Portfolio Madness

29 September 2009 at 6:02 pm · Filed under writing ·Tagged , , ,

It’s finally happened.  I’ve finally so involved in a project that I don’t have time to write witty things on my blog.  When I decided to apply for creative nonfiction MFA programs this fall, I thought I might as well take my first poetry class.  Why not?  I’d be studying creative nonfiction for three years.

But now it looks like I’ve been barking up the wrong genre.  Maybe it’s all new for me now, but I haven’t felt such passion for writing in a long time.  It takes all sort of ultimatums and quotas (and usally lots of binge eating) for me to write prose, but I find I can write poetry all day long.

And now, with my poetry teacher’s blessings, I’m trying like mad to create a portfolio to apply to MFA poetry programs this fall.  Fortunately or unfortunately, I’ve so in love with poetry that I haven’t touched my creative nonfiction portfolio at all in the past four months (and that still needs a lot of work).

Might I be accepted to both genres?  And then, oh, the decision!  Three years keening on the altar of prose or basking in the music of poetry?

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Life as Grocery List

24 August 2009 at 8:10 pm · Filed under writing ·Tagged , , , ,

I recently picked up an audio recording of Ann Patchett’s Run, curious as I was to read her fiction after reading her memoir Truth & Beauty, about her friendship with Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face.

While Run was a decent novel, I was more stunned by what Patchett said in an interview following the audio recording.  According to the publisher/interviewer, it took Patchett six years to write Run, and at the same time, she’d produced Truth & Beauty.

The interviewer asked, “Was the act of writing nonfiction at the same time interference, or did it help clarify things for you, or did it make no difference whatsoever?”

Patchett replied, “It really made no difference.  Writing nonfiction is so much easier than writing fiction—for me—that it really is akin to saying, ‘I did my shopping list, and then I went back to my novel.’”

What!  In my writing circle, we grit our jaws and wipe back tears as we slowwwwly weave our memories into story, and Ann Patchett has the nerve to say that, for her, nonfiction is like writing a shopping list.

Granted, she’s more seasoned than most of us, but I think the success of Patchett’s Truth & Beauty relies heavily on the aura of Lucy Grealy, the tragic artist—the lurid story of neediness, depression, reckless spending, promiscuity, and drug addiction behind Grealy’s triumphant, hopeful Autobiography of a Face.  I thought there were key elements missing from Truth & Beauty, particularly exploration of Patchett’s inner life as she served as Grealy’s quasi-suicide hotline.

How could she not have felt annoyance and resentment as Grealy called her several times a day to ask if she loved her?  To bemoan that nobody loved her.  My gods, who could put up with that—and why?  And how did Patchett deal with the guilt, if any, that she made the decision not to contact Grealy about her coming into town the night that Grealy died of a drug overdose?

If what we wanted was an exposé on Grealy’s brokenness, we got it.  It’s hard for me, though, to trust a narrator who guards herself in a self-portrait of saintly patience. (Patchett does reference this in the book, when Grealey wonders what she’s done to deserve her loyal friendship and says, “But at least I can make you feel like a saint.  That’s what you’ve always wanted.”)

Nonfiction is “easy” to write when we write about another person’s problems and risk little of ourselves.

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Behind the Editor’s Desk

14 August 2009 at 1:49 pm · Filed under writing ·Tagged ,

For almost half a year, I’ve served as a volunteer reader for a literary journal, which means I speed through dozens of submissions and decide which pieces are strong enough to pass on to the official prose editor. It can be a bit of a power trip, designating manuscripts for rejection, where my pieces have ended up often enough, and wondering how people have the nerve to send out pieces with such weak storylines and flat characters, often in the wrong genre.

(Please don’t ever give your characters (first and last) names that all begin with the same initial, and please don’t start your pieces with a character in yoga meditation. Please don’t make your entire story a flashback, a dream, or a character’s endless complaint. Please also refrain from being so enamored with your own talent that you can’t cut out poetically lovely, redundant lines, i.e., The sky dimmed into ebony. The night hung thick as velvet. The darkness drowned us in silence.)

It’s been inspiring, too, to see the range of creativity in writers’ stories and be witness to the hope, courage, and naked guts it takes to send one’s stories out for publication—thousands of submissions competing for a handful of printed pages. It’s also been enlightening to discern, through reading the submissions and the writers’ cover letters, which MFA writing programs I’d want to attend.

And it’s horribly sobering to see the works of creative writing professors and widely published writers in the same slush pile as the works of amateurs—and later see them together in the same rejection pile. No matter how much training we’ve had or how much we’ve published, we all have to start with the same blank page or screen and hope what we create is meaningful.

That said, I also see that it’s true that we shouldn’t take it too hard when our work gets rejected. You could have an undergraduate or some volunteer like me screening the manuscripts—each of us with our own tastes and particular mood swings when we sit down with a pile of submissions and I imagine each of us striving to produce quality work ourselves.

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Journaling Madness

7 August 2009 at 6:20 pm · Filed under writing ·Tagged ,

As a follow-up to my earlier post about journaling, I want to say that quotas are a great way to get back into a writing commitment.  Goodness knows I too often abandon my pen and keyboard in favor of sloth, mindless reading, mindless eating, and Internet surfing, and I have to reacquaint myself with discipline through minimal daily writing quotas, until passion (or at least interest) can take me beyond.

Journaling can also be profoundly helpful in providing an outlet for our confusions and bitter emotions.  Sometimes I think bad moods just want to be acknowledged, and if we give them airtime in our journals, they’ll be satisfied and go away.  I occasionally, however, find myself holding on to bad moods or giddy distractions when I know I can dispel them or work them out by writing in my journal.

I don’t recommend delaying sanity in such a manner.  It seems I sometimes want to feel human emotion gnashing at my heart for a while longer, after half a book and a few bowls of ice cream.

On that note, here’s another excerpt from Samara O’Shea’s Note to Self: On Keeping a Journal and Other Dangerous Pursuits (pg. 9-10), in response to a friend’s question of whether she should write down everything she thinks, as she sometimes thinks about strangling certain people:

Writing solidifies thought, which can be unnerving, but it also gives you a sense of control.  Maybe the risky notion just needs to be written to be released.  Perhaps seeing it will enable you to recognize its ridiculousness, or maybe you’ll have to write it many times for that to take place.  Writing also makes thoughts easier to deal with or at least acknowledge, which is the first step in just about anything.  You need to acknowledge a dream before you can pursue it.  You need to acknowledge a problem before it can be solved.  You need to acknowledge pain before healing can begin. I’ve found the acknowledgement part is sometimes harder than whatever needs to come after it.  …  We all have moments of madness, and the more in tune you are with all of your thoughts—even the ones you’d rather not have—the more in tune you are with yourself.  This isn’t to say that all thoughts worth recording need to be inappropriate or frightening.  Recording blissful thoughts and experiences is important, too.  You can relive the happiness as you write and then again as you read.

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Dangerous Pursuits

3 August 2009 at 4:34 pm · Filed under writing ·Tagged ,

Last month a friend of mine asked for tips on journaling, and I thought I’d share the tips here, many of them related to the timed writing exercises we do in the Fresh Start writing group.

When we’re flirting with the idea of bringing more writing into our lives, I belong to the school of quantity vs. quality. That is, I tend to focus on reaching a quota each writing session — perhaps ten minutes a day or three full pages in one sitting. This way, the mind is free to wander and perhaps even plumb the depths of the subconscious.

This also makes writing a regular habit, where the focus is merely on fulfilling a quantifiable goal rather than reaching an epiphany. (Of course we hope the latter occurs .)

It’s good to have a list of several topics you’ve always wanted to write about, and you can keep such a list tucked in your journal, such as:

  • my father’s gambling habit
  • the embarrassing school lunches Mom packed
  • the time my hair caught on fire
  • my first love
  • how I used to eat hot dogs raw
  • the day I gave the neighborhood bully a black eye
  • the smell of gasoline

Then, if you can’t think of anything to write when you sit down to your journal, you can choose one of these topics at random and write for your self-set quota number of pages or minutes each day.

On that note, here are a couple of excerpts from Samara O’Shea’s Note to Self: On Keeping a Journal and Other Dangerous Pursuits (pg. 2):

A journal is one of the only places where no one can judge you, and it should also be a place where you are not judging yourself. It’s difficult to do that when you’re already criticizing yourself for falling short of the process, so I invite you to dismiss everything you think a journal should be from your mind. Your journal is an extension of you, and therefore it can be whatever you want it to be. You can write every day or once a year. …

…the purpose of a journal is to serve as a mirror for your mind. You are your own universe. Your mind is vast, and even you can’t know of all the passions, insights, fears, and troubles that dwell within. A journal is an effective way to peel back the fleshy onion layers and get tot the center of yourself—bear in mind that there can be tears involved when handling an onion.

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Writer as Shaman

21 July 2009 at 11:41 am · Filed under writing ·Tagged

Here’s a great quote from an interview of Sandra Cisneros by Paul Mandelbaum, featured in 12 Short Stories and Their Making, edited by Mandelbaum (pg. 355).  Here Cisneros responds to Mandelbaum’s question of how rage is best used in art, in reference to her short story “Never Marry a Mexican.”

I wonder about my siblings and my mother and other people around me, how everyday people cope with the blows that life gives you.  Because I feel that one of the privileges of being an artist is we can take all of those stories, whether they’re ours or stories that we’ve witnessed, and we have not only the privilege but we have the profession of sitting with them over a long period.  Almost as if we were assigned to do a sitting meditation with these stories over a decade.  Over six months.  Over several weeks.  Most of society doesn’t like to think about these things.  The kind of obsessive stories that would damage one’s psyche.  Most people cope by not thinking.  And I think that’s where it’s most damaging, because it grows.  They become ghosts inside you.  Whereas for the artists, that’s their job.

You know, my mother doesn’t have time to sit and think about these things all day long, to live her life backwards, but that’s my job, and I’ll do it for her, and for other people in the community.  I think writers are the shamans of the community.  I think that everybody sins and you just process it and purify it for them.

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Reading Responsibly

15 July 2009 at 11:37 am · Filed under writing ·Tagged , ,

In my nonfiction class last spring, the instructor suggested that we keep an ongoing log of inspirations and the different aspects of craft we’ve learned from different writers and pieces.  Agh, I wish I had started such a log years ago.  I usually read books so fast that I scarce remember, let alone identify, specific nuances of craft and style.

One of my favorite, most revered classes from my undergraduate years was a 300-level course called Great American Writers, in which the professor selected texts that challenged the idea of each word in that class title (What defines a text as “great” literature?  What identifies an “American”? Who is considered a “writer”?).  Instead of assigning us analytical papers, our professor told us to write one- to two-page personal responses to what we’d read—a startling idea for most undergrads.  We were allowed to express our own opinions?

I have often wished to be motivated enough to regularly engage in such a practice, writing a one-page response to each book I read instead of tossing it aside to immediately start another.  (I read two books yesterday, The Reader by Bernard Schlink and the horrendous Children of God Go Bowling by Sharon Olson, which I thought was a literary memoir and discovered instead was a chick lit novel featuring a neurotically witty, self-absorbed heroine with the same name as the author.  Oh look, maybe I can start writing short blog responses to each book I read.)

Yes.  I will attempt this, to document elements of craft and write responses to the various texts I read.  I wish I had embarked on his hundreds of books ago, but here’s a start.

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