Day Five - Residency Fever

Sorry we have been all so quiet. Residency fever has us all hot and bothered - about theme, about great children's books, about writing process, about being together in a community that I want to bottle up and take home with me.

But I know if I did I'd never sleep. In Jackie Briggs Martin and Liza Ketchum's workshop we mined childhood memories to write powerful sensory scenes that lay buried inside us. These residencies are like overwhelming sensory scenes that wash over us, full of laughter, tears, exhaustion and awe. I think all of us here - faculty and students - know how unique, how privileged we are to spend this time together twice a year. In a way it is like summer camp as Anne blogged about. One leans new skills, whispers into the night, sometimes even tears into one's pillow about not being good enough.

Last night I tried to write a post, but had no words to sum up the stimulating day. A presentation by writer Wendy Orr and illustrator Lauren Stringer about their individual processes that produced the delightful picture The Panther and the Princess, a discussion about girl heroines in Alice's critical thesis presentation, an evening of awe inspiring grad and grad assistant readings, followed by delightful conversation with first year students, laughter with faculty and a decompression conversation with my roommate Anne.

Five days into the residency and it feels like a fever dream that I don't want to end, but that if it doesn't, I may burn up from the stimulation of lectures, workshops, readings and fellowship with beloved faculty friends and old and new students.

As I try to look back, what stands out for me is the deep sharing on process this week. So appropos because our focus is theme. Betsy Partridge in her talk on "Kickass Nonfiction" talked about kotodomo (spelling ?) the idea that every word has a spirit, a soul. But we can only find those soul words, the themes in our writing by sitting down every day to write them. Betsy shared how she takes her primary research and weaves the details into her story, word by word. She talked about how when dealing with controversial or complex information she lets actual quotes do the heavy lifting.

This morning we return to our workshops after a morning off yesterday to cool down and recharge for the second half of the residency. Each workshop with fellow faculty Kelly Easton has offered deep and respectful discussions with student writers about each piece, focused on craft and also evolving into the process behind it.

Anne just came out to ask about her outfit for the day. She gave me a new word. Ineffable. Much of what goes on here is unspeakable, like our writing. But we try to speak, to share, so we have the hot spirit to return home to our work.

I must stop. My temperature is up. More from the front later. More for me to savor all semester long. CRM

Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends, Once More

We're about to enter our residency, some of us more well-coiffed than others. Twice a year, the Hamline students and faculty gather on campus for ten days of workshops, lectures, and lots of great companionship. My husband tells me there's a famously untranslatable German word--gemütlichkeit--the feeling of warm-heartedness and companionship that one feels for one's fellows, friends and strangers alike, while drinking gigantic steins of beer in the beer hall. Change "gigantic steins of beer" for "epically bad food" and there you have Hamline. It's a magnificent thing to be amongst other writers.

Residency is something like the first few days after you've been turned into a vampire--it's hard to focus on anything else. So the Inkpot might get quiet for the next week, or very weird, or filled with postings from Ron about how nice the weather is in California. I will try to file some reports, and I'll just apologize in advance for everything I say. Meanwhile, I'm getting my stuff together to go work in the Hamline library--I've got a lecture to write--and I raise a cafeteria-style, institutional-Diet Coke-filled glass to my fellows. See you soon.

One more...

One more incident from Asilomar, where my wife caught a ripper of a cold.

The students and I had nearly two days together, so we got to know each other pretty well. The members of the Cambria Writing Group are all friends, but they don't cut each other much slack when it comes to analysis. One of the topics that came up was the difference between an autobiographical poem that stuck to the so-called facts and one that took liberties for the health of the poem.

Who'd really argue for the former, right? That goes in a diary. But a couple of the folks were pretty adamant about truth: if in fact somebody went to Walmart he or she shouldn't say Piggly Wiggly Market even though the market has better reverb in the poem.

Here's the interesting part -- one of the gals who strongly favored taking liberties brought in a poem with some guttural-sounding words, and when somebody pointed out that they were at odds with the tone of the piece she said, "But that's what really happened." Of course her friends jumped all over her.

She had a hard time letting go, though, and after dinner took me aside and asked if she couldn't keep those grating consonants. Tongue in cheek, I told her she could keep one. So the next morning there was a revised poem -- a veritable field of daffodils except for the single aloe plant.

RK

Workshop stories

So I did go north to, essentially, Pacific Grove, for that workshop. And I used every suggestion I could get from my friends and most of the ones I rely on. The students at Asilomar were a lovely group who'd been meeting off and on for more than 30 years. They knew a lot, but the ghazal seemed new. And the "talismanic word" exercise from a summer ago at Hamline really propelled some interesting dialogue.

We were together for a day and a half, including meals, so we got to talk a lot. One of the things that came up was the number of workshops all over the country. At least a few of these folks had been in others in different parts of the U.S.

That led us into writing poems about workshops (Billy Collins has a beauty) and overnight a few people kept working on theirs. The best one had a very cool image: in a AAA office, the woman had seen a map of America with a little light for every major tourist attraction. So the poet wanted another kind of map, one that had a light for every poetry writing workshop. She said that every time a group met, the light would go on. So that on some nights, the light from the map alone would be bright enough read by.

RK