Alumni Voices with Ellen Kazimer: Resetting My Setting

As someone who has lived overseas and moved twelve times, I know that every place is unique. Two towns from a small state like Connecticut appear so similar to an outsider, but to a native, they are as different as night and day. There is a different rhythm, a different sensibility. Every town has a unique, idiosyncratic heartbeat once you get beyond their similar appearance.

So I shouldn't have been surprised that shifting my setting upended my novel. I naively thought this would straighten out a few plotting issues. My characters kept wandering over into this town for entertainment so I figured I would situate them there. My plot problems would be solved, right?

Of course not. In fact, I created a slew of new obstacles for myself. And as the esteemed Jane Resh Thomas wrote last month, "setting, like yeast, is not put-in-able at late stages of the cookery." I had ruined my "bread." Most of my original scenes no longer fit.

My first town was largely homogenous in demographics and was located on a sheltered harbor. My new setting jutted out into the Atlantic, its harbor unprotected from the elements. In many ways, my young protagonist was less protected, too. She finds more ways to get in trouble. While other characters had to find new jobs, she found new dreams. So I experienced first hand what Jane wrote last month. "Although place does concern distances and landmarks, it also determines character."

As I revised, I recalled Ron Koertge's lecture back in summer residency of 2013. He proposed we let our characters wander through the town and see whom they meet as an exercise in character cartography. On any summer’s day, my characters would have run into some of the wealthiest families in America. Additionally Ron advised that we “map out your character's world and see what sticks out.” As it turned out, my characters tripped over things that stood out and lay splayed out on the sidewalk. From that vantage point, though, they could see the underclass—the nameless, faceless servant class of those moneyed families. I realized these servants were not nameless or faceless to my characters. So I had to uncover their stories as background to my story.

In the end, social class became an antagonist in my story, thwarting the dreams of my protagonist. She can't go anywhere without being affected by class distinctions. My protagonist loves to swim. In the former town, there were lakes and a shoreline available to everyone. In the new setting, there is a swim club reserved for only the very wealthy and the shoreline is privately owned. She also loves the movies, but class determines where she sits. Affluent summer residents reserve the box seats and servants crowd the theater on their solitary afternoon off.

Moving my setting presented many challenges to my "work in progress." Using Jane's metaphor, I had to throw out the bread I was baking. Truly, this new loaf is so much better. We often hear about letting our characters lead as we write and revise. Perhaps we should consider having the setting lead, and see what happens to our characters and plot.

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Ellen Kazimer is a January 2014 graduate of the MFAC program. She lives and writes in Virginia. 

Faculty Voices with Jane Resh Thomas: Setting and Fiction

Jane Resh Thomas

Developing writers have assured me so many times that they would “put in setting” after they had completed first drafts of their novels that you'd think I'd be prepared for this proposal, but still it always shocks me. A writer's inserting setting into a half-baked story is like a baker's adding the yeast after the bread is kneaded. Yeast releases the air bubbles that create the grain of the loaf, its physical structure. Without yeast or some other leavening, the loaf cannot rise. Setting is the world through which characters move and conflict and plot play out. Setting, like yeast, is not put-in-able at late stages of the cookery.

A writer's inattention to setting from the beginning of a story results in its floating in the clouds, unmoored, deprived of a specific culture and definite place. Fiction needs a context, something impossible to provide without a setting. For this reason, fantasy writers must build worlds as well as characters. Writers of realism must place their plots in a real place that affects events, not a generic one.

Although place does concern distances and landmarks, it also determines character. The remark “Bless her little heart” may mean something ironic, rather than fond, something entirely different in Charleston, South Carolina than it does in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The subtle assumptions of a Louisiana fisherman differ from those of a Wisconsin farmer in ways we can't know without experience in both places.

In early April, my son Jason and I drove from Minneapolis to the North Shore of Lake Superior for the day. We went to the mouth of the Gooseberry River, where we sat at a picnic table overlooking the open water where the river entered the big lake. The wind was cold; I wore my beloved old secondhand beaver coat with the collar up around my ears. As we sat there, we talked about the scene before us and hypothesized.

On the far side of the river, on a sandbar, two people sat looking for agates, far enough away for us to be uncertain of their age and gender, though we thought they were a youngish woman and a twelve-year-old girl. How had they reached that sandbar? Beyond them, a seventy-five-degree bluff arose. They couldn't have descended that steep incline on the opposite bank. They must have gone from our side across the river ice. But look, we said. Look how rotten the ice is. See that dark place, where the snow is saturated? They were lucky once, but they'll have to cross again. Those people are headed for a swim.

After a while, the child returned across the ice to our side of the river. She avoided the dark spot. She was lanky and her weight was light; she made the crossing without mishap. A few minutes later, the woman followed her, but she quickly left the girl's tracks. As she headed straight for the place where the snow was wet and dark, Jason took off. He skidded down the ten-foot cliff on our side of the river and came even with her upstream when, just as we had foreseen, she fell through the ice. Perhaps she found a footing on a submerged rock, for she caught herself on the sharp edge of the hole and hauled herself out. Jason shouted at her to lie on the ice and crawl to the riverbank, but, still oblivious to her danger, she ignored the advice. The last time we saw her, she had taken off her icy jeans and stood shuddering and barefoot in a cotton skirt. She did not thank us.

Here were four characters in a far-north landscape, on the banks of a river where the flow and depth varies according to snowmelt, which was light this year. The two agate-seekers were strangers to this place; no native would cross river ice in April, knowing that it's unreliable even in cold January. No native would bring a cotton skirt on an April road trip to the North Shore. No. Natives bring wool and fleece and down and beaver skins. This mother who had risked her own and her child's life was also a fool.

The observers, Northerners all their lives, were not particularly prescient or wise. They foresaw events not only because of their own experience with rivers and lifetimes in the North, but because they had read Jack London's terrible story, “To Build a Fire,” where an Alaskan trapper falls through river ice and freezes because his hands are shaking so hard he can't keep a match lit. People on the North Shore say that, if you capsize on Lake Superior in early spring, you have twelve minutes to save yourself from hypothermia. After the incident at the mouth of the Gooseberry, a blasé gas station clerk said to us, “Oh, ya. People die down there every coupla years.”

Fiction writers must create the world through which their characters move. They must consider how that world influences events and how it has shaped the people who inhabit it.

Faculty Voices with Jane Resh Thomas: A Super-Hero Grows Up: “Jack and the Mad Dog,” a Novella by Tony Earley

Jane Resh Thomas

In Mr. Tall: Stories and a Novella, by Tony Earley, the author of Jim the Boy and The Blue Star presents a hilarious and dead serious new version for adults of the tale about “that Jack,” the one of Beanstalk and Giant Killer fame. As he waits for the farmer to go to sleep, so he can bend the farmer's wife over a plow for the price of four dollars, Jack sips a colorless liquid from the mason jar he found in the middle of the road. The drink is not moonshine, however, but “seeing juice.” Jack will never be the same.

Earley has given the priapic youth of folklore a conscience. Never again will his belief in his own powers enable him to seduce and rob and hoodwink and cuckold every passerby without cost to himself. When he sets out for Yonder and meets a sweet young virgin, he will never again be able to roll her in the hay with no thought of consequence and then set out again without remorse. He won't be able to keep aloft the flying bottom-rotted rowboat and white-oak contraption in which he and his friend Tom Dooley escape the snarling black dog that blocks Jack at every bridge he encounters.

The old man who has “spen[t] all those years and spells and truck helping [the boy] out,” when the old man “could've boodled up all the treasure for [him]self...,” “could've been the one [who] diddled all the maidens and flummoxed the giants and stole the gold and soared around in the flying boat”—that same  old man is the one who left the seeing juice in the road. He sounds like a worn-out father at the end of his son's exhausting adolescence. Now he has run out of gifts:

“Jack, you ain't going to understand a word of this, but being a king didn't

 interest me none, and I never developed a taste for treasure. But making sure no harm come to you once you set out? That there made me rich as I ever cared to be.”

A nameless cry laddered up the inside of Jack's ribcage toward the light. “But I'm ethically challenged,” he said.

“You are that.”

“And I never think about nobody but myself.”

“You do not.

“I don't deserve a single thing you give me.”

“No, sir, not one. You always have been, and continue to be, a most unworthy vessel.”

“Then why—”

            “Because, honey, that's what makes it count.”

In this gloss on assorted folktales, Earley makes fun of everything and everybody, including the “pointyheads” who write glosses on folktales. The novella curls back on itself and comments on Earley's own literary techniques. Jack winds up in a double-wide at the top of the hill with a pail of water, Jill, and a baby, having discovered responsibility as a tornado bears down on them.

Just as happens every day to grownups in the real world.

Faculty Voices with Jane Resh Thomas: Trouble

Jane Resh Thomas

Many people who write for children had a painful childhood themselves. Many of us have old business in childhood that makes us, unawares, want to protect our characters, so we soften conflict and draw them as perfect little insufferable darlings.

As Carol Bly used to say, however, “'The sky was blue, and the clouds were like sheep' is not a story.”

No. Stories are about trouble. No trouble, no story. “The sky was blue, and the clouds were like sheep, and Miss Lydia Best had just caught me cheating on my Latin test.” Now there's a story, especially if you knew Miss Best, as I did in junior high. Her hair was white and shingled up the back. She always wore nicely tailored suits in impeccable condition. An upright broomstick through her torso kept her perfectly erect. She never smiled. If Miss Best stabbed you with a glare and jerked her thumb toward the door, you were on your way to the office without a word's having been said, and you knew you'd never known such trouble in all your years at school. Anybody who would cheat on a test in Miss Lydia Best's Latin class had to be crazy.

Hic haec hoc
Hujus hujus hujus

“The sky was blue, and the clouds were like sheep, and those red dots on Lenna's cheek came from the bristles of the hairbrush her mother had swung just before Lenna left for school. If she answered Miss Best with the truth about those dots, her mother would kill her.”

Stories are about trouble.

Because so many writers for children want to protect their characters, one of the books I ask my students to read is Donald Maass's [sic] Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, where Maass asks contrarian questions that help in the revision of a story. They pry a writer out of his unconscious ruts. (The paperback workbook contains the guts of the hardcover book, Writing the Breakout Novel: Insider Advice for Taking Your Fiction to the Next Level, and also poses exercises.) Maass's questions ask for the other side of things. Your character hides behind her hair and would never call attention to herself? Donald Maass would ask, what's the opposite of hiding and being withdrawn? What would happen if your character did the opposite? Write that scene.

Editors' most frequent explanation when they reject manuscripts that are “well-written” is the deadly summary “The story is too quiet.” What editors mean thereby is that the characters are too nice to live, their world is too pretty, the opposition to their hopes and dreams is too bland and tepid. The sky was blue and the clouds were like sheep. So what? Where's the conflict?

The best advice I could give to anybody who asked, even if I hadn't read the manuscript, is “Push the conflict.” Who in your childhood caused the most trouble for you? Who in your story reminds you most of that person? How have you dramatized your protagonist's hatred for him? Yes, hatred. If you haven't hated, you haven't lived. Half of life is seizing our hatred and harnessing it to something more constructive. Adults are only more adept than children at hiding their jealousy and malice and lust. What were the secrets your family demanded you keep as a child? They didn't have to tell you to keep your mouth shut. You knew. What are your character's family secrets? His parents' upcoming divorce? Financial trouble? The druncle?  What is the worst thing your character ever did?

What would you be ashamed for Miss Lydia Best to know about you?

Alumni Voices with Polly McCann: The Writing Process: or Why I Love Being a Failure

On the highest shelf of a storage closet, in the furthest part of my basement, behind a room someone painted purple—for reasons known only to them—are three boxes. I’ve never opened them. What’s in them? A photography darkroom kit I would have done anything for twenty years ago. Now they are just dreams put on a shelf.

I wanted to be a famous artist, like Modigliani or Picasso, or Mary Engelbreit. I envisioned art installations at galleries with photo emulsion-washed linen—fifteen feet high. Anyway, I’ve never done an installation, not one. And my gallery sales to date: two paintings. I could say I’m a failure at becoming a famous artist. But then, there’s something about the writing life that flourishes in failures. 

So to all your storytellers out there who constantly dip your pen into that inkwell (and don’t always feel like the Olympic-sized winner you really are) I wanted to explain why I love being a failure. Possibly, you have a similar list with vague intentions to use those castoff failures somewhere or other: There was the time I failed at being a banker, but I know that that bank vault scene in my middle grade novel is truly accurate. Or what about the time I failed at being a secretary, a janitor, a nanny, or a preschool teacher? they could be professions for my characters’ parents. Then there were those failed friendships, a marriage, ten consecutive summer gardens, the time I tried to sew pants. Okay, so maybe all of you haven’t failed at as many things as I have. But you might be thinking that life is fodder for art, or writing, or something like that. Right?

Sure, maybe the missteps we own are the crap we shovel into the compost heap called the writing life. Well, I think there is more to it than that. Our failures form not just what we write, but how we write. Something about our writing process changes from experience. The kind of failure that I’m talking about are the kind in which you mastered something; truly loved something only you put it away in order to write. We all have these failures hiding on a shelf in our closet, but you know what I love about being a failure? Failing to become that museum quality artist is exactly what made me into the writer I am today.

Let me describe my process. Here I am writing my first novel, or third (or at least the one I promise not to throw away this time). I feel totally confident from all my Master’s level classes: I’ve got Plot from Marsha Qualey; Point of View from Phyllis Root and Jackie Briggs Martin (I can still hear them talking about ducks “Oh, no, mud!” they are saying in very duck-like voices); I have endowed objects, and talismanic words in my dialogue just like Ron Koertge said I should; I have Eleanora’s third leg of the three legged stool—Setting; and I have asked myself WWJRTD? What would Jane Resh Thomas do to find out what my character truly desires; and I’ve even tried to build a world which follows find Anne’s heroic monomythic journey. I’m left alone to face something worse than the blank page, reams of really bad free writing. That’s when the beauty starts.

Now that I’ve built a framework out of the best advice anywhere (Thank you Hamline MFAC!) but my poor novel still resembles a scared rabbit in the headlights, my failures kick in. Suddenly I know what to do: Ah, now it’s time to sketch in the layout. Now it’s time to add contrast and color to my characters. Now it is time to paint the scene. My writing process takes on new terminology unique to my own experiences and failings. I know that because I’ve learned how to do one thing well, I can learn another. That includes writing a novel, or maybe a graphic novel, or a play. So in fact, my past failures weren’t really failures, they were just the beginning. My failure was really the foundation of everything. It’s what I write and more importantly it’s how I write.

One of my favorite authors, E.L. Konigsburg sums up the process of calligraphy writing in her novel, The View from Saturday, and I think loving our failures as storytellers works pretty much the same way:

            "You must think of those six steps not as preparation for the beginning but as the beginning itself."

       

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Polly McCann is a 2011 graduate of the Hamline MFAC program. To learn more about her writing and illustrating, please visit her website.

Publication Interview with Miriam Busch: Lion Lion

Balzer and Bray, September 30 2014
illustrated by Larry Day

Please describe the book.
The text is minimal – most of the book is a dialogue between a boy and a lion.  The boy is looking for Lion, and the lion is looking for lunch. The lion follows the boy through the neighborhood, refusing every food the boy offers to him.  Readers might wonder: IS THE LION GOING TO EAT THE BOY? WHAT DOES THIS KID MEAN, HE’S LOOKING FOR LION? CAN’T HE SEE THE LION RIGHT THERE?  Lion and boy speak—seemingly at cross-purposes— until a surprise reveals that the boy has everything under control after all.

As the story progressed from inception to copy-edited version, what were the major changes? How did those changes come about?
This story began as another story entirely: one about a boy-king named Rusty and some lions. The initial story idea came from the illustrator (who had a loose story). He asked me to collaborate. We worked on this story for a couple of years, but after many revisions, it still didn’t work. 

Still, something about it wouldn’t let me go. Months after we scrapped Rusty, I doodled a what-if idea on a diner napkin. Keeping in mind my African travels and childhood around-the-world folktales, I borrowed from Rusty—the first two lines and a lion— but set it on Kenya’s Lake Naivasha. I wrote a different kid – this time, just a clever kid who knows how to be a friend.

Initially, I needed that specific setting to shape the story, but by the time the editor suggested an urban setting, the story was strong enough to let that happen. To me, this change adds to the sense that the boy leaves his home to wander through the neighborhood of his imagination.

In a previous revision, the boy slyly (knowing that the lion would refuse) offered different animals to the lion to eat – the editor suggested the change to the food the animal friends were eating.

This book was truly a collaboration between me and Larry Day. While aiming both for a tongue-in-cheek surprise and entirely interdependent words and pictures, we paid close attention to the interplay of text rhythm and visual rhythm through every revision.

When did you first begin work on it?
 2008.

When did you finish?
 2013. 

What research was involved before and while writing the book?
I grew up on folk tales from around the world, so while that’s not research, it is background. I cycled through so many animals in the many revisions, and – this sounds silly — I did tons of research on eating habits and habitats. (I wanted to make absolutely sure that the foods the animals were eating would have the necessary irritating effect on the lion.)

Your first book was published in 2009. What have you learned about being an author (v. being a writer) since then?
In no particular order:

• There is, apparently, a thing called “Strategy” when it comes to publishing – what you debut with makes a difference.  If your first book sells well, editors are more likely to give your next manuscripts a look. (Duh, right? But I didn’t have a clue.)
• I write across ages and genres. Very smart people have advised me to publish under two different names – one for YA  (and up), one for the younger set.  
• I’ve learned that agents and editors often move around, and it’s a good idea to pay attention to who’s where. 
• I’ve learned that while YES, this is a people-driven business, and many times more of a popularity contest than we’d like to believe, there’s room for all sorts of quirky personalities. 
• And I’ve learned that almost everything is a flash in the pan – bad reviews, good reviews, trends – everything passes. It’s best for my own forward motion to pay only small doses of attention to any of that stuff that’s not in my control. To paraphrase Jane Resh Thomas, “Do your work. It’s the only thing that over which you have any control.”

Where do you do most of your writing?
 These days, I’m at my dining table. (My office is too messy!)

Do you remember the first book you loved?
There were so many! But one of the first was Ruth Krauss and Ellen Raskin’s Mama, I wish I Was Snow; Child, You’d be Very Cold. It is one of the few books I still have from my childhood. I loved that book so much I wanted to dive into it. (As is evidenced by my delicate longing-filled crayon work on the endpapers.) 

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Miriam Busch is a January 2014 graduate of the Hamline MFAC program. She lives in Illinois.

Publication Interview: Liza Ketchum

Out of Left Field, the latest novel by faculty member Liza Ketchum, was published this month by Untreed Reads. To learn more about Liza and her writing visit her website.

Please describe the book.
The summer of 2004 is full of promise for Brandon McGinnis. He has a job, a spot on the varsity swim team, loving parents, and loyal friends. Brandon and his dad, ardent Red Sox fans, wonder: could this be the year the Sox end their eighty-six year drought? Then Brandon’s father dies suddenly. A new will, signed just before his death, reveals a secret kept for thirty years. As shadows of the Vietnam War bleed into the escalating War in Iraq, Brandon sets out to solve the mystery his father left behind. His journey takes him to Canada’s Cape Breton Island, where he uncovers bittersweet truths about the past, and a family facing its own hidden demons. Brandon’s courageous search throws him into life’s game with its devastating losses, unexpected curve balls, and thrills as wondrous as a home run on an autumn night.

As the story progressed from inception to copy-edited version, what were the major changes? How did those changes come about? When did you first begin work on it? When did you finish?
The novel actually had its inception in the late ‘90s, when Lois Duncan asked me to write a short story for an anthology entitled “On the Edge.” The story I wrote—“Sables Mouvant”—featured a boy named Brandon, whose father has just died. In the short story, Brandon learns that his father—who moved to Canada to escape the Vietnam War—may have had a son during that time, a fact he kept secret from everyone. The short story takes place in France, near the D-Day beaches. It involved quicksand (sables mouvant, in French), shifting tides, and a boy’s need to understand his father. For years after the story was published, its background nagged at me. I wondered about the supposed half brother in Canada. Did he exist? And I thought about the father. Why would he hide this truth from his family? Years passed, the Red Sox finally won a World Series title after a drought of 86 years, and I found myself jotting ideas in a notebook. My husband and I had visited Nova Scotia many times, and I realized I could set part of the novel in that beautiful area. I recently unearthed my first handwritten draft, dated 2007, so the novel version took almost seven years to complete (though I also worked on other projects at the same time).

The major changes that took place involved the characters themselves. Though Brandon is the central protagonist, I wanted to include characters on the Canadian side of the border, and I decided to let their story evolve through phone calls. (The story takes place in 2004, so texting wasn’t as common then.) I also needed to understand and deepen the father’s side of the story.

The novel’s structure also changed as I revised. Because baseball is an important thread, I decided, during a late revision, to divide the novel into nine “innings,” and to title each scene—within the inning—with a baseball phrase that also relates to the scene’s action and/or emotion. In addition to the phone calls, the novel also includes letters written by Brandon’s father while he was in Canada, as well as e-mails between Brandon and a Canadian friend of his father’s. Decisions about the design of typeface and fonts, for the different textual elements, took place during the final moments of copy editing, just before the book went live.

What research was involved, and how did it affect the story’s development?
Though I lived through the Vietnam era myself, and was deeply affected by it, I didn’t know much about the men who fled to Canada to escape the draft. My Hamline pal and colleague, Marsha Qualey, was tremendously helpful as I researched that aspect of the war. We talked about the era and shared valuable readings. I needed to know what life was like for those who crossed the border. Where did they live? How did they find jobs and housing? Were they in hiding there or living openly? I didn’t realize that the Canadian Mounted Police worked with the FBI to track down deserters, and that not everyone was welcomed when they arrived. I read books about the period, studied newspapers from the time, and also watched old TV footage of the draft lottery that took place in 1969.

I decided to make baseball an important element in the story, not just because I love the game but also because I wanted to balance Brandon’s grief and confusion with something he loved and was passionate about. Though my husband and I followed every moment of the Red Sox World Series championship, I read sports writers’ accounts of the season and also kept a schedule of the games—with wins and losses—pinned up above my desk, so that I followed the season along with Brandon.

Finally, the story required medical research as I solved the mystery surrounding the father’s death.

Why does the Vietnam War cast shadows over this novel? What caused you to write about that period?
My friend and teaching colleague, Jane Resh Thomas, tells her students, “Write what haunts you.” The Vietnam War, and the events surrounding it, have haunted me since 1968-69, when my cousin and a dear friend died in that conflict. I became politically active against the war during college and worked for anti-war candidates after graduation and in subsequent elections. Though the war has been over for decades, I never stopped thinking about it. I have visited Maya Lin’s beautiful memorial in Washington, D.C. many times. Lin’s polished granite wall honors the 58,000 American men and women who died in Vietnam. But I knew that thousands of young men who were opposed to the war fled the country and went to live in Canada. What happened to the war resisters—as they called themselves—after they crossed the border? What was it like for those who came home after President Carter granted them amnesty? I often write novels to explore questions I can’t answer. Out of Left Field is no exception. In 2004, when our government launched a second war in Iraq, I decided it was time to write this story.

West Against the Wind, your first book, was published in 1986. What have you learned about the business of writing since then?
Whatever I’ve learned about “the business of writing” always comes back to craft. Though the business has certainly changed—Out of Left Field is my first novel to be published simultaneously in an ebook and Print on Demand format—the quality of a story is still what matters most. Readers—and editors—still want a gripping story with interesting characters and a situation that keeps them turning the page. I’ve been lucky to teach with inspiring colleagues and to work with talented students over the years.  I learn something new from the writing community every residency and semester, and each book I write is a new experience that presents me with different challenges. Stories now come in many different forms and that’s exciting. I’ve never written a graphic novel, but who knows? Perhaps that will be next.

If very good friends are visiting for one evening, do you cook or go to a restaurant? If the former, what would you cook? If the latter, what restaurant?It depends on the season. Right now, our vegetable garden is laden with fresh veggies, and the farm nearby has fabulous sweet corn, so we’re eating fresh-picked vegetables at home with visiting friends and family. In the winter, we like to sample many of the different ethnic restaurants in our Boston neighborhood, from Indian to Thai to Persian. If we eat at home, dinner is likely fresh fish, caught locally and grilled, and veggies from the farmer’s market that is open year round.

Faculty Voices with Jane Resh Thomas: Patience

Jane Resh Thomas

At the Hamline residency's discussion of the writing life in July, Laura Ruby and Claire Rudolf Murphy talked about the virtue of patience. Nothing could be more important to us as we learn the craft, write our books, and struggle to market them.

Writing is a lifelong apprenticeship, yet a woman telephoned one of my writer friends, wanting her to put the woman in touch with a publisher: in the few months since God told her to make books for children, she had written a hundred-odd picture books; the only thing holding her back from publication of these treasures, she assumed, was the right connection.

Writing is a lifelong apprenticeship, yet many people who enter MFA programs in writing believe that, by the end of two years, their work will be publishable, if not already published. Many writers send out their work way too soon, when it still requires several more drafts before an editor will read it all the way through.

The need for patience is borne out by several friends' recent experience. In the face of rejections by the dozen over the years, Cheryl Blackford, who spoke last winter at Hamline, found a publisher for her new novel, Lizzie and the Lost Baby (Houghton). Twelve years after Jane St. Anthony completed Isabelle Day Refuses to Die of a Broken Heart, she found a publisher who will bring out that book and paperback editions of her previous two novels (University of Minnesota Press). Several years after their graduation from the Hamline MFA Program in Writing for Children and YoungAdults, Maggie Moris found an agent for the novel that was her thesis, and Jane O'Reilly landed a two-book contract for her fiction (Egmont). All of these women kept on writing their fiction, despite incessant discouragement for years from agents and publishers.

The kind of patience these writers exhibited was prodigious. In the first place, they had the patience to develop their talent by learning their craft. They all write clear flawless English in distinctive voices. They know how to build an English sentence, a character, a theme, a chapter, a through line, a novel. They stay with a manuscript until they've learned what it wanted to say, what they wanted to say through it. They set aside draft after draft, until their writing sings like a choir, all of its parts working together. People who publish their work, in addition to native talent and skill, have to be drudges, able to persist in a project until it makes them want to flush it and cut their own throats. Then they go on again anyway.

People who publish their work also have given up publication as their reason for being. They've learned to live their lives in the world, not shackled to their desks. They've made writing one of their pleasures, independent of whether it ever sees the inside of a library. They've divided their creativity from the misery of locating agents and editors. They can play the hardball of publishing, where a rock flies past their noses at ninety miles per hour every time they raise their heads. Writing for them is a daily practice, however the world responds to their work.

Writing is a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer continues to develop, even as she markets the work of the writer she was last year. Patience, stubbornness, determination, if not the keys, are some of the keys to our finding joy in the work.