Merwin’s Garden

Dana Isokawa

On the northern coast of the Hawai’ian island Maui, off a road leading down to the cliffs above the shore, a lush forest grows. Mango trees covered in vines stand next to palms as tall as eighty feet, while heliconia and hibiscus grow far beneath the canopy. Palm fronds and ferns wave in the air. The grounds are shady and quiet. And in the middle of the garden sits a two-story wooden house filled with books, the home of poet W. S. Merwin, who until his death at the age of ninety-one on March 15, tended to the thousands of palms and plants growing on the surrounding nineteen acres. 

Merwin lived in the garden, which includes one of the world’s finest collections of palms, for more than forty years. In December the Merwin Conservancy, which the poet and Paula Merwin, his wife, established in 2010 to protect the garden and encourage others to create their own artistic and ecological practice, will become the owners of the house and garden. “We are preparing to take on this kuleana—a Hawai’ian word that means responsibility but also implies incredible honor,” says Sonnet Kekilia Coggins, the conservancy’s executive director. “Merwin’s beloved garden was a product of his imagination and will be the site of inspiring and fostering imagination in others for years and years to come.”

Merwin acquired the land in 1977 after moving to Maui to study with the Zen Buddhist master Robert Aitken. He had already published and translated several books of poetry and won his first Pulitzer for his 1970 poetry collection, The Carrier of Ladders (Atheneum). When he purchased the property, previously part of a pineapple plantation, the soil had been ruined from years of farming. For the next four decades, the Merwins restored the land into the flourishing forest it is today, with more than four hundred taxonomic species of palms from all over the world.

Coaxing the soil back into health was not easy: Merwin planted something every day for a period of time, and his editor at Copper Canyon Press, Michael Wiegers, estimates he planted several thousand plants, many of which died in the first few years. Wiegers, who is also on the conservancy board, says the process of restoring the land parallels Merwin’s evolution as a poet. “Both poems and palm forestation seem very effortless, almost casual on the surface, yet both are very carefully considered, and earned over years of practice,” he says. “His first poems are lovely, but they also feel a little over-considered, just as when he first started planting on that land. Right away he wanted to reintroduce rare native species, but it didn’t work. He wasn’t able to force the plants to grow in dead soil. Through a daily life practice, he built and nurtured both the soil of the forest and the ground of his poems.”

Poems literally nourish the forest ground: Merwin would compost papers and correspondence—including the manuscripts sent to him by hopeful poets seeking a blurb—and add them to the soil. Coggins says she still comes across the notepads and pens he stashed around the garden in case he wanted to jot down a line. Until he lost his eyesight toward the end of his life, Merwin spent most of his days writing, meditating in the Zendo he built in the middle of the garden, and tending to the plants. “It is an enchantment, all of it, from the daydreaming to the digging, the heaving, the weeding and watching and watering, the heat, and the stirrings at the edges of the days,” he wrote in his book What Is a Garden? (University of South Carolina Press, 2016).

People cannot leave the grounds—muddy and full of mosquitoes as it is—without feeling changed, Coggins says. Poet Naomi Shihab Nye, a former board member of the conservancy, says, “Visiting always felt like stepping into another world. A deep, sacred, silent world, full of growing and chittering birds and timeless light and shadow.” Wiegers sees the garden as a work of land art, like Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, as well as a feat of conservation. In 2014 the Hawaiian Islands Land Trust recognized the ecological significance of the land by granting it permanent protection. Sara Tekula, the conservancy’s director of programs, says that palm experts and botanists who have visited the garden say that its palms come closest to the “fullest expression of their wild selves” of any cultivated specimens they have seen.

Merwin was known for his deep care and attention to the environment; his writing often expresses grief toward mankind’s role in destroying itself and the land, as well as reverence for the unknown and the natural world that connects all beings. Poet Jane Hirshfield says he was “a person whose recognition of the intimacy of all beings with one another was early and unparalleled.” By growing the palm forest, Merwin put into practice these values present in much of his work. “He didn’t hope for some change to happen elsewhere or by someone else’s hand or by some other force—he knew change was necessary, and he wanted to repair the whole legacy of human exceptionalism,” Coggins says. “So he went out and planted trees. It was agency; it was creative action.” 

The conservancy’s work focuses on this idea of creative agency and integrity, or “walking your beliefs,” as Coggins says. She and the conservancy staff plan to launch a residency program in 2021 that brings artists, scientists, policy makers, designers—anyone with a creative practice—to Merwin’s home. The nonprofit already hosts school and artist visits and educational programs for teachers in the garden; publishes Merwin’s poems and information about the palms on its website; and runs a salon series, the Green Room, that brings thinkers and artists such as Richard Powers and Terry Tempest Williams to Maui and Oahu. The staff is also planning fund-raising events across the United States and a celebration in Maui in March 2020.

As the conservancy staff prepare to increase their programming when the garden passes into their hands later this year, Coggins admits it is bittersweet—Merwin was beloved by those close to him, as well as by many readers around the world. But his garden continues on as a living example of what one person can do to conserve the earth, even in the face of seemingly overwhelming environmental concerns—the quickening extinction of species, increased deforestation in many regions of the world, climate change—and the thorny geopolitics surrounding these issues. As he wrote in “Place,” a poem from his collection The Rain in the Trees, published by Knopf in 1988, “On the last day of the world / I would want to plant a tree.”  

 

Dana Isokawa is the senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

September/October 2019

Literature and the Environment

by

Maggie Millner

September/October 2017
8.16.17

In Print and Online

In 1992 in Reno, Nevada, a group of scholars and writers founded the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) to promote interdisciplinary research and conversation about the connections between humans and the natural world. Comprising professionals in both the humanities and the sciences, ASLE encourages collaboration, supports environmental education, and convenes a community around the twin goals of literary excellence and ecological sustainability. Now, twenty-five years later, the organization is more robust—and necessary—than ever.

The intersections of poetry and conservation biology, or speculative fiction and environmental activism, may not seem intuitive. But in the early 1990s many scholars working at the crossroads of these increasingly siloed disciplines sought a way to share ideas and enlist creative, scientific, and ethical advice from specialists in other fields. With the advent of ASLE, members gained access to a directory of multidisciplinary scholars, as well as environmental studies curricula, a list of awards and grants, mentoring programs, and a bibliography of ecological writing, among other resources. In 1993, ASLE launched the semiannual (now quarterly) journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, which publishes academic articles in addition to poetry, nonfiction, and book reviews.

Since 1995, ASLE has also hosted a biennial conference, each event held in a different U.S. city, at which intellectual cross-pollination and collaboration can happen in person. The twelfth conference, titled “Rust/Resistance: Works of Recovery,” took place in June and doubled as a celebration of ASLE’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Hosted by Wayne State University in Detroit, the 2017 conference featured more than eight hundred presenters as well as keynote addresses by writers and environmentalists such as poet Ross Gay and historian and novelist Tiya Miles. According to ASLE copresident Christoph Irmscher, these conferences serve as “sustained intellectual experiences in which an array of amazing speakers complements the serious conversations that take place in individual panels.”

ASLE’s quarter-centennial comes at a critical moment. As an organization committed equally to literature and to environmentalism, ASLE and its membership are doubly threatened by the massive rollbacks in arts and climate spending proposed by the Trump administration. The White House’s 2018 budget plan, unveiled in May, would slash funding to the Environmental Protection Agency by nearly a third, eliminating 20 percent of its workforce and leaving the agency with its smallest budget in forty years, adjusting for inflation. Predicated on a staunch denial of the urgent reality of climate change, the plan proposes crippling reductions to programs that clean up toxic waste, determine the safety of drinking water, and research and predict natural disasters, among others.

In June, President Trump announced that the United States will also be withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, an agreement between nearly two hundred nations to reduce emissions and mitigate global warming that was adopted by consensus in 2015. “As we have known ever since Rachel Carson, the environmental crisis can only be addressed globally, not within traditional national boundaries,” says Irmscher. Branches of ASLE have been established in nearly a dozen countries or regions outside the United States, including Brazil, India, and Japan, and this year’s ASLE conference drew around a thousand members from twenty-five countries. Irmscher describes the organization’s international, interdisciplinary conferences as its “pièce de résistance against Trumpian unilateralism.”

The Trump administration’s proposed 2018 budget would also eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities. Though such cuts seem unlikely at this point—Congress thus far having upheld federal funding for both agencies—the proposal itself is indicative of an attitude that devalues the importance of art and literature to American life and culture. In light of such threats, Irmscher looks to literature for models of political environmentalism. “Panels and presentations on Thoreau’s Walden—to mention one of the intellectual progenitors of ASLE—can no longer ignore the fact that his philosophy of resistance has assumed new importance in an era when the government systematically suppresses scientific evidence,” he says.

In a sense, the joint disavowal of both environmental protection and the arts can be seen as a confirmation of what ASLE has always known: that these disciplines are deeply linked and even interdependent—that, as Rachel Carson once said, “No one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.” In the face of these most recent threats, ASLE will continue to serve as a meeting point. “In a climate that discourages innovation, scientists have adopted new roles as dissenters and protesters,” says Irmscher. “As they unite and march, they find new allies in the arts and humanities that have long spoken truth to power. ASLE, whose core mission is to promote collaboration and public dialogue, provides an organizational framework for such new alliances.”
 

Maggie Millner teaches creative writing at NYU, where she is pursuing her MFA in poetry. Previously, she served as Poets & Writers Magazine’s Diana and Simon Raab Editorial Fellow.              

Writers, Editors Resist

by

Sarah M. Seltzer

May/June 2017
4.12.17

In Print and Online

The Wednesday morning after Election Day delivered a political shock for just about everyone, including writers—but hot on the heels of the electoral surprise came an existential dilemma: How could writers attend to the quotidian concerns of sentence structure, agent-hunting, and sending out work when America was so divided on seemingly every major issue—from reproductive and LGBTQ rights to immigration laws and the environment? Like much of America that morning, many writers turned to their friends and colleagues for answers. “On Facebook, everyone was saying, ‘Now more than ever we need fiction, art, and books,’” says writer Anna March, who had spent time in Pennsylvania that week, knocking on doors for Hillary Clinton with her mother. “I got a little bit panicky. I thought, ‘Oh my God, are people really thinking that art is going to save us?’ Because it’s really about organizing and getting out the vote.” Similarly, fiction writer Paula Whyman, based in Bethesda, Maryland, described the morning after the election as a rare world-changing moment. “As a fiction writer I had a lot of questions in my mind about what would happen to fiction and how we would go on working,” she says. “Does it really matter now?”

Both Whyman and March reached for similar outlets to channel their doubts and reassert the power of writing. Whyman answered a call on Facebook by her friend, the writer Mikhail Iossel, for help launching a new publication and with a small group started Scoundrel Time, an international online journal intended to foster artistic expression in the face of political repression and fear. March, eager to harness the energy of the arts community for political activism, decided to start Roar Feminist Magazine, an online publication that would provide a platform for politically informed fiction, poetry, and essays—as well as a way to strike back against an election that frequently devolved into disrespectful language, most notably the leaked Access Hollywood tape showing Donald Trump making lewd comments about women. “We wanted to do something that was both literature and revolution,” says March. 

These efforts are part of a growing number of projects and events started by writers, editors, and literary organizations in response to the election and the current political climate. Poet Erin Belieu and PEN America organized Writers Resist rallies, which brought out thousands of writers and citizens in cities all across the United States on January 15, five days before the presidential inauguration, to “defend free expression, reject hatred, and uphold truth in the face of lies and misinformation.” Poet Major Jackson started a collaborative poem, “Renga for Obama,” at the Harvard Review, while the Boston Review released the poetry chapbook Poems for Political Disaster, and Melville House published What We Do Now, an essay collection focused on “standing up for your values in Trump’s America.” 

Roar and Scoundrel Time both launched in late January—Roar on Inauguration Day and Scoundrel Time ten days later—and have since produced an impressive body of work and attracted large followings in just a few short months. “The idea of starting a new journal would be laughed at otherwise,” says Whyman. “There are so many excellent journals doing beautiful work that I in no way want to compete. But I think of this as something entirely different.”

Indeed, the interest both magazines have received in terms of financial support and submissions suggest that the audience is engaged. With a very small inheritance from her grandmother, who died shortly before the election, March was able to launch the Roar website and with her collaborators held a successful crowdfunding campaign that raised $12,000 in just a few months. The Roar staff includes Sarah Sandman and  Bethanne Patrick as executive editors, Jagjeet Khalsa as production editor, and several section editors, including novelist Porochista Khakpour and humor writer Cynthia Heimel. The title is a play on the “pussy” motif that appeared on posters and signs, and in knitted hats, after Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood remarks were made public. According to March, the journal’s mission involves “roaring, not meowing.”

The most prominent feature of Roar, which publishes three new pieces each day, is a section called “My Abortion,” in which women relate their experiences with abortion. The daily column serves to remind readers of what’s at stake under the strongly antiabortion Trump administration. Other columns include the Roar Meter, which uses numbers to tell a story: “Number of votes by which Hillary Clinton won the popular vote: 2,864,974 / Number of Americans who receive Planned Parenthood services: 2,840,000” reads the beginning of one entry. A column called Fight This Hate highlights “a small selection of hate crimes and/or harassment,” alongside fiction, poetry, and art sections. “Think about if Guernica met the Nation or VQR met Mother Jones,” says March. “We want to be at the intersection of the finest writing and political activism.” The editors plan to expand in the spring by publishing six pieces a day and bringing on more explicitly political writers.

Scoundrel Time (named for the 1976 book by Lillian Hellman about the McCarthy era) is, in Whyman’s words, “a place for artists to respond as artists” to the postelection reality. “There are wonderful and thoughtful journalists and commentators, people at think tanks, and activists in every realm doing important things,” says Whyman. “But this is a place for artists to speak to what’s going on from their particular perspective. We can keep telling one another stories, and those stories will draw people in and give them some relief.” The journal is a registered nonprofit organization, and the all-volunteer staff plans to look into nonprofit partnerships. Slightly less confrontational in tone than Roar (though no less political), Scoundrel Time publishes fiction, photography, poetry, essays, and dispatches from around the world, with a focus on content that’s current. “The strongest argument I can think of for satire and parody is that despots and authoritarian regimes of all stripes hate it so,” Tony Eprile writes in a February essay tying recent Saturday Night Live sketches to a long tradition of political subversion through mockery. Fiction writer Jodi Paloni also spearheads an Action section, encouraging readers to make calls and show up to protests.

Scoundrel Time and Roar also drummed up support at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Washington, D.C. in February. Whyman and her fellow Scoundrel Time founders gathered in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue and read aloud from James Baldwin, Emma Lazarus, and Claudia Rankine. Meanwhile, Roar supporters wearing pink “pussy hats” handed out pink Roar-branded condoms and stickers at the bookfair. They weren’t the only ones making a statement at AWP: Split This Rock, a D.C.–based organization focused on poetry and social change, collaborated with organizations such as VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and CantoMundo to hold a candlelight vigil for freedom of expression outside the White House, during which writers such as Kazim Ali, Ross Gay, and Carolyn Forché delivered speeches about the importance of writing and art.  

Scoundrel Time plans to organize similar actions in the future, but for now it carries on that spirit of standing together and holding space, albeit online, for writers to freely speak their minds. With their new journals, both Whyman and March hope they can help writers to, as Whyman says, “hang on to our humanity and feel like [we] can gain understanding.” 

 

Sarah M. Seltzer is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, and ill-advised tweets. A lifelong New Yorker, she is the deputy editor of the culture website Flavorwire.com.

Protesters march on Trump Tower in New York City as part of the Writers Resist rallies in January. (Credit: Ed Lederman)

Dear President: A Message for the Next Commander in Chief From Fifty American Poets and Writers

by

Staff

September/October 2016
8.17.16

In Print and Online

In a little over two months, we the people will choose the forty-fifth president of the United States. Between now and then, the nominees will present their policy proposals and debate the issues, shaping a national conversation about some awfully big and important topics. But before we get to those televised debates (the first of three is scheduled for September 26 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York) we wanted to give some of our most thoughtful and articulate citizens—poets and writers—a chance to offer their perspective. Because, as former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove remarked, “Our nation needs to learn to value its independent writers and artists as the heralds of a richly textured, inclusive national identity.”

The request was simple: Imagine you are face-to-face with the next president—whoever that may be—and, in a few sentences, write about what you hope to see addressed in the next four years. It turns out something pretty great happens when you ask writers to convey, without a lot of political grandstanding, what is most important to them. The contours of some of America’s biggest issues—education, health care, gun violence, racism, immigration, and the environment among them—start to come into sharper focus, the collective discourse rises above the rhetoric of political pundits, and the pomp and circumstance of the political process falls away, so that we are left with a discussion of real problems, real concerns, and, if not solutions, then at least some honest ideas that may inspire action of real, lasting value. 

Dear President,

“The countless complex problems facing the world require complex critical thinking. Please reinvest in public higher education systems like UC, SUNY, CUNY, and the other once-strong and accessible state systems of higher education. Restore and privilege humanities and arts education at the K–12 and higher-ed levels. Reduce the military budget and make a real commitment to social and educational infrastructure.” —Kazim Ali

★

“Please listen to the stories being told right now by the scientists who study, and the citizens who live, amid the catastrophic changes taking place across the planet. They are not fiction; without courageous leadership they will become fate.” —Steve Almond

★

“Your critics, most of them, would have called me a superpredator back then, when the memory of the pistol was heavy in my palm—so that’s not my focus. But now, unlike then, you have power, and I’m left to wonder what you will call the young men and women lost in the system, those who walked down paths they regret. Do they earn your scorn, your mercy?” —Reginald Dwayne Betts

★

“I would like President Clinton to know that I support her and her agenda fully, especially as it relates to education, the arts, and the environment. The single greatest problem facing our species is the erosion of the environmental conditions that allowed us to evolve and thrive and tap out messages like this one on our phones and computers. We are doomed, yes, but later rather than sooner, I hope.” —T. C. Boyle

★

“Once the body arrives in the world it immediately becomes fragile—fragile in that it needs nourishment, protection, education, and endless chances; bodies of color, in particular, have had these basic human rights revoked, and it continues. I call for a protection of these bodies through a reassessment of the justice system and retraining of authorities who violate the civil liberties of citizens of color through racial profiling, stop-and-frisk, and abuse; human life is at stake, and my wish is that the next four years will reflect back the beauty and not the wreckage of our existence.” —Tina Chang

 

★

“America has often seen itself as a beacon of democracy, but the American project has always been about a settler project of inclusion and exclusion: democracy for those imagined as real Americans, and inequality for slaves, immigrants, black and brown bodies, and those who live in places the United States has colonized or destabilized, most recently Iraq and Libya. I hope that you can see yourself not just as a standard-bearer for a global economic elite, but as a force for equality and justice for all.” —Ken Chen

★

“There’s so much I could ask of you—a list of demands—but first to ensure our safety as citizens. Too many lives have been lost to gun violence—mass shootings, gang related, and otherwise—and now it is more than a false dilemma, it’s a reality that can no longer be ignored.” —Nicole Dennis-Benn

★

“There is no present or future without immigrants; white supremacy (and all of its sequelae) is one of the gravest threats to our democracy.” —Junot Díaz

★

“I want an America with tougher gun laws. I want an America that nurtures and embraces diversity.” —Chitra Divakaruni

★

“Eight million metric tons of plastic are dumped into the oceans every year. Our government has to get involved in legislation that reduces one-use plastics, invests in alternative-packaging ideas, and dramatically decreases pollution in the oceans, or by 2050 there will be more plastic in the sea than fish.” —Anthony Doerr

★

“If we are ever to attain our forefathers’ aspirations for ‘a more perfect union,’ educating our young—not only in the sciences, but also the arts—cannot, dare not, be neglected. If our children are unable to say what they mean, no one will know how they feel; if they cannot imagine different worlds, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points.” —Rita Dove

★

“I would say to the president that she should work to dismantle the global culture of corruption present at all levels of society, which prevents any meaningful change or accountability, and whose primary victims are the powerless and disenfranchised. This complicity is a symptom of larger systems of discourse and economy that exist to preserve the status quo, and I would say that in the absence of means to transform those systems outright, she should start, at the level of the law and of media, to model ways of addressing concrete problems with transparency and tenacity, showing that even at the most entrenched levels of corruption, change can be effected.” —Robert Fernandez

★

“The stakes are too high for you to ignore the grievances voiced by those of us who believed you when you spoke of progress and equality. We can’t afford for you to go slow.” —Angela Flournoy

★

“Climate change—stop dicking around. War—use only as the ultimate last resort.” —Ben Fountain

★

“I’d like our next president to know compassion and compromise. I’d also like her to know how thrilled I was when I received a thank-you note from her husband after I sent Chelsea a birthday card when I was fifteen.” —Carrie Fountain

★

“The occupation of Palestine by Israel—mass incarceration, presumption of guilt, withholding of resources, wanton destruction of human life, all underscored by the creation of physical barriers and the emotional propaganda of persecution, exclusion, mythmaking, and fear—are mirrored, one by one, in the policies of institutionalized racism in the United States. Unless we face this singular fact, and acknowledge our collective culpability as architects and sponsors of state terrorism here in our American cities, and in our foreign policy regarding Palestine (which is the bedrock of all other foreign policy), we will continue to be unable to fulfill the potential of our democracy for our people, and remain excoriated abroad for our impotence and hypocrisy.” —Ru Freeman

★

“Dear Madam President, our undocumented families are not silent or invisible in our hearts. May they be just as present in your actions as we continue to build this home, this country, together.” —Rigoberto González

★

“None of the problems of this country will be solved without things getting messy, and without your commitment to listen, truly listen, and to govern for the people who have the least in this country—black and brown women of color, undocumented women, trans and lesbian women, poor women, the people you usually wish to have behind you at a podium but rarely invite to the room where decisions are being made. Invite us in and listen and then act.” —Kaitlyn Greenidge

★

“President Clinton, after celebrating with a tall flute of Prosecco, please make gun reform your first order of business. In four years, I hope to live in a country where the pen is mightier than the gun (and the money that keeps it in power).” —Eleanor Henderson

★

“Ms. President, I want you to know that the power of having our first woman as president doesn’t escape me; I’ve been waiting for this my entire life. And I want you, as the first woman president of the United States, to place the liberation and justice of historically marginalized people at the center of your work—
terrifying, hard, necessary work. We need this more than ever.” —Tanwi Nandini Islam

★

“I would like the next president to know that the 2016 presidential campaign has awoken a sizable portion of this country’s electorate to the limitations of a two-party system that is beholden more to its own status quo than the interests of its constituencies; that we are more awake than ever to the corruption of politicians who claim allegiance to ‘the people,’ but whose votes and policies are purchased outright by producers of weaponry and manufacturers of economic disparity. I would like the next president to know that we will be watching and taking note of their promises to Wall Street and the military-industrial complex, that we will call out their positions on trade deals that betray American workers, their complicity with a prison-industrial complex that seeks profit from incarceration, their commitment to a justice system that frees criminals in uniform while killing people of color with impunity, and that we will organize beyond their scarecrows of fear to create a movement capable of replacing this oligarchy with the highest of this nation’s ideals: democracy.” —Tyehimba Jess

★

“Madam President, thank you for sparing us your opponent’s dismal and clownish stupidity, his blind and blinding hate. I’m still scared, though. I’m scared that you think beating him will be the hardest part of your job, and I’m scared of what’s happening to the environment, to our schools and water supply and our tolerance, scared of people being out of work and people being hooked on painkillers and people not being allowed to use the restroom where they feel most comfortable. I don’t give a rip if you’re honest or transparent or running a thousand different e-mail servers, but I need you to be compassionate and smart and clear-eyed, to be decent and flexible and open-minded, to be afraid with me—with all of us—and despite our fears, not least yours, I need you to be brave and resilient and, well, hopeful.” —Bret Anthony Johnston

★

“I’d like to talk about government subsidies for mental-health care. We tend to speak about mental health after some extreme event, like a shooting spree, but mental health is an everyday thing. So many people—especially poor people and minorities—are suffering in silent pain.” —Tayari Jones

★

“Make fighting bigotry a priority—bigotry of all sorts, from race to sexuality to gender to class. I feel it’s especially the responsibility of our candidates this time around, as this very election unleashed a whole new wave of intense bigotry directed at all sorts of minorities—so I feel like it is the urgent responsibility of the elected official to face this and work to increase the dialogue, education, and awareness required to heal and advance.” —Porochista Khakpour

★

“I watch my students invest in cultural, economic, and financial change despite their pessimism and frequent belief that we live within a system that profits from their disenfranchisement. How do we convince the next generation of thinkers that their engagement and participation in the political system matters as they watch so much of the progress facilitated by activists of the past dismantled?” —Ruth Ellen Kocher

★

“Madam President, please pay more attention to, support, and build up public education. Our schools are the democratizing cornerstones of our communities—and this country’s future.” —Joseph O. Legaspi

★

“I’d like to trust that the voice of any suffering person, regardless of category, had as much currency with you as some power broker. I’d like not to doubt you knew that suffering was of a piece with the planet’s emergency, the ongoing story of oil, water, war, animals.” —Paul Lisicky

★

“Your country is complex; it is hard to imagine a foreigner being able to fix it for you. Keep this in mind when you consider invading another nation.” —Karan Mahajan

★

“What’s really important to me is the radical reconceptualization of our broken criminal-justice system that targets young black and brown people—increasingly girls and young women—for arrest, detention, and incarceration, thereby continuing the program of relegating generations of people of color to second-class citizenry. It is clear to so many of us that the increased presence of police in daily life, alongside the militarization of police forces, is the wrong path to go down, and that we have to think progressively in our imagining of the future we’d like to create.” —Dawn Lundy Martin

★

“Please put climate change at the front and center of our national conversation, and follow up by funding initiatives toward developing and using sustainable energy.” —Cate Marvin

★

“Peace is a good word for politicians to look up, understand the meaning of it, use it once in a while, learn to practice it. You are committing environmental child abuse by poisoning our food, polluting our air, and totally destroying the environment so that a few of your cronies can make a few extra billion or two while the rest of us will not survive even to serve you.” —Alejandro Murguía

★

“The blight on ‘American exceptionalism’ is the recurring cycle of black youth raised in communities where poverty, inadequate education, and insufficient recreational and job opportunities exclude too many of them from the promise of the American Dream. It is urgent that you fund programs now to address this shameful problem.” —Elizabeth Nunez

★

“Dear Madam President, help us lift up the least advantaged among us. Put your strength and determination behind education, jobs, and equality. We have benefited greatly from the moral guidance of the last administration. Please keep the spirit of ‘yes we can’ alive. God bless you.” —D. A. Powell

★

“What the world wants, demands, deserves, and needs from you is that you guide your leadership and base your decisions on just one principle: love. Because isn’t that the whole point to it all—love? Isn’t that why we all keep on going?” —Mira Ptacin

★

“Madam President, the influence of the Israel lobby is not as valuable as the lives of the many Palestinians who have been living in degradation and increasing terror under the Israeli occupation for the last half century, just as the influence of the NRA lobby is not as valuable as the lives of the many U.S. citizens who have been injured and killed due to gun violence.” —Emily Raboteau

★

“There should be a new cabinet post—Secretary of the Arts. For the inaugural six poets: European, Hispanic, Asian American, African American, Native American, Muslim.” —Ishmael Reed

★

“I want the president to know that we are tired of having our voices silenced and our needs unmet. I want the president to know that we want better gun control, higher minimum wages, recognition of women’s rights, better education, and most of all a greater sense of our shared humanity—unity, not division.” —Roxana Robinson

★

“President Hillary Clinton, I live in Portland, Oregon, where every day I watch our homeless camps grow in size. Homelessness is a national crisis that has barely been discussed this election season. You’ve pledged ‘to direct more federal resources to those who need them most.’ As you do so, please don’t forget about some of your most vulnerable constituents: homeless Americans. It’s an issue at the nexus of economic inequality, joblessness, rising housing costs, lack of affordable housing, health care accessibility, and systemic racism. Please make connecting all Americans to safe, stable homes and services a priority.” —Karen Russell

★

“Madam President, where has all the funding gone for arts in the schools? Could those kuts be the reesen we are all getin dummer?” —George Saunders

★

“The growing disparity in wealth in this country undermines any hope we have for achieving social justice. Changing this won’t be easy, and will require more courage, conviction, and political leadership than you have exhibited in the past.” —Dani Shapiro

★

“Since arts and humanities programs enrich our American lives beyond measure, connecting and inspiring people of different backgrounds and inclinations better than anything else does, it would be reasonable to support them threefold or more, without question. The fact that Bernie Sanders, a Jewish American, found it possible to be frank about the injustice and criminal oppression that Palestinian people have suffered for the past sixty-eight years suggests other politicians might be able to do this too—injustice for one side does not help the ‘other side’ and everyone knows this but does not act or speak as honestly or honorably as Sanders did.” —Naomi Shihab Nye

★

“I would like you to know that we do not have any more time—at all—to postpone addressing the issue of climate change. And while you’re working to ensure the survival of the planet, please remember that some of us are dying at an even faster rate from poverty, lack of health care, gun violence, police brutality, war, and twenty-seven kinds of intolerance—so please use your authority to help ensure that we live to see (and help implement) the climate-change solutions you set in motion.” —Evie Shockley

★

“I want the next president to shout from the housetops that violence is not a source or sign of strength but of weakness, whether inside a home or between nations. I want us to address violence at all scales, from domestic violence and gun violence to our endless, failed, one-sided, expensive foreign wars to the subtle violence against the poor and the unborn among our species, against more fragile species, and against the earth and the future that is unchecked climate change and the brutal fossil-fuel industry.” —Rebecca Solnit

★

“Did you know we need to find more jobs for the unemployed? Also, Palestine and Israel need to work it out.” —Tom Spanbauer

★

“If you can’t do everything, at least do what you say. I just wanna live in a country that knows the difference between love and hate.” —Ebony Stewart

★

“Our public-education system is in desperate need of resources, specifically in marginalized communities, as well as a more learner-centered, diverse curriculum emphasizing perspectives across race, gender, class, nationality, sexual orientation, ability, and the multiple intersections therein to challenge all of us to be better human beings on this planet. And, Madam President, if I can focus our last few minutes on my beautiful, complicated city: Your support of Rahm Emanuel terrifies me. Thank you for listening. Please, keep listening. To all of us. Not some. All.” —Megan Stielstra

★

“Free Leonard Peltier. Free Chelsea Manning.” —Justin Taylor

★

“No language is neutral. To speak is to claim a life—and often our own. If more Americans speak to one another, in writing, in media, at the supermarket, we might listen better. It is difficult, I think, to hate one another when we start to understand not only why and how we hurt, but also why and how we love.” —Ocean Vuong

★

“The greatest threats facing the United States are not terrorism and illegal immigration but rather injustice, bias, inequality, and fear. To be a great nation we must focus on criminal-justice reform; the eradication of the vestiges of slavery; education; and human and civil rights for all.” —Ayelet Waldman

★

“Please stop separating families through deportation; let it be understood that they did not want to be in this country to begin with (which reminds me, please stop bombing children, stop invading countries, stop sending the young and poor onto the battlefields). Please create a path toward citizenship for everyone, not just the ‘dreamers,’ because we all learn to dream from our parents.” —Javier Zamora

★

 

The Importance of Place: Where Writers Write and Why

by

Alexandra Enders

March/April 2008
2.11.08

In Print and Online

Conrad Aiken
worked at a refectory table in the dining room; Robert Graves wrote in a room
furnished only with objects made by hand. Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up;
D. H. Lawrence under a tree. William Maxwell preferred “small messy rooms that
don’t look out on anything interesting.” Katherine Anne Porter said she got her
writing done in the country, where she lived like a hermit. Ben Franklin wrote
in the bathtub, Jane Austen amid family life, Marcel Proust in the confines of
his bed. Balzac ate an enormous meal at five in the evening, slept till
midnight, then got up and wrote at a small desk in his room for sixteen hours
straight, fueled by endless cups of coffee. Toni Morrison found refuge in a
motel room when her children were small; E. B. White sought it in a cabin on
the shore. Due to her problem back, Penelope Lively works in an armchair, with
an “ancient electronic typewriter” on her lap, while A. L. Kennedy finds
comfort in a “monster black chair” in a room “the color of blood.”

“For years, I couldn’t write anywhere except at my cabin and
my house and then my office in the granary, but two years ago I got liberated
and wrote a novella in a motel in Montana,” Jim Harrison told Nancy Bunge in an
interview that appears in her collection Master
Class: Lessons From Leading Writers (University of Iowa Press,
2005). “I felt splendid because then I wasn’t locked into those places.” How
extraordinary that statement sounded to me when I first read it. Extraordinary
because I, too, feel the necessity to write in a specific place, but also
because I am constantly looking for a new place, for the place where I believe I will be able to
work best.

Why do some writers prefer company and background noise,
while others need isolation? Why do some need the magical monotony of sameness,
and others the inspiration of variety? What does it mean for a writer to be
locked into a place? What does place even mean to a writer?

The late poet Robert Creeley once said, “The necessary
environment is that which secures the artist in the way that lets him be in the world in a most
fruitful manner.” Creeley himself required a “very kind of secure quiet,” as he
put it. “I usually have some music playing, a kind of drone that I like, as
relaxation.” Writers need to find a way to access creativity and that can begin
with the physical spaces they occupy when they work. (Paradoxically, when the
writer is writing well, is truly immersed in the project, this space dissolves
and becomes irrelevant.) The writer exists in a kind of melding of literal and
imaginative, at times oblivious to the actual surroundings, at times
unconsciously attuned to external stimuli—music, scent, a familiar view.

In his 1951 essay
“Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” British psychologist D. W.
Winnicott wrote, “It is in the space between inner and outer worlds, which is
also the space between people—the transitional space—that intimate relationships
and creativity occur.” While Winnicott had a cultural model in mind, this
concept of a transitional space between inner and outer worlds helps make sense
of how writers enter what Richard Russo has called “that psychic place where
you need to be in order to do your best work.” Each writer needs to establish
the configurations of this creative space, which incorporates memory,
imagination, intention, and curiosity, but also exists in the real world; at
the same time, each writer must also negotiate how much protection this space
needs from the demands of the everyday.

For many writers, the transition from waking to working needs
to be as quick and unremarkable as possible; they speak of the proximity of
their work spaces to their beds, so that their mornings can slide easily into
writing. When Sherry Ellis asked Binnie Kirshenbaum about her personal ritual
for an interview in the Writer’s
Chronicle, the novelist said, “Get out of bed, make coffee, stumble
into my office, turn on the computer, and I sort of get started before I’m
fully awake. It’s a way of tricking myself so that I don’t get distracted with
the newspapers or e-mail or deciding it’s a good day to clean out the closets.”
Toward the end of a project, Joan Didion slept in the room with her manuscript
because she felt “the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to
it,” and it was immediately available if she woke in the night to make changes.

Novelist Beth Gutcheon has
breakfast in silence, with a section of the New York Times, followed by a bath with the paper’s Book Review,
also in silence, and then goes to her office for four or five hours of work. “I
find it hard to settle down to work when anyone else is in the house, because
they might pop in and speak to me,” she says. “I can’t imagine working in a
public place, for the same reason I find social events exhausting, if
delightful and absorbing: The mental equipment that records dialogue and is
always listening for the way people express themselves has no off switch. So
all I would do trying to work in public is harvest aimless gobbets of what was
going on around me. I can’t sort it out and arrange it into patterns until I’m
alone and not going to be interrupted.”

The writer exists in a kind of melding of literal and imaginative, at times oblivious to the actual surroundings, at times unconsciously attuned to external stimuli—music, scent, a familiar view.

A destabilizing element in an otherwise secure space may be
helpful. Poet Andrew Motion sits at a glass-topped table. “Although the sight
of my legs crossing and uncrossing can add to my nervousness when I’m working,”
he says, “I like the slightly vertiginous feeling it gives me—as if I were
staring over the side of a boat.” On the other hand, disturbances in the work
space can affect the writing negatively. During a time when she was having
problems writing, novelist Rachel Cline consulted a feng shui practitioner.
When Cline described the pages of old manuscripts stacked up behind the chair
in her work space, the practitioner said, “That’s the problem—all those
papers, one on top of another. Each one’s like a little knife ready to stab
you.”

For some
writers, establishing a transitional space means finding a way to be alone but
not solitary. “The whole thing about writing is how to be able to withstand
solitude,” says Francine du Plessix Gray. For years she had a writing room
across the courtyard from her husband Cleve Gray’s studio, but after his death
she found she needed new rituals to stave off the isolation. In warm weather
the author now works outside at a weathered wooden table beside a small pool of
water. In winter, she sits in the old part of her house, in the library by the
fire, which she keeps burning all afternoon long. “The natural elements of fire
and water are my best companions,” she says. “There’s something primal,
archaic, shamanistic about being within sight of those elements.”

“I always get up and make
a cup of coffee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the
coffee and watch the light come,” Toni Morrison told Elissa Schappell in a 1993
Paris Review interview. “And I realized for me this ritual comprises my preparation
to enter a space I can only call nonsecular…. Writers all devise ways to
approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become
the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is
the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before
it arrives. It enables me, in
some sense.”

Many writers choose libraries, intermediate spaces that
aren’t totally isolated but are quiet, protected, and controlled. Herman
Melville and Willa Cather wrote at the New York Society Library; Virginia
Woolf, George Eliot, and George Bernard Shaw all worked in the famous Reading
Room at the British Museum. Shaw described his ritual in his diary:

When I lay too late in the mornings (which is most
often the case) I did not go to the museum until after dinner…. I made a stand
against late rising by using an alarm clock and actually succeeded in getting
up regularly at eight every morning until the end of the year, when the clock
broke and I began immediately to relapse. I got a new clock, but did not quite
regain my punctuality, which, by and by, made me so sleepy in the afternoon
that I got into the habit of taking a nap in the Museum over my books.

Novelist Anne Landsman is
a member of the Writers Room in New York City, a nonprofit organization that
offers desk space to writers who prefer to work in a shared environment. “I
work best in situations around other people who are creating,” says Landsman, who’s
been a member since 1994. “Everyone’s a writer. There’s nothing aberrant or
unusual or out of place. It says Writers Room on the door. It allows you to be
what you are. I’d be happy if they provided work clothes with Writer on the
back. I love the signing in, the routine. It gives you permission to take a
deep breath, to realize that writing happens the way everything else happens.
Writing makes me feel sufficiently vulnerable and it helps to be with other
people. Another comforting thing is you see people having different kinds of
days.”

Preparing to work,
deliberately and intentionally, can help build the bridge between inner and
outer worlds, whether a writer leaves the house or not. Landsman says her
preparations begin with reading on the train to the Writers Room. “By the time
I’m at the Writers Room, have set up the desk, maybe made a phone call, or a
cup of tea, I’m ready. You know how cats and dogs circle in their beds at
night? It takes me between five and twenty minutes. Then I turn on the computer.
It’s like taking an elevator down; I’ve gone to that other place.”

Other writers find busy
public spaces more conducive to work. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
had regular tables and hours at the Café Flore and later the Deux Magots, and
knew they would be surrounded by people but not intruded upon. “It’s a less
lonely way to write,” Russo said of writing in diners, in an interview on
Barnes & Noble’s Web site. “I’m less self-conscious when it’s not so quiet….
I’ve always enjoyed writing in public spaces, because when the phone rings,
it’s not for you.” Poet Catherine Barnett has a favorite booth at her local
diner. “It’s out of the way and protected. I like writing there because people
take care of you.”

I myself have found the lounge at the Mark Morris Dance Group
in New York City, where my daughter takes a weekly class, a very productive
space. There, amid the tiny girls in their ballet clothes and the dozing
fathers, I am able to tune out the distractions and focus only on the work at
hand.

Travel can provide another kind of transitional space. For
some, the actual journey—the movement between places—inspires the writing.
Poet Tom Sleigh likes to write on trains, which he describes as “meditative,
calming, and interesting for the way the scenery keeps flashing by.” In her
contributor’s note for “Mr. Sweetly Indecent,” published in The Best American Short Stories 1998,
Bliss Broyard wrote that her story “was written virtually in one sitting, while
I was traveling from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Boston.” She noticed an unusual
greeting between passengers and opened her notebook.

I worked on the story while I waited for my plane, for
the entire three-hour flight, and then kept writing in the terminal in Boston
until I’d finished…. When I come to think about how the story came to be, it is
the circumstances under which it was written that loom largest in my mind. The
anonymous, unanchored feeling of being in an airport terminal and flying high
above the earth liberated me from some of my normal writing anxieties. I
followed the story where it took me, without thinking ahead about plot,
character development, or really any thematic concerns. In retrospect I see
that some aspects of where the story was written found their way into it:
eavesdropping and voyeurism, a sense of traveling between separate worlds, and
the feeling I often have while flying of a temporary suspension of my belief in
how things are supposed to work.

Others
actually take trips in order to write along the way. Erskine Caldwell, author
of Tobacco Road (Scribner’s
Sons, 1932), ran a bookstore in Maine with his wife, photojournalist Margaret
Bourke-White; when he needed time to write, he would take a bus from “Boston to
Cleveland maybe, and get off at night once in a while to write. I’d do a story
that way in about a week’s time. Then for a while, I took the night boats
between Boston and New York. The Fall River Line, the New Bedford Line, the
Cape Cod Line, all going to New York at night. The rhythm of the water might
have helped my sentence structure a little; at least I thought it did.”

Then there are those like
Eudora Welty, who “found it possible to write almost anywhere I’ve happened to
try.” (Welty preferred home because it was “more convenient for an early riser…. And it’s the only place where you can
really promise yourself time and keep out interruptions.”) Robert Frost claimed
famously to “never write except with a writing board. I’ve never had a table in
my life. And I use all sorts of things. Write on the sole of my shoe.” For
some, the transitional space is actually more external than internal; they
thrive on outside contact. Allen Ginsberg could write poems anywhere, anytime.
“He isn’t the least bit self-conscious,” Creeley said of Ginsberg. “In fact, he
seems to be stimulated by people around him.”

Being in the world as a writer, to paraphrase
Creeley, takes many forms. For me, different stages of a project have always
demanded different settings. In the beginning, when an idea is just emerging, I
search for the right place to incubate what is coming. Where are the characters
going to reveal themselves? Do I want to be alone, or with others? To work in
quiet or with background noise? Near the end of my project, these questions
will not matter; I will perch wherever I need to. I’ll work on the edge of a
bathtub, in the car, waiting for my daughter to brush her teeth. Like the moon,
the momentum and sheer bulk of my novel will pull me to it. In the middle
stages I want something different again. I want a place where work has to be
done, a library or office. This long stage is about routine and discipline—it’s nice to be surrounded by familiar things
because they suggest my life as a writer.

I was in the middle of a
novel when, several years ago, my husband, the sculptor Peter Soriano, won a
grant to live and work in Alexander Calder’s house in the tiny town of Saché,
France. The house was enormous—a farmhouse on steroids, we called it—and
severely underfurnished. I could not get comfortable in that cavernous house,
could not find a spot secure enough to work. I was also a little homesick. My
novel was about an island in Maine, a novel in which landscape, and the
character’s attachment to it, played a big role, and the irony of working on
that while feeling distinctly unattached to this place in the beautiful French
countryside was not lost on me. Finally I moved a table into a corner of the
bedroom. And so, while Peter was out in the studio and our daughter at the
village school, I made a boat out of that desk, a bridge that connected me to
my own New England landscape, and to the imagined world I was creating.
Meanwhile, in the days and weeks that followed, the French landscape outside
and its lovely slow spring was seeping in, and in my novel the bright and
forceful Maine summer was hurtling out, and there, on that simple pine table
pushed up against the bare white wall, I found a way to contain it all.

Alexandra
Enders is the author of the novel Bride Island (Plume, 2007).
She lives in New York City.

Where Big Books Are Born: Danez Smith on the Millay Colony

by

Danez Smith

March/April 2018
2.14.18

In Print and Online

I left the Millay Colony with a new relationship to deodorant and a new respect for wild turkeys, but it was my second collection and the relationships with my friends and collaborators that were born anew in that beloved barn. My month at Millay was split between a four-week individual residency and a weeklong group residency with the Dark Noise Collective, my artistic and chosen family. I showed up to Millay a lotta bit nervous but curious about what doors in my work would open up there, out of my element. (I’m very much used to being Black&FreeInTheCity, not Black&LostInTheWood.) Thankfully the staff and the land itself, which seems infused with some soft blessing by Edna herself, make it hard not to settle in and let the work take you. Millay is where my book became a book. I had time and space to play in new forms, get to the questions I didn’t always have the time to think. I got to the bottom of myself there. Millay offered comfort and the space for deep meditation and investigation. During the group residency, our relationships to one another and our work had no choice but to deepen, having been given so much time to be with one another, away from noise and worry. Millay is held up in my heart as one of the best places artists can go to toil and dance in the hard labor that feeds them most.

 

Three Points of Productivity:

1. The cooking is excellent, the groceries for all other meals are provided, and the kitchen is great for dancing.
2. The land surrounding the residency is perfect for people who love nature and people who are new to it and scared of it just the same.
3. If you’re ever feeling low on inspiration, you can just Google all the writers and artists who have carved their names into the doorframes to get some juice.

 

Danez Smith is the author of two books, including Don’t Call Us Dead, published by Graywolf Press in 2017.

The Millay Colony: Two- and four-week residencies from April through November for poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers at Steepletop, the former estate of Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz, New York. Residents are provided with lodging, studio space, and meals. Next deadline: March 1. Millay Colony for the Arts, 454 East Hill Road, P.O. Box 3, Austerlitz, NY 12017. (518) 392-3103. www.millaycolony.org (Credit: Whitney Lawson)

Where Big Books Are Born: Tayari Jones on the Ucross Foundation

by

Tayari Jones

March/April 2018
2.14.18

In Print and Online

Getting to Ucross is not easy. There aren’t many direct flights into Sheridan, Wyoming. You have to fly to Denver, where there may or may not be a tiny plane waiting to take you the rest of the way. After that, budget another forty-five minutes by car. Unless it’s snowing. If that is the case, you’ll get there when you get there, but once you do, it’s paradise. I have a theory about artists residencies: They are helpful only if they provide something that you don’t have at home. A friend of mine who has a big family says that a retreat is any place her kids are not. When I was a young writer accustomed to writing on a desk shoved into a closet, a room with a window constituted luxury. By my fourth novel I had a room of my own, but I didn’t have peace and natural wonder. Ucross is situated on the open prairie. As an early riser, I delighted in glorious purple-streaked sunrises. Just outside my studio, deer pranced like jackrabbits. Needless to say this was a far cry from my life in Jersey City, where I once looked out of my window just in time to see a greasy raccoon scurry up a lamppost for a better look at the drunks tussling in the middle of the street. In the quiet dawn of Wyoming I solved a major problem in my novel An American Marriage. There in my studio, completely alone, I decided to experiment with an epistolary format. The solitude of Ucross lent itself perfectly to the idea of separated lovers communicating by post. The helpful staffers provided me with a typewriter so I was able to duplicate the way my hero would write letters from prison. Each morning for a month I awoke filled with anticipation. I tiptoed downstairs to my studio where my characters waited for me to break the silence of the dawn with the sharp click of a typewriter, scoring their words onto clean paper.

Three Points of Productivity:
1. It’s multidisciplinary. There’s less of a sense of competition—and less pressure to network, or to be networked—when folks aren’t in the same lane.
2. Meals are provided. Until you don’t have to feed yourself, you don’t realize what a hassle it is to feed yourself; also, good healthy food makes for a strong writing day.
3. The hikes are gorgeous. A daily sojourn into nature became a way to loosen up knots in my story; it was a meditation of sorts.

 

Tayari Jones is the author of four books, including the novel An American Marriage, published by Algonquin Books in February.

Ucross Foundation: Two- to six-week residencies from March through early June and from mid-August through early December to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers on a working ranch in Ucross, Wyoming. Residents are provided with lodging, studio space, and meals. Next deadline: March 1. Ucross Foundation Residency Program, 30 Big Red Lane, Clearmont, WY 82835. (307) 737-2291. www.ucrossfoundation.org (Credit: Stephen G. Weaver)

Where Big Books Are Born: Danez Smith on the Millay Colony

Craft Capsule: Every Novel Is a Journey

by

Tayari Jones

2.6.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-fourth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Last week I wrote about how I came to make Roy the protagonist of my new novel, An American Marriage. The decision was frustrating because I came to this tale seeking to amplify the muffled voices of women who live on the margins of the crisis of mass incarceration. So imagine how hard it was for me to make the Roy’s story the main color of the take and relegate Celestial’s point of view to a mere accent wall. It nearly killed me. I was prepared to pull the novel from publication.

Luckily, I had a craft epiphany.

Roy is a great character. He’s like Odysseus, a brave and charismatic man returned home from a might battle. He just wants to get home and be taken care of by a loving wife and sheltered in a gracious house. His voice was very easy to write because he is easy to like; his desires and decisions make it easy to empathize with him. He is a wrongfully incarcerated black man. What decent person wouldn’t root for him?

Celestial was bit more challenging. She’s ambitious. She’s kind of stubborn. And most important, she isn’t really cut out to be a dutiful wife. Back when she was the protagonist of the novel, I used to say, “I am writing a novel about a woman whose husband is wrongfully incarcerated…” and everyone would expect the novel to be about her fight to free him. And it wasn’t. It was about her decision not to wait.

On the level of craft, it just didn’t work. For one thing, you can’t write a compelling novel about what someone doesn’t do. (There is a reason why Bartelby doesn’t get to narrate his own story.) Second, as I wrote last week, Roy’s crisis is just too intense and distracting for the reader to care about any other character as much.

So, what to do?

I foregrounded Roy. He is the protagonist and readers find him to be very “relatable” (my very least favorite word in the world). I took Roy on the journey, and I invite readers to accompany him. As the writer, I came to the table understanding that the expectations put on women to be “ride or die” are completely unreasonable; furthermore, there is no expectation of reciprocity.  But rather than use Celestial’s voice to amplify my position, I allowed Roy the hard work of interrogating his world view, and the reader, by proxy, must do the same.

The result is a novel that was a lot harder to write, but the questions I posed to myself and my readers were richer, more complex, and I hope, more satisfying.

 

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

Craft Capsule: Finding Your Story

by

Tayari Jones

1.16.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-first in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Like most thoughtful people, I have noticed that the world is on fire and I want to use my skills to help extinguish the flames. To this end, I set out five years ago to write a novel that addresses the injustice of wrongful incarceration. I applied for and received a fellowship to the Radcliffe Institute and I became a dedicated researcher. I learned a lot, so much so that I got angry just watching Law & Order, my ex-favorite television show. I was informed, “woke,” and motivated, but I couldn’t write a novel because I had no story. The problem was that I was trying to write to the issue, and I can only write a story that is issue-adjacent.

I know I have a novel when I have a question to which I don’t know the moral/ethical answer. When it comes to wrongful incarceration, I am not torn. The state should not imprison innocent people. Full stop. Also without ambiguity: The prison system is cruel, corrupt, and in desperate need of reform, if not abolition.

So where was the novel?

The answer revealed itself in a food court where I spied a young couple. She was dressed in a lovely cashmere coat. He wore inexpensive khakis and a polo. They were clearly angry, and clearly in love. I overheard the woman say, “Roy, you know you wouldn’t have waited on me for seven years.” He shot back, “What are you talking about? This shit wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.”

Just then, I knew I had a novel. The reason is that I understood that they were both probably right. I didn’t know him, but I couldn’t quite picture him waiting chastely by for seven years. At the same time, I couldn’t imagine her behind bars. But did he have a right to demand her loyalty when both seem to agree she would be in no position to demand the same? Was this question moot since she would not likely face this challenge? Was this a kind of privilege? Could she mitigate this privilege by waiting like a modern-day Penelope? Should she?

So we have a couple with a conflict, and at stake between them are issues of reciprocity, duty, and love. Yes, there is the injustice of mass incarceration. And yes, this injustice is fueled by racism and prejudice. Neither of them doubt this, and neither do I. But the question of “will you wait for me” is foremost on his mind.

The result is my new novel, An American Marriage. Roy and Celestial are newlyweds, married only eighteen months, when Roy is arrested for a crime he did not commit. When he is slapped with a twelve-year sentence, the questions of desire and responsibility are at the center of the characters’ lives. As a writer, I was genuinely torn: Roy needs Celestial to be a link to the life he left behind, and Celestial loves her husband, but she has only one life. I wrote this novel not only to satisfy my heart’s curiosity as to what they would do, but to also satisfy the part of my mind that wondered what should they do.

I realized that my passion for the issue of incarceration was the reason that I couldn’t write about it directly. A novel is not me, as a writer, telling the reader what I already know. And an honest novel is not about me pretending to take on “both sides” of an issue about which I have a clear opinion. I had to start with my issue and then walk away from it until I found the thing I didn’t know. To truly challenge the reader, I had to challenge myself as well.

 

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

 

Craft Capsule: Gin and Scotch Tape

by

Sandra Beasley

5.2.17

Online Only

This is the eleventh in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Years ago a distinguished poet hosted our class’s workshops at her home in Virginia. The house was perched on an incline; down the hill was her writing cabin alongside a pond. We met at her dining room table and tried not to be distracted by the hawks swooping outside the windows.

A student brought in a draft that compared the scent of gin to Scotch tape. Setting aside all other matters of theme or craft, the discussion lingered on this comparison. The simile was bright and original. But was it accurate? That only a few in the room had ever sampled gin, and even then only of an aristrocrat variety, did not aid our analysis.

Reaching her limit, the professor sprang up from the table. “We’re settling this,” she said. She walked into the kitchen and retrieved a roll of Scotch tape. She went to a corner of the dining room, opened a cabinet, and pulled out a bottle. She walked the gin around the table so we could sniff accordingly.

Lesson one? To compare the scents of Scotch tape and gin doesn’t quite work, because the former obscures the latter’s floral qualities.

Lesson two? Always be prepared to have your simile put to the test.

Lesson three? Never let a turn of figurative language, no matter how vivid or clever, hijack what you’re trying to say. I can’t remember who wrote that poem, or where its heart lay. I only remember the gin and Scotch tape. 

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain

by

Sandra Beasley

4.25.17

Online Only

This is the tenth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

 

***

I attended a high school geared toward professions in science or technology, so I have an active analytical streak and crave objective rubrics for understanding the wildly creative poems, stories, and essays that I read. I suspect I’m not alone in this.

One of my mentors, Gregory Orr, articulated four “temperaments” of poetry in a 1988 essay titled “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry.” You can envision these facets of craft as quadrants, positioned on an X-Y axis. To the left, limiting impulses: “Story” in the upper quadrant and, below it, “Structure.” To the right, impulses that extend limitlessness: “Music” in the upper and, below it, “Imagination.” Though designed for poetry, I find these temperaments useful for prose as well. As writers, we each typically favor two of the four in our work. Which temperaments bring you to the page? Which come easiest to you? Which do you need to consciously strengthen in your work?

This system gives us a way to articulate differences in aesthetic without ranking them. I’m relieved to set aside presumptive hierarchies. I suspect I’m not alone in this.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”

by

Sandra Beasley

4.11.17

Online Only

This is the eighth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Beware the indeterminate “it,” I often say, when fine-tuning a draft.

But that word is so convenient. “It” carries the football from the previous sentence. Whatever “it” you just defined, you’re sticking with it for another ten yards, right?

Except that you’re fumbling the play. Too often, relying on “it” dissipates your language’s energy. Circle every “it” that leads off a sentence. Revising to avoid these instances will force your verbs into action, and clarify your intent.

This is not a hard-and-fast rule. Sometimes an indeterminate “it” will remain, one that has earned its place on the field. The pronoun can be strategic—signifying not just gender neutrality but an absence of comprehension or known name, a fumbling toward meaning, the building of suspense.

In the right hands, “It” can be a potent force. Just ask Stephen King.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: The Art of Targeted Revision

by

Sandra Beasley

4.18.17

Online Only

This is the ninth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

“Too many hours of revising—to no clear end!” my student complains. He is tired. He feels like the poem never really gets better. There’s always more work to do.

Welcome to revision: the arbitrary realm in which we debate “the” versus “an,” “this” versus “that.” Spend an hour putting a comma in. An hour later, take it out.

Part of the problem is that we complicate the revision process by making our aims abstract. One big revision, we promise ourselves, will make the poem “better.” Don’t privilege “better,” which is a meaningless term. Assign clear and objective tasks. Devote one round of revision exclusively to heightening your imagery, another to reconsidering your verb choices, a third to playing with lineation or tense.

Think of each revision as an experiment. Often these experiments will feel like evolutionary progress, and you’ll keep their results intact. Not always, especially as you near the end of the revision process. When the new version fails to appeal—when you find yourself resisting, reverting, defending an earlier choice—you are locating the poem’s true form. You are identifying what makes this poem yours, and yours alone.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Find Your Metaphor

by

Sandra Beasley

4.4.17

This is the seventh in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

A friend of mine, a poet, was trying to figure out what bothered him about a draft of my poem. “A poem should be like a wall,” he told me. “You build it brick by brick.” He pointed out that, in his opinion, key bricks were missing.

I didn’t share his vision, but I admired that he had one. I’ve come to value developing a metaphorical model for your genre. A model can help you identify your goals, name your struggles, and proceed toward success.

Perhaps you follow the lead of “stanza,” the Italian word for “room.” You come to think of each poem as a house. How do the rooms differ in function, size, and occupancy? Where does your central drama take place? What comprises your roof?

Perhaps you come to think of your essay as a harp. Each researched fact glimmers, an available string in a golden frame. But you can’t play them all at once. Only in choosing which notes to highlight, and how to sequence them, can you create music.

Personally, I always think of memoir as an egg. I’m protective of the inspiring memory, smooth and undisturbed in its surface. But I have to be prepared to break the egg. I have to make the idea messy before I can make a satisfying meal.

Perhaps your novel is a shark. Perhaps your villanelle is a waltz. Perhaps your short story is a baseball game. Don’t adopt my metaphors. Find one of your own.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.21.17

Online Only

This is the first in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

As a project for school, my thirteen-year-old son, Will, spent several days carrying an egg around. His task was simple: Keep the egg from breaking.

The experiment was intended to show what it’s like to have a baby, to approximate the feeling of constant vigilance that never leaves you once you have a child. Ultimately, of course, it was supposed to make hormone-addled adolescents think twice before doing something stupid.

As a mother of three, though, I wasn’t convinced. A baby is nothing like an egg, unless it’s an egg that cries, wets itself, sucks on you constantly, and wakes you up four times a night. But as my son described the feeling of carrying his egg—he named it “Pablito”—I realized that it did remind me of something. “It’s always there,” Will said. “You can’t forget it or take it for granted. You feel protective and anxious all the time.”

Carrying an egg around is like writing a novel. No matter what else you’re doing, the fact of the novel is in the back of your mind. If you go too long without attending to it, you get nervous. It is always with you, a weight solid and yet fragile, in constant danger of being crushed. Like the egg, the weight of a book-in-progress is both literal and metaphorical. Within the accumulating pages, as inside the delicate eggshell, are the raw ingredients for something greater. Keeping it intact requires patience, time, attention—and, most of all, commitment. This concept applies to any stage of the process: The egg is both the idea that you nurture long before you begin to write, and the writing itself, which must be fostered and sustained.

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.7.17

Online Only

This is the third in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Jackson Pollock’s reply to an interviewer’s question about how he composed his paintings of “accidental” splatterings has stuck with me. “I don’t use the accident,” he said. “I deny the accident.”

The sheer bravado of this is thrilling, and as a writer I find it to be a useful way to think about my work-in-progress. When I’m putting words on the page it’s easy to second guess, to question the often-unconscious choices I make as I go: the trajectories of characters’ lives, shifts in direction and focus, minor characters who gain traction as the story moves forward. The editor in my head starts whispering: You’re going in the wrong direction. Why are you spending so much time on that character? You need to focus, get back to the story you originally envisioned, stick to the plan.

Over time I’ve learned to trust my impulses. Whatever else they may be, these unanticipated detours are fresh and surprising; they keep me interested, and often end up adding depth to the work. Not always, of course—sometimes an accident is just an accident. But believing that these splatterings on my own canvas are there for a reason, as part of a larger process of conception, gives me the audacity to experiment.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.28.17

Online Only

This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The problem of beginning…

The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.

On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season….

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.28.17

Online Only

This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The problem of beginning…

The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.

On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season….

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.28.17

Online Only

This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The problem of beginning…

The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.

On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season….

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Tolstoy’s Short Chapters

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.28.17

Online Only

This is the sixth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Anna Karenina is more than eight hundred pages long. So why does it feel shorter than many three-hundred-page books?

As I read this novel recently I noticed that Tolstoy cuts his long scenes into short chapters, usually no more than two or three pages. This makes sense, considering it was published in serial installments, from 1873 to 1877, in the Russian Messenger. Tolstoy often ends a chapter in a moment of suspense—a door opens, a provocative question is asked, a contentious group sits down to dinner, characters who’ve been circling each other finally begin to talk—which propels the reader forward into the next chapter.

The psychological effect of these short chapters is that this huge book is easy to get through. Reading in bed late at night (as I tend to do), I’m tempted to put it down, but then I riffle ahead to find that the next chapter is only three pages long. And I really want to find out who’s behind that door.

Three pages. I can do that—as a reader and as a writer. 

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: Visual Prompts

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.21.17

Online Only

This is the fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

For many writers, visual and tactile stimulation is an important component of the creative process. William Faulkner used to map his stories on the wall in his study. If you visit Rowan Oak, his home in Oxford, Mississippi, you can still see the notes for his 1954 novel, A Fable, in his precise, small handwriting. Edwidge Danticat has said that she has an evolving bulletin board in her workspace where she tacks up collages of photos of Haiti and images from magazines.

I, too, have a new board for each book I write. When I’m starting work on a novel I gather scraps like a magpie. My Orphan Train board was covered with postcards from the New York Tenement Museum depicting the interior of an immigrant Irish family’s cramped apartment, a black and white photograph of a young couple at Coney Island in the 1920s, a map of the village of Kinvara in Ireland. I hung a hand-carved Celtic cross on a green ribbon and a stone shamrock on a red ribbon from Galway; a Native American dreamcatcher from Maine; a silver train pin from a New York Train Riders’ reunion in Little Falls, Minnesota. I tacked up note cards: “Food in Ireland 1900s” was one (“wheatmeal, hung beef, tongue, barley”). Another listed ideas I wanted to explore (“links between misplaced and abandoned people with little in common”).

For A Piece of the World, I included a print of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World; photos I took, inside and out, of Christina’s home in Cushing, Maine; some Emily Dickinson poems (“This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me”); and postcards of other paintings Wyeth did at the Olson house, including Wind From the Sea and Christina Olson (both of which make appearances in my novel). I photocopied sketches Wyeth made for his portrait of Christina. I even included a small handful of grasses I’d plucked from the field Christina sat in.

I find these idea boards fun to assemble and inspiring as I work. My mantra, always: Find inspiration where you can.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

An outline of A Fable on the wall of William Faulkner’s study at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi. (Credit: Joe Bonomo)

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

Craft Capsule: Making Conversation

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.14.17

Online Only

This is the fourth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Dialogue is hard to get right. It should sound like natural speech, but in fact it’s nothing like it. I like to send my creative writing students out to cafés and parks with notebooks to transcribe bits of overheard conversations. Then I ask them to type up these transcripts and turn them into dialogue between characters. Inevitably their written dialogue bears little resemblance to the overheard conversations. When you write dialogue you must eliminate niceties and unnecessary patter, and cut to the core of the exchange—unless the patter is crucial to the story, conveying a dissembling, depressed, incoherent, or boring personality. At the same time, it should sound natural, like something someone would actually say. The writer George Garrett called this dovetailing—trimming for verisimilitude and impact.

In direct and indirect speech, your characters should constantly be saying “no” to each other. Most of us (myself included) tend to avoid conflict in our real lives, but conflict is crucial in fiction. It keeps the story interesting.

Richard Price, in his novel Lush Life, allows his characters to talk and talk and talk. Price maintains a delicate balancing act; his characters’ words matter. What they say changes the direction of the story. But he never burdens his dialogue with exposition or forces it to convey plot points that don’t come up naturally. In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway writes, “In order to engage us emotionally in a disagreement, the characters must have an emotional stake in the outcome.” Price’s characters are nothing if not emotionally invested.

Price’s dialogue is vital to the story because it moves the action forward. He constantly puts his characters in conflict with one another. Their conversations are full of surprises—self-revelation, inadvertent admissions, hearsay, evidence—and kinetic energy; they crackle with life. Real life.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

Craft Capsule: Making Conversation

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.14.17

Online Only

This is the fourth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Dialogue is hard to get right. It should sound like natural speech, but in fact it’s nothing like it. I like to send my creative writing students out to cafés and parks with notebooks to transcribe bits of overheard conversations. Then I ask them to type up these transcripts and turn them into dialogue between characters. Inevitably their written dialogue bears little resemblance to the overheard conversations. When you write dialogue you must eliminate niceties and unnecessary patter, and cut to the core of the exchange—unless the patter is crucial to the story, conveying a dissembling, depressed, incoherent, or boring personality. At the same time, it should sound natural, like something someone would actually say. The writer George Garrett called this dovetailing—trimming for verisimilitude and impact.

In direct and indirect speech, your characters should constantly be saying “no” to each other. Most of us (myself included) tend to avoid conflict in our real lives, but conflict is crucial in fiction. It keeps the story interesting.

Richard Price, in his novel Lush Life, allows his characters to talk and talk and talk. Price maintains a delicate balancing act; his characters’ words matter. What they say changes the direction of the story. But he never burdens his dialogue with exposition or forces it to convey plot points that don’t come up naturally. In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway writes, “In order to engage us emotionally in a disagreement, the characters must have an emotional stake in the outcome.” Price’s characters are nothing if not emotionally invested.

Price’s dialogue is vital to the story because it moves the action forward. He constantly puts his characters in conflict with one another. Their conversations are full of surprises—self-revelation, inadvertent admissions, hearsay, evidence—and kinetic energy; they crackle with life. Real life.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”

Craft Capsule: Visual Prompts

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.21.17

Online Only

This is the fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

For many writers, visual and tactile stimulation is an important component of the creative process. William Faulkner used to map his stories on the wall in his study. If you visit Rowan Oak, his home in Oxford, Mississippi, you can still see the notes for his 1954 novel, A Fable, in his precise, small handwriting. Edwidge Danticat has said that she has an evolving bulletin board in her workspace where she tacks up collages of photos of Haiti and images from magazines.

I, too, have a new board for each book I write. When I’m starting work on a novel I gather scraps like a magpie. My Orphan Train board was covered with postcards from the New York Tenement Museum depicting the interior of an immigrant Irish family’s cramped apartment, a black and white photograph of a young couple at Coney Island in the 1920s, a map of the village of Kinvara in Ireland. I hung a hand-carved Celtic cross on a green ribbon and a stone shamrock on a red ribbon from Galway; a Native American dreamcatcher from Maine; a silver train pin from a New York Train Riders’ reunion in Little Falls, Minnesota. I tacked up note cards: “Food in Ireland 1900s” was one (“wheatmeal, hung beef, tongue, barley”). Another listed ideas I wanted to explore (“links between misplaced and abandoned people with little in common”).

For A Piece of the World, I included a print of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World; photos I took, inside and out, of Christina’s home in Cushing, Maine; some Emily Dickinson poems (“This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me”); and postcards of other paintings Wyeth did at the Olson house, including Wind From the Sea and Christina Olson (both of which make appearances in my novel). I photocopied sketches Wyeth made for his portrait of Christina. I even included a small handful of grasses I’d plucked from the field Christina sat in.

I find these idea boards fun to assemble and inspiring as I work. My mantra, always: Find inspiration where you can.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

An outline of A Fable on the wall of William Faulkner’s study at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi. (Credit: Joe Bonomo)

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident
Craft Capsule: Making Conversation

Craft Capsule: Visual Prompts

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.21.17

Online Only

This is the fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

For many writers, visual and tactile stimulation is an important component of the creative process. William Faulkner used to map his stories on the wall in his study. If you visit Rowan Oak, his home in Oxford, Mississippi, you can still see the notes for his 1954 novel, A Fable, in his precise, small handwriting. Edwidge Danticat has said that she has an evolving bulletin board in her workspace where she tacks up collages of photos of Haiti and images from magazines.

I, too, have a new board for each book I write. When I’m starting work on a novel I gather scraps like a magpie. My Orphan Train board was covered with postcards from the New York Tenement Museum depicting the interior of an immigrant Irish family’s cramped apartment, a black and white photograph of a young couple at Coney Island in the 1920s, a map of the village of Kinvara in Ireland. I hung a hand-carved Celtic cross on a green ribbon and a stone shamrock on a red ribbon from Galway; a Native American dreamcatcher from Maine; a silver train pin from a New York Train Riders’ reunion in Little Falls, Minnesota. I tacked up note cards: “Food in Ireland 1900s” was one (“wheatmeal, hung beef, tongue, barley”). Another listed ideas I wanted to explore (“links between misplaced and abandoned people with little in common”).

For A Piece of the World, I included a print of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World; photos I took, inside and out, of Christina’s home in Cushing, Maine; some Emily Dickinson poems (“This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me”); and postcards of other paintings Wyeth did at the Olson house, including Wind From the Sea and Christina Olson (both of which make appearances in my novel). I photocopied sketches Wyeth made for his portrait of Christina. I even included a small handful of grasses I’d plucked from the field Christina sat in.

I find these idea boards fun to assemble and inspiring as I work. My mantra, always: Find inspiration where you can.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

An outline of A Fable on the wall of William Faulkner’s study at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi. (Credit: Joe Bonomo)

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident
Craft Capsule: Making Conversation

Craft Capsule: The Art of Targeted Revision

by

Sandra Beasley

4.18.17

Online Only

This is the ninth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

“Too many hours of revising—to no clear end!” my student complains. He is tired. He feels like the poem never really gets better. There’s always more work to do.

Welcome to revision: the arbitrary realm in which we debate “the” versus “an,” “this” versus “that.” Spend an hour putting a comma in. An hour later, take it out.

Part of the problem is that we complicate the revision process by making our aims abstract. One big revision, we promise ourselves, will make the poem “better.” Don’t privilege “better,” which is a meaningless term. Assign clear and objective tasks. Devote one round of revision exclusively to heightening your imagery, another to reconsidering your verb choices, a third to playing with lineation or tense.

Think of each revision as an experiment. Often these experiments will feel like evolutionary progress, and you’ll keep their results intact. Not always, especially as you near the end of the revision process. When the new version fails to appeal—when you find yourself resisting, reverting, defending an earlier choice—you are locating the poem’s true form. You are identifying what makes this poem yours, and yours alone.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Find Your Metaphor
Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”
Craft Capsule: Visual Prompts

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”

by

Sandra Beasley

4.11.17

Online Only

This is the eighth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Beware the indeterminate “it,” I often say, when fine-tuning a draft.

But that word is so convenient. “It” carries the football from the previous sentence. Whatever “it” you just defined, you’re sticking with it for another ten yards, right?

Except that you’re fumbling the play. Too often, relying on “it” dissipates your language’s energy. Circle every “it” that leads off a sentence. Revising to avoid these instances will force your verbs into action, and clarify your intent.

This is not a hard-and-fast rule. Sometimes an indeterminate “it” will remain, one that has earned its place on the field. The pronoun can be strategic—signifying not just gender neutrality but an absence of comprehension or known name, a fumbling toward meaning, the building of suspense.

In the right hands, “It” can be a potent force. Just ask Stephen King.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain

by

Sandra Beasley

4.25.17

Online Only

This is the tenth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

 

***

I attended a high school geared toward professions in science or technology, so I have an active analytical streak and crave objective rubrics for understanding the wildly creative poems, stories, and essays that I read. I suspect I’m not alone in this.

One of my mentors, Gregory Orr, articulated four “temperaments” of poetry in a 1988 essay titled “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry.” You can envision these facets of craft as quadrants, positioned on an X-Y axis. To the left, limiting impulses: “Story” in the upper quadrant and, below it, “Structure.” To the right, impulses that extend limitlessness: “Music” in the upper and, below it, “Imagination.” Though designed for poetry, I find these temperaments useful for prose as well. As writers, we each typically favor two of the four in our work. Which temperaments bring you to the page? Which come easiest to you? Which do you need to consciously strengthen in your work?

This system gives us a way to articulate differences in aesthetic without ranking them. I’m relieved to set aside presumptive hierarchies. I suspect I’m not alone in this.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”
Craft Capsule: The Art of Targeted Revision
Craft Capsule: Visual Prompts

Craft Capsule: Real Time vs. Page Time

by

Wiley Cash

9.26.17

Online Only

This is the twentieth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Several years ago I worked with a student who was writing a novel about a guy training for a career in the sport of mixed martial arts. The novel was exciting and interesting, and the writing was strong and compelling. Until the fighting began. The minute the bell rang and the fists and feet started flying, the pace of the narrative turned glacial.

This may come as a surprise to you; it certainly surprised me. The talented author was actually a former MMA fighter, so it seemed impossible that he was unable to write an exciting fight scene. Then I realized that fight scenes are rarely exciting on the page. I believe this is true for two reasons. First, a fistfight is a process, and processes rarely make for compelling reading. Second, fistfights are exciting because they unfold in real time, which is wholly different than page time.

I want to talk about process first. Process is part of our daily lives, and many of the processes we undertake are performed through rote memory: brushing our teeth, making coffee, pouring cereal. These processes aren’t very interesting, and they don’t really need to be written about in detail. Readers may need to know that your characters drink coffee, eat cereal, and brush their teeth, but they don’t need to see this happening. Telling them it happened is enough. This is an example of when telling should be privileged over showing. But sometimes you may want to show a process, especially if it proves a level of expertise. Perhaps you’re writing about a character who is skilled with firearms, and you want to show that level of knowledge and skill. Perhaps you should have a scene in which the character goes through the process of breaking down and cleaning a firearm.

Most often, when readers start down the road of reading about process they’re not interested in the process itself; they’re interested in the outcome. The fight scenes in my student’s mixed martial arts novel are a good example. While the scenes were very technical and showed the same level of skill and mastery that I just mentioned, as a reader I quickly became bogged down in the descriptions of the movements, and I lost a sense of the movements themselves. I found myself skipping through the process of the fight in order to discover whether or not our hero won the fight. I realized that as a reader I was more interested in the outcome than I was in the process. The scene hinged on the result of the fight as an event, not on the act of fighting.

Not only were the fight scenes weighed down by process, they were also slowed down by the act of reading. Let’s step out of the ring. Think about the fights or dustups or schoolyard shoving matches you’ve witnessed. How long did they last before someone stepped in or called the parents or the teachers came running? Thirty seconds? A minute? A few minutes, tops? These events almost always unfold very quickly. The movements are fast; words are exchanged at a rapid clip. Your eyes and ears are able to take in the movements and the verbal exchanges simultaneously. Now, imagine trying to portray these events verbatim on the page. Think about how many words would be required to nail down both the movements and the dialogue. It would take much longer to read that scene than it would to witness it.

There’s an old writerly saying that dialogue isn’t speech, but rather an approximation of speech. Sometimes, this is true of action, especially in terms of process. 

 

Wiley Cash is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Last Ballad, A Land More Kind Than Home, and This Dark Road to Mercy. He currently serves as the writer in residence at the University of North Carolina in Asheville and teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program. He lives with his wife and two young daughters in Wilmington, North Carolina. His website is www.wileycash.com.

Craft Capsule: The Art of Active Dialogue

by

Wiley Cash

9.12.17

Online Only

This is the nineteenth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

When I work with new writers, one thing I often notice is their lack of faith in their dialogue: They don’t trust that it’s strong enough to stand on its own. They feel that they must add something to really get the point across. These writers add action words to their dialogue tags in an attempt to hide any flaws they fear may be hiding in their characters’ verbal interactions. In other words, they do everything they can to make certain that the reader gets the full import of what the characters are attempting, consciously or unconsciously, to communicate.

Often, and unfortunately, these action words take the form of gerunds. Let me follow this with a caveat: Gerunds in dialogue tags are not always a bad thing if they’re used purposefully and sparingly. I use them. Other writers I admire use them. But if I’ve used a gerund in a dialogue tag then I can defend it because I’ve already spent a good deal of time trying to consider whether or not to use it.

The gerunds in dialogue tags that bother me are the ones that are clearly there to underpin weakness in the dialogue. This happens when writers feel they need an action to complement a line of dialogue. Here’s an example:

“What do you mean?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders.

Let’s add an adverb and make that gerund really awful.

“What do you mean?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders nervously.

The writer (in this case, me) felt the need to add that gerund (and perhaps the adjective as well) because the dialogue itself was pretty weak. “What do you mean?” is a boring question. Anyone can ask this, but your character can’t just be anyone. He has to be a particular person with particular turns of phrase and particular movements (what are often called “beats” in dialogue) to flesh out what he means.

Let’s give it another try, and this time let’s write a better line of dialogue that essentially says the same thing as our original, just more clearly.

“What am I supposed to say to that?” He shrugged his shoulders. “What does that even mean?”

I tinkered a little with the original line and split it into two, but I divided the two lines with the beat of action. I feel like my two lines are pretty strong, and they seem particular to this person, whoever he is. Because my dialogue is strong, it doesn’t need the support of action. So my action can stand alone.

The action also does something the dialogue cannot do. It illustrates visually what the dialogue means verbally. The phrase “What am I supposed to say to that?” is a phrase of exasperation, so the action takes this a step further and shows exasperation. The follow-up question of “What does that even mean?” amplifies both the original question and the action.

If I had kept the gerund shrugging it would have combined the dialogue and the action, which crowds the reader’s mind in asking her or him to do two things at once: see and hear. Let’s focus on asking one thing of our reader at a time. The act of reading is not the act of movie watching, which often requires viewers both to see and hear at the same time. Literature and film cannot do the same things in the same ways.

The gerund shrugging is also a weak action word because it does not have a clearly demarcated time of beginning. How long has this guy been shrugging? After all, we enter the word “shrugging,” and presumably the dialogue, as the shrugging is already under way. On the other hand, when we read the line “He shrugged his shoulders” we are entering the action at the moment it begins. It has not been unfold-ing since an indeterminate moment in time. The action feels particular, as if it is caused by the line of dialogue that precedes it. It gives us a chance both to digest the dialogue and imagine the action. It does not ask us to do both at the same time with the confusion of wondering when the shrugging actually began. This is deliberate writing. We should all be deliberate writers.

I want to close with a few lines of dialogue from my upcoming novel, The Last Ballad. In this scene, a man has just come up a riverbank and met a small boy standing at a crossroad. The boy is staring down into a ditch where his injured dog is lying. The man asks the boy where they are.

The boy lifted his eyes from the ditch and looked around as if getting his bearings.

“Gaston,” the boy finally said.

“Gaston,” he repeated. He looked down at the boy. “Do you mean Gaston County?”

The boy shrugged.

“Mama just says ‘Gaston’ when she says ‘here.’”

I worked really hard on this scene. I wanted it to communicate an edge of laconic strangeness. The boy’s poverty has rendered him a bit provincial. The man’s travels have rendered him a bit wistful. I purposefully separated the actions from the lines of dialogue and cordoned them off in their own sentences.

But what if I’d used gerunds?

“Gaston,” the boy finally said, lifting his eyes from the ditch and looking around as if getting his bearings.

“Gaston,” he repeated, looking down at the boy. “Do you mean Gaston County?”

“Mama just says ‘Gaston’ when she says ‘here,’” the boy said, shrugging.

Written this way, the scene unfolds too quickly. The boy gives his answer about their location before getting his bearings. The man’s quizzical repetition of the word “Gaston” is marred by his deliberate action of looking down at the boy. The words and the actions do not go together. They must be separated and addresses and experienced on their own terms.

My advice is this: Trust your dialogue. If you don’t, make it stronger. Then, once your dialogue is strong, bring in action beats that amplify the speaker’s message, not messy gerunds that clutter it.

 

Wiley Cash is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Last Ballad, A Land More Kind Than Home, and This Dark Road to Mercy. He currently serves as the writer in residence at the University of North Carolina in Asheville and teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program. He lives with his wife and two young daughters in Wilmington, North Carolina. His website is www.wileycash.com.

 

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”
Craft Capsule: Making Conversation
Craft Capsule: Find Your Metaphor

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”
Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain

Craft Capsule: The Scourge of Technology

by

Tayari Jones

1.23.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The cell phone is the worst thing to ever happen to literature. Seriously. So many great fictional plots hinge on one detail: The characters can’t connect. Most famous is Romeo and Juliet. If she just could have texted him, “R, I might look dead, but I’m not. Lolz,” then none of this would have happened.

In my new novel, An American Marriage, both e-mail and cell phones threatened my plot. Here is a basic overview: A young couple, Celestial and Roy, married only eighteen months, are torn apart when the husband is wrongfully incarcerated and given a twelve-year prison sentence. After five years, he is released and wants to resume his old life with her.

A good chunk of the novel is correspondence between our separated lovers. In real life, they probably would have used e-mail. But the problem, plot-wise, is that e-mail is so off-the-cuff, and there is so little time between messages. I needed to use old-fashioned letters. Their messages needed to be deep and thoughtful, and I wanted them to have some time to stew between missives. But who in their right mind (besides me) uses paper and pen when e-mail is so much faster and easier?

The fix was that Roy uses his allocated computer time in prison to write e-mail for the other inmates, for pay. As he says, “It’s a little cottage industry.” He also explains that he likes to write letters to his wife at night when no one is looking over his shoulder or rushing him. 

So look how this fix worked: You see that even though he is incarcerated, his is still a man with a plan. The challenge was to figure out how to avoid e-mail in such a way that it didn’t read like I was just trying to come up with an excuse to write a Victorian-style epistolary novel.

The cell phone was harder to navigate. Spoiler: Celestial has taken up with another man, Andre, in the five years that her husband is incarcerated. A crucial plot point, which I will not spoil, involves Andre not being able get in touch with her. Well, in the present day there is no way to not be able to reach your bae, unless your bae doesn’t want to be reached. Trouble in paradise is not on the menu for the couple at this point, so what to do? I couldn’t very well have him drop his phone in a rest-stop commode!

To get around it, I had to put Andre in a situation in which he would agree not to call Celestial or take her calls—although he really wants to. Trust me. It’s killing him. But he makes an agreement with Roy’s father, who says, “Andre, you have had two years to let Celestial know how you feel.  Give my son one day.” Andre agrees and has to rely on faith that their relationship can survive. The scene is extremely tense and adds suspense to the novel. I had to get up and walk around while I wrote it.

I predict that future novelists will not grapple with this quite as much as we do, as technological advances will be seen as a feature rather than a bug. But for now, you can still write an old-fashioned plot that doesn’t involve texting or tweeting—you just have to figure out a work-around that enhances the plot and understanding of your characters.

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

 

 

 

Craft Capsule: Finding Your Story
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain

Craft Capsule: Finding the Center

by

Tayari Jones

1.30.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-third in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

My new novel, An American Marriage, involves a husband and wife with an unusual challenge: Eighteen months after exchanging their vows, he is arrested and incarcerated for a crime he does not commit.

I was equally interested in both their stories, but for some reason early readers of the manuscript were way more interested in him (Roy) than her (Celestial.) At first, I was convinced that this was sexism, plain and simple. Men’s stories are considered more compelling. To try and make Celestial more appealing, I tried to give her a more vibrant personality. But regardless of the details I added to embroider her, beta readers still felt that she was “undeveloped” and that Roy was the character who popped. It almost drove me crazy. Finally, I realized that Roy held the readers’ attention because his problem was so huge. (He’s wrongfully incarcerated, for goodness sake!)

Undaunted (well, maybe a little daunted), I read stories by my favorite women writers who write beautifully about women’s inner lives. I checked out Amy Bloom, Antonia Nelson, Jennifer Egan. How did they manage to make emotional turmoil so visceral? In these writers’ hands, a small social slight can feel like a dagger. Why couldn’t I do this in my own novel?

I found the answer in the work of Toni Morrison, for all answers can be found there. It’s a matter of scale. There is a scene in The Bluest Eye where the lady of the house is distraught because her brother hasn’t invited her to his party, although she sent him to dental school. By itself, this is terrible and totally worthy of a story. However, in the same frame is Pauline, the maid who has suffered all manner of indignities in an earlier chapter. In the face of Pauline’s troubles, the matter of the party seems frivolous.

With this, I discovered a fundamental truth of fiction and perhaps of life: The character with the most pressing material crisis will always be the center of the story. Although Celestial’s challenges as a woman trying to establish herself in the world of art is intense, the fact of Roy’s wrongful incarceration makes her troubles seem like high-class problems and to center them in the novel feels distasteful to the reader, like wearing a yellow dress to a funeral and fretting over a scuffed shoe.

The solution: I made Roy the protagonist. Celestial’s voice is still there, but she is a secondary narrator. It was a hard choice because I was drawn to her story in the first place, but it was being drowned out by Roy’s narrative. Finally, I had to stop fighting it. The protagonist of An American Marriage is Roy Othaniel Hamilton.

It took me five years to figure this out. Of course, every craft solution makes for new craft obstacles. I’ll talk about the fall-out from this shift in my next (and final) Craft Capsule, next Tuesday.

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

Craft Capsule: The Scourge of Technology
Craft Capsule: Finding Your Story
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

Where Big Books Are Born: Christine Schutt on Yaddo

by

Christine Schutt

March/April 2018
2.14.18

In Print and Online

I went to Yaddo to finish a novel, and I came close to the end. Then, in a burst, I wrote the epilogue. I had hoped that the great ghosts of Yaddo’s past would give me their blessing, and after a fashion they did. I found a link to them in fellow resident Romulus Linney, who took me for a drive around the area and pointed out places where important work had been hatched. We talked about his plays. We talked about playwriting and acting. We talked about his daughter Laura Linney and her performance in a brother-sister movie I liked very much. Our conversation inspired thoughts about a brother-and-sister story set in Los Angeles, the title to which came as suddenly as the epilogue. I expected quiet at Yaddo, and I found it. What I did not expect was the salubrious effect of such quiet: It made me more receptive to sound. Some sentences were plucked as from the air, like this one, when the only other sound was the owl: “Mrs. Pall-Meyer, short-waisted, stooped, breasts shrunk to teardrops, Mrs. Pall-Meyer was a dirty old woman, no matter she was rich.” The sentence needed only a place to go, which I found a few years later, in a story called “Oh, the Obvious,” which appears in Pure Hollywood.

Three Points of Productivity:
1. Something to prove. Yaddo thought I could do the work and that the work was worth doing, and to that end they gave me a place to sleep and space to work, and breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I had no choice but to prove them right in backing my cause.
2. The food. The meals were consistently good, or I remember them that way, and the joy of not making lunch, just picking up my pail on the way to work. A sit-down dinner at a long table in a formal setting with informal, animated company was a pleasure.
3. The landscape. With some 440 acres to roam at Yaddo, I took long walks. I saw snapping turtles settled on the bank of the pond in the mornings and more than once a vixen and her cubs, and at night the owl made music.

 

Christine Schutt is the author of six books, including the story collection Pure Hollywood, published by Grove Press in March.

Yaddo: Two- to eight-week residencies from November through May for poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers on a 400-acre estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Residents are provided with lodging, studio space, and meals. Next deadline: August 1. Yaddo, P.O. Box 395, Union Avenue, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866. (518) 584-0746. www.yaddo.org (Credit: Elizabeth Haynes)

Where Big Books Are Born: Tayari Jones on the Ucross Foundation

by

Tayari Jones

March/April 2018
2.14.18

In Print and Online

Getting to Ucross is not easy. There aren’t many direct flights into Sheridan, Wyoming. You have to fly to Denver, where there may or may not be a tiny plane waiting to take you the rest of the way. After that, budget another forty-five minutes by car. Unless it’s snowing. If that is the case, you’ll get there when you get there, but once you do, it’s paradise. I have a theory about artists residencies: They are helpful only if they provide something that you don’t have at home. A friend of mine who has a big family says that a retreat is any place her kids are not. When I was a young writer accustomed to writing on a desk shoved into a closet, a room with a window constituted luxury. By my fourth novel I had a room of my own, but I didn’t have peace and natural wonder. Ucross is situated on the open prairie. As an early riser, I delighted in glorious purple-streaked sunrises. Just outside my studio, deer pranced like jackrabbits. Needless to say this was a far cry from my life in Jersey City, where I once looked out of my window just in time to see a greasy raccoon scurry up a lamppost for a better look at the drunks tussling in the middle of the street. In the quiet dawn of Wyoming I solved a major problem in my novel An American Marriage. There in my studio, completely alone, I decided to experiment with an epistolary format. The solitude of Ucross lent itself perfectly to the idea of separated lovers communicating by post. The helpful staffers provided me with a typewriter so I was able to duplicate the way my hero would write letters from prison. Each morning for a month I awoke filled with anticipation. I tiptoed downstairs to my studio where my characters waited for me to break the silence of the dawn with the sharp click of a typewriter, scoring their words onto clean paper.

Three Points of Productivity:
1. It’s multidisciplinary. There’s less of a sense of competition—and less pressure to network, or to be networked—when folks aren’t in the same lane.
2. Meals are provided. Until you don’t have to feed yourself, you don’t realize what a hassle it is to feed yourself; also, good healthy food makes for a strong writing day.
3. The hikes are gorgeous. A daily sojourn into nature became a way to loosen up knots in my story; it was a meditation of sorts.

 

Tayari Jones is the author of four books, including the novel An American Marriage, published by Algonquin Books in February.

Ucross Foundation: Two- to six-week residencies from March through early June and from mid-August through early December to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers on a working ranch in Ucross, Wyoming. Residents are provided with lodging, studio space, and meals. Next deadline: March 1. Ucross Foundation Residency Program, 30 Big Red Lane, Clearmont, WY 82835. (307) 737-2291. www.ucrossfoundation.org (Credit: Stephen G. Weaver)

Where Big Books Are Born: Danez Smith on the Millay Colony
Craft Capsule: Every Novel Is a Journey

Where Big Books Are Born: Tommy Orange on the MacDowell Colony

by

Tommy Orange

March/April 2018
2.14.18

In Print and Online

I got into the MacDowell Colony without knowing anything about it. I’d seen it listed in someone else’s bio and applied on a whim. I got in with an excerpt from my debut novel, There There, which I’d been working on when I could since 2011, while working full-time and becoming a new father. The month I spent at the MacDowell Colony in 2014 could not have been more important for the development and advancement of the novel as a whole. What I needed most at the time was time itself, and the colony provided that in a cabin in the woods of New Hampshire, with all meals provided, including lunch delivered to my door every day in a picnic basket. The novel first took form in this setting. And when I read a chapter to the other artists there at the end of my time I was encouraged in a way that gave me the momentum I needed to keep working when I got home.

Three Points of Productivity:
1. The residency respected each artist’s space and time, and didn’t require any work be shown at any point, during or after the residency.
2. Delivered lunch allowed me to work throughout the day without interruption. With novel writing particularly, for me anyway, or any longer body of connected work, sustained time is the hardest to get in real life. There were many days I didn’t leave my cabin at all and worked upwards of twelve hours at a time.
3. The setting itself, in the snow (it was January), in the woods, was like working in a dreamscape, which for me was inspiring.

 

Tommy Orange is the author of the novel There There, forthcoming from Knopf in June.

MacDowell Colony: Residencies of up to two months offered year-round for poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers on a 450-acre estate in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Residents are provided with lodging, studio space, and meals. Next deadline: April 15. MacDowell Colony, 100 High Street, Peterborough, NH 03458. (603) 924-3886. www.macdowellcolony.org (Credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)

In Print and Online

W. S. Merwin in the garden in 2010.  (Credit: Tom Sewell)

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Date:
  • August 13, 2019
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