Mendocino Writers Blog

October 2009 Newsletter

The Mendocino Coast Writers Conference newsletter for October 2009 has just been added to the conference website. You can reach it at www.mcwc.org . This link also gives you access to an archive of all the previous conference newsletters.

A BARBARA BLOG

What It Means To Me     by Barbara Lee             

 

When I roast a chicken or a turkey and there's the possibility of gravy, I feel the spirit of my deceased father-in-law, Homer, hovering over my shoulder.  Homer loved gravy; on meat, on potatoes, on biscuits, on anything.  He was a kind man who loved deeply and he had the greatest smile you can imagine, albeit with store-bought teeth.    Started out as a poor Oklahoma white/Cherokee kid who never graduated from high school, went into the public works program during the Great Depression, was a veteran of WWII who mustered out with skills as a mechanic, married a woman of such beauty that he shivered at the sight of her, provided for her two kids, became a Dad of one son and then beloved Grandpa to my kid.  Anyone who thinks I fret needlessly about the gravy doesn't know what it means to me.

 

 

MCWC second day blog

Here I am at the conference showing a committee member how to start a blog post. The conference is in its second day and is wonderful so far. We had an inspiring talk by Ellen Bass and tonight is the event at which Luis Rodriguez is the featured speaker.

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. 

On Writing Exercises by Jill Myers

An Interesting Exercise

At the 2007 MCWC Conference, workshop leaders Rebecca Lawton and Jordan Rosenfeld assigned an exercise I liked, which was to examine the last full paragraph of “A River Runs Through It” and write something similar. We were asked to use our own situation but with the original writers’ form and phraseology.  The exercise gave us permission to be inspired by another writer’s talent, and the notion that adaptation isn’t necessarily plagiarism. 

In the English Department Newsletter I receive from Stanford, there is a piece by Jeanne Althouse, one of Nancy Packer’s current students, responding to an assignment to write something a la Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (a one paragraph short-short in which one person is giving instruction to another, ending with a question.)  I read Ms. Althouse’s piece with a good deal of envy, and also two thoughts—I wish I’d written that, and another one—maybe I will.  

What I’ve Learned
In a Continuing Education class I took from Stanford professor Nancy Packer she said to “hit the ground running” when you start a story.  I’ve never forgotten that instruction because as a metaphor it is so lame.  Hitting the ground means that for a few minutes you are essentially a pile of crap—confused, your body hurting and maybe your own personal blood leaking out of your skin.  You’re trying to figure out what has happened, and instead of leaping to your feet you whimper for a while in your puddle of aches and bruises until some living breathing soul touches you and only then are you able to struggle up to maybe a sitting position.  But in spite of the clichéd metaphor I knew what she meant.  Start right in.  What happened to get you to this point is not what the reader wants to know.  He’s interested in the ‘who what why and when.’ If you can work all this information into a single sentence, like  ‘He sped away after she fell out of the car, and for a moment as she lay in a pile of aches and bruises all she could do is wonder where she was and how she got there” you have your start, although I’d prefer some quotes over the indirect address. Here’s a pitfall.  Don’t stuff your sentences with clauses.  Here’s another one.  Don’t fall in love with a word or phrase.  And for God’s sakes, write about something important to you.  If you feel disgusted by the image of someone being pushed out of a speeding car by a disgruntled boyfriend because she absolutely refused to …—here’s another thing, you have to be careful about sexual references.  Writing about sex may be too hard for you at this point.  Anias Nin did it, but are you Anias Nin?  Maybe so, but I doubt it.  An ellipsis (three dots) is handy for writers avoiding difficult description, but back to my point.  If you’re repelled by the torture scenes in ‘24’ and the utter implausibility of the ‘007’ films, don’t write about a girl falling out of a speeding car and ending up in a pile of aches and bruises, with her new silk pants shredded along with parts of her anatomy that were not ususally exposed.  Forget the guy and the girl and the cheek-scraping highway.  Maybe you want to concentrate on the dog, the one that ran in front of the car and made the guy swerve so that the girl fell against the poorly latched door after she refused categorically to…  Everyone likes dogs, and whether the severely squashed dog was whimpering in the street alongside the girl, or whether the car missed the dog (except for a small section of tail it didn’t need anyway) and it trotted over the whimpering girl and began licking the blood from her scraped cheek—the dog’s the thing.  Don’t write from the point of view of the dog, though, nobody can get away with that, and don’t tell me about Steven Millhauser.  Are you Steven Millhauser?  I doubt it.  Don’t write from the point of view of body parts either, even though Eve Ensler has had a good deal of commercial success, although "speak my bleeding cheek" has a certain alliteritive elegance as a title.  If you feel closely connected to the dog, you’ll have a better story, and you can still keep the guy and the girl whimpering in a pile of aches and bruises on the highway.  Another thing, don’t go all self-referential and post-modern-y on me, and forget about being clever.  You want a real story, not something that shows off how witty you are.  Tell jokes at the dinner table if you want attention.  Finally, Ms. Packer said that good stories often have a circular form, ending with a reference to the situation that began the tale. Not a big finger pointing  ‘look, look’ but a subtle bringing the reader back to where the piece began.  Sometimes this is all the resolution your story gets, and you have to leave the whimpering girl and the dog vainly trying to thump his tail on the road for the sake of that big check from the New Yorker.  But after all, isn’t that what we all want?

Maureen Eppstein: new poetry collection

Maureen Eppstein, a board member of the conference and published poet, has a new collection coming out. It will be published by March Street Press which published her previous collection, Quickening. The new project is a full length 75 page book tentatively titled, Rogue Wave at Glass Beach. Publication date has not been set but we look forward to this special tome.