narrative Archives - Word Café

PAUL RUSSELL “PAST & PRESENT” 10/22/15

November 1, 2015 By Word Cafe

WORD CAFE EVENT ARCHIVE
PAUL RUSSELL – PAST & PRESENT, 10/22/15

Novelist and Vassar professor Paul Russell led a terrific discussion of the many roles of past and present in fiction. His just-released novel Immaculate Blue centers on the wedding of longtime lovers Anatole and Rafael. Guests include Anatole’s close friend and Poughkeepsie neighbor Lydia and the elusive Chris, with whom they share a complex past and a love object named Leigh, aka Our Boy of the Mall. They also share another novel: younger versions of Chris, Anatole, Lydia, and Leigh appear in Paul’s first novel, The Salt Point, published in 1990.

Paul read the opening of Immaculate Blue, set in a changing Poughkeepsie. It’s narrated in present tense, with a swooping point of view that moves fluidly from one character’s thoughts to another; Paul favors “ensemble novels” over the “claustrophobia” of a single first-person narrator. Present tense has the advantage of immediacy–you’re right there with the narrator as events take place–but “can lack a certain reflective depth.” Paul’s writing professor James McConkey posited that literary use of present tense was a response to the atomic bomb; there’s no faith in the future. Past tense communicates an assurance that we’ve survived, and can look back on the events of the story from a safe distance. Present tense gives the feel of a story unfolding from moment to moment; its pace is more hectic than thoughtful.

Immaculate Blue’s wedding and reunion with long-absent Chris gives all the characters occasion to revisit the past in memories and in conversations with each other. Paul pointed out that good dialogue appears overheard, that characters talk “to each other, not to us” in a sort of shared shorthand–they don’t remind each other of things they already know. The reader does not need to get all the facts to be drawn in–in fact, quite the opposite. “We love puzzles,” Paul said. “We love putting the pieces together. If somebody hands you a jigsaw puzzle that’s already done, where’s the pleasure?” Nina added that a writer’s great place of power is making the reader want to find out what happened.

Paul observed that his characters’ versions of their shared past vary in often self-serving ways, so “there is no truth, only perspective.” Though he hadn’t revisited these characters in many years, when his agent proposed writing a sequel to The Salt Point, he caught up with them instantly. “It was as though there was a locked room in my brain where the characters had been living, and all I had to do was open the door.” Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, with its ten-year gap between parts one and two, offered him inspiration.

THE EXERCISES:

— Paul read a short passage from Joyce’s story “The Dead,” in which Gabriel Conroy has an awkward conversation with Lily, a servant girl who answers his small talk about schooling and marriage with “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you,” revealing far more of her experience than he expects. Paul asked us to write a seemingly inconsequential encounter between two people in which the dialogue gives a hint of an unexpected history.

— Nina asked participants to think of a place they had been both as a young child and later in life (a relative’s house, a school, a vacation spot). Write a paragraph or section in present tense from the child’s perspective, beginning with “I am standing in…” and a second paragraph in past tense from the adult perspective, beginning with “When I went back, I noticed…” What is the effect of the switch in tenses?

Photo credit: Jana Martin

JOSEPH LUZZI, “Writing With All Five Senses”

November 20, 2014 By Word Cafe

JOSEPH LUZZI is a writer and professor of Italian at Bard College. The first child in his Calabrian family born in the U.S., he is the author of the memoir My Two Italies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 2014. He is a frequent contributor of essays and reviews to publications including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, the London Times Literary Supplement, and many others. His first book, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (Yale Univ. Press 2008), received the Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies from the Modern Language Association, and he is the author of A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2014). His work has been translated into Italian and Portuguese, and he has lectured throughout the world on art, film, literature, and Italian culture.

Read Nina Shengold’s Chronogram profile.

“Writing With All Five Senses” – The Exercises

Hard to believe we’ve reached the end of our Fall 2014 Word Café series! But Joseph Luzzi finished our 12-course literary banquet with style, reading from his new memoir My Two Italies, and discussing his transition from scholarly writing (Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy and A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film) to more personal writing. The key was our discussion topic: “Writing With All Five Senses.”

Joe described coming home after school in the afternoon, hoping for the aroma of his mother’s homemade bread, and being greeted instead by the noxious fumes of boiling tripe. It was the unbidden memory of that smell, he says, that started his writing on a new path. (“Proust got madeleines, I got boiled cow stomach,” he quipped.)

The sense of smell conveys the strongest memories, he says. But sounds, tastes, and textures–“things you can get your hands dirty with”–are equally evocative, and ground your writing in sensual details that connect the reader. Sight is less physical and more familiar–it’s the “go-to” sense for description. Nina commented that it’s often useful to think about which sense is dominant in a fictional character and explore that imagery.

Joe also spoke about the need for spontaneity in writing: “If you turn the screw too many times, you wipe out the threads. Trying too hard can mean losing the joy and flow.” He reminded us that everyone has a natural idiom, something we know well and can talk about fluidly, in our natural voice. “Tell that story,” he said. “Write the book you really need to write.”

JOE’S EXERCISE

Think about something you’ve already written and reconceive it, letting the senses activate the ideas. Bring what was in your mind into the body, the physical details of the experience.

NINA’S EXERCISE

Write about a specific family meal or dish, using all five senses to describe its preparation and consumption. Happy Thanksgiving!

VALERIE MARTIN, “Narrative Voices”

September 11, 2014 By Word Cafe

VALERIE MARTIN is the author of nine novels, including Trespass, Mary Reilly, Italian Fever, and Property, three collections of short fiction, and a biography of St. Francis of Assisi, titled Salvation. She has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Kafka Prize (for Mary Reilly) and Britain’s Orange Prize (for Property). The Confessions of Edward Day was a New York Times notable book for 2007. New books include The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (Nan Talese/Random House) and a middle-grade book, Anton and Cecil: Cats at Sea, co-written with Valerie’s niece Lisa Martin. Valerie Martin has taught in writing programs at the University of Massachusetts and Sarah Lawrence College, among others. She resides in Dutchess County and is currently Professor of English at Mt. Holyoke College.

“Narrative Voices” 9/11/14 – The Exercises

The second Word Café was a literary treat. Acclaimed novelist Valerie Martin read several selections from her brilliant novel-in-many-voices, The Ghost of the Mary Celeste. She read a passage narrated by a skeptical woman journalist interviewing a celebrated spiritualist who surprises her with details of her mother’s death, and another about the young Arthur Conan Doyle during his stint as a ship’s doctor in Africa.

We talked about how writers make the decision to use first or third person. Valerie observed that first person narration creates the sense of a story told in a spoken voice, and is especially effective when the narrator is trying to justify his or her behavior (“First person is driven by guilt.”) It bonds the reader to the speaker’s version of events and other characters, whether accurate or not.

Third person works well for broader-canvas stories. Nina likened the omniscient third-person narrator to a movie camera, which can provide a long-shot overview, then move close in on one character in the scene, then another, then cut to an entirely different time and place.

After some questions about different narrative strategies, we passed out two writing exercises for people to try in class or at home:

EXERCISES: 500-1000 WORDS

CHARACTER (Valerie Martin):

Consider a friend or family member you know well. Answer the following questions about him/her: What is her ambition? What is her idea of fun? What does she value? Who or what is she conflicted about? What inhibits her? What, in your view, are the strengths and weaknesses of her character? What do you know about her that she probably doesn’t know about herself?

NARRATIVE VOICE (Valerie Martin & Nina Shengold):

Choose any object in this room. Writing in first person, in the voice of its previous owner, explain where it came from and how it got here.

Once again, it was amazing to hear what people wrote and read after just a few minutes of concentrated time. Writing is usually a solitary pursuit, but there must be something special in the collective energy of many writers working in the same space.

Next week’s guest is poet Mark Wunderlich, talking about rhythm and image. Join us!

“Writing With All Five Senses” – The Exercises

Joseph Luzzi

Nina Shengold and Joseph Luzzi

Nina Shengold and Joseph Luzzi

“Narrative Voices” 9/11/14 – The Exercises