Perfect Pitch

All of us who write (and maybe all of us who’ve lived thirty or more years) know that all critics have something of value to tell us. But they aren’t all equal. There are the kind who tell you only what you want to hear (useless), the kind who tell you the truth some of the time (useful) and those who tell all the truth all the time (watch out!). Finally, there are those who pitch their relentlessly honest criticism into that range where you can hear it best. I call them Heart Critics, for they do not confine themselves to speaking their minds only; consequently, their words can deeply resonate within your own heart, letting you know when they’re right (quite often).

In thirty-five years of serious writing, I’ve found that those in the last category are as good as dark Italian roast coffee. I just received the much-anticipated first critique of the novel I’ve been working on for the last two years from Rex (not his real name), who’s a Heart Critic par excellence.

Tougher Than Tissue, Harder than Aluminum Foil

We all struggle to be the kind of writer (and person) who benefits from criticism. I’d like to think I’m becoming such a writer as I continue my lengthy apprenticeship, but I don’t know. I think my skin’s gotten tougher—God knows it needed to—but an occasional critic’s comment can still sting. However, I’ve had the pleasure of knowing quite a few writers who win my total admiration for the way they sit impassively, pens in motion as they receive incoming “friendly” fire about their latest masterpiece.

I’m talking about the workshop, of course, which can be likened to a literary gauntlet, or even perhaps lynching, if not conducted as a respectful sharing rather than a brutal free-for-all. Thankfully, I attended a conference early in my creative writing teaching career, where I received excellent “Guidelines for Critique” on how to conduct a workshop). But the face-to-face oral round robin isn’t the only way to get criticism. Several of my friends who eschew the workshop prefer to simply circulate their manuscript among often far-flung readers, then receive back detailed commentary and marginalia, when, after several weeks or months, the critics have time to respond. My latest experience with Rex shows how well the long-distance process can work, if head and heart are synchronous.

Caution! Warning!

It’s so easy to waste this priceless opportunity by submitting a manuscript too soon. I implore you to make sure the draft is as good as you can possibly make it on your own before troubling someone else to read it. Novel-writing’s a long, lonely business. It’s tempting to get in a hurry, find a contest you want to enter or publisher you want to submit to and—bingo—before you know it, you’ve e-mailed your poor critic your gestating baby that doesn’t even have eyes and ears yet. Maybe you just want someone to tell you what the hell it is you’re doing. But it’s best if you know—or think you know—what you’re doing before you put someone else in the awkward, even impossible, position of figuring it out for you.

I can hear writers protesting, “It’s only a rough draft—I know it needs a lot of work.” But if it’s the kind of work you can do yourself, especially the mechanical smoothing that will make reading so much easier, then I say do it. Although I realize I may be prettifying and spell-checking passages, even pages, that will eventually be cut (what novelist Lawrence Block calls “washing garbage”), I’d rather my story read well so my critic can concentrate on characterization, setting, plot and theme, not commas and wordiness.

The Shrinking, Sinking Heart

The last time Rex stuck his neck out for me was several years ago for my novel Running from Mercy: The Psalms of Israel Jones, which won the 2010 Hackney Award. As with my latest novel, I’d re-written Mercy over the course of several years, then submitted it to a well-published MFA friend for criticism. After rewriting based on his remarks, I submitted it to my writing group, who collectively gave me hell, resulting in yet another rewrite. After that, I was ready for Rex—in, fact, more than ready (or so I thought).

The day Rex returned my book, I opened the package abstractly, thinking I’d just survey the territory. (By the way, such a moment is a really good time to pray, meditate or perform whatever spiritual practice prepares you for a trial.) Glancing randomly through the manuscript, I was shocked to see so much of Rex’s writing all over it. Though distracted, I nonetheless sat down and started turning pages. Incredible, I thought, temperature rising. There was writing on almost every page…sometimes a lot of writing. Oh. My. God.

Snapping the book shut, I replaced it in the envelope. Still rationalizing, I decided there was no reason to panic, get angry or feel hurt. Rex was simply imposing his style on me. Yes, that was it! Lots of quibbling about word choice and sentence structure, grammar stuff I could ignore if I chose to. (Okay, I was a tad mad that he thought he had to nit-pick like this with me, an English teacher just like him.)

Payoff

You’ve no doubt intuited what I found when I finally sat down and studied Rex’s careful, clear responses to my years of hard work. Oh, there were nit-picks, all right: embarrassing errors my closest proofreading hadn’t found. But the vast majority of his comments concerned faulty motives; character contradictions; plot lapses; inconsistent details, i.e., substantive failures to satisfy the reader’s expectations and enforce the rules of my own story. He’d let me know I simply hadn’t yet delivered the goods.

It hit me what I’d done: I’d fantasized that the manuscript I’d sent him was nearly ready to submit to agents or publishers. (How we writers delude ourselves.) At this point I laid down the gauntlet; I wanted to hug him for not letting me deliver the child prematurely; it was clear it would not have thrived in the hard, cruel world of demanding readers, prospective publishers and agents.

But it was the way that Rex did it—his bedside manner, if you will—as, in several pages of summary, he first highlighted the manuscript’s strengths, then proceeded to couch his criticism in positive, encouraging language, letting me know he was sympathetic to my noble vision (which, however, I’d fallen far short of achieving). And he even recommended strategies for my next revision, humbly suggesting while never insisting.

It’s the process I try to duplicate with every manuscript my fellow writers entrust me with. And I fall short; I’m pretty sure I’ve unintentionally stepped on a few toes as recently as within the past few months. I’m just trying to be honest, I rationalize. Well, honesty isn’t enough, when you’re dealing with someone else’s baby. I can do better. I can build up, ennoble, and even honor anyone trying to do this hard, nearly impossible thing—and I can still tell the truth about shortcomings. From my heart I thank you, Rex, for the double gift of how to give and take literary criticism, one of many I’ve received from my fellow writers.

Life and Lit

There are even Heart Critics who can successfully critique our lives as well as our manuscripts; I’m blessed with a handful of friends who will give me some of the truth some of the time; and at least one, a friend of long standing—road-tested, rugged and a tad irascible—who, over the years, has mostly given me all the truth, all the time, about my character and my life (whether I asked or not). It sometimes hurt, but, as with a manuscript, I improved myself (my Self) slowly as a result. There’s always another rewrite, thank God.

Heart Critics

Who’s Conrad?

Back in the early nineties when I was assisting Susan Carpenter in directing the Antioch Writers Workshop, Susan said one day, “Conrad wants to interview you.”

When I seemed nonplussed, Susan frowned. “And you call yourself a poet! Don’t you listen to Conrad’s Corner on WYSO?”

Chagrined, I confessed I didn’t know Conrad from Adam. She smiled slyly. “Conrad Balliet is a real character. And he loves poetry.”

Arriving at the WYSO studio for our interview, I met a tall, thin, courtly older gentleman in his mid-sixties. Conrad made me feel supremely comfortable during my first time on radio with his warm smile, easy manner and sincere love of poetry. We chatted, I read two or three poems and left with a warm buzz.

My Latest Interview

Subsequent interviews with Conrad during “WYSO Weekend Edition” (at 10:30 on Sunday mornings) have been just as pleasant. My third, and latest, occurred in February of 2012; if you’re interested, here’s the link to the show, during which I shared “These Poems,” “Boots,” “Uncle Frank and the Boy” and “Communion.” (*Simply scroll the toolbar to the interview, which comes at 15 minutes, 22 seconds into the show.)

http://www.wyso.org/post/wyso-weekend-february-12th-2012

Patron Saint of Poets

While retired Wittenberg English professor Conrad does read the classics—his favorite is Yeats—he frequently reads the work of local poets like David Lee Garrison, Robert Brimm, Marietta Ball, and Myrna Stone during his daily one-minute shows most weekdays. (Many archived programs are available on the WYSO Web site at www.wyso.org.)

Now 84, when Conrad reads, you can imagine the fire roaring in the grate behind him and smell the leather-spined volumes on the mahogany bookcase behind him. He frequently cries after reading a poem that particularly moves him. For a great article on Conrad’s unusual interest and unusual life, see http://www.springfieldnewssun.com/entertainment/ohio-theater-arts/conrad-balliet-not-only-reads-poetry-on-wyso-he-lives-poetry-1233912.html.

Lately he’s begun encouraging poets to come to the studio and record themselves reading their original works for air-play later. (Either Conrad himself or someone at the studio tutors poets in the use of studio technology.)

Poetry Month

Every year during April, Conrad hosts a reading by local poets at the Dayton Public Library. Having attended, I can tell you it’s a lot of fun, you’ll hear lots of good stuff and meet really cool people. The time is shared very democratically among poets who sign up to read for two to three minutes each during the two-hour event. If you’ve never been, you must go at least once—it’s a real Miami Valley grass-roots poetry event!—either to read or listen.

And Here’s to WYSO . . .

And I must thank WYSO, 91.3 from the bottom of my poet’s heart for giving Conrad the opportunity to share his passion. These days poetry is a hard sell for lots of reasons (*see “How Poetry Can Matter,” an excellent discussion of this issue by Jordan Mills Pleasant in the March 27-April 2 edition of the Dayton City Paper: http://www.daytoncitypaper.com/how-poetry-can-matter/). But the station continues to support the noblest of the verbal arts, despite changes in management and programming. Tune in at 91.3 on any weekday evening at 7:59 for “Conrad’s Corner” or Sunday morning at 10:30 for “WYSO Weekend Edition.” I think you’ll be glad you did.

As Conrad always says, “Thanks for listening.”

Photograph of Conrad Balliet from www.wittenburg.edu; used with permission.

Kudos to Conrad & WYSO

The Game

After my agent was unable to sell my novel Running from Mercy: The Psalms of Israel Jones to a commercial New York publisher, I decided to market it myself. As a result, I’ve learned a lot and even experienced a few epiphanies since re-immersing myself in the world of small press publishing.

I’ve played this game before, perusing the guidebooks—mostly Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors and Literary Agents 2012 and Writer’s Digest Books’ 2012 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market—as well as investigating websites and talking to my published friends, but not since 2004. One thing I’ve learned this time is that there are almost as many small presses as there are writers. I wonder how anyone with a manuscript of merit could not find someone to publish it. And yet there’s still no accounting for taste, which easily eliminates 25% of the available markets; plus, the small press world is hardly free of the status game, so credentials—having an MFA from the right program, publications with the right lit-mags—probably eliminates another 25%.

And then there are all the various niches. Many smalls are devoted to a certain audience based on politics, ethnicity, sexual orientation and geography, leaving out another 25% or so. Thus, I’m quickly left with a tiny minority of presses from which to ferret out those few who’d realistically publish my kind of fiction. This ain’t a bad thing. For those of us not too concerned with making money, a niche that truly fits is exactly what we’re after.

My Criteria

Every small press should know what it can and can’t profitably publish (however it defines “profitably,” hopefully more spiritually than financially). I’ve developed my own criteria, deciding that I wanted the qualities below to make this experience even better than my previous ones with Disk-Us Books and Plain View Press, the publishers of my novels, I Was So Much Older Then and The Measure of Everything, respectively. So far my criteria are:

1. Longevity: Since small presses come and go, it seems a good idea to avoid newbies; I was looking for at least least five years in the biz, though ten, twenty or more would be lovely. And it’d be nice to see that these presses have published some authors like me—and continued to keep them in print.
2. Distribution: I wanted to see that the press had the capacity to get books out there. I’ve had enough experience to know this is, by far, the toughest thing that publishers and writers face, and there’s no easy answer to the task of how to connect even the most amazing book to a real, live, paying audience. Even though I don’t need to make money on my writing, I realize that all publishers besides non-profits do. So the deal should be that authors promise to do their share to get the word out—speaking, giving workshops, being interviewed, blogging, reviewing, etc.—if the publisher will make their books available at places where they’ll most likely sell. Also, it’d be great if the press spends some resources helping authors sell their wares, beyond maintaining an attractive, easily navigable website, such as snail-mailing catalogs to previous purchasers, helping write and distribute press releases and garner other publicity, maybe even recommending or retaining a publicist. Many of the smalls’ websites I researched name the distributor(s) they use—a big plus!
3. Pricing: I don’t expect or need to be published in hard cover. But the size and clarity of print, paper quality and overall attractiveness are very important to me, as I assume they are to readers. Although I know smalls need to make more off each sale than bigs to survive, I’d hesitate to try a publisher who asks way more than $15 for a 200-page paperback novel ($12.95 is even better.) So I pay attention to how much a press’s books cost, if offered for sale at the site (as they mostly are).
4. Credentials: I glanced at the authors’ credentials to see if I could relate, but it’s really the experience and size of the staff I’m most interested in. Sometimes editors, marketers and their interns are mentioned, sometimes not (some websites are so cryptic it’s even hard to find how to submit ). One brand-new press I found—idealistic, friendly and welcoming—at least had a couple of people devoted to marketing. They’re still on my list!
5.  Track record: It’s nice to see authors and books highlighted for winning awards, but that’s not as necessary to me as feeling that the publisher will be a good partner. Also, if it looked as if too many books were being published, I took that as a possible sign of discouragement. Would I become just as lost in the crowd as I would at a big commercial publisher?

Having What You Want, Wanting What You Have

Now for the epiphanies. I’m surprised to find myself enjoying a process I was dreading. Of course I prefer to write, alone at my desk surrounded by my characters, rather than market—and I will always spend most of my writing time there. But it feels good to be doing this myself, rather than relying on an agent—hoping but never being 100% certain she’s doing the things I want and need done. And at long last I’m okay with the fact that there is and always will be a business side to writing, if one wants to communicate one’s work to as wide an audience as possible. And that applies to just about all of us writers.

I find myself not so ambitious anymore. These days, I want to do most of what I do to enrich, enliven and enlarge my spirit (and help others do the same). That doesn’t mean I won’t work damn hard for any publisher who publishes me. I stand ready and able to promote my work—with energy, enthusiasm and passion—but I will not sell my soul.

Finally, it’s okay with me to want publication but not to need it. It’s been really hard to get to this point—and I’ll bet it is for a lot of us writers. It may, in fact, not only be the hardest part about writing but the hardest part about life: wanting more than the universe seems ready to yield us at any particular time. But it’s so much more peaceful, more conducive to serenity, to want what I have. It’s humbling—and that’s a good thing.

Seeking (But Not Desperately) the Perfect Publisher

I want to thank everyone who attended my solo poetry reading at the Troy-Hayner Cultural Center last Thursday evening, March 8, even those who thought about coming, and tried to come, but for whatever reason, couldn’t make it. Thank you, family, friends, students and strangers. There were many personal pleasures for me, not the least of which was the honor of reading in such a historic, atmospheric place. But something happened that reminded me of why I do this (or should be doing this) in the first place.

Moments: Laughing Like a Kid

Something I’d read the day before prepared me for my poetry epiphany. M. Scott Douglass, publisher/owner of Main Street Rag Press, wrote in his monthly MSR newsletter recently about the reason he attends the Associated Writing Programs annual conference. Even though it cost him $2,000 and 27 hours to drive from Charlottesville, North Carolina, to Chicago this year, it was worth it, he claimed, to meet people like Todd Robinson, an author MSR just published, on the book fair floor.

As Douglass tells it, “I’m getting waves of these cute little girls coming by, pointing to his book and identifying him as their teacher. Late afternoon he shows up reaching across the table with this big maw of a hand. He’s this big ol’ six foot-four bear of a guy who laughs like a little kid. And what fun he was. Those are the moments I go for.” (*see http://www.mainstreetrag.com/MSRMonthlyNewsletter_03-2012.html for more.)

Serving the Muse

Well, a similar thing happened at my reading. While I read, I noticed a woman in the back, apparently enjoying herself, who looked awfully familiar. Later at the reception, I felt emboldened to approach, her familiarity overcoming my usual shyness. What a surprise—and pleasure—to meet this interesting person, whom I did NOT know after all (I’ll call her “Molly” so as not to possibly embarrass her).

As it turns out, Molly had gone to quite a bit of trouble to attend the reading and seemed pleased that she came. And here’s the beautiful, humbling part: she came for poetry—not for me. I respect (and admire) her pure desire to hear poetry. It makes me glad I planned and rehearsed, selecting poems for their “listenability” and striving to pace myself so that I wouldn’t exhaust the audience. Molly’s presence made me feel I was serving the art of Poetry that night rather than indulging my own ambitions. I’ll bet Scott Douglass feels the same way about the hassles of small-press publishing when he meets a Todd. It’s all worth the sweat somehow.

Connections

So thank you, Molly (and Scott and Todd), for reminding me of my responsibility to you, and to any stranger, that shows up to hear my work. I’ll try to be worthy of your time and attention. Yes, I owe a debt to friends and family, too, who took time out of their busy schedules to come out on a cold, rainy March night, but meeting Molly (and reading Douglass’s newsletter) reinforces something I know but can lose track of. Poetry is about words yes, but it’s at least as much about connecting people with words (and the worlds conjured by those words) as it is about beautiful language and imagery.

After this reading, I’m encouraged to do others—and to keep what I learned from this reading to the forefront of consciousness. So stay tuned. If you’re on my contacts list, I’ll let you know of other events, and if you’re not on my list but would like to be, let me know and I’ll put you on it. If you’re a writer, let me know of your literary goings-on, too.

Poetry is People

An Invitation

Would you join me on Thursday, March 8 at 7:30 p.m. at the Troy-Hayner Cultural Center in Troy, Ohio for an evening of poetry? I know you’re very busy—and I know poetry’s a tough sell. Maybe you’re sometimes disappointed when you read modern poetry—surreal, allusive and just plain weird as it can often be. Me, too; and maybe my poetry will strike you the same way. I hope not. True, I write it mostly for myself, but when it comes time to choose a few for pubic delivery, I promise to keep you, my audience, firmly in mind: to try to make you laugh or cry a little, to make you feel the amazing grace as well as confusing lunacy of being human—and to aspire to the music of language.

I promise not to read for more than an hour; with poetry (fiction, too), less is often more. Weather and health permitting, I’d love to see you there. Refreshments will be served afterward and there’ll be time to chat.

The Challenge

Being asked to read your own original poetry in public is a great gift—but it is also a responsibility I do not take lightly. Especially deciding what to read.

Revisiting my first chapbook, Appalachian Day, published by Samisdat in 1985, I was pleasantly surprised to find those old poems not nearly as awful as I’d expected (I wrote one of them as a college junior—that would’ve been 1973!). Most, though, were written in the eighties, and even though I had to read a couple of them with one eye closed, I discovered at least one poem in the small collection still excites me enough to consider for the Hayner reading.

Then I visited Haskell (Seven Buffaloes, 1987): West Virginia dialect poems, the first of which I “wrote” around 1986, when I was in my mid-thirties. After coming home from a long, stressful day of teaching one afternoon, I put pen to paper and suddenly here was this ninety-three-year-old man speaking—he sounded a lot like my Grand-dad, who’d been dead less than five years then. So I just let him talk through me for a chapbook’s-worth of poems. While I confess to having some of the same dialect-squeamishness as Paul Laurence Dunbar (whose early successes were with his black dialect poems), I confess there’s still a place in my heart for this old guy; his dramatic monologues have sometimes pleased a poetry audience, so I’m not ruling out reading a Haskell or two.

Poet, Heal Thyself

As soon as I accepted the Hayner gig last fall, I knew that I’d read from my latest chapbook, Healing Arts (Pudding House, 2005). The book’s concept of including both performing arts (music, dance, drama) as well as medical arts (both “folk” and formal) still appeals to me, and I’ve gotten a kick out of reading some of them aloud to gatherings. Surely I can glean three or four from the book’s thirty-two pages. “Flummoxed and Fretful, the Blind Poet is Bludgeoned Gumptionless, Stumbles, Awakens, is Blessed, Walks On” seems a likely candidate.

The Uncollected

But I admit to being more excited about sharing brand-new work, the result of my ten-month-long poetry experiment. Sifting through the nearly 250 poems has been interesting. Plenty humbling, for one thing. There are many clunkers, to be sure, but the real kicker was finding poems I’d completely forgotten writing, some that I question whether I actually did write—yet there they are in the little moleskine journal my father-in-law gave me.

I’ll conclude with a new one that I read during my interview with Conrad Balliet on WYSO a couple of Sundays ago:

BOOTS

Like a lover, I squeeze
inside their safe spaces
until they just feel right.
Unlike others, these fit tight
as second skin the first time
I set my size elevens into them.
Hugging ankles, they point me
firmly in the right direction.

We’ve crossed a lot of water,
plunged down banks, strode straight
down drought-dusty July roads.
Their soles have gripped stone
spiriting me up to bluffs
where they kept me grounded,
though my arms wanted to fly.

Waiting patiently in the back-
seat floor while I drive,
their silence suits my own;
we ask each other no questions,
seek neither kindness nor mercy.
The love that leather engenders
is better without expectations.

Look: there they sit in sunlight,
sweat and creek water drying,
seam stitched back after bursting,
leaking only a little now,
letting me know that, like me,
they’re not going to last forever,
but they’re plenty good enough
for right now.

More Information:

• Troy Hayner Cultural Center: http://www.troyhayner.org/ or http://visitmiamicounty.org/attraction/1
• Map to Troy Hayner Cultural Center: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?q=Troy-Hayner+Cultural+Center++301+West+Main+Street+Troy+Ohio,+45373&hl=en&cid=6230196550830991645

Got Poetry?

When my father-in-law gifted me with a slightly-larger moleskine journal than the pocket-sized one I’d been carrying around for several years, I wondered what I’d do with it. Little did I know it would be the catalyst for me to write over two hundred poems in just ten months.

The Gift That Keeps Giving

My father-in-law is salt-of-the-earth Appalachian. A deer hunter (with a bow), prize-winning marksman, pool shark and reader of adventure tales, he’s always kept me on my toes. On my infrequent visits to West Virginia, he always asks me what I’m writing, and listens when I tell him. So maybe I wasn’t all that surprised to tear off the Christmas paper and find that moleskine.

The inscription inside got me emotional: “May the words you write or put in this little book bring you great joy and richness. $$$.” It was signed, “Love, from Papa Ben.” I haven’t had a real father in my life since I was ten, though I’ve had many wonderful surrogates who’ve left their marks on my character. So Ben’s gift felt like the closest thing I’d ever have to a father encouraging me to follow my greatest passion. I decided his “little book” would have a special purpose; I just didn’t know what it was yet. But I soon would.

The Quest: A Poem a Day

In March I retired after 35 years of full-time college teaching: an auspicious moment to start something new. Pondering how I’d really be able to churn the novels out now, I noticed Dad’s moleskine, picked it up, opened it, and thought how the pages were the perfect size for poems! Then I was walloped with a voice asking me: What if you wrote a poem every day?

The author of a book on writing I’d read said she’d written a haiku every day for a while. I’ve never written haiku; but I did write and publish poetry actively for ten years. When I began writing novels, though, I found it hard to serve more than one muse (even my folk-singing “career” began to wind down). However, I never completely quit writing poetry; I still managed to compose two or three poems a year—without many keepers among them. Maybe, I thought, this experiment will produce more keepers or at least teach me something: about poetry, the writing process, about myself.

Poetic Jazz

“Rules” developed. First, I wasn’t going to wait for inspiration—these poems would be spontaneous and quickly composed. I’d write at least one every single day, maybe more. And not look back at what I’d written until the book was full.

Also, I’d strive for automatic writing: get a first line, a theme and improvise, like the jazz-men I admire so much. And hope for the occasional jewel to emerge—but I wouldn’t care very much if it didn’t. I’d leave the poem alone after I wrote it: no obsessive-compulsive editing. (In recent years a “keeper” usually went through 15 or 20 drafts before being deemed audience-friendly or abandoned.)

What Really Happened

Now that the experiment’s nearly over, with only fourteen pages to go, I can tell you it didn’t go exactly as planned. In some ways it went better.

I’m not writing a poem every day, but most days, until quite recently. Now it’s more like one every three days—but that’s still a lot of poems. I learned that it’s hard to lower my standards enough and take the time to write a poem when not in the least inspired. I found I do usually need inspiration to write a poem, even with the lowest expectations. Sometimes I was able to whip out the little book while walking or wrapping up things before bedtime and let ‘er rip—with something like good results. But mostly I found myself thinking up a subject first.

As for not editing—or looking back at poems until the book was full—both were laughable dreams. I flip back and forth all the time, astonished at what emerges when I dip into the unconscious at moments when I least feel like writing a poem. And when, upon re-reading, I think of a better word and see lines and stanzas needing to be cut…I can’t stop myself. What writer can?

Harvest

What have I learned or gained from this little experiment or exercise, you ask? Well, because I did look back at the poems as they filled my pages, I decided to pluck out potential keepers and submit them to my tedious o.c.d. revision process. I’ve already got twelve keepers, and I’m sure I’ll be able to cull a dozen more before I’m through. (One of them, “Uncle Frank and the Boy,” has already won me free tuition to this year’s Antioch Writers’ Workshop and was published in the Mock Turtle Zine!)

Was it worth writing to produce a dozen keepers? Absolutely. But I’m convinced the activity would’ve been a worthy exercise even without bearing fruit. Such prolific production encouraged me to take risks, experiment and stretch myself. It’s easy, after achieving any sort of success in writing (publication, for example), to become way too conservative—not good if you want to grow.

Naked

Furthermore, it got me in touch with a neglected part of my writing self, convincing me it would be a loss, were I ever to abandon poetry altogether. (Why would I ever think it necessary to do so? Should I also re-think my folk-singing career?) Maybe it restored poetry writing as an essential discipline, an art I should practice for the rest of my life; time will tell.

I wrote a few hard poems, touching subjects that cut into the dermis, maybe even sheared into bone. Did I really say this about that? Did I mean it? Is there more to say? This is your life, says the Little Book. (That doesn’t mean all my poems are autobiographical—believe me, I wrote about everything!—but a few of them did strip me naked.)

The experiment may have affected my fiction—all writing is fuel for other arts, even other genres. In a couple of instances, I used the same idea for a poem that I’d already used in fiction, which is rare for me.

Luring the Muse

And these are just benefits I’m conscious of. I’m humbled, reading through these pages, by how badly I can write when I truly let go—but also by how little in control I really am of my creative process. And I like that; it’s even okay to find that I’m really just “channeling” other writers sometimes. Maybe the bottom line is that, the more you show up to write, the higher the odds that you’ll be there when the lightning bolt arrives: your “Wasteland,” “Howl,” or “Leaves of Grass.”

Reading poetry is necessary, vital to my life, but writing poetry is life. When my little book is full, maybe I’ll begin another. Dedicated to you, Papa Ben, just like this one.

Photograph by Alexandre Dulaunoy

Dad’s Little Book

My favorite column in Poets & Writers is “Why We Write.” Although I used to read the premier writers’ magazine mainly for publishing news and markets, I’m much more likely to read it nowadays to find the faith and inspiration to continue to write fiction for a world that increasingly doesn’t seem to want or need it.

The Great Silence

A poet friend and I were recently e-mailing each other new poems to read and critique, and she mentioned how her work usually meets with silence. Yesterday, a fiction writer correspondent said pretty much the same thing, only in reference to marketing: people request a free reviewer’s copy and then. . . nothing.

Writers of course must make peace as early as possible with the reality that no one’s asking us to do this. Our friends and family, above all, must be excused from forced reading and even more from forced critiquing. And those blessed souls who do buy our books must never be asked whether they actually read or what they thought of our work (but we can hope they’ll volunteer something!).

Admittedly I learned this the hard way. Now it’s quite enough when, totally out of the blue, someone e-mails or calls me—as the daughter of my former professor did a couple of years ago, when she saw I’d mentioned her dad in the Acknowledgements to my novel I Was So Much Older Then. Maybe we should simply see publication as sending a message in a bottle, to perhaps be found years and miles away—or maybe not at all.

Strangers and Bad Guys

So if we’re not mainly writing for friends or family, then who? Well, strangers, we hope: the “huge” book-buying public for whom are written all those books filling our favorite bookstore to the rafters. It’s hard to walk into those stores if you’re a published small-press writer as I am, and not want your work to be there among your literary heroes. But if no one’s heard of you, you probably won’t be asked (or allowed); and if you are allowed, your work will most likely languish in the Great Silence of the Shelves. (But not for long; books by non-best-selling authors have the shelf life of a magazine.)

At first, I wanted my books there, anyway, simply to “be available.” But when not a single copy sold in the weeks following a reading I gave at my local Barnes & Noble, I changed my mind. While bookstores sell (to me) a precious commodity, it’s a business like dry-cleaning or anything else—it exists to make money. Except in the minds of some local independents, bookstores are for “best-selling” authors. Just as you don’t need an agent if your work isn’t commercial, your work doesn’t require a bookstore if it’s not going to sell a lot of copies.

Since I made my peace with that, I’ve sought to connect with my audience through other venues—readings at colleges and universities, workshops, book clubs, blogging. I’m not mad at Barnes & Noble anymore; instead, the store’s become my library-café as well as provider of the few new, deeply-discounted books I purchase.

The Shrinking Audience

Conceding that one is probably not writing for the great book-buying public certainly narrows one’s audience. I’ve written here before that an Audience of One is really enough; that it’s a great way to keep depression and anxiety at bay and even achieve spiritual progress. The satisfaction, even joy, that comes through the discipline of writing is considerable—and highly recommended. For me, it’s more than even discipline; it’s a spiritual practice, like meditation, yoga, prayer.

But in my heart of hearts, I know that writing for myself isn’t enough; I truly do want to share with an audience. Want = desire. And as all good Buddhists know, desire is what gets you in trouble in this life. Making peace with that desire for a large audience has created tension and stress in my life—and maybe in yours, if you’re a writer. It isn’t easy, and it has to be dealt with, sooner or later if it’s not to consume you.

The Messenger

For months I’ve carried around an article I copied from Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors, & Literary Agents 2009, entitled “The Writer’s Journey: The Path of the Spiritual Messenger.” Written by Deborah Levine Herman, the essay provides reassurance, wisdom and practical advice to writers who find their spirituality at odds with the business of publishing. Herman writes: “If we have people listening to what we have to say, we can believe that we are the message and forget that we are merely the messenger . . . We are all here to improve the lives of each other.” I appreciated hearing that—and inside a book on the business of writing!

Ego vs. Spirit

Ms. Herman’s words touched a deep nerve. In recent years, the major conflict of my writing life is not what and how to write but whether my desire for publication contradicts my desire for greater humility and service. I wonder whether I should persevere in what sometimes seems an ego-feeding rather than a spirit-centered proposition. At the heart of the conflict is whether my writing is of value to anyone but myself; and, if the latter, whether I should surrender my craving to share it with the world. Any advice, such as Ms. Herman’s, that takes me down a notch or five—and helps me see the value of what I do as possibly serving others in addition to myself—gives me hope that I’m on the right path.

If we have people listening to what we say . . . That’s a pretty big if, given the Great Silence I spoke of earlier. However, if we are able to attract and hold readers, I believe we must view writing as a responsibility as well as a joy. Once we get people listening, what will we say? Will we help or harm? Is it foolish of us to imagine that our writing matters enough to do either?

The Mission

In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner exhorts us to write “ . . . so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs . . . so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on.” In other words, to write responsibly.

If I have any credo, the above quote is pretty much it. Thus, it’s my responsibility as messenger to not only deliver the news through my writing—that things aren’t nearly as shitty as they often seem; that redemption, while improbable, is still possible—but try to publish as well. However, Publication Highway is full of potholes like burnout and bitterness, even financial ruin, if a writer’s willing to quit her day job and put everything on the line for it. (My advice: Don’t do it.) I’m choosing to slow down these days, maybe even park, get out and walk, appreciate the scenery and talk to people, see what’s on their minds.

Hearts and Minds

The insight I receive from reading Herman and Gardner—that I’m only the messenger, not the great, famous author I set out to be three decades ago—joyously bursts the bubble of my grandiose self-inflation and brings me down to a planet where, though my books are not currently on Barnes & Noble’s shelves, they are in the hearts and minds of a few. Audience of one or of thousands? Maybe it doesn’t ultimately matter. We are all here to improve the lives of each other. One reader at a time.

The Messenger

The Moment I Knew

When it happens, you feel something crawling up your spine to stroke the back of your neck. Your mouth goes dry; electricity quivers inside arms and legs. Something clicks in the brain and you suddenly know something you didn’t only seconds ago. The veil parts and you are offered this opportunity, this gift. Forgiveness. Understanding. Love. Such moments are dramatized in a new book called The Moment I Knew: Reflections from Women on Life’s Defining Moments ($14.95 from www.sugatipublications.com), a collection of brief, compelling essays and poems by women from six countries. It’s a book men should read as well as women.

Eyes of Love

Recently my fellow Yellow Springer Cyndi Pauwels and I sat down at the Underdog Café to chat about Reflections, in which her essay, “The Powerful Eyes of Love,” appears. “When I read, I want to be enlightened, uplifted or entertained,” Cyndi told me. This collection achieves at least that; I found it so compelling I read most of it in a weekend. It also has the power to move the reader toward greater wholeness.

Cyndi’s essay appears along with twenty-nine others in the second “Reflections from Women” series, founded by editor and psychotherapist Terri Spahr Nelson, who hopes to provide writers as well as readers the chance for self-examination, expression and healing. The limit was 2,000 words, meaning the writing is tight and concise, lending credence to the adage “less is more.” Writers of greater or lesser writing experience from Granville, Ohio to Reading, England tackle topics ranging from relationships to pregnancy, family, children . . . and love.

When Cyndi began writing her essay, she figured it would be light, perhaps humorous; the finished product, however, turned out to be a clear-eyed, unflinching look at childhood trauma, a look that moved me deeply

The Past is the Present

In Cyndi’s essay, “Powerful Eyes of Love,” the present met the past on a recent icy day in Ohio following an eight-inch snowfall. “I realized I was having an inappropriate instinctual reaction to a situation,” she explains. I believe the essay is one of the most powerful in the collection, and that’s saying a lot—she’s in very good writing company.

At the wheel of her husband Geo’s new truck while he frantically works to free it from the icy driveway, Cyndi re-lives, in the span of a few minutes, the years between ages seven and seventeen when her step-father abused her for everything that went wrong in the household—just the way everything seems to be going wrong on this day. But Geo isn’t her step-father, and, in a shattering climax, Cyndi discovers she is not that abused, fearful child anymore. I won’t spoil your reading pleasure by quoting one of the most loving—yet spontaneous—speeches I’ve ever heard from a fellow man, but its utterance, accompanied by “the eyes of love,” promoted Cyndi’s long, slow healing, which continues to this day.

Why Put Yourself Through It?

During our conversation, Cyndi and I agreed that, while writing is not therapy, it can certainly be therapeutic.

“I work through it [trauma] on the page,” she says, “from my perspective as a disinterested bystander, not just what I was experiencing, because situations aren’t black/white; there are nuances. My involvement had an impact on the situation. I re-lived the experience [of abuse], but not in a negative way. My responsibility is to work through it; if my closure helps somebody, I’m glad.”

The experience of publishing such an emotionally naked piece was, she maintains, very positive, though she confesses, during the weeks following acceptance, she almost withdrew her essay for fear of what her mother might think. As it turned out, her mother’s response was “noncommittal.” However, through reading the essay, a sister from whom Cyndi had been largely estranged for a number of years re-established contact. About her abuser, Cyndi admits that compassion is something she struggles with, and she has no interest in her step-father’s reaction to her essay.

A Collaborative Experience

The process of writing and publishing the “Powerful Eyes of Love” was “a learning experience and taught me a lot about myself,” Cyndi concluded, adding, “I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t say publishing was also validation after drowning in rejection.”

Writers could look long and hard and not find as writer-friendly a venue for publication as the Reflections of Women series, designed by editor Nelson to be an extremely collaborative process. Cyndi said she never felt forced to accept Nelson’s proffered editing; some suggestions she took and some she didn’t. Also, the writers were allowed to vote on the book’s cover photo as well as which charities the book would benefit. (A “significant portion” of proceeds from the book’s sale will go to three charities that assist women. Purchasing online from Sugati guarantees a greater percentage to these worthy organizations.) Furthermore, a week before publication Cyndi participated in an on-line salon with 6-8 other Reflections authors. If the book’s sales exceed $5,000, all 30 writers will split the resulting royalties. Such a democratic process is rare in the small press publishing world.

Another feature of the book I enjoyed a lot was that the author’s bio note appeared immediately after the respective author’s piece, often with an update, briefly telling us what’s transpired between the time of the story and the present (it’s usually good news).

Writers and Shoppers Alert

From initial query to publication, the entire process took about a year, according to Cyndi, which in this business is pretty fast! Interested writers should visit the website to see topic areas for upcoming books in the series, along with deadlines. Interested readers might want to take advantage of November’s “blog roll,” during which Nelson is offering a 25% price reduction when you buy two copies of the book from the website; you can also receive free shipping (given at checkout). How about a copy for you and your significant other—or a woman friend? I don’t think you’ll be sorry.

P.S.

If you live close by, Cyndi will be appearing at the 23rd annual Lebanon (Ohio) Horse Drawn Carriage Parade and Christmas Festival on Saturday, December 3, 2011 in the Chapters Pre-Loved Books Booth from 4-6 p.m. with Tami Herzer-Absi , another Yellow Springs resident, who also has an essay in the book. Cyndi blogs in candid detail about her experience being published in The Moment I Knew on her website: http://cpatlarge.blogspot.com/2011/11/moment-i-knew.html.

Links:
To purchase the book (Sugati Publications): www.sugatipublications.com
Cyndi’s blog: cpatlarge.blogspot.com
Lebanon Horse Drawn Carriage Parade: www.ohioslargestplayground.com/lebanon-antique-horse-drawn-carriage-parade/
Chapters Pre-Loved Books in Lebanon: www.chaptersprelovedbooks.com/
Underdog Café: www.emporiumwines.com/

A Book for Both Genders: Healing Through Writing

 The Real Thing
Talk about creaky wooden floors and funky circa-1965 style! Consuming two formerly side-by-side shops at 233 Xenia Avenue in Yellow Springs, Ohio, the Emporium/Underdog Café is heaven for writers of every stripe (as well as artists, activists, academics and thinkers). Any time of day you can spot laptops, tablets and good old-fashioned pen and paper being wielded in quirky comfort. Other coffee shops might have better coffee, cutesier cupcakes and frou-frou sandwiches, but E/UDC has the “meat and potatoes.” Substance over style is apparent in every aspect of the place, from funky ambiance to the luscious homemade food, from soups to sandwiches to killer breakfasts.

Yellow Springs’ Living Room

For many, this place is the beating heart of The Town That Time Forgot. Though the tag of Hippie Town both amuses and irritates me, a resident of over thirty years, it is, like any stereotype, somewhat true. If you want to see the patrons of E/UDC through that lens, you can: bearded, long-haired men; women in granny dresses and beads; toddlers in tie-dye. But I see laid-back diversity. Folks of all age, origin, creed and class are as comfortable here as they are in their own living rooms. If you don’t believe it, attend a Friday night wine tasting, where mostly locals groove to some of the best (mostly) home-grown music you’ll hear anywhere. It’s joyous, raucous and safe as Sunday school. But you came to hear about the literary life, didn’t you?

The Inner Life

If, like me, you’re a fan of writing in public, E/UDC is the Rolls Royce (or ’65 Ford Mustang). If you’ve never tried it—and you want to get started—then all you gotta do is walk through the door; the subtle tinkling of that little bell on the door will rocket you back four decades. The Emporium’s wooden floor is old and scarred, the light dim, the walls packed with coffee and beer, the counter and case full of delectable food and goodies. Accompany your coffee with a homemade macaroon or decadence bar.

Stroll on in, take a left and the short ramp will land you in the Underdog, where the furniture’s a charming hodge-podge of Goodwill fare. Join me at one of the scarred, scrawled wooden tables. I love the low-slung vinyl chair, the beaded lampshade, the butt-eating couch, the paint-peeling concrete floor and the ubiquitous art on the walls of the Underdog. Drop in at 3:00 p.m. on a Thursday (as I am now) and you might find silence, quite a contrast to Friday nights or weekend mornings. On the other hand, you might overhear an interview in progress; a low, intimate conversation; or someone soapboxing big-time. One afternoon in recent memory I witnessed a meeting of a youth chess club; on another, three elementary-aged girls were singing while bent over their arts, crafts or—who knows—Marxist manifestos. I love the diversity, especially in age.

Ready…Set…Write

Mug full of House Blend, Ghirardelli dark chocolate consumed, I’m ready, aren’t you? As shadows outside lengthen, you sink deeper and deeper; the sounds of clinking mugs, rising voices, distant radio subside and you plunge into the subterranean depths of your writer’s trance…

When someone enters on the Emporium side, sending the bells a-tinkle, you look up, blinded by a burst of sudden light. Outside, framed by the storefront window, you see through your post-trance haze a picture-postcard-perfect snowfall in progress. Flakes flutter straight down, obscuring human figures across the street, customers to-and-fro-ing from Tom’s Market. You almost expect to see Dickensian frock coats and top hats, buttoned shoes and bustles, a passing carriage on a street now a whitening mass of frozen mud. Where the hell am I? You wonder.

Returning to the page or screen, you bring your sestina, screenplay or sci-fi blockbuster to a close and glance at your watch. Incredible. Two hours have passed. You’re now between worlds, missing the depths where sound was muted, walls transparent, colors unearthly. Someone has begun playing the piano: soft, tentative chords fill the space left by your retreating dream. As a violin joins in, you sit back, as tired and happy as a just-surfaced snorkeler returned to air and sun.

The Wraiths

Stoneycreek Roasters in nearby Cedarville, another of my favorite coffee shops, has a deck above a creek, but it can’t compare to E/UDC for atmosphere inside. I’ve seldom written within these walls when I didn’t sink at least several leagues beneath the endless sea of my imagination. If you can’t write well here, you can’t write in public and should probably keep to your garret. The place itself is a worthy subject. E/UDC was my model for the Bean Tree in my novel The Measure of Everything; I had a lot of fun memorializing it by setting several significant scenes within these worthy walls.

You might also consider inviting some pals to join you for a writers’ workshop. Nobody will bother you. Even if you live here, it’s possible to disappear. Let your body language announce your intent; Yellow Springers are great respecters of space. Solitude is possible even in the presence of prolific sociability. Even during the gabbiest times—Saturday or Sunday mornings—I’ll see the writing wraiths, hunkered invisibly at tables against the wall. It takes my writer’s eye to distinguish them from the paintings, quilted figures and dim drawings. I glance and look away, turn my attention back to my newspaper or essay I’m grading. I know I’ll soon be joining my brothers and sisters in writing.

Cultural Oasis

As is no doubt evident, there are plenty of reasons besides writing to visit this magical place. Many come to perform—musicians from all over love the reception they get here. (Visit the website for the full schedule of upcoming events.) But the management is open to all sorts of cultural fare. I debuted The Measure of Everything here on a Friday night back in ’05 with the help of The Fries, a fabulous Miami Valley oldies band specializing in 3-part harmonies and acoustic guitars. I knew better than to assume the wine tasters could live by words alone, and the chapter I read got a very respectful hearing before we rocked out.

And politics. Anyone who knows anything about Yellow Springs knows that we relish debating the issues of the day, with a slight leaning toward the liberal. Campaigning politicians, local and state, as well as activists from all over wanting to draw a crowd to discuss an issue show up here. One village council member conducts weekly “office hours” here. And with Antioch College’s first new class since the closing of ’08 now convened, the cultural/political scene should be livelier than ever. (Of course it never stopped.)

More Than a Coffee Shop

Those of us who live here wonder how we ever got along without this funky place. Of course people talk on the street and in the produce section at Tom’s, at the Sunrise, Winds, the Trail Tavern and Dayton Street Gulch, at Street Fair and Friday Flings. But while all those venues have their loyal constituencies, it seems that if we had to choose just one place to embody who we are, the Emporium/Underdog Café would win, hands-down. See you there?

Links/Resources:
Emporium/Underdog Café website – http://emporiumwines.com/cafe/
Stoneycreek Roasters website – http://www.stoneycreekroasters.com/
The Fries – http://www.reverbnation.com/thefriesband

The Emporium/Underdog Café: Lost in Time

A Place to Start

My Comp I (English 111) classes at Sinclair Community College are writing memoir essays this week. For a lot of reasons, it’s a loaded medium. I’m trying to play fair by not requiring anything of my students that I don’t require of myself. Therefore, I’m writing one, too.

Memoir, while easier in some ways than argumentative thesis-and-support essays, can be a challenge for seasoned writers, much less newbies. Writing honestly about your own life is daunting, especially when students are given a criteria sheet containing everything from organization to pacing and significance (see link to Narrative Writing link, below). Narrative writing is a great place to begin a basic writing class, requiring as it does lively and varied sentences and diction. In a class where secondary research is banned, we’ll need to tell personal stories for the rest of the quarter to support our positions.

Prewriting

We use the time-tested methods of free-writing, brainstorming and clustering (described in any basic comp text) to break writer’s block and find the real topic: the focus, the story-within-a-story, which is crucial to the essay’s success. Plucking a subject thoughtlessly out of the air usually leads to a mediocre story lacking significance. In my brainstorm, I came up with: drinking Clorox when I was a toddler, going on a spiritual retreat to the Trappist Monastery of Gethsemani, attending my first Bruce Springsteen concert and playing spring break at Fort Lauderdale with my college Christian rock band. I decided to tackle the Clorox incident, not only because the class seemed interested, but because I am interested in probing its meaning for its lasting effect on my life. Here goes…

Day of the Dragon

It must’ve been a really hot August day. According to family legend, I was a toddler, walking but not talking much. My mother and I were on the basement level of the garage apartment where we lived, and my mom was washing the uniforms of my dad, who, working third shift, was sleeping upstairs. I’ve imagined the scene hundreds of times…

It’s cool but humid in that dank, stuffy space, and I see my two-year-old self eyeballing that glass of bleach with intense interest. Maybe, by that time in my young life, I’ve tasted Seven Up, that clear, sweet drink in a green bottle; maybe I think it’s a glass of water. While my mother’s back is turned, I toddle over, making no noise, reach up, seize the glass, raise it to my lips and drink. It’s hard to imagine the rest.

I don’t think that I would’ve drunk much before it started burning and worse in my infant stomach, roaring up my esophagus like a hissing fuse. Things would’ve happened fast. Howling, I must’ve dropped the container, spilling the rest of the harsh liquid, maybe breaking the glass. When Mom turned around, she surely knew what had happened. Young, and inexperienced, newly saddled with the demands of not only taking care of a husband but now a son, she was doubtless overwhelmed, maybe paralyzed when she saw me crying. Known for her slowness, she must’ve acted fast that day.

The thing she did right, the thing that I have been grateful for all my life, was her summoning my father. Did she scream and wake him, pound a broom on the garage ceiling or leave me alone while she raced upstairs? I have only her word for what happened next.

“Your dad came and grabbed you up. You vomited all over that jacket he got from somebody who’d been in the army in Korea, the one with the dragon on it.” (I can see that jacket if I strain hard, although I may be inventing; to me, it’s Superman’s cape.) She pauses, shakes her head. “He laid you in the Pontiac beside him and took you to the hospital and had your stomach pumped.”

It was one of a handful of kind acts my father did for me, the largest being the gift of giving me life. I could’ve easily died that day—or been a sick kid for a long time. Neither happened. Superman arrived and spirited me away.

I don’t think my dad was drinking much then, therefore he wasn’t in a stupor from which he would not have roused. Within five years, however, he’d be drinking heavily, my mom and I would be living alone and waiting for him to visit, to pay the rent (or electric bill so the lights could be turned back on) and to buy groceries. The word for my dad would soon be Absence. By the time I was in fourth grade, he’d be gone for good.
But the Day of the Dragon, the young dad showed up and apparently took charge. The boy he nicknamed Butch befouled that fancy jacket festooned with its coiling monster of which he was so proud. Maybe I even defiled his car seat; surely there was hassle once he got to the emergency room. A country boy with about a third-grade education, my dad would’ve been lost in a hospital.

“Your father saved your life.” Mom always said it with the greatest pride. She never took any credit for what happened that day, though Dad would never have come running had it not been for her. The one thing my mother would be capable of doing for the following two decades until I left home to marry my first wife was asking people, often strangers, for help. It’s a gift I should not minimize, although to this day I have trouble depending on others.

When I’m tempted to vilify my father for abandoning his wife and son, and minimize his gifts—a wagon, a bicycle, some flashy six-gun sets and a Davy Crockett outfit three sizes too big—I have to recall that he gave me life. Twice.

Truth vs. “The Truth”

Writing which is this personal can be intense. As a fiction writer, I never feel I’m into deep enough water unless I’m nearly embarrassing myself with my characters, their issues, conflicts, revelations and resolutions. There are similarities but also huge differences between writing autographical fiction and writing memoir (see the link below for more information), the biggest one being strict fidelity to the literal truth. In memoir, you’ve got to name names, make people and places recognizable and tell the truth as you know it—not just “the truth,” the theme that naturally emerges from characters in conflict, but what actually happened, or as close as you can get. And you may not know the event’s significance when you begin; you have to take it on faith that you can strike gold by digging for it.

Demons and Angels

When first conceived, I thought my Clorox memoir would focus on my mother and her mental illness, which, while it would increase over time, was apparent even in my earliest years. But as I wrote, my father became the focus, a man I hardly know and about whom I have extremely mixed emotions, a man who abandoned his family, a man I cried for one whole day when he left.

That’s what memoir does: the process of writing can take you to the heart of the matter (or the matter of the heart) and place you right in front of your demons—and angels, as my dad turned out to be on one of the most important days of my life. Lightning may not immediately strike; memoir is a process, like any writing task, and it requires patience, faith and trust. I’d like my students to see this first assignment in their college writing course as an opportunity to face, or at least explore more deeply, an issue, a person or a memory that resonates for them, and maybe—but not necessarily—troubles them, like the relationship with a parent, a sibling, friend or romantic attachment.

Blowing the Top Off

While there are no easy formulas for any writing assignment, there are guidelines for narrative/memoir writing. It’s crucial to have a tight, trusting writing community in which to produce such emotional work. Such writing begs to be shared, and my students will submit their work for silent peer evaluation; we may even read a few aloud, voluntarily, of course. I remind students they must find the degree of self-disclosure that’s comfortable for them. They need to know their truths will be respected, and in my classes they always are. The comments they earn prove their efforts are appreciated and often admired. For the majority, it’s a satisfying assignment; I’ve read many that, in Emily Dickinson’s words, “took the top of my head off.” I expect this latest batch will do the same, and I humbly, eagerly look forward to reading them.

Links:
Narrative Writing (PDF)
Memoir vs. Autobiographical Fiction (PDF)

Memoir 101: Demons and Angels