Word Café

a master class for readers and writers

LISA A. PHILLIPS “Literary Obsession”

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WORD CAFE EVENT ARCHIVE
LISA A. PHILLIPS – 10/1/15

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Journalist and author Lisa A. Phillips read a riveting selection from her book Unrequited: Women and Romantic Obsession. This led to an intense and fascinating free-range discussion of the book’s subject, and the parallels between romantic obsession and writerly obsession.

Lisa pointed out that “obsession can change you,” sometimes in positive ways. It can be a goad to self-transformation, provide a muse, make you work harder. A romantic obsession can be “much better on the page, on the canvas, out in the world doing good works–whatever you do to channel it in a healthy direction.”

Obsessive love is a perennial subject for literature of all sorts, and Lisa discussed “our current preoccupation with balance and regulation, when so much of the state of creating and the quest for love is unbalanced and tortured,” adding that desire and the chase are inherently suspenseful. Unrequited love keeps the reader hooked: will they ever get together? Nina noted that the urgency of a character’s drive to get what she wants makes for good drama; “I want you.”/”Okay.” is a very short play.

We also spoke about finding the courage to reveal behaviors you’re not proud of in memoir writing. Lisa says, “The distance of time really helped.” She was driven by wanting to understand what had happened to her, and to many others. Though she used her own experience as a narrative spine, Unrequited is also a work of journalism, touching on neuroscience, psychology, literature, and history, and incorporating other women’s personal stories. Why just women? Because the archetype of the male pursuer/stalker is more familiar. Women in obsessive love are judged by different standards, dismissed as “bunny boilers and psycho bitches.” Lisa wanted to take a closer look.

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LISA’S EXERCISE:

“Writing about your obsession can be brilliant and cathartic. It can also be dangerous — creating a kind of myopic feedback loop that is more psychological torture than literary production.

How to get inside this fraught space without losing yourself to it? If you are currently obsessed with something, or someone, imagine your obsession as a story that is already over. If you’re not obsessed now but have been, your job is a little easier.

Here’s the writing prompt: Write about a moment in your obsession when you became unrecognizable to yourself. How did you feel? What did you do? What did you want to do but didn’t?

Feel free to work this fictionally by writing about the moment a character became unrecognizable to him/herself.

Free yourself to write without self-judgment.”

NINA’S EXERCISE:

Write a short poem, fictional story, or memoir piece in which every line or sentence starts with the words “I want,” except for the last.

SARI BOTTON “Getting Personal”

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sari bottonSARI BOTTON has worked as a journalist, essayist, ghostwriter, and teacher of various kinds of writing. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, More, The Rumpus, plus other publications and anthologies. She has been an adjunct professor in the journalism department at SUNY Albany and taught first-person writing in the continuing education program at SUNY Ulster. She edited the popular Seal Press anthology Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakeable Love for New York, forthcoming in October. She also co-edited Get Out of My Crotch: 21 Writers Respond to America’s War on Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health, and is editorial director of the award-winning TMI Project.

“Getting Personal” 11/6/14

Author and editor Sari Botton arrived at Word Cafe with exciting news: her anthology Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York just made it onto the New York Times bestseller list! She treated us to a wonderful reading from her essay from the collection. See my profile of Sari in the November Chronogram.

Nina Shengold and Sari Botton Word Cafe
Nina & Sari

Nina Shengold and Sari Botton

"Getting Personal"
Sari Botton Chronogram by Roy Gumpel
Sari Botton

Sari Botton

Goodbye to All That
Goodbye to All That

Goodbye To All That

Writers on Loving and Leaving New York
never-can-say-goodbye edited by sari botton
Never Can Say Goodbye

Never Can Say Goodbye

Writers and their Unshakable Love for New York


Our topic was “Getting Personal,” and we talked about the differences between personal essay and memoir, going deep to release and explore material, and then learning to edit and shape it; reading aloud really helps. We also talked about facing fears and the importance of creating a safe space to share work when it’s still raw. Sari is editorial director of the TMI Project and writes a column for The Rumpus called “Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me.”

Sari suggested that if you resist writing about something, that probably means it’s a story worth telling. You may not choose to publish or share what you’ve written, but getting it on paper helps you unlock what you do want to write about. And often the things we struggle with are what will connect most with others. No one wants to read about the perfect surface of someone else’s life. We want honesty.

This does not mean all personal essays have to mine traumatic experiences or melodramatic events. Sari is a big fan of what she called “the familiar essay,” in which the writer conjures details of an experience that readers can relate to, or comes at something familiar from a different angle. Personal and specific detail, she said, is the route to making a piece of writing feel universal.

When participants got up to read the (excellent!) beginnings they’d written based on Sari’s (also excellent!) writing prompts, she offered a TMI rule that Nina thinks should pertain to all aspects of life, not just writing workshops: No self-deprecating remarks.

SARI’S EXERCISES:

Write a true story about:
A time when you tried to seem cool.
How NYC turned you into YOU.
The me nobody knows.
A song that is or was your personal anthem.

NINA’S EXERCISE:

Write about a time when you had to wear something you wouldn’t usually wear. Where were you going and how did you feel?

ABIGAIL THOMAS, “Getting Started”

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ABIGAIL THOMAS, daughter of renowned science writer Lewis Thomas (The Lives of a Cell), is the mother of four children and the grandmother of twelve. Her academic education stopped when, pregnant with her oldest daughter, she was asked to leave Bryn Mawr during her first year. She’s lived most of her life on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and was for a time a book editor and for another time a book agent. Then she started writing for publication. Her memoir, A Three Dog Life, was named one of the best books of 2006 by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. She is also author of Safekeeping, Two Pages, and Thinking About Memoir. When Thomas can’t write she paints on glass. She lives in Woodstock, NY with her four dogs.

“Getting Started” 9/4/14 – The Exercises

Nina Shengold and Abigail Thomas
Word Café with Abigail Thomas
and Nina Shengold

Nina Shengold and Abigail Thomas together in conversation

Abigail Thomas by Jana Martin
Abigail Thomas

Abigail Thomas at Word Café

word cafe salon
The writers
filled the house.

The place was packed!

Writers at outdated: an antique café. SRO.


Word Café got off to a spectacular start with Abigail Thomas reading selections from Thinking About Memoir, and a sneak peek at her upcoming book What Comes Next and How To Like It. Here are a few of the insights I gleaned:

— Use a notebook to write down everything and anything. Don’t call it a Journal (or worse yet, “journaling”) and don’t worry about writing well. It’s for you, not for posterity. It’s the equivalent of singing in the shower.

— If you don’t remember something, write two pages about not remembering. One thing can lead to another.

— The places you resist most are where the live coals are. You can say, “Hot dog, I’m onto something.” Or you can take a nap.

Here are three exercises we gave out before the break. (You’ll always have a choice, and whatever you don’t start writing in class, you can try at home. Go ahead!)

  1. Write two pages describing any decade of your life using only three-word sentences. (Abby’s example: “Slept with Israelis. Needn’t have bothered.”)
  2. Write two pages in which the second sentence is “It wasn’t funny.”
  3. You are going someplace and you find a box. What does it look like and what do you do? Two pages.

If you’re sensing a theme here, Abby’s published a book of exercises and writing prompts entitled Two Pages, available from The Golden Notebook Bookstore.
Come back for more!