Lynda Barry Has the Cure for Rejection Blues, I Think

In a world where there are a lot of people saying "no," it's nice to hear someone say simply "good."  Not "the best."  Not "better than his but worse than hers."  Just "good."  Without any specifics or actual judgments.  That part is up to you, the writer.

Because are we really doing this for approval?  Really?  There are much easier ways to get approval, I think.

The big irony is, maybe 80% of my published work came out of working with Barry's method.  Some of it even came out of the class itself.  Barry's focus is on imagery and working in series.  She steers away from publication, fame, all that claptrap.  Regarding fame, she says, "It's a cookbook," which only the gray haired people and science fiction geeks understand, but then she is kind enough to explain.  I won't here.  Wikipedia does a good job.

This article on Barry's class in the NY times is worth a read.

Virtual Summer Conference: Sellers on the Nonexistent Top Ten Tips

Given recent events, it's hard to just resume activities.  But I am doing it.

Back to the Virtual Summer Conference.  Here's a podcast I have listened to often, Heather Sellers giving a talk called, "10 Tips for Finishing Your Book." She confesses early on, "there are no top ten tips," and, "when you're at a conference, it's really easy to turn into a child," with respect to the plethora of advice one receives at these events. "Remember, you already know every single thing you need to know--you just need to do it," Sellers says. So the bulk of her talk is about how to find the kind of solitary play that fosters the right mindset for finishing a long project.  She's from the Lynda Barry / Robert Olen Butler school of teaching writing, which I always find gets things moving for me.

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE HEATHER SELLERS TALK VIA ITUNES.
(It's iTunes U. You can stream or download. Track #4.)

Taking Care of the Writer

With so many folks around me learning to cope with serious illness, grief, and transitions, it's absurd for me to obsess on my recent batch of routine literary disappointments. The skinny SASE's and almost-theres are nothing new to me, and I have plenty of practice handling them.

One disappointment has nothing to do with literary merit. The class I was planning on taking this summer has been canceled. I heard from Captain Fiction himself that he has chosen to take care of his own health instead. Six-hour lectures are no joke for anyone at any age. He clearly made the right choice, one that I hope might lead him back to the writing desk. (It's selfish of me, but I would not mind reading another single-paragraph Lishkowitz novel.) Maybe I can learn, if not from his yelling voice in class, from his example of self-care. (Dumb, therapyish choice of words, for which he would probably yell at me, but yeah. I said it.) He is "refusing the gas pipe," to use his own words. Refusing suicide-by-teaching.

I find myself running all those choice sentences through my head, the ones I have been composing carefully and hoping to test out on him, the man with the magic ear. Then it dawns on me: this is just the usual schoolgirl crap. Hoping to please teacher. Hoping to please editor. Please, notice me! Notice me! When will I just stop already?

The teacher I need to please is me. The editor I need to please is me. The ear I need to tune up is mine. Self-care is how adults cope with routine difficulty and disappointment.

And with that in mind, I went back to another teacher, one I have never met. Natalie Goldberg's books helped me access some rich subject matter back when I was first exploring fiction-writing. I discovered they are available on audio download, for a reasonable price, read by the author, with remarks thrown in, the 50-year-old Natalie commenting on the 36-year-old Natalie. She has evolved, but also cares for the person she used to be. It's a self study that is full of the right kind of humility. In her Long Island accent, she "nags" (her word) me gently to "get to work."

Teachers come in all forms--some gentle, some not--some in person, some far removed by geography or time. So, for the moment, I'm back on track. Writing. Back in the practice, as she says.

I feel impotent in the face of the frailties of body and spirit I have been hearing about in the past few weeks. I think we all do. For all of you I know who are heartbroken or grieving or in pain or facing giant challenges right now, I think about you every day, and wish you peace of mind, energy, and courage.

Medieval Guild System? Maybe.

I just love Anis Shivani's essay in the Fall 2010 issue of Boulevard, "The MFA/Creative Writing System is a Closed, Undemocratic, Medieval Guild System that Represses Good Writing." I don't entirely agree with it, but I do love the argument. What are your thoughts? "Well-told myths of internal solidarity and well-timed rituals to enhance fellow-feeling"--well, that sounds about right. Programs each have their "house style." He goes after all the big institutions: the schools, the artist colonies, the fellowships, the summer conferences, the magazines, even the annual "bacchanal" of the AWP gathering, with an almost gleeful hammer. Masters, journeymen, and the rest of us schlubs trying to get in.

The only thing missing from his argument is joy. Yes! The kind of joy that doesn't come from a dark outlook. Maybe this fellow-feeling isn't all that false. Just one girl's opinion.

As for the assertion of written output getting more "conservative," this is something many of us agree on, including the MFA-ers themselves. Part of the challenge of entering the guild is knowing which kool-aid to drink, not losing sight of the world outside the guild.

Anyway, I highly recommend this entertaining essay. Inflammatory in all the right places.

Writing Class Time Machine

Ever wish you could take a workshop with Faulkner? Check out this free resource. Listen in on a writing class from 1957.

Write Camp Notes Part Two

As promised, I'll continue with my report from the New York State Summer Writers' Institute at Skidmore College. I had two workshop instructors, Amy Hempel and Mary Gaitskill. I'm a fan of the writings of both of them, for different reasons.

Hempel's fiction has a warm feeling that I appreciate; I haven't pinpointed exactly how she accomplishes it, but I have a couple theories. One possibility is that she doesn't rely on conflict in the traditional sense. Because much of her work is very very short, she doesn't need to use conflict to make one commit to reading, and her notion of "plot" is more reliant on character obsession and language. Her humor is based in surpise, the disarming turns her narrators take inside paragraphs, or indeed sentences. And she doesn't waste language. This feels to me very respectful of the reader and is another source of warmth.

One of the things I like about Gaitskill's work (Veronica in particular) is her facility with physical description to bring out character emotion. Her empathy is not just for characters but for everything in their world. When I read her work, I am reminded that emotions are not something contained inside a human being. We all radiate emotion all around us, in the way we observe the world and interact with it. The interpenetration is palpable and mysterious. Gaitskill captures this in a very rare way.

I bring up these observations about their work because each had an approach to teaching writing that was consitent with these observations.

Amy Hempel immediately set a warm tone. At the beginning of each critique we went around the room and each named something that we thought was working well in the story. This was a welcome reminder to me that something positive can be said about every unfinished work, and I mean every one, and it does not hurt to give specifics. Further, pointing out what works is not the same as saying you love the story, it's finished, etc. We had no trouble with this exercise.

After going around the circle, she asked us leading questions, like "how did people feel about ____?" Sometimes she even took a vote. What I liked was how she followed up after our response: she addressed the writer each time and instead of "here's what you should do," she said, "so there's some information you can use." (Or something like that.) It's an important distinction, and very respectful of the writer. One of the reasons we go to workshop is to learn how strangers react. The reactions are a data point, not necessarily a prescription for how to move forward.

Hempel also found moments in each critique to address us all with general ideas about how to make fiction better. Questions to ask ourselves: what do I have that's already enough? What happens in this story--not what is it "about," but what happens? (She allowed that what happens is often language, not incident.) Regarding setting: what is the thing that only happens here? Is the story an account of an event or an event itself? And some tidbits I jotted in my notebook: Pay attention to what you give yourself to work with later. The story needs to be logical on its own terms. In stories of illness, illness is the situation, not the story. (I think of her much anthologized "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried.")

Her comments in my manuscipt were gems. I had submitted a reminiscence piece and she encouraged me to do something to bring it into the present, to give a reason for discussing 1977 right now. It's a logic question. I've played with this suggestion and I'm happier with the story. And her line edits were what you would expect from Hempel. Like she said, what do I have that's already enough? It's hard for me, sometimes, to trust that I've adequately presented a theme. Her cuts were quite encouraging. Like yes, I did say it already. She helped me to trust my readers more.

On to Mary Gaitskill. She opened the class with a discussion of the state of literature. Her argument was that we attend writing programs to learn how to write better, and since this costs money, social class is involved. (The elephant in the room at a nice college like Skidmore, and she said it on the first day. I applauded inwardly.) Further, writers teach at writing programs to make a living, because publishing isn't enough. And to top it off, the only people who read literary fiction are aspiring writers, writers, academics, etc. It's become an insular world. We are ghettoizing ourselves. She seemed really distraught over this development, over the inability of writers to actually interact with people in other walks of life.

Her approach to teaching writing reminded me of the (offstage) teacher in her story "Description." Partly because of themes in the student stories we were critiquing, and partly because this is her strong suit, she focused on creating emotional empathy through physical description. The discussion was tremendously helpful to me. We went through stories of John Cheever and Flannery O'Connor, among others, to look at the use of crude characterization mixed with not-crude description. It's an angle I hadn't thought of before. The crude, maybe even grotesque nature of the characters in the textbook stories had a similarity to Gaitskill's earlier work, and she pointed out where the description in the stories "opened up" and became more subtle. Listening to Gaitskill's close reading was worth the price of admission.

Early in the class, Gaiskill discussed the mysterious nature of what makes writing great. "It's like a person's unconscious or guts--invisible but essential--that inner quality that makes the work alive." And she argued that style is a big part of it. "We think of style as something superficial," she said, "but it's not. " The examples she gave later in the class supported this argument, where the nature of the description turned softer, making character identities--even crude ones--fall apart.

Which is in line with something Hempel said, and I'll close with it: "The more consistent a character is, the less credible." I'll chew on this for awhile, while I go off to finish my household chores.

Hope this has been fun for you to read. If you ever get the chance to work with either of these teachers, I recommend them.

Write Camp Notes Part One

It's been a couple weeks since I got back from the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College. Now that I've finally unpacked, I'll share.

First the basics and logistics. It was a four week workshop with the option to attend for only two. I was there for the second half. Many of the students were there on scholarship from grad or undergrad creative writing programs at other schools. Others were teachers using continuing ed grants. Others were serious "hobbyists" like me, who need to play full-time writer for a couple weeks every year, on vacation from otherwise unrelated dayjobs. And there was a handful of retirees, some just starting to write. The mix of age and experience was large (with all the positive and negative aspects one would expect). Most of us stayed in the dorms, in a block of single rooms set aside for writers.

The schedule was less strenous than other conferences. Mornings were unprogrammed. Workshop met Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons. Class size ranged from 5 to 16. There were 7 concurrent workshops, so it was possible to learn every single student's name. Some students paid extra for a consultation on a book-length manuscript with an author of note. (Many of them told me it was a shining highlight of the conference.) Tuesday and Thursday afternoons were generic Q&A sessions with visiting writers. (These sessions relied on the students to provide the topics of discussion, which I felt was a weakness relative to other conferences--I would have preferred to hear the authors talk on specific craft-related subjects. Wouldn't you love to hear Russell Banks talk about voice for an hour? Or Charles Simic talk about what one learns from doing translations? But I digress.) Each evening had a reading by two of the faculty or visitors, followed by a reception. There was a good amount of drinking but alcohol was not the main event. Sunday evening had a student reading and barbecue at an old Victorian mansion attached to the school.

But enough with the nuts and bolts, and on to the unique and/or noteworthy aspects. My overall impression was that we were encouraged to delve deeply into the work of others. The nightly faculty readings were long (each author for as much as 45 minutes) and gave more than a taste of a writer's work. Bob Boyers, the director, gave a thorough, thoughtful introduction to each writer, and while the good-natured jokes did fly about the length of his speeches, they were an art form unto themselves, carefully composed (and even, from previous years, compiled in a volume called A BOOK OF COMMON PRAISE), and designed to help us hear new things in the work of authors we thought we already knew.

A word on the faculty and guests. It's an astonishing list of literary heavies, and my reason for going. (My favorite readings were from Charles Simic, Danzy Senna, Nick Delbanco, Rick Moody, and my teachers Amy Hempel and Mary Gaitskill.) Hero worship was definitely in the air. But the faculty, too, seemed committed to passing the baton. It felt (to me) like it was more than a dayjob to them.

This theme of delving deeply extended into the classroom, where we were reading and annotating 30 pages each of student prose. (Most other workshops I have done ask for half that amount.) With a class of 16, plus assigned published works to read, the load added up. I learned what a slow reader I am. I had flash memories of the oppressive weekends of grading papers, back when I used to teach comp. So the "free" mornings in Saratoga Springs turned out to be me with my folder and pencil, changing venue but not activity: to the cafe in town, to the cafeteria, to the library, to my dorm, to the outdoor chair. To work and work some more, this annotating freak went.

The sheer volume of required reading created in me a new impatience for extra verbiage, for explanation of character motive and/or backstory, for wit for wit's sake. I apologize (if you're reading this) to my classmates for the mass of delete marks I put in your pages. It's not you, it's me, and I think I overreached. I encourage you to ignore the unhelpful comments. I'm not one of those people who thinks workshop is about thickening your skin. But it is about sharpening one's taste and editing skills, and I grew a lot in that department. Emphasis on taste, as in that's why there's horseracing.

I kept thinking about what my husband says about a good day up at bat. The pitch might be coming at 80MPH but if you're in the groove, if you've practiced your fundamentals and put on your lucky underwear and said rabbit rabbit rabbit when you got out of bed in the morning, if you are in the best possible shape before you stand at the plate, the ball looks like it's hanging in the air. All you have to do is whack it.

I felt a little of this shift happening in my brain. The long hours spent picking apart other peoples' unfinished work has made it much easier to pick apart my own. The mistakes and missed opportunities jump out faster. I don't have to beg readers to show them all to me.

The other byproduct of the deep-looking emphasis of the conference was a total lack of instruction on how to get published. I found this refreshing. It wasn't a matter of the discussion being premature for the students (it was for some, but not all), but rather, it would almost be in bad taste. This was a conference about writing and reading, but not about sales. Yahoo.

I want to get into more specifics about what I learned in the classroom, but I'll save that for a future post. Just one more thing before I sign off--that sparkly water they have all over Saratoga bubbling from those cute Victorian spigots--delicious! But it contained microbes my body did not know yet. Be warned. Also: racehorses are exciting and gorgeous when they're working out in the morning. They're not wearing all that wacky colorful clothing they wear on race day, and they are not in a big pack, so you can see more of what they're doing. Worth getting up early. Damn, they're fast.

More later! Off to make dinner.