Larry Benjamin's Blog: Larry Benjamin's blog - This Writer's Life - Posts Tagged "awp"
Moving On
I haven’t been able to write.
If you’re not a writer, that probably sounds melodramatic. If you’re a writer, you probably d understand how upsetting it is to write those words, to be unable to write.
Like a lot of writers, I would imagine, I sometimes go long stretches without writing, because I don’t have anything to say. This dry period feels different though. I want to write, know what I want to say but somehow the words aren’t coming. Work on my next book stalled after the first paragraph. I tried to be patient, gentle with myself, solicitous of my fragile talent. I’m just tired, I told myself. There’s been a lot going on, I reminded myself: our dad died, I started a new job, there were the holidays …
I dreamt of Daddy the other night. I was walking through a crowded train station, carrying a heavy box in my hands, close to my chest. I have no idea what was in the box, but it was heavy. Everything was in black and white; the hard, white light falling from the skylight above made everything gleam like metal. Then I saw him, walking in the crowd towards me. Everything was in black and white, except him. He was all sepia tones: brown suede jacket, khaki pants, sharply creased, highly shined brown shoes; his brown face and terra cotta lips shone. Dad. As he passed me without speaking, he smiled. As I continued walking in the opposite direction—I knew, somehow, I couldn’t turn around and follow him—I slowed my pace. I remembered when I first moved back to NY after college, I was working at Macys. Occasionally, I’d end up on the same train as my dad going home at the end of the day. He walked fast and always seemed to be ahead of me as he got off the train. Knowing I couldn’t yell out to him, I usually just trailed in his wake catching up to him in our building’s lobby as he waited for the elevator.
Though Dad’s smile had acknowledged me, his look had also warmed me, made it clear I couldn’t follow him, that I had to continue on my path as he continued on his. I started to walk faster and when I looked down at my hands, I realized they were empty, my heavy box gone.
When I woke up, I pondered the dream. Dad seemed to be telling me he had to go on his journey and I had to continue on mine. It was time to let him go. Oddly, I’d thought I had but maybe not. Maybe my own unacknowledged grief was what was holding me back, stealing my words.
That day, I made flight and hotel reservations for the 2018 AWP Conference & Bookfair where I will be joining fellow writers, Alan Lessik and Kathy Anderson, in presenting a workshop on Writing LGBTQ Fiction Based on Real People. I used some of the money Dad left me to pay for the trip. That night I was unable to sleep. I was effectively alone. Stanley, exhausted from the marriage of Prozac and Vodka, had plunged headlong into sleep an hour earlier, Riley curled at his side. Toby dogged my steps as I walked into the library and began to look for a book to read. I hadn’t read a book in I don’t know how long. It made sense that I hadn’t read. And not reading seemed related to my not writing. For, if I couldn’t lose myself in the words, the story of another, how could I lose myself in the story I needed to tell? I pulled Graham Green’s “Travels With My Aunt,” off a shelf and began to read. The first line was “I met my Aunt Augusta for the first time in more than half a century at my mother’s funeral.” My new book opens with a funeral so my pulling Green’s book off the shelf seemed more fortuitous than random.
After our dad died, our youngest brother Kenon, told us about the day mom and dad dropped him off at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh his freshman year. Kenon became unsure as they were getting ready to leave him and head back to the Bronx. My father pulled him aside and told him, “If I didn’t think you could do this, I wouldn’t leave you here.”
Kenon had chosen his path and dad delivered him to the head of it. When he ‘d hesitated beginning his journey, dad had nudged him forward. Just as he seemed to be nudging me in my dream.
Dear D.:
I went for a walk today in the snow. As I stood waiting to cross the street, I looked up at the sky, the snow-covered roofs edging the snow-filled sky. I remembered standing on that same corner and looking up into a fall sky, the leaves on the trees red-orange-red, so that I had felt as if I had been staring into the heart of a fire. C. had been alive then, and I had felt warmed by his love, brilliant as that tree.
A childhood fancy captured me suddenly, and I lay down in the snow and, moving my arms and legs in a sweeping arc, made a “snow angel.” I tired quickly and lay still for a moment within that casket of snow and ice. A memory of C.—of C., naked and beautiful, holding a single yellow rose against his chest—reached up and tugged at my heart, pulling me to my feet, leading me away. I left grief behind, buried in a shallow grave.
I watched the snow fall. I watched a snowflake fall for each life that had been lost. I watched a snowflake fall for each tear that had been shed over a life that had been lost. I watched a king’s ransom in snowflakes, like diamonds and pearls, fall soundlessly to the ground.
Love,
S.
—Excerpt from “The Cross,” Damaged Angels
If you’re not a writer, that probably sounds melodramatic. If you’re a writer, you probably d understand how upsetting it is to write those words, to be unable to write.
Like a lot of writers, I would imagine, I sometimes go long stretches without writing, because I don’t have anything to say. This dry period feels different though. I want to write, know what I want to say but somehow the words aren’t coming. Work on my next book stalled after the first paragraph. I tried to be patient, gentle with myself, solicitous of my fragile talent. I’m just tired, I told myself. There’s been a lot going on, I reminded myself: our dad died, I started a new job, there were the holidays …
I dreamt of Daddy the other night. I was walking through a crowded train station, carrying a heavy box in my hands, close to my chest. I have no idea what was in the box, but it was heavy. Everything was in black and white; the hard, white light falling from the skylight above made everything gleam like metal. Then I saw him, walking in the crowd towards me. Everything was in black and white, except him. He was all sepia tones: brown suede jacket, khaki pants, sharply creased, highly shined brown shoes; his brown face and terra cotta lips shone. Dad. As he passed me without speaking, he smiled. As I continued walking in the opposite direction—I knew, somehow, I couldn’t turn around and follow him—I slowed my pace. I remembered when I first moved back to NY after college, I was working at Macys. Occasionally, I’d end up on the same train as my dad going home at the end of the day. He walked fast and always seemed to be ahead of me as he got off the train. Knowing I couldn’t yell out to him, I usually just trailed in his wake catching up to him in our building’s lobby as he waited for the elevator.
Though Dad’s smile had acknowledged me, his look had also warmed me, made it clear I couldn’t follow him, that I had to continue on my path as he continued on his. I started to walk faster and when I looked down at my hands, I realized they were empty, my heavy box gone.
When I woke up, I pondered the dream. Dad seemed to be telling me he had to go on his journey and I had to continue on mine. It was time to let him go. Oddly, I’d thought I had but maybe not. Maybe my own unacknowledged grief was what was holding me back, stealing my words.
That day, I made flight and hotel reservations for the 2018 AWP Conference & Bookfair where I will be joining fellow writers, Alan Lessik and Kathy Anderson, in presenting a workshop on Writing LGBTQ Fiction Based on Real People. I used some of the money Dad left me to pay for the trip. That night I was unable to sleep. I was effectively alone. Stanley, exhausted from the marriage of Prozac and Vodka, had plunged headlong into sleep an hour earlier, Riley curled at his side. Toby dogged my steps as I walked into the library and began to look for a book to read. I hadn’t read a book in I don’t know how long. It made sense that I hadn’t read. And not reading seemed related to my not writing. For, if I couldn’t lose myself in the words, the story of another, how could I lose myself in the story I needed to tell? I pulled Graham Green’s “Travels With My Aunt,” off a shelf and began to read. The first line was “I met my Aunt Augusta for the first time in more than half a century at my mother’s funeral.” My new book opens with a funeral so my pulling Green’s book off the shelf seemed more fortuitous than random.
After our dad died, our youngest brother Kenon, told us about the day mom and dad dropped him off at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh his freshman year. Kenon became unsure as they were getting ready to leave him and head back to the Bronx. My father pulled him aside and told him, “If I didn’t think you could do this, I wouldn’t leave you here.”
Kenon had chosen his path and dad delivered him to the head of it. When he ‘d hesitated beginning his journey, dad had nudged him forward. Just as he seemed to be nudging me in my dream.
Dear D.:
I went for a walk today in the snow. As I stood waiting to cross the street, I looked up at the sky, the snow-covered roofs edging the snow-filled sky. I remembered standing on that same corner and looking up into a fall sky, the leaves on the trees red-orange-red, so that I had felt as if I had been staring into the heart of a fire. C. had been alive then, and I had felt warmed by his love, brilliant as that tree.
A childhood fancy captured me suddenly, and I lay down in the snow and, moving my arms and legs in a sweeping arc, made a “snow angel.” I tired quickly and lay still for a moment within that casket of snow and ice. A memory of C.—of C., naked and beautiful, holding a single yellow rose against his chest—reached up and tugged at my heart, pulling me to my feet, leading me away. I left grief behind, buried in a shallow grave.
I watched the snow fall. I watched a snowflake fall for each life that had been lost. I watched a snowflake fall for each tear that had been shed over a life that had been lost. I watched a king’s ransom in snowflakes, like diamonds and pearls, fall soundlessly to the ground.
Love,
S.
—Excerpt from “The Cross,” Damaged Angels
Ode to Words (Part 3): Silence
My father taught me the value of silence. It was from him that I learned it takes more strength to hold your tongue than to loose it. Daddy was always the quiet one in our house. My mother’s voice was the dominant, reasoning soundtrack. My brothers’ voices were like murmurs on the wind .I was the noisy, unruly, talkative one. I was “like a clapper bell from hell,” my quiet father insisted.
I spent my adolescence resenting my father’s silence, my twenties and thirties trying to understand it, only to discover in my forties that daddy wasn’t intentionally silent: he only spoke the words that needed to be spoken. By the time I entered my 50s, he ended nearly every phone call with “I love you.” He used his words sparingly, saying only what needed to be said. If he told me over and over that he loved me it was because he knew I needed to hear he loved me.
For me, noisy kid that I was, my father’s silence was particularly jarring when set against my mother’s loquaciousness. Her words like foot soldiers ran onto the battlefield only to trip on the cliff edge and tumble into the abyss of his silence—at least that’s how it seemed to me in my fevered writer’s imagination: an endless, tireless army of words tumbling into the abyss of silence.
If you’ve read any of my early work, you may have noticed that one of my recurring themes is “silence.’ This is hardly surprising given my stories are nearly all grounded in truth, in my lived experiences. A big part of that lived experience was the quietness of my father.
The excerpt below, from one of my short stories, “2 Rivers,” is one of my favorites, in part because it was inspired by my parents and how I saw them at the time:
EXCERPT
My mother was a professional florist; she orchestrated stunning arrangements in priceless porcelain vases for people with no sense of beauty or smell. She talked constantly, compulsively. To my father. To herself. To her minions of flowers. Her voice filled the empty rooms around her like sunshine after a rain. Her words tumbled over each other, reaching, grasping air, plunging hysterically into the void of my father’s silence. Her voice entertained him, seduced him, very rarely elicited his laughter, sometimes accused him.
My mother’s voice underscored my childhood memories like a Max Steiner score. It was, of course, her voice that welcomed me home, wafting down the stairs, “Luke, is that you?”
Her voice greeted me at the front door, embraced me, backed away holding me at arm’s length, then pulled me to her bosom and escorted me through the house. It was as if her loquaciousness could compensate for his resolute silence. Or did it perpetrate it? For even if he had been inclined to speak, he would not have been able to get a word in edgewise.
In that house, the scent of flowers suffocated me. Like my father’s silence. Like my mother’s voice. Her words, serfs that had once done my bidding—cajoling me out of a mood, entertaining me, comforting my distress—now rose up against me, their feudal lord. An army of words, taking up arms, striking down the nation of me.
I had to leave, had to get back to Seth, to make him understand. My mother’s voice escorted me to my car, hugged me one last time, wished me safe passage, urged my speedy return.
—From “2 Rivers,” Damaged Angels
Conceptually, I see writing creative fiction as a way to create art from found objects. Thus, everything around me, finds its way into my work as a found object; I don’t so much invent as retell, observe, and detail.
I’ll be at the AWP Writer’s Conference in Tampa, FL next month where I’ll be joining fellow authors Alan Lessik and Kathy Anderson on a panel discussing “Writing LGBTQ Fiction Based on Real People.” My father will almost certainly come up. I hope you can join us for the discussion.
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
Writing LGBTQ Fiction Based on Real People
Novels and short stories are often shaped by real events happening to real people that they know. Three LGBTQ writers will talk about the real people within their stories and how the creative process changed both the characters and ultimately the authors themselves. For LGBTQ writers, exploring these stories become an exploration of our larger community and the known and unknown histories of our lives. Each of our writers will discuss these themes and read from their works.
Workshop # F124
Room 11, Convention Center, First Floor
Friday, March 9, 2018
9:00 am -10:15 am
______________
I spent my adolescence resenting my father’s silence, my twenties and thirties trying to understand it, only to discover in my forties that daddy wasn’t intentionally silent: he only spoke the words that needed to be spoken. By the time I entered my 50s, he ended nearly every phone call with “I love you.” He used his words sparingly, saying only what needed to be said. If he told me over and over that he loved me it was because he knew I needed to hear he loved me.
For me, noisy kid that I was, my father’s silence was particularly jarring when set against my mother’s loquaciousness. Her words like foot soldiers ran onto the battlefield only to trip on the cliff edge and tumble into the abyss of his silence—at least that’s how it seemed to me in my fevered writer’s imagination: an endless, tireless army of words tumbling into the abyss of silence.
If you’ve read any of my early work, you may have noticed that one of my recurring themes is “silence.’ This is hardly surprising given my stories are nearly all grounded in truth, in my lived experiences. A big part of that lived experience was the quietness of my father.
The excerpt below, from one of my short stories, “2 Rivers,” is one of my favorites, in part because it was inspired by my parents and how I saw them at the time:
EXCERPT
My mother was a professional florist; she orchestrated stunning arrangements in priceless porcelain vases for people with no sense of beauty or smell. She talked constantly, compulsively. To my father. To herself. To her minions of flowers. Her voice filled the empty rooms around her like sunshine after a rain. Her words tumbled over each other, reaching, grasping air, plunging hysterically into the void of my father’s silence. Her voice entertained him, seduced him, very rarely elicited his laughter, sometimes accused him.
My mother’s voice underscored my childhood memories like a Max Steiner score. It was, of course, her voice that welcomed me home, wafting down the stairs, “Luke, is that you?”
Her voice greeted me at the front door, embraced me, backed away holding me at arm’s length, then pulled me to her bosom and escorted me through the house. It was as if her loquaciousness could compensate for his resolute silence. Or did it perpetrate it? For even if he had been inclined to speak, he would not have been able to get a word in edgewise.
In that house, the scent of flowers suffocated me. Like my father’s silence. Like my mother’s voice. Her words, serfs that had once done my bidding—cajoling me out of a mood, entertaining me, comforting my distress—now rose up against me, their feudal lord. An army of words, taking up arms, striking down the nation of me.
I had to leave, had to get back to Seth, to make him understand. My mother’s voice escorted me to my car, hugged me one last time, wished me safe passage, urged my speedy return.
—From “2 Rivers,” Damaged Angels
Conceptually, I see writing creative fiction as a way to create art from found objects. Thus, everything around me, finds its way into my work as a found object; I don’t so much invent as retell, observe, and detail.
I’ll be at the AWP Writer’s Conference in Tampa, FL next month where I’ll be joining fellow authors Alan Lessik and Kathy Anderson on a panel discussing “Writing LGBTQ Fiction Based on Real People.” My father will almost certainly come up. I hope you can join us for the discussion.
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
Writing LGBTQ Fiction Based on Real People
Novels and short stories are often shaped by real events happening to real people that they know. Three LGBTQ writers will talk about the real people within their stories and how the creative process changed both the characters and ultimately the authors themselves. For LGBTQ writers, exploring these stories become an exploration of our larger community and the known and unknown histories of our lives. Each of our writers will discuss these themes and read from their works.
Workshop # F124
Room 11, Convention Center, First Floor
Friday, March 9, 2018
9:00 am -10:15 am
______________
Larry Benjamin's blog - This Writer's Life
The writer's life is as individual and strange as each writer. I'll document my journey as a writer here.
...more
- Larry Benjamin's profile
- 126 followers
