the Ghost that takes as its center the story of a giant squid and uses it as a point of departure. The book is driven partly by multi-engined narratives, but also by lyric association, by lists, by imagination. At its center, the book is a meditation on issues of obsession, mystery, and mythmaking. Although the shape of the book is what some might consider loose, it’s precisely that shapelessness that brings into focus the colossal size of our lives. The book has the central metaphor of the giant squid to anchor us as we follow its leaps and turns.

Two very different approaches to memoir, each of them completely valid and appropriate for each writer’s intention. Wolff wants to tell us a story of a particular section of his life; Frank wants to tell us stories inside stories while letting the details lead him hither and thither but always with a particular consideration in mind. Each writer’s approach is organic to his aesthetic of what a memoir should be and what effect it should create for the reader.

The wonderful thing about creative nonfiction, even within the specific form of the memoir, is that there’s room for so many different aesthetics. We should never let someone else’s determine our own. Know what your own experience was—a logical progression from point A to point B, perhaps, or a mosaic of events, associations, meditations—and find the form and shape that will best allow your reader to have that same experience.

Publishing with a Small Press

This week of Christmas, I’m responding to a request to talk a bit about publishing with independent presses. This is becoming an increasingly valid form of publication with several examples of small-press books garnering critical acclaim. The small presses exist to do what many New York houses are becoming leery of doing, namely giving a home to authors whose work may not fit the current mold of what major publishers think the latest big-selling book should be, or giving a home to authors whose sales records with the big houses aren’t enough to make a publisher have confidence that they’ll be able to make money on their latest books.

Those who look down on the small presses actually diminish themselves by failing to celebrate the gift of publication, a gift that lifts us all up because a writer’s voice has been heard. A community of writers is exactly that, a group of people who know how hard it can be to write something and how hard it can be to find someone to publish it. Why in the world would a member of that community want to look down on a fellow writer?

These days, it’s important for any writer to take an active role in promoting his or her book, and perhaps this is especially true when publishing with a small press. Some writers even hire an independent publicist to help with the promotion of the book. Other writers get very active with arranging readings and signings. They rely on contacts at universities. They contact event coordinators at bookstores. They send review copies to newspapers and journals. They establish an online presence. Even the major houses know not to underestimate the power of social media. In short, writers do the things that publicists do at the major New York houses; they get word about the book out there and then hope for the best.

And speaking of the best, I close this post with all my good wishes to everyone for a blessed holiday season. My wish for you is that you’ll keep doing the good work, that you’ll keep celebrating one another’s, that you’ll be supportive of those who labor at the blank page the same way you do. It’s no small thing when a voice gets heard, whether that voice comes from a large publisher or a small one. Blessings to you all, from my house to yours.

 

 

Again? New Perspectives on Old Material

Continuing to respond to your requests for blog posts about particular topics, I turn my attention this week to the question of how I’m able to write about my parents again and again while coming at that material from fresh angles.

To be honest, sometimes I worry about my returning to the story of my family over and over. I worry that readers will eventually tire of my writing about the accident that cost my father both of his hands when I was barely a year old and the rage he brought into our home throughout my childhood and on into my teenage years. Then I think about what a notable writer said—maybe it was Fitzgerald, maybe it was Flaubert (some of you will surely know)—about a writer being lucky to figure out early on what his obsessions were and to spend a lifetime writing about them.

No single event in my life has shaped the rest of it the way my father’s accident did. I keep trying to write myself out of it, but I never quite succeed. That’s why I have to go back and tell it again. The key to writing about the same material over and over is to find a fresh perspective. I try to change the camera’s lens. For example, I just finished an essay about my grandmother—my father’s mother—and her blindness and her belief in the faith healer, Oral Roberts. Through her story, I approach the story of my father in this piece called “The Healing Line.” The central event of the narrative is a moment I’ve written before from my own perspective. Writing about it this time, I look at it through my grandmother’s perspective, through the circumstances of her life, and I find something new because I do that.

In another newly finished essay, my father’s story comes to the page through the story of a night when a strange young man, lost and confused, came into our house. I use his desperation, his cry for help, his reaching out to my mother as a way of thinking about the secret anger we were trying to keep hidden inside our home.

My key, then, to revisiting the same material numerous times is to always find a different lens through which to see that which won’t leave me alone. My obsession, it seems, is never ending, as, of course, true obsessions always are, but the position from which I see is always moving, using different characters or situations as my viewfinder. The end result for me is a fuller picture of my own experience. I learn something new with each essay that I write. If the material is richly complicated, as this story of my family is, I’m not sure one will ever run out of new ways to explore it as long as the writer is open to the slightly off center perspective that other characters or stylistic choices can provide.

Yogi Berra and the Art of Flash Nonfiction

I remember a story about Yogi Berra trying to explain the fine arts of hitting a baseball to another player and then realizing that he really couldn’t explain. “Let me show you,” he said, and he proceeded to demonstrate. Yogi was also known to say at some point, “How can you hit and think at the same time?”

I’m thinking about this as I start responding to readers’ requests, the first being to discuss the flash form of creative nonfiction. Let’s say we’re talking about 750 words or fewer, the size of essays that our friends at Brevity publish. Believe me, there are plenty of folks who are smarter about this form than I, but I’ll do my best to make what I hope will be some useful points, and maybe, like Yogi, I’ll even try to show you.

To write flash nonfiction, you have to:

1. Get comfortable with not knowing. When I start a piece of flash nonfiction, I feel as if I’m a horse who has blinders on preventing me from seeing anything extraneous. I can only see as far as the sentence I’m writing takes me. I don’t want to know where the piece is going. I want to be surprised when I get there.

2. Proceed with urgency.  There’s no time to get comfortable. Writing flash nonfiction is like being pushed into a river, one with a strong current. You have to survive. Every movement you make means something. It’s life or death. Better start swimming. Better keep it up. The flash form demands this intensity even if the subject matter is quiet. You can’t waste a single word.

3. Let the voice guide you. Others may see this differently, but for me writing flash nonfiction has always been a voice-driven enterprise. Sometimes I find a communal voice that sweeps the essay along; at other times, I find an intimate, vulnerable personal voice that does the same work. A piece of flash nonfiction is in many ways a musical composition. It’s important to be aware of the sounds your words are making and to use those sounds to take you where you’re meant to be.

4. Be brutal. You have to be willing to restrain yourself while you’re urgently writing. There’s no time for explanation or much exposition. Flash nonfiction lives in the present moment even if you’re writing about something that’s long past. Remember that horse with those blinders? No time to notice what’s around you. Stay grounded in what’s immediate. Keep moving.

5. Be open. To me, being open involves being willing to think in terms of opposites. I might begin a piece with a voice of certainty, for example, as I do in my essay, “Talk Big”:  

             Nights like this—a Friday night at last call after too much Pabst, and Jack, and Wild Turkey, and Seven and Sevens—we talk big. Why wouldn’t we? We know who we are—   the lowlifes, the no-accounts, the pissants, the stumblebums. All liquored up. Ten foot tall and bulletproof. . . .

From that first line, I’m on the lookout for the moment in the essay when the pressure of language, narrative, and imagery will turn that certainty into something that’s quite the opposite. This, after a violent death, is the ending of that essay:

Afraid to be alone, afraid to shut our mouths, let our tongues go dead, our words dry up.

What’ll we be then?

Scared shitless.

Scared to death.

This is the place I didn’t know I was headed when the essay began. Here’s a link to the entire essay: http://brevitymag.com/nonfiction/talk-big/

I often rely on the compression of narrative, the urgency of language, the attention to details, to create an organic moment of surprise, a moment of resonance. A piece of flash nonfiction can’t be quiet at the end. It can make a quiet sound, but it has to make an unforgettable noise in your readers’ hearts and minds. You have 750 words to make sure that no reader will ever forget the end of that essay.

Writing flash nonfiction is like something else Yogi Berra said: “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going because you might not get there.”

 

 

Lessons Learned: Missing Kent Haruf

I want to thank everyone who responded to last week’s invitation to submit requests for future posts. I received some really good suggestions, and I meant to respond to one of them in this post, but then I saw the sad news that Kent Haruf, author of Benediction, Eventide, Plainsong, The Tie That Binds, and Where You Once Belonged, had died, and my mind turned from issues of craft to issues of how to carry oneself as a writer. Kent was expert at both.

I first met him in the early 90s when I was a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He came to do a reading, and afterwards I approached him and said I grew up two hours northeast of where he was teaching at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. I am, by nature, a shy person, but I very much wanted Kent to know how his work spoke to me. I wanted to establish some common ground. So I spoke about Illinois and I told him I missed the woodlands. He told me he missed the open space of western Nebraska and eastern Colorado. Lesson learned: love what you love without apology.

Fast forward a few years, and I’m landing at Lambert Field in St. Louis, where Kent picks me up and drives me to Carbondale for a job interview. It’s not a short drive, and we get to talking about growing up in small towns and before I know it we’re talking about spirituality, and Kent says to me, “I know I’m not supposed to ask you these questions, and if you try to sue me, I’ll deny everything.” I said, “Kent, don’t worry. We’re just two guys talking.” He asked me if I believed in a deity and whether I thought there was an afterlife. It was clear that he asked me because he was thinking about such things himself, and for whatever reason he saw me as someone who might lend him a sympathetic ear, which I did. We chatted about what we believed, what we questioned, what we thought might be possible. We were just two guys with miles to eat up and things on our minds. Lesson learned: Say what you mean; admit what you don’t know.

A few years later, my first memoir, From Our House, was set to come out from Dutton. Kent was kind enough to provide a blurb. Not only that, he wrote me a postcard to tell me he had done so and to say he hoped the book “sold like hotcakes.” Lesson learned: Do what you can; be kind. We are all life-long apprentices to the craft.

Kent once said, “Writing is the hardest thing I know, but it was the only thing I wanted to do. I wrote for 20 years and published nothing before my first book.” Lesson learned: Love what’s hard—love it all the more because it’s hard and because it matters that much to you.

Five years later, Kent provided a blurb for my novel, The Bright Forever: “Lee Martin’s The Bright Forever goes deep into the mystery of being alive on this earth. Written in the clearest prose, working back and forth over its complex story, and told in the dark, desperate, vivid voices of its various speakers, it holds you spellbound to the end, to its final, sad revelations.”

So here we are at the end, at those inevitable, sad revelations. I’ll miss Kent’s directness, his wry humor, his beautifully crafted sentences, his way of carrying himself, without pretension, without airs, his way of being a writer, which to him meant being a workman. I love this Facebook post from Kent’s former colleague Allison Joseph: “I remember Kent telling us that to write Plainsong, he would go down in the basement of his house in Murphysboro and write that day’s pages with the screen dark and a hat over his eyes.” Lesson learned: Earn your job and do it faithfully without complaint.

I also love Allison’s story of when Kent was living in a mobile home park in Carbondale and was explaining to a neighbor that his job was to teach people to write. The neighbor took this literally, thinking Kent taught handwriting, and Kent saw no reason to correct this impression. Lesson learned: We are all from the same tribe—no one better or worse than anyone else—and  we should never forget that.

 

 

 

 

Tell Me What You Want to Hear

I’ve recently seen a Facebook post that allows you to track all of the states that you’ve visited. That got me wondering about how many states I’ve visited to do a reading or to teach a workshop. The total is twenty-eight and spans from Alaska to Florida to Vermont and a whole lot of other places in between—all thanks to the kindness of folks like you.

So here on the Monday before Thanksgiving, I think it’s appropriate that I dedicate this post to the people who for whatever reason have found my writing and my teaching to be of interest. I’m extremely grateful for the friendships I’ve made and the schools and writing conferences I’ve had the chance to visit. I’m also thankful for those of you who continue to read this blog. Writing is by nature a solitary, and sometimes lonely, pursuit. I’m more thankful than you can know for the connections we’ve managed to maintain over the years.

If memory serves me, I believe I started this blog in 2011, which means I’m nearing the end of four years of posts, which means, gulp, I may be starting to repeat myself.

I’m inviting you, then, to let me know what you’d like me to discuss in future posts. I want this blog to be as useful as possible for you, so please feel free to leave a comment, or email me at leemartinauthor@gmail.com, to let me know how I can be most helpful to you. Anything to do with the craft of writing, publishing, or teaching is fair game.

I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving. I’m glad for your company. You have sustained me for many years, and for that I’m extremely grateful.