Word Café

a master class for readers and writers

Jenny Milchman + Jeffrey Davis “Inspiration”

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WORD CAFE EVENT ARCHIVE
JENNY MILCHMAN + JEFFREY DAVIS “INSPIRATION” 11/19/15

Hard to believe we’ve reached our last author event of the Fall 2015 season! Our topic was “Inspiration,” and authors and workshop leaders Jenny Milchman and Jeffrey Davis were an inspired pairing.

Jenny led off by reading the opening of her latest novel, As Night Falls. She described her turf as “tales of women who are about to cross that thin gray line, whose life has been upheaved.” All of her published novels have roots in upstate New York, and she’s very concerned with the economic and cultural tensions between longtime locals and incoming weekenders and ex-urban residents–the workers who build showplace homes, and the people who own them. She’s also the founder of national initiative Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day and the star of the World’s Longest Book Tour.

Jeffrey wrote the groundbreaking nonfiction book The Journey from the Center to the Page: Yoga Philosophies and Practices as Muse for Authentic Writing and has worked as a creativity consultant around the globe. Practicing yoga, he says, “shifted my concentration and gave me an emotional range that the 25-year-old poet never had. It opened me up as a writer.” He treated us to readings of three poems from his forthcoming collection Coat Thief, due out in 2016.

This opened a freeform discussion of creativity and process, where ideas come from and how they develop. Jenny can remember the “genesis moment” of all her published and unpublished novels except for As Night Falls, which mystified her with its eerily prescient similarity to the Adirondack convict escape which filled the media right before its publication.

Jeffrey spends “a lot of time in museums, watching people watch art.” Before he became a father, he had “a regular poetry rhythm, waking up first and attending to whatever that tremor of a feeling is.” He’s trained himself to “seed my mind,” writing down something–an image, description, phrase or melody that’s “somehow in conversation with that feeling.”

Both writers agree that movement helps. Yoga, walking, driving, even a shower can give an idea room to stretch. Jenny also urged writers to “write the kind of book you curl up with at night.” Jeffrey described “the hunger for that immersed state, the song of joyful concentration.”

THE EXERCISES:

Jeffrey asked writers to start from “the nuance of feeling.” What are you or your character feeling at this moment? Don’t answer directly. Write into a particular description, scene or object that’s in conversation with that feeling.

Jenny invited us to “Look around this space. What would happen if something went wrong here tonight?”

Nina paid homage to the evening’s downpour by inviting writers to describe being outdoors in terrible weather, and heading toward a light. What does it turn out to be? Do you go inside?

Nicole Quinn “World Building” 11/5/15

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WORD CAFE EVENT ARCHIVE
NICOLE QUINN, 11/5/15

nicole-quinnThis week’s reading was a special treat–alongside her credits as screenwriter, playwright, and author of The Gold Stone Girl trilogy, Nicole Quinn is an award-winning audiobook narrator(http://nicolequinnnarrates.blogspot.com/). She read a brief selection from each of the trilogy’s three books (It’s a Nightmare, Disbelief, and Rewire), addressing our topic of “World-Building,” along with intertwined issues of character, narrative voice, and creative process

The trilogy unfolds in a far-distant future in which women are treated as breeding livestock. The earth’s continents have shifted into a single Pangaea-like mass ruled by the demonic Night Mare. Most of its inhabitants–human and otherwise–live in a massive urban sprawl, but reluctant hero Mina was born inside a willow tree and raised by folksy, quietly rebellious “off-gridders” Dee-Dee and Bubba.

Nicole’s impetus for the trilogy came from an image in It’s a Girl (http://www.itsagirlmovie.com/), Best Documentary winner at a festival that awarded Best Narrative Feature to her own film Racing Daylight (http://www.racingdaylightthemovie.com/home.htm). The documentary opened with a shot of brightly wrapped bundles bobbing in an Indian river; a title card identified them as cast-off baby girls. Nicole was horrified and galvanized.

She chose the far future as a way to avoid finger-pointing and lecturing, and to make things that are extreme in our world the norm. Nicole built her future’s culture organically and intuitively as she went along, often using everyday things she observed (a heron fishing, the word “housewife”) and putting a spin on them. She asserted that an invented world needs “really strong rules. You’re God in your world, but a good reader will notice if you break your rules.”

Nina pointed out that although the term “world-building” comes from fantasy literature (think Middle Earth, Narnia, Oz, Earthsea) the writer of any narrative needs to create the specifics of the world where the story takes place. What’s its history, culture, environment? How do its creatures behave? What well-chosen details–“brush strokes,” Nicole called them–will paint the whole picture, transporting us to another place or time?

Nicole does a lot of revising, and presented the terms “down draft” (as in getting it all down) and “up draft” (cleaning it up) as used by writing teachers Peter Bricklebank and Anne Lamott. (I couldn’t find the terms’ origin online, but here’s Lamott’s delightful essay on “Shitty First Drafts” from her book Bird By Bird.

As usual, everyone’s questions were excellent, and the conversation ranged from world-building to character and language. Which is as it should be, since they’re all joined at the hip. As Nicole said, “It’s all just storytelling.” Amen.

nina-shengold-nicole-quinn-word-cafe
THE EXERCISES:

Nicole: Look inside your purse or pockets and describe the objects you find there as if to a being that has no familiarity with them at all.

Nina: Describe a place you used as a getaway or hideout as a child. Try to remember what you imagined there. If you want to make the imaginary element a step or two more literal, feel free.

Akiko Busch, “Writing Place”

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April 9, 2015

akiko buschAKIKO BUSCH treated a lively, attentive, and talkative group to a lovely reading from Nine Ways To Cross a River, her memoir of river-swimming, regeneration, and river as metaphor. Though our topic was “Writing Place,” we drifted with the currents into a wide-ranging discussion of the writer’s process and craft.

Akiko spoke about the need for observation and attentiveness, practices she honed as a citizen scientist, as described in her recent book The Incidental Steward. Her advice to her Environmental Writing students at Bennington rings true for all of us: “Slow down. Pay attention to details. Be specific. Get the textures, get the sounds.”

nina-akiko-2She also talked about honoring the unexpected. Many heads nodded as Aki described how the vision in your head of what you plan to write changes through the physical process of putting words on paper. One thing leads to another, and (much like our discussion of writing about place) you find yourself following a different path than the one you preplanned. Be open to this. There is joy and surprise in discovering where your words lead you.

Bobbi Katz recited a line from A Fly in the Soup, a memoir by poet Charles Simic: “Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat, and the poem is as much the result of chance as it is of intention.”

Several questions addressed specific issues. If you want to provide a detail such as what bird you hear singing, but don’t know the answer, what do you do? Akiko talked about doing online research after the fact, once you know what it is that you need to fill in. Nina pointed out that there’s a difference between naming and detail. Sometimes what you need is not the name of the bird, but the musical quality of its song. Is it liquid, harsh? Does it sound like a flute, run up and down scales, repeat patterns? What will help your reader share your experience of hearing that bird?

What does it mean if you find yourself going back to the same material over and over? Akiko and Nina agreed that we all revisit the subjects that resonate most for us. Returning to the same pool again and again probably means you’ve tapped into a very deep spring, and there’s more to bring up.

THE EXERCISES:

Akiko suggested writing a memory from childhood that involves water: being on, near, close to, or in the water.

Nina suggested describing a place that was important to you as a child, whether indoors or out, using all five senses, but no adjectives or adverbs.

Try both of these. See what watery memories your bucket brings up, and how the ban on adjectives and adverbs forces you to choose verbs and nouns that make readers feel, hear, smell, taste, and see what you’re writing about.