Lee Martin's Blog, page 63

Paying Attention to Form in Flash Nonfiction

Brenda Miller writes about how paying attention to form in creative nonfiction can invite the writer to make “inadvertent revelations where the writer no longer seems in complete control.” She says, “Form essentially becomes the writer’s inky courage.” Here, then, is a writing activity I developed that asks the writer to work with metaphor as a way of coming at emotional material indirectly. If it works, the activity should make the following possible (again, quoting Brenda): “Revelation or discovery emerges organically from the writing; the essay now seems to reveal information about the writer rather than the writer revealing these tidbits directly to the reader.” Sometimes our material is too emotional for us to face head-on. Sometimes we need a form in which to contain it. By paying attention to the artistry, we can discover what we have to say. Here, then, are the steps of the activity, followed by the essay I wrote in response to the prompts.

1.         Choose an abstraction to write about, something large and intense like grief, or sorrow, or love, or joy.

2.         Daydream a list of particular emotional memories that the abstraction calls up in you. Write a paragraph focusing on one of those memories. Begin with the line, “I remember. . . .”

3.         Now do a bit more daydreaming. When you think of the moment you’ve portrayed in the first paragraph, what other memories come to you? Grab onto one of them and make that the focus of your second paragraph, moving forward or backward in time.

4.         In the third paragraph, concentrate on a particular object that comes from one of your memories. This object will be the title of your 750-or-fewer word essay. Describe the object. Put it into action. Gather the details that will lead to your final paragraph.

5.         In this last paragraph, let the object grow into a metaphor for the intense emotional meaning rising in the essay. Write a simile, such as “That sloth is as slow as grief.” (From Jill Christman’s “The Sloth,” a much better example than my own essay.)

6.         Find a fact with which to open the essay. Add a sentence to the beginning. Find a way to evoke that fact at the end.

 The Kite

A buoyant object floats in the air without using energy. It goes as it goes. I remember an afternoon in April—this was forty years ago—when I drove home with the sort of carefree delight that an eighteen-year-old boy can have in spring. My parents were waiting for me, and had been for some time, but I didn’t know it. My father said, “Where have you been?” My mother’s face was set with what I now know was worry. I was to drive them to the hospital, she said. My father had been ill in a way that I took little note of, and now the doctor was admitting him for tests.  It was my Easter vacation from school, and I’d been at the state park with some friends. We’d been flying kites, and I had no reason to think that my parents might be in need of me. A sunny day, a cloudless sky, daffodils in bloom, the smell of grass, a fresh wind—I thought I had all the time in the world. But when my mother said, “We went out looking for you,” I knew that I was wrong. Standing in my house, I felt cut loose from all that was familiar and safe, swept up in time’s irrepressible current, and yet anchored to all that was yet to come.

Days later, in the parking lot of the hospital, my mother told me, “Your dad has cancer.” Just like that, something inside broke free and left me forever.

I’ve never forgotten the way I held onto the string as overhead the kite tugged at me. I bent back my head and watched it flit and dip and soar. I heard the plastic shudder and pop on its balsa wood sticks. I felt each change of direction, the kite going slack or taut.

Now I think of quail and goldfinches and the way they bob and dip. Swallows swoop and arc. All according to their instincts for flight. All in a beautiful and graceful motion. But this kite, glorious as it was, shook with the wind, rose and fell in a ragged and unpredictable way. No fault of its own. It was plastic and light wood at the mercy of the air currents. I did my best to hold it steady. I felt the strain of it trying to keep itself aloft. I thought, This kite is as stupid as misery. How easy it would have been to open my hand and let it go. In the end, I couldn’t save my father, nor can I save myself or anyone I love. Still, that day, only a length of string between me and the sky, I kept faith. I believed in the miracle of flight. I held on.

The Heart’s Field: Place in Fiction

I grew up in a place where people came to town on Saturday nights to do their trading. My father  loafed with the other men in Tubby’s barber shop, or Buzz Eddie’s pool hall, and then went out to sit on the bench on the corner, still shooting the shit, while my mother and I pushed a cart up and down the aisle of Ferguson’s market or Spec Atkins’s Grocery, laying in what we needed for the week ahead. The gully on our farm where we tossed what we couldn’t burn of our trash, was full of Wagner’s juice jars, blue Milk of Magnesia bottles (my father had a nervous stomach), Log Cabin syrup bottles, Indian Summer cider jugs.

We did our trading because we worked like mules all week. We worked hard and got put up wet. We took our baths in galvanized washtubs on Saturday nights. We stayed up late and watched Championship wrestling on WTVW out of Evansville, Indiana, our TV rotor set at SE. We listened to high school basketball games on the radio in the winter. We sat at our kitchen tables, which were covered with vinyl oilcloths and ate apple slices and corn popped over a gas burner on the stove. We yelled at the radio when a call didn’t go our team’s way. “Give him a saddle, ref. He’s riding him.” “Ah, you’re blind out of one eye and can’t see good out of the other.”

My mother scrubbed her head, did rubbings of laundry. My father said, “If ‘if’s’ and ‘but’s’ were candies and nuts, we’d all have a merry Christmas.” He said, “People in hell wanting ice water, too,” whenever I whined about something I didn’t have and wanted. “Mister, you’re breeding a scab on your nose,” he’d say if I whined too much. Sometimes we were a day late and a dollar short. Other times, we were told to shit or get off the pot, straighten up and fly right, or else someone would jerk knots in our tails.

We were a farm family in southeastern Illinois. We had our sayings, and we had our ways.

Fish frys; pancake suppers; chowders; ice cream socials; bridal showers with mixed nuts and butter mints; Tupperware parties; donkey basketball games; auctions; meetings of the Odd Fellows, the Moose, the Elks, the Masons, the Rebekah Lodge; bingo games at the American Legion; demolition derbies and harness races and tractor pulls at the county fair.

To quote Flannery O’Connor: “There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you.”

Stories that seem like they could happen anywhere actually seem to not be happening at all. What is the texture of existence in the places that you know best? What are the customs, the language, the social expectations, the geographical landscape, the demands and pleasures of climate, the idiosyncrasies?  Characters usually act in accordance with, or resistance to, the places where they live, and once they do they set a narrative in motion.

So that story (or novel, essay, poem, play, screenplay) you’re working on? Make sure you’ve gathered the details of the setting, not just the sensory details, but the facts of language and custom as well. Put your main character in what O’Connor called “a believable and significant social context” and let one action lead to the next in this very specific place where people talk certain ways, do certain things, or else violate it all by stepping outside the expected.

“The truth is, fiction depends for its life on place,” Eudora Welty wrote. “Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of ‘What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?’—and that is the heart’s field.” The uniqueness of place is endangered today. Builders build houses according to a handful of models. Franchise restaurants and shops replace independently owned businesses. Don’t even get me started on how the discount store, Walmart, has dried up the downtown business districts of thousands of small American towns. The truth is the landscape is becoming more and more homogenous and predictable these days. Thank god for the artists, then, who remind us of the particulars of our world. Today, more than ever, it’s important that writers understand how to evoke the unique qualities of landscapes by finding the details that distinguish them and then using those details to create characters, plots, atmospheres, and meaning. If you know your place fully, you’ll understand how it becomes necessary to the characters, their stories, their emotions, and to everything you’ve come to the page to express.

 

The Doorway between Memoir and Fiction

As someone who writes both fiction and creative nonfiction, I’ve long been interested in the intersections between the two. More specifically (and this is probably more the teacher in me than the writer), I’ve been curious about how using both forms to approach the same material can deepen the writer’s intellectual and emotional responses. To put it simply, what happens to the revision of a piece of fiction when the writer writes about the autobiographical sources that the narrative suggests? Likewise, what happens to a piece of memoir when the writer takes the material and turns it into fiction? I’m interested in the dialogue between the forms and how it affects the revision process.

So when Dinty Moore proposed a team-taught craft class for the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Conference where we’d both be teaching, I jumped at the chance to work with him. Here, then, is the writing activity that we came up with. Our objective was to explore what happens when we invite an exchange between memoir and fiction.

1.         Recall a time when you lied, a time that still makes you feel a little “squirmy” to recall. This shouldn’t be a white lie, but a lie with lasting consequences. My lie would be one I told when I was in first grade. It may have been the first significant lie I ever told. Our teacher had allowed us to take our sack lunches out on the playground. She warned us to be careful with our milk cartons and not to spill them. Well, of course, I spilled mine. When she asked me what happened, I made up a story about an older boy, someone I’d never seen, coming up the road (this was a two-room country school) and kicking over my milk and then leaving. I was a good kid. I knew it was wrong to lie. Why had I been so quick to do it? What does that lie still make me feel uncomfortable when I recall it? When you’ve identified your lie, write a piece of very brief memoir about it. Try to keep it under 750 words. If you have trouble starting, use the line, “I said it happened like this. . . .”

2.         Now revisit the material of the memoir, only this time use a third-person point of view and give yourself permission to stray from the facts. Invent whatever you wish. In other words, write a brief piece of fiction (again, try to keep it under 750 words). Here’s the opening that Dinty suggested for mine: “Tommy’s teacher told the class to take their cartons of Dairyville and sack lunches of baloney and cheese on Sunbeam bread out onto the playground that day because the cafeteria still smelled too much like paint. ‘Don’t spill the milk,’ she warned, just as Tommy cleared the doorway to the outside.”

3.         Has the piece of fiction adjusted your view of the lie that formed the base of the memoir? Dinty suggests that even though the events or dialogue or thoughts that comprised the piece of fiction didn’t really happen, “perhaps they suggest some subconscious truth, a deeper layer or view of the real situation.” Revise your brief memoir using anything that you learned by writing the piece of fiction.

When I wrote my piece of fiction, I added a character that wasn’t there at the time of the actual experience. That character and the way she interacted with the boy, Tommy, ended up showing me that the reason the lie stays with me has something to do with the way I want to see myself, and the way I want others to see me. I’m not sure whether I would have gotten to this without transforming my experience into fiction. For me, the fiction opened some additional doorways to the memoir and ended up creating a more complicated and textured piece.

Since this was the first time, either Dinty or I had used this exercise, we’d love to hear your thoughts. To me, all writing is thinking with language, and writing in other forms can take our work to a fuller rendering.

“Sweet Boy”

(Autumn Semester classes have begun here at The Ohio State University, and my MFA workshop in creative nonfiction is off to a fast start. We talked last week about writing vertically down into the material to find the story of the writer’s thinking. Using Naomi Shihab Nye’s brief essay, “Mint Snowball,” as our model, we came up with a writing exercise that asked us to begin with particular sensory details that we associated with someone from our lives, living or dead, and to see where those details might take us. Essayists should have no agenda when setting out, only to follow the trail of details to the things we didn’t know we had to say. We should arrive at moments of unanticipated discovery. Here, then, is the piece I wrote about my grandmother.)

Sweet Boy

My grandmother, my father’s mother, was nearly blind with cataracts. She lived in our farmhouse when I was a boy, and I found her to be short-tempered, severe, and sometimes unreachable. Not that I tried all that much. For the most part, I made sure I stayed out of her way. She slept in the big front bedroom where she kept her treadle sewing machine, her dresser and wardrobe, her commode of pink wicker because our house had no running water, no indoor bathroom. She never would have been able to find her way to the outhouse at night. As it was, whenever she left her bedroom, she felt her way to the kitchen with her fingertips. They skittered over the door jambs, the plaster walls, the edge of the pie safe, the tops of the ladder back chairs, the stovepipe, the pump handle at the sink. At one time, this had been her house. Now, in her old age, it belonged to my mother and father.

I watched her, imagining that she couldn’t see me. What would it be like to be blind? Sometimes, when she was in the kitchen, I hunkered down beneath the drop leaf table and closed my eyes. In that darkness, my other senses sharpened. I heard the squeal of the pump handle as she worked it and then the splash of water. I knew she was filling the tea kettle. Soon I heard the whoosh of gas at the burner, then the scratch of a match over the side of the stovepipe. I smelled the sulfur of the match, the gas coming up through the burner jets. I heard the kettle scrape as my grandmother set it down over the fire. She opened the pantry door. I heard it knock against something on the other side. Her fingers felt their way over the quarts of tomato juice, green beans, strawberry preserves, that my mother had put up in the summer. My grandmother was reaching for her jar of Sanka coffee, and when she had it, she came back to the kitchen, opened the cupboard and found the cup she favored, a cup made of hard pink plastic. I heard the lid scrape a little as she opened the Sanka. I could even smell it. I was never as close to my grandmother’s world as I was during these times when I closed my eyes and slipped down inside it the best I could.

Perhaps I’m who I am now, at least in part, because being around her taught me to be still and to pay attention. Maybe listening to her slow movements about that kitchen showed me the art of patience and invited me to consider what it was to live inside someone else’s body. I admit that my temperament sometimes comes too directly from my father, who unlike my grandmother, was always in a hurry, always a worrier, always trying to keep ahead of whatever he felt was bearing down on him. He must have been his father’s son, as I am his, which often led to my misbehaving and the lash from his belt.

One day, when my grandmother felt too puny to get out of bed, I somehow ended up there with her beneath a quilt now long gone, much to my regret. Had I known she was ill? Had I been like a family pet that senses that someone is in need of comfort and come to her in spite of my natural inclination to keep my distance? She told me a story about my father when he was the age I was then and some older boys threw his cap on the schoolhouse roof, and he was afraid to come home without it. It was a gray day in early spring, a light rain streaking the windows. I closed my eyes and listened to it. My grandmother smelled of Vicks Vapo-Rub and the Tums antacids she favored, and beside me on her night table were a box of horehound ribbon candy and a box of Black Draught Laxative. She went on talking, her voice nearly a whisper, as if she had all the time in the world. Can I hear it now? Can we call up the voices of the dead? Or are there only the sounds and smells they left behind to guide us? The Vicks, the Tums, the horehound candy, the Sanka, the match against the stovepipe, the gas jets. If I sit very still, I can follow the trail back to this woman, and the boy I was, and all she taught me when I thought she had no mind of me at all.

“Your father was so scared,” she said, “but I wouldn’t have spanked him. He was a sweet boy. Such a sweet, sweet boy.”

But her story of my father’s fear and dread was so contrary to the man I knew I could barely make room for it. For an instant, I seemed to drift away from that place to a world I could only dream might someday be mine. Then I opened my eyes. I was still in my grandmother’s bed, still in my house, which was an angry house so much of the time. My grandmother’s commode was still there, her wardrobe, her treadle sewing machine.

In a few days, I did something to anger my father, and he started to whip me with his belt. My grandmother, feeling better now, was passing through our living room, a fresh cup of Sanka in her pink cup. Somehow she found the bare skin of my father’s arm, and she pressed that hot cup against it, and like that, at least for the time, she saved me.

Is there a way now to see beyond the anger of my home? Can I take any comfort from this blind woman who for the most part scared me to death? Or am I still left to find my own direction? Can I trace the word, “love,” back to the word, “grandmother,” back to that day?

Shrinking Your Novel

I just got back from teaching a workshop in the novel at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Conference in Montpelier. I had six first-time novelists in the workshop, and I’d seen about twenty-five pages of each manuscript before we all arrived in Montpelier. Some people had complete drafts of their novels, and some were still working toward that end. Each book was compelling and glorious in its own way. What in the heck could I do in our five days together to make any difference for these six writers?

It’s been my experience that my own early efforts with the novel form are attempts to find the shape of the book and to fully understand what I’m trying to do with the material. My first drafts are very, very messy. When I teach a novel workshop at a conference, it’s my goal to send each writer away with a clearer idea of what they’re exploring and the structure they’re building that will best house that exploration.

So we talked about characterization, structure, detail, point of view, and language. I made suggestions for writing exercises, and I told my novelists that they should use any one of them that they preferred to either revise a troublesome section or to create something new that they sensed should be a part of the manuscript. They’d have their chance to share this work on our last day together.

Somewhere along the way, I got a crazy idea. We were looking at Stuart Dybek’s piece of flash fiction, “Sunday at the Zoo.” Many of you know I love using that story as a way of looking at narrative structure. The compressed form is like an X-ray. It makes the bones of the structure stand out more clearly. I found myself thinking, why not compress the novel by asking folks to use their material to imitate the Dybek story. A couple of my students did just that, to stunning effects. Their pieces of flash fiction required them to focus on what was really important in their novels. It asked them to make choices. It led them to aspects of the material they hadn’t considered. They more clearly defined the movement of their narratives. They found the right narrative voice. They wrote with more specificity and urgency. Listening to them read those pieces of flash fiction, I felt that they were much more intimate with the worlds of their novels. I felt their urgent need to tell their stories.

So what conclusions can we draw from this? Perhaps writing in a short form can help us think about what really matters to us in the novels we’re drafting, or have drafted. Perhaps this compression can show us the way our novels want to move and can also make the shape of the book more clear. Take any piece of flash fiction that you’d like to use, as long as its aesthetic is in line with that of your novel. If your novel is heavily narrative, then the Dybek story will do nicely. If your novel is more contemplative and interested in exploring a character’s interior life, ala Mrs. Dalloway, then maybe a different story, maybe Woolf’s “Kew Gardens” might be a better choice. Use whatever story you choose as a model. Identify the artistic choices that the author has made in the construction of that story. Then fit the material of your novel to its form. See what that process has to teach you about the work you’re doing, or have already done. Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s List, and many other fine books, talks about how he has to find the cookie cutter for each of his novels—in other words, the form to which everything will stick. Perhaps this exercise with the shorter form is one way to help the novelist find that cookie cutter. If you’re working on a novel now and want to try this suggested exercise, I’d be very interested in hearing the results.

Keep doing the good work!

 

 

Context

In all honesty, I had no idea what I would write about today. Then I went out to mow the yard, and I noticed a Tonka Truck dump truck in the yard across the street, and later, I saw the shell of a cicada clinging to the purple bloom of a Blazing Star, and through those two details I started to go somewhere I hadn’t known I would.

When I was a boy, I had a Tonka Truck like the one in the yard across the street. The bed of the truck in my neighbor’s yard was raised as if the load had been delivered and soon the driver would lower it and move on down the road. I also collected the shells of cicadas when I was a boy, finding them clinging to the limbs of trees.

I imagine there are a number of folks who share those experiences: the joy of a Tonka Truck, the fascination with those cicada shells. To tell someone I had a Tonka Truck when I was a boy, or that I collected cicada shells has little resonance for a listener, outside the shared nostalgia for our childhoods now gone.” Neither statement tells you anything about who I was as a boy, or what my fears, or dreams, or secrets were. Those two sentences are as declarative as declarative can be. “I had a Tonka Truck when I was a boy.” “I collected cicada shells.” Nothing vibrates above or beneath them. They are merely facts.

The Tonka Truck in the yard across the street intrigues me since no children live in that house, nor do any children come to visit the man who lives there. The man is a troubled man. I’d say he’s somewhere in his fifties. During the day, he sits on his front steps, and I hear him talking to himself, or else to whatever voices he hears inside his head. Sometimes he rants and rails against whatever it is that disturbs him.

Now, he’s taken to lying in the middle of the street late at night. Recently, I took the garbage can to the curb and found him on his back. I said, “Aren’t you afraid a car might hit you?” He said, “They usually have their headlights on.” He liked to lie there and look up at the stars, he said. “I wouldn’t want to see you get hurt,” I told him. He said, “I wouldn’t want to see you get hurt either.” Not sure whether he meant that as a threat or an expression of neighborly affection, I bid him good night and went back inside my house.

The cicada shell is amazing for its detail: the clear globes where the eyes once rested, the delicate threads of the antennae, the slit in the back through which the new cicada emerged, its clear wings laced with lime green skeins. The wings and the new body would harden in time, and the cicada would fly away, leaving the shell for me to find.

I remember the first time I spoke to the man across the street. I’d been mowing, and he’d yelled at me. I ignored him. Later, he came to my door to apologize. He kept saying, “This is my neighborhood, and these are my neighbors,” as if he were trying to remind himself of what kept him anchored to this world.

Details are nothing without context. What we carry inside us matters and details resonate when they allow the importance of all that we can’t say to emerge. I think of my neighbor lying in the street, looking at the stars. I think of that Tonka truck, the bed lifted, in his yard. I consider a grown man, perhaps dreaming of his own childhood, perhaps eager to unburden himself of whatever haunts him now. I think of how desperately we sometimes long to escape. I pick up the cicada shell and place it on my palm. It rests there, balanced on its legs, such a light and brittle thing.

 

 

Sunday

A porch swing sways, and the chains in the eyehooks screwed into the rafters let out their lazy creaks as if this is a day of rest for them, too. Or nearly so. They still have to support the weight of the neighbor who pushes ever so lightly with her foot and feels the breeze on her face and listens through the window screen to the radio playing dance music in her living room. The faint sounds of big band tunes: “Moonglow,” “In the Mood,” “Begin the Beguine.”

Somewhere down the street, a screen door taps against the frame. This is one of those afternoons when the air is so still that sounds travel. Someone is listening to a Cardinals’ game on the radio; someone else is turning the pages of the Evansville Courier, or the Vincennes Sun-Commercial,  or maybe last week’s Sumner Press that they’ve finally found enough time to read. The pages rattle just a bit, but not in an unpleasant way, more the way a soft brush sounds when swept through a girl’s long hair.

And maybe it’s that girl who sighs, daydreaming about the boy she loves.

Uptown, a ceiling fan turns slow circles in the sundries store where the girl’s mother sits behind the counter using a file on her fingernails and watching the hand on the Bubble Up clock click off another minute.

Across the street, in front of the TV Repair Shop, a boy and girl sit on the hood of his Impala and watch the color set that’s always on in the window even though they can’t hear the sound. The boy has a Pall Mall between his lips, but he hasn’t lit it. He keeps flicking the lid of his Zippo open and then, after long intervals, closed, and the woman in the sundries store closes her eyes and remembers her husband when she first fell in love with him and how he was never in a hurry, how she thought they had all the time in the world.

“Baby,” the boy on the Impala says, and he draws out that long “a” sound as if it’s the sweetest taste he can ever imagine, and he wants to hold onto it as long as he can.

Eventually, the Impala inches away from the curb. The woman in the sundries store switches off the ceiling fan and turns the deadbolt lock on the door. Her daughter writes her boyfriend’s name over and over on a piece of notebook paper, her handwriting all loops and tails. The baseball game ends and the radio goes off, its hot tubes ticking as they cool. The newspaper slips to the floor as the reader dozes. The porch swing, empty now, sways a time or two and then is still.

Call it a sleepy town. Call it a dead town. My hometown where once upon a time on summer Sundays there was time, if we wanted it, to listen. I hear the porch swing creak, the radio play, the baseball announcer murmur, the girl sigh, the newspaper pages rustle, the ceiling fan turn, the clock hand click, the Zippo open and close, the boy say, “Baaa-by. Oh, Baaa-by.”

I hear it all, and my listening tells me this: when it comes to our writing and our living, nothing is too small a thing.

The lock turns at the sundries store. The woman’s sensible heels make gentle tapping noises on the sidewalk as she starts toward home, taking her time as she strolls past the houses where baseball games and newspapers and porch swings and lovesick girls have gone silent. So slow and dreamy her pace until she climbs the steps to her house, takes the doorknob in her hand. Just before she turns it, she whispers to herself, Baa-by, Baa-by. That word. Just before she goes inside, she sighs.

 

 

 

 

 

How to Give a Reading

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll recall the filmstrips that we used to see in grade school, those still images complete with captions projected onto a screen. Someone had to read those captions, and in my school I was often that someone. I suppose my teacher chose me because I wasn’t afraid to speak up, I spoke clearly and slowly, and I changed the inflection of my voice to add a bit of oral interpretation to scintillating subjects such as the production of rubber, amazing feats of science, and the mysterious lost colony of Roanoke.

Of course, I didn’t know then that one day I’d be a writer and would give readings of my work to audiences. Here are a few things I’ve learned over the years about how to give a reading. I offer this advice primarily for those who are just starting out. Maybe you’re a student about to give your first reading, or maybe you’re a writers’ conference attendee about to do the same, or maybe you’ve published that first book, and lo and behold it’s a smash and you’re about to hit the book tour trail. Whatever your situation, here are what I hope will be some helpful thoughts about how to engage an audience.

1.         Be gracious. Remember that a number of people have spent their time and energies to make your appearance possible. After you’re introduced, take a bit of time to thank them. And those people in the audience? They don’t have to be there (well, if you’re at a university sometimes students are required to attend a certain number of readings for extra credit). They’ve chose to come out to hear you. You’re their guest. Thank them, too. I’ve always found that a bit of levity before beginning the reading is a good way to connect with your audience. Nothing snarky, nothing vulgar. Just something lighthearted, perhaps even self-deprecating, to let your audience know you’re a real person. I once attended a reading where a very famous writer, after his host had introduced him, strode to the podium and without a word of thanks, or of anything else for that matter, launched into his reading. When he was finished, he quickly retired to the wings. The end. The distance between him and his audience was wide indeed.

2.         Don’t be afraid of the microphone. It’s your friend. Cozy up to it, but don’t put it in your mouth. If possible, arrive early and give the mic a test to see how sensitive it is and how close you’ll need to stand in order for your voice to be comfortably heard in the back rows.

3.         Be expressive, but not cartoonish. Remember, you’re not just reading; you’re interpreting. You’re recreating for the audience that experience of being read to when they were children. Don’t overdo it, but do think about the way you use inflection to emphasize certain things. Think about where your pace should slow or speed up. Think about the well-timed pauses that signify the shift to dialogue. Know your text so well that you can comfortably look up and make eye contact with your audience, drawing them even more fully into your material.

4.         Be selective about what you read. Put yourself in your audience members’ places and think about what grabs your attention at a reading, and, likewise, what lets it go. When it comes to reading prose, I’ve always found scenes of action to work well, scenes in which something happens and that have a central narrative line for the listeners to follow. If you can choose something that also has a question to be answered—perhaps it’s a plot-based question, or one that’s based in the character relationship, or better yet both—you’ll stand a better chance of arousing and keeping your audience’s attention.

 5.         Less is more. Be mindful of your time. You don’t want your audience to start to push back against you because you’re going on too long. The venue often determines the time period. A bookstore reading, for instance, that’s meant to promote a new book, should be fairly short with plenty of time left for audience interaction. They not only want to hear you read from the book, they also want to hear you talk about it. If you’re sharing the podium with other writers, which is often the case at writers’ conferences and book festivals, never, never, never, go over your allotted time. Be a good literary citizen. Don’t foster the reputation of being so in love with your own voice that you can’t make room for those of your fellow-writers. If you’re doing a solo gig, and there’s to be a question and answer period after the reading, I find 30 minutes or so to be a good limit. If there’s no question and answer, I rarely go beyond 40 minutes. The longer you read, the more likely that your audience’s attention will begin to wander.

6.         Be courteous and generous. This advise applies to your entire visit, but especially to the  question and answer period following the reading. Don’t appear bored with the questions even if you’ve answered them time and time again. Don’t be snarky. Never belittle a questioner. Remember that a person asks a question because they have a sincere interest in the answer. They don’t know that countless other people at countless other readings have asked the same question. They’re asking it for the first time, and they genuinely want to know.

Giving a reading really comes down to being a good guest, someone who’s polite, gracious, energetic, attentive, and interesting—someone people would be eager to invite for another visit.

Why I Write: In Conversation with George Orwell, Joan Didion, Terry Tempest Williams

Nights are often the times when I feel the minutes of my life ticking by. Sunday nights, for whatever reason, are the worst nights for this dread that comes creeping toward me—perhaps it’s just the fact that I can see much more of my life behind me than ahead; I’m soon to be fifty-eight—and I start to question the days spent and the journey traveled. Tonight, as I try to fall asleep, I explain to myself why I write (with a nod to the writers before me who have done the same) in hopes that such a list will remind me of who I am and maybe even slow time and hold the inevitable end at bay.

I write because my father told stories, and I listened. I write because my mother loved books and taught me to love them, too. I write because I want to live in someone else’s life. I write because everyone’s a mystery, even me, and stories have the power to make us understand. I write because I have to give some shape to the chaos. I write because I fail time and time again, both in my writing and my living. I write because the music of language spoke to me in books and I wanted to make a beautiful noise to answer back. I write because there’s so much I don’t know. I write because I love to be entertained by a well-crafted narrative. I write because once upon a time someone said to me, “Once upon a time.” I write because my fourth-grade teacher told me I had no imagination. I write because rarely in my childhood home did we touch each other with affection. I write because, when I do, I know what it is to love. I write because the end is coming, and I’m whistling in the dark. I write because I want to talk to you; I want to know why you write, or sing, or dance, or paint, or cook, or garden, or play music, or pray. I want to know someone’s listening. I don’t want to be alone. Please tell me.

 

Report from the Antioch Writers’ Workshop

Last week, I had the privilege of teaching at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and what a wonderful teaching experience it was. I got to see some old friends while also making a number of new ones. The participants were smart, engaged, generous . . .and they even laughed at my snail jokes.

My fiction class started at 8:30 each morning, which made for an early wake-up call, but we all soldiered through and had a bit of fun while doing so. I loved sitting in on the poetry class, led by Cathy Smith Bowers, and the creative nonfiction class, led by Dinty Moore, and I loved my conversations with the afternoon workshop leaders: Sherri Wood Emmons, Roxane Gay, Jeffrey Ford, Cathy Essinger, Matthew Goodman, Greg Belliveau, and Trudy Kishner. As my small-town newspaper used to say when reporting birthday parties, family reunions, or even shopping trips to nearby cities: “A good time was had by all.”

When I gave the keynote address to kick off the workshop, I said that I’d been lucky with the conferences I’d attended when I was first starting out because they’d given me a supportive group of folks who took my work seriously, who told the truth but as delicately as they could, who provided a network of friends that continues to this day. I also benefited from the instruction of workshop leaders who were more interested in teaching than in playing the role of “famous author.” I was exposed to editors and agents. I felt like a writer, and I left with the sense that with hard work and continued practice I could be better. From what I observed at Antioch, this was the experience of most, if not all, of the participants. Kudos to the organizers of this conference. I highly recommend it.

The workshop also had a Young Writers component, a group of high school students who turned out to be bright, poised, and darned talented. I listened to some of them read at the open mic one evening, and I came away mightily impressed. It was those young writers that I was thinking about when I listened to two literary agents talk about taking their clients’ books to auction in hopes of getting the largest advance that they could. These agents also were very direct about the types of books that they were looking to represent, and most of them were genre fiction. I learned terms I hadn’t previously known. Steampunk, for instance, and other sub forms of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, etc. The agents were professional, energetic, and no doubt helpful to many in the audience. They were good writers’ conference citizens, willing to share their expertise with their listeners, and their presence demystified much about the publishing industry. So kudos to them, too. I started to wonder, though, whether the conversation about auctions and trends ran the risk of making the listeners, particularly the young writers, believe that a commercial interest was valued above any sort of literary inclinations. If we were in a cartoon, would our eyes have been flashing dollar signs?

Admittedly, my own aesthetic leans toward literary fiction and nonfiction, but still I don’t seek to diminish genre fiction or mainstream nonfiction. Every form has its place, and every book represents a writer’s individual talents and perseverance and should be celebrated. If zombies are your thing and that’s where your talents lie, then go for it. Write the best zombie book that you can write. But what if some of the people in the room, particularly those young writers, started to think, “Well, it’s clear that I have to write a steampunk-Victorian-vampire novel because that’s what sells.” What if they let what the agents were saying keep them from writing the things only they could write with authority and passion (yes, maybe even literary fiction) because they were too focused on commercial interests?

All I’m saying is this: when we start out as writers we can too easily believe that we have to write to fit current market trends. Even if we know from the git-go that we’re interested in writing literary fiction we can sometimes let the marketplace steer us away from our true material. I know I spent a long time thinking that no one would be interested in the stories that I had to tell about people in small towns and on farms in the Midwest. When I was a teenager, and on into my twenties and even some of my thirties, what I needed more than anything was the freedom to read widely and to try a number of different approaches in my writing. That’s how I began to define my aesthetic; that’s how I came to understand what world mattered most to me and how to best express it. Had I gotten the idea too early that I had to write a certain type of fiction, for example, who knows if I’d ever have become the writer I am today, one that I’m completely comfortable being, and isn’t that what we’re all after whether we be writers of literary fiction, or sci-fi, or steampunk, or any other number of genres and sub-genres? We want to spend our days doing the work that most fulfills us, writing the books that our talents lead us to write. I guess I’m saying we want a perfect match between writer, material, and form. In the final analysis, that’s what makes us the most happy.

In the afterglow of what was a fabulous workshop, I feel compelled to offer a voice to stand alongside the voices of those two agents. What I’d say to the young writers at the workshop (and to anyone still experimenting as they try to find their material, their voice, their form) is, don’t write a book to cash in on a market trend. Write the book that only you can write. Write it with all your heart. Write it for a lifetime, and be blessed.