By Ben Hess
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The podcast currently has 17 episodes available.
Attending a literary workshop can be fraught with highs and lows of creative feedback, a gorgeous natural setting, and amazing peers. Who happen to be alone 90% of the year, creating magic on a screen. Hear two first hand accounts of navigating the wilds of a writing conference in Northern California. Writers include Brittany Erickson Tuttle and Tony Pandola along with insights from award-winning novelist and memoirist Andre Dubus III.
Links:
Andre Dubus III - http://andredubus.com/
Tony Pandola - Writer and Cuban Travel Guide
Brittany Erickson Tuttle - Buy Angel Food (a novel)
Season Two Partner, Writing By Writers - http://writingxwriters.org
Episode Sponsor - Talking Book, http://talkingbook.pub
Produced & Hosted By: Ben Hess - http://twitter.com/BenHess
The infamous '95 Toyota Previa aka Tony's rolling home six months out of the year.
Meet 90 year old debut author Lillian McCloy, who was stationed in six countries while raising three kids as the wife of a CIA undercover agent. Host Ben Hess gets to explore the real experiences of this spy family, well beyond the detective fiction of his youth. He also compares the editing of that memoir with the experiences professional editor Jay Schaefer had working on Under the Tuscan Sun and creating a short fiction magazine in the 1980s.
Links:
Lillian McCloy - http://www.bordertownpublishing.com
Order Six Car Lengths Behind an Elephant HERE
Jay Schaefer - http://www.jay-schaefer-books.com
Season Two Partner, Writing By Writers - http://writingxwriters.org
Episode Sponsor - Talking Book, http://talkingbook.pub
Produced & Hosted By: Ben Hess - http://twitter.com/BenHess
Imagine my excitement when, all these years later, I came across a book, a memoir even, about a family with that kind’ve life. The cover company, global travel, espionage kind’ve life. The life I’d pined for on so many muggy Georgia afternoons all those years ago. Now whether you get teary eyed when thinking of your 80s glory days or if you weren’t yet born, this episode’s got it all:
The challenges of pre-internet literary entrepreneurship, life inside the global espionage trade that led to a memoir, and all the while, the power of editing to craft the most compelling story possible.
[Story Geo theme music] We’re brought to you by Talking Book, the modern audiobook publisher, talkingbook pub and in partnership with literary workshop series Writing by Writers who is now booking spots for the 2017 Generative Workshop in Boulder, Colorado. The Boulder faculty includes award winning writers Pam Houston, Camille Dungy, and Andre Dubus III. Get your future literary weekends set at writingxwriters.org.
Lillian: Langley had no concept of what that was like when you’re living in a foreign country and uh supposed to be a family of high income and very respected, and we didn’t have the money to do it. We didn’t have the expense account to do it. It was hard … It’s kinda difficult for me to talk with someone about this that I don’t know. [Ben: sure] It was so ingrained in us never to talk about it. Never. Except to my own family. We were allowed to tell one person.
Host Ben Hess takes his passion for film to the literary world and explores the ins and outs, ups and downs, of the often circuitous adaptation process. Guests include National Book Award finalist Andre Dubus III (House of Sand and Fog, Townie, Dirty Love), Willa Award winning novelist BK Loren (Theft), award winning screenwriter Jonathon E. Stewart, and fiction author, teacher, and screenwriter Alan Heathcock (VOLT: stories).
Links:
Andre Dubus III - http://andredubus.com/
BK Loren - http://bkloren.com
Alan Heathcock - http://alanheathcock.com
Jonathon E. Stewart - http://jstew.com
Season Two Partner, Writing By Writers - http://writingxwriters.org
Episode Sponsor - Talking Book, http://talkingbook.pub
Produced & Hosted By: Ben Hess - @BenHess
Election Year Lit Selection - Dave written by Gary Ross, directed by Ivan Reitman
Between 35 and 40 million Americans - that’s 11% to 14% of the population - move every year according to the US Census Bureau and real estate metrics site HomeData. Episode 14 features two chapters and spotlights authors at very different stages of their writing journey, Pulitzer Finalist in Nonfiction Luis Alberto Urrea (The Devil’s Highway: A True Story, Into the Beautiful North, The Hummingbird’s Daughter) and blogger Gretchen Howell. They shared several stories of impactful moves, and the effects felt on their writing.
Links:
Luis Alberto Urrea: http://www.luisurrea.com/
Gretchen Howell: https://spinstera.wordpress.com/
Gretchen’s Fave Podcasts Blog Post: https://spinstera.wordpress.com/2016/07/09/can-you-hear-me/
Season Two Partner, Writing By Writers - http://writingxwriters.org
Episode Sponsor - Talking Book, http://talkingbook.pub
Produced & Hosted By: Ben Hess - http://twitter.com/BenHess
Election Year Lit Selection - All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
This episode, Sexuality in Lit, features three writers who have incorporated sex and sexuality into their work in very different ways. Chapter 1, Tina’s Transformative Performance, features Fenton Johnson’s (The Man Who Loved Birds) account of a live concert in the late 60’s. Amber Keyser is our Chapter Two, Mom’s Sex Book, subject and she discusses the challenge of writing about sex in The V Word while raising kids, and in Chapter Three, Shifting Identity, National Book Award Winner Mark Doty (Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems) examines our changing cultural landscape around the LGBTQ community.
Links:
Mark Doty: http://markdoty.blogspot.com/
Fenton Johnson: http://fentonjohnson.com
Amber Keyser: http://amberjkeyser.com/
Season Two Partner, Writing By Writers - http://writingxwriters.org
Episode Sponsor - Talking Book, http://talkingbook.pub
Produced & Hosted By: Ben Hess - http://twitter.com/BenHess
Election Year Lit Selection - Beauty Queens by Libby Bray
Host Ben Hess is fascinated by beginnings - get it right, and you've hooked your reader. Get it wrong, and all your hard work is set aside for another story or book. He explores how strong works begin with interviews and readings from science and environmental writer Craig Childs (Apocalyptic Planet: A Field Guide to the Everending Earth, House of Rain), writer and teacher BK Loren (Theft and Animal, Mineral, Radical: A Flock of Essays on Wildlife, Animals, & Food), and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Luis Alberto Urrea (The Devil’s Highway: A True Story, The Hummingbird’s Daughter) .
Links:
Craig Childs - http://www.houseofrain.com/
BK Loren: http://bkloren.com/
Luis Alberto Urrea - http://www.luisurrea.com/
Season Two Partner, Writing By Writers - http://writingxwriters.org
Episode Sponsor - Talking Book, http://talkingbook.pub
Produced & Hosted By: Ben Hess - http://twitter.com/BenHess
Election Year Lit Selection - Primary Colors by Anonymous / Joe Klein
Episode Transcript Coming Soon!
How do we elegantly write about ‘unexplainable’ concepts like spirit, sex, beauty, or death? In a lightly edited panel discussion, national and regional award winners Mark Doty, Greg Glazner, and Lidia Yuknavitch provide thoughtful consideration to this challenging task while referencing literary giants Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Walt Whitman. You’ll also hear the third installment of our Election Year Literature segment, featuring Pulitzer Prize finalist Luis Alberto Urrea’s recommendation.
Links:
Pam Houston - http://pamhouston.net
Mark Doty - http://markdoty.blogspot.com/
Greg Glazner - http://www.gregglazner.com/
Lidia Yukanavitch - http://www.lidiayuknavitch.net/
Luis Alberto Urrea - http://www.luisurrea.com/
Season Two Partner Writing By Writers - http://writingxwriters.org
Episode Sponsor - Talking Book, http://talkingbook.pub
Produced & Hosted By: Ben Hess - http://twitter.com/BenHess
Election Year Lit Selection: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
Coming Up in Episode 12:
Craig Childs - http://www.houseofrain.com/
Luis Alberto Urrea - http://www.luisurrea.com/
Gretchen Howell - cross country cyclist and aspiring writer - http://spinstera.wordpress.com
Episode 011 - Language for the Ineffable
Greg Glazner:
I’ll just try to start and we’ll hear what everybody else has to say. But the subdivisions of this particular topic don’t exactly go together to me [LAUGH] …
Ben Hess
Welcome to Story Geometry, the podcast on the craft and community of writing, I’m your host Ben Hess that’s award winning musician, poet, teacher, and writer Greg Glazner. And the topics he’s not sure go together? Well, here’s Pam Houston to explain:
Pam Houston
I’m very eager to hear the three panelists, Mark Doty, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Greg Glazner, speak on the subject of Spirit, Sex, Beauty, (Death), and the Ineffable and how the mind makes language of them.
Ben: As you may know, Pam is the author of the award-winning short story collection Cowboys Are My Weakness and the autobiographical novel, Contents May Have Shifted. She’s also the co-founder of Writing by Writers, my partner in podcast crime. This is episode 11 Language for the Ineffable and this is a companion to Episode 5, our first ‘live panel’ episode.
Of course to attend writing workshops and literary adventures, including panels like this one, visit writingxwriters.org for schedules, faculty bios, and all the registration details.
So you’re about to hear a thought-provoking discussion on writing unexplainable topics and the language our mind creates to do so. In fact, Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Wallace Stevens make appearances too. You’ll then hear from Pulitzer Prize finalist Luis Alberto Urrea, for our Election Year Literature segment where I exploring past works inspired by, about, or shaped by policies, politics, or politicians of the era. And finally, you’ll meet a guest from next month’s episode 12. She’s an aspiring writer, who also happens to be cycling across the country.
All of this is brought to you by our friends at independent audiobook publisher Talking Book … so stay with us.
Again, Greg Glazner:
Greg: The first thing to do there is to see what we’re talking about. What are we talking about? There are probably about 50 different answers to that question in this room. So when I think about that question, I think about literal interconnectedness. So I would be very inclined, if I’m writing about this thing that I’m calling, innerconnection, to take the edge off of it by mentioning a cheeseburger wrapper or, you know, a jingle or some bad remark I made in public. Do you see what I mean? That for some bizarre reason, to be a person to me seems to mean to be on about 17 different levels all at the same time. And the more of that we can suggest in language, the less hokey it sounds.
Lidia: So when I looked at that funky list on the piece of paper, um, they did all look connected to me.
Ben: This is Lidia Yuknavitch whose most recent novel is the haunting, lyrical The Small Backs of Children. Her memoir - or anti-memoir as she calls it, The Chronology of Water - was a Finalist, PEN Center USA Creative Nonfiction Award and named as a Best Book of the Year by The Oregonian
Lidia: From my point of view, when I thought carefully about each of those words, and I think sex and spirit and death and beauty and the ineffable. Is that -- is that it? When I looked at them separately and as a group, what it brought me to was that they’re each thresholds [LAUGH]. And when we arrive at them as embodied creatures, we experience identity dissolution. You don’t have to agree, but I like it when you agree [LAUGH].But then, when I was listening to Greg, I went off on this whole other tangent in my head. When you were talking about how -- writing about the cheeseburger in addition to the cosmic awareness thing or the lofty writerly thing. I tapped into that quite keenly because a poet who I think does that beautifully and opened the door for a lot of us was Emily Dickinson. “And I heard a fly buzz when I died” is, like, a quintessentially one of those. Right?
Ben: I gotta admit, I had to look it up. So we’re all on the same page, Lidia’s quoted the first line of Dickinson’s famous - but not to me until now - four stanza poem, I Heard a Fly Buzz.
Lidia [cont’d]: At the moment of dissolution [LAUGH], she sees a fly and she writes a poem about it. And that remains profound to me. I will never stop loving that poem or any of her poems. She’s a god [LAUGH]. So that’s one thing. A second thing is that when I myself move to try and write about those instances, I got to personal experience, because it’s those are hard topics to capture without being a cliché idiot. Right? So I go to personal experiences and in my life. I, for whatever reasons, I’ve been at the life-death moment three different times. So some of it’s sad. I’m giving you the warning. I was there at the moment my father drowned and died and I brought him back to life. With mouth-to-mouth. So I was at the moment of his death and the moment of his life and they happened on top of each other. That’s a big one. And it’s a big one, too, if you haven’t -- I can’t assume any of you have read the Chronology of Water, but if you did read it, thank you [LAUGH]. You read the scene where I, as the 23-year-old daughter have to make the choice whether or not to save my abuser. And that moment is you can’t write about it. You can’t bring language to it and succeed. It’s one of those moments. Right? Utter dissolution. And so, going back and trying to recapture it brings you back to a dissolution moment. But that’s a life-death moment where I understood profoundly that life and death were longer opposites and they were not at two ends of a spectrum.
And a second one I had, this is the sad one -- that one’s not sad to me, which is interesting [LAUGH]. I said it last night. I had a baby girl who died the day she was born. Also can’t quite write about that. I’m not the only one in the room, by the way. This is not a story that’s told often. But same thing. I had the birth-death moment in one moment. Right? And I’m a writer and a painter so that was big. And in there with the grief and I went all the way down the grief road to psychosis, I was institutionalized not knowing what to do with that grief. So I went all the way down the grief road and I had to choose to come back because I kind of liked it there. Dissolution. Ego dissolution, world dissolution, body dissolution. Holding -- I keep going like this because I know what it felt like to hold life and death.
Mark Doty
This topic, which seems impossible, is suddenly made possible by having genius colleagues. This is wonderful.
Ben: Mark Doty won the 2008 National Book Award in Poetry for Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems and in additional to several books of poetry, has written three memoirs including a craft book, The Art of Description: World Into Word.
Mark: We approach these experiences with humility because we understand, as Greg is saying, that knowledge is partial, always, language is not comprehensive, always. So that space of rupture, of what is uncapturable, may well be this space that spirit can occupy, because we have that doubt, because we can’t easily fill it. It’s a breach into which other kinds of knowledge can enter.
Lidia: And so, to go and try and write, none of us, no writer anywhere on Earth is ever going to be able to perfectly capture the truth of any of those dissolution moments. So, you know, why try would be one question. Right? Why try if it isn’t possible? But what makes us human is that we can’t help it [LAUGH]. What’s beautiful about us is that -- the urge to try to bring language close to the threshold and -- and maybe even dissolve in the process, it’s worth it.
Lidia: That’s why you do it. That’s why you get that weird feeling in your stomach when you’re getting close to it in a piece of writing and you want to run away. [LAUGH] And if you stay a writer, it’s because you don’t run away. … It’s because you keep going. So that you can and then, it isn’t because you want to represent it and be the person who stands up and rises and says I am the one who represented it. We do it so that we remember how to recollect ourselves as a group too. We do it to tell storytelling, oldest form, poetics and storytelling and cave drawings, to recollect the group so the group isn’t facing dissolution in the face of catastrophe or racial injustice or war or abuse. That’s the reason to do it. So I’m here to recruit you [LAUGH]. Okay. I’m in [LAUGH].
Ben: A brief pause to say you’re listening to Episode 11,a lightly edited panel discussion on Language for the Ineffable brought to you by independent audiobook publisher Talking Book. I was able to sit down with Talking Book at the recent Association of Writers and Writing Programs - AWP as it’s called - in Los Angeles:
AD INTERVIEW - My name is Kris Hartrum, I’m the senior editor for Talking Book. I do most of the acquisitions, edit the lit blog. I lived in Tokyo for 7 years where I started TYO Mag which is a literary and arts community magazine. Writing that you can get behind as a person and a reader, that for me is the litmus test.
Ben: I think we should contribute a Talking Book audiobook to Gretchen, our cross country cycling writer. You’ll hear from her later in the episode, but now back to our panel with National Book Award winning poet, Mark Doty …
Mark: Those moments, they seem to me profoundly linked to, and I liked very much how you said that, Lidia, that they are thresholds. And they are thresholds to that which cannot be spoken. They are the places where language fails. And therefore, the will, in particular, somehow, of the poet, I think, and I probably am meaning poetry here not specifically as a form, but more as a distillation of what that when we talk about the poetry of sport or, the poetry of trees or whatever, that spirit is to fill the silence, to articulate it, to give voice to it. It’s why you cannot look in the eyes of a seal and not want to supply some words. You know, there’s a consciousness that’s not yours. Is there any language? What do you do? You got to speak. Dogs. The wordless always calls to us, babies.
There’s a beautiful phrase by Hart Crane -- one of the great love poems of the 20th century.
Ben: Mark’s referring to American poet Hart Crane’s Voyages, which is a six-section love-cycle of poems, published over multiple years starting in 1923.
Mark [cont’d]: He’s -- he’s talking to the sailor that -- that he was briefly enamored of,who broke his heart, and he says, “Sleep hasten while they are true. Sleep, death, desire close around one instant in one floating flower.” And that’s a description of orgasm.
Mark: “Sleep, death, desire close around once instant.” In that moment , everything has dissolved that I know and, yet, I’m not gone. So to be dissolved, to lose your sense of self, but to be present. -- is something that -- in some ways, familiar to all of us and is absolutely resistant to words. And therefore, the only way that we can have a communicated shared experience with that is through art. Right? The most sophisticated use of words, the same medium that I use to order lunch is the one I’m using right now and the one that I’m going to use when I write a poem and the one that Walt Whitman is using, Elizabeth Bishop are using. Right? But to use it with the maximum degree of subtlety and sophistication, to point to what you cannot say? Poetry is very good at indicating what it can’t name. That sort of drawing a circle around an open space so that you can see what’s in it.
Lidia: Yeah. I’m so glad you brought Whitman up. I’ll do a quick pass at it. Okay? First of all, as I was saying in the workshop I’m sharing with the wonderful writers I’m with this week, Whitman is my alternate Bible. It’s on my bedstand.
Mark: It’s what he wanted.
Lidia: Yeah. I know. He told me [LAUGH]. So Kathy Acker was my mentor, but Whitman’s the reason I became a writer. And in it, even when I was young, I saw energy never dies, it just changes form, which is what you’re talking about partially. I saw it in his words. I saw that’s what he was saying, that life and death are not what we’ve been told, so I’m so glad you brought that up. And the other god in that era is Emily Dickinson to me. So Dickinson and Whitman really represent the start of something huge in America, that we took really weird directions eventually. But I also wanted to say while I was listening, the books I’ve written in the last five, eight years -- eight years, about eight years, that came out of the trauma of losing a child. And I agree. You can’t really say certain things around that event. But it is absolutely a concrete example of energy never dying and just changing forms. Because the girl in Small Backs of Children is the girl.
What if she had lived? What if there is a girl spirit that I can follow as a character in fiction and poetics and reanimate in another form? And can I follow her and love her and learn something from her story? Can she be brought back from the dead if the dead is not an end, not a tylose? And even more, can they give you instances or even if I fail at it, can I try to give you instances where you can feel her body in your body, this girl? That’s a moment of what we’re talking about. And so, I think we do take these instances of stuff you can’t handle in ife or stuff that’s one of these thresholds and remake it. And another thing I wanted to say before I do my mic pass is, I might be in the minority on this, I don’t know because I haven’t asked either one of them, but sometimes, I think both language and the body are similar thresholds. Sometimes, I wonder if they shouldn’t have been on the list. That language and the body are metaphors for experience, which I learned from Dickinson and Whitman. And so, it’s -- I guess I’m just throwing it out there like an idea. What if they, too, are the kinds of thresholds we’re talking about? And
Greg: I want to say that in addition to these questions of thresholds, which I’m really interested in personally, very interested in, they’re in my writing a lot, there’s also the other side. So here’s an example by a poet … who, if he would have said he had a spiritual life at all, he would have said it was in the imagination. Sometimes he said he did not believe in such a thing, and that would be Wallace Stevens.
Ben: Stevens was an American Modernist poet whose known for Sunday Morning, Snow Man, and The Emperor of Ice Cream.
Mark: Yeah, amazing example. And I think that really great poems never want to have it just one way.
Lidia: For my literary recitation, I’m going to [LAUGH] recite the entirety of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved [LAUGH]. No. I’m addicted to literature so I just -- I’m basking in bliss right now just listening. I want to be a student again [LAUGH]. But I want to bring another element of the topic in besides what we’ve talked about so far, and that is -- and I could be dead wrong about this, so don’t sue me. It’s just an idea [LAUGH]. But in some ways, I think there’s, those categories and these spaces of writing are also, possibility spaces for agitation. And in particular, agitation against cultural norms and narratives. And art has always been a possibility space for speaking truth to power or bearing witness to what the culture is trying to smooth over and make you forget about. And it’s just another angle on the question that these particular topics and thresholds and sublime, subliminal, liminal spaces are also a place with a politics to it.
Mark: So -- so we’ve been, talking about these -- approaching these things sort of from a position of transcendence, you know? And it seems to me important that we talk about it from a position of desperation, too, because we come up against the things we’re talking about. It’s usually absolute wreckage, that’s leading us towards the necessity of confronting these things. We’re broken by them. We are harmed by our culture’s response to sexuality or we are grief stricken and unable to put anything together and nobody wants to hear about it, you know? So that’s the place where we have to find some way to speak in order not to be erased. Yeah. I’ll take it a little further -- on a personal level. We were having a conversation the other night about writing about grief, you know, and how do you talk about loss? And it occurred to me that I don’t know how anybody lives through grief unless you make something. And you need a container and one of the things that writing provides for us is, something that will hold that which is by nature uncontained. So we say we’re falling apart, you know, or I can’t hold it together or my experience of new grief was that it was oceanic. I was just slapped by waves. I couldn’t focus on anything. My attention was carried away by any current. And writing was the first thing that let me focus. Before I could read, I was beginning to write sentences about what I was experiencing because that felt like the lifeline. And so, that work of making something that would sort of be the more stable externalized version of my own consciousness, you know, was the thing that got me through. Without that it couldn’t have happened. And part of that work was then describing the process of making it. I mean, if you’re writing non-fiction, one of the things that invariably you wind up doing is talking about how you become the person who can write this. You know, what are the forces that are making this book or whatever this thing is come into being? And so, it’s a process of paying attention to one’s own process of consciousness and awareness, and that is enormously helpful. Right? It’s kind of meditation, really
Lidia:There’s a thing I’d like to encourage you guys to ponder, write about, think about, challenge yourself to articulate. And that is, if you go back to the little list of sex, death, that list, give yourself writing challenges where you use one to articulate the other. You use sexuality to articulate death. Right? You use death to articulate something banal. You use [LAUGH], you know, not opposites or binaries, exactly, but you move through the one to find a new way to articulate the other. I think that’s a great sort of writing prompt area to fuck around with and to open yourself up to the idea that the ways we’ve inherited for telling the story are tired. And that you really are writing in a new time. This really is a zeitgeist and the demand of a zeitgeist is that you innovate. It’s that you make the new forms and you find the new ways to say things and you have relationships differently and you let go of the old stories and risk the weirdness of telling in a fucked up way that might just be the way of your time. And in particular, I’m interested in death and sexuality in my own work. How do we retell, reinvent, innovate in those areas to liberate ourselves from the old narratives and understand new ways of being, like in terms of physics?
The demand is on you to tell the story differently, but we’ve been chicken shit for a long time [LAUGH]. And we have, you know models of people telling the story differently. We can pluck them out and name them and recite them. But it’s our job too. It’s your job to figure out how -- what the new ways of telling it are going to be.
Lidia: And so, the topic of the panel seems to me partly about you. How you going to do it? … You know, we’re busting our asses trying [LAUGH] on our end and probably sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail. But the question is bigger for you. How are you going to do it? How are you going to change your writing? How are you going to tell it differently? What does innovation mean for you? What is the largest risk you could take in writing to enter the areas we’ve been talking about? What would it look like on the page? Right? I had to risk writing a novel that looks different on the pages than other novels. One of these things is not like the other [LAUGH]. And I had to risk that it could flop and no one would publish it and I’d be sitting alone in my underwear in my bathroom with it. But to me, the answer was the form has to change and move toward poetics, even though I’m a novelist. So I did. But anyway, the question is more important for you. But you see what I mean? The panel topic is about you and how you’re going to make the changes in your own language.
Ben: With this panel in mind, I’ve been wondering as I continue writing, what changes am I going to make in my own language? And where in the process do they occur? Some changes in the first draft, but with a novel length thing, for better or worse, close attention to language comes during revision, when I have the arc of story and shape of my character’s journey. To me, added thought and nuance with language, with vocabulary, with word choice is icing on the completed novel cake. And yes, I can almost feel Greg, Lidia, and Mark cringe.
So it’s late April now, how are you doing with Election Year 2016? I had the great fortune to sit down with Luis Alberto Urrea in Boulder, Colorado. Luis is the best selling author of 17 books, including The Devil’s Highway and The Hummingbird’s Daughter. Urrea recently released a book of short stories,The Water Museum and a poetry collection, The Tijuana Book of the Dead.
Luis: So many, but I would say, you know, one thing you need to understand about me was that I was a working class kid, self taught Rock and Roll idiot. So my epiphanies were often ridiculous. "Jim Morrison said" blah blah blah, you know what I mean. … I hammered things together by reading and listening and watching. So you know, at that age, Hunter Thompson blew my mind. I thought how can you possibly get away with the things you are saying, you know on the campaign trail and so forth? Yet his incendiary rage and enthusiasm made me really comprehend that this wasn't just politics, this wasn't just "oh I don't like that guy," you know or this guy, there are things such deep things at stake about our identity and our soul. And this election cycle is just insane for me to watch. I sometimes can't believe my eyes and my ears … at this point. Where we've gotten to.
Ben:Hunter S. Thompson’s novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is an autobiographical commentary on the failed 1960s counterculture movement. It also popularized Gonzo Journalism, which is Thompson's often seamless blend of fact and fiction. The novel was published in two parts by Rolling Stone magazine in ‘71 then released by Random House in 1972. Which is the year Republican Richard Nixon trounced Democrat George McGovern in the Presidential election. Thompson was not a fan of Nixon’s and claimed the new President represented "that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character"[1]
Ben:What recommendations do you have for a future installment of Election Year Lit? We’ve featured John Steinbeck, Junot Diaz, and now Hunter S. Thompson … who’s next? Send me your ideas to [email protected]. Special thanks to Mark Doty, Greg Glazner, and Lidia Yuknavitch for their thoughts on language around Spirit, Sex, Beauty, (Death) and the Ineffable and Luis Alberto Urrea for Election Year Lit thoughts.
Coming up in Episode 12 of Story Geometry, You’ll hear much more from Luis on his works across genres, insights from globe hopping, award-winning science and nature writer Craig Childs, and also from Writing by Writers workshop participant Gretchen Howell … who arrived to the Chataqua Lodge on a loaded down bike. I asked her about the origins of her journey from California to Boulder:
Gretchen: It came about in a couple of days at the beginning of February, I had seen an ad for this writing workshop, and I knew I wanted to do another long bike ride. I had quit one job and didn’t have any enthusiasm at all about getting another teaching job so I decided I could ride my bike from California to Writing by Writers in Boulder and then continue on to see more of my friends and visit different places I hadn’t see in the US and hopefully go to more writing workshops on the way.
Ben: I’m a cyclist but have never yet done anything like this. Yet! Very inspiring. You can follow Gretchen’s journey in real time on her Cycle Spinster blog at spinstera dot wordpress dot com - the link will also be this episode’s show notes on StoryGeometry.org.
I’m your host and editor, @BenHess on Twitter and Instagram and we’re Story Geometry on Facebook and Twitter. Mark those calendars for future episodes arriving the last Monday of each month throughout 2016. Don’t forget to visit today’s sponsor TalkingBook.pub to create your very own audiobook. Our theme music is from Mark Hodgkin and additional tracks are from Greg Glazner’s band, The Responders. Be sure to rate and review Story Geometry in iTunes, send feedback via StoryGeometry.org, and sign up for future Writing By Writers events and conferences at Writing Writers.org.
More literary words of wisdom next time, thanks for listening …
How do authors approach writing a book-length piece, whether fiction, creative nonfiction, or memoir? As he continues tackling his work-in-progress novel, host Ben Hess explores varying approaches to structure, character development, and plot with debut novelist Elizabeth Marro (Casualties) and GrubStreet National Book Prize Winner Josh Weil (The Great Glass Sea). He also includes another perspective on structure from award-winning writer and teacher Pam Houston that was first broadcast in Episode 001.
Links:
Election Year Lit Selection: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Episode 010 - What's Your Scaffolding?
Outdoor sounds - water of a fountain, car traffic in background. It starts to fade then ..
Ben Hess
Given you started the novel, the first draft I guess, in 2004ish / 2003ish, how many iterations did you feel like you went through, give or take?
Betsy Marro
If I showed you all the versions of this thing you would gag. [laugh].
[theme music kicks in]
Ben
Welcome to Story Geometry, the podcast on the craft and community of writing, I’m your host Ben Hess, and that’s Elizabeth Marro who has just released her debut novel, Casualties.
Betsy
I added them all up, and we’re talking over a thousand pages, you know pages actually written and tossed and kept. I mean we’re in the thousands.
Ben
In the thousands! Yeesh. Each episode I choose a theinsights from award-winning writers and teachers as well as newer scribes. Here we are, Episode 10 - hitting double digits - with What’s Your Scaffolding?
Yes, we’re exploring structure in this episode, with a nod toward longer form fiction and creative nonfiction. You’ll hear much more from Elizabeth - who goes by Betsy - on her 12 year journey as Casualties went from idea through many, many, MANY drafts and ultimately to publication. Final page count is 358 by the way, well down from her 1000 plus. We’ve got key insights on structure from the Sue Kaufman Prize winner for First Fiction, Josh Weil. Josh is the author of short story collection New Valley and the novel The Great Glass Sea, and we’ll hear about a different approach from award-winning writer and teacher Pam Houston.
Josh Weil
How do you get from this initial thing into a story?
Ben
Here’s Josh Weil.
Josh
When I say OK here’s this theme I want to deal with, here’s this guy I want to figure out, here’s this event that’s going to set something in motion, what’s going to be the way the story unfolds then?
Ben
After Josh tackles these questions, they’ll be a discussion about literature and politics and the intersection of the two. I kicked off this Election Year Lit segment in Episode 9 reading an excerpt from Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath which topped the bestseller list in 1940.
All of this is brought to you by my literary partner in crime, the nonprofit workshop series Writing by Writers, and our sponsor Talking Book, the independent audio book publisher, so stay with us.
[theme music punch, then fade]
Josh
What craft means … what it really means to me is tools
Ben
Again, here’s Josh Weil. He spoke at Writing by Writers Manuscript Bootcamp in glorious Tomales Bay, 90 minutes north of San Francisco.
Josh
… and being able to use tools in order to transfer that inspirational feeling you might get or the thing that leads you into a story and the great kind’ve trick and frustrating thing that I’m trying to do is get how I feel on to the page in a way that can transfer to the reader. [So] for me craft is about tools that help us get there. And one of the most important tools for me is an outline. So I thought I’d talk about outlining um I want to do that for a couple reasons. One, I suspect it’ll piss Pam off. [huge laugh]
Ben
As you probably know, Writing by Writers co-founder Pam Houston is NOT a fan of outlines. Her view of story just doesn’t support that approach. Here she is from Episode 1:
Pam Houston
For me stories are really physical things, you know, they have a shape, they have a depth, they are really 3D in my mind when I’m writing them. I think of geometric figures in relation to the story to help me understand the story structure. Sometimes the structures are more complicated; and sometimes it’s quite simple like I think about stories as like two intersecting triangles or a rhombus or um, uh, a parallelogram. I think of geometric figures in relation to the story to help me understand the story structure. Sometimes the structures are more complicated; and sometimes it’s quite simple like I think about stories as like two intersecting triangles or a rhombus or um, uh, a parallelogram.
Ben
And yes, this approach led us to the podcast name Story Geometry! But, on the other hand, here’s more from Josh:
Josh
If I know the bones of the story, if I have the scaffolding there then it gives me the freedom not to worry about the purpose of what I’m doing on the page in the moment and instead let the characters do shit.
Ben
As I’ve floundered off and on with my novel, this makes sense to me. It has a logic to it. But then, here’s more from Pam:
Pam
I don’t ever think about plot. I don’t even really ever think about characters until many revisions down the road, you know, I’m thinking about form, I’m thinking about what is the shape of the story, if this story were a sculpture what would it look like, what would its geometry be.
Ben
With these two divergent approaches toward the process, here’s more from Betsy Marro. We chatted in a gorgeous park, near the Pacific Coast Highway, just south of Los Angeles.
Betsy
I was interviewed on the radio last week … she said, do you bang out a draft, do you barrel through it then go back and fix it? And I said no, there’s been no barrelling. [laugh] No barrelling for me.
Ben
To that point, for the next one since you’re working on one, either the short story collection or the novel, would you outline or would you …
Betsy
I’ve started to. I’m trying to. And outline isn’t really what I’m going for. What I’m trying to go for is, ‘what is this story about for me.’ Know enough about it going in and see what structure ... Outline it? Yes and no. I think once I have my people, to me I have to say, when in doubt, I goto the characters. At the end of the day I’m a character driven person. People and their weirdnesses and what makes them tick, that’s the thing that makes be excited about writing. That and place. [laugh]
Ben
So we’ve got varying approaches to consider from Josh, Pam, and Betsy, all yielding complex, powerful, character driven stories. Josh wrote 4 novel length things - his description, not mine - before getting his MFA. None of those 4 were published. But he continued to hone his approach to the craft, using organic outlines - again his term, not mine - and started winning short fiction contests and getting published.
Betsy, on the other hand, doesn’t have a MFA. In fact, she told me writing Casualties was, in essence, her MFA. And she writes organically, letting in depth character research dictate their actions and subsequent plot.
In fact, Josh spoke about both of these paths when we sat down for an interview after his talk:
Josh
Some writers will go through that entire growth process on one novel and they're going to spend ten years working on that novel and revising it and reimagining it and that's just the book they have to write and that's a fine approach too. On the other hand you know I have a novella that I wrote that is 150 pages. Some people think about it as being a short novel, I wrote it in three weeks and then didn't change it that much afterwards you know so it really depends on the project and where you are as a writer too.
Ben
Before exploring story scaffolding further and since we’ll be talking about it in more detail, I want to give you a taste of Betsy’s novel. She’s going to read a short excerpt and has graciously provided the text as well, which I’ve placed inside this episode’s transcript. So you can read along as you wish - and of course, click the link to purchase Casualties too - all on StoryGeometry.org. Here’s Betsy:
Betsy
I’ll set this up a little bit, I’m going to read from the first chapter, and it’s where Ruth, my lead character, who is a single mother and defense executive, with big plans for her 19 year old son who’s been in the house a little too long. She’s meeting him later that day, after his birthday. He’s late, supposed to have been there the night before but he spent the weekend in the desert and he he’s just rolling in as she’s rolling out to work. And she’s a little impatient.
BETSY MARRO from Casualties
Ruth thinks of the garage where he works part time, fixing dirt bikes, motorcycles, and those tricycles his friends race in the desert. Then she sees her brother back in New Hampshire, head always stuck under the hood of a truck or car, or half-buried in the engine of someone’s farm machine. He’d given up on himself without even trying. She wasn’t going to let that happen to Robbie. “I’m talking about a career. It’s not too late. You can find something that—”
“I’m starved. What’s in the fridge?” Robbie grabs the door of the refrigerator.
“Don’t turn your back on me. We’re going to get this settled. Now.”
He swings around to face her. “I was going to save my news for later, but I might as well tell you now.”
Ruth doesn’t want to hear; she’s heard it all before. “You need a real job. With a real future.” They’ve both heard this before too. She pauses, searching for words that are new, that will penetrate.
“That’s what my news is all about Ruthie.”
Ruth feels her jaw cramp with the effort of biting back a sarcastic What now? Maybe he’s gotten that girl, his boss’s daughter, pregnant. He’s going to spend the rest of his life getting tattoos and living for weekends in the blazing sun with beer, engines, and a couple of kids. He’s going to let his mind, that alive, curious mind she’d once been so proud of, go to waste. Is he trying to spite her by hurting himself? Ruth’s train of thought is rumbling so loud and fast she doesn’t realize at first that Robbie is still speaking. “What did you say?”
Robbie’s chin still juts out as though he’s expecting trouble, but he is searching her face the way he used to when he was a boy and wanted to see if he’d pleased her. He starts over, speaking slowly, deliberately, as if each word is loaded with explosives and must be uttered with care.
“I said I decided to work for Uncle Sam. Kinda like you only I joined the Marines. Signed on the dotted line last Friday. A couple months and I’m outta here.”
Ruth feels a sudden slipping inside, even though she can’t move. “That’s impossible.”
Robbie’s eyes harden and he smirks again. “They want me. A few good men. Guess I’m good enough for once. Besides, there’s a war on—but you know all that, right?” He rubs the tips of his thumb and forefinger together and imitates the sound of a cash register. “Cha-ching.”
Ruth grips the edge of the chair in front of her. She wants him to take it all back, the announcement he made so proudly and now his insulting tone that somehow makes her job sound dirty. The military couldn’t run their wars without the civilians she found for them. She helped men and women make money they needed, more than they could ever make doing the same jobs at home. But they were adults, not nineteen-year-old kids.
“No!”
Robbie shrugs, but his eyes stay focused on hers. “Not your call. For once, I’m doing what I want to do.”
I think I’ll stop it there …
Ben
Fantastic! So many questions for you ….
But standby, we’ll get to those questions soon, along with more from Josh Weil, and our Presidential Election Year Lit selection after a brief word from our sponsor, Talking Book ...
[music change]
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Ben
You’re listening to Story Geometry, Episode 10, today’s theme, What’s Your Scaffolding? With all the writers and teachers I’ve had the opportunity to meet and talk to, I’m always curious why they write? And why do we choose fiction, nonfiction, poetry, memoir, or screenwriting? Or is it even a choice? Again, here’s Betsy Marro.
Besty
I’d been a writer since um my early, early days. I was a journalism major and english major in college and then anything I did in business required a huge amount of writing. But the writing of the novel, that I had to learn.
Ben
A different beast …
Betsy
A different beast. I had read, I understood fiction from, from a literature major’s perspective, from a reading perspective, but to actually sit down and write it was another whole experience. … the more I wrote, the more I realized I didn’t know how to write. Or I didn’t trust I knew how to write. I knew I was learning it. I knew I was coming, I knew I could write, there was just so much more to know.
Ben
And Betsy wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote Ruth’s story and Robbie’s story. Without a clear picture of where she was going, without the novel’s foundation or its trellis or scaffolding.
Betsy
There were a bunch of iterations between 2004 and say 2006 or 07 or something. Then a big change. Then a bunch of throwing out, then in 2009 I had what I thought was still a pretty big book, and I threw out 600 pages. And I ended up with 150 pages of disconnected scenes. This is very interesting for anyone who's talking through things from a structural standpoint, I spotted something. I sort’ve violated some rules with the structure of my book I think. [BH - Yes.] I um don’t bring in a major character until halfway through the book. [BH - Page 145 or so, yeah]. I know, and um …
Ben
Given the 600 pages you cut and all the evolutions you’ve gone through when did you hit on this structure that you ended up with?
Betsy
Well that’s interesting because Casey - that character who comes in halfway through the book - used to appear a lot closer to the front. I used to have 3 or 4 chapters, and then Casey. You know the first three chapters were Ruth, then Casey, then it was going to go back and forth. And I’d largely handled Robbie through flashbacks. And um, but there was a remoteness to Robbie that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with. And I’m going to credit … I can’t blame the structure on my father but what he did say to me, we were driving up to see his sister in Vermont. I didn’t think he’d finished the last draft I’d given him, and he said ‘Oh no I finished it.” And I said, “oh yeah?” And he was real quiet for a minute and said, “You know, it just seemed weird not to meet Robbie. I really needed … I wanted to see him, I wanted to understand him .. he’s the reason a lot of this story happens. And I felt cheated, I didn’t feel like I got a sense of him. Just through the way you’ve done it.” … So so just as an experiment, I wrote the Robbie chapters which are now at the beginning of the book. You know really the book was going to be, when I did the major revision in 2009 and lost 600 pages, it was going to be entirely a journey story. The roadtrip was going to be the spine of the story. And it turned out not to be spine but the lower half of the back. [laugh] I would say that I like structure. I like playing by the rules … I think they help you. [laugh] So I’m, I’m very happy with this next one to try to do that a little bit more. We’ll hopefully see how that goes, you know.
Ben
Indeed! I am confident Betsy will launch her next book in say 2020 so cutting her cycle by two thirds. Meanwhile, Josh Weil came to fiction both as an avid reader and also as a filmmaker.
Josh
I come to writing in a roundabout route as a director. My undergraduate training was in film school, and I studied directing theater a lot, and when the writing is really singing for me, when it’s going really well, it feels like I’m a director directing actors, the characters. And they have … I’ve kind’ve set out a corral of what is acceptable for the scene, you know, how the scene is going to work, what it needs to accomplish, then I just let’em go to it.
Ben
I love this reference to our characters as actors on stage or on set.
Josh
Even Stephen King - I was looking up writers who might support my idea - and I thought surely Stephen King would support the outline. And it turns out, he doesn’t. [light laughter] Uh, it turns out he believes the plotting and spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible with an outline and that stories make themselves, and the writer’s job is to give them a place to grow. I actually agree with that I just think the place to grow for me is the trellis of this outline. Same thing with Ishiguro.
Ben
Josh is referring to Kazuo Ishiguro, four-time Man Book Prize nominee and winner for Remains of the Day.
Josh
He says he spends two years researching before writing. He complies notes and flowcharts that layout both plot and character’s emotions and memories. he says, “the preparation gives my narrators the opportunity to suppress meaning and evade me. Especially when they say one one thing and mean something else.” And that can be very important to know kind’ve what is at heart, what is coming in the story, what are the characters deepest concerns of the characters so that they can not talk about it. Margaret Atwood starts to feel the story’s staking shape …
Ben
Just confirming, Atwood wrote The Edible Women, The Handmaid’s Tale, and the recent dystopian MaddAddam trilogy.
Josh
… she prints out chapters, she arranges them in piles on the floor, plays with the order by moving the piles around. For me I kind’ve see all that as outlining, it’s just different ways of going about it. I spend you know a year or more writing ideas out in a notebook.And then when I’m ready to start … before I start actually writing the piece I collect all those ideas for scenes, the scenes that are most exciting to me, the conflicts that seem most important to the work, and I write them out in paragraphs.
Ben
And it’s these paragraphs of scenes that form Josh’s scaffolding. And as he actually writes - one of these foundational paragraphs could bloom into 10 or 20 pages - he’s constantly making more notes on the outline, revising direction, moving things around. So it’s alive, it’s organic.
Josh
And I should say, partly why I feel so strongly about this - and again, I have to stress, this is the way that I write, not for a minute saying that everybody should do this, but I value a first draft tremendously which is a dangerous thing to do because it puts a lot of pressure on the a first draft. Sometimes that stymies me, it takes me a month to get going because I don’t want to get going in a way that’s on the wrong path. But I do feel, for me at least, there is a certain freshness and honesty and newness and truth that comes out of a first draft that is not … my editor hat is not yet on. And I don’t want to lose that. So that’s why I feel such a need to outline so that I can lose as little as possible in that first draft.
Ben
In honor of the Election 2016 circus and in the spirit of unconventional structure, I’m going close today’s episode with a contemporary work for our Presidential Election Year Lit series. With immigration one of several key themes this election cycle, I’m featuring a contemporary literary immigrant, Dominican American Junot Diaz whose novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize.
In an interview with British publisher Faber & Faber, Diaz says, quoting here, “in Oscar Wao, for all its historical stuff, all its nerd stuff, the entire book is about a family trying to find love.” Which I found moving and bold. This from an immigrant who quote “faced a tremendous amount of racism and bigotry. Not just from white Americans, but from black Americans and Latinos.” For those interested in hearing Diaz, there are several clips of him reading from Oscar Wao on YouTube.
Don’t you just wonder what literature will spawn from this bizarre, vitriolic Election cycle of 2016? What recommendations do you have for a future installment of Election Year Lit? Hit me up on social media or [email protected].
Special thanks to Elizabeth ‘Betsy’ Marro, Josh Weil, and Pam Houston for their thoughts on structure. I’m your host and editor, @BenHess on Twitter and Instagram and we’re Story Geometry on Facebook and Twitter. Mark those calendars for future episodes arriving like a foil wrapped easter egg the last Monday of each month throughout 2016.
Don’t forget to visit today’s sponsor Talking Book dot pub to create your very own audiobook. Our theme music is from Mark Hodgkin and additional tracks are from Greg Glazner’s band, The Responders. Be sure to rate and review Story Geometry in iTunes, send feedback via StoryGeometry.org, and sign up for future Writing By Writers events and conferences at Writing X Writers dot org.
And in closing, for those of us a little farther along the roller coaster of life, Betsy Marro:
Betsy
I’m not as unique as I thought in that category. There are people out there writing all the time and at all ages and doing amazing things. Usually 50, not closer to 60. [laugh] Really what makes it harder are the stories you tell yourself. Yeah the competition’s always there, just look around at all the writers that are out there.You know, age at the point, hasn’t got a whole lot to do with it.
Ben
More words of wisdom next time on Story Geometry, thanks for listening!
Season Two of Story Geometry kicks off with Episode 009, an exploration of Initiative vs Destiny. Host Ben Hess is in conversation with award-winning writer Fenton Johnson where Fenton also reads from his latest novel, The Man Who Loved Birds, and literary nonprofit Writing by Writers Co-Founder Karen Nelson. There's also an update from writer and teacher Pam Houston on her upcoming memoir, not to mention 'appearances' by George Eliot, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Steinbeck.
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Story Geometry Ep9 - Initiative vs Destiny
Footsteps on gravel, music plays in background slowly fades in under car door open and slam. Engine starts. Sounds of driving then …
Hi it’s Ben with Story Geometry, the desert of Tucson in the winter. It’s the Monday after Super Bowl Sunday, and I’m on my way to interview Fenton Johnson. Revered writer, both fiction and nonfiction, of contemplative thought, of a search for faith, of stories of rural Kentucky.
Arrival at Fenton’s house. Car door slam. Brief walking sounds, doorbell, then …
Fenton – Hello.
Ben – Fenton, how are you?
Fenton – Good to see you.
Ben – Great to see you as well. Chillier than I thought in Tucson in the winter.
Fenton – Well you know we’re 2800 feet or something ….
Fenton – What I’m about to do, I waited to offer you … but I’m going to make myself an Americano which is half espresso and half hot water.
Ben – That sounds fantastic.
Fenton – I’ll make one for you.
Ben – Please.
Kitchen sounds: some banging, running water.
Ben - While Fenton brews up some magic, here’s what’s happening in 2016 and with Season Two of Story Geometry, THE podcast about the craft & community of writing and storytelling. I’m beyond thrilled to continue the partnership with literary non-profit and workshop series Writing by Writers.
I’m releasing episodes monthly, the last Monday of every month from February through November, so mark those calendars. And during this span, citizens in these United States are going through the arduous, exhausting, and divisive process of electing a new President. So they’ll be some discussion about literature, politics, and intersection of the two.
Closer to home, twenty-sixteen is the year Writing by Writers co-founder Pam Houston is wrapping up her latest book, a memoir, with working title The Ranch: A Love Story, about life on her 100 acre ranch at 9000 feet in Colorado, which has a tentative publication date in 2018.
And at the other end of the literary cycle, influenced by Pam, by last season’s interviewees, and by you, yes you Story Geometricians, this is the year I’m completing my long dormant, quite dusty work-in-progress novel. Having just revised the first 6000 words, I’ve got an incredible amount of work ahead. But I’ve missed these characters, and I’m glad they spoke up again and demanded to have their story told.
Fade up sounds of the kitchen, coffee brewing:
Fenton – Here you go … You know Americano’s started because Americans would come to Europe and in Europe coffee only meant espresso and American’s weren’t used to that at all …
Ben – Too strong, too thick
Fenton – And the café’s started, they said, “We’ll make it for the Americans, we’ll dilute it half and half.”
Ben - As Fenton and I get settled in his living room here’s what coming up on this Episode 9: Initiative vs. Destiny. You’ll hear how he almost became a lawyer instead of a teacher and Guggenheim Fellowship and Lamda Literary Award winning writer. In case you’re not familiar, Fenton’s books include the award-winning novel Scissors, Paper, Rock, the incredible memoir Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey Among Christian and Buddhist Monks, and his latest, a novel The Man Who Loved Birds.
You’ll also hear how the unlikely encounter with a fashion magazine changed Writing by Writers co-founder Karen Nelson’s life, and an exciting update from the road! Award-winning teacher and writer Pam Houston calls in with an update on her memoir.
So adjust those earbuds or headphones and stay with us.
MUSIC
Ben - I wanted to dive in and talk more about the teaching aspect of your world. Fenton’s taught in creative writing programs at San Francisco State University, Columbia University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, and UC-Davis. Currently he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arizona here in Tucson and serves on the faculty of Spalding University’s low-residency MFA Program. 24:47 Are you teaching creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, or analysis or what’s the scope of the courses that you’re teaching right now?
Fenton - I see myself as always teaching writing. … You know I gave a speech last week to my students about how they need to read poetry and that they needed to attend poetry readings. That is a lesson that I got, I got it from a lot of sources but the person who sparked it in my writing life as an adult is Pam. Shortly after we first met she (Fenton laughs) made some sort of dismissive remark about a writer who didn’t read poetry and I thought about that for a second …
Ben (laughs) I don’t read poetry …
Fenton - I thought and I hadn’t been reading much poetry, and I thought about it for a second, and thought Oh well sure, of course, she’s right because you know poetry is a distillation of of writing and you know and wants to have it in one’s life in the way one wants espresso in the morning or cognac in the evening.
Ben - I asked Pam about this and which poets she may have recommended back then. Without missing a beat, she mentioned Louise Glück, Carl Phillips, and Adrienne Rich so more for your Goodreads to-read list if you haven’t read them. Here’s more from Fenton:
Fenton - I get different rewards from each undertaking, writing and teaching, I say .. I don’t think my students believe me but it’s absolutely true … that I always learn, I feel I always learn more from students than I teach them because … every aspect of the class teaches something. The advantages of both teaching and writing as professions is that you’ll never master either one of them, they always have something to teach you, that is as true now as it was when I was 30.
Ben - Did you come out of the MFA program at Iowa and then publish your first book soon after or were the connections there kind’ve a direct correlation or not so much?
Fenton - It’s a good story because it’s a necessary story. I had gone to Washington. I had worked as a press secretary on Capitol Hill for a couple of years right after college, and I save up a little bit of money, and I said to myself, “OK I’m going to write for two years. I’m going to make my living as writer, I’m gonna try … whatever that means … and at the end of that two years if I have not published something in what I consider to be national venue I will say that I fought the good fight and that I was destined to go to law school, and I’d go to law school. Eleven years later I had my first genuinely national publication.
Ben - Eleven years.
Fenton - There’s a story of a Writing by Writers personage that’s of interest here … Jay Schaefer, who comes to Writing by Writers from time to time as a consulting editor, he was on the board of the now defunct San Francisco Review of Books …
Ben - And you may remember that Jay was featured back in Episode IV - our first look at the Business of Writing
Fenton (cont’d) - … and I’d just moved back to San Francisco, and it wasn’t in my shy country boy’s nature to go up to people who are on panels and thrust myself in front of them. But I was sitting in the audience, and I thought “you know, if if you’re going to do this thing, you’ve got to do this, you you’ve gotta break out of your shell, you’ve got to you know you can’t just send things in over the transom, you actually have to go engage.” so I went up to Jay, stook out my hand and said, “I just came back from Iowa, I wrote book reviews for the local newspaper in Iowa City, and could I write something for the SF Review of Books? And Jay was the first person to publish my fiction, he’s become a lifelong friend, a lifelong editor, and a consultant on my work. All of which is by way of saying, testifying to the rewards of judicious moments extending yourself beyond what you think is possible, what you’ve been told is possible, what you’ve told yourself is possible, with your life.
Karen Nelson - I was recently graduated from college, I was riding on the T in Boston to my job, and I didn’t have anything to read,
Ben - Speaking of judicious moments that alter life’s trajectory, here’s Writing by Writers co-founder, Karen Nelson.
Karen (cont’d) - … so I picked up a Glamour magazine that was sitting on the seat beside me, and for people who know me, that’s not a magazine I’d normally read. So I flipped to the book reviews section, and there was a review on Cowboys Are My Weakness by a woman named Pam Houston that sounded fantastic. So I got off the train, stopped in the bookstore and bought that, and so I’d have something to read on the ride home. at which point I fell in love with Pam’s writing … Well I got a mailer saying she was teaching at the Aspen Writing Workshop and thought “Ooh that’d be fun” Then kind’ve set it aside. And then I thought, “No, wait a minute, I really could go to Aspen and study with her so I’d signed up for the workshop and gotten in, and was thrilled about that …”
Ben- Let’s play the ‘what if’ game just for a minute - what if Fenton hadn’t gone to that panel featuring Jay Schaefer? What if Fenton hadn’t approached him afterward and asked to write reviews? Fenton’s now published 5 books: memoir, creative nonfiction, and fiction which have impacted thousands of readers.
Ben - What if Karen hadn’t rushed to buy Pam’s Cowboys Are My Weakness? What if she didn’t invest in her passion for writing and skipped that Aspen workshop? Certainly Writing by Writers wouldn’t exist in today’s form. So a question I’ve been wrestling with - do seemingly random acts of initiative dictate our path or does each and every one of us have a pre-determined destiny that will unfold, regardless of our actions?
Ben - I clearly lean toward the former but open to discussion - as a personal example, I took the initiative to leverage years of video and film storytelling to attend a radio production workshop in Brooklyn. Which in turn led me to pitch a podcast idea to Karen and Pam … and ta-da Story Geometry was born. In fact, I asked Fenton about this new age of media we’re living in …
Ben - Have you listened to many podcasts, were you familiar with the the structure?
Fenton - I I’ve recorded podcasts for other people, and I’ve listened to podcasts, but I’m not a podcast kinda guy. You know, I like silence a lot. And particularly when I’m walking around or driving, I’ll drive across country [Ben interjection] and not listen to anything.
Ben - Interesting, that’s my main mode ...
Fenton - Pam is the same way, she listens to books … I can’t listen to audiobooks. I get involved in the book, then I’m not driving.
Ben - You’re in a ditch [laughing].
Fenton - I’m wandering in someone’s lane …
segue to MUSIC
Ben - AD COPY - If you’re like Pam and I and LOVE great aural storytelling especially while driving, then you just have to know about today’s sponsor TALKING BOOK -- The Independent Audiobook Publisher. TALKING BOOK will produce your audiobook and get it pumping through the largest distribution network available to authors anywhere. Killer audiobooks like the wildly praised F 250 by New Jersey poet and novelist Bud Smith. With TALKING BOOK authors call the creative shots and receive the highest share of royalties. That means more control of your work and more money in your pocket. Go to TALKINGBOOK.PUB and turn your story into your audiobook.
MUSIC fades away
Ben - Welcome back, this is Story Geometry Episode 9, Initiative vs. Destiny, talking with inaugural Writing by Writers faculty Fenton Johnson and co-founder Karen Nelson. So Karen goes on to study with Pam Houston for several years in a private workshop called PAMFA, for the PAM MFA. They get to know each other well, and then the economy tanks. The University of California is facing severe budget cuts, which impacts Pam directly as then-head of the UC-Davis Creative Writing Program. One of the casualties is their annual writing workshop in Tomales Bay, California about 90 minutes north of San Francisco and right next to the coastal town of Point Reyes.
Karen - We were out there for the weekend on the beach with the dogs
Ben - Pam’s readers will know she’s a Wolfhound lover and owner. Karen’s been a chocolate labrador momma for years. And you’ll hear her lab Rusty and my retriever Berkeley playing and scratching on the floor as we talk.
Karen (cont’d) - and we ran into the people who run the Point Reyes bookstore, and they said, “Why don’t you come over for dinner, we should talk about what the Tomales Bay workshop would look like without the University of California of Davis. So we did [and] after talking it through and listening to what the bookstore had to say about how much the community appreciated how much they’d done out there, we got into our separate cars, drove our separate ways, and by the time we both got to our homes we had each individually thought, well, why don’t we try this.
Ben - And ta-da, Writing by Writers was born ... initiative!
Karen - Well we’ve certainly grown quickly. We’ve tried not to grow too quickly.We’ve added a workshop a year and what we’ve tried to do is identify where the holes are out there in the other workshops that are being offered, so Tomales Bay is a very classic workshop … it’s always been focused on craft side not on the publication side of the writing so that’s been the cornerstone. We only take a certain level of manuscript, and we also sometimes have the classes that are advanced or intermediate so we’re screening everything to make sure you’re not being put into a level that’s not appropriate for you. But we also love working with,, all levels of writer and wanted to have a workshop that included everyone, even if you had never really written a word up to people who are published authors and just wanted that inspiration, that’s why we developed the Boulder Generative workshop, so it’s a long weekend, really focused on craft and writing exercises, just generating new work, and building community.
Ben - To give you a taste, Episodes I, II, and III are all pulled from the 2015 Boulder Generative conference and feature fiction writer Alan Heathcock, creative nonfiction writer Gary Ferguson, and Pam.
Karen - (cont’d) .. because as all of us know, writing is a very solitary activity and it’s easy to get lost in your own world it’s easy to feel like you’re just floundering, it's easy to feel like you’re staring at a blinking cursor, and nobody understands what you’re going through, and your friends keep asking when your book’s going to be published, and you haven’t even gotten a word on the page, and they don’t even understand the whole process. Community is a really critical part of what we do with Writing by Writers because we do want it to be supportive, we want it to be people coming together where they can share their concerns, their excitement, they can share their ideas, they can share their struggles perhaps in a way they can’t do when they’re home alone or that other writers can’t recognize or that other non-writers don’t understand what the real pressures are so having this community has been absolutely key to us
Ben - In the spirit of community, Fenton shared an example of this solitary challenge:
Fenton - We’re all I don’t know , you know, kind’ve in our different ways, solitary lions roaming the velte and um and and and we like being alone, either we like, or we teach ourselves to like it. We had better because we’re going to spend a lot of time with you in the room and the blank page. I had another great trauma in my life, and I was coming back to the desk after that great trauma and I thought “I can’t face a blank page, I don’t have the strength right now to face a blank page so I’ll go back to something I wrote earlier.”
Ben - So Fenton went back to a scene that had really stuck with me from his first novel, Scissors, Paper, Rock.
Ben - I was so captivated by the early courtship, the trapping scene … the sense of language, of dialogue, especially in an era gone by and then to place that in … rural Kentucky, did you spend a fair amount of time doing any research to find that or did it just come from your work on those characters?
Fenton - It took two years to work it’s way out because I couldn’t find the right voices. The day after we buried my father, my brother asked me if I wanted to help him go run traps … you know his traps at 4:00 in the morning ... and the descriptive parts of that are basically what we encountered. I’d done it with my brother, I’m a gay man, and I kept trying to write the story as if it was two gay men. My brother is not gay … and it just didn’t work … and I went back to that story and realized it was a man and a woman, not two men, and then it wrote itself in you know two days and I changed hardly a word how it wrote itself in those two days.
Ben - Given my background and interests in film, in episodic television, I asked Fenton about other forms of storytelling, given the age we’re now living.
If I were younger and I wanted to tackle that world I would be seriously interested in writing for television because interesting stuff is happening on television.I wonder sometimes if when you know Middlemarch or Great Expectations were published in the mid 1800s people literally lined up on the street to wait, to be the first to snatch the next chapter, the next installment of the story from the sellers when they came out and that is clearly, obviously analogous to how today’s television storytelling is happening. And it may be that I don’t know a series like The Wire or The Good Wife or Six Feet Under or whatever, that those will be seen as the 21st Century version of the serialized novel of the Victorian Age.
Ben - I LOVE this comparison. And Fenton’s picked three iconic series here. But he went on to say …
Fenton - The print medium has certain advantages that no other medium can supply and one of them is the fantastic flexibility in terms of manipulation of time - that’s one of the things I teach in film you can have your main character, let’s say, short hair in one sequence and long hair in the next or no beard in one sequence and a beard in the next, you know that time has passed. But nothing can compete with narrative prose on a page for saying ‘Three days earlier comma’ and if you have the reader, if you’ve done the work and you have the reader in the fictive dream, then you’re three days earlier. Or you’re two years down the pike. And the flexibility of that is so marvelous and so inviting, that’s my medium, that’s my natural medium.
Ben - I’d love to have you, I know you’re about to dive in to your book tour and launching the book would you be willing to read a small piece?
Fenton - you know one of the things on the list to do is I gotta figure out what I’m going to read from it, I wonder if there’s just a paragraph in here ...
Fenton - You know I don’t think it needs much setting up, interestingly enough. It’s in the point of view of the character named Johnny Faye who is a kind of Don Giovanni, a renegade VietNam vet who lives outside the law, uh who lives for love. Everybody he comes near - men, women, inanimate objects - uh hungers for his body and he gives it to them and this is the last paragraph of the book. Smith is the name of the police officer.
Ben - Without further ado, here’s a brief reading from The Man Who Loved Birds.
“Johnny Faye … FENTON ASKED US NOT TO INCLUDE HIS READING TEXT HERE … In death he loves them all.”
Ben - Fantastic.
Fenton -I really wanted to play with narrative suspense the way Alfred Hitchcock sets forth in a wonderful book which I highly highly recommend, easy to read, quick to read which is Francois Truffaut’s interviews with Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock talks a lot about narrative suspense and who’s a better master than Alfred Hitchcock – one thing he says is anyone can conceal information from the viewer or the reader and have it as a surprise at the end. Any hack can do that. The best way to create suspense is to provide that information to the reader or the viewer up front and have them participate in the process as the characters discover information that you already know to be the case. And so with this book, The Man Who Loved Birds, I like to think at the very beginning that the reader knows that Johnny Faye is going to be shot, what else can happen to him? He’s the figure of anarchy at a point in history when anarchy is definitely not in the public favor.
Ben - More from my chat with Fenton will appear throughout Season Two, but as we wrap up Episode 9, Pam Houston and I were chatting via cell phone about this interview and how things were coming with her memoir. And as things go, the call dropped, then we simultaneously called the other back and left voicemails. Here’s what Pam had to say .. .
Pam - Hey Ben, I think the call dropped as I was going on and on and on um the very shortest answer is I’m I’m so loving having this amount of concentrated time to work on it. It’s just a slow damn book, so it’s going well, and I hope to get a lot more done in these upcoming weeks. I need to because it’s sort’ve ‘hit the ground running’ from March 28th ...
Ben - March 28th is the annual Association of Writing Programs or AWP conference. This year it’s in glorious Los Angeles.
Pam - cont’d - I’m making real progress but it’s a slow book. Up til now I thought, well it’s a slow book because you’re too damn busy and you’re doing 17 million things which was true, but now I’ve had nothing but it to stare at for these many weeks and it’s still ... it’s slow. But it’s going, I’m writing everyday, and I’m adding pages, and I’m working shit out but it just gets … more and more complicated which I think will be a good thing. I have about 60 pages locked up which represent the introduction and the essay at the heart of the book. I have another 160 pages that I wish were locked up, hoping that those will come together in the next few weeks, they need organization and polishing, and then I have about another 100 pages that are floating in my computer and some of those go in the book and some of them don’t. So that’s where I am right now.
Ben - For those of you who follow Pam on Facebook and Twitter - and if you’re not yet, why not, may I ask? - then you’ll know Pam isn’t shy on expressing political opinions along with environmental and societal concerns. With Election 2016 looming and in a not so subtle reminder to get out and vote, I’ll close each episode with a brief reference to a literary work about or influenced by politics, politicians, and policies of the era.
First up … well, you tell me. Here are the opening few sentences:
To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover.
Ben - That, of course, is then opening to John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Grapes of Wrath, about an Oklahoma family the Joad’s and their migration west to California after losing their family farm. The novel was released in 1939 and was born at the height of the Great Depression. Former ranch hand Steinbeck was writing articles on assignment for The San Francisco Daily News about conditions in the migrant worker's camps in California's Central Valley which along with time spent traveling cross-country with a migrant Oklahoma family, served as the foundation for the novel.
Meanwhile the 1936 Presidential Campaign featured incumbent Franklin Roosevelt against Kansas Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas in an election that focused on economic class to a surprising extent. Even though 80% of the nation’s newspapers endorsed Landon, Roosevelt won an astounding 523 electoral votes to Landon’s 8.
The Grapes of Wrath remained on the bestseller list throughout the election year of 1940, where FDR won an unprecedented 3rd term over Wendall Wilkie.
So what literature’s already out there pulled the energy, excitement, or disgust depending on your point of view, from the Obama presidency? What will come out of this election cycle? What recommendations do you have?
That’s all for today - we’ve gone from Hitchcock to Steinbeck, from Glamour Magazine to the San Francisco Review of Books, quite a ride in considering Initiative vs. Destiny!
I’m your host and editor, @BenHess on Twitter and Instagram and we’re Story Geometry on Facebook and Twitter. Warm thanks to Fenton Johnson and Karen Nelson for inviting me to their respective homes and to Pam Houston for an update on her memoir.
Don’t forget to visit today’s sponsor Talking Book dot pub to hear Bud Smith’s new novel, F 250. Our theme music is from Mark Hodgkin and additional tracks are from Greg Glazner’s band, The Responders. Be sure to rate and review Story Geometry in iTunes, send feedback via StoryGeometry.org, and sign up for future Writing By Writers events and conferences at Writing X Writers .org.
Next time on Story Geometry, you’ll hear from a later-in-life debut novelist, several surprising challenges from aspiring writers pursuing the craft, and another literary political election year classic.Thanks for listening!
We break down four foundational tools for the writer’s toolbox pulled from award winning writers Mark Doty, Greg Glazner, Pam Houston, and Lidia Yuknavitch. To whet your appetite, they are: number one - Find Inspiration, number two - Form / Structure, number three - Rhythm of Language, and number four - Reading Aloud.
Links: • Mark Doty - http://markdoty.blogspot.com/
• Greg Glazner - http://www.gregglazner.com/
• Pam Houston - http://pamhouston.net
• Lidia Yukanavitch - http://www.lidiayuknavitch.net/
• Season One Partner, Writing By Writers - http://writingxwriters.org
• Episode Sponsor - Talking Book, http://talkingbook.pub
• Produced & Hosted By: Ben Hess - http://twitter.com/BenHess
Story Geometry - Ep8 - Filling Your Toolbox
Pam Houston: I think that when you begin sending work out into the world … you have probably, realistically three sentences. Maybe. To get somebody’s attention and definitely no more than that.
Ben Hess: Welcome to Story Geometry, I’m your host, Ben Hess. This is THE podcast about the craft & community of writing with insights from leading published authors of our day, like award winning writer and teacher, that’s Pam Houston. This is episode 8, Filling Your Toolbox, and we’re gonna get discuss some foundational tools so that your work gets read past the three sentence mark!
Over the next few minutes, you’ll hear from two-time NEA fellow and National Book Award winner for Poetry Mark Doty, novelist, memoirist, and Lidia Yukanavitch, novelist, musician,, and poet Greg Glazner, and more from the award-winning Pam Houston. So dust off that empty metal tool box that’s been buried in the garage and get ready to add some key pieces … all when our show continues.
I’ve partnered with literary nonprofit Writing by Writers - they’re at writing x writers dot org - on this Story Geometry episode and all the ones prior. They’ve programmed an amazing series of 2016 literary workshops, adventures and conferences including their 3rd Annual Generative Workshop in Boulder, Colorado, April 8-10th. Whether a new student or alumni, save $100 off tuition by using code GEOMETRY when you register for the workshop before December 31st - this offer’s been extended, so hit pause and SIGN UP.
Mark how did you how did you settle on poetry as your form?
Mark Doty: Wasn't a choice. LAUGHTER I was first writing … always reading something and I liked writing when I was very young. In high school I was keeping a journal not of what happened to me as I was always bored by writing a diary but of images, ideas, dreams, little sketches …
Ben: Mark Doty and I chatted at dusk on a small hill overlooking Tomales Bay in Marin County California. He won the 2008 National Book Award in Poetry for Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems and in additional to several books of poetry, has written three memoirs including a craft book, The Art of Description: World Into Word.
Mark: I stumbled upon some poems by William Blake and by Federico Garcia Lorca. And what I loved about them was the way that there was … a depth charge to the language. They were often very short, rather mysterious poems which said more than they said.
Ben: Full disclosure: I’ve not read either Blake or Lorca. Or much poetry for that matter. Regardless, tool #1 - find, cultivate, study your literary inspiration.
Mark: They somehow conveyed things that the denotative meanings of the words alone could not account for. Something about music, something about the magic of imagery. Something elusive. I love that, I wanted to make something like that.
Ben: Do you find … when you're working on a new piece, is poetry inherently musical? Is it inherently lyrical? Or it or do you have to find a rhythm and beat and meter it once you have more words on the page?
Mark: I am a person who tends to begin with the visual, with an image that strikes me as something I want to describe. …. For me, description comes first but it's very closely allied to a mode of speaking that might feel casual or offhand or it might feel heightened and elevated, it might feel like short lines that want to highlight a small unit of language or like some more extended movement, where words tumble over themselves. …. And so it comes about really through reading. Musical poets that one loves you know you drink in Marlow and drink in Keats drink in Shakespeare and the music starts coming out through your fingers if you're lucky.
Ben: OK, so Mark’s got Blake, Garcia, Marlow, Keats, and Shakespeare in his toolbox. But just a few minutes later in our chat, he said:
Mark: If you find a poet you love. So you completely adore a Lucille Clifton poem, the thing you do is go and read as much Lucille Clifton as you can and just roll in that influence like a dog rolling in a good smell, you know, take it in and then you will keep what's in that is like you, that you need for your work and gradually let go of the rest.
Ben: And of course this applies equally to creative nonfiction, fiction, essays, memoir, whatever form of the craft you’re pursuing. I’ve come to realize and believe it’s our duty to study the masters who have come before, to roll around in their work as Mark says, and then see how it permeates our poetry or prose.
Mark: There was a period in my life when I was hugely influenced by John Ashbury which is something you probably wouldn't expect from my poems. But his syntax, the kind of cool beauty of those poems, the way they move from description to meditation, was very important to me. And I let myself just do that for a while until the parts of that influence that weren't really mine fell away. However now if it were up to me to say what everybody should read. I'd send everybody to Keats. I'd send everybody to me to D.H. Lawrence, I’d send everyone to Hart Crane, to Robert Lowell. to Elizabeth Bishop to James Merrill.
Ben: I was an actor years ago so the Inspiration Layer in my toolbox included a wide range - Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde to Edgar Allen Poe to Arthur Miller to Tom Wolfe to Stephen King. And I’m thrilled to report this layer is only getting deeper and richer with every Writing By Writers faculty member and student I have a chance to interview.
Lidia: I should start by saying I'm a form junkie. I am one of those writers who is more interested in form than content.
Ben: This is Lidia Yukanavitch whose most recent novel is the haunting, lyrical The Small Backs of Children. Her memoir - or anti-memoir as she calls it, The Chronology of Water - was a Finalist, PEN Center USA Creative Nonfiction Award and named as a Best Book of the Year by The Oregonian. I asked her about the unique structure of Small Backs of Children:
Lidia: I'm so deeply interested in form so I knew there would be formal play. I didn't arrange ahead of time the specific formal moves I made. The namelessness came intuitively as an experiment for a certain number of pages ...
Ben: Lidia named her characters for the art they create … The Filmmaker, The Photographer, instead of conventional names.
Lidia: [cont’d] and once I saw it moving in the story and on the pages it felt more and more right to not ever make a main character because that's not the kind of story I wanted to tell. And our proper names are first indicators of individuality. And so it was an easy way to get rid of main character. It was an easy way to take the focus off the single individual.
Ben: So our second tool is Form and Structure. What fascinates me is how these are so connected to the genre we choose to write and how play and experimentation in a less familiar form can help our writing across the board. For example:
Pam Houston: With my prose writers in graduate school I have them write formal poems all the time.
Ben: Here’s Pam Houston, whose award-winning novel Contents May Have Shifted is a masterful tapestry of 144 travel themed vignettes.
Pam: I have them write [poems] … because I believe that form is another way to do an end around your analytical brain it's a way to focus on something other than the aboutness and often really great things emerge. I mean Contents May Have Shifted, people would ask me three years in, what’s the story about, and I would have no idea. Like there’s twelve sets of twelve. I would describe it as a form. You know I would describe it formally. Because I really didn’t know what it was about. … Physical form is a very very important … more than other writers. Like I think about stories as Rubik's Cubes I think about them as slinkys, I think about them as spirograph flowers, I think about them as geometric shapes. I always feel like I'm happier if I know the size of the boxes I'm trying to fill and then I fill them. That’s my version of an outline, that's my version of safe space.
Ben: Here’s more from Lidia Yukanavitch talking about The Small Backs of Children:
Lidia: I put it in motion just you know just to see, but then after a certain number of pages it became clear to me that was the right pattern for the kind of story I wanted to tell. A choral story and a story that could only resolve if pieces came together. And so losing the names was a very strong …. anyone in the world could look out and go look, the names are missing and think at least I thought, if not exactly what I was aiming for.
Ben: I was reading an interview that you gave a while ago.
Lidia: I might have lied … LAUGHTER
Ben: Well I want to test that and repeat your own words back to you and see if you had any different perspective. (Lidia: I might!) “Inside the relationship between a writer and a reader, a fiercely passionate world may arise.”
Lidia: Oh no I still agree with that. I'm of the opinion that books should happen to you. That you should feel like an event occurred, you know I an event horizon. And to me those are the best books, the literature books that change your life and I know there are books that are just entertainment. Or give you escapism. Or you’re reading them because they're assigned. But from my point of view, if a book happens to you it means it changed your DNA somehow,and you live differently? And so that thing I said between a reader and a writer, I'm talking about that space between us where you feel like something happened instead of just “I read some words and that was cool.” So I guess they I believe that. That one I agree with.
Ben: With two tools – Inspiration and Form / Structure – identified and several more to come, reminder that you’re listening to episode 8 of Story Geometry, Filling Your Toolbox. Today’s show is brought to you by our inaugural sponsor ... Spoken Word Inc, the Independent Audiobook Publisher.
Spoken Word will produce your audiobook and get it pumping through the largest distribution network available to authors anywhere. Audiobooks like the wildly praised F 250 by New Jersey poet and novelist Bud Smith. With Spoken Word Inc authors call the creative shots and receive the highest share of royalties. That means more control of your work and more money in your pocket. Go to Spoken word inc dot com and turn your story into your audiobook.
Ben: Continuing what both Lidia and Pam said about form vs content, here’s poet, essayist, and novelist Greg Glazner who also teaches in the Creative Writing program at UC Davis. I was curious about form in his completed but not yet published novel, Opening the World. And when you had the kernels of the idea for for the novel, how did they shape and form in prose versus, versus poetry?
Greg Glazner: You know believe it or not the the first idea for the novel was form. What I had decided that I was … there were certain things that I didn't write about because I was writing a narrow columns down the page. And I was interested in just opening it up and letting it … letting it say different kinds of things I than I could or would in you know in a poem. So it started with a whole different subject. You know. It was actually it was initially about physics. And it didn't turn out to be about that at all. It's about this character name Len who who coincidentally plays guitar and writes.
Ben: Greg’s description of Form is a perfect segue to our 3rd Tool - The Rhythm of Language.
Greg: But it too, started with the sounds of the sentences. You know once I was really on to it, I mean I had a rough idea of some subject matter but um those sentences were incredibly important to me.The rhythms and the sounds in the voice qualities.
Ben: As you've gone through this publishing journey, have you had any pushback on that evolution of POV and form or … has that been an issue?
Greg: You know I haven't heard any explicit pushback on that question. If someone gave me pushback on it I would listen to it. I think the pushback I'm getting is is over the poetic quality of the language.It's a four hundred page book and it intentionally moves slowly so that we can savor where we are and I think that is the exact polar opposite of of what is is wanted these days, you know, I'm writing uh uh sonic, you know, rhythmical sentences for a purpose you know either you slow down and diminish your numbers of page per minute or per hour that you're reading or else there's nothing there for you, you know.
Ben: Can you define how poetry and music live together, especially as a musician?
Greg: This is really a question is one of the most interesting questions to me about poetry and for me personally the way they they live together is through. Through rhythm. Through tone. Uh … in music. If you have a groove going. You have a background rhythm established. And then with a guitar solo you counterpoint off of the rhythm that already exists behind you and then the notes themselves are are akin to singing and singing is akin to vowels. So each word has both a drum strike and a singing. The drum strike is the syllable. And whether it's accented or not. If you're listening carefully is how hard the drum strike happens. And the syllable the vowel is what you sing through. So each phrase is a little bit of a rhythm section or a little bit of a rhythm riff with singing in it. And so I am hearing, when I write poems I'm hearing a kind of background rhythm that varies. That breathes. But that is always there in my mind. And then I’m counterpointing against that rhythm with the drum strikes. And the singing of my solo. And so. So to me a poem is primarily musical. If I can’t hear how a poem sounds, I can’t start.
Ben: Language’s rhythm and tempo can also inform so much about the emotional state of a character or even guide the author toward choosing one point of view over another. Here’s Pam Houston.
Pam: I like the second person for a few very specific reasons one reason is that I'm from New Jersey and that's how people speak there. The second person is the official state language of New Jersey. And its, its to my ear, a very American way to speak. It's a very American way to tell a story. It deflects responsibility the way we do here in America and it's, it's inclusive in this kind of Jersey way that just makes a lot of sense to me. “So you're sitting there, and this guy comes up,” the auntie says. Like that's how you tell a story where I come from. It’s in the second person. Uh I I also love about the second person that its,first person with a little wash of shame over it. It's like I'm a little bit ashamed to say ‘I’ so I'm going to say ‘you.’ I like that deflection. It's like shame without having to say you're ashamed. I like ‘that’ a lot, I like the rhythms it sets up in sentences. Sets up entirely different rhythms and cadences in the sentences and I I like that a great deal.
Ben: I’ve not spent much time in Jersey but at least now I’m prepared to visit - I know their language! Mark Doty’s craft book The Art of Description is a collection of four essays, and when I asked about its origins, the first thing Mark said is:
Mark: To my mind, description is not just the idea. Description is not just about rendering the surface of perception. It's about how is perception translated into language. How do we render the world as we know it into something that can evoke for the reader, the concrete experience for the reader? It's very mysterious to me because words are abstract. They are common property, they are in some funny way ordinary, and there certainly bloodless right? How do you make physical reality out of them? And when you do so you're not simply if you're doing a good description, you're not just scientific description or measurements then you're also revealing how you feel about something. And what's important to you, in what you describe. So I think it's an endlessly fascinating subject.
Ben: And it seems that people are using it, not only poets, but creative non-fiction writers, fiction writers …
Mark: If description is description and if you are doing a good job of representing your own perceptions, if you're evoking those for the reader, what an asset that is to your fiction or to your nonfiction. Absolutely. I think probably every writer should spend a little time studying poetry or writing poetry just simply for the experience of focusing on language as a thing in itself. For the prose writer, language too often um you know sort of disappears as a value. We think we want to be transparent. I don't want the language to call attention to itself, right? But in fact language is not transparent. Language has weight and shape and meaning and so it's very useful to spend time looking at it.
Ben: I had the fortune of doing some Shakespeare as an actor back in college days, days gone by, but the musicality of that language whether it's iambic pentameter or some of the of the famous monologues, when looking at the sonnets and hearing the sonnets read for me I admittedly had been intimidated by poetry and yet Shakespeare’s sonnets give a little bit of a window in.
Mark: First of all I think it’s so important what you said: hearing the poem read.
Ben: And yes, Reading Aloud is #4 for the toolbox.
Mark: Reading aloud yourself because two things happen when you do that: one is that you start inhabiting the music of the poem physically you feel it in the muscles of your jaws and you move your tongue and it influences your breathing and that is the way to get much closer to the active life of a poem. The other thing that happens is that when a poem’s read aloud, you understand that it's an address. Someone is speaking to someone else. And that's very different than something sitting flatly on the page as an object of study, right? If Shakespeare is trying to persuade someone or he's trying to charm or flatter or if he's trying to convince a listener that uhh time has no power over his love or his love’s beauty or his writing. Then uh that's a very different thing when it's spoken. It's argued. So that address is something that really is crucial to the life of poetry.
Mark: So we’ve dusted off our toolbox and added four things: Inspiration, Form / Structure, Rhythm of Language, and Reading your drafts Aloud. With those in mind, we’re going to close today’s episode a little differently … with an assignment. Here’s Pam:
Pam: So this story, that I'm going to ask you to write ... it's just a story of twenty six lines and the first sentence starts with an A and the second sentence starts with a B, the third starts with a C … a C word, B word, an A word. The other rules are you one of your twenty six sentences has to be one word long. And another one of your twenty six sentences has to be fifty words long. Exactly. And you can substitute for X or Z but not both. You can go forward through the alphabet or backwards but you have to go in order. So you can start with Z or even start with A.
Ben: Send your submissions by January 15th to hello AT story geometry dot org, we’d love to see what you come up with !! We’ll continue to add more to our toolbox in the new year. This concludes our inaugural Season One of Story Geometry [wild APPLAUSE]. Thank you … yes, thank you for joining me on this podcast storytelling journey. We’re taking a holiday hiatus – side note, I’m on the move, leaving the San Francisco Bay Area after many years for sun and palm trees in Los Angeles – so look for Story Geometry Season Two’s kickoff in February complete with more words of wisdom on the craft and community of writing.
Thanks so much for listening to Episode 8, Filling Your Toolbox, I’m your host and editor, @BenHess on Twitter and Instagram. Warm thanks to Mark Doty, Lidia Yukanavitch, Greg Glazner, and Pam Houston for sharing their insights.
Don’t forget to visit today’s sponsor SpokenWordInc dot com to kick of the new year with a new audiobook. Our theme music is from Mark Hodgkin and additional tracks are from Greg Glazner’s band, The Responders.
Be sure to rate and review Story Geometry in iTunes, send feedback via StoryGeometry.org, and sign up for future Writing By Writers events and conferences at Writing X Writers .org - psst, use that promo code GEOMETRY for the 2016 Boulder Generative workshop before December 31st. Thanks so much for listening
The podcast currently has 17 episodes available.