Mendocino Writers Blog

Finding My Way through Creative Nonfiction by Pilar Graham - Creative Nonfiction Presenter - 2009

     I’m lost. I have to surrender because I don’t always know where I am going. I have no map as to how I must address memory or story. What I do know is that in order to tell a good story I need to think small. The larger pieces have a better chance to find their place in the story. In order to think small I have to slow down long enough to evaluate the whole truth. What creative nonfiction form should I use: memoir, personal essay, prose, literary journalism, nature essay etc.? With poetry as my first language, I know I must rely on what feels like a metaphoric journey, with the gift of being more fluid than water itself. It’s this watery past—often referred to as a “moving image” that must be slowed down long enough to catch a glimpse of what it wants me to see—even if they arrive fragmented and bias. Regardless of which creative nonfiction form I choose (or surrender to) I still must decide what it to focus on, and what to leave out. It’s a matter of remembering and forgetting. I am, in turn, celebrating something that would have otherwise been forgotten, and in the act of writing, I am no less, confirming, perhaps even celebrating the experience. This much I know to be true. Before I take on any creative nonfiction task, I remind myself that it’s the incidents or the situations that create story and this is point I go small and weave myself into my translation of the story. These situations presents the context or circumstances, often times the hidden plot. As I became seduced into the world of creative nonfiction writing, it was nature writing that found my true calling; here in this solace place of pace, I found an array of writers who posed bigger questions in their writing, like Walt Whitman—not just his foundational poetry, but the records of eloquent and insightful prose; Annie Dillard, Lisa Knopp, Robert Root, Scott Russell Sanders, and Kim Barnes—to name of few, and all of whom have impacted not only the way I see the world, but how I respond to it. The attempt of the nature essay is to pose bigger questions about the world around the writer. The goal of the essay is not to describe in detail about what the writer is observing, but to open up the channels on larger subjects, make connections, and make note between the worlds within the world they are observing. One must be excellent observer. “No one ever gets tired of the moon. Goddess that she is by dower of her eternal beauty, she is a true woman by tact—knows the charm of being seldom seen, of coming by surprise and staying but a little while; never wears the same dress two nights running, nor all night the same way; commends herself to the matter-of-fact people by her usefulness, and makes her uselessness adored by poets, artists, and all lovers in all lands; lends herself to every symbolism and to every emblem; is Diana’s bow and Venus’s mirror and Mary’s throne; is a sickle, a scarf, an eyebrow, his face or her face, as look’d at by her or him; is the madman’s hell, the poets heaven, the baby’s toy, the philosopher’s study; and while her admires follow her footsteps, and hang on her lovely looks, she knows how to keep her woman’s secret—her other side—unguess’d and unguessable,” (Whitman, Walt. “Whitman: Poetry and Prose.” Specimen Days. Library of America College Editions, 1996. 851-852). Perhaps Whitman’s keen account of the world around him (displayed through his poetry, prose, and essays) set the pace and influenced some of the world’s highly recognized essays not only on nature, but in the courageous act of finding one’s way through creative nonfiction.

Essay--Creative Writing 101 by Allegra Pescatore--Part One

Allegra Pescatore, aka Allegra Fisher, was a MCWC 2006 High School Scholar. For her senior project at the Mendocino Community High School she taught a Creative Writing class. Allegra will attend Hampshire College in the fall.

Creative Writing 101
By Allegra Pescatore

Part One

            A normal day in my Creative Writing class starts in the empty Lit/Comp classroom with me, myself and I staring at the clock and tapping my foot in annoyance.  The stage is therefore set for the students to arrive, as always, late from their break (some of them are usually on time, but it adds dramatic flare to exaggerate any story just a bit, so if you are in my class and are on time, forgive me for taking some literary license)....After a brief introductory rant, I begin by giving them a writing prompt. Some days it will be a word (try Dendrochronology, which, on a side note, means the art of tree ring dating, which I’ve always been curious about it, I mean, is it tree dating or tree dating? Another favorite is Floccinaucinihilipilification: to establish or state that something has no value), and other times a more traditional prompt (write from the point of view of a clean sock mistakenly placed in the laundry basket). I try to keep these prompts light and easy, since they’re just a warm-up. Five minutes of fast and furious, uninterrupted writing later, I tell them to put down their pens and, unless someone wants to read a particularly good or funny response to my day’s prompt, we move on to the subject of the day.
        For the sake of this example of a normal day in class, I will say that today’s theme is character realism. I explain quickly that it doesn’t matter how great one’s characters are, how moral/immoral, sane/twisted and otherwise enthralling and mysterious, if they don’t feel real, then the audience won’t love/hate them.  Now I give them their assignment for the day. We gather paper, clipboards and pencils (I suggest dark glasses and trench-coats, but none are available) and set out for town. As we walk I explain. Discreetly, I ask them to observe people going about their day-to-day activities. They are to jot down quirks, habits, ticks and any interesting conversation they overhear. I ask them to please not get caught stalking....The next day, I ask them and the others to share their findings. We discuss how to create realistically flawed and quirky characters, and then I ask them to write a 1000 word piece centered on making the main character and villain as real as possible. Now they can use what they learned to begin to develop the cast from their November Novels.
        National Novel Writing Month is a worldwide event. Thousands participate, taking on the challenge of writing a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. Of course requiring new writers to write that much would be tantamount to suicide (I could see them stalking towards me with bloodshot eyes and gleaming knives, chanting “blood. Blood. Blood,”) so I let each of them pledge a certain number of words with a class minimum of 30k. I extended my offer to all writers in the community and by Halloween, I had over thirty people pledged to sit their behinds down every day of November and fulfill their word-count.
On the 31st of October, ten minutes to midnight, a large group of writers were sprawled out...waiting for the countdown to begin and November to start with a frenzy of words...“Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven.” Everyone was holding their breath, I could see their fingers twitching, their first sentences already coalescing before their eyes. “Three. Two. One.” From then on no one said a word....It’s a magical sensation to write like that, without restraint, without having to worry if the words you’re typing are good. It’s an excellent moment for the inner editor inside us all to go on a quick vacation to Fiji and let us have some peace. While it’s dancing naked on the beach and cracking open coconuts with a rock, we, the writers, are letting all pretenses go and letting what we really want to say flow out of us. As a writer I admire greatly said: “Horrible first drafts make good second drafts and fantastic third drafts.” To that, I would add: “But if you have no first draft to begin with, it’s all rather pointless.”
As my own word count started piling up, I began to see the transformation in my students. At the beginning of the month, they had been people who wrote, but now they started being writers. They would come to class with stories, things like: “Yesterday my hero decided to follow some pixies into the forest. He ended up having to be saved by the mysterious figure who I still don’t really know much about. I can’t wait to see what happens next!” I can’t wait to see what happens next. That is the sign that the story has come to life, is in fact, crawling out of the evolutionary gravy and shedding its gills for fully functioning lungs. Soon, it will start talking for itself, and eventually it might reproduce into a sequel. The writer is no longer in control, we’re just hanging on for the ride and getting carpel tunnel syndrome while doing it. The writer is nothing more than the vessel, the tool the characters use to bring themselves to life. We writers are Pinocchio’s fairy’s wand. It’s a humbling place to be in, your ego pushed aside to let a dream come through....Not everyone completed their novels that month, many fulfilled their word goal but found that their stories were just beginning, while others found a perfect end thousands of words short of the mark. Finishing however, was not as important as having begun.       To Be Continued

Essay--Creative Writing 101 by Allegra Pescatore--Part Two

Allegra Pescatore, aka Allegra Fisher, was a MCWC 2006 High School Scholar. For her senior project at the Mendocino Community High School she taught a Creative Writing class. Allegra will attend Hampshire College in the fall.

 

Creative Writing 101

by Allegra Pescatore

Part Two

The first thing on the agenda for when we came back after winter break was to summon all the Inner Editors back from the tropics. They came in, tanned and resentful, to help me teach poetry. While they unpacked from their month long break, I explained our plan of action to the class: “First, forget everything I’ve told you so far about writing. Poetry is not fiction; it’s music and should be treated as such.” For this semester, our big project would be the Poem of Origin. I was first introduced to the concept, and wrote my own poem of origin, at the California State Summer School for the Arts, by Sacramento’s Poet Laureate Julia Connors. During her month long class, she had us write a collection of poetry about our origins, our memories and our families. The poems were then laced together into one long work, called the Poem of Origin. A picture of one’s self in 1000 words so to speak. I spent about a month introducing my class to the different poetical forms and how to write and edit poetry. Where in the first semester I had pushed quantity, now I demand quality. After almost two months of work, including binding the poems into hand made books, I was again able to sit back and read what my students had to say. I was completely blown away.
I don’t know if I’m a good teacher, or if I was blessed with the best of students. Ether way, I have imparted what wisdom I know and, I believe, learned what they had to teach. Every day that I walk into that empty Lit/Comp classroom and sit down to wait for my students, I know that this is where I’m meant to be as assuredly as I know that they will be late. As much as I love writing, I get just as much if not more joy from teaching, the same feeling: like I’m channeling something else. It’s been an honor to be allowed to do this as my senior project. Only at a place like the Community School would something like this be possible.

Benjamin Percy article in Poets & Writers

Rising star fiction writer Benjamin Percy, a presenter at this summer's Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, has an article in the latest (July/August) issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. It's titled "The Geometry of Dialogue: How to Maintain Momentum in Fiction." In it he describes an approach to writing dialogue that adds dimension to characters and moves the story forward.

Billie Holiday is my muse. . . from Carole Weatherford

Billie Holiday is my muse and she herself enlisted me to write the book Becoming Billie Holiday. The work is a fictional verse memoir, combining elements of poetry, biography and a one-woman show. The jazz icon's early years unfold through 97 poems written in her voice and titled after songs from her repertoire. The experience of writing the book was somewhat magical. After listening to her early recordings and reading several biographies, I began writing. The poems poured out of me in six weeks, as if I channeled the 25-year-old Billie.

The book made several best book of the year lists and won a Coretta Scott King author honor from the American Library Association. Here's an excerpt from the book's penultimate poem.

If Dreams Come True

 

I will bathe in spotlights

and sleep on satin.

Gardenias will bloom

year round in my backyard.

Sadie’s rib joint will make

rich folks lick their fingers.

“Prez” and I will do ten dozen duets.

Crooners will sing my praises

between the lines of songs.

Hornmen will trumpet my arrival

and claim me as their own.

Piano players will secretly

pine for me as my solos

move them to tears.

. . .

Cats will groove to my blues

long after I’m gone. . .

 

 

At least part of her dream came true. At last count, Amazon offered more than 500 Billie Holiday albums.  July 17 will mark the 50th anniversary of the singer's death.

Ragdale Fellowship Call for Applications

Henri Bensussen, a Mendocino Coast writer who was a resident at Ragdale a few years ago, forwards this announcement:

Ragdale  - A Community of Artists 

is pleased to present
 
The Alice Hays Fellowship
For Social Justice
 
This Fellowship is awarded to one fiction or nonfiction writer who is working to bring awareness to a topic of social justice, environmental justice, or peace. 

 

The Alice Hays Fellow will receive a four week residency at Ragdale and a $500 stipend.
 
Application deadline:

September 15, 2009

  
Please visit:  www.ragdale.org/hayesfellowship
for application details
 

Or call Regin Igloria, Director of Artists-in-Residence at 847.234.1063 x. 206

An Early Conference: Hope, Celebrity, Punctuation--story by Jill Myers

An Early Conference: Hope, Celebrity, Punctuation

I had pictured him as a man with a certain East Coast lankiness, wearing a well tailored suit with a kind of casual elegance, maybe a silk tie worn loosely around his patrician neck, although from what fictional ingredients I assembled this image of a renowned editor of a renowned magazine I have no idea.  C. Michael Curtis, fiction editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was the keynote speaker at an early Mendocino Coast Writer’s Conference.  His agreeing to address our closing dinner was a coup by Marlis Broadhead, the founder and director of the conference.

The actual C. Michael Curtis speaking democratically from the very floor on which our folding chairs rested (there was no raised stage in the community room of the Fort Bragg Presbyterian Church) was of average height whose slightly rotund middle was accentuated by a sweater vest of the kind my grandfather wore.  With a certain Bostonian elongation of the vowels, C. Michael Curtis told us that the Atlantic Monthly wanted good writing, and we should avoid sloppy manuscripts: typos, improper margins, two-sided pages.  We fidgeted; our metal chairs creaked. We knew all that.  We wrote as well as we could.  We paginated, we proofed, we double-spaced.  We would forgive him his avuncular appearance if he revealed the inside story, the scoop that would move our manuscripts from the tippling rejection pile to publication as the single fiction story appearing in the Atlantic each month.  Then he said, “Whenever I get a manuscript that has a semi-colon in the first couple of paragraphs, I take the author seriously.”  A semi-colon!  Who would have guessed it?  Would a colon be even better? 

C. Michael Curtis had come to the conference with his wife.  Some of us were momentarily disappointed that there was a wife at all:  we’d had midnight dreams of a powerful editor overcome by the attractiveness of a West Coast writer of a certain age who could not only put together a mean paella, but whose stories show, shall we say, great promise?  Whose stories were, shall we say, masterful?  But there she was, a slender woman with graying curls escaping from a few poorly placed bobby pins, an attentive smile as she listened to her husband conclude his talk.

Before C. Michael Curtis could return to his table to finish his coffee a line formed before him, and I, usually shy, joined it.  I’d confided to a writer friend that C. Michael Curtis had written me encouraging letters when he rejected my stories, and once, in a particularly graceful rejection, asked me to send him everything I wrote, because “You’re so good.”  My friend said he would be pleased to have a face to put to the stories he so reluctantly didn’t publish.  So there I am, nervously in line, regretting that the Presbyterian Church didn’t allow us to serve alcohol.  The line moves quickly: handshakes, a fixed smile from C. Michael Curtis, an occasional empathetic look at a stammering writer from the nice wife.  I introduce myself.  C. Michael Curtis smiles politely.  I say my name again, in case he hadn’t heard.  Another smile. 

“I’ve abandoned the profoundly irritating present tense,” I say, quoting a recent rejection note.

“Oh?” he says, obviously not having committed to memory every word of every letter he’s sent to me.  I feel a little push from the woman behind me.

“I appreciate your interest,” I mumble.  C. Michael Curtis looks at his watch and wishes me good luck.  Mrs. Curtis gives me a sympathetic smile.  I stumble out of line.

Now that I know the importance of semi-colons, I notice them everywhere.  For instance, on the first page of “Mrs. Dalloway” Virginia Woolf constructs a dazzling ninety-nine word periodic sentence in which twenty-one clauses ripple outward like the leaden circles Mrs. Dalloway imagines as Big Ben strikes the hour.  This sentence is studded with no less than five semi-colons.  In Virginia Woolf’s next published work, “To the Lighthouse” she favors a more pedestrian construction, and a comma followed by a conjunction often replaces the semicolon.  She does not, however, abandon the periodic sentence. But that’s the subject of another post.

From Strunk and White

If two or more clauses grammatically complete and not joined by a conjunction are to form a single compound sentence, the proper mark of punctuation is a semicolon.

Use a colon after an independent clause to introduce a list of particulars, an appositive, an amplification, or an illustrative quotation.

Epilogue:

Sometime in the 90’s The Atlantic Monthly stopped publishing fiction in each issue.  C. Michael Curtis never accepted any of my stories. 

THE DEADLINE---A STORY BY STEFANIE FREELE Conclusion

THE DEADLINE
Conclusion

by Stefanie Freele

He handwrote, with the hurry-zoom of the chocolate, with the rapid beat of his jiggling knee, with half a cheek on the chair and pajamas pinching his middle. Not pinching like he couldn’t breathe, but pinching in a way he knew he should unpinch and he would feel much better, but that would take time and he had none of that. He wrote page after page after paragraph after line after word after word after word, until the pencil broke with a down-push and he reached for another and stuffed two pieces of cracked chocolate in his mouth to ensure he’d meet the target by morning. Not the morning of daylight, but the morning on the East Coast, the morning that came far before his morning, the morning that would be there before his sun would hit the kitchen and glint off the fruit bowl.

 The cat jumped across the page causing the pencil to skid and he flipped the meow to the side, but she sparked an idea that caused him to circle back to page 73 and edit that section he wasn’t really happy with anyway. He underlined and crossed out and zig-zagged across words that were once valuable. A noise behind him interrupted the flow, was it the wife going to the toilet? He gripped the pencil with his go go go hand and flew back to where he was before only to forget where the thought was taking him, so he bounced the opposite knee for inspiration, ground chocolate between his teeth and said for the love of God, I’ve got to finish this.

The flashlight blinked twice, the light turned yellowish, it weakened, it diluted. The figures. The report. The wordcount. Five hundred words to go. He went back to the beginning and sprinkled adverbs lovingly, quietly, generously, adverbally until he only needed 350. He added buts and therefores and thens. He raced through with liberal adjectives, magnificent, enlarged, contentious. He summarized and quoted and connected and segued as much as he could until the flashlight flickered and petered, leaving him in the darkness again, not the darkness of an empty heart, but the darkness of an empty wallet.

Finishing the page, with 27 words to go and the clear sound of his wife sneezing from the bedroom, he let himself squeeze the final sentence, not like a man squashing a full balloon, but like a man forcing breath from already emptied lungs. He heaved down the last word, placed it on the paper he couldn’t see, adjusted the pinching waistband and called back the cat. Not the command of get over here this very second, but the command of By God, I’ve lost my mind, don’t leave me now.
THE END

THE DEADLINE---A STORY BY STEFANIE FREELE PART ONE

THE DEADLINE   

PART ONE

by Stefanie Freele

As he calculated his figures over and over again, once, twice, then three or four times, as many times as he could, inserting numbers here and there, in between, over and around, adding extras, deleting none, his world turned darker, as if his vision was lessening, dimming, darkening like night, edging closer like wolves around a wounded animal, until he could see no more, just blackness, utter nothingness, not even the page in front of him, or the pencil lead, or even the pencil eraser, in fact not even the pencil itself, he could be writing on the desk for that matter, but he continued to write those numbers, augmenting his spreadsheet, stretching his report, writing, writing, writing, until he felt he'd gone mad, mad from insanity, mad from lack of sleep, mad from pushing the pencil beyond where it ever went before, and he pushed and pushed until his wife turned on the light and said for the love of God, you've got to come to bed.

And so he did, wearing the same pajamas not removed in three days, he lay there blinking until his wife slept the sounds of sleepiness and he crept toward the chocolate, unwrapping the dark pieces and tucking them into the sides of his mouth with the first one under his tongue like medicine to return to the desk with the red emergency flashlight spreading a spray across his pages.

CHECK THE BLOG TOMORROW FOR CONCLUSION

Molly Dwyer wins Award at Book Expo America

Here is some great news: Molly Dwyer's self-published novel REQUIEM FOR THE AUTHOR OF FRANKENSTEIN has just earned a Gold Award for Historical Fiction from Foreword Magazine's Independent Publishing Awards, announced at Book Expo America (NYC).
Molly presented at MCWC in 2008.