Poetry for Fiction Writers

I am not a poet. I loved poetry up until I was about fifteen. I loved writing it and reading it. I was obsessed with all the female poets who’d gone insane. Then I stopped, for no good reason other than I wanted to write longer things with plots and characters.

Now I am suddenly faced with having to teach a section on poetry in an Intro to Creative Writing course. Panic. So I turn to Ron, fellow inkpot blogger and Hamline faculty who recommended In the Palm Of Your Hand by Steven Kowit and The Poet’s Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux. Turns out I already had them on my bookshelf, likely purchasing them after one of his brilliant lectures years ago. I also have Rules For the Dance by Mary Oliver, along with one of my favorites because it describes poetry forms in such a clear and simple manner that even I, a nonpoet can understand: A Kick in The Head by Paul Janeczko.

In reading up on poetry, thinking about it, going through some of my long-forgotten favorite poets, I also conjured up from the depths of my brain two poems that I wrote when I was five. I wrote them on yellow lined notepaper in big, fat letters, but they only exist in memory now. These poems may explain my interest in mad poets, as well as why I no longer consider myself a poet—not because they are so terrible, but because I don’t think I could write anything nearly as profound today. However because it is a Sunday and the first day of August, I am willing to share: (remember I was five.)

MY CAR
My car died one day.
I couldn’t understand.
Why?
Why do things die?
Why oh why oh why?


THE END
Once when I was little I said,
“I won’t! I won’t! I’m dead!”
That’s it.
A one, a two, a three,
The end of me.

Writing as Therapy

The most satisfying work I've ever done was using writing and theater in clinical practice. I was amazed by the way writing mined the unconscious, entered the heart's depth, and allowed my students to hold their deepest truths to the light, often for the first time. At this July's Hamline residency, I had the experience of lecture as therapy. There were tears (not even from rejection slips), laughter, and contemplation.

The connection of our speakers to their work was communicated in their heartfelt presentations. Elizabeth Partridge's stories of Woody Guthrie and his tragic life, the only seeming redemption his music, pierced our hearts. Deborah Wiles opened her metaphoric home to us: her struggles, the call of books that would not abate until she read and read and wrote. She then drew from her story a larger context for us all to examine our work and our lives. And we wept with both of them: over children burned to death, a musician's mind succumbing to disease, over a mother living in a car with two children, but determined to transcend.

And this is why we write: to push aside the numb banalities of existence and enter the core of compassion.

But all was not tears: Elizabeth Bird had us amazed and amused with literary tales: whether Hans Christian Anderson would ever leave Dickens' home, whether Pooh would be x-rayed to find his inner music box, and Tony Blair's pronouncement that England would not be seeking "the return of Winnie the Pooh Bear." Her intelligence and passion for the subject transported us, as she shared the comical and tragic stories of authors and the children for whom they wrote.

And this is why we write: to entertain, to give joy, to enlighten children and ourselves. These wonderful speakers reminded us.

So how does it apply to writing? Simply this. We must feel. It's kind of exhausting...one does like to put it off. But it must be done. To feel is to be human. To feel is to communicate. To feel is to be a writer.

E-readers

Well, I did it: I bought an e-reader. This may not seem like a big deal—but I’m a lifelong technophobe who has scorned most new gadgets. (I even pooh-poohed the first electronic typewriter until I saw how a correcting key would change my life.) And I don’t understand how this stuff works. I’ve always sympathized with James Thurber’s grandmother, who imagined that “electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.”* So I’m surprised that I succumbed to this new toy.

The truth is, from the moment I saw someone reading an e-book on a plane, I wanted one, then felt guilty. Buying an e-reader seemed like a betrayal of my dear friends who run fabulous Indie bookstores—not to mention that writers are paid poorly for e-rights. Besides, I love actual books. I love the feel of the paper, the smell of a brand new book no one has opened, the way print looks on the page. Books are my friends. According to an article in the NY Times this spring, an e-reader is not green. And it would be sacrilege to read a picture book to a grandchild in that format.

And yet—imagine boarding a plane with a light carry-on. And how nice to read a friend’s 200 page manuscript without printing it out. My e-reader even lets me borrow books from my library at no cost. I open it up and Kurt Vonnegut grins at me. I can replace my tattered copy of Slaughterhouse Five without cluttering my groaning bookshelves. It’s the wave of the future—and I’m having fun so far. That is, until my husband grabs it for a game of Sudoku…

*James Thurber, The Thurber Carnival, p. 186.

Transmedia

I'm emerging briefly from my Inkpot sabbatical to direct your attention to an interesting website, The Literary Platform--especially the article "Cathy's Book" that was posted in June. "Transmedia" isn't a term that trips lightly off the tongue, but it's one we'll hear more and more.

MQ

Out With the Old-In With the New

Two things happened yesterday. First, I got a letter from my old publisher bearing news that one of my first (and favorite) books is going out of print. This is one of the worst moments for a writer. It is a heartbreaking loss of something loved. It’s happened to me before and it will happen again, but it’s still so hard to bare. No more books available ever!! How can that be? How many copies do I have in my basement and how do I decide how to distribute them? They are rare and precious commodity now—even though they obviously aren’t popular enough that anyone wants to buy one. But, what if I—gasp—run out completely and never see the book again?!! It will be like it never existed! Despair and devastation!

Two hours later UPS delivered a padded envelope from my new publisher. Inside were three brand new spanking-shiny ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies. aka, galleys) of my picture book that is coming out early 2011. This is one of the best moments for a writer. The book looks like a book! It smells like a book! The pages are smooth and soft. The colors are vibrant. This means the book is actually going to come out and the publisher isn’t playing some cruel joke on me after all. The book was finished so long ago, that I’d actually thought it had come out and then gone out of print already, but no I’d merely forgotten that I’d created it. Ah, I have a future after all! Joy and jubilation!

So the old book is out of print, the new book is about to emerge. In the end what excites me most is the book I get to work on today, the one still in progress. That is what matters. Everything comes and goes, but if you keep working there will always be something on the table to get you excited, even with the despair and jubilation that may come all at the same time.

I Can't Even Title This Post

I need to come up with a title for my book. Pretty much now.

As regular readers know, I've written a contemporary retelling of "The Snow Queen." It takes place in Minneapolis in the present day, and also the magical fairy tale woods place that exists within it. You know. Plus there's the lair of the Snow Queen. It's, of course, tropical.

I was calling it The Snow Queen. I know it's a bit of a stretch. But the book is actually really far away from the fairy tale now, and retellings don't tend to keep the name of the tale anyway. I need to change it.

I hate titles. I'm terrible at them. I had to retitle the third book in my trilogy. It went from The Promethean Flame to The Immortal Fire. This took me a year.

My goals are simple: I want something that doesn't immediately make someone go, "Huh?" I want something that could not possibly be used for a mass market adult mystery/romance set in Minnesota. I want something that doesn't sound like a fantasy taking place in some barren realm where it's always winter until some girl/boy comes and through the warmth of his/her heart causes the whole place to thaw and then spring bursts forth from the deadlands like that one planet after the Genesis thingy landed on it and then Spock died.

This cuts out a lot.

My bookshelves taunt me. A Wrinkle in Time. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankeweiler. E.L. Konigsburg, now, that chick can title.

Anybody? I think The Wrath of Khan is taken.

Nomenclature

Hello--I'm new to the Hamline blog (though not to the program). I'm excited to be part of the conversation.

A week ago today, Phyllis Root and I slipped away to see the McKnight Prairie Preserve, a remnant of original prairie that runs along a low ridge south of the Cannon River. We parked next to a cornfield. I was still seeing generic grass and flowers when a meadowlark sang from a post, and Phyllis began to name the blossoms at our feet. Daisy fleabane. Milk vetch. Grey headed coneflower. Flowering spurge. Prickly pear cactus. (Yes, cactus native to the prairie. Who knew?) Prairie milkweed, nothing like Vermont milkweed, but also tasty to monarchs. Lead plant, far prettier than its name. I felt like my grandkids, who are pointing at everything and asking “Zat?” Luckily for me, Phyllis knew the answers.

I love learning new names, even though I may forget them. Specific names add spice to bland prose. They also bring up images and associations. When an illustrator for my picture book wanted me to remove the word “seagrape” from my story—because she’d never seen a seagrape bush—I sent her photos. For me, the word seagrape evokes the sound of flat, saucer-shaped leaves rattling in the wind. I smell the salt air, and hear my grandfather’s scratchy voice as he shows me the tracks of a bobcat, imprinted in wet sand beneath a seagrape bush.

As I clear my desk this morning, perhaps these names will find their way into a poem or story, like Ron Koertge’s talismanic words. Showy tick trefoil. Culver’s root. And here’s one for Buddy the Poetry Cat: Field’s Cat Foot.

What specific nouns and names show up in your writing now?

Bits & Pieces

Buddy the Poetry Cat was happy to see me and he showed this by looking up when I came in the door, and then going back to sleep. Probably he was examining his life. He's a big Henry James fan.

There's an interview with yours truly on a site called Long Story Short. Some of the same stuff as was revealed in the gig on Saturday, minus the poems of course. But it might be interesting -- I tend to lie to interviewers, and then forget what I say. In a recent Biographical Note in a literary magazine I wrote that I was an unpublished writer living in North Dakota and working on a saga. Nothing makes me wearier than those solipsistic entries listing every forthcoming poem and a Kerouac-like life as fisherman, rock climber, cook, and towering dwarf.

I have to say that I get as much out of the residency as any student. I can use the T.A. Barron list of deepest fears/highest hopes/etc. even though I'm not a fantasy writer and even though he bored the pants off me on graduation day. Flash Fiction is fun, and I'll always pick up Poetry when I spy it standing on the side of the road in the rain. But there's nothing like a long piece --two or three or four pages a day every day. All I need now is an idea and a Bic pen.

Congratulations again to the grads and welcome to the newbies.

Auntie Em, TA Barron, and the Family Von Trapp

We've all dispersed now and are facing reentry. It's always a shock after residency to realize that the rest of the world doesn't stop while you're at Hamline, not to mention being confronted with people who expect you to be able to converse with them, feed yourself with utensils, and wear your underwear inside your clothes.

It was an emotional last night on Sunday as the graduating class serenaded us with the final number from the Sound of Music--as emotional as anything can be that involves "Edelweiss" played by a chorus of kazoos. It's always so hard to go back into the real world, where no one gets the value of a good kazoo chorus.

The previous night our graduation speaker TA Barron gave a reading. He writes fantasy, so it was not a surprise to see the sky outside the window-lined room grow heavy with metaphor as the evening went on. It was a surprise when the tornado sirens went off and security ushered us all into the basement, Barron included. We like to give our guest speakers memorable experiences.

Barron was a generous and impassioned guest, an evangelist for the work of writing for kids. I got to sit in on his master class with the graduating students before their graduation--it was less meteorologically epic, but equally inspired. Barron has a fascinating way of mapping his characters before he begins: he starts by giving the ordinary details--appearance, speech, customs. But then he asks himself what their deepest fears are, and what are their highest hopes and truest longings. And finally, what is their secret. He does this for every single character, and then he goes back and does it for every place and every magical object. This is the sort of writing that hums with magic--when every person, place, and thing whispers secrets to you.

He said this process was about engaging both sides of the brain--the planning side letting the dreaming side do its work. But he was careful to say that this is his process, that our stories and our meanings are swirling around wanting us to find them, and our job is to "open the door to the magic dream" however we can. This was a theme of our theme residency--how we go from putting words on the paper to seeing these words for the dream they are making. What kept coming up, again and again, is "magic." This is storytelling, after all: words and sentences that, put together, make something vibrant, animate, and whole. We can search and search for the proper formula for this alchemy. Or we can just trust it. Barron urged the latter, that if you start down a path that gives you opportunity you will "open up the fullness of your creative capacity." Or, in the words of graduating student Dave Revere: "Magic--I'm content with that."

Home to Dream and Sleep

Safe to assume that the Hamline Summer Residency residents are now all home again (or on their way), tucked in their beds and hopefully catching up on all that loss of sleep, and all that mind stimulation. It’s always like this—an intense week covering the gamut and all the ranges of emotional highs and lows combined with this complex and beautiful writing life. I keep coming back to that Socrates quote, “an unexamined life is not worth living.” How fortunate we are to be writers and have this agonizing opportunity to examine life in all its grit and glory.

My dogs were thrilled to have me home for about three minutes and then just wanted their same old food and walk routine. I am happy to be back in my little familiar house for a day or two before the next step of intense emotional whirlwind begins—but that’s part of the life of the writer, which is really the life of every human being. So much for long and complicated transitions. Home is where we are now.

Hats off to all the Hamline graduates, their stunning readings and their scintillating personalities. Congrats to all the third semester enlightening lecturers. Congrats to the second semesters for coming back with enthusiasm and openness. Congrats to the first semesters for surviving the beginning of their journey thus far.

Now, after a bit of sleep, the real exciting work begins. Wahooo!
Don’t forget to write. Dark nights of the soul and all.

PS. Anyone feel free to comment on some of your personal highlights of the residency for those who were not there. It's too much for one sleep deprived faculty member to summarize.