Readings from the Workshop

If you check out this blog post from the Kenyon Review website you'll find the live recording of readings by the amazing and wonderful instructors of the Writer's Workshop.

The entire recording is roughly an hour long with three short stories, two wonderful poets and a lovely non-fiction reading as well.

Sadly, my live reading was not recorded this year. There were technical difficulties on my night (someone stepped on the cord between computer and mic) and the data was lost.

I'll do a not-live recording of it with my awesome Audacity shareware(thanks El Johno for the tip) and post it on my website with the others.

Unless NPR decides to record it first. From mid-June to mid-July NPR is running a Three-Minute Fiction contest -- guess what Kenyon's time limit was for student readings? -- judged by an editor from The New Yorker.

Ad of the Week

Day Four - KRWW

I gave my reading tonight. It went well. For once I was able to listen to -- and remember! -- the readers that came immediately before and after me. I must be getting more acclimated with reading to groups.

Although I have to say that it did feel sad to have so small an audience to read to this year. The Kenyon Review is down one fiction workshop this summer (probably because of the economy) and one poetry workshop because the instructor suddenly passed away several months ago. The Review (tastefully) did not seek an alternative instructor.

I ended up reading the story I had previously dubbed "boring." Turns out it was boring because the order I told it in was very dull. Workshop enlightened me, I went off and rewrote the story, met with the instructor who further reordered the story and I was good to go.

Good to go; after I read it to the mirror in my room roughly twenty times, that is.

I have come to understand that my main issue with story structure is endings. Not the last line as much as the last fifth of the story. I have developed a laundry list of ways to screw up an ending such as foregoing the plot to dwell on the emotional conflict. In workshop, this had been dubbed "Eileen's Problem." As in, when diagnosing someone else's story we use the phrase as shorthand for "you fucked up the ending."

I think it's cool to have a problem named after me.

I'm also learning to see it in other people's stories as they read them. That's what's really cool. Being able to pick it out in other people's work means I'm learning. Now if only I can gain enough distance to find it in my own ...

After the reading tonight I went out for a much enjoyed drink with a large group of people. I ended up staying at the bar for over two hours. Eventually the crowd thinned and the three of us left all had writing pads out.

It was enlightening to have the three quietest people from workshop have a conversation together. Five words were said.

That's a joke.

Day Three - KRWW

Tuesday was better. Not leaps and bounds better but better.

We're breathing easier because we're getting to the meat of what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong. Getting to write the full stories that we're used to thinking in.

I give my reading tonight. CRAP. What will I read? Probably the first thing I wrote. It's the only thing that's finished that's not boring. Doh.

Day One - KRWW

I have arrived at the Kenyon Review Writer's Workshop! Excitement! Overcoming many difficulties to get here (namely a dead car transmission and a linguistics paper which is still not finished). Despite this I arrived well and on time.

Sunday morning was the first day of workshops.

Our two quotes for the week are Hanna Ardent: Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it, and Einstein: If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. We are committed to a week of both not defining and bringing forth absurdity. I like it.

Kenyon has the distinction of being a writing workshop. That is, we write. "Summer workshops" and "writing conferences" have somewhat dubious reputations for being places where writers (A) gather to talk and rub elbows, or (B) edit by committee -- or, as Tyler Meier calls them, "workshops that witch doctor the manuscript you brought with you." Here we bring nothing with us but our acceptance letters. Here we write to produce new work.

I feel like I have been rushing through the last week. Go, go, go. Get the car, get the cats, go. Drop the cats, repack, go. Get to town, unpack, go. Get to breakfast, to workshop, to lunch to dinner to reading, go!

Finally, I took a breath Sunday evening.

How long has it been since I seriously considered sleep before 10:00 pm? Today, I am there.

There's been no time for me to relax and enjoy the Kenyon experience ... even that beer I caught with a friend Saturday evening felt scheduled and false. This place is frickin verdant, naturalist's wet dream and I've been ignoring much of its beauty. Is it the go, go, go mentality? Is it the paper hanging over my head?

Kitten 385

I spend a lot of time making room for the cat. I should stop trying and just realize that if the cat wants there to be room she will make room. Even when I've covered the couch with all the stuff I'm packing.

Ad of the Week

Moma.org/isee

Going to Kenyon.

I'm going to Kenyon tomorrow.

Tomorrow. It's beyond odd. I haven't hyped up this trip the way I have the two previous occasions when I attended the workshop because there's been no break in which to hype things up during. There's the car breaking down (fingers crossed that it will get out of the shop today and I can drive it to Ohio) and there's class. I am STILL working on my linguistics project. Give me a flexible deadline and I will stretch it as far as possible.

Anyway. Going to Kenyon is surreal. I've been doing laundry for it all week. Well, more like I've just been doing laundry.

I made a list of things to pack.

You'd think that I'd be a bit more crazy considering I'm about to leave for eight days. But I'm not. Perhaps it's that I'm fairly relaxed about where I'm going and what I'll be doing there and how things will be when I arrive. But really I should be more concerned. Or anxious. Or perhaps I should just be packing.

Term

notes on craft

It's the end of the summer term. Which seems odd. Seven weeks and it's practically over. For me, all that remains is a term paper.

I've located a shareware concordance program (not that the normal person ever has need of one, but it's here if you're interested) and I'm analyzing my own writing. Namely I'm looking for features that appear in "literary" attempts at writing that may not appear in my attempts at "popular" writing and vice versa.

I shocked quite a few people in my class (including my literature/linguistics professor) by stating that my writing instruction in the MFA had firmly suggested that literary writers today should avoid verb tenses ending in -ing.

I do not mean gerunds, or nouns that end in -ing such as her singing was awful. [Just learned what that part of speech was called!]

For a piece that is written in the past tense, these verb forms often take the shape of participial phrases. I have been instructed that using the simple past is essentially stronger, more direct, less "common" and, in general, preferred. I've had this verbalized to me, but if anyone's seen it in print I would love to know where so that I could read/cite something for my paper.

To take a cliche phrase that fits the bills:

They dragged her away kicking and screaming.

Would be liter-ified by changing it to

She kicked and screamed as they took her away.

Or

She kicked. She screamed. But still they dragged her away.

You get the idea.

Of course, all stylistic advice is arbitrary, but this was something I have heard ONLY within the world of literary fiction and that all important institutional MFA stamp of approval. Other places note caution of the participial phrase because it often creates confusion:

Undressing, Larry stepped into the shower.

Truth is that this sentence is more the work of a lazy writer -- or a lazy showerer who wants to wash their clothes and skin simultaneously -- but in a more complicated sentence the logic confusion can sneak up on you. So "doing away with it" would seem only practical. But genre writing doesn't say you must. In fact, the Science Fiction Writers of America in their online tips and essays offer ways to avoid undressing in the shower and other confusions by putting the sentence into passive voice. I shit you not. If we're dealing with two evils here, then passive voice is definitely the greater of the two.

So losing the participial phrase loses the confusion of action, the confusion of subjects that follow the phrase (see SFWA article) and the frequent "fix" of passive voice. It also allows the writer to do more artistic things with the sentence and to avoid tired, cliche phrasings. See how "kicking and screaming" changed in the above example? No, it wasn't a genius-level rewrite, but it's much nicer than the commonplace phrasing. And if there is one thing literary writing does not want it is to appear commonplace or use any of the crutches popular writers and average speakers can get away with.

Life: day two

Wow. My lasts post was so much more meaningful when John read it.

I should have guessed Jud would want the car stats. Me, I was trying to go for the "less is more" (b/c less=less whining) approach.

The car is:

- Honda Civic 2001
- automatic
- all the gears went (I believe) as it moved in neither direction without the help of gravity and an incline
- tackle the repair myself? Ha! I can check and assess myself, after that I dial for dollars. I wouldn't know where to start and while my father and his brother used to repair and rebuild cars all the time (his first car he assembled from two cars of the same model, one had a non-working engine and the other had been rear ended) but so many systems in newer cars are run or monitored by computers that it really makes the at home repair more difficult than it's worth for him.

Which brings us to
- AAA came and towed it away to the local Honda repair.

Got a call from the repair people. The transmission pump died. They're ordering a new one. It will be here ... eventually. Maybe it'll be done Friday. Maybe not. Oh. And the warranty ran out in June. Last June, not this June.

And I'm supposed to drive to Kenyon on Saturday.

I suppose the good news is that I'm just barely old enough to rent a car without paying out the nose for it should it come to that.

And I write in really short sentences when I'm cranky and trying not to whine. Although I'm not nearly as upset as I could be.

It died within walking distance of my apartment on a non-busy residential street on a sunny June afternoon when I had precisely two hours to spare before I had to be in class. There are so many other places and times it could have gone out that my rolling backward down a will (with a working break) is more comic than anything else.

And I am living in a place where being without a car for a week is acceptable. I can walk to the university and to a bunch of quick food/convenience mart type places and I discovered that my university ID lets me ride the city bus for free. The exercise will be good for me. Although I'm not thrill at the thought of grocery shopping by bus; it reminds me of living in Chicago.

Life

I had planned a couple of really interesting posts for this week. One on linguistics and one about an Elmore Leonard interview I heard on NPR over the weekend. But. At 2:00 p.m. on a Monday my transmission died.

And so. Instead of going up the hill. It rolled backward down the hill. Thankfully, it was not a busy hill.

Poor little car.

Kitten 338

Ad of the Week

Pop Culture

I fail at Twitter. I'm pretty sure that I do. I just discovered that people have been "sending me messages" that it would have been really polite of me to answer like ... a month ago. That and I still can't figure out what I should tweet. I'm starting to pick up on the form but the purpose of the content still alludes me.

That said, the Associated Press has put out a new style sheet for reports which, among other more important things, codified how to write about Twitter. Apparently to tweet and to twitter are both acceptable verb forms. Now I'm just waiting for the MLA to come to a consensus on how to cite to a tweet in an academic or research paper.

But while trying to resuscitate my twitter account I saw in the list of "popular topics" -- and by popular they mean right now! -- Chastity Bono. Who? You can tell how old I am when I hear "Bono" and think U2 not Sonny and Cher. Apparently she is the child of the later pair who had (has?) an attempted music career which earned her enough status to make the D-list and go on "Celebrity Fit Club" where she supposedly "endeared herself to the public." I'll take their word on it; I never watched.

Turns out she's having a sex change operation -- gender reassignment to be P.C. -- and that's why she's a hot twitter topic. I don't really think this is news worthy but the writing in this short article is:

Chastity Bono will become a man
Posted: June 11, 2009, 5:34 PM by Adam McDowell
Chastity Bono, who now goes by the name Chaz and is best known as the daughter — er, son — of Cher and the late Sonny Bono, will undergo a sex change operation, reports TMZ.com. As Bono will be the first (marginally) famous person to make such a transition, expect much media hoopla to ensue, including speculation about whether this will change public perceptions about transgendered people. Also, expect stupid jokes.

Isn't that it? Isn't that why we care? Because we think the media will care? Or the media will attempt to make us think we care. Or they're just run so much coverage and commentary that we either do care, we formulate opinions that are really just parroting the reporters, or we get so sick of it we never want to talk about gender reassignment ever again.

All though the expect stupid jokes part is right on. Can't everyone just read Adam McDowell's short article (and yes, I reposted it in its entirety) and move on with their lives. Just acknowledge the eventual hoopla and bad jokes without engaging in either? That would be great. Thanks.

The same thing is making me angsty about the "Jon & Kate Plus 8" saga ... and we so are getting into saga territory. Leave well enough alone. In front of me at the register at Target two women were agreeing that they were almost certainly going to get divorced. I wanted to smack my forehead. Obviously, Americans viewing a couple only through highly filtered, highly edited interviews on television (and let's not forget the tabloid reports and media speculation) can determine what their next move will be. Me? I think they'll stay together out of sheer economic necessity. A middle class American family of that size cannot economically survive a divorce (or a loss of high grossing TV show).

But whatever, it's all pop culture now. And at least now, for all my clicking around following various links and searches, I know what jumping the shark means.

Deprived

So I'm supposed to be doing reading deprivation this week to show myself what I do when I am given a significant chunk of time back.

What have I learned that I do with that "extra" time? Watch movies and read.

Yes. That's it. When I deprive myself of reading I binge read. I didn't even make it a whole week before I sat down on my couch and tried to start reading every book on the side table at once. I kid you not. I opened one book then thought of the book beneath it in the stack -- I'll read one chapter from that! I thought. It's non-fiction and sectioned, so once I'm done with the section I can pick up this novel again. All the while I had a book lying open but face down on my lap to mark my page in that text.

My binge burned me out pretty quickly and I didn't finish a section from any of those books but I did read at least a few pages of all of them -- some more than others. My lesson learned: reading deprivation makes me kinda kooky and spastic.

Still chugging along on the summer novel. Progress has been stop and go this past week as I'm still trying to recover from a trip home to visit family which broke my writing routine. Now the novel is in difficult territory. I have to find a way to transition and raise the stakes again while letting my heroine grow. She's been fairly traumatized so far and I need to give her a little bit of time to breathe and start to feel secure before I traumatize her again ... but at the same time I don't want to let the story flat line. Perhaps this would be a good time to "grow" the characters surrounding her.

Movie Review: Star Trek

I know I'm behind the curve and that most people who would consider seeing Star Trek in the theater already have. But most of what I have to say is for those who have already seen it.

I was disappointed. My father, who watched the original series when it aired in the sixties, was particularly disappointed. His main beef was that the young Kirk was not very likable. I stumbled over the fact that all the "main" characters jumped from barely graduated students to the senior crew commanding a spaceship. Cadet to captain? I think not.

For all that it was a good summer action flick. I particularly love the notion of "space jumping" -- it's a lot like sky diving except you do it from outside a planet's atmosphere into the planet's atmosphere. That was cool.

Not cool? The alternate reality. This wasn't a prequel, it was an alternate reality created by time travel. And unlike previous sci-fi time travel gigs, this one irrevocably changed the circumstances of the present reality and while the same characters eventually meet their circumstances and therefore their relationships are different.

Now I'm not a Trekkie -- I haven't seen all the movies, I'll watch the show if I'm channel surfing and it's on but I've never followed it religiously, and I just don't do conventions. Period. -- but this new movie feels like a cheat. Everything that has been made before it with the title Star Trek -- and it's such a body of work that it is an institution in the realm of TV and film -- has been wiped clean and discredited. It leaves me feeling very unsettled and unsatisfied.

All the in jokes were there. The lines characters delivered so often or so well that we'd never believe the new actor if he didn't give us "fascinating" or "dammit, I'm a doctor not a physicist" or "I'm givin it all I got!" shouted up from Mr. Scot in engineering. But the novelty clashed with my wondering through the whole film how they were going to "right" the situation and get it back to the "reality" that I knew. They didn't. And I'm bummed. If there's anyone who should be able to fix a time-space anomaly it's Hollywood, and not even they got it right this time.

Reading Deprivation

Week four of The Artist's Way: Reading Deprivation.

Reading! Deprivation -- WTF? RU Serious!? I'm not supposed to read for the next week. Hmphf. This is the first aspect of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way that I've balked at. Morning pages, sounds good. Artist's date, yeah I can do that. Reading Deprivation .... that's just not natural!

Cameron claims that excuses like "but I'm a student" or "what about work" have no hold on her. She points to those times when we've wiggled out of a weeks worth of reading just because we didn't want to or had something else going on. Damn. Those are really good instances to point to.

I'll give her the pleasure reading, the leisure reading, the blog reading (yes that means your blog), the news reading, the novel reading, the forum reading, the anything else reading ... but I will not give up the for-class reading. It's just too damn close to the end of my semester and I need to start my project ASAP and that includes relevant scholarly research.

The point of this ungodly deprivation is to show us what we do when we have that extra time. I'm supposed to be particular in my notation of what I do with my non-reading time. I'm uncertain to what end this all goes, but I guess I'll have to continue to trust in the program.

Ad of the Week

Complete with The Making Of video



I haven't seen this one on television yet, but it follows the same aesthetic.

Friday Events

Two things are going to happen today. The first is that the "summer project" group is meeting for the first time. This is a group of women who are MFA candidates who are participating in this special side project which is a spin off of another project. Basically this means that we're taking one word -- it's either gonna be root or center -- and we're each using it as a prompt for a poem, or a piece of short fiction or essay that we write individually.

Then we will swap/share what we've written and someone else will write a response to our piece. Then someone else in the group will write a response to the response ... you see how it grows and morphs.

The original project was done with a group of poets only -- how exclusionary! -- but our group has people focused in poetry, fiction and nonfiction, although there's nothing that says we have to use one form over another.

Should be interesting.

The other thing that's happening is that I'm being reunited with the furry terrors formally known as cats. They've been residing at "the gym" also known as my father's house. It's the gym because with oodles of room to run around -- and run they do -- they always seem to come back slimmer after a week at the gym.

They were hanging out there because of the apartment inspections which apparently did not include my apartment (knock on wood). No I'm not smuggling cats in on the DL, they're registered and legal, etc. But long story short they ended up with Dad. He's been shutting them in bathrooms and closets and other small spaces that they dive into while he's not looking and then an hour later he wonders why the other cat is sitting in front of the door. Cats. What can ya do?


Selection of photos demonstrating their small-space-loving antics. Above: book cat. Below: When my mom gave me an Easter gift in a pink bag she didn't realize she was giving me a cat toy as well.



Without them here my apartment is oddly quiet. And calm. And it stays clean a lot longer after I vacuum. But there's no purring ball of furry goodness sleeping on me when I wake up and there's no one meowing hello at me when I come in the door.

I suppose I should actually write a post this week.

I've spent much of the past four days working on the first ten thousand words of a new novel and successfully avoiding my linguistics class projects. Today I presented on that linguistics project. Don't worry: it went well. I only procrastinate until the last possible minute, not beyond.

Writing this blog post is another means of procrastinating on the written part of the project. Though, by the time this "runs" on Thursday morning I will have finished writing so no need to leave me scornful, mother-like comments about getting back to work. I know, I'm sucking all the fun out of it ;)

Working on the novel has been delightful. It's a "commercial" (i.e. not literary) project but it's happy. I've developed a pattern that has worked extremely well over the past few days. In the afternoon I print out the last half page of the text, then that evening I continue the scene or start the next one by writing it out long hand on the print out page. This gives me a quick edit of the typed text and it also means that the next morning when I go to type it up I have a "running start" for finishing my daily goal of 1000 words.

Someone recently reminded me that Stephen King in his memoir On Writing (which I really need to finish one of these days), says that the first draft of a novel should not take more than three months to write, otherwise the story gets stale in the mind of the author and that staleness translates into the writing. Editing that draft may take forever, but the first one should make it's debut in a heated rush. [I'll leave you to create your own similes and double entendres to follow that statement.]

This week's writing in The Artist's Way deals primarily with shame and anger. Shame that others inflict on us for being creative and "outside the box" of their perceptions and noting the anger we feel as indicative of what is really the matter. No, we don't act on our anger in society (most of the time) but we shouldn't dismiss that anger as irrational or unimportant because there had to be something that triggered it. Just because a hay bale seems to spontaneously combust does not mean that there was not a legitimate reason for the bale to go up in flames.

(Oxidization of wet hay in the center of a tightly bound bale spikes the internal temperature. I did a report on it in eighth grade science.)

I've been thinking about it but, as anger is not socially appropriate to air no matter how wonderfully introspective it is. And I'm really itching to just blab it all. Damn politeness.

Funny

All of this guy's videos are great, but I particularly love these two.