First Semester Aftermath

31 December 2010 at 1:30 pm · Filed under Life in General ·Tagged , ,

If I didn’t have a good excuse before for my sluggish posts, now I do: graduate school.  I just finished my first semester of my MFA program in poetry, and I am glad to say that — after several all-nighters, too many deadlines, and too many extensions of deadlines — I have most of the hair on my head left.  It was mighty scary seeing so many strands of hair littered all around my writing desk.

Taking on the formal study of poetry, I knew I was risking the same thing that happened to me in the formal study of art — allowing my high-strung, obsessive nature to snuff out my joy in creativity.  I used to love drawing, but now, after my art degree, I can only doodle.  After going into the program quite green, I now know a lot more about poetic craft and tradition.  But I’m a lot stiffer in my expression, too aware of the poetic giants and crafty rules.  I’m also writing a lot about depressing subjects, as if now that I’m serious about writing (in an MFA program), I need to write about serious things.  Bah. 

I need to practice better time and energy management this upcoming year (and the rest of my life).  I need to remember how to have fun in my writing.  Hmm, doesn’t this sound rather stiff and serious?

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Novel Writing Workshop with Carol Test

14 June 2010 at 6:58 pm · Filed under writing ·Tagged , ,

I suppose I can’t complain since I’m headed to graduate school this fall, but I do regret that I won’t be in town for my fiction teacher Carol Test’s novel-writing workshop.  She has this great syllabus structure in which students bring in the same section of their novels at the same time — the beginning, the reversals, section ends, and such.   This setup makes each workshop more focused so students can identify specific strengths and weaknesses in their own work and how to give specific feedback in the works of others.

Carol, will you be able to offer this next June when I’m back in town for summer vacation!?

Novel Writing Workshop – Phoenix College
 
Back by popular demand, CRW 271: The Novel Process is designed to help students take a mass of pages and turn them into a novel with a clear, solid structure. The course will focus on outlining, developing scene lists, structuring the novel, creating conflict and workshopping pivotal scenes.
  
Wednesdays, 6-8:40 p.m.
Fall semester 2010 (August 25 – December 17)
Instructor: Carol Test
Section #: 12158
Register through Phoenix College
 

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Testimony

19 February 2010 at 1:22 pm · Filed under Life in General

Whew, this blog has collected a lot of dust since I last checked in, and I might cheat by making a few predated posts. The start of 2010 has been a long haul. In early January, before the dust had even settled in my whirlwind of MFA applications, one of my aunts had a stroke.

It was torture seeing her in the hospital, where she was poked, prodded, x-rayed, scanned, injected, tied down, intubated, and medicated for four weeks before the doctors told us there was basically nothing more they could do. We finally took my aunt to hospice (where I would rather have brought her two weeks earlier), and she passed away two and half days later, holding my hand.

She was my second mother, really. I like to say that my immigrant mother was the one who disciplined me into being a good Chinese girl and my American-born aunt was the one who spoiled me silly with cotton candy and ice cream, trips to the circus, and too many presents at Christmas. It was a gift to spend her last days with her.

At one point I read her excerpts from Denise Chavez’s Taco Testimony, a memoir with recipes, and I told my aunt, who loved cooking tamales and tacos and couldn’t cook Chinese food at all, that I one day wanted to write a book like this, a memoir encompassing the Chinese and quasi-Mexican palate of my upbringing.

I’ve been saying this for ten years. It’s time to get it done.

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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 usually 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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