Writing Stories: Michael Silverblatt with Jess Walter

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One of my favorite podcasts is Michael Silverblatt’s “Bookworm” from KCRW. These interviews with writers are about the right length for a thirty-minute walk around the neighborhood.

Silverblatt recently  talked with Jess Walter, a novelist and short story writer, whose latest book is We Live in Water, a collection of short stories. Walter says he spent seven years trying to get his stories published, and they kept coming back. “Manilla boomerangs,” he called them.

Jess Walter

Jess Walter

Lately we are seeing an increase in the popularity and publication of short story collections. George Saunders, Sam Lipsyte, and, of course, Alice Munro all have new collections of stories.

If you have a short story tucked away in the drawer, why not take another look at it? And then write a new one just for the heck of it. You’re on your way to a collection!

I’m going to uncover a few of my stories lurking in certain computer files, breathe some life into them, and send them out. Maybe they will be “manila boomerangs,” but at least they will be out of hiding.

Here’s the interview from “Bookworm” (3/21/13).

Click on the small blue (Listen) bar below. We’ll talk more about fiction writing in future blogs.

Jess Walter: We Live in Water

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Listen to/Watch entire show:
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Crow School

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Kay Ryan has a way of getting right to the point. I’ve been subscribing to Poetry Foundation’s Audio-Poem-of-the-Day. So each morning I get to hear a poem read to me. It’s a good way to start my writing time.

A Draft of a Kay Ryan Poem

A Draft of a Kay Ryan Poem

This morning “Felix Crow” was in my ear. It made me think of my last post, “The Secret.” So far (it has been only a few days now), I’ve been good about looking for that moment during the day when I see something new or beautiful or amazing.

Kay Ryan’s “Felix Crow” calls attention to those things we don’t always see as beautiful, like crows. We tend to over-look certain creatures who don’t meet the standard definition of beauty. Here in Florida, we certainly ooh-and-aah when we see the roseate spoonbills or a tri-colored heron. Not so much, a crow or buzzard. imgres-1

“Felix Crow” called me up on that. So I’m opening my eyes a little wider today. Thanks to Kay Ryan.

Here’s the poem. Just click to hear the reading.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/audio/FelixCrow_byKay.mp3

P. S. For those of you following my earlier posts on writing prompts, the poem (and crows)   made me think of another writing prompt.  Today look for something others might not think of as beautiful. Later when you return to your notebook, write for ten minutes or more about what you saw.  

Felix Crow 

Crow school
is basic and
short as a rule—
just the rudiments
of quid pro crow
for most students.
Then each lives out
his unenlightened
span, adding his
bit of blight
to the collected
history of pushing out
the sweeter species;
briefly swaggering the
swagger of his
aggravating ancestors
down my street.
And every time
I like him
when we meet.
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Kay Ryan
Source: Poetry (November 2004)

The Secret

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Wouldn’t it be nice if we could, once and for all, grab onto that one bit of advice that will make all the difference? In a recent New York Times essay, “The Art of Being Still,” Silas House writes:

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I was a young, naïve, foolish writer who was searching for my way. I swallowed hard and asked him [James Still] if he had any advice on how to be a better writer. He didn’t answer for a long minute, gazing off at the hills as if ignoring me.

But then he spoke, and I realized that he had taken that moment for quiet thought. “Discover something new every day,” he said. That advice changed me as a writer and as a person.”

The narrator Paul Chowder of Nicholson Baker’s novel, The Anthologist (one of my favorite novels), says:

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 And then a man of forty or so, with a French accent, asked, “How do you achieve the presence of mind to initiate the writing of a poem?” And something cracked open in me, and I finally stopped hoarding and told them my most useful secret. The only secret that has helped me consistently over all the years that I’ve written. I said, “Well, I’ll tell you how. I ask a simple question. I ask myself: What was the very best moment of your day?” The wonder of it was, I told them that this one question could lift out from my life exactly what I will want to write a poem about. Something I hadn’t known was important will leap out and hover there in front of me, saying I am—I am the best moment of the day. . . . Often, I went on, it’s a moment when you’re waiting for someone, or you’re driving somewhere, or maybe you’re just walking across a parking lot and admiring the oil stains and the dribbled tar patterns. One time it was when I was driving past a certain house that was screaming with sunlitness on its white clapboards, and then I plunged through tree shadows that splashed and splayed across the windshield. I thought, Ah, of course— I’d forgotten. You, windshield shadows, you are the best moment of the day. “And that’s my secret, such as it is,” I said.

― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

What’s your secret, such as it is?  What advice would you give? Or what have you learned from someone else?

Let me know.

In the meantime, I’m going to try to write or photograph (or both) the best moment of each day. Or something new. Right now, it is this quiet moment before our house guests arrive. (We have a lot of them here in Florida.)

A Note in a Bottle: Sending Our Writing into the World

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During the last five weeks of our writing class (“Jumpstart Your Writing”) here on Sanibel, we’ve used the metaphor of a “note in a bottle” to talk about writing: the note as the words we write and the bottle as the container for the words. This bottle can come in many shapes. It could be in the shape of a single poem, story, or essay. It could be a collection of poems, stories, or essays. It could be a novel or a memoir. What about a blog entry? an editorial in a newspaper? a carefully constructed letter to a granddaughter? So the bottle is the shape we give to our writing.
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When we’ve written and shaped our pieces into some sort of container, it is time to toss that note and bottle into the sea. (This is particularly apt because Sanibel is a slip of an island on the Gulf of Mexico.) In other words, it is time to send our writing out into the world.

The very act of bringing our shaped final piece to the class, then reading it, and passing out copies to each other is the simplest and most basic way of throwing our bottles into the sea. We’ve taken our words out of the notebooks, shaped them into some form, and sent them on their way.

Some of us may send our “notes in bottles” beyond a class or writers’ group. Maybe we’ll publish one of  our poems or short essays in the local newspaper; maybe we’ll send a piece to our families; maybe we’ll submit our writing to a contest or a magazine. We don’t always know where our writing will end up, or who will read it, for that matter.781sunderland_Janetheadshot

Janet Sunderland, one of the contributors to the anthology, When Last Mountain: The View from Writers over Fifty, is about to toss her note in a bottle into the sea. We’ve stayed in touch since the anthology was published, and she wrote to tell me that her chapbook of poems, At the Boundary, will be forthcoming from Finishing LIne Press. She writes: “That goal [of publishing a book] has been elusive to me and perhaps for a good reason. Perhaps I simply wasn’t ready to take on the daunting task of marketing and selling a book. As writers, we love to write. Marketing? Well, not so much.” So sometimes it takes a bit more of an effort to get that bottle out there. But Janet has done it.product_info

And so have the writers in the class.

Getting our work out of notebooks and into the world isn’t always easy, but then we can move on to create more notes in more bottles for more people to discover.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” –Maya Angelou

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To find Janet’s book, go to Finishing Line Press, PREORDER FORTHCOMING TITLES.  You can read her bio and reviews of her chapbook. Congratulations, Janet!

Jumpstart Your Writing: Valentine’s Day Prompts

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We’re headed into the third week of our “Jumpstart Your Writing” workshop here on Sanibel. It is going well. Nine of us are writing like crazy. For each class, I’ve created an envelope of “jumpstarts.” The first week the ten-minute prompts were adapted from Natalie Goldberg’s Old Friend from Faraway. I typed and printed out a couple of sheets of Natalie’s ten-minute writing prompts and then cut the paper into slips, which I placed in an envelope for each person. The idea is to draw one or two slips from the envelope and, without pausing to think too much, plunge in and write for at least ten-minutes. The second week’s envelope included prompts based on stories and people. The third week’s collection was from the prompts we each created during the first class meeting. Other strategies have included story-telling (comparing oral and written versions of the same story) and writing from photographs. We’re using In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction for inspiration and as models for our own writing. Next week we focus on words. We’ll each bring in a piece of writing that we love because of the words.

imagesSince tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, here are two poems: one by Tony Hoagland, one by Gertrude Stein (which I like because of the sound of the words.)

The prompt (Hoagland): Pick a simple object (like a windchime) and pair that object with a person you love or loved. (It doesn’t have to be romantic love. Any kind of love will do just fine.) Write for ten minutes.

The prompt (Stein): “Twinkling with delight…” Use this phrase as a start. Go for ten minutes. (Note: If you click on the high-lighted word burr in Stein’s poem, you will find a page that talks about Stein,Toklas, and this poem. You’ll also see that Stein’s poem was a kind of “note in a bottle.” I’ll say more about this in my next blog.)

Windchime

BY TONY HOAGLAND

She goes out to hang the windchime
in her nightie and her work boots.
It’s six-thirty in the morning
and she’s standing on the plastic ice chest
tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch,
windchime in her left hand,
hammer in her right, the nail
gripped tight between her teeth
but nothing happens next because
she’s trying to figure out
how to switch #1 with #3.
She must have been standing in the kitchen,
coffee in her hand, asleep,
when she heard it—the wind blowing
through the sound the windchime
wasn’t making
because it wasn’t there.
No one, including me, especially anymore believes
till death do us part,
but I can see what I would miss in leaving—
the way her ankles go into the work boots
as she stands upon the ice chest;
the problem scrunched into her forehead;
the little kissable mouth
with the nail in it.

 

“Windchime” copyright © 2003 by Tony Hoagland. Reprinted from What Narcissism Means to Me with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota. All rights reserved. www.graywolfpress.org

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[The house was just twinkling in the moon light]

BY GERTRUDE STEIN

The house was just twinkling in the moon light,
And inside it twinkling with delight,
Is my baby bright.
Twinkling with delight in the house twinkling
with the moonlight,
Bless my baby bless my baby bright,
Bless my baby twinkling with delight,
In the house twinkling in the moon light,
Her hubby dear loves to cheer when he thinks
and he always thinks when he knows and he always
knows that his blessed baby wifey is all here and he
is all hers, and sticks to her like burrs, blessed baby

 

Gertrude Stein, “[The house was twinkling in the moon light]” from Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (St. Martin’s Press, 1999). Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Gertrude Stein.

These poems (and thousands more) can be found on the Poetry Foundation website:  http://www.poetryfoundation.org.