Living The Dream, Part 5

Don't forget part 1,  part 2,  part 3 , or part 4.


Disclaimer to Part 5
-I've left out a whole lot of what happened during residency, more dinners with the faculty, meetings with first semester students about their work and the program, lunches with some of our guests lectures and readers, and the many private conversations I had with students and faculty. These were precious times for me. It's valuable to list these items for you, dear reader, in case you want to apply for the GA or learn more about the going-ons of the program. But to divulge the inner-workings and conversations that occurred would be to sacrifice the sacred...

So I bring you the highlights:

DAY 4

GRADUATE LECTURE: WOW, THAT DESCRIPTION MAKES ME FEEL BAD
Laura Jones

• The visual info provides thematic hints.
• If a character walks by a baby deer versus road kill…different tone
• B/c it’s there (passive imagery). You feel something, not plot. 
• Images can go beyond (literal interpretation). 
• Style versus content. Images can make for a pretty reading.
• Using style of image to convey information.

EXERCISE: Take this bare-bones statement and make it visual.
                               "I road a horse to my friends house." (The Fall of the House of Usher).

MY EXAMPLE:
I rode past the general store and waved hello to Mary the shopkeeper. She stopped and wiped her hands on her apron and grinned. "I’ve got some candy you can take to Marybeth’s." I slowed Nelly down and hopped off. I ran to Mary. “Hold tight a minute. I’ll get it.” I pulled on my shirt to get some cool air. When she returned, she handed me a bag. I peeked inside and saw the shiny candy red coating on the apples. Then I said goodbye and hopped back on the horse to hurry to Marybeth’s.

• Content based imagery- objective description of what’s there
• Tone based imagery- subjective experience of narrative voice

DAY 5
STUDENT READINGS

A few snippets from the crew.

Kassie Rubico
“A comma splices through my fragmented thoughts.” From her piece about teaching her first grammar class.
Gabe Cleveland
“I don’t know who’s in my bed!” What he whispered to his roommate across their bedroom when he waking up to a strange girl laying next to him.
Sally Stanton
“A scaredy cats fear is not a wall built in a day.” From her middle grade novel.
Sheree Renee Thomas
“Nothing on his mind but the heat…he don’t know the heat’s gonna bring him down.”
“Heart lookin’ like a crooked knife.”
Beth Richards
“Those things might make people think the wrong things and we don’t want that do we?” “No one was willing to correct me in detail.” From her piece about the first time she came out.
Beth Grosart
“No way I was buying sex items in the same place my mom bought chicken.”
“Even though I currently qualify as a thief, I had a hard time lying.”
Alexis Croteau
“Why is he taunting me? Doesn’t he know I’m about to die?”
Lauren Kelly
“I hate white cars. They make me want to kill my mother.”
Alison McLennan
“It is neither repelling nor inviting. It just gets you through the day.”
Jackie Brown (intro)
“The only thing these poems have in common is that they have people in them.”
"If that mocking bird don’t sing. It’s dead.”

DAY 6
GRADUATE LECTURE: CROWD AS CHARACTER
Jim Kennedy

Individuals (people on a highway)–in a major traffic jam–get out and talk–camaraderie, boundaries gone.

This morning’s Boston Globe
Porter Square yesterday, 447 passengers trapped

•     No cell phones
•     Helplessness
•     Then, camaraderie
•     Haircut appointments and meetings and job interviews

The T guy shepherded everyone.
   
Cinematic and fiction crowd characters

Cricket in Times Square- destructive, crowd character

Seven Chances- 1000 brides show up, crowd chasing, credible. Angry, wanted to destroy him.

Crowd influence
   
GRADUATE LECTURE: EASING ANXIETY ABOUT UNDERSTANDING POETRY
Teresa Sutton
Exercise: In A Dark Time Theodore Roethke
1.    Write three words to describe how you feel before you read the poem
2.    A few people to share
3.    Now teacher asks for volunteer to read the poem aloud
4.    Then ask, what do you notice about the poem?
5.    After you discuss it, then rate how you feel on a scale of 1-10, Light bulb!

If you get a whole class, it brings a lot to it. Teacher doesn’t need to say much during this.

DAY 7
Graduate Lecture: THE FICTIVE DREAM AND ITS IMPACT
Melissa Ford Lucken

Fictive dream, commercial versus literary.

What’s the difference?

Wants us to think about this.
Discussion in small groups.
Then she goes through what we have put on the board:

• More accessible language
• Entertainment versus art
• Craft versus form

Commercial about making money, high concept pitch, conceptualized product, target audience within general, 3 sentence pitch: Dystopian YA, Paranormal romance, erotic, erotic romance, chick lit…

Literary

•     Themes
•     Motifs
•     Enveloping action
•     Exposition (not in commercial)
•     Read aloud

Commercial
    Close 3rd person (author intrusion is a bad thing)
    Branding, swag, promo, prepackaged and shaped.

DAY 8/9
HIGHLIGHTS

Lunch q & a with Iain Pollock

Iain considers audience, wants reader to be conscious of the racial perspective. Cites Robert Hayden.

Wants to push reader to have to do the research but not Google everything.

He says to us to think metaphorically when you are reading poetry. This happens faster in poetry than in fiction. Descriptive 'cause short.
That’s why reading out loud is so important.
The poem must resist the intelligence
. Almost successfully.
People feel shut out by poetry. How do you feel? Iain asks his students this.

Tomorrow read Part 6...the dream ends.

Living the Dream, Part 4: Day 3

Don't forget part 1 or part 2 or part 3.
  
Day 3

GRADUATE LECTURE: “Practice doesn’t make perfect: A Case For a Better Practice”
Seth Edwards

• Define Process: What you do as a writer. The motions you go through. NOT your process by which you improve your specific piece.
• “I don’t think I have anything truly unique to add to the conversation” (about process).
• Analogy to improving golf game.
• Instructed Gabe to come up and putt. Then showed him intense instruction on it…resulted in not getting it in.
• “Drive” is for show.
• “Putt” is a science.
• Haphazard routine with no awareness. If you just stand up and putt around for ten years, you might improve…
• Phase I: “Just do” or “Just putt” No method, no awareness, [I would say almost compulsive maybe.] Here’s where he learned that practice makes perfect doesn’t work. It’s absurd. Yet as a writer, this is what he was doing.
• Phase II: Too much too soon. Coaching and instruction overload, resulted in tensing up. MFA program.
• Phase 3: 3,6,9 method for golf. Put the ball at 3, 6, 9 feet..
• The moment of discovery.
•  What am I doing while I putt? When I was putting during the process of practice became aware of how my body was being held and what time of day it was, what mood I was in. Discovered I was really tense.
• “I became self aware of how I practiced–NOT the practice itself (not the game or drill itself).
• Yet as a writer I wouldn’t do this…
• “Writing is like…”
• What are the implications? Make your practice better. Get intentional.
• How do you writer? What do I do? I better get intentional.
• Can I become a better writer?
• Yes….Figure out how and then replicate. Good habits and bad habits.
• No…because they won’t do the work.
• Is talent enough? No.

• Strategies to improve.
• Francine Prose Read Like A Writer
• Can you really know what you did after you did it?
• Speculate. Avoid navel gazing though. Analysis. Anti-thesis of writing for most of us.
• Mind/body. Art/Science
• Chapter 2 of Burroway…added later in second edition.

• Study your process: 1. Imitation of whoever’s writing you love. 2. Visualization
• Exercise: Writing is like….Making lasagna…eventually you stop following the recipe and make it your own....Ballet…drill, dance, rehearse, perform.

Q & A with Jackie Woodson

• “When I sit down to write, I avoid newspapers, cell phone, etc. I use a playlist and replay it over and over.” For the Tupac book she played Tupac and Eminem and Lauren Hill. House has to be really clean no distractions. Get into space and not getting interrupted. Be aware of limited time to write because kids come home. When I’m stuck, I read or listen to books. Her go-to books are Member of The Wedding, To Kill a Mockingbird, anything by Raymond Carver.
• Listening to books versus reading. If it’s really well written, wants to read. If it’s factual information, wants to listen to retain.
• Cathy asked how to you figure out the vessel for the story? Picture book, YA, Middle grade, poem? Jackie says that the age of the character dictates.
• First line matters.
• Poetry line-by-line, but with urgency.
• She reads out loud. Not very concerned with language in Pecan Pie so didn’t read aloud.
• She says she is a minimalist as a writer. Brush strokes of appearance of characters and setting. Desire for reader to meet her half way.
• “I get to choose my illustrator, but I can’t talk to them.”
• Pictures and words are independent
• Translate internal thoughts of character to the stage for her play version of Locomotion. And keep the integrity of the story the same. 7 characters into 3.
• Jackie “Plot happens. It’s the thing that will happen…If you get 2 people in the room, conflict will happen.” What do they want and how are they going to get it?
• It’s all about HOW the story is told.
• When writing characters that are not nice you have to have compassion for them and that allows you to find the broken place in them to make the reader have compassion.
• “In the act of writing I do not try to look for the universal. Rather, I assume we are all connected. The gaze has to be bigger.”
• Walk through the world with eyes wide, wide open.
• She doesn’t outline or plan.
• “If your story is trying to say something, say it.”
• She doesn’t write the curse words besides "damn" or "hell". Instead she says they cursed a lot and let the reader decide which ones.
• She doesn’t read a lot of craft books but mentioned Bird by Bird and John Gardner. Also The Hero’s Journey.
• Says uses the fiction as her craft books.
• Picture books are the hardest. Adult fiction can look back and YA no looking back. 

Part 5....tomorrow......

Living The Dream, Part 3: Day 2

Don't forget part 1 or part 2. 

DAY 2

• Damn birds woke me again.
• Rain again.
• By 9:13 I’m at Starbucks having my tea with foam
• I don’t move until 11:45.

GRAD LECTURE: HOW TO BUILD AN ABSENT CHARACTER
Jina Simmons 

• The absent character is a siphon, a magnet, according to an author called Roosevelt.
• Annette, in the back, says the absent character “Can’t defend themselves”.
• “Ghost persona” Gina calls it. Person isn’t there but their presence is felt.
• We care about the protagonist what we do with the absent character is to show how the protag. is affected by the absence.
• What is it about not having this person in his or her life and how has the absence affected her?
• The absent character was just not a void, questions, memories, stories Gina says this.
• Multidimensional absent character
• Stories exist about the absent character. Who tells these stories? Were they affected?
• We meet him the way Barack does (referring to Barack Obama’s memoir).

GRAD LECTURE: LET'S GET IT STARTED, Jumping Into a Story
Angela Foster

• First pages…If the first page isn’t good, I will shove it back on the shelf. I had to judge a contest and low and behold, she discovered her method was right, those that became finalists had good opening pages.
• Writing first pages is like herding cats. You don’t know it’s successful till you’ve done it and someone tells you you’re successful, and you might not get it until you are done with the whole manuscript.
• When in doubt or whenever possible, tell the whole story of the novel in the first page. – John Irving
• Hook ‘em and hold ‘em- Will Weaver a Minn. writer
• 3 Key components
• The hook, come quickly @ the first line.
• Make the reader care. "I had a friend and we shared everything and then she died and we shared that too.” Memory of Trees
• Create a sense of danger or curiosity. “Mother spooned the poisoned corn and beans into her mouth…” Mother is starving they all are and she wants to make sure these bits are not going to kill the children so she goes first. From Change Me into Zeus’ Daughter
• The set up, setting, back-story, intro to characters, foreshadow
• Engage the reader through set up. –Memory of Trees, sets the tone through a sense of place.
• Conflict, yearning, emotion that drives the story, opening action

GRAD LECTURE: AN EXPLORATION OF DYSTOPIAN FICTION
Rick Carr

• A movie running in back of him with a timer running. Image: “Anarchist hackers against WB/IMF”- a tight focus in on a smiley face with no nose.
• Dystopian Fiction:
• Looking back…how did we get here? The real world with the fictional world.
• “Where fiction and nonfiction collide is what dystopian fiction is.” -Rick
• Struggle with nature. Protagonist trying to engage with nature.
• On the screen: A fist with the world. “Revolutionary”
• An old man spray-painting the words “Fuck the Gods” in Bright Red.
• Showing real images while discussing dystopian fiction.
• Image: No Gods, No Masters, Against all authority

GRADUATE LECTURE: THE REMINISCENT NARRATOR IN LITERATURE
Carol Owens Campbell

• "I’m really excited and thank you all for bein’ here and I really want to welcome y’all."
• Bottles of water and bowls of fruit and candy.
• "Did I thank y’all for coming?"
• "I also want to say that I’m honored you’re here, Sterling."
• "What am I going to do? Give everyone a puppy?"
• So instead I just brought you a reminder of a puppy…a pic of son with his first puppy.
• I don’t remember everything about this moment/day…however I can reminisce (with the pics).
• Series of pics of Griffin, her son, with puppy growing, transformed him into a caregiver.
• “I’ve never gone this long in a class without someone crying for his or her mommy.” Carol taught preschool.
• How do children most like to learn? They like to play…Are you all ready to play?
• Dual of clashing perspectives.
• Reminiscent narrator- a passive commentator in a rocking chair, milquetoast, sedate–NO!
• Let the dual begin.
• The most revolutionary and rebellious storytelling voice is this narrator.
• Reverie thinking back….Reveille- instead, a wake up calls.
• Summer afternoon…To me they have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Exercise:

The first time I heard_________ by ________ I was with ________and we were at_______.

Then choose one part and expand in a paragraph.

My Example:
The first time I heard Wanted Dead or Alive I was with neighbors, and we were on the bus going home from school in fifth grade.

Neighbors on Casey Drive. Only in the summer there was a granddaughter named Jennifer, blond and nice and perfect. And her cousin Janelle opposite. I told Janelle how girls got their periods. Jennifer once came looking for me at the Maher’s while I was playing Barbies and I felt really stupid. I remember being at the grandparents house with her once and her Uncle who was the brother of her mother loved Laura Branagan and was getting ready that night to go her concert. I remember the four-post bed in the bedroom cherry wood But I can’t remember the family’s name.

This was a fav writing exercise of an editor at a conference from a workshop she went to in NY.

***

Highlights from later in the day...

• Sacred dinner of which I will not speak of in this blog. Sterling Watson, Meg Kearney, Tanya Whiton, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Kathleen Auger, Laban Carrick Hill. I bow to them.
• Readings that evening:  Jaime Manrique Took him 6-7 years to write and just got a publisher. Spanish and Chinese and next year English. Pastoral novels. “If I couldn’t support my wife writing novels, what would I do?” “What right did I have to ruin her life too?” Dennis Lehane. Mystic River was his fifth novel. Movie had his voice and vision. Sterling, his mentor, introduced him. “Thrilling uneasy anticipation." Shutter Island. "Dennis is tough acting… he writes tough guys and is one himself.”  “I’m all choked up and emotional and I can’t feel cool.” D.H. after Sterling
• note to self...Dennis inspires me to go the edge. Favorite lines: “If her face looked 17 then her brain looked 10.” AND “Can she cook? That’s important. Not if they’re good or bad but that they are willing to do it.”

Part 4 tomorrow...

Living The Dream, Part 2: Day 1

In case you missed Part 1, click here. 

Day 1

6:45 AM.  Two angry birds scream at each other. This will be my alarm clock for the next nine mornings. On my run, it begins to rain and then thunderstorm. I turn up my headphones and sing “Born This Way” at the top of my lungs to prevent hearing thunder claps.

9-10 AM: Check in old friends Kassie, Beth, Jina. Facebook each check-in as I go. 
10: Campus tour…I remember everything from the list T gave me except pointing out to new students the “safety room” in PDR. What’s a “safety room”?  

  1 10:30 AM: Orientation From Meg

• “[We, as writers, sometimes think] Somehow someone’s success takes away from your own. The antidote is to fall in love with the work of someone else. By some magical process your own work improves and envy goes away.”
• Students from 18 different states
• “Keep an open mind. We all approach our work in different ways.”
• “Positive criticism. Not tearing someone down. It’s all about making that poem the best it can be. “
• “We are here because we are hopelessly intelligent…When you reach the point between intelligent response and kindness, choose kindness and intelligence will follow. “
• “I hope that you all want to be seen…don’t expect to get discovered. Even if you meet agents and editors.”
•  Program highlights: Dennis Lehane, Jacki Woodson, Lee Hope…Student Readings.

 GGrad lecture:  Kate Schmidt- Allusion in poetry…The negatives…Getting a handle on allusions. What is an allusion? It takes the reader outside the text, forces the reader to leave the familiar, brings in material that has nothing to do with the poem. “The first task of poems that I want to publish is that they are open to the reader.” – anon. Allusions can make it hard for the reader–that’s the negative. Sometimes writers sneak in agenda. Sometimes things are better dealt with indirectly. 

    Grad lecture: Suzanne Deshchidn: Contemplative Writing. Julie Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Walking to get the creative juices flowing. Induce creative capacity in the brain. Contemplative, trying to get out of the left-brain and into the right. The artist way “changed my life”. You have to translate out of poetry (to the fiction/prose writers). “Beat out with your feet the words and rhythms…”says Suzanne about using walking to help induce creativity. Making your bed…anything you do can be a contemplative act…be present to the moment…meditative mundane. Using rocking chairs, creative impulses. Anything rhythmic. No agenda. No time frame.  “This isn’t for poetry only…”
 
T  The rest of the afternoon to evening...

Later in the day, as I hustle from a grad lecture to the office, Meg takes my pic 'cause I look official with my Solstice t-shirt and clipboard. Then T and I meet about selling books…but it barely begins before we realize we are missing books…T goes to find said books, and I go around to double check rooms. Along the way, I see a lost student and scribble a note on my clipboard about said student. (Later I will have the chutzpah to retrieve lost students and deliver them to workshops). Then, finally, moments before the Welcome Reception, T and I meet about the book-selling…It all seems easy until I have to do it. (Grad assistant secret:  T  likes to come in here and touch all the books each morning). She tells me to think of this as a “lemonade stand”. It’s stressful at first, but when I see T at the end, she is so reassuring, I figure all is okay…Then, we have our first faculty readings: Favorite line from T’s reading: I was aware that I was enunciating wildly and using my stage voice. 
Love what Joanne says about David in her intro: “David scripts the edginess of the tumultuous years.” David reads "Turning Japanese" from Rush Hour and I remember why I love David so much. Great line, “Cleaning my tonsils so hard I almost threw up.” 
Susan introducing Sterling: “It’s my pleasure to introduce the writer I want to be when I grow up.” Great lines from his reading, “For Adam and Eve, the past was a ruined garden.”  “There lips together in a rocking kiss…”  “Separate from his will his skin recoiled.”

Stay tuned for Day 2 tomorrow...

Living The Dream, Part 1

It’s  been 7 days, 3 hours, and 33 minutes since I drove away from Pine Manor College, leaving behind possibly the 11 best days of my professional/writing life…

No longer a student, I had privy to certain things like faculty dinners outside on the back porch of the Ferry building, a stretchy bracelet that held the key to the office, and an extra long clipboard that held important and shall remain nameless documents. Additionally, I spent mornings (instead of in workshop), at Starbucks writing (typing out hand-written notes for this blog mainly) or in the office copying, collating, and assisting in the extinguishing of any “issues”. This “no longer a student” status suited me well. Meg and Tanya were amazing to work for–no micro-managing. They trusted me, and this gave me confidence.  And as the days passed like the kind of dream you long to remain in, I slept fitfully in my new reality.

 The last task I had as a graduate assistant occurred as I stood (awkwardly) in the Moncrief room watching the grads receive their instructions from Meg. Although I was technically “done” (save for a faculty photo), I saw out of the corner of my eye our commencement speaker holding a flash drive. I heard, above the din, “I just need to print this.” Many a last minute request (a bottle of water, an escort to the dining hall, copies for a class) had been made that week. Requests that I don’t know how Meg or Tanya could physically fulfill each and every time they were made. Early on, I realized part of my job as an assistant would be to make sure I was around for such last minute requests. How does one do that when one is running around campus doing a million other things (sitting in on every grad lecture, taking photos, composing this blog)? I don’t know. I just did it–so much (or so well, hopefully) so that Meg and Tanya, throughout the week, said to me You just seem to appear…right when we need you.

So I’m sure it didn’t really surprise Tanya when I “appeared” next to her and Cornelius. “Let me run up to the office and do that,” I said gently, plucking the flash drive from his hands.

It was surreal and awesome to run upstairs right before graduation and print what would be the most inspiring commencement speech I had ever heard. I will admit; I read it while I waited, savoring my last task as GA.  

After my final assignment, when I stood next to the great Laure-Anne Bosselaar to take the faculty photo, it finally hit me that I had crossed over again:

No longer a student and now no longer a staff member.

After the photo and before commencement began, a slow creeping emerging began inside of my body, and as I threaded through the crowd of people to the bathroom, I identified the feeling.

I was waking up.

*** 

NOTES FROM THE RESIDENCY, JULY 2011

BEFORE DAY 1 

First night before it all begins. Nerves are frayed (mine). Had dinner at a noisy, wood paneled restaurant while in a lovely foreshadow of the week to come, The Cure, plays. It’s the B sides, songs I haven’t heard since high school. We discuss important matters like why I carry a plastic bag of potatoes in my car.

By the end of the meal, my pre-residency anxiety manifests in a killer stomachache cured only by the tums Meg offers once we arrive back on campus at the office. We visit a soda machine I never knew about as a student. Perks of being on the other side...

The following morning, Thursday. I complete tasks I haven’t done since being a magazine intern in college. Collating and folder-making, schlepping supplies and books. I sweat. I work. It feels good.

The afternoon is spent checking classrooms. T carries an extra long clip board. I eye it enviously. After lunch-on-the-go in containers, T hands me the clip board so I can start the first official responsibility of the GA: Check in students. I hold the clipboard like a newborn. It’s the beginning of a slightly unhealthy bond to an inanimate object…

Later I have dinner with Colleen at Cheesecake…I have a moment where my missing of Kimberly and Kathleen (my buddies when I was a student) is so intense, I have to excuse myself to the bathroom and collect myself. What will it be like without them?

Later, I am a student briefly when I hang in the dorm with Rick, Jacqueline, Colleen, and Seth…The first of what will be MANY pilgrimages to the Met bar…I tell them all, I can’t drink. Gotta work in the a.m…Famous last words.

Stay tuned all this week as I post notes from each day of the residency.  

Don't forget part 1,  part 2,  part 3 ,  part 4, or part 5.