Word Café

a master class for readers and writers

Word Café Salon 3/12/15

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word cafe salonThe first Word Café Salon on Thursday was a joy. When I started the series last fall, I invited a stellar lineup of 12 guest authors to read and talk about their work; we ended each class with a short writing session. My goal was to send everyone home with the rough beginnings of something they could continue to work on, but at every class, a few brave souls got up and read what they’d just written. These fresh and spontaneous pieces were great, and made me want to hear more.

So I decided to start and end this year’s Word Café series with two “Salons,” giving participants a chance to share more polished work with the group. I had no way of knowing how many people would sign up to read, or what they would bring to the table.

As soon as I entered outdated: an antique café, I smelled fresh-brewed coffee. Juliet Harrison greeted me with a warm hug, and at a corner table, I spotted Kathleen Griffin, Connie DeDona, and Sue Sparrow, three of the five members of an ongoing writers’ group that started last fall at Word Café. They continued to meet through the winter, and all of them brought new work to share.

More Word Café regulars arrived, greeting me and our multitasking man-at-the-door, Craig Mawhirt. There were also some newcomers, several of whom signed up to read, along with a group of attentive listeners. Robert Burke Warren breezed in with a mike stand and kick-ass vintage amp he’d borrowed from BSP (many thanks!) And we were off.

Our first reader, Lisa St. John, is about to publish a book of poems with Finishing Line Press. (You can preorder a copy of Ponderings at Finishing Line Press.) She was followed by Connie DeDona, Kathleen Griffin, Christina Franke, Sue Sparrow, Robert Burke Warren, Elisabeth Henry, Juliet Harrison, Craig Mawhirt, and Darcy Smith. All ten readings were excellent, and so were the brief but lively discussions after each offering. We heard poetry, memoir, essay, fiction–a wonderful kick-off to our equally eclectic spring author series.

COMING NEXT!

On Saturday, 3/28 at 6pm, I’m hosting a panel discussion called “Writers Teach Writing” with an all-star lineup from Word Cafe’s opening season. Join me, SARI BOTTON, LAURA SHAINE CUNNINGHAM, ALISON GAYLIN, AMITAVA KUMAR, JANA MARTIN, GREG OLEAR, ABIGAIL THOMAS, and MARK WUNDERLICH at the Woodstock Library for this special event. Admission is free, so bring friends!

Then it’s back to outdated for Thursday author events throughout April and May. Classes start at 6:30; admission is $15/class, or $125 for the full series, including the final Salon on 6/25.

My first guest on April 2 is nonfiction writer extraordinaire MARILYN JOHNSON, who’s profiled archaeologists in Lives in Ruins, librarians in This Book Is Overdue, and obituary writers in The Dead Beat. Join us for “Digging Deep: A Writer’s Curiosity,” and check out the rest of spring’s offerings at wordcafe.us. I’ll be posting these write-ups, photos, and announcements on the Event Archive page every week.

See you soon, and keep writing,

Nina

JOSEPH LUZZI, “Writing With All Five Senses”

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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

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Joseph Luzzi

Joseph Luzzi

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Nina and Joseph Luzzi

Nina Shengold and Joseph Luzzi

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Nina and Joseph

Nina Shengold and Joseph Luzzi



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!

KIESE LAYMON, “Letters Home”

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KIESE LAYMON is a black southern writer, born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon attended Millsaps College and Jackson State University before graduating from Oberlin College. He earned an MFA from Indiana University and is the author of the novel Long Division and a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Laymon is a contributing editor at gawker.com. Long Division was named one of the Best of 2013 by Buzzfeed, The Believer, Salon, Guernica, Mosaic Magazine, Chicago Tribune and the Crunk Feminist Collective. Laymon has written essays and stories for Esquire, ESPN.com, Colorlines, NPR, Gawker, Truthout.org, Longman’s Hip Hop Reader, The Best American Non-required Reading, Guernica, Mythium, Politics and Culture, and others. Laymon is currently at work on a new novel “…” and a funky memoir called 309. He is an Associate Professor of English at Vassar College.

Read Nina Shengold’s Chronogram profile.

Letters Home 11/13/14 – The Exercises

Word Cafe Echo brothers
Nina, Darnell, Marlon & Kiese
Nina Shengold, Darnell Moore, Marlon Peterson & Kiese Laymon
Darnell Moore
Darnell Moore
Darnell Moore
Marlon Peterson
Marlon Peterson
Marlon Peterson
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Nina, Echo Brothers and Kiese
Nina, Darnell, Marlon and Kiese


Dear Word Café family,

Hard to sum up this powerful evening in words. There was a lot of listening and love in the room as Kiese Laymon, Darnell L. Moore, and Marlon Peterson read their contributions to the essay-in-letters “Echo,” which also includes letters by Mychal Denzel Smith and Kai M. Green. (The full text is in Kiese’s amazing How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, which you can order from The Golden Notebook.

Our subject was “Letters Home.” We talked about how letters foster direct address and one-on-one intimacy; Darnell called epistolary forms “invitational,” and I observed that letters begin and end with words of love and respect (Dear, Love, Bless, Yours truly). While Marlon was incarcerated, he started writing letters to a teacher friend’s middle-school class–he says it meant as much to him as it did to the students, who often wrote about things they’d never felt able to tell their families or anyone else.

We talked about the courage it takes to go deep and tell personal truths. Darnell still gets fierce anxiety when he reveals himself in print, but feels it’s important to connect with others who struggle with issues of mental health, suicide ideation, physical abuse, sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia. He spoke about building a bridge that invites readers into the conversation, and how a piece that feels vulnerable often gets responses of “Thank you for writing that.” (Here’s an example, just published in Ebony).

Kiese spoke about feeling a responsibility to others whose lives are revealed when he tells his own truth. In the title essay of How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, he describes his mother (a college dean) pulling a gun on him when he was 19. When he showed it to her before publication, she said he couldn’t print that, and even that she didn’t remember it happening. Kiese felt strongly that it needed to be part of the essay, and proceeded “as generously as possible.” They exchanged long letters about what should and should not be revealed, things they’d never been able to talk about in person. “It opened a dialogue. Maybe printing that wasn’t good for my mother, but it was good for our relationship.”

When writing fiction, Kiese sometimes writes letters from one character to another as part of his process, just to get inside their head and get the sound of their voice right.

Marlon talked about the value of writing by hand, and the intimacy of looking at someone else’s handwritten words. He said he often “walks with an idea in his head” for a long time, then sits down at 2am to write it all at once; his letter in “Echo” happened like that.

Kiese said the word “echo” explores the way truths reverberate: “If you really open up, what do others write back?” Darnell talked about creating a “safe, risk-taking space” and “writing to create community.” All three men have collaborated with others on writing projects under the collective name Brothers Writing To Live (from the Facebook page: “We are a group of black cis and trans-men who hail from spaces across the United States. And we write so that we and our people might live.”) He also spoke about men’s involvement in feminism, and the reverberations among disenfranchised communities: “What would it be like if we all stood up and said, ‘This is not right?'”

We talked so long, and fielded so many great questions from participants, that we skipped the usual break and barely had time to start on a writing exercise. But here’s what it was:

— Pick someone in this room you’ve never met and introduce yourself. Sit down and start writing letters to each other. Write about what brought you here tonight, and something about yourself.

If you weren’t in the room, or didn’t get the name and address of the person you’re writing to, write a letter to someone else. And send it. Tell your truth. Connect.

Love, Nina