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a writer's journal
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Interesting experience, giving manuscript
feedback to other writers at
Wesleyan Writers' Conference last week. More than once, the reaction
to my detailed comments was along the lines of "...but did you
like my story?" Monday, June 26, 2006
Wesleyan Writers Conference turned out to be a great experience on so many levels! The dialogue workshop session went more-or-less as planned, although a scheduling glitch left me with forty-five minutes instead of an hour. I compressed things, didn't use transparencies, and covered much less than I had prepared. Comments afterwards from the forty or so attendees indicated that the session was well-received.
The reading from Things Kept, Things Left Behind drew good response, too, or seemed to, especially considering the horrible reading slot I drew. I went on last, after 10:00PM, following hours of guest speaker, faculty, and fellows readings. Those who stayed seemed to respond to the passages I chose. That's encouraging.
While those two events had concerned me going into the conference (they were the ones I fretted over, spent so much time preparing for), the conference held many other wonderful moments. The author readings, for example, and the receptions afterwards, the manuscripts by several talented attendees that I got to read and hear read, and Roxana Robinson's classes on the short story, the elements that engage a reader and make him want to read. It was all good, but over too soon.
On the whole, the people at Wesleyan were so fascinating. They're writers, after all. Or working at becoming writers. I tried to meet as many as I could--at meals, at readings, or sitting outside on walls--as many as the too-short week allowed. I don't know what next year will bring, but I hope it includes the conference at Wesleyan.
Friday, June 16, 2006
Brad Watson's The
Heaven of Mercury is one of my favorite novels. I recently found online this 2002 interview of
Watson by Robert Birnbaum. In it Watson talks about the long process of
the book's coalescing, of finding its language, voice and form. Here's a
snip from the interview, and a
link to the full text.
Saturday, June 10, 2006
I've been putting together a workshop session I'll be giving at Wesleyan
Writers Conference.
Wednesday, June 7, 2006
I've been working on a dialogue workshop session for Wesleyan Writers Conference, pulling small dialogue sections from my favorite novels and stories. I'll use them to illustrate the five dialogue "tips" that I hope attendees take away from the session.
But even more importantly, I hope people leave with a better sense of how to read as a writer, how to see the ways that their favorite authors use dialogue in fiction. It's been instructive for me, pulling examples, and I've got too many already, way too many for the one-hour session. I'll have to trim the list mightily. And maybe I'll do handouts of the extras at the end of the session.
In a way, this will be the workshop I wish I'd had five or six years ago, back when dialogue, to me, was still just characters talking too much like people do.
NOTE: I've avoided any discussion of political, religious, or similar topics in this journal. It's a writer's journal, and its subject is writing--primarily mine. It's not that I don't have strong opinions or that I'm reluctant to express them. But there are ten thousand forums for such discussions. Why make it ten thousand and one?
Having said all that, I'm making an exception for this, an issue somehow hidden from view in the mountains of central Appalachia, a place not far from my home, the subject: destruction of our landscape by Mountaintop Removal coal mining.
Aerial photos ( 1 2 3 4 5 ) from last week's Mountaintop Removal tour are available now, thanks to Thomas Hart Shelby. Please take a minute to view them and reflect on what it says about us and our stewardship of the land.
Thursday, June 1, 2006
As part of a program set up by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, twenty-five writers rode in vans from Lexington to the Appalachian coal fields of southeastern Kentucky on Wednesday. The first stop was a healthy forest, a hillside herb farm nearly surrounded by ongoing mountaintop removal operations. The ecology of the area is unique, unduplicated anywhere on our planet. The view from space only suggests the irreparable damage done to forests, valley streams, and the mountains themselves, its malignant spread more extensive now than in this somewhat outdated photograph. Driving through the faux-lunar landscape is incredibly painful to anyone who loves the land.
That evening at Hindman Settlement School, a dozen or more residents of the area each in turn told their personal stories, stories of loss of livable land, breathable air, drinkable water, in short, loss of the land they believed was their heritage. A young couple told of trying to raise a family on land damaged by mountaintop coal operations, of valleys filled and streams polluted, of enormous dammed toxic waste pools looming on plateaus above their land. One mother told of fouled water, trying to teach her baby to not drink what comes from the faucet. Another mother told of speeding coal trucks, one of which killed her daughter. An older husband said the coal companies paid no attention to their complaints, "like we're throw-away people," he said. "We were raised to believe we were stewards of the land, that it wasn't ours to destroy."
On Thursday evening, we were met in Lexington by authors from the prior two tours of mountaintop removal sites. Several hundred people gathered to hear them read and reflect on the enormity of the damage being done daily, the effect of recent liberalization of laws that allows systematic filling of streams and valleys with mining waste. Writers from this tour read verbatim excerpts of the testimony we'd heard the night before. Others who read and expressed the spectrum from concern to outrage included Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, George Ella Lyon, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, James Baker Hall, Erik Reece, Loyal Jones, Maurice Manning, and Bob Sloan.
I hope to post more photos of what I witnessed in eastern Kentucky these past two days. It's not pretty, but it's real. The world needs to see and feel an outrage, too.
Friday, May 26, 2006
Last evening I drove into Lexington for a reading and mini-workshop with Allen Wier. I'd been impressed with him when he sat in on a workshop at Sewanee Writers Conference last summer. His reading from Tehano, his new novel set in 19th century Texas, included a bloody Comanche attack on small group of wagons. Publishers Weekly criticized the book, saying it "relies heavily on gruesome depictions of violence to sustain momentum." I sensed some discomfort in the listeners as Wier read, but by the end it seemed there was a kind of awe for the brutal honesty with which he wrote that scene. It is a huge and ambitious book, one I'm only sixty pages into reading at the moment.
The other good news this week is that I'll be assisting Roxana Robinson at a workshop this summer. I'm quite excited about it and expect to learn much. For now I've set aside Tehano to read Robinson's novel, Sweetwater, and some of her short fiction, too.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Monday evening my daughter and I were in New York City, attending a reading at The Back Room given by a dozen writers from Zoetrope Virtual Studio, the writers workshop. Several readers were writers I've known online for several years. What an amazing experience, meeting them finally in the flesh. The precipitating event for the get-together was Roy Kesey's arrival from China to promote his new book, Nothing in the World. Pia Ehrhardt, Pasha Malla, Sue Henderson, and a bunch more were there, the readings great, the evening ending much too soon.
I'm assembling a one-hour seminar/workshop session for next month. The topic is my choice, and I thought "dialogue tips" might be something I could reasonably talk about. The group will likely be mixed, some accomplished writers and some newer to the craft, which will make the session a challenge. I've been soliciting ideas from other writers, ideas about what hints they've found useful, what mistakes they see in dialogue by new writers. Answers have been thoughtful and will be most helpful when I put the session together.
Tuesday, May 9, 2006
I signed up for the May 31-June 1 authors tour of Mountaintop Removal today. With several weeks away from writing for conferences this summer, I debated whether to subtract two more days for this. But it's an important issue, more important in the overall scheme of things than whether I get a few pages written on the novel. So I'm going.
Saturday, May 6, 2006
Last week I wrote a piece for the Backstory website, which features recently published books and the author's discussion of its genesis. I learned a lot writing it. Most books on the website are novels. Their authors typically talk about the origin of their characters or their concern with a particular political issue or a plot twist that arrived in a dream. And they all relate their books as closely as possible to their own personal stories and backgrounds.
For a short story collection like Things Kept, Things Left Behind, the task wasn't so simple. Each story, after all, is different in so many ways.
I'm not originally from the region where the stories are set. As often as not, my characters are quite unlike me in their social situation, outlook, beliefs, age, and sometimes gender. So I ended up writing the Backstory piece more about how my small town upbringing, albeit not Appalachian, informed the collection. I also wrote about something I learned in the eighteen months I worked on the stories: that my single-character efforts tended to end up in a bottom drawer or wastebasket. The stories that did catch fire were those with two well developed characters, often mismatched, connected by family or history, their relationship altered by story events. They developed unique shapes and fit nicely into the collection.
And I wrote a paragraph at the end about how a writer's characters can come from anywhere. They need not start with him or her. In fact, mine rarely do. They begin quite unlike me, at least on the outside. But they come to life as soon as I give them yearnings I've felt, when I give them bits of internal landscape not so different from mine. That's when they get up and dance.
The Backstory piece will run a few weeks after the book publishes in October. Not sure if it's effective publicity for the book or not. Doesn't matter, really. The piece was worthwhile for what I learned in writing it.
Tuesday, May 2, 2006
During last Saturday's panel discussion by Algonquin's editor, authors, and marketing director, a considerable emphasis was placed on the importance of the author's "story," his history and motivation, and how it relates to the book. Silas House's background, his "novel-writing mailman" persona, these helped get attention for Clay's Quilt. An ex-accountant who writes a fantasy novel has no advantage from his background, no hook. Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, on the other hand, is linked in publicity to "real people and true stories gleaned from her extensive research into the world of traveling circuses during the 1930's." This plus her dog, cats, goats and horse. Emyl Jenkins is a longtime, well-known antiques appraiser. Her first mystery novel introduces antiques dealer and sleuth, Sterling Glass. The link, author to book, is a strong part of the packaging, the hook, the handle. Not exactly an encouraging aspect of the whole process, but it does seem to be the reality of publishing today. Not sure what all this says for TK,TLB or for the novel-in-progress. It's not a worry for today.
Saturday, April 29, 2006
In the mail today came the happy news that I'd been awarded a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in fiction at this summer's Sewanee Writers Conference. I'd applied for it in February and have been holding my breath the last two or three weeks, waiting for word. Needless to say, I'm elated. Also quite humbled.
According to conference literature, in 1983 Tennessee Williams left the residual portion of his estate to the University of the South to support "creative writing," this as a memorial to his grandfather, the Reverend Walter E. Dakin. In addition to providing a number of fellowships and scholarships, the fund partially underwrites the costs of every participant at Sewanee Writers Conference. Alongside the literary works of his lifetime, Tennessee Williams' great legacy is in the ongoing tradition of creative excellence that flourishes at Sewanee for two weeks every July.
Did I mention humbled?
This afternoon I drove into Lexington to check out the Bluegrass Festival of Books, a new one-day event sponsored by University of Kentucky, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, and the Lexington Herald-Leader. It's half the size of the fall Kentucky Book Fair, the surroundings are more posh (Lexington Center), and the layout more spacious. Nearby rooms for sessions and workshops are comfortable, too. If it's held again next spring, maybe they'll put me on the roster of authors selling and signing. I'll suggest as much to University of Iowa Press.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
The first bound galley, "uncorrected page proof for advance review," of TK,TLB arrived by FedEx late today. It looks good, looks like a book. The cover photo shows crisper in person, the weathering aspect clearer and more intriguing. At least it strikes me that way.
Gin, bless her heart, took a photo for me, the one at left. Click to enlarge.
I'll have to send this first copy away, send it to the Kentucky Arts Council tomorrow as part of my Individual Artist Professional Development Grant Application. But I'll send a postage-paid envelope, too, so the KAC can return the book when their deliberations are through. This one belongs on a high shelf, a keeper.
Yesterday there was a letter from Wendell Berry in the mail, an invitation to participate in the Kentucky Authors Mountaintop Removal Tour, two days in the region viewing the devastating effects of the practice and listening to the testimony of people in the region. It's scheduled for the end of May, and I'm hoping to go. I've seen scalped mountains and filled valleys from a distance. I need to see them up close.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
This afternoon I went to a reading by authors at a local church, the Missing Mountains Tour. Erik Reece read from his book, Lost Mountain, which reports, day by day, the demise of aptly name Lost Mountain in a single year. A number of authors read from the Missing Mountains anthology. It documents the ravaging of mountains and valleys in eastern Kentucky and adjacent Appalachian coal regions to satisfy an appetite for cheap coal, the expedient destruction of a landscape that should be an enduring national treasure. Wendell Berry read, as did Bobbie Ann Mason, Ed McClanahan, Mary Anne Taylor-Hall, Loyal Jones and eight or ten more. Their passion for the cause is great, their outrage a beautiful thing to see.
Yesterday I read for Kentucky Writers Day, a local celebration at Gravel Switch, Kentucky. The scene I decided to read was Cheryl's restaurant meeting with Suggs in "First Husband, First Wife." The crowd was sparse at 10:30 a.m., but the reaction seemed positive. This material, plus the following scene in the basement of Rodell-Ward, will probably be an effective fifteen-eighteen minute reading.
Other good news from last week is that Bellevue Literary Review will publish "Lake Charles" in their fall 2006 mental health theme issue, 'Peregrinations of the Mind.' BLR is a highly regarded literary review published in the Department of Medicine at New York University. Publication is scheduled for September.
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