Paper Ceiling?
Sara Oliver Gordus
A creative writing professor once said that he thought I still believed that there was something mystical about the writing process. I needed to let that go, he said – the sense of thinking that writing meant throwing everything into a black box, crossing my fingers and hoping it would come out sparkling. Writing was a skill to be mastered, like welding or sausage-making. It required a thoughtful and consistent process honed over time. I liked this advice – it took a lot of pressure off of me. I didn’t need to pray I’d find a golden ticket each time I opened up Microsoft Word. I just needed to draw confidence from developing my skills, from becoming a better writer. That self-validation (wow, that sounds so self-help), has armed me as I’ve sent my stories out into the literary world, where external validation is hard to come by. I want to think of becoming a “successful” writer as more like a trip through the sausage factory. A grind (I kill me) with a measurable outcome, just as long as I remember to use the right ingredients and techniques. And despite all this mental cheerleading, in quiet moments, I fear that it might be more of a crapshoot. There are probably more talented people out there writing interesting things than there are bookstore shelves to fill or readers to find them. It is entirely possible that I could do everything “right” and still remain unknown. That’s weighty to think about.
I compare the somewhat nebulous path it takes to become a writer with a capital W to the path I would take to move up the ranks of the large publishing house I work for. I’m not saying it would be easy to one day become company president, but if I think that if that were my goal and I failed, at least, in later reflection, I would be able to pinpoint the stage where I reached my limit. The day I hurled a file folder at the CFO, say, or simply just reprioritized by life goals. Wow, that makes it sound awfully depressing– to think that I could look back on my life and know the point where I faltered. It seems much better to stick with the writing, the crapshoot, and keep on hoping, nay believing, that my next piece of work will be better than the previous one.
It’s a tough gig, this writing, no doubt. But it’s a part of me – I need it. Even if I never top a critic’s list, I’ll be content at the end of my days knowing that I was here and I left something behind – a record of having lived a thoughtful life.
Have a Heart
Molly Meneely
My first moment in the State of New York, I slipped and fell in LaGuardia Airport on the way from the gate to the baggage claim like an idiot, my forty-pound carry-on of books accelerating the descent. Miraculously, two people helped me to my feet and kindly said nothing to amplify my humiliation. But this—my first step? It foreboded doom, and on the sidewalk each day to work, I see it again and again in my head—my knee cap cracking at contact with the urinated pavement, the flail of my borrowed coat a quick flash of beige before the strides of hurryers pave across my back. My lips pressed to cold, flattened gum, I hear the thump of a stack of newspaper upon the shelf that is my rear end. “New York Times Sunday, New York Post,” hawks the woman above my flattened body.
“Have a heart” calls the troll-voiced man collecting donations each day as I leave the deli with my latte I convince myself I pay for by walking everywhere. “Help is on the way” reads the circular button above the office building elevator numbers which I’m assuming would light up if I were really in trouble. “If I were a gay prostitute, that’d be a different matter altogether” said the man in front of me on the sidewalk two nights ago, and I think, no kidding, that would really be something to write about.
Because how can I write this place, this bulb of literary, cultural, urban, American brightness? How dare I feel unique to be dazzled by the energy of it all?
But I do. I do have a heart. And it’s my heart that clenches each time I step outside, squeezing itself dry, again and again drafting that moment on the edge of something—a moment that hovers, without oxygen or sense, birthing stars in my eyes and a flicker of what the depths of things can be—all before the world begins to flow again and I can never be the same. It’s exactly why we jump out of planes or fall in love, or move here. To get back to that place. The place inside our minds that takes our breath away, that permits us to ride upon the wind like space ships or voices. The only help I know to get there, see, is to keep writing.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Zombies Are Horrible Writers: Advice from Bryan Fry and Sara Oliver Gordus
Trying to Get it Right
Bryan Fry
I am a writer, husband, and father of three. So lately, when someone asks me about my profession, I tell them I’m training to be a professional juggler which draws a lot more attention than when I say I’m a writer. If I’m a writer, the conversation halts because my acquaintance has met one of our types and does not want to travel down another path of strange intellectualism. If I’m a juggler, I’ve broken the ice with a bad joke and I find it easier to slide into a comfort zone, minimizing my romantic profession and getting down to the real, matter-of-fact purpose of life: children.
Approaching eight, Gracie is the oldest member of our troupe and now that she is in second grade and finishing her first year of piano lessons, I’m relearning the art of concentration and detail. With writing, cleaning, and continuous diaper changing, it is difficult to find fifteen minutes to sit down and help with her studies and some days, when the work piles up, I break down into a trance, a real zombie-like state. If you’re a juggler like I am, this is important to avoid. Zombies are horrible writers.
Needless to say, Gracie hates homework and piano practice. After a few minutes of either, she begins to wiggle around, stare up at the ceiling, or break into guttural laughter when she hears her little brother sing, “shake yo bootay.” Of course, this is to be expected because she is young and her mind is free, but I often hear myself telling her to pay attention to detail. When she writes words wildly in her notebook, I have her erase them and start again. When she misses the second beat in a half note, I point it out.
“Try it again,” I say.
Starting over is a hard concept to grasp, and I try not to force my daughter too hard for fear she’ll end up hating school and music altogether. But more importantly, I realize I’m telling her what I’m constantly trying to tell myself. For years, I pushed writing aside because I was waiting for moments when words would begin to rain down and I’d have no other choice but sit down and pound them out. I admit I’ve felt electrifying moments when writing seemed easier. But those don’t happen very often, definitely not every day, and they don’t last long.
No. Writing is concentration. It’s starting over, erasing and trying again. If you walk into a music building, like the one my daughter practices her lessons in, you’ll hear music through the doors of the little rooms where musicians spend hours every day practicing, repeating the same three measures over and over until they get it right. Isn’t that what writers do?
I make it a point to write every day. This is difficult for a juggler, but it’s something I must do. I lock myself up in my own little room where I spend at least an hour writing and rewriting sentences. When the work isn’t going well, it makes it easier to know that I’m just practicing my own little language, twisting sentences around, replacing lame verbs, and chopping out corny devices. I know eventually I’ll get it right.
**********************************************
Bryan Fry lives and writes in Pullman, Washington with his wife and three children.
**********************************************
Snooze3
Sara Oliver Gordus
I set my alarm for 5:00 AM each weekday and hit the snooze button three times. Each time, I need to propel my self out of bed, stumble across the room, blindly press the snooze button, and flop back into bed. I must do this in order to gradually accept the injustice of leaving the warm cocoon of my dreams. Beep, propel, stumble, press, flop. Three times. My husband is a wonderful man.
I torture myself this way so I can write in the mornings. Does this make me a morning person? Not in the slightest. I obviously don’t wake up early naturally and it’s a struggle every single day. I strive to get up at 5:30, but sometimes it’s 6. Any time spent is better than nothing, right? I don’t know why I’m asking your approval. Of course it’s right. It’s right for me.
I stick with it until about seven when the rising sun begins to glare on my keyboard and my coffee cup is empty and cold. My mind is quieter in the morning. My inclination toward anxiety and self-criticism is still groggy and I can write fairly unencumbered by my own self-doubt. I can get my words out in a quiet, lucid space before inviting my editor brain in.
Robert Pinsky purportedly was once asked by a student how one could become a great writer and a noted one. Pinsky’s alleged response: “Three words. Ass. In. Chair.” Well, my ass is in my chair and its 6:33 in the morning. I’m drinking black tea because I was too tired to make coffee. But I’m doing what I love, right? Well, I love the outcome of my writing, but damn, the process sure is hell.
**********************************************
Sara Oliver Gordus was born in California and now resides in Massachusetts, where she is an associate editor at a textbook publisher. Her fiction has previously appeared in the Jamaica Observer. She is a graduate of the University of California at Davis and Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She celebrated her marriage last August.
**********************************************
Bryan Fry
I am a writer, husband, and father of three. So lately, when someone asks me about my profession, I tell them I’m training to be a professional juggler which draws a lot more attention than when I say I’m a writer. If I’m a writer, the conversation halts because my acquaintance has met one of our types and does not want to travel down another path of strange intellectualism. If I’m a juggler, I’ve broken the ice with a bad joke and I find it easier to slide into a comfort zone, minimizing my romantic profession and getting down to the real, matter-of-fact purpose of life: children.
Approaching eight, Gracie is the oldest member of our troupe and now that she is in second grade and finishing her first year of piano lessons, I’m relearning the art of concentration and detail. With writing, cleaning, and continuous diaper changing, it is difficult to find fifteen minutes to sit down and help with her studies and some days, when the work piles up, I break down into a trance, a real zombie-like state. If you’re a juggler like I am, this is important to avoid. Zombies are horrible writers.
Needless to say, Gracie hates homework and piano practice. After a few minutes of either, she begins to wiggle around, stare up at the ceiling, or break into guttural laughter when she hears her little brother sing, “shake yo bootay.” Of course, this is to be expected because she is young and her mind is free, but I often hear myself telling her to pay attention to detail. When she writes words wildly in her notebook, I have her erase them and start again. When she misses the second beat in a half note, I point it out.
“Try it again,” I say.
Starting over is a hard concept to grasp, and I try not to force my daughter too hard for fear she’ll end up hating school and music altogether. But more importantly, I realize I’m telling her what I’m constantly trying to tell myself. For years, I pushed writing aside because I was waiting for moments when words would begin to rain down and I’d have no other choice but sit down and pound them out. I admit I’ve felt electrifying moments when writing seemed easier. But those don’t happen very often, definitely not every day, and they don’t last long.
No. Writing is concentration. It’s starting over, erasing and trying again. If you walk into a music building, like the one my daughter practices her lessons in, you’ll hear music through the doors of the little rooms where musicians spend hours every day practicing, repeating the same three measures over and over until they get it right. Isn’t that what writers do?
I make it a point to write every day. This is difficult for a juggler, but it’s something I must do. I lock myself up in my own little room where I spend at least an hour writing and rewriting sentences. When the work isn’t going well, it makes it easier to know that I’m just practicing my own little language, twisting sentences around, replacing lame verbs, and chopping out corny devices. I know eventually I’ll get it right.
**********************************************
Bryan Fry lives and writes in Pullman, Washington with his wife and three children.
**********************************************
Snooze3
Sara Oliver Gordus
I set my alarm for 5:00 AM each weekday and hit the snooze button three times. Each time, I need to propel my self out of bed, stumble across the room, blindly press the snooze button, and flop back into bed. I must do this in order to gradually accept the injustice of leaving the warm cocoon of my dreams. Beep, propel, stumble, press, flop. Three times. My husband is a wonderful man.
I torture myself this way so I can write in the mornings. Does this make me a morning person? Not in the slightest. I obviously don’t wake up early naturally and it’s a struggle every single day. I strive to get up at 5:30, but sometimes it’s 6. Any time spent is better than nothing, right? I don’t know why I’m asking your approval. Of course it’s right. It’s right for me.
I stick with it until about seven when the rising sun begins to glare on my keyboard and my coffee cup is empty and cold. My mind is quieter in the morning. My inclination toward anxiety and self-criticism is still groggy and I can write fairly unencumbered by my own self-doubt. I can get my words out in a quiet, lucid space before inviting my editor brain in.
Robert Pinsky purportedly was once asked by a student how one could become a great writer and a noted one. Pinsky’s alleged response: “Three words. Ass. In. Chair.” Well, my ass is in my chair and its 6:33 in the morning. I’m drinking black tea because I was too tired to make coffee. But I’m doing what I love, right? Well, I love the outcome of my writing, but damn, the process sure is hell.
**********************************************
Sara Oliver Gordus was born in California and now resides in Massachusetts, where she is an associate editor at a textbook publisher. Her fiction has previously appeared in the Jamaica Observer. She is a graduate of the University of California at Davis and Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She celebrated her marriage last August.
**********************************************
Monday, June 25, 2007
Having a Heart, Finding Contentment: Molly Meneely & Sara Oliver Gordus
Help is on the Way
Molly Meneely
I have just become the greatest writer cliché. I moved to New York this month, and I would like to Make It. Too bad no one gives a rat’s ass (and that actually means something here) about the fact I consider myself a writer and have only an armful of old notebooks and a few small credits to prove it. At least I didn’t move to Los Angeles to act.
But the city is lapping me up, at least in some ways that don’t matter at all. Consider the wind, whose gusts, exuberant to the point of violence, rocket me up 7th Avenue to my epically boring day job, propelling my hair into a galactic tangle above my head. Or the broad, dawdling snowflakes that hover over intersections, luring me to take a deep inhalation of winter—only to find myself drowning in the sour molecules of the sewer, the burdened fumes that could only be subway-born, or the thick and salty cooking smell of sausages and franks (what is the difference anyway?) sizzling nearby which convince me one can eat affordably anywhere if you aren’t picky about the content of your meat products. The instantaneous bumps and brushes of shoulders, bags, and U.S. postal service push carts—my path to most anywhere has evolved into an infinite series of collisions as we all try to out-jaywalk each other in front of an accelerating cab. These physical connections lack the soft stroke of a lover I’ll surely be months without, but still seem the most exhilarating human contact—that briefcase against my ribs—it’s the city battering me, egging me on: You really like think you’ll make it out alive? I do, I do.
My first moment in the State of New York, I slipped and fell in LaGuardia Airport on the way from the gate to the baggage claim like an idiot, my forty-pound carry-on of books accelerating the descent. Miraculously, two people helped me to my feet and kindly said nothing to amplify my humiliation. But this—my first step? It foreboded doom, and on the sidewalk each day to work, I see it again and again in my head as if happening anew—my knee cap cracking at contact with the urinated pavement, the flail of my borrowed coat a quick flash of beige before the strides of hurryers pave across my back. My lips pressed to cold, flattened gum, I hear the thump of a stack of newspaper upon the shelf that is my rear end. “New York Times Sunday, New York Post,” hawks a woman above my flattened body.
“Have a heart” calls the troll-voiced man collecting donations each day as I leave the deli with my latte I convince myself I pay for by walking everywhere. “Help is on the way” reads the circular button above the office building elevator numbers which I’m assuming would light up if I were really in trouble. “If I were a gay prostitute, that’d be a different matter altogether” said the man in front of me on the sidewalk two nights ago, and I think, no kidding, that would really be something to write about.
Because how can I write this place, this bulb of literary, cultural, urban, American brightness? How dare I feel unique to be dazzled by the energy of it all?
But I do. I do have a heart. And it’s my heart that clenches each time I step outside, squeezing itself dry, again and again drafting that moment on the edge of something—a moment that hovers, without oxygen or sense, birthing stars in my eyes and a flicker of what the depths of things can be—all before the world begins to flow again and I can never be the same. It’s exactly why we jump out of planes or fall in love, or move here. To get back to that place. The place inside our minds that takes our breath away, that permits us to ride upon the wind like space ships or voices. The only help I know to get there, see, is to keep writing.
*********************************************
Molly Meneely lives and writes in New York, in addition to working in editorial at an academic publisher where her time spent teaching composition at Arizona State University is actually coming in handy. She has her M.F.A. from ASU and her B.A. from Stanford. She has been published in the Blood Orange Review, SOMA Magazine, and GetOut! Phoenix and used to be a professional ballet dancer. In her free time, she smells the roses and, relatedly, gets passed by speed walkers while jogging in Central Park. *********************************************
Those Who Can’t Do
Sara Oliver Gordus
I work at a publishing company, so it’s no surprise that I work with people who love books. No, I don’t take three martini lunches with Michael Chabon or Zadie Smith (besides, I think those lunches have been replaced with two-Pinot dinners). I work with academics on college textbooks. The majority of my coworkers have degrees in English and have smart observations when our office book club meets every six weeks or so at a restaurant that we try to nebulously tie into the book’s theme. Watership Down? No doubt a vegetarian dining spot. Our discussions are at times rather insightful and I’m impressed and thankful to be around so many people who value literature.
Some of my coworkers even write and, with a few people, I have formed an informal writing group. It’s tough though. I had to ease up somewhat on my fear of blurring the line between my professional self (capable, upbeat) and my writer self (nuanced, occasionally sarcastic). I think it helped that I didn’t often work directly with those in my writing group. Generally, I don’t talk about my writing much at work. Perhaps out of fear of being a publishing company cliché – “I’m an associate editor, but what I really want to do is write!” (Insert big blinking eyes and vacant smile here). But when my writing does come up, many people say, “Oh, I used to write, I should really get back to it,” and “It’s so hard to find the time.” And that really is the crux of things; once you commit yourself to an adult, full-time job, things change. A job produces tangible benefits, namely money, but makes it harder to prioritize other goals in life, like writing. And who, but a fortunate few with means or a very unfortunate few without, doesn’t eventually succumb to the lure of a paycheck?
A writer of poignant, regret-filled travelogues once told me that a writer should pick a job he hates. That way, he won’t become too content, too lazy, and therefore he could ensure that his writing is his number one priority. I took this advice once, inadvertently, when I found myself in the unfortunate position of having a job I hated. I felt angry and resentful all the time at work. My time away from work was spent de-compressing and fretting about finding another job. I wrote a lot less. The best situation is to find a job you are content with (even if it doesn’t speak to your soul), and make sure the hours are fairly well defined so you can treat your writing time like a second job. If the people you work with like books, well, that’s a bonus.
*********************************************
Sara Oliver Gordus was born in California and now resides in Massachusetts, where she is an associate editor at a textbook publisher. Her fiction has appeared in the Jamaica Observer and Blood Orange Review. She is a graduate of the University of California at Davis and Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She celebrated her marriage this August.
*********************************************
Molly Meneely
I have just become the greatest writer cliché. I moved to New York this month, and I would like to Make It. Too bad no one gives a rat’s ass (and that actually means something here) about the fact I consider myself a writer and have only an armful of old notebooks and a few small credits to prove it. At least I didn’t move to Los Angeles to act.
But the city is lapping me up, at least in some ways that don’t matter at all. Consider the wind, whose gusts, exuberant to the point of violence, rocket me up 7th Avenue to my epically boring day job, propelling my hair into a galactic tangle above my head. Or the broad, dawdling snowflakes that hover over intersections, luring me to take a deep inhalation of winter—only to find myself drowning in the sour molecules of the sewer, the burdened fumes that could only be subway-born, or the thick and salty cooking smell of sausages and franks (what is the difference anyway?) sizzling nearby which convince me one can eat affordably anywhere if you aren’t picky about the content of your meat products. The instantaneous bumps and brushes of shoulders, bags, and U.S. postal service push carts—my path to most anywhere has evolved into an infinite series of collisions as we all try to out-jaywalk each other in front of an accelerating cab. These physical connections lack the soft stroke of a lover I’ll surely be months without, but still seem the most exhilarating human contact—that briefcase against my ribs—it’s the city battering me, egging me on: You really like think you’ll make it out alive? I do, I do.
My first moment in the State of New York, I slipped and fell in LaGuardia Airport on the way from the gate to the baggage claim like an idiot, my forty-pound carry-on of books accelerating the descent. Miraculously, two people helped me to my feet and kindly said nothing to amplify my humiliation. But this—my first step? It foreboded doom, and on the sidewalk each day to work, I see it again and again in my head as if happening anew—my knee cap cracking at contact with the urinated pavement, the flail of my borrowed coat a quick flash of beige before the strides of hurryers pave across my back. My lips pressed to cold, flattened gum, I hear the thump of a stack of newspaper upon the shelf that is my rear end. “New York Times Sunday, New York Post,” hawks a woman above my flattened body.
“Have a heart” calls the troll-voiced man collecting donations each day as I leave the deli with my latte I convince myself I pay for by walking everywhere. “Help is on the way” reads the circular button above the office building elevator numbers which I’m assuming would light up if I were really in trouble. “If I were a gay prostitute, that’d be a different matter altogether” said the man in front of me on the sidewalk two nights ago, and I think, no kidding, that would really be something to write about.
Because how can I write this place, this bulb of literary, cultural, urban, American brightness? How dare I feel unique to be dazzled by the energy of it all?
But I do. I do have a heart. And it’s my heart that clenches each time I step outside, squeezing itself dry, again and again drafting that moment on the edge of something—a moment that hovers, without oxygen or sense, birthing stars in my eyes and a flicker of what the depths of things can be—all before the world begins to flow again and I can never be the same. It’s exactly why we jump out of planes or fall in love, or move here. To get back to that place. The place inside our minds that takes our breath away, that permits us to ride upon the wind like space ships or voices. The only help I know to get there, see, is to keep writing.
*********************************************
Molly Meneely lives and writes in New York, in addition to working in editorial at an academic publisher where her time spent teaching composition at Arizona State University is actually coming in handy. She has her M.F.A. from ASU and her B.A. from Stanford. She has been published in the Blood Orange Review, SOMA Magazine, and GetOut! Phoenix and used to be a professional ballet dancer. In her free time, she smells the roses and, relatedly, gets passed by speed walkers while jogging in Central Park. *********************************************
Those Who Can’t Do
Sara Oliver Gordus
I work at a publishing company, so it’s no surprise that I work with people who love books. No, I don’t take three martini lunches with Michael Chabon or Zadie Smith (besides, I think those lunches have been replaced with two-Pinot dinners). I work with academics on college textbooks. The majority of my coworkers have degrees in English and have smart observations when our office book club meets every six weeks or so at a restaurant that we try to nebulously tie into the book’s theme. Watership Down? No doubt a vegetarian dining spot. Our discussions are at times rather insightful and I’m impressed and thankful to be around so many people who value literature.
Some of my coworkers even write and, with a few people, I have formed an informal writing group. It’s tough though. I had to ease up somewhat on my fear of blurring the line between my professional self (capable, upbeat) and my writer self (nuanced, occasionally sarcastic). I think it helped that I didn’t often work directly with those in my writing group. Generally, I don’t talk about my writing much at work. Perhaps out of fear of being a publishing company cliché – “I’m an associate editor, but what I really want to do is write!” (Insert big blinking eyes and vacant smile here). But when my writing does come up, many people say, “Oh, I used to write, I should really get back to it,” and “It’s so hard to find the time.” And that really is the crux of things; once you commit yourself to an adult, full-time job, things change. A job produces tangible benefits, namely money, but makes it harder to prioritize other goals in life, like writing. And who, but a fortunate few with means or a very unfortunate few without, doesn’t eventually succumb to the lure of a paycheck?
A writer of poignant, regret-filled travelogues once told me that a writer should pick a job he hates. That way, he won’t become too content, too lazy, and therefore he could ensure that his writing is his number one priority. I took this advice once, inadvertently, when I found myself in the unfortunate position of having a job I hated. I felt angry and resentful all the time at work. My time away from work was spent de-compressing and fretting about finding another job. I wrote a lot less. The best situation is to find a job you are content with (even if it doesn’t speak to your soul), and make sure the hours are fairly well defined so you can treat your writing time like a second job. If the people you work with like books, well, that’s a bonus.
*********************************************
Sara Oliver Gordus was born in California and now resides in Massachusetts, where she is an associate editor at a textbook publisher. Her fiction has appeared in the Jamaica Observer and Blood Orange Review. She is a graduate of the University of California at Davis and Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She celebrated her marriage this August.
*********************************************
Friday, June 22, 2007
Collaboration & Creativity: Two Writers Discuss Finding the Time, Energy & Curiosity to Keep Going
Curious George and Jacquie
Mary MacGowan
Regardless of how busy I am, I write poems at the average couple's lovemaking rate: 1-2 per week. I do this not through sheer force of will but mostly out of curiosity. I keep writing and/or revising, day in, day out, because I don’t know how to not write and/or revise. Really. I mean it. My curiosity would probably, literally, kill me.
If I don’t write, then I won’t know what could have happened. And maybe, if I had chosen not to write that night or that day or that moment, then maybe – if I had written at that time – then maybe I would’ve gotten the next poem “right.” Maybe I would’ve been close. Maybe I would’ve surprised myself. Who knows what I could miss.
Maybe my poems get written inside of me, and they will stay there forever unless they become words on paper. And yes, maybe it’s okay to carry around unwritten poems for the rest of my life, but if that’s the case, then I won’t get to know those poems. And they are my biological parents – I can get through life all right never having met them – hey, my adoptive parents are very nice and loving. But I’m just so curious! I just want to know what they look like, and if they look anything at all like me. I think they do. I think they look like me. But first I have to put them on paper to find out.
If I start a new poem in the evening, I print it out and take it to bed with me where I read it and make changes before I fall asleep. Then, in the morning, I plod over to my computer to type the changes. Then I email the poem to myself so I can see it while I’m at work. Then I send it to Jacquie, my soul-poetry-mate.
I’ve never met Jacquie and she hasn’t met me, either. That was a joke. Considering my previous poetic inner voice confession, you probably think Jacquie is a another delusion. But she’s not, she’s a very real person I met (online) through the MFA in Writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University. And that is not a joke. We email each other almost every day to exchange poems and stories. We are brutally honest with each other. We challenge and edit and get stuck and solve problems. We loudly celebrate success with typographic symbols and plenty of exclamation marks. And we will probably never meet in person, because our relationship would probably promptly lose its magic.
*******************************************
Mary MacGowan's bio:
“Regardless of how busy I am, I write poems at the average couple’s lovemaking rate: 1-2 per week. I do this not through sheer force of will but mostly out of curiosity: What will I write next? And how close will I come to saying it right?”
*******************************************
About Wigs
Karen Hausdoerffer
Wednesday, two o’clock, and my co-teacher and I pose in front of the thrift shop mirror, trying on used wigs. Platinum blond. Ink black. Hot-pink. These are the discount wigs, tangled and balding like animal pelts. Tonight we will play “The Price is Right” with our adult, English as a Second Language students, and we want hair to compliment our bridesmaid-dress costumes. By the time we purchase our selections, it’s past three, and time to prep the rest of my lesson. I’ve missed my writing time again.
After finishing my MFA, I began teaching ESL, thinking the flexible hours would give me space to write. But my writing times often fill with lesson planning. The potential hours of preparation expand limitlessly, and the rewards for good lessons come immediately. Tonight, when our students jump out of their seats shouting numbers in English, I’ll fill with adrenaline. On writing afternoons, I work alone, sending off stories to magazines I won’t hear back from for months.
I know why I let these writing afternoons slip away; the question is, why block off the times at all? When I was a teenager, I daydreamed that my writing would help people politically. Now I understand that even when I achieve publication, my audience is small and generally like-minded. If my goal is to help people, maybe I should pour myself exclusively into this job serving immigrants.
Driving home, transformed into a platinum blond, I am not thinking about my students, though. I’m thinking about wigs: wigs as costumes; wigs for women with cancer; plastic wigs; wigs from human hair, itchy wigs in winter; hot wigs in the summer; the black wig that transformed my co-teacher’s face into a stranger’s. I begin fiddling with the first line of a story about small-town teenagers with wigs.
Why create time for writing? Ideas for the story flood me with energy, distinct from the energy of teaching. I want to see language and stories not just as practical skills for surviving in America, but as the source of this feeling of creation. And I want to live in a world where people keep making stories and poems, regardless of where the words go after they are written.
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Karen Hausdoerffer lives and writes in Gunnison, Colorado, one of the coldest towns in the country. She teaches English as a Second Language to adults, and to families with small children. She also teaches writing and Spanish at Western State College. *******************************************
Mary MacGowan
Regardless of how busy I am, I write poems at the average couple's lovemaking rate: 1-2 per week. I do this not through sheer force of will but mostly out of curiosity. I keep writing and/or revising, day in, day out, because I don’t know how to not write and/or revise. Really. I mean it. My curiosity would probably, literally, kill me.
If I don’t write, then I won’t know what could have happened. And maybe, if I had chosen not to write that night or that day or that moment, then maybe – if I had written at that time – then maybe I would’ve gotten the next poem “right.” Maybe I would’ve been close. Maybe I would’ve surprised myself. Who knows what I could miss.
Maybe my poems get written inside of me, and they will stay there forever unless they become words on paper. And yes, maybe it’s okay to carry around unwritten poems for the rest of my life, but if that’s the case, then I won’t get to know those poems. And they are my biological parents – I can get through life all right never having met them – hey, my adoptive parents are very nice and loving. But I’m just so curious! I just want to know what they look like, and if they look anything at all like me. I think they do. I think they look like me. But first I have to put them on paper to find out.
If I start a new poem in the evening, I print it out and take it to bed with me where I read it and make changes before I fall asleep. Then, in the morning, I plod over to my computer to type the changes. Then I email the poem to myself so I can see it while I’m at work. Then I send it to Jacquie, my soul-poetry-mate.
I’ve never met Jacquie and she hasn’t met me, either. That was a joke. Considering my previous poetic inner voice confession, you probably think Jacquie is a another delusion. But she’s not, she’s a very real person I met (online) through the MFA in Writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University. And that is not a joke. We email each other almost every day to exchange poems and stories. We are brutally honest with each other. We challenge and edit and get stuck and solve problems. We loudly celebrate success with typographic symbols and plenty of exclamation marks. And we will probably never meet in person, because our relationship would probably promptly lose its magic.
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Mary MacGowan's bio:
“Regardless of how busy I am, I write poems at the average couple’s lovemaking rate: 1-2 per week. I do this not through sheer force of will but mostly out of curiosity: What will I write next? And how close will I come to saying it right?”
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About Wigs
Karen Hausdoerffer
Wednesday, two o’clock, and my co-teacher and I pose in front of the thrift shop mirror, trying on used wigs. Platinum blond. Ink black. Hot-pink. These are the discount wigs, tangled and balding like animal pelts. Tonight we will play “The Price is Right” with our adult, English as a Second Language students, and we want hair to compliment our bridesmaid-dress costumes. By the time we purchase our selections, it’s past three, and time to prep the rest of my lesson. I’ve missed my writing time again.
After finishing my MFA, I began teaching ESL, thinking the flexible hours would give me space to write. But my writing times often fill with lesson planning. The potential hours of preparation expand limitlessly, and the rewards for good lessons come immediately. Tonight, when our students jump out of their seats shouting numbers in English, I’ll fill with adrenaline. On writing afternoons, I work alone, sending off stories to magazines I won’t hear back from for months.
I know why I let these writing afternoons slip away; the question is, why block off the times at all? When I was a teenager, I daydreamed that my writing would help people politically. Now I understand that even when I achieve publication, my audience is small and generally like-minded. If my goal is to help people, maybe I should pour myself exclusively into this job serving immigrants.
Driving home, transformed into a platinum blond, I am not thinking about my students, though. I’m thinking about wigs: wigs as costumes; wigs for women with cancer; plastic wigs; wigs from human hair, itchy wigs in winter; hot wigs in the summer; the black wig that transformed my co-teacher’s face into a stranger’s. I begin fiddling with the first line of a story about small-town teenagers with wigs.
Why create time for writing? Ideas for the story flood me with energy, distinct from the energy of teaching. I want to see language and stories not just as practical skills for surviving in America, but as the source of this feeling of creation. And I want to live in a world where people keep making stories and poems, regardless of where the words go after they are written.
*******************************************
Karen Hausdoerffer lives and writes in Gunnison, Colorado, one of the coldest towns in the country. She teaches English as a Second Language to adults, and to families with small children. She also teaches writing and Spanish at Western State College. *******************************************
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Telling Stories: An ESL Teacher and Recreation Therapist Write Back
Here is the Story of Itzel
Karen Hausdoerffer
Here are my students, learning English. Here is Lidia, 65 years old, from Santiago, Mexico, half an hour from the sea. Here is Julio, prep-cook at Club Med, wants to read T.S. Eliot in English. Here is Itzel, Indigenous Cora, mother of three. When she found her husband in bed with her niece, she kicked him out of the house and stayed in the U.S. Eduardo is not here; he heard a rumor that la migra was in town.
My co-teacher says, “Americans are so ignorant, and our students have incredible lives. You’re a writer—why don’t you tell their stories?”
And yet here am I, beginning another novel, with a white, middle-class, American protagonist. I have been told, “If we can’t empathize outside our own culture, even in fiction, there is no hope for human understanding.”
So why not write Itzel’s story? My first temptation is to make her a symbol of subaltern strength, this single, twenty-six-year-old woman struggling for her children against an ugly world. That would be a factual story. But a true story is never so easy. There is another piece that I would need to tell. When Itzel found her husband naked with her niece, she blamed thirteen-year-old Juliana for everything. “Men are weak,” she told me in Spanish. “We can’t expect any better of them. But Juliana was like a sister to me.” A sister pulled out of school at age twelve, sent from her home, entrusted with three preschoolers, paid only in food and lodging.
How do I tell that part of the story, embellished with detail, metaphor, epiphany? It’s an important story, and Itzel, with her two jobs and three children, does not have the time or resources to write it. But I ask myself so many questions before beginning: is there a difference between empathy and presumption? Can I trust my own motives as a writer? Could this be misread as racist? How can we judge Itzel, from a culture so different from ours? How can we not judge her, in a story about statutory rape? Is this whole endeavor invading my student’s privacy? My questions paralyze me, and I return to my white protagonist.
Eduardo is mistaken about the migra; they haven’t come to Gunnison all year. But his neighbors swear they saw the vans just this morning. Perhaps then, fear drives what stories we believe, what stories we tell, what stories we can’t bring ourselves to tell. Here is my remaining question, after all the rest grow quiet: which fears do I combat, and which fears do I let guide me?
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Karen Hausdoerffer lives and writes in Gunnison, Colorado, one of the coldest towns in the country. She teaches English as a Second Language to adults, and to families with small children. She also teaches writing and Spanish at Western State College.
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Nursing Home Stories
Mary MacGowan
I work full time at a nursing home. My title is Recreation Therapist, which means I plan and implement activities that are fun and stimulating for the residents on my unit – all of whom are at the end of life. Most people say that they couldn’t imagine doing my job, but for some reason I don’t mind it, which is probably why I do it. I’m paid crap for it, but I find my day relaxing, the benefits good and, best of all, I’ve had some awesome poems come out of it. In fact, I’ve begun a series based on nursing home experiences. The challenge is avoiding over-sentimentality, but so far I feel good about them.
My nursing home poems are often funny. I mean, come on. . . .There’s Libby, who gets angry at me as resident chorus director. She yells at me that everyone is whispering – but, of course, she is the one who is deaf. And there’s Basya, who eats a red bead and refuses to spit it out, and then eats apple pie while miraculously keeping the bead in her mouth, and then, finally, sweetly spits the bead into my hand while looking at me and tsk-tsk-ing like I am the crazy one. These images counteract the sadder ones, like a young man, Barry, who died while I sang for him – he was so thin his body was folded and folded until he was as thin as an origami peace crane.
*******************************************
Mary MacGowan's bio:
“Regardless of how busy I am, I write poems at the average couple’s lovemaking rate: 1-2 per week. I do this not through sheer force of will but mostly out of curiosity: What will I write next? And how close will I come to saying it right?”
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Monday, June 18, 2007
Swingshift Series continues with Mary MacGowan and Karen Hausdoerffer
Angry for Meetby Karen Hausdoerffer
The man meets the woman at the restaurant. Ten adults lean over the sentence in
their books, parsing the English phonemes.
“Meet?” Consuelo says. “Carne? Como steak?”
I picture the man in the story meating his date, smearing prime rib across her face and bare shoulders in some perverse American custom.
“Es diferente,” Georgina tells her classmates. “Pero se pronuncia igual.”
I write the two words on tag-board strips in big letters that smell like markers. I set the cards in front of Manuel. “Which one do you eat?” Manuel picks up M-e-a-t. “Meets the woman? Or meats the woman?” He chooses M-e-e-t. I tape both words to the wall.
Everyone copies meet into notebooks and guesses at definitions. Conocerse like nice to meet you or else reunirse, like have a meeting. Even without its homonym, meet has so many definitions that it does not translate directly into a single Spanish word, let alone into Cora, the indigenous language some students speak.
What about the past tense? Like the people in the story, Georgina met her husband at a restaurant. I cut the card, removing one e and reconstructing the word, met. But why m-e-t? They want to know. Why not m-e-e-t-e-d?
“Because,” I say, “English is a crazy language.”
Unlike children, the adults in my classes begin with mastery of at least one other language. English words are three times removed from the concepts they signify. The picture of meat becomes carne before it becomes m-e-a-t. My students teach me to see English from the outside, to see its rules as startling, rather than inevitable. As a writer, I so often float my hands over a keyboard without even seeing the letters. I like this chance to hold the words in my hands, pass them around the room, pronounce them until the sounds become meaningless even to me: meet, meet, meet, meet, meet. At times, the language opens up, revealing new metaphors invisible to me as a native speaker.
Manuel says, “Meat. Restaurant. Now I am angry.”
Georgina corrects him, “Not angry. Hungry.” She annunciates, so we hear the nasal bight of the ang, and the gut-longing of the ung.
I write these words on tag-board as well and ask everyone to practice with me: clutching our stomachs, we groan “hungry”; scowling, we shout, “angry.” In the spaces between the cards and the silences between the words, I feel the closeness of the concepts along with their signifiers. Anger. Hunger. Two desires that twist in the stomach.
At times, I am angry with English, the way it confounds my students, refusing to settle into regular patters of spelling and usage. But mainly, I am hungry for it, hungry for the language I have grown up in, the language I write in, the language I have ignored, as an insider. I want to devour English, like meat. I want to encounter it, and to join with it, like meet.
Taking Dictation
Mary MacGowan
My inner poetic voice is quite a character. He bosses me around (and yes, he is a he) and he forces me to write, even when I think I don’t have the time. How does he do this, you may ask? He makes me feel miserable until I cave in. I check my emails, do the dishes, bang around the house, all the while wondering what the heck’s wrong with me? And then, finally, it happens.
So I start to write, and this is me, writing: I lean – hard – into the air in front of me, listening carefully to take a kind of dictation from the voice of this entity. Sometimes I get the words right on the first try, but usually I have to “try out” this word or that word, one line or another, and then I ask my inner voice, “Is that it? Did I get it right?” My best poems are the ones that come through the clearest, like FM radio.
And yes, I have a name for him, but I’m not going to reveal that here because it might upset him and then he’ll leave me and then I’ll be on my own and I’ll never write again. And don’t be signing me up for multiple personality therapy, I won’t go. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing wrong with hearing this inner poetic voice; in fact, in the Mary MacGowan Universe he is a national hero.
Mary MacGowan's bio: “Regardless of how busy I am, I write poems at the average couple’s lovemaking rate: 1-2 per week. I do this not through sheer force of will but mostly out of curiosity: What will I write next? And how close will I come to saying it right?”
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Issue 2.3 | Now Available!
Blood Orange Review 2.3 is now here. Go check it out: http://www.bloodorangereview.com/.
Loss, regret, absence: these themes play a dominant role in this issue of Blood Orange Review. I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but I am. I think the selection has less to do with editorial mindset than with a subterranean swell, a collective unconscious, the likes of which inspire David Warren, this issue’s featured artist. As an editor, it’s sometimes eerie to read the works of strangers and feel like you’re eavesdropping on part of a single conversation.
However, this issue is no morose dinner party; these writers are not in a funk. Though they might write of failed relationships, aging, and grief, they do so through the filter of humor, philosophy, religious imagery, culinary arts, nature, technology, and music. Everything they touch and everything that touches them becomes material to be converted into language and meaning.
The Swing Shift Writers Series will continue on Monday with posts from Karen Hausdoerffer and Mary MacGowan. You won't want to miss them!
Loss, regret, absence: these themes play a dominant role in this issue of Blood Orange Review. I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but I am. I think the selection has less to do with editorial mindset than with a subterranean swell, a collective unconscious, the likes of which inspire David Warren, this issue’s featured artist. As an editor, it’s sometimes eerie to read the works of strangers and feel like you’re eavesdropping on part of a single conversation.
However, this issue is no morose dinner party; these writers are not in a funk. Though they might write of failed relationships, aging, and grief, they do so through the filter of humor, philosophy, religious imagery, culinary arts, nature, technology, and music. Everything they touch and everything that touches them becomes material to be converted into language and meaning.
The Swing Shift Writers Series will continue on Monday with posts from Karen Hausdoerffer and Mary MacGowan. You won't want to miss them!
Friday, June 15, 2007
Palpant Dilley on Eisenstein
Film & Diction
Andrea Palpant Dilley
Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein is famous for his theory of filmic montage, the idea that meaning is made through the collision of images, through juxtaposition, and is therefore dialectical in how it “talks” to an audience. He tested his theory by editing together a number of sequences with the same neutral face and then showing it to a test audience: sequence number one showed the neutral face cut next to a bowl of hot oatmeal, and the audience interpreted the scene as expressing hunger; sequence number two showed the neutral face cut next to a crying baby and the scene was interpreted as frustration, etcetera. In other words—meaning came not just from one image, but from the particular syntax of a sequence. The way things were put together changed everything.
Eisenstein’s theory of montage applies more to writing than I ever understand early on. I’ve always had this terrible propensity to over-write, as all my writer-friends can attest. The very first poem I wrote in seventh grade is almost physically painful to read, five lines about a weeping willow tree as a metaphor for suicide composed with totally excessive, over-the-top language. I loved words. Big words. Polysyllabic words. Dramatic, hand-across-the-forehead-with-woe words.
What I have learned since seventh grade, by the simple refining power of time, editing and frank feedback, is that the non-diction aspects of writing are every bit as important as what words I choose to use. The way I put words together carries meaning, the medium is message, the nonverbal nod that means more sometimes than the word “yes.” And simplicity matters: the juxtaposition of two, plain monosyllabic words can be more thrilling to read than the most ornate word, just as well-framed, juxtaposing film images mean more than the most decorated set. As such my understanding of film editing has informed my literary editing. Now when I edit something I’ve written, I read for pacing and sequence and simplicity, I stand back and stare at the dialectical tension of ideas and moods and images all galloping across the page. I have learned to look at the big picture.
My seventh grade teacher managed somehow to look at the big picture, too. She wrote at the top of my weeping willow suicide poem, with the mad kindness of a creative writing teacher, “Great job, you have a knack for writing. Keep at it.” And so I did.
Andrea Palpant Dilley
Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein is famous for his theory of filmic montage, the idea that meaning is made through the collision of images, through juxtaposition, and is therefore dialectical in how it “talks” to an audience. He tested his theory by editing together a number of sequences with the same neutral face and then showing it to a test audience: sequence number one showed the neutral face cut next to a bowl of hot oatmeal, and the audience interpreted the scene as expressing hunger; sequence number two showed the neutral face cut next to a crying baby and the scene was interpreted as frustration, etcetera. In other words—meaning came not just from one image, but from the particular syntax of a sequence. The way things were put together changed everything.
Eisenstein’s theory of montage applies more to writing than I ever understand early on. I’ve always had this terrible propensity to over-write, as all my writer-friends can attest. The very first poem I wrote in seventh grade is almost physically painful to read, five lines about a weeping willow tree as a metaphor for suicide composed with totally excessive, over-the-top language. I loved words. Big words. Polysyllabic words. Dramatic, hand-across-the-forehead-with-woe words.
What I have learned since seventh grade, by the simple refining power of time, editing and frank feedback, is that the non-diction aspects of writing are every bit as important as what words I choose to use. The way I put words together carries meaning, the medium is message, the nonverbal nod that means more sometimes than the word “yes.” And simplicity matters: the juxtaposition of two, plain monosyllabic words can be more thrilling to read than the most ornate word, just as well-framed, juxtaposing film images mean more than the most decorated set. As such my understanding of film editing has informed my literary editing. Now when I edit something I’ve written, I read for pacing and sequence and simplicity, I stand back and stare at the dialectical tension of ideas and moods and images all galloping across the page. I have learned to look at the big picture.
My seventh grade teacher managed somehow to look at the big picture, too. She wrote at the top of my weeping willow suicide poem, with the mad kindness of a creative writing teacher, “Great job, you have a knack for writing. Keep at it.” And so I did.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Andrea Palpant Dilley on Resistance
Writing as Resistance
Andrea Palpant Dilley
I have what most writers would kill for: a home office all my own, a work schedule that allows me to write for three hours every afternoon, and uninterrupted solitude. No kids. No commute. No complications. I wake up in the morning, yawn a few times, ruffle my hair, soak down some cereal, and then wander down a five-foot hallway into my office, one wall away from where I just woke up. After five hours of work as a long distance documentary producer, I wander back into the kitchen, make myself tea and mark the end of work and the start of, well, more work.
I have Virginia Woolf’s “Room of My Own” but my room lacks something: a place to depart from, a place to push against. Here’s what I mean. TS Eliot went to work in the morning, spent all day at the bank lifting and sifting slim bills of money and then went home to write. He departed from somewhere and arrived somewhere else. And maybe like the rest of us, on his way home he bitched and moaned and muttered about his boss before he sat down to write Prufrock with the indelible line, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” and my other favorite, “I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” I, on the other hand, inhabit the same space for work and writing which I have discovered is quite complicating mentally. I fight morale fatigue more often. I confuse writing with work and work with writing. I get lonely spending all day in solitude.
So if I had the chance, I might trade Eliot his writing life for mine. Writing is an act of resistance, not in the civil-political sense necessarily (although certainly it can be that), but in the most simple, psychological sense of pushing up against something. It puts a healthy sense of distance between you and everything around you. Now I will leave work behind and the boss with the grating voice and I will go home to my writing. This act of departing-and-arriving creates definition. Demarcation. A space to reflect. I imagine that it feels sort of like jumping off a derailing train—you leave behind the dirty locomotive of daily labor, and you land in the dirt on your own terms and your own feet. There is freedom to it. A sense of arriving at a certain kind of wilderness. It’s up to you, now, to mark the path home.
Andrea Palpant Dilley
I have what most writers would kill for: a home office all my own, a work schedule that allows me to write for three hours every afternoon, and uninterrupted solitude. No kids. No commute. No complications. I wake up in the morning, yawn a few times, ruffle my hair, soak down some cereal, and then wander down a five-foot hallway into my office, one wall away from where I just woke up. After five hours of work as a long distance documentary producer, I wander back into the kitchen, make myself tea and mark the end of work and the start of, well, more work.
I have Virginia Woolf’s “Room of My Own” but my room lacks something: a place to depart from, a place to push against. Here’s what I mean. TS Eliot went to work in the morning, spent all day at the bank lifting and sifting slim bills of money and then went home to write. He departed from somewhere and arrived somewhere else. And maybe like the rest of us, on his way home he bitched and moaned and muttered about his boss before he sat down to write Prufrock with the indelible line, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” and my other favorite, “I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” I, on the other hand, inhabit the same space for work and writing which I have discovered is quite complicating mentally. I fight morale fatigue more often. I confuse writing with work and work with writing. I get lonely spending all day in solitude.
So if I had the chance, I might trade Eliot his writing life for mine. Writing is an act of resistance, not in the civil-political sense necessarily (although certainly it can be that), but in the most simple, psychological sense of pushing up against something. It puts a healthy sense of distance between you and everything around you. Now I will leave work behind and the boss with the grating voice and I will go home to my writing. This act of departing-and-arriving creates definition. Demarcation. A space to reflect. I imagine that it feels sort of like jumping off a derailing train—you leave behind the dirty locomotive of daily labor, and you land in the dirt on your own terms and your own feet. There is freedom to it. A sense of arriving at a certain kind of wilderness. It’s up to you, now, to mark the path home.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Swing Shift Series: Andrea Palpant Dilley
Writing vs. Editing
Andrea Palpant Dilley
When I was 23 I took a job at a local film company as a production assistant (PA), a starter position that involved stocking the fridge with soda pop, emptying the recycling bin by the copy machine, and buying Starbucks drinks for hot shot producers who wore tight shirts and talked on cell phones. I was a fresh college graduate with an English major and no technical know-how in the production business. My only relevant skill, my only remnant of dignity, was writing. I worked in the basement cubicle room called affectionately “the rat maze,” where once the CFO came down two flights of stairs to stand awkwardly by my desk and ask me to proof read his report. Writing had business value. I had something to leverage. So after a few years of writing and PA-ing, I worked my way into a producing position in the Nonfiction Division, where I started directing and editing documentary stories.
Director David Mamet famously said that a film happens in the edit room. It is arguably the most important part of the process, a very solitary activity that requires sitting in a dark room punching colored buttons for hours on end, not nearly as sexy a process as people outside the industry imagine it is. My editing in many ways is an almost opposite process to my writing. Writing is mostly a positive, constructive process of building up. Word. Metaphor. Plot development. Image editing is mostly a negative process of exclusion and cutting down, like sculpting. Cull. Cut. Splice. With writing I’m tethered to the internal life, laboring with memory and imagination. With editing I’m tethered to the external world, limited to what has been said and seen and shown. I can’t reimagine my characters, I can’t change the way they walk on camera the same way I can sift through verbs on paper, changing the lilt of things with a couple of key strokes.
I remember an old war veteran I interviewed for a documentary on Japanese American internment during WWII. He had been drafted to serve out of an internment camp, a formative, difficult experience which he detailed to me in an almost two-hour interview one winter day. Leaning forward toward the camera, he said to me before he said anything else, “I’ve never really talked about the war to even my family.” And then he told stories about young men trudging through dark forests in France, and it was the sort of thing I could never have written. It was meant to be told on camera. It was meant for the medium, the same way a poem is meant for the solitary white space of paper. The limits of the documentary medium made it singular and different than other mediums. The boundaries made it beautiful.
Andrea Palpant Dilley
When I was 23 I took a job at a local film company as a production assistant (PA), a starter position that involved stocking the fridge with soda pop, emptying the recycling bin by the copy machine, and buying Starbucks drinks for hot shot producers who wore tight shirts and talked on cell phones. I was a fresh college graduate with an English major and no technical know-how in the production business. My only relevant skill, my only remnant of dignity, was writing. I worked in the basement cubicle room called affectionately “the rat maze,” where once the CFO came down two flights of stairs to stand awkwardly by my desk and ask me to proof read his report. Writing had business value. I had something to leverage. So after a few years of writing and PA-ing, I worked my way into a producing position in the Nonfiction Division, where I started directing and editing documentary stories.
Director David Mamet famously said that a film happens in the edit room. It is arguably the most important part of the process, a very solitary activity that requires sitting in a dark room punching colored buttons for hours on end, not nearly as sexy a process as people outside the industry imagine it is. My editing in many ways is an almost opposite process to my writing. Writing is mostly a positive, constructive process of building up. Word. Metaphor. Plot development. Image editing is mostly a negative process of exclusion and cutting down, like sculpting. Cull. Cut. Splice. With writing I’m tethered to the internal life, laboring with memory and imagination. With editing I’m tethered to the external world, limited to what has been said and seen and shown. I can’t reimagine my characters, I can’t change the way they walk on camera the same way I can sift through verbs on paper, changing the lilt of things with a couple of key strokes.
I remember an old war veteran I interviewed for a documentary on Japanese American internment during WWII. He had been drafted to serve out of an internment camp, a formative, difficult experience which he detailed to me in an almost two-hour interview one winter day. Leaning forward toward the camera, he said to me before he said anything else, “I’ve never really talked about the war to even my family.” And then he told stories about young men trudging through dark forests in France, and it was the sort of thing I could never have written. It was meant to be told on camera. It was meant for the medium, the same way a poem is meant for the solitary white space of paper. The limits of the documentary medium made it singular and different than other mediums. The boundaries made it beautiful.
Andrea Palpant Dilley is a documentary producer and director and has completed In Time of War, an hour program on the Japanese American internment camps of WWII narrated by Patty Duke and broadcast nationally by American Public Television, as well as Sudan: The Path to Peace, a documentary on the current crisis in Sudan which premiered at the Amnesty International Film Festival in Victoria, B.C. Prior to producing Andrea worked as a freelance writer, interviewing among others NPR's Ira Glass and jazz legend Gunther Schueller. Andrea enjoys photography as a personal hobby.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Lenox & Hummel Blogs Continued
My Five-Year Plan
Stephanie Lenox
My grant money will soon be depleted, so while I’m trying to savor my last weeks of free writing time, I’m also trying to look forward and find a job that will fit my financial and literary goals. Job searches require a lot of introspection, and on top of the already high degree of reflection required to write poetry, I’m just about sick of personal pronouns and action verbs. I’m embarrassed by all the versions of my resume floating out there in the hands of strangers. I have the unique opportunity to be roundly rejected on all levels on a daily basis—fu-un!
I recently read a slick magazine article about getting what you want. The inspirational writer said that you must have a vision of what life will look like when you achieve your dream. And then you must work backward from that vision to the present. It seemed like a good idea, so I tried it. My five-year plan happens to involve having my first book published and working happily in a career that involves writing. The vision is clear. I can see it. So what happens just before I achieve this dream? Someone other than myself decides I’m worthy of a book contract or a career position. As a writer (read: control freak) I have a really hard time with that.
It’s easy to get side-tracked by the rejections and absence of control that is a part of the writing life. I try to get by with what I can direct: every day that I write, I am a writer. I don’t need someone’s seal of approval to feel like I’m moving forward in that goal. And soon, hopefully, someone will have the common sense to hire me. In the meantime, I need to keep my poems and resumes out there.
Multi-Tasking
Heather K. Hummel
As a person that must eat, and likes luxuries like organic salad, I work a lot. I’ve averaged two jobs at a time since I was twenty. Right now, I technically have four jobs. Wait: I accepted new contract work today: let’s make that five. So, writing is something that goes with me, everywhere. I revise poems while on the treadmill at the gym. They say iambic pentameter is like a heartbeat; perhaps my meter is always going haywire because I work on it during my cardio routine. I could never be a good formalist; I tried once—I didn’t complete a single poem.
My dedication (or dogged persistence, depending on whom you ask) means that I work on poems at the airport. I routinely work on poems as I sleep. For me, it isn’t a matter of finding more hours in the day to write; I multi-task, and take it with me, always. On road trips, I take notes in my journal about historical markers, native plants and birds, what my family says; these bits and pieces will soon show up in my writing, no doubt.
If you were to surprise me and conduct a strip search, you’d probably find in my pockets: keys, a protein bar, a pen and a poem that is in process and covered in illegible scribbles. You’d rarely find cash.
Once, my brother, a visual artist, told me I was lucky: to make my art, all I need is a pencil—he pointed out that I can write on menus or napkins if I need to. And I try to keep that in mind: my “work”—the work I do to pay the bills and eat—is utilitarian. I will do it as much as needed, but my brain-space is mine and dedicated to writing. And if the rhythm and essence of my poetry is imbued with everything I am up to (running, love-making, cooking dinners)? So be it.
Stephanie Lenox
My grant money will soon be depleted, so while I’m trying to savor my last weeks of free writing time, I’m also trying to look forward and find a job that will fit my financial and literary goals. Job searches require a lot of introspection, and on top of the already high degree of reflection required to write poetry, I’m just about sick of personal pronouns and action verbs. I’m embarrassed by all the versions of my resume floating out there in the hands of strangers. I have the unique opportunity to be roundly rejected on all levels on a daily basis—fu-un!
I recently read a slick magazine article about getting what you want. The inspirational writer said that you must have a vision of what life will look like when you achieve your dream. And then you must work backward from that vision to the present. It seemed like a good idea, so I tried it. My five-year plan happens to involve having my first book published and working happily in a career that involves writing. The vision is clear. I can see it. So what happens just before I achieve this dream? Someone other than myself decides I’m worthy of a book contract or a career position. As a writer (read: control freak) I have a really hard time with that.
It’s easy to get side-tracked by the rejections and absence of control that is a part of the writing life. I try to get by with what I can direct: every day that I write, I am a writer. I don’t need someone’s seal of approval to feel like I’m moving forward in that goal. And soon, hopefully, someone will have the common sense to hire me. In the meantime, I need to keep my poems and resumes out there.
Multi-Tasking
Heather K. Hummel
As a person that must eat, and likes luxuries like organic salad, I work a lot. I’ve averaged two jobs at a time since I was twenty. Right now, I technically have four jobs. Wait: I accepted new contract work today: let’s make that five. So, writing is something that goes with me, everywhere. I revise poems while on the treadmill at the gym. They say iambic pentameter is like a heartbeat; perhaps my meter is always going haywire because I work on it during my cardio routine. I could never be a good formalist; I tried once—I didn’t complete a single poem.
My dedication (or dogged persistence, depending on whom you ask) means that I work on poems at the airport. I routinely work on poems as I sleep. For me, it isn’t a matter of finding more hours in the day to write; I multi-task, and take it with me, always. On road trips, I take notes in my journal about historical markers, native plants and birds, what my family says; these bits and pieces will soon show up in my writing, no doubt.
If you were to surprise me and conduct a strip search, you’d probably find in my pockets: keys, a protein bar, a pen and a poem that is in process and covered in illegible scribbles. You’d rarely find cash.
Once, my brother, a visual artist, told me I was lucky: to make my art, all I need is a pencil—he pointed out that I can write on menus or napkins if I need to. And I try to keep that in mind: my “work”—the work I do to pay the bills and eat—is utilitarian. I will do it as much as needed, but my brain-space is mine and dedicated to writing. And if the rhythm and essence of my poetry is imbued with everything I am up to (running, love-making, cooking dinners)? So be it.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Lenox & Hummel Blogs
Time=Money?
Stephanie Lenox
In the introduction to In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction, Annie Dillard gives no-nonsense advice to new writers, which includes this injunction: “When you are writing full-time (three to four hours a day), go in the room with the book every day, regardless of your feelings.”
Her introduction contains a lot of good advice, and I recommend reading it and the book in its entirety, but what really grabbed me about this statement was that Annie Dillard considers full-time writing to be three to four hours a day! Here I’ve been working on my book and sitting down for eight-hour stretches with my laptop and my brain, putting in a solid work day when Annie (a real writer) recommends half that. My first response was, What does she do with the rest of her day? I guess that’s not important. Like anyone, she probably has a day job, laundry, meals, relationships, social obligations, research, mail.
While examining my response to her statement, I’ve realized that I’ve been needlessly applying a corporate model to my writing work. Why do I need to put in an eight-hour day? Why should I treat myself as a slacker employee if I’d rather read a book or go to an art gallery? Why should I equate the stack of words I produce with success?
Simply put, it doesn’t work that way. Writing, for most people, is not a profitable business. I’ve received a grant to defray the costs of living while I write, but I am not being paid by the hour or the word. Like Robert Graves once said, “There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money either.” So, I’m trying to stifle my inner-Puritan and learn to write and enjoy living without a paycheck.
Work Uniforms
Heather K. Hummel
Sometimes, being a writer feels like I have a body covered in tattoos that are barely hidden by the limits of my clothes. When I dress to go to the college where I teach, there is a thin guise of conservatism and banality, but underneath are illustrations of my entire life philosophy—including the drunken and better-left-forgotten exegesis, in indelible ink no less. Aren’t all writers naked, but camouflaged?
I knew a boy in college that had a smiley face tattooed on his chest; someone somewhere probably recalls that I once wrote an ode to guacamole. “For posterity’s sake” always seemed like such a silly concept to me. As I get older, I can more about each sentence that I write, each image in every poem I make; writing has the power to reveal deep and hidden things, and those things can hurt or heal.
As I write now, it is a bit of a strip tease: those tattoos are being revealed, one shimmy or shake at a time. Paradoxically, my dance with writing is simultaneously more restrained and cautiously executed, and more filled with abandon and utter joy. This is a short life; I’d like it to be densely rich and true. If I pray about my endeavors, it is for that. Then, I sit down to work, and my fingers begin to tap a new rhythm.
Stephanie Lenox
In the introduction to In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction, Annie Dillard gives no-nonsense advice to new writers, which includes this injunction: “When you are writing full-time (three to four hours a day), go in the room with the book every day, regardless of your feelings.”
Her introduction contains a lot of good advice, and I recommend reading it and the book in its entirety, but what really grabbed me about this statement was that Annie Dillard considers full-time writing to be three to four hours a day! Here I’ve been working on my book and sitting down for eight-hour stretches with my laptop and my brain, putting in a solid work day when Annie (a real writer) recommends half that. My first response was, What does she do with the rest of her day? I guess that’s not important. Like anyone, she probably has a day job, laundry, meals, relationships, social obligations, research, mail.
While examining my response to her statement, I’ve realized that I’ve been needlessly applying a corporate model to my writing work. Why do I need to put in an eight-hour day? Why should I treat myself as a slacker employee if I’d rather read a book or go to an art gallery? Why should I equate the stack of words I produce with success?
Simply put, it doesn’t work that way. Writing, for most people, is not a profitable business. I’ve received a grant to defray the costs of living while I write, but I am not being paid by the hour or the word. Like Robert Graves once said, “There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money either.” So, I’m trying to stifle my inner-Puritan and learn to write and enjoy living without a paycheck.
Work Uniforms
Heather K. Hummel
Sometimes, being a writer feels like I have a body covered in tattoos that are barely hidden by the limits of my clothes. When I dress to go to the college where I teach, there is a thin guise of conservatism and banality, but underneath are illustrations of my entire life philosophy—including the drunken and better-left-forgotten exegesis, in indelible ink no less. Aren’t all writers naked, but camouflaged?
I knew a boy in college that had a smiley face tattooed on his chest; someone somewhere probably recalls that I once wrote an ode to guacamole. “For posterity’s sake” always seemed like such a silly concept to me. As I get older, I can more about each sentence that I write, each image in every poem I make; writing has the power to reveal deep and hidden things, and those things can hurt or heal.
As I write now, it is a bit of a strip tease: those tattoos are being revealed, one shimmy or shake at a time. Paradoxically, my dance with writing is simultaneously more restrained and cautiously executed, and more filled with abandon and utter joy. This is a short life; I’d like it to be densely rich and true. If I pray about my endeavors, it is for that. Then, I sit down to work, and my fingers begin to tap a new rhythm.
Friday, June 01, 2007
Welcome to the Swing Shift Writers Series
To kick off the Swing Shift Writers series, the editors of Blood Orange Review give their own thoughts about their personal struggles and tricks with balancing work and writing.
You’re not the boss of me!
Stephanie Lenox
Stanley Bing has recently come out with a new and revised version of his book Crazy Bosses, which was first published in 1992. Since then, he has honed his experience by becoming the boss himself, which has allowed him insight into the insanity of leadership. In the book, he pinpoints five different kinds of crazy bosses:
The Bully
The Paranoid
The Narcissist
The Wimp
The Disaster Hunter
After receiving a project grant that allowed me to quit my job and focus on my writing for several months, I thought my scheduling woes and work frustrations would be over. Now that I’m in complete control of my days, I have had to figure out what kind of boss I’m going to be. Enter: new boss. Same as the old boss.
During the months I’ve worked on my project, I’ve been both micro-manger and absentee leader. I have timesheets and reading lists and submission goals and spreadsheets. I’ve torn myself down to the point I thought about quitting altogether. I’ve managed to write some work I’m proud of, but it is never enough. I’ve had the opportunity to exercise my craziness in many unproductive ways.
Bing explains that “there is a limit to the effectiveness of rationality.” He later recommends that readers “aspire to the most potent level of craziness you can personally achieve in your lifetime.” The key is the word potent. While the above crazy types can be a drain on achievement, there are certain kinds of craziness that can serve the greater good.
In my remaining weeks, I’m trying to hold tight to a different kind of insanity in order to push my writing to the next level. I’m reading more and staring out the window more. If I don’t write, I’m trying to be nice about it. I leave the house at least once a day and make sure to have a conversation with someone other than the cat. I’m trying to remind myself why I write and why I’ve worked so hard to have this time to concentrate on my work. Through it all, I’m remembering the words of my teacher: “If anything, you should have fun.”
I’m a horrible, crazy boss. But I’m trying to get better. I’m trying to love my words enough to revise them. I’m reading more than I have in years—out loud for hours on end. I’m trying to remember that there’s never a perfect time to write—I will never have enough space, leisure, money, and time. I’m trying to counter fear and paranoia (an occupational hazard) with generosity and patience.
Work Benefits
Heather K. Hummel
One of my most helpful writing tricks is the happy side-effect of a job that I do part-time: I am a yoga teacher. I started practicing yoga because I had too much stress in grad school. But I've continued to practice, and then teach yoga because it clears the clutter from my day and makes me focus, really focus on the thoughts in my head.
After searching high and low for "inspiration" I realized that I usually have plenty of inspiration to keep me busy writing, but it's hidden under distracting, jumbled thoughts about what I needed at the grocery store, and what tasks I need to finish at the office before the weekend comes.
Early yoga practitioners did not "do" yoga like so many people do it these days, as calisthenics. Early yoga practitioners considered that it was a way to get the restless body (and mind) to settle down enough so that the practitioner could meditate. And isn't writing a form of meditation? We sit down and focus, and then explore some image or metaphor very intently, much like one might stare at a candle flame or visualization during a meditation.
So, why do I teach yoga, and not just "practice" yoga if it is a preparation for my writing practice? Well, it is often said that teachers teach what they most need to learn. I'm still learning how to get all the useless clutter out of my brain so I can see the poetry underneath. And teaching yoga gives me a couple hours a week where I have to practice, no excuses: I'll get fired.
You’re not the boss of me!
Stephanie Lenox
Stanley Bing has recently come out with a new and revised version of his book Crazy Bosses, which was first published in 1992. Since then, he has honed his experience by becoming the boss himself, which has allowed him insight into the insanity of leadership. In the book, he pinpoints five different kinds of crazy bosses:
The Bully
The Paranoid
The Narcissist
The Wimp
The Disaster Hunter
After receiving a project grant that allowed me to quit my job and focus on my writing for several months, I thought my scheduling woes and work frustrations would be over. Now that I’m in complete control of my days, I have had to figure out what kind of boss I’m going to be. Enter: new boss. Same as the old boss.
During the months I’ve worked on my project, I’ve been both micro-manger and absentee leader. I have timesheets and reading lists and submission goals and spreadsheets. I’ve torn myself down to the point I thought about quitting altogether. I’ve managed to write some work I’m proud of, but it is never enough. I’ve had the opportunity to exercise my craziness in many unproductive ways.
Bing explains that “there is a limit to the effectiveness of rationality.” He later recommends that readers “aspire to the most potent level of craziness you can personally achieve in your lifetime.” The key is the word potent. While the above crazy types can be a drain on achievement, there are certain kinds of craziness that can serve the greater good.
In my remaining weeks, I’m trying to hold tight to a different kind of insanity in order to push my writing to the next level. I’m reading more and staring out the window more. If I don’t write, I’m trying to be nice about it. I leave the house at least once a day and make sure to have a conversation with someone other than the cat. I’m trying to remind myself why I write and why I’ve worked so hard to have this time to concentrate on my work. Through it all, I’m remembering the words of my teacher: “If anything, you should have fun.”
I’m a horrible, crazy boss. But I’m trying to get better. I’m trying to love my words enough to revise them. I’m reading more than I have in years—out loud for hours on end. I’m trying to remember that there’s never a perfect time to write—I will never have enough space, leisure, money, and time. I’m trying to counter fear and paranoia (an occupational hazard) with generosity and patience.
Work Benefits
Heather K. Hummel
One of my most helpful writing tricks is the happy side-effect of a job that I do part-time: I am a yoga teacher. I started practicing yoga because I had too much stress in grad school. But I've continued to practice, and then teach yoga because it clears the clutter from my day and makes me focus, really focus on the thoughts in my head.
After searching high and low for "inspiration" I realized that I usually have plenty of inspiration to keep me busy writing, but it's hidden under distracting, jumbled thoughts about what I needed at the grocery store, and what tasks I need to finish at the office before the weekend comes.
Early yoga practitioners did not "do" yoga like so many people do it these days, as calisthenics. Early yoga practitioners considered that it was a way to get the restless body (and mind) to settle down enough so that the practitioner could meditate. And isn't writing a form of meditation? We sit down and focus, and then explore some image or metaphor very intently, much like one might stare at a candle flame or visualization during a meditation.
So, why do I teach yoga, and not just "practice" yoga if it is a preparation for my writing practice? Well, it is often said that teachers teach what they most need to learn. I'm still learning how to get all the useless clutter out of my brain so I can see the poetry underneath. And teaching yoga gives me a couple hours a week where I have to practice, no excuses: I'll get fired.
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