Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2015 i The Writer

LAST JANUARY, an article by Patrick O’Malley caught my eye in The New York Times. O’Malley is a psychotherapist in Texas, and his column was about the grief of losing someone you love deeply. He was writing about a client who had lost a baby – O’Malley had lost a child earlier in his life as well – but the overarching topic of the piece was about getting grief right. Not only did O’Malley make the reasonable assertion that a person’s style of grieving is as unique as his or her fingerprint, but he spoke about the value of bereavement groups where grieving hearts can share their stories. O’Malley quotes the writer Isak Dinesen: “All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story or tell a story…

Verb in the simple past. But it’s worth experimenting to see what tense makes the most tenses show the time frame of a sentence. Most stories are told sense. Remember: Timing is everything. Yes, when discussing the events in a work of literature – or other form of art – use present tense. This is called literary present tense. The work of art exists in an eternal present. Every time you open the book and read, the events are unfolding. In discussing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, for example, you might say this: When Gatsby meets Daisy at Nick’s house, the tension is high. You would use past tense if you went on to discuss something that happened before this event. For example: When Gatsby meets Daisy at…

No time for proper rest during conferences? Thirty seconds of deep breathing can reset your brain and refresh you for the tasks ahead. Take a break by closing your eyes and breathing in and out six times. H2O-YEAH It’s important to stay hydrated when you’re walking so much and in such deep thought. A literary-inspired water bottle will keep you quenched during long conference hours. Starts at $21.95. zazzle.com WRAPPED IN WORDS Choose your favorite passage from one of 11 great works of literature to wear around your neck and keep you warm in drafty conference rooms. Some of the works featured include Persuasion and Wuthering Heights. $48. storiarts.com NOT-SO-RISKY BUSINESS Stylishly store contact info in this business card holder. Networking is an important part of attending a conference, so…

Shel Silverstein joins Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak in a troika of rebellious writers who understood that the way words sound makes reading more memorable. All three knew how much children enjoy the interplay of nonsense and naughty, frustrating certain censors who thought their work maddeningly subversive. Which, of course, they were. During my childhood in the 1950s and early ‘60s, my schoolteacher mom took us on weekly excursions to our local branch of the San Diego County Library. Every six months or so, a local author who called himself Dr. Seuss released a new volume, featuring his now famous hatted cats, bizarre breakfasts and poignant pachyderms. At school, our reading text was called Fun with Dick and Jane. By comparison, Seuss’ characters were having loads more fun. Mom’s stash…

KEYS IN POCKET, hawk on fist, and off we go. Leaving the house that evening is frightening. Somewhere in my mind ropes uncoil and fall. It feels like an unmooring, as if I were an airship ascending on its maiden flight into darkness. Stepping over the low railings into the park I head for the thick black avenue of limes and the lamplit leaves beneath. Everything seems hot and clean and dangerous and my senses are screwed to their utmost, as if someone had told me the park was full of hungry lions. Night air moves in the spaces between the trees. Moths make dusty circles about the lamps. I look down and see each pale blade of grass casts two separate shadows from the two nearest lamps, and so…

USUALLY, AT NIGHT, I hear them just as I’m falling asleep. Sometimes, I lie at the very brink of forgetfulness, waiting, as if their arrival is my signal that I can fall asleep. The settling of the wood floors, the wind astir in the jasmine, the deep released fragrance of the earth, the crow of an insomniac rooster. Their soft spirit footsteps, so vague I could mistake them for my own breathing. Their different treads, as if even as spirits they retained their personalities, Patria’s sure and measured step, Minerva’s quicksilver impatience, Mate’s playful little skip. They linger and loiter over things. Tonight, no doubt, Minerva will sit a long while by her Minou and absorb the music of her breathing. Some nights I’ll be worrying about something, and I’ll…

“When recruiting workshop presenters, remember that they need to be good teachers, not just good writers.” — Karim Shumaker, South Coast Writers Conference Coordinator “We use a project management tool called Basecamp. I put all pre- and post-conference tasks on it. It keeps everyone in check and sends us reminders.” —Donna Talarico, HippoCamp Conference Chair “We’ve focused on craft in fiction the first two years. Pick a focus and stick to it. Try not to be everything to everyone.” —Patricia Marshall, Woodcrafters in Eugene Conference Director “You need to have passion and drive, whole-heartedly believing in what you are doing and how it will impact the creative community. Surround yourself with other passionate people who can help make that dream a reality.” —Cornelia Becker Seigneur, Founding Director of Faith &…

Taina Asili – Uses singing, songwriting, workshops and more for social change, focusing on issues of race and community building. Yvette Hyater-Adams – Once a CEO of a consulting firm for Fortune 500 companies, now runs writing and arts workshops for health for African American women CEOs. Minna Dubin – Works with teens and young adults in the San Francisco area through Writers Corps. Nancy Morgan – Recently retired from the Lombardi Cancer Center, where she was the arts and humanities coordinator, creating an arts program for those with cancer and their caregivers. Seema Reza – Facilitates writing workshops and events with wounded warriors at two major military hospitals in the DC area. Jennifer Cross – Created Writing Ourselves Whole in San Francisco, where she facilitates workshops focused on reclaiming…

In January 2015, author and Iraq War vet J.P. Lawrence penned an essay for Talking Writing titled “Free Speech: Who Gets to Decide?” In it, he reflects on the years he spent as editor of a college newspaper – years in which he sometimes had to cut stories that represented “thinly veiled personal attacks.” “The rhetoric of free speech,” he observes, “is often invoked by those who are, in fact, offended by the divisive ideas expressed by less powerful voices. The ironic – even horrific – result? Privileged writers and artists argue for free speech in order to silence criticism by a marginalized group.” Readers erupted into the kind of discourse that editor Martha Nichols loves to see sparked by the pieces in this digital magazine. She moderated the online…

1 Make a friend. Finding a like-minded, or maybe not-so-likeminded, writer to bring into your inner circle can be priceless. You can each help each other brainstorm, get through rough writing patches and read new work.: 2 Learn a lot. Attend workshops that speak to you – and as many of them as possible. Getting advice from writers who have been in your shoes and learning the methods that work for them can make your entire conference experience worthwhile.: 3 Write. The whole point of attending a conference is to discover more about your own writing style. Use the energy surrounding the event as inspiration and maintain that momentum once you get back home and are back to the lonely task of working solo. The following conferences, retreats and festivals…

When you first begin writing, the horizon extends promisingly before you. All you see are your creativity and the gift of your words that readers will surely devour. You know intellectually that there will be bumps, but those will be quickly navigated as your energy and muse pour on the coal, slinging amazing ideas into the world. And in this sunshine coated-beginning, you think you have very little to learn and a great deal of wisdom to share. Ah, youth. I started writing seriously at age 23. I’d been a voracious reader for some time and had written short film scripts and plays in high school, but nothing that I’d show except to my closest friends, with whom I shared my secret desire to write. It would be two years…

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Malcom bids Macduff to “Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak/Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.” The need to unleash crushing feelings of grief has inspired the creation of many memoirs, including notable examples from Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking), Calvin Trillin (About Alice), C. S. Lewis (A Grief Observed) and, more recently, Cheryl Strayed (Wild). To that elite list add author Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk. When Macdonald’s father, acclaimed photographer Alisdair Macdonald, died suddenly in 2007, she crumbled. In her grief, the experienced falconer decided to buy and train a young female goshawk. Macdonald had never flown a goshawk. She knew them only as a deadly, ferocious, intimidating species. And yet she was drawn to take this step.…

In addition to the National Medal of Arts, Julia Alvarez has won several other prizes and awards, including the Lyric Poetry Award in 2015 from the Poetry Society of America; the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award in 2009; the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature in 2002; and the General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers in 1986. She has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Ingram Merrill Foundation. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents won the 1991 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. In the Time of the Butterflies is an NEA Big Read title. It was made into a 2001 movie, directed by Mariano Barroso. Her YA novel Before We Were Free won the American Library Association’s Pura Belpré Award in 2004. Alvarez is writer-in-residence at…

Lois Lowry hit her daughter once. Just once, lightly, across the seat of her jeans with a wire coat hanger. Her daughter had taken a stack of freshly ironed-and-starched dresses and left them in a heap on her bedroom floor. Years later, Lowry asked her daughter if she remembered the incident. “Remember it?” her daughter answered. “How could I not remember the time my own mother beat me unmercifully around the head and shoulders with a blunt instrument?” “Memory, we should bear in mind, is a subjective thing,” Lowry tells readers in the July 1987 issue of The Writer. But that doesn’t mean memory can’t be an essential tool when writing, especially when writing for children. Lowry admits she can’t remember names or appointment times, but each year of her…

Scott Eyman has a big presence. And why not? He has written biographies on some of the biggest names in Hollywood: Cecile B. DeMille, Louis B. Mayer, John Ford. His most recent book is John Wayne: The Life and Legend. In a review of the book for The New York Times, filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich writes: “The portrait Eyman paints very much resembles the Wayne I knew for nearly 15 years: extremely likable, guileless, exuberant, even strangely innocent.” That’s not faint praise for a biographer. But Eyman puts in the hours. “When you choose a subject – and these books take a God-awful lot of time – you have to be discerning about who you want to spend four or five years of your life on.” Eyman and I met at…

So much of going to a writing conference or retreat is about making contacts with fellow authors and building a community of likeminded artists. Many choose to get the team building started by taking to Twitter ahead of time to discuss the projects and the processes surrounding such events. Here are some of our favorite MTs about literary festivals and more. Natalia Cecire @ncecire Woman in the pub asks me what I’m writing. Me: “A conference talk.” Her: undisguisedly crestfallen that I’m not incognito JK Rowling. Evelyn Skye @EvelynSkyeYA Gorgeous day for a writing retreat with @AnnaShinoda. We are actually working. Really. Claire Legrand @clairelegrand desperately wanting to go on a solo writing retreat to finish This Damn Book. no Internet, no pets, no people. lots of food. but ALAS!…

“I love those end-of-the day sessions when folks are sitting around and you begin to see their passion and commitment to their art – what that looks like in practical terms, what writers they quote, what other arts fill their conversation. It’s about seeing what the writing life looks like up close, reflected in others. I’ve also learned something about teaching – how to speak in a way the writer can hear, how to honor the work. A workshop isn’t about being smart, it’s about listening carefully, hearing what the poet and the poem are aiming for, seeing how close they’ve gotten.” —Betsy Sholl, former Maine Poet Laureate “There are many, many ways to approach writing. No one truly knows exactly what they’re doing. Anyone who offers boilerplate wisdom is…

Writing about animals has a long tradition in nonfiction literature. The titles also tend to sport a colon and long subtitles – largely because animals often take on greater symbolic meaning by allowing us to project our own emotions onto their personalities. Dogs and horses seem to be the most popular in stories – in fiction, think Lassie, Black Beauty, Old Yeller and Flicka. Legendary or lap-sized, pedestrian or heroic, animals have come to represent a special place on best-seller lists as well. The team at The Writer compiled this list of nonfiction books as resources for writers considering crafting a tale – with a tail (or not). Seabiscuit: An American Legend BY LAURA HILLENBRAND A horse goes from being an underdog to a sports legend. Rin Tin Tin: The…

AS THE SUN SETS on the first day of the Summer in Words Conference at Oregon’s Cannon Beach, writers and presenters mingle – not over martinis at a hotel bar – but around tidepools and boulders festooned with orange and purple sea stars. In the distance, 235-foot-tall Haystack Rock offers inspiration for those who’ve traded pen and paper for camera or sketchpad. A debut YA author frolics on the sand with her dog. A New York Times best-selling novelist plays with his children and pauses to talk with participants from his afternoon workshop. “Writers need real face time with each other,” says Summer in Words director Jessica Morrell. “They need to be inspired by how other writers live their lives. People come back from the beach experience, and their cheeks…

* Tom Wolfe is offered $5 million for film rights to his book The Bonfire of the Vanities. At the time, it was the highest amount ever paid to an author for film rights. * August Wilson wins the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Fences, the sixth work in the playwright’s 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle. * Hatchet, Gary Paulsen’s acclaimed young-adult survival novel, is published. * Stephen King releases four novels in the same year: Misery, The Tommyknockers, The Eyes of the Dragon and The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three.…

Betsy Sholl, former Maine Poet Laureate: “Stonecoast has a very collegial atmosphere. It is both laid-back in a way that allows creativity to well up, and also focused on each participant’s growth as a writer. Stonecoast has over the years perfected its elements, so it is a very fruitful time for the folks who come.” Elizabeth Peavey, Glorious Slow Going: Maine Stories of Art, Adventure and Friendship: “There is nothing lovelier than being on the coast of Maine in summer, but then, I’m biased.” Peter Behrens, The O’Briens, The Law of Dreams and Karin: “The people are the absolute priority. I think they all come there as these lonesome strangers, as most writers are, and the atmosphere of the place and the dedication of my fellow teachers create a…