Launching Barcelona Notebook

I have been away--away from home, away from cat (hair), away from media. Well, most media. I traveled to Barcelona for a 10-day poetry course. How's that!

The pleasure of a writing workshop in June is a tradition I've kept nearly every year for the last 11 years. I took part in the annual Writers at Work conference as a Salt Lake local 2005-2009. I missed 2010 (we were moving) and 2011 (residues of the move). Since coming to Germany, I've returned to Salt Lake City three times for the June conference (in 2014 as a fellowship winner). In fact, that wonderful organization is holding this year's conference right now, 5,000 miles away.

Writers at Work is a great conference for new-ish writers. I'm proud of and grateful for my own pedigree: Brenda Miller (2005), Jesse Lee Kercheval (2006), Christopher Cokinos (2007), Abigail Thomas (2008), Eileen Pollack (2009), Steve Almond (2012), Katherine Coles (2013), Robin Hemley (2014).

From my seat on the back deck in Flein, where two black cats slink around in the overgrown grass, the blue-blue Utah sky feels far away. This year's conference site at Ft. Douglas looks out over the University of Utah and the Salt Lake Valley; I bet standing there I could almost see Simon's grave at Mt. Olivet. So here's a shout out to all my dear people and places in Salt Lake: I miss you this year, so far away.

I have stayed closer to home this time. At the AWP conference in April, in addition to gathering information about low-residency MFA programs, I searched for English writing opportunities in European locations. The final evening of the conference I caught the last ten minutes of a reception hosted by various residency programs, hoping the promise of "and international" in the description would yield options.

Postcard for writing workshop
with Sharon Dolin

I passed by a postcard with an image that did not quite capture my recollection. Writing About Art In Barcelona. I took the card and walked on, looking to pick up whatever else I could find. Barcelona? Art? Poetry? Me?

A brisk motion with a VVRRT sound grabbed my attention from the right. That sculpture thing, life size, had just rolled down from a stand at the wall. A slender blond in a black top was gathering it in. I connected her to the postcard in my hand and started a conversation about how, although I live in Europe and would like good writing opportunities there, Barcelona Art Poetry had not been on my mind.

And then I felt a tingle in the softness of my knees and elbows, radiating from my spine. That adrenal fight-or-flight-something-is-going-on tingle. I had been to Barcelona once before, and I had seen the sculpture on that postcard. Markus had attended a conference in the beach town of Sitges, and Simon (age just barely one) and I had traveled along. May 25-June 2, 1998.

Fundació Miró May 1998

Back to Barcelona, 17 years later. What a beautiful trip we had--happy new parents and a healthy, bouncing boy enjoying a (mostly) vacation trip. Back to places I'd visited with Simon, long before I had any idea how much a child can suffer and that he would be that child. Before I knew how diminishing it is to lose the brightest light of your life. Back in 1998 I didn't even know yet what it feels like to have the brightest light turn into two with my second child.

The details: the workshop fell within Miriam's two-week vacation (Pfingsten). We could all go! That is, we could get an apartment in Barcelona, and Markus and Miriam would go shopping and see various sites while I attended the daily two-hour workshop. Most afternoons they could join cultural visits with the poetry group. To boot, Markus had a two-day conference in Toulouse the end of the prior week. He flew there and took a train to Barcelona, where he met me and Miriam at the airport. I stayed on for the last four days alone, while Markus and Miriam returned in time for her to get back to school. Super tidy.

I have so much to process, so much to report. I will be writing a new series here: Barcelona Notebook. It will be more occasional than daily, and it will be my opportunity to reflect on both trips--1998 and 2015. Learnings from a 10-day writing workshop could take forever to settle in. Let's see where this goes. I hope you'll come along!

Thisbe Nissen's reading
recommendations in 2008

Meanwhile, I am back to what I left when I departed. I'm working my way through a re-discovered reading list, given to me by Thisbe Nissen in 2008. Those interlibrary loans burn holes in my night table. I returned the Mangusso and Flynn (I mentioned them on May 18th) before I left for Barcelona. John D'Agata's essay collection Halls of Fame awaited me after the trip. I've been back for "two sleeps" now (as Simon used to say). D'Agata's words go into me like perfectly toasted nuts--irresistible and long in the chewing. For example, the essay about Martha Graham, written as alphabetized portions of dictionary definition. I'd never heard of D'Agata in the summer of 2008 when I talked with Thisbe. That fall I read his anthology The Next American Essay for two classes. I liked it so much I typed up every bit of his interwoven essay introducing the other 32, just to see what it looked like in one piece. (Side note: Thisbe's recommendations are written in three colors of ink. I'm practically certain she was using my four-ink pen, which had actually been Simon's.)

This list is a treasure. Marilyn Ablidskov and Mary Allen, whoever you are, you're next. I've already read the Hood and the Hall (both grief memoirs).

Blogging in E-Prime

As a writer, I practice judicious use of the verb "be," partly out of cultivated habit and partly out of conviction that I express myself more precisely without using forms of "be." I learned the idea during a workshop with Brenda Miller at the 2005 Writers at Work conference. Brenda asked us to write for ten minutes about our earliest memory. Then she directed us to locate all the forms of "be." Can you replace these structures with something more evocative? she asked. "I was short" can become "I couldn't see over the kitchen counter."

The exercise works well as a revision technique, allowing me to let everything onto the page in exploratory drafts, including all forms of "be." For an early re-write technique, I can note the instances of "be" and consider options. Astonishing transitions can occur. Recently, I wrote the sentence, "I was mortified," in a childhood recollection. "Mortified" makes a strong impression, and I thought it might justify using "was" before it. But then I applied the "be" rule and pushed further. How does "mortified" feel? A fiery liquid squirts in my belly. My head twists frantically to see who might be watching. I draw inside and seal my clamshell tight. I run. My mouth goes dry. The "be"-less possibilities promise more sensual imagery.

As a teacher of writing, I encourage my students to work alertly with the verb "be," a practice that helps them identify ineffective use of the passive voice. This evening I talked about the idea over dinner with my husband, who also favors limiting "be" in writing. He tapped on my iPad and brought up the wikipedia entry for E-Prime. All these years of practicing the limitation and I had no idea it had a name and a considerable following.

Of course I have written this blogpost "be"-lessly (and not without some struggle). I found one "mistake" (see below). The "fixed" version drops three words, just from converting the "be" construction into an active verb. If you have a word limit, shaving a couple of words per sentence makes a difference.

Original draft:
This evening I talked about the idea over dinner with my husband, who is also a fan of limiting "be" in writing. (22 words, 111 characters with spaces)

"Be"-less text:
This evening I talked about the idea over dinner with my husband, who also favors limiting "be" in writing. (19 words, 106 characters with spaces)

Did I miss anything else?

Published!

Photo: Markus Vodosek

Today is the day: I am a published author!  Objects of My Attention has been published in the 83rd issue of Quarterly West.

My essay was selected earlier this year as winner of the 2014 Writers at Work Fellowship in literary nonfiction. I'm joined on the "page" of Quarterly West by fiction winner Mil Norman-Risch and poetry winner Molly Spencer. Other contributions of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, new media/visual art, and reviews appear in Issue 83, selected by the editorial staff through their submission process.

Quarterly West (associated with the University of Utah Department of English) has gone completely online. When you visit the QW site, you will find my piece in a hip digital layout. The piece itself is conventionally formatted, but the site around it is visually complex (especially in the version that appears on mobile devices). If that's a bit too much for you, especially in contrast to my subject, you might want to print it out to read (your browser should print without the background).

I am grateful to Robin Hemley for selecting my piece as this year's fellowship winner and to Writers at Work for the time-consuming task of running a competition each year. I'm grateful to Quarterly West for publishing the winning texts. So many people engaged with me as I developed this piece. Nicole Walker, Christopher Merrill, Melanie Rae Thon, Matt Kirkpatrick offered sage teacherly guidance. Many have read and commented: Writers in Stuttgart (especially Cindy, Amy, and Jadi), workshop-mates and classmates, the Craigs (David, Julie, Ann, and Norm), Jim Martin, Anne Adams, audiences at readings in Bad Wimpfen, Oberlin, Alta, and Salt Lake City, and Markus, who lived through these times with me. Steve Woodward (Graywolf) and Emma Komlos-Hrobsky (Tin House) offered spot-on editing advice to make the piece sharper and lither. Miriam, my daughter, expects more of my writing than anyone, and she will continue to drive me until there is a book you can hold in your hands. Simon, whose beauty and struggle have given life to my writing, will always have my loving attention.

Learning from Michael Martone

I first heard of Michael Martone in 2010 during a fiction workshop with Melanie Rae Thon at the University of Utah. He was one of the gurus she cited during the course (English 5510) along with John Edgar Wideman, Carole Maso, William Maxwell, John Berger, and numerous others. He has resided among my files as "EXPERIMENT #8: THE MARVELOUS MICHAEL MARTONE." Melanie's exercise suggests re-imagining a common object (like Martone's "Chatty Cathy Falls into the Wrong Hands" story) or a disturbing historical fact (his "It's Time" essay about people hand-painting clocks with radium) or any revision at all using Martone's "remarkable sense of detail as inspiration for your own work."

Experiment #8 was heavier lifting at the time, what with needing to find the Martone texts in the special coursepack in the English Dept. office, so I'm glad it worked out to meet Michael in person at the 2013 Writers at Work conference and to see him again there this year. He's very entertaining, and the lifting is light indeed when you get to listen to him read or talk. He's likely to make you laugh. Pretty hard.

I want to note that I saw Michael Martone and Melanie Rae Thon in conversation during a break in this year's conference at least once, and I realized the situation: both of their names end with the syllable "tone." So, of course. Not that many names do, after all.

Michael Martone, University of Alabama
Website: http://english.ua.edu/user/84*
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_A._Martone (not the hockey player)
Workshop title: The Four C’s: Cut, Compress, Context and Collage

*a website that appears to contain an actual bio rather than a fictional "contributor's note," however yesterday the site was down and who knows about today?

June 4, Opening Faculty Panel: Why are we writing?

Michael got the conversation going with a reference to William Stafford, who said if you can't write, "lower your standards." Writing is not the same thing as writing in a publishing-oriented way. In fact, Michael deplores the displacement of our sense of the pure value of text. In schools now, children receive coupons for pizza as a reward for reading a book. Not great, Michael says. It used to be that "reading was the pizza."

Michael brought up the "everybody writes" vs. "special people write" divide exemplified by Jack London on the one hand and Henry James and Edith Wharton on the other. He cited critic Frank Norris' dismissal of the "tragedy of the broken teacup" in works such as those of James and Wharton. I located a discussion of this idea in Michael Martone's 2005 book, Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art. I won't pretend to have read the full discussion there, but I share the title because it's emblematic of the sort of thinking Michael does on a rigorous and regular basis: What can be reversed and thought about completely differently?

The idea of publishing is in flux, Michael says. The old "publication equals validation" equation is fading. Now the "means of production" are in the hands of the writers. The concept of vanity publishing is not the same as self-publishing. Roles are intermixing--writer, editor, publisher--cultural "gate-keeping" is less a power of the publishing industry.

The panel ended with comments about genre specialization being too extreme (Robin Hemley) and Ellen Bass' comment that you're a writer if you're writing and not if you're not. Michael gave a push for innovation: look for a new way everyday; the greater culture expects progression.

What I learned about Michael's workshop from my "spies"

As with the fiction workshop, my infiltration of the multi-genre workshop was somewhat desultory. I knew from friends on the inside that things were interesting and fun, but exactly what they were up to, I can't say for sure.

One day at lunch, Chelsea Blackman walked through the dining room with a handful of paint samples, four colors on a strip of paper. She was distributing them for an exercise in the Martone workshop. “I’ll take one!” I said, greedily. I love colors, and paint swatches are a great place to look for color names. So is the Wikipedia List of colors (although it’s alphabetical, not by actual color, which can be tedious) and the Wikipedia List of Crayola crayon colors (which is a trip back into deep memory).

What I forgot to do was ask about the exact assignment. I expect Michael had something specific and perhaps counterintuitive in mind. Nonetheless, I’ve done the exercise. I did it this way: use all four color names in a text. What I enjoy about this sort of prompt is the way it challenges me to imagine things I've never seen before and to play them out for a little while. Here's my text.

Luncheon 

A silver half dollar, soldered on the underside to an unseen ring, gleamed from its perch atop the rolled cloth napkin, next to a setting of silver salad fork, fork, empty white plate with dimpled rim, knife, and soup spoon. A Kennedy profile, staring off to the left: round and round the table, the Kennedy napkin rings stared. 

The napkin, sharply pointed top and bottom, slid out from the ring and opened as a white diamond, corners folded toward the middle like envelope flaps. A veritable lap robe, so large and crisp and white. 

Tall cylindrical glasses, filled moments ago with water over perfectly square cubes of ice, sweated in a ring at the interior of the table, just inches from a silver platter beneath the central arrangement of lilies. Light from the window bounced off the platter, pierced the glass, and projected a peculiar illusion: iced cube silver. 

Knees and thighs brushed against chantilly lace. Ice rattled in glass. John F. Kennedies rolled sideward. Crisp damask sails snapped open and disappeared. Lilies dropped crumbly dark pollen. Teeth thudded on silverware. Forks clanked against porcelain. Breadcrumbs lodged in crochet. Ice vanished. Coffee spoons dripped. Napkins fell like white mountain ranges when knees pulled back and away from lace.

(Now I wonder if I ought to have included or not included a broken teacup...)

June 6, Reading by Michael Martone on Friday night

I spent Michael's reading being a pleasing mixture of baffled and entertained--so much so that my notes are spare. He gets you thinking, for example about "the four nows." That's the now of the story, the now of writing, the now of reading, and the now of talking about the above. Concepts like "now" find themselves on shifting ground. Michael led off the reading with a few "Contributor's Notes," familiar from his reading last year and fun to hear again. He's created a small genre: false or perhaps semi-true biographies that follow the form of the literary bio. When asked for an "actual" contributor's note for the real back section of a book, he tends to send another of this genre instead.

Michael read from a series of 25-word memos, a form that derives at least half its power from the titles (which are exempt from the word limit and tend to be hilarious). No notes; I was laughing.

Ditto for whatever he read called "Amish in Space"--a collage piece that falls under "Indiana Science Fiction" and puts Amish space travelers in no gravity with livestock.

The Martone book I purchased at the conference is The Blue Guide to Indiana. I believe he read from it (about the Bob Ross Museum) because my notes indicate that and I've heard Michael read that bit before, but I have a blank spot in my memory from this particular evening--could I have been so completely entertained as to not remember it? (So it goes). The Blue Guide is a "fake" travel guide. I haven't read it the full book yet, so I'll just give you Melanie Rae Thon's blurb from the back jacket: "Michael Martone is a man with a mission, a fabulous inventor of history and memory, landscape and people. His quirky, magical tours hurl the reader across the borders between fact and fiction into a country of the mind where what we desire and fear fills our senses. Take the tops of your convertibles and fly! Trust The Blue Guide to Indiana to point you to some of the most delightful places on the planet."

Michael concluded his reading with something quite new: Four for a Quarter (as in the old-style photo booth where the camera took four separate shots in rapid succession). He called it fictions of things in fours. The piece he read is called "Four in Hand" and talks about knots in neckties: Windsor, Bow, Half-Windsor, and Four in Hand. The piece is very touching--how he knotted ties over the years for his father, who died earlier this year. Michael told me my own reading the evening before about my son's death had given him a nudge to present this work.

More on this topic, Michael has just had a photograph called "Curtains: My Father Dying, April 8, 2014" published by Ascent magazine, complete with a contributor's note.

June 8, Closing faculty panel: How we got here and where do we go from here?

Michael presented collage, one of the topics addressed in his workshop, near the opening of the panel discussion. It's about juxtaposition and recontextualization. Found objects, natural collaging, randomness, fragments, association, improvisation. It favors velocity (not perfection). One of my favorite quotes of the conference: "Quantity not quality." To underscore the point, Michael cited Joseph Stalin's position on military tanks: "quantity has a quality all its own." Michael advised us to think of the work as expansive. "Write this and move on."

Another favorite one-liner I've already shared with writer friends: "Remember, a page a day is a book a year."

When asked about stepping out of genre, Michael said the human impulse is to order and sort. He encouraged us to confuse and rearrange. Rather than accepting categories like "good" and "bad," he said we need to "worry the categories." He stressed, as he had in the opening panel, to find in writing a different value than commodity.

I now see that my notes do not contain a "favorite exercise" from Michael Martone. Is this another black hole in my note-taking, or have we in fact been short changed here? Some category worrying going on right now...

I can report that I applied learnings from Michael almost immediately (in addition to the stolen paint chip). The day after the conference ended, my last day on US soil for an undetermined period of time, I finally made it to Nordstrom Rack, where I tried on some summer dresses. In the end, I couldn't make up my mind. So, I bought three. That's what you meant, Michael, about quantity and tanks, right?

Learning from Lawrence Coates

Lawrence Coates writes, among other things, about California wine country. Living near hillside vineyards here in Germany, I took an instant interest purely because of the subject matter. That and his affiliation with Bowling Green University in my home state of Ohio. Over the course of the conference I appreciated his particular note of inquiry and unusual perspective. He's reminded me that a lot can happen when you bring "unrelated" ideas together.

Website: www.lawrencecoates.com
Workshop title: The Story and the Novel--Forms and Variations

June 4, Opening Faculty Panel: Why are we writing?

Lawrence commented that some people write from tragedy and pain (I would count myself in that group), but that he writes primarily out of inquiry, out of not necessarily accepting what's taken to be "real." He writes historical novels. Writing is a means of understanding the self as one of many; of locating the stories of others; of exploring how people live in relation to the natural world in the place he comes from. Similar to Ellen Bass (and her comment picked up from Lawrence's), Lawrence says writing is about the pleasure of making.

What I learned about Lawrence's workshop from my "spies"

Well, I didn't have any official spies that I grilled about the fiction workshop. We heard from several participants during Open Mic readings, and I was moved, entertained and impressed by what I heard. Fiction writers create worlds without hanging on to actually occurring or already occurred realities. In my own writing (so far) I remain so connected to rendering actual events that this ability to create worlds is a marvel to me. I read a good deal of fiction, but I wonder if I will ever grow the muscles to write it.

Despite the lack of spy activity, I have located one of the fiction workshop activities based on texts Lawrence shared during his reading and in a posting he made on Facebook right after the conference. He described the exercise as picking an improbable image to write to. The images are generated by a group of writers together. Then each picks one to write about in 500 words. I'm sure if you try one of these prompts, he'd be delighted to hear from you.

From a June 9, 2014 Facebook post by Lawrence Coates:

"If anyone who has done a common image story with me is interested, my group came up with three new prompts at Writers @ Work. The rules are simple... you have to write a short short, 500 words or less, with one of these images included:
1) Baby doll in a wheelchair.
2) Panties in a pine tree
3) Pizza in the rain.
It seems that one of the shorts I read there, 'Lobster in the Laundromat,' made an impression. At least, one of the other faculty members said that his students were talking about it."

He's right, "Lobster in the Laundromat" made an impression on me and others. I've looked for a published version to link to, but I haven't turned one up yet. My current lead is a literary magazine called Lake Effect. However, it is print only, and the website does not indicate the issue that contains the Lobster story. I'll update this entry when I get the information.

June 6, Reading by Lawrence Coates on Friday night

Lawrence opened his reading with two of these short shorts. The first, "Bats in Purses" and the second, "The Lobster in the Laundromat." Both pieces carried compelling and bizarre imagery. It stays with me, the picture of a lobster watching clothes circle around beyond the glass door of a washer. The good news is that another piece, The Trombone in the Shopping Cart, was just published by Ascent. It's different from the Lobster, but the stories share an aching loneliness--the loneliness of being overlooked--that pierced me when I listened to the reading.

During the second part of his reading, Lawrence read the first chapter of his newest novel, The Garden of the World. While researching a previous novel, he'd come across an historical event that he chose to be the ending of this novel. (I won't say what the event was; you might find it more interesting to discover for yourself.) He conceded that some of the research for this winemaking novel was "liquid and pleasurable." When he mentioned the "fruiting canes" of the grape vines in the second paragraph, I became alert: here was my chance to learn English terminology about vineyards, since I've learned most of it in German.

This novel was the Coates book I purchased. I started it on the airplane home and finished it a few days ago. The pages are filled with sweeping and intimate scenery, with period detail in buildings, clothing and vehicles, and with characters that fully inhabit three dimensional space. Most of the chapters are subdivided into morsels of scene and image. The events accumulate in a way that feels close to life--memorable segments add up while the stuff in between fades away. There's lightness in the language--not in the sense of lacking content but in the sense of moving easily, without being weighted down. Here's a sample from a World War I battlefield in Chapter Two "Loyalty Day" (page 17):

       "There was only one tree still standing in the cratered earth between the two trenches, a stumpy, unidentifiable tree, with most of its branches and leaves blown off, more like the memory of where a tree had been than anything yet living. ...
        Then, suddenly, the tree was lit from within, a great tower of light from in the heart of it, illuminating it to the tip of its crippled branches. Gill remembered very clearly that sudden light."

June 8, Closing faculty panel: How we got here and where do we go from here?

Bouncing off Ellen Bass' comment about looking for multiple metaphor options (rather than aiming at some ultimately "right" one), Lawrence shared a technique he uses to get clarity about a character. Define the character by generating ideas this way: "S/he's the kind of person who _____________." Like metaphor, these ideas need to stay on the level of the concrete. He gave an example of the character Meyer Wolfsheim in the Great Gatsby, a man who wears cuff links made of human molars.

As a favorite exercise, Lawrence offered the disparate image activity described above. Another image possibility: Wedding Cake in the Road. Although I haven't tried it yet, the exercise reminds me of a prompt I've tried from Brian Kiteley's 3A.M. Epiphany. This link to Kiteley's website will direct you to some exercises from his new book, the 4A.M. Breakthough. Similar concept. Exercise 15 in the 3A.M. Epiphany instructs the writer 1) to develop a vivid, haunting image; 2) to develop a second, unrelated compelling image; 3) to write a story fragment out of the two images together (600 words). I was astonished at the energy of this when I tried it several years ago. I'm guessing the disparate image idea has a similar source of tension and creativity.

I'm always grateful for creative impulses from fiction writers and especially from writers as generous and pleasant as Lawrence Coates.

Learning from Ellen Bass

The 2014 Writers at Work conference (June 4-8 at Alta Lodge in Utah) featured four workshop instructors: Ellen Bass (poetry), Michael Martone (multi-genre), Lawrence Coates (fiction), and Robin Hemley (literary nonfiction).

As a participant in Robin Hemley's workshop, I spent the most time learning directly from him about the genre I write in: nonfiction/memoir. However, I made it my business to learn as much as I could from the other three instructors as well. I listened carefully during faculty panels and readings. I made use of "spies" in each of the other workshops. I took advantage of opportunities for conversation at meals, in the hot tub, and walking down the halls.

Reflecting on five intensive days spent in the midst of writers takes some time, especially after the travel I did in May and June (Oberlin, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, and Alta during three weeks in the US). The next trip, barely a week after I returned to Germany, took me to Austria for busy days of family visiting and music performance in celebration of Markus' parents' 50th wedding anniversary. If it weren't for the distraction of World Cup soccer in Brazil, I might be digesting my conference experience more swiftly. But that temptation is too great, and I enjoy watching the games.

My idea is to share what I learned from this year's conference faculty, each of whom has sent me forth with impulses and energy for my work. I want to begin with the poet, Ellen Bass.

Website: http://www.ellenbass.com
Workshop title: When I Met My Muse

June 4, Opening Faculty Panel: Why are we writing?

Ellen offered a good, basic reason for writing: because you want to. She compared writing to making a mudpie--something you do for the primitive satisfaction of making. "If you love sentences, then you can write." She considers writers to be "people for whom writing is more difficult" and she sees writing "as a way to pay attention, notice more deeply." When terrible things happen, she said, write.

When the discussion moved on to writing about challenging topics, Ellen encouraged us to be bold. "Nothing is taboo; you have to be brave to reveal, to be controversial, to write things somebody thinks you shouldn't be writing (or another part of you thinks you shouldn't)." She said she thinks of herself as being in the special olympics and trying to do her best there. It's an honor to be in the lineage--you put your pebble, not necessarily a boulder, on the altar of writing.

Ellen also spoke about facing ignorance--our own and "dumb questions" from others. I liked a term she used: you develop "functional calluses" against what others might say; you learn to give stock answers. If I understand my notes correctly, Ellen indicated an energy about her own ignorance--that it means she always has something to bring to the "blank page," something to work on.

In closing, she offered: "If you're writing, you're a writer. If you stop writing, you're not a writer. The whole game is to keep writing."

What I learned about Ellen's workshop from my "spies"

My lodge roommate, Katharine English, and workshop mates Star Coulbrooke and Natalie Taylor from last year's conference (during which I boldly joined the poets for the three days of workshop led by Katharine Coles) kept me apprised of their progress in the poetry workshop. Notably: Ellen structured each of the three days to include a two-hour writing block. Participants wrote a new poem each day. (To those of us in "workshop method" critique-based sessions, where you can learn a great deal but you must then apply the learning on your own later, this opportunity to generate work inspired some envy.) We heard several of these new works during Open Mic readings.

The second thing my spies raved about in Ellen's workshop was her critique method. For a given poem, the critique began with an opportunity for participants to praise the work in question. Then Ellen carefully, kindly, wisely and thoroughly offered a spot-on critique. I believe I can picture this process, but I would have enjoyed seeing it in action.

Finally--and quite amazingly for me--my own writing found its way into the poetry workshop. As described in the June 11 post The night I read at Alta Lodge, my Thursday night reading had a direct connection to Ellen's topic for Friday's workshop: Sentiment vs. Sentimentality. (I.e., emotion is present in the writing without relying on expressions like "It was terrible.") My fellowship-winning essay, "Objects of My Attention," goes into intimacies and detail about my son's death to cancer and about my ensuing grief. The topic is loaded with sentiment--knock-you-out-at-the-knees sad and awful experiences--but the writing is object-based, specific and unsensational. Over and over at lunch on Friday, poetry workshop participants enthusiastically told me how often they had referred to my writing in their discussion that morning.

June 7, Reading by Ellen Bass on Saturday night

Ellen read from her poetry collection Like a Beggar. As I generally do, I scribbled along while listening. She began with a lovely assertion: "Poetry is one way of choosing joy." Katherine Coles offered a similar sentiment last year. I believe I am beginning to see over the edge and into the deep poetry well of joy. Here are the snippets of language that made it into my notebook.

"breasts that remember the sting and flush of milk"

          "the backyard potatoes swell quietly"

"as darkness was sinking back into the earth"

         about killing chickens, Ellen said, "I loved the truth"

"rhododendron blossoming its pink ceremony"

          "the moon rinsing the parked cars"

I allowed myself to purchase one book by each of the faculty (watching my luggage weight limit). I chose Like a Beggar.

June 8, Closing faculty panel: How we got here and where do we go from here?

During the final panel, Ellen stressed the concept of discovery. "If you get to the end of the page and you have only written what you already know, then you haven't written yet. Allow the poem to have its way with you. The poem is smarter than you are." In her workshop, she said they focused on finding sentiment, not bland statement. She cited neurological studies that support the idea that sensory detail activates brain response. In workshop they looked at metaphor, and her advice is just write a bunch and select later rather than tunneling toward the "right one."

Example: After reviewing these notes, I tried the metaphor idea. I'm struggling in one piece of writing to describe a certain Christmas tree decoration typical of my Austrian relatives: special chocolates wrapped in fringed tissue paper, hanging as ornaments on the tree. How to describe that tissue paper wrapping, the fringe? I've tried pompoms. No. My sister-in-law suggested those fringed papers at then ends of chicken drumsticks. No. (A Christmas tree covered in chicken legs?!) So (sitting on the toilet) I let my mind wander. I saw the toilet brush. Then in sequence: hairbrush, toilet brush, street sweeper, car wash scrubbers flapping around, anemone in water. Hmm. Could I use the idea of anemones? Then I saw the color palette of the tissue paper as that of tropical fish. It's quite accurate. Perhaps I can make use of this association. Perhaps I'm still looking.

Another Ellen-ism from the panel: Why make a fool of yourself? Why not make a fool of yourself?

An audience question from Lori Lee, a member of the nonfiction workshop, yielded a true bonanza of inspiring exercise ideas. I am so grateful to Lori for asking the question. Ellen contributed a series of "writing prompts that bring up a lot."

1. Write a scene when father (or other) comes home at the end of the work day when you are a child. This sort of "poem of the moment" has the best odds of working out as a poem.

2. Discovery is best when it "just happens," but when it doesn't, you can be aggressive about discovery. Ask your poem: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" If it says "I don't know" then look at its "test scores" and say (like a school guidance counselor) "maybe you can be this."

3. Imitations. Do them tight or loose. Try same syllable count. Imitate metaphor and image, reflective statement. "Suck DNA out of the poem. Steal its exuberance." As a poet, you absorb rhythms in your cells, especially from older poetry. Appropriate as much into your body as you can.

4. Practice before you begin work every day: write ten lines of iambic pentameter. It can be nonsense. Use the practice to walk through the door of poetry.

I tried this on June 26 during a writing group session:

To sit and think and write and look and breathe

I go to Cindy's garden hut and reach

my arms too high to write, my elbow up

my shoulder slant; I angle chin and line

of neck to accommodate this chair, this desk--

a table rounded, brown and formed to look

like wood, like walnut, eb'ny, something dark

but plastic, meant for outdoor use in rain

or sun, still new because the garden's new--

a hiding place with birdsong, breeze and light.

5. Gather suggestions and prompts from writing books for exercises, put cut up slips into a basket, pick one before bed at nigh. That's your assignment for tomorrow.

6. Purposely write something bad (150-200 words). "To write not bad, you should avoid using adverbs." If you succeed, you have managed to create a "good badness." The exercise can disable anxiety about your intent (what you want to do) and performance (what you do do). "If you write bad well, you can feel good about it." (I've tried this before, and it can be a lot of fun.)

My gratitude and admiration go to Ellen Bass for her gifts at the conference. I wish I'd taken the opportunity to speak with her directly. Somehow the time went by--and I missed my chance for an autograph in her book. However, I was paying attention!

I'll close with one more mention. I left the conference with poetry inspiration, quite probably because of Ellen's reading on the last evening. The next day, back in Salt Lake City and getting ready to re-pack for the flight home, I happened on a poetry prompt on my friend Seema Reza's blog. Instead of packing, I wrote a poem from the prompt. Then over the next days (including endless hours in airports and planes) I fiddled with a relining/rewrite of the poem to give it a visual shape. In the end, the first poem is the best because it holds the energy. But it's amazing how far you can travel in re-expressing ideas and adding/removing syllables or letters to fit a concept. If your eyes haven't fallen out already from this long post, head over to Seema's blog and read my poem versions in the comments on her June 2 post called Normal. Then stay on her blog to read her June 11 stop on the Blog Tour.

The night I read at Alta Lodge (2014 Writers at Work fellowship in literary nonfiction, part 2)

Up in the Wasatch mountains, toward the top of Little Cottonwood Canyon at 8,530 feet (2,600 meters), I spent five days in a rustic lodge with a group of writers. We collect here to listen and talk, read and write, exercise our intellects and our emotions, and a walk outside if we make the time. It's the Writers at Work annual conference, this year featuring workshops with Robin Hemley in nonfiction (my group), Michael Martone in multi-genre, Ellen Bass in poetry, and Lawrence Coates in fiction. Participants share in afternoon open-mic readings (a good place to start, as I did at a 2006 W@W conference back at Westminster College in Salt Lake City). In the evenings, we hear readings from the faculty, guest writers, and the year's fellowship winners.

It's behind me now, and I still can't quite believe I was one of the readers on Thursday night, along with Mil Norman-Risch (fiction), Molly Spencer (poetry) and Rachael Weaver (guest writer). What a night. I was glad I had practiced reading for audiences. For a final dress, I hiked alone up the mountainside in the afternoon and spoke the text once to stony cliffs. All went well. In sharing this intimate, sacred text about my family's life and my son's death, I gather strength.

The next morning, I journaled. This bit of writing struck me as I reviewed my notes while flying home to Germany, yesterday to today. From the transatlantic flight, I've shared photos out my window in a new slide show: Sunset to Sunrise.

Sunset to Sunrise slide show

To move this post along, I'd like to quote my notebook from the morning after my reading at Alta.

June 6, 2014, 7:12 am, Alta Lodge

For weeks I'd steered myself toward the date of June 5th, my reading of my essay about Simon's death at the Writers at Work conference. Today is June 6th.

I'd set my alarm for 6:45, just in case, expecting I would rouse earlier, naturally with things to write on my mind (my blog, comments for workshop). But the electronic marimba twiddled its pattern of notes and tore me from far under.

No sign of my roommate. Blankness in my mind first. Then remembering to roll to one side of the bed to quiet my iPad alarm to the other side for my thyroid pill. Is the dose related to the faucet of sweat, only worse since coming to the Salt Lake Valley from Ohio, worse since coming up in the mountains? In Germany it's been only moderately bothersome (or I've stopped caring). Here I'm switching shirt, bra and underwear 2-3 times a day, grateful they dry out again so fast, doubting cotton after all--sweat soaks my cotton armpits dankly and the microfiber bra stays near-dry.

It was my neck I felt in the morning, though, mis-angled on the pillow, a ruler inserted from mid-shoulder up through the side neck toward my skull, both sides, pressing muscle, nerve. Familiar pain. I cope by expecting I can't relieve it--only by getting up, beginning things, taking my mind other places. The pain has become part of me, like my brown eyes.

Brushing teeth I closed my eyes into a weeping--into the empty-other of after-the-anticipation. I had done it, that reading. Stood in the restaurant turned event room, held a wired microphone in my right hand, steadied the shaking atop my right breast, wished for a camelback tube to suck on as my mouth dried to paste but raised the light plastic cup with a quivery left hand to sip only when I could truly break, but not during Part One when I needed it most because it was better to lose my B-sounds and R's to the stickiness of mouth flesh than to stop anywhere in that long piece of cloth.

There are many gratifying outcomes from the reading. So much support for both story and writing. The next morning, members of the poetry workshop stopped me at lunch to say they'd been discussing my work as an example of sentiment vs. sentimentality. My work was a literary reference!

People ask me how I can do it, read this difficult text out loud. The answer is this: I believe in the words, one after the next. By giving these words to an attentive, absorptive audience, I find the energy I need.

A choir friend, Renate, from Salt Lake City drove up for the reading with her sister. They are German, and we conversed a while "auf Deutsch" afterward. I walked them out to the sidewalk, where we leaned on a railing and gazed at the half moon. Renate began to sing: Der Mond ist aufgegangen. I joined her for a verse, holding the melody to her ornamentation. I turned to her and said, I just want you to know, that was Simon's favorite German lullaby. He used to ask for it: Mo' gange.

That lullaby was part of Simon's memorial service in Salt Lake City on August 28, 2004. Soprano Carol Ann Allred and pianist David Owens performed. I've linked to the full text, with English translation, at Simon's Place. It's a beautiful, thoughtful, quiet text worth reading. Don't miss the photo at the bottom of the page showing our sweet four-year-old Miriam.

The blog tour (and some complicated stuff I do when I write)

Today I’m officially joining a blog tour. I want to thank Natalie Taylor for inviting me. She and I became friends during the 2013 Writers at Work conference in Katharine Coles’ poetry workshop. Natalie’s forthcoming chapbook, Eden’s Edge, is one subject of her blog: Eden on the Edge. I had the pleasure of sharing a reading with Natalie last week in Salt Lake City. Her poems (some of them) meander through imagery and concepts of the Garden of Eden. Others travel through (sometimes appropriated) childhood memories. She shared perhaps eight poems (I was listening, not counting). I am eager to read the full chapbook. Thank you, Natalie, for thinking of me and tagging me for the tour. Natalie’s blog tour post about her own writing process is here.

Natalie Taylor reading at First Unitarian Church
in Salt Lake City on May 29, 2014

I’ve done a few minutes of research to locate the origin of this particular blog tour. I don’t believe I found it, but I did find sites that promote Book Blog Tours and Blog Book Tours. Authors can tour their books from blog to blog as a means of widening their audience instead of or in addition to traveling city to city to read and sign books. If this particular blog tour started that way, I believe it has now become something else, perhaps like a game of whispered telephone. Natalie was asked by a writer friend, and then Natalie asked me. My task is to answer four questions about writing and pass the tour along to writer friends of mine. It’s like a game of tag. In my case, there’s no book to promote, not yet. Although my forthcoming publication in Quarterly West of my fellowship-winning essay will be a sturdy start.

Here are the blog tour’s four questions.

1) What am I working on?

I am writing a lived story. Perhaps it is a memoir. Perhaps it is essays that approach the topic in various ways. The life experience that brought me to writing is the illness and death of my son. One ongoing project is a chronological draft of the story, which I began in November 2013 by writing 50,000+ words during National Novel Writing Month (I blogged about NaNoWriMo on November 23, 2013 and November 28, 2013). That project has stalled around 130,000 words. I drafted chapters on conceiving a child, being pregnant, giving birth, parenting and breastfeeding, giving birth again, parenting and breastfeeding even more. Around mid-December, as I continued drafting, I reached the time of Simon’s diagnosis, and the narrative became much more difficult to write. I find myself splintering into multiple (possibly interesting, often evasive) directions. It is difficult. 9/11 happened. My friend Sally’s father died of prostate cancer. A month later we discovered Simon, at age four and a half, had an aggressive form of cancer.

2) How does my work differ from other of its genre?

I need to identify my genre before I can answer this question. The quick answer is “memoir”. Another answer is “creative nonfiction”, which my husband, Markus, recently misremembered in an informative way: “fictitious non-creation”. Maybe I’ll go with that.

There are a few books (Hannah’s Gift by Maria Housden, Comfort by Ann Hood) written by mothers who grieve a child lost very young. Neither one feels to me like what I’m doing, but I’m not done yet. Uncommon as child loss is in our society, we know how common it is in human history. I believe Housden and Hood each provide a response to this dichotomy of the universality and deep personalization of mother-grief. I believe my work will offer an additional unique response.

Joan Didion’s two books on loss and grief, on being a wife and being a mother, also feel connected to what I’m working on. The Year of Magical Thinking was published in 2005 not long after I first read Didion and not long after my son died (2004). I recall waiting for a turn on a library copy. The backdrop to Didion’s exploration of walking forward after her husband’s sudden heart attack and death is their daughter’s ongoing hospitalization. Blue Nights, sadly, chronicles the death of her adult daughter, about a year after her husband’s death. The New York Times review of Blue Nights calls Didion a “connoisseur of catastrophe”. Yes, I believe that’s what draws me to her and to Annie Dillard (especially Holy the Firm). I need companions in catastrophe. I hope one day I will write as powerfully.

3) Why do I write what I do?

I can’t stand not to. The experience gestates within me. I carry it. On a day I can’t yet imagine (just like anticipating a birth), I will bring it fully into the world.

4) How does my writing process work?

I journal. I draft. I do very well when I’m in a workshop or a class and someone gives me an assignment, preferably a very smart one. In my current chronological draft, I have avoided doing “research” by looking in my older journals or digging out the binders of medical records and notes from Simon’s illness. I’m looking for the story as I remember it. Occasionally, I consult a photo or the updates my husband and I posted at Simon’s Place. Sometimes I use a date calculator or calendar to help me remember things such as what day of the week Christmas fell on in a given year.

As I return to the initial drafts, I add material. I look for the places that hold energy and write more to uncover what’s underneath. I share parts with my writing group for input. Sometimes there are multiple drafts to combine. Inevitably, the writing process reveals things to me: things I had quite forgotten (often poignant), disparities between the memories in my head and actual documents (photos, videos, writings), and filtering of experience through media (I remember a certain photo or video segment, I realize, instead of remembering the event itself).

Here is an example. For the Writers at Work workshop with Robin Hemley starting on June 4^th, I have put together a manuscript using an idea from my (as I call it) NaNoWriMo draft. The time of Simon’s diagnosis and illness presents writing and emotional challenges. One approach I tried was to tell the story in four consecutive Christmases from 2001-2004 (from diagnosis to after his death). From an initial five or six paragraphs about each of the four Christmases, I explored and expanded each part. I wrote about earlier Christmases. I had pages and pages. Then—I thought this was a clever idea—I decided to make each section take the form of “flash nonfiction”, which will be the focus of the workshop with Robin Hemley. “Flash” is variously defined, but let’s call it concise writing that’s under 750 words (sometimes under 1,000 and sometimes even shorter). The challenge of re-condensing my expanded material did a couple of things. It made me cut, cut, cut. It made me find efficient modes of expression. And it confused the hell out of me.

Christmas 2002 ended up absorbing some of the “earlier Christmas” material, but out of chronological order. To begin reducing and integrating, I went at my various drafts with a Sharpie marker, blacking out everything but the words that had to stay. I snipped the pages into segments with their handwritten notes and highlighter scribbles and then taped them together in a new order. I threw some parts away. In the end, I had a four-foot long strip.

Work very much in process, May 2014

I rolled the strip like a scroll to clear it aside. The next morning, when it was time to write the new draft, I attempted to unroll the thing and spread it out on a corner of my desk. It rolled back on itself. Then I had an idea: what if I leave it rolled up and simply reveal it bit by bit as I write? (Think Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and John McPhee’s article Structure in the New Yorker). I steadied the thing by winding it around a roll of paper towel. Bit by bit, I arrived at a new draft. The roll, I discovered, relieved the intimidation factor of writing the whole section anew because it revealed just one workable bit at a time. My goal became to finish the scroll, and I did.

If you click on the photo to view it larger, you can read
some of the scribbles and the type.

Often, that is how I write. Sometimes, though, I get an energetic first draft that holds. My essay for the Writers at Work fellowship begins with paragraphs I wrote as an exercise for a class. The essay’s opening sentence comes whole from that quick draft. I posted the original exercise on Simon’s Place in an entry from November 7, 2009.

Passing the blog tour on to the next writers

Seema Reza is a poet and essayist based outside of Washington, DC, where she coordinates and facilitates a unique multi-hospital arts program that encourages the use of the arts as a tool for narration, self-care and socialization among a population struggling with emotional and physical injuries. She serves as a council member-at-large for the Transformative Language Arts Network. She is at work on a forthcoming book of poetry and prose. I met Seema in 2012 during a Writers at Work conference in a nonfiction workshop led by Steve Almond. In May of 2014 our paths crossed again at the Creative Nonfiction conference in Pittsburgh. Her blog is Seema Reza—Reading and Writing.

Nicole Trick Steinbach goes by the name of Pickle in the blogosphere. Also known as Mrs. Steinbach (Frau Steinbach), also known as Mommy, also known as Nicole, she is an American, living and working in Germany since early 2003. Her two children regularly inspire hilarious blog posts; too bad she usually falls asleep before she, you know, blogs them. Nicole and I met obliquely through the online ex-pat community Toytown Germany because we were both looking for a writers group. We found we lived in the same general quadrant of Germany and created our own group for two until her first child was born. I am proud to say that when I offered support for her breastfeeding in the early months, Nicole (and her son) really “ate up” the advice I was able to give. Nicole’s blog is Pickles and Onions. Head on over to find out who Onion is.

Ladies, I give you the tour torch. I’m eager to read your posts.

Interview posted & Upcoming reading

As one the winners of this year's fellowship competition, I have done an interview with Writers at Work. Toward the end of the interview, I describe an artwork I saw at the Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart in November 2012. It's called Mitten (Middle) by Katharina Hinsberg. You can find additional views here if you scroll down the page. The Kunstmuseum is a marvelous glass cube at Schlossplatz, and Wikipedia has a few photos of the building to see.

And, next week I'll be doing my first public reading of my essay "Objects of My Attention." I am delighted to be hosted by my friend Peggy Fehily, proprietor of the Cornwall Tearoom. If you are anywhere near Bad Wimpfen, Germany and you have time on Monday evening, please join us. The reading will of course be in English.

Mary Craig, winner of the 2014 Writers at Work Fellowship
in Literary Nonfiction, will read her prize-winning essay
"Objects of My Attention"

18:30-19:30     Gathering time (light food available for purchase)

19:30-20:15     Reading

20:15-21:00     Desserts and discussion

Cover charge 5 EUR, which includes tea/soft drinks all evening.
Savory refreshments available for purchase.

For more info and to register please contact:

peggy@cornwall-tearoom.de

Hauptstr. 50
74206 Bad Wimpfen
Tel: 07063-3449867

One of the pleasures of knowing writers

My friend Kate Jarvik Birch launched her first book on Kindle this week. Deliver Me (Bloomsbury Spark) is an eighteen-chapter ride through an imagined future you don't ever want to see. I bought it last night. Read three chapters. Slept. Read another five before breakfast. It's a holiday today (Tag der Arbeit in Germany or Labor Day) and the first day in ages that we've had steady rain. Perfect for splitting the rest of my day into reading more, then joining a friend's birthday gathering for few hours, and coming home to finish the final chapters. Yes, Kate is a friend and I am motivated to read her book. But me reading a book in under 24 hours--that's a rare event. The story moves with speed and compelling tension, and the characters are intriguing. There's a nice blend of the predictable (you make some good guesses) and the unpredictable (things just aren't that easy in this imagined world).

"Deliver Me" is written for a Young Adult audience, and it's available as an eBook and as an Audiobook. I wouldn't let the YA categorization discourage any adults from reading it. The book is both thought-provoking and enjoyable as a narrative.

The Union, the country in which the story takes place, is an entity unto itself. It feels clearly totalitarian and it obliterates the individual. The characters constantly fear running afoul of the authorities, and the punishments are as grisly as in Margaret Atwood's "Handmaid's Tale", which shares some themes about human reproduction in a strained future context. Wynne, the protagonist, is an especially free-minded character, and she tells the story as its first person narrator. We learn her secrets. She is also inclined to share confidences with other characters. These conversations occur in hallways, group bedrooms, laundry facilities. The characters take pains not to be overheard by others in the room, but no one seems concerned that a room might be bugged. No one looks out for surveillance cameras. I like what the no-technology aspect does for the story telling (a lot happens in dialogue), but I kept getting that "watch out!" tension inside myself, wondering who might hear or see the characters when they are taking risks in their talk and actions.

I guess my one "problem" with the novel's imagined world is this low-tech aspect. There's a mention that the Old World existed several hundred years ago. I take to mean our current world, putting this future one maybe 300 years from now. As far as I can tell, we have to imagine this future as a place without computers and surveillance cameras and recording devices. Of course that's possible--that the future would be less technologically equipped than the present--but the idea caught me up a few times. Still, it didn't diminish my enjoyment of the story.

Even more than for a good story, I read for image and insight. I'm not widely read in YA literature, so I can't compare "Deliver Me" to many other books. (I did read John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars" last fall, and for my taste, I'd rather be reading Kate Birch. I've also read "The Hunger Games". Both of those successful sellers offer plenty of suspense and troubling stuff to keep you reading, but neither author is particularly poetic (and Green's plot contains some clumsy choices). Nothing stopped me in those books to savor the language. "Deliver Me" required a highlighter. Some quotes:

"I'd never seen so much water up close before; couldn't have imagined the way the early sun shone off of it, throwing the light against the little ripples so the surface glittered; a million shards of gleaming glass." (Loc 386, vivid light!) 

"Overall, the room looked the way I imagined one of the Carriers' bedrooms would look, were it not for the table lined with shiny doctor's instruments sitting next to the bed and a few tall machines whose cords cluttered the polished floor." (Loc 602, I've seen those tall machines and the cord cluttered floor) 

"You know when you wake up from a dream and you remember that something happened in it. You remember that there was a place, but then when you try to really remember, try to put it into words, it drifts away." (Loc 954, exactly what happens when I want to tell about a dream) 

Dialogue spoken by Tamsin: "They used to love fresh eggs for breakfast. That's what I was thinking about, before…when you came in…how they used to get up early each morning and fetch the eggs so they could have breakfast waiting for me when I woke up. It was a real memory. Not just a picture…" (Loc 1733, the work and the joy of remembering the dead)

Kate Jarvik Birch

I've been impressed with Kate Birch ever since I met her in 2007 at a Writers at Work conference workshop in nonfiction. We both came with stories about difficult times with a child. Hers was about her youngest going missing for hours, only to be found later the same day to great relief. Mine was about the day my son went through major surgery for cancer. There was an irony we both saw: her essay was called something like "The Worst Thing that Could Happen" and mine was called "The Best Possible Outcome". Kate's daughter was found. We were not so lucky; Simon died two years after the surgery day. We've been friends ever since that summer and companions in writing. Kate's blog is called My Next Life. She's a mom of three, a wife, a visual artist, and a prolific thinker and observer of the world. Pay her a visit and read this new book!

2014 Writers at Work Fellowship in Literary Nonfiction (part 1)

I attended the Writers at Work annual conference for the first time in 2005. I was a website-writer (I hadn't adopted the word "blogger" yet). Together with my husband, Markus, I had posted photos and written updates about our son's life with cancer at Simon's Place from 2001-2004. Simon died when he was seven. In the early years after his death, I wrote about grief. I posted little movies of him (pre-YouTube). I wrote up quotations of things Simon said, gathered from journals and bits of paper. I archived his life.

At the 2005 Writers at Work conference, which took place at Westminster College in my Salt Lake City neighborhood, I took Brenda Miller's workshop in nonfiction. We wrote imitations (like painters copying masterworks). We wrote from memory. I "met" Joan Didion and Bernard Cooper. A year later in 2006, I worked with Jesse Lee Kercheval in a generative workshop* in which we wrote fiction, poetry, prose poetry, and nonfiction over five intensive days.

The 2007 Writers at Work nonfiction workshop was in the hands of Chris Cokinos. Chris was a non-stop source of reading recommendations, and I chased many titles down. I was on my way from being a person who had never heard of Vivian Gornick or Mary Karr to someone who had read their work. That was the year I realized I needed more than a great conference each June, and I started taking semester-length writing and literature courses as a non-matriculated student in the University of Utah Department of English. From 2007-2010 I took one or two per semester (Timothy O'Keefe, Karen Brennan, Matt Kirkpatrick, Paisley Rekdal, Melanie Rae Thon).

I won a scholarship to the Wesleyan Writers Conference in 2008, and I traveled back to my early undergraduate haunts in Connecticut for a week. (I transferred to Oberlin, where I ultimately graduated.) Abigail Thomas's workshop at the 2008 Writers at Work conference in Salt Lake City came immediately after my Wesleyan week. There's no real comparison between the two conferences. People seem to make connections at the Wesleyan event, but if you want to work on your writing, go to Utah.

2009 took Writers at Work (and me) into a period of transition. I attended the conference that year, up at the Spiro Arts Center in Park City, with Eileen Pollack, whose write-it-real approach to a generative workshop challenged the smooth coating around my work.

I missed Writers at Work in 2010 and 2011. I believe there was a conference hiatus in 2010, which was during our move from Salt Lake City to Germany anyway. In 2011, I languished in writing isolation over here in Germany. In 2012, I put myself on a plane and went back to Utah for the conference and spent a nonfiction week with the very funny and also very serious Steve Almond. Same story in 2013, only that year I veered into a mind-opening poetry workshop with Katherine Coles (ask me sometime about the hamsters…). The current conference location at Alta Lodge in Little Cottonwood Canyon is mountain getaway.

Many of the years since 2006, I've entered my writing in the annual Writers at Work fellowship competition. Always in nonfiction, always from my work about my son. Aside from that Wesleyan scholarship, I haven't sent my work much anywhere else. Although I've received valuable encouragement from instructors, consultants, and workshop attendees over the years, I never made it into the finalist group.

Until this year. I submitted an essay in January, called "Objects of My Attention". Finally, here was an essay where the pieces seemed settled, the parts seemed authentically named, and I felt done as a writer. I'd love to see what a professional editor's eye and hand would add, but I felt content. I admit that my hopes crept very high when I learned I'd reached the finalist group. Then on March 11th, I awoke to find an astonishing email from Writers at Work: this year, I won!

Perhaps the lapse of a full month before I have written here about the competition win gives an idea of how moved and stunned I am. This year's nonfiction judge is Robin Hemley, whom I greatly look forward to meeting at the conference in June. His remarks about my essay mean a great deal to me. I have begun to study Robin Hemley's work, and I will be back with a report.

Today, I feel happy about this recognition of my writing. I am arranging some readings here in Germany, in Oberlin, and in Salt Lake City. There will also be a reading at the 2014 Writers at Work conference. The material is difficult to read for an audience, and I need as much routine as I can get. I'll post dates and times here on the blog. Perhaps you can attend! The essay will be published later in the year by Quarterly West.

Meanwhile, I can't enter the Writers at Work nonfiction competition ever again. It has provided a sturdy motor for my progress, but now it's time to strike forth in new directions!

*A "generative workshop" means you write new work together and you don't have to bring diddly with you, as far as words on the page, and some years that's a huge relief.