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Word Café

a master class for readers and writers

LISA A. PHILLIPS “Literary Obsession”

October 13, 2015 By Word Cafe

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.

MARILYN JOHNSON, “Digging Deep – A Writer’s Curiousity”

April 6, 2015 By Word Cafe

nina shengold marilyn johnsonWord Café’s second season began with a bang as Marilyn Johnson delighted a packed house with frank, funny tales of her evolution as a writer.  She studied poetry in college, became an assistant to Esquire’s legendary fiction editor Rust Hills, and began to write fiction herself.  Struggling with self-doubt and blockage, she moved sidelong into journalism and obituary writing (“I LOVED writing about dead celebrities!”), which led to her first book, The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries.  Marilyn says her writers’ block “disappeared when I took myself out of the center.”  She feels a responsibility to tell others’ stories and get it right, and has a passion for research, online and in the field.

Marilyn described her books The Dead Beat, This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, and her new book Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble as a “a trilogy about memory professions.”  She read a passage from Lives in Ruins about attending a “forensics camp” in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, in which the metaphor of digging deep became literal.

Nina observed that writing is also a “memory profession,” and that there are many parallels between the ways nonfiction and fiction writers create settings and characters and structure a narrative to draw readers in.

Marilyn agreed.  “We’re trying to open up a world, bring a world to life,” she said, adding that prose needs to be “alive, with sparks coming off it.  Something has to have a beating heart going on.”

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THE EXERCISES:

Marilyn suggests enrolling in an activity that takes you outside your comfort zone and writing about that

Her in-class exercise:  Fantasize about a world you’ve always wanted to enter, a gate you’ve never gone through, and write about that.

Nina’s exercise was a close cousin:  You (or a character you create) are walking down a street or hallway. You see a door that’s slightly ajar.  Push it open and enter.  What do you find?

We heard some astonishing starts by writers in the group, including teen prodigies Ava Ratcliff and Jack Warren, who built whole worlds in minutes.

Try something new, and dig deep!

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