Alumni Voices with Polly Alice: Changing Lives

Dear MFAC Hamliners and Alums,

It was so great to be at the winter Hamline Residency this year for a few days. I was inspired, encouraged and impressed by all the new faces.  I’m writing to you from my sewing room/ office well really it’s my mother’s office. I have no idea what my computer is in here really. Her doctorate degree is here above my head and a quilt I may never start is folded up on the table to my left; picture of my grandmother on my right-- along with the iron. It’s been out since I put the Boy Scout patches on.  I ironed them in the wrong place and they had to be removed.

So how is writing going for you all? It’s finally come to my late-blooming-attention that writing is something that always happens on the side.  And won’t happen without intention. I am maybe one of the only people I know who loved my Hamline critical thesis. I worked on it from the day I began as a student up until I graduated three years later. I took it from 40 pages to 20 pages. I guess I’m a research paper nut. This all makes sense to me now that I’m in my second semester teaching college freshmen to write term papers. Yes it all makes sense. I get some kind of evil enjoyment out of teaching other people to write essays. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But I’m glad I fit in somewhere, thank you, God.  (Yes I know last time I wrote you Hamlinites, I was running an art gallery—ahh the life of the artist, things change so fast). Now I’m three blocks up at the community college. Same commute, same neighborhood—different art.

I get to write notes to the students thanks to Blackboard (a new invention since I was 18). I never ever sent a message to a teacher outside of class. hmmm. Now I get messages night and day. I’ve even gotten a call during class so someone could tell me about their intestinal trouble. Student teacher confidentiality has changed a bit since I was in school. One thing, I have the students write me letters at the end of the semester about what they’ve learned as part of their final. So cheers to me. I finally get some letters.

So my crazy need to write to people and have them write back is now fulfilled by being the cooky absent-minded English professor.  Yes, I like it. I also wear silly scarves and thick classes—it makes for the look, too bad everyone still thinks I’m a student. I don’t know what I do wrong there.

And I’ve decided to take my beloved Hamline Thesis and use it again! First I took it from 20 pages to 6 pages and submitted it to a contest and won prize. Then from 6 pages to a 1 page abstract and I got accepted to share at a conference--and went to a conference and shared. That was fun. Now I’ve turned it into a book proposal. One of those books you read on the plane. I think that although I have fun trying to get to my novels I will get to these nonfiction books much faster. Let’s hope.

Besides all that I just got a new summer job. I’m going to be writing for kids. I’m writing and creating art curriculum for summer camps! Who knows how that will go. But let the paint fly.

Being a writer is turning out to be really life changing. I’ve been put on a Title III committee to teach classes that help students get college ready. Our textbook in English 90 and 101 is Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. We watched the new documentary, 13th, about the thirteenth amendment by Duvernay… I’ve never learned so much about the country that I’m living in and what people overcome to just live. Just live. All my students want to be better writers. I’ve got single moms, people from every continent on the globe and several islands, basketball scholarship winners, hopeful ex-cons, baby boomers, survivors, and kids from down the block. We all jump in to writing together. I share with them what I learned from you all.

I can see it changing lives. After each student leaves, I take a small breath. There goes one more person who will now get a better job, have a chance to get an education, someone who will make a difference.  Next fall I’m teaching English 102. The textbook is Hamilton. Profs are fondly calling the class: Find your own revolution. I certainly have. 

POLLY ALICE author and illustrator, opened New Thing Art Studio in 2015 back home in Kansas City-- where she paints, illustrates children’s books, and teaches college writing. Her work is often mixed media. “I create my art to be more like poetry—to have symbolic meanings layered from dream and memories.” Polly won the 2014 Ernest Hartmann award from the International Association for the Study of Dreams from Berkley CA for her research on self awareness for writers and artists through dreamwork. She loves to grow basil and explore the unexpected in her free time.

Alumni Voices with Polly Alice: Something About Writing

Dear Hamline MFAC friends,

I’m writing you from HU 211 where I now teach English 101 twice, two days a week. The inner city campus of the local community college has somehow decided to welcome me on board. Just four blocks from my former art studio, the campus is one large system of buildings with a view of uptown from where I park my Soul in the back lot every Monday and Wednesday. My classroom is filled with the slim table desks and chairs, four posters of Frida Kahlo, a twenty-foot white board, and an ad from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art exhibit from 1992. The lighting isn’t too terrible. The carpet is a nice gray check, and as they said when I first came in, I’m “exactly the kind of person they are looking for.” I have no idea what that means.

For six hours a week, I have to find something to say, something about writing. Looking into the vast subject of words and how we use them, I’m searching for all the unspoken things from my undergrad classes. What I say from week to week must build a bridge to a place that students may care to go.  Students who overwhelmingly chose to write their first essays on why college is not really that important to getting a great job. Students who catch up on sleep outside the adjunct office, or watch TV by phone in between classes. Students who have said, they really like my class.

So every time I prepare for class, I ask myself what I’m going to say that’s worthwhile. Because I’m someone who loved to skip class, sneak out when the professor’s back was turned, write all my assignments at 2 am the night before without revising. There was the time I left class because the professor touched the end of his nose too often. A couple of times I skipped Ethics because the rather overheated professor like to raise his arms a lot. Once I even spoke loudly about a teacher’s pedagogy as he came up behind me on the sidewalk. If there is one thing I’ve come to recognize the last few years, is what youth really means. The hilariousness of it. The wonderful bliss of ignorance. The amazing aptitude for discovering something new.

Every time I prepare for class, I ask myself what I’m going to do to make it interesting. I remember the professor who introduced me to poetry. Writing a paper about that poem, changed the entire course of my life, made me who I am as a person, and continues to effect each and every thing I do: how I think, how I process, and how I chose to pursue my creative life. I remember the lectures that brought me to tears, made me wonder about the universe, or helped me understand just how little I really knew about the world.

Every time I prepare for class, I ask myself where I want these students to go. My answer: I want them to fly into the future on wings made of words, words made into sentences - sentences formed into a path they can walk on; into the place they were meant to be.

I guess I’m surprised to suddenly become an English Professor. I think I like it.  

Polly Alice author and illustrator, opened New Thing Art Studio in 2015 back home in Kansas City-- where she paints, illustrates children’s books, and teaches college writing. Her work is often mixed media. “I create my art to be more like poetry: to have symbolic meanings layered from dream images and memories.” Her work centers on healing, small loves, and the every day. Polly is a proud Hamline MFAC alumna. She won the 2014 Ernest Hartmann award from the International Association for the Study of Dreams from Berkley CA for her research on self awareness for writers and artists through dreamwork. She loves letters. Write her anytime and you’ll be sure to get one back. 

Writers v. Artists in the Ring

Greetings Inkpot readers! This week MFAC alum *Polly McCann writes to us on dystopian politics, where to write, and her new artistic community/gallery, Paper Birch Landing.

Dear Hamline MFAC-ers & Friends,

Last night my ten year old said, “Do you know what we like to talk about at lunch on Wednesdays? Politics.” What followed was a brief conversation about a rather awkwardly groomed politician who used to be the richest man in America. I gleaned from the following conversation that even ten-year-olds think building a wall to keep people out is an evil political plot that must be punished over chicken nuggets and instant mashed potatoes. Some of the political thoughts in our country seem to remind the local fifth graders of their favorite dystopian novels like The Unwanted by Lisa McMann.

I said, dastardly politicians who build hypothetical walls of hatred hadn’t read any good children books when they were kids. “That’s why we write for kids,” I said. Because we are hoping a generation of people grow up already knowing that forcing people to be the same, or forcing people to stay out, or forcing them to live in fear just leads to dystopia. It ruins our world, our creativity, then our hearts. Well, I wasn’t that poetic aloud, but how much can you say at bedtime?

Last week, I wasn’t there on Wednesday to tuck in the kids. I drove downtown and parked myself in a folding chair in the back room of the Uptown Arts Bar. I wanted to find out about the other poets and artists in my hometown. Pound Slam is spoken word poetry: 30 poets, three minutes each, three rounds. Three hours of in-your-face-poetry. So now I know what poets care about; what they are angry about. I know about their spiritual lives, their jobs, their loves, their politics. They are angry about dystopia too, they say something about it in a rhythm no political figure except Martin Luther King Jr. could probably imitate.

Monday, January 18th was Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I didn't have the day off. I was working downtown. How did I get out of the burbs? In the 2014-2015 school year I sat at home and wrote a novel alone in my grandma’s old dining room chair. In the 2015-2016 school year I left my house and rented a studio space in the city. It’s made all the difference. Maybe 20 years of creating in a small room finally got to me. Maybe I’m just rolling in a current of events I have no control over. Whatever the reason, I’m not alone anymore. I have two other artist/writers with me at the studio space we share. From the third floor studio I have a view of KC’s midtown and all of King’s dreams echoing about in the street.

My work is better with a view and coworkers. I need other writers. I can’t sit alone, building awkwardly groomed antagonists to fight on paper, with accidental walls around my writing space. Artists experience the same thing. The walls are up. Having been an artist and a writer exclusively - and now trying to do both - I want to bring the two groups together. So I’m doing something new. It’s formed out of the community I met when I left my desk at home. Now it’s turned into an art gallery of sorts.

What will happen there? We are trying to figure that out. Writers can meet in our art gallery for critique groups. Spoken word poetry might be nice on the terrace for our June Street Art show. “…merely posing,” a quote from a poem by the new poet laureate, sounds like a great name for a juried art show with a photography theme. Novelists without an office could use the study for a space to get away. We can throw awesome book launch parties, build websites, make cakes. I’m thinking if we work together as creatives - a rather new term I’m fond of - then we can inspire each other to keep going. Someone has to make sure kids read good books with good old common sense for what's a bad idea. Someone has to make sure writers get recharged. Artists need other creatives to experience their art. Maybe we could meet in the middle. Step over the walls. There’s a lot of work to do. As one of my new artist friends says, “We’re stronger together.” I'm calling it #ArtLocal.

*Polly McCann, artist, writer and mother, earned her MFA in writing from Hamline University. Tea with Alice is the working title for her first collection of autobiographical poems; three generations of stories retold in free verse. She has been published in Naugatuck River Review and Arc 24. She is the owner of NewThing Art Studio in Kansas City. She loves to grow basil and explore unexpected surprises in her free time.

Flags, Enemies, and Fried Chicken

Greetings Inkpot readers!  This week MFAC alum *Polly McCann writes to us on the joys of writing - and the struggle to let a little misery in.  Read on to hear her take on the challenge of adding antagonists into your story.

The washing machine runs in the room above me. Everyone is finally tucked in for the night. I left the kitchen somewhat clean, and it smells like fried chicken I didn't have to cook. The dog is asleep on his trundle bed (long story) comatose from allergy medicine (another long story). I put my ten dollars of gas in my car tonight so I could get home from my new art studio downtown - enough until I get paid on Wednesday. It's almost midnight and I'm writing to you from my little blue den in the basement of a big house at the top top of Kansas City. My desk was put together by my 10 year old and me. On it, a mason jar full of cold filtered water on a coaster marked with the letter "P." Life is dreamy now at night, with cars driving past in a street filled with rain. Life is a like a "sweet little egg" as Jackie Briggs-Martin wrote in her Louisiana picture book, Chicken Joy. My kids keep it upstairs on their shelf. 

Sweetness only goes for so long, maybe a paragraph and then what happens? As a writer I struggle most with "antagonists." In Chicken Joy, the hero is about to become quiet rooster stew. His nemesis is the farmer who wants to eat him. Then there is his own self doubt that has cost him his voice. Without these enemies, we'd only have the first two pages of the book. Fabulous, but not as memorable. In fact that is why I title of each of my worksheets for every story, novel, chapter book, "Antagonist List." Claire Rudolf Murphy got me into this habit. I love it. She told a class once the antagonist represents what the main character desires and also prevents them from getting it. On my worksheet, I make a list of idioms, word plays, associations, folk tales, and questions. I place all sorts of educated and trendy little notes to help me write a good manuscript.

Problem is, I can never get to the antagonist. I paddle around in little boats with no where to go. I sit in the sun and nothing happens, not even a ripple. Writing without an enemy doesn't work I guess. One wise advisor told me this week, you can't be a writer unless you believe in enemies. Well I said something rather teary back. The trouble is, I hate to say anything bad about anyone, real or imagined. I hate to tell my story, what I have overcome, if it means I have to drag someone else through the mud. What if my enemy were to change? What if my enemy didn't mean to do those terrible things? What if my enemy was someone I hoped to love? What if they did something incomprehensibly horrible enough that I don't know where that kind of evil comes from? That's not your problem, she answered. They are part of your story.

The Welsh flag reminded me of this quandary again last night. As I tucked my little guy into bed, the flag is pinned to the wall above his sea turtle bedspread. A white ground, green grass and a very red dragon make up the flag from Wales. Why? It's a flag about the enemy they overcame. Flags aren't covered normally with daisies or paddle boats or even fried chicken, though I think I'd like one like that. No flags are fierce. They prove what we've conquered. They show us how far we've come. I think from now on I'll add a new section to my antagonist worksheet: A place to draw my character's flag of choice. Yes, that may be one more section to keep me from choosing an antagonist, but maybe, just maybe, I will finally put on those big author pants then tell the story I needed to tell the whole time.

*Polly McCann, artist, writer and mother, earned her MFA in writing from Hamline University. Tea with Alice is the working title for her first collection of autobiographical poems; three generations of stories retold in free verse. She has been published in Naugatuck River Review and Arc 24. She is the owner of NewThing Art Studio in Kansas City. She loves to grow basil and explore unexpected surprises in her free time.

A Letter on the Importance of Writing Groups

Who writes letters anymore?  In this fast-paced age of email blasts, instant messaging, and texting it seems no one has time to write more than two sentences at a time.  Well, not everyone has given up on letter writing yet.  

Today Polly McCann* has written a special letter to all of us reading The Storyteller's Inkpot on the value of a writer's group.  If you enjoy it, I encourage you to check out her blog, Letters From Polly, to read more of her letters.

Dear Friends,

I decided to write you all a letter (as I can't seem to stop writing them) about what I've been doing since graduating from Hamline's MFAC program. It hasn't all been avoiding bifocals and moving into my mother's basement. (Hah, I'm not making this stuff up.) No, a lot of great things have happened as I've found ways to get started on the journey that is the writing life.

The best tools for that journey are not only the ergonomic chair and writing desk (or Google fiber being installed by zippy little blue trucks filled with chipper workmen who introduce you to their cousins and fix your printer no charge). No. What I'm taking about is your writing group. You need one.

Yes to get started as a writer I found I needed other people. The best work I've written since graduating from Hamline several years ago were projects I finished in order to submit to my writers' group. I could spend all my time writing bad poetry. But in the end, I found I needed that accountability to keep me going; remind me I'm not insane just because I chose to be a writer; and give me a deadline.

I just have to show up to group with something good. Shame is a motivator, but more than that it's friendship. Let me tell you what happened. . . . A few years ago I decided to host a SCBWI group. I met Johanna. She, noticing that I had a newborn baby, and a degree to finish, and that my house wasn't properly dusted, then promptly took over the group and moved it to Panera. I was thankful.

Johanna inspired me. She wrote every day and submitted work frequently. It was for Johanna I dredged up a poem about the novel I intended to write. I had no words for a project I intended to write. With the support and encouragement of my writer's group, my empty page became 60 words and those 60 words became 30 scenes.

Last year I met again some of the people from my old writer's group at our annual SCBWI conference in Kansas City. There we talked about Johanna's recent passing. She had spent the last years in and out of chemo and would write the entire five hours during her treatments. I don't know how you would feel, but we felt we owed it to Johanna to begin our group again.

So I started a writer's group at my local library through the SCBWI. Thirty glistening-eyed-authors-to-be came to the first meeting.  When people bring their work and show me how far they've come-- I think of Johanna and how her commitment spreads. I think of all the professors who poured so much passion and knowledge into me. I think about how we are changing hearts and minds, lighting them like candles, one word at a time. Even if it is only our own heart and the group we meet at the library on Saturday mornings, or the group we meet on Google Chat on Thursdays at three o'clock during the little one's nap time. Even so, it's worth it. My heart needs it.

Writer's group is where I learn what I did right. Oh, I know I do a lot of things wrong. I miss a lot. My dialogue will never sparkle like Ron Koertge. My rhythm will never sing like J.J's "worm meets worm." My fantasy will never reach the height of Georgia B. But in the end, I will find my voice. And my writer's group lets me know the good notes I hit along the way.

Since I graduated from Hamline, my writer's journey has had some perilous turns. My life has been turned up side down and right side up. But through writing and through my community I've found "my secret love for hearts," as my daughter calls it. I've found my way home.

Dear Polly,

Thank you for taking the time to write this wonderful letter and agree to share it on The Storyteller's Inkpot.  Letter writing is an under-appreciated art form, and this topic was a superb one.

P.S. - Feel free to send us another letter anytime!

*Polly McCann, artist, writer, and mother, earned her MFA in writing from Hamline University. Tea with Alice is the working title for her first collection of autobiographical poems; three generations of stories retold in free verse. She has been published in Naugatuck River Review and Arc 24. She is the owner of NewThing Art Studio in Kansas City Crossroads arts district. She loves to grow basil and explore unexpected surprises in her free time.

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."

       

 *

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