Word Café

a master class for readers and writers

CAROL GOODMAN, “Once Upon a Time”

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CAROL GOODMAN‘s fiction includes her bestselling and critically acclaimed debut novel The Lake of Dead Languages, The Seduction of Water, The Drowning Tree, The Ghost Orchid, The Sonnet Lover, Arcadia Falls, the young adult novel Blythewood, and a fantasy trilogy written under the name Juliet Dark. Goodman’s books have been nominated for the IMPAC award twice, the Simon & Schuster/Mary Higgins Clark award, and the Nero Wolfe Award; The Seduction of Water won the Hammett Prize in 2003. She lives in Dutchess County, and teaches creative writing and literature at SUNY New Paltz.

Read Nina Shengold’s Chronogram profile.

“Once Upon a Time” 10/30/14 – The Exercises

Carol and NIna
Carol Goodman
with Nina Shengold

Carol Goodman and Nina Shengold

The_Selkie_by_yaamas
The Selkie by Yaamas

The Selkie by Yaamas

Selkie by Arthur Rackham
Selkie by Arthur Rackham

Selkie by Arthur Rackham

Carol Goodman and Nina Shengold
Carol Goodman and Nina Shengold

Carol Goodman and Nina Shengold



Carol Goodman enchanted us with a reading from her Hammett Prize winning mystery The Seduction of Water, in which a woman recalls her mother telling her a bedtime story about a selkie, a seal-woman captured by a farmer who steals her skin.

Our topic was “Once Upon a Time,” and we talked about the timeless allure of fairy tales, which Carol uses often in her novels and in her classroom at SUNY New Paltz. “They are our first stories,” she explained, going on to discuss the hero’s-journey structure and character archetypes in these classic tales. They’re laden with meaning and metaphor, and when one of her students has trouble coming up with a story idea, she often suggests retelling a fairy tale from a different point of view.

Carol also advises writing students “to go straight for the conflict;” Nina used to give teenage playwrights the cooking-show advice, “Bam! Kick it up a notch!”

Fairytales can provide a useful metaphor and prototype for a character’s journey, even if the book is not set in a magical realm (we talked about Jane Eyre as a character who goes through her own dark wood). Carol observed that an essential question for any character is “Why are you telling me this now?”

She writes longhand in notebooks, spending one day each week typing the previous week’s work. Since she writes in sequence, Carol sometimes finds that she needs to insert exposition in later drafts to set up choices she made as the story evolved. She cited a movie term for this–“ret-con” (for “retroactive continuity)–and suggested introducing the exposition into the story twice: once in passing near the opening, and again about 60 pages later, so that when it reappears in mid-book it will seem familiar and organic to the story. Nina pointed out that classic comedy also observes a “rule of three.”

CAROL’S EXERCISE:

(Also from The Seduction of Water; the narrator is a writing teacher!)

“Write about your favorite fairy tale from your childhood. Retell the story, but also say who told you the story and what you thought about it then. What did you learn from the story? What did it tell you about the world you lived in?”

 NINA’S EXERCISE:

Choose something in this room that could be a magical object, transforming you or your character in some unexpected way or transporting you into another world.

 

 

AMITAVA KUMAR, “Location, Location”

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AMITAVA KUMAR is a writer and journalist. He was born in Ara, India, and grew up in the nearby town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty and delicious mangoes. Kumar is the author of several books of non-fiction (A Matter of Rats, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, Husband of a Fanatic, Bombay-London-New York, Passport Photos) and a novel (Nobody Does the Right Thing, also published as Home Products). A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb was adjudged the best nonfiction book of the year by the Page Turner Awards in 2011; in 2007, Home Products was short-listed for India’s premier literary award, the Crossword Award; Husband of a Fanatic was an “Editors’ Choice” book at the New York Times. In 2015, a collection of essays entitled Lunch With A Bigot will be published by Duke University Press. He lives in Poughkeepsie, where he is Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College.

Read Nina Shengold’s Chronogram profile.

“Location, Location” 10/2/14 – The Exercises

Our topic on October 2 was “Location, Location.” Vassar professor and multigenre writer Amitava Kumar delighted a rapt audience by reading several passages from his book A Matter of Rats, sprinkling in stories about how he constructed this short biography of his hometown, Patna, India.

Amitava Kumar lecturing at Word Café
Amitava Kumar
Amitava Kumar reads a passage from his book, A Matter of Rats.
Nina Shengold and Amitava Kumar
Nina & Amitava
Nina Shengold and Amitava Kumar on "Location, Location"
Amitava Kumar
Amitava Kumar
Amitava Kumar talks to a rapt audience of writers.


Amitava passed out a page with 11 brief writings by Arundhati Roy, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, David Wojnarowicz, Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel, J.M. Coetzee, Lydia Davis, Joan Didion, and Ismat Chughtai. Volunteers read several of these aloud, and we had a lively discussion about the specific choices and details that bring them to life.

Nina quoted an essay by Nancy Willard, recounting a game she’d played with her sister in which one girl would close her eyes as the other described a place, adding details until the listener cried out, “I’m there!”

We talked about using a concrete detail to anchor a fictional description of a place you’ve never been, or asking someone who does live there to vet the details; James Joyce sent his sister to check on things while writing about Dublin from Paris. It’s often easier to write about a place you remember than one where you’re living now, because memory distills it to essentials. Amitava likened this to the difference between the depth of field of an iPhone camera, which renders everything in a photo in focus, and a professional SLR camera, which can be focused selectively so that one object is sharp and others are blurred or pushed into the shadows.

  1. Amitava read a passage from Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland including a phrase about “Poughkeepsie, a merry name that sounds like children crying out in a game.” He asked each of us to consider the sound and feel of our hometown’s name and write a sentence or two connecting that name to the place. (The ones people read were wonderful!)
  2. Another exercise from Amitava: Describe what can you see outside the window closest to where you write.
  3. Click to open Amitava Kumar’s handout.
  4. From Nina: Write a detailed description of leaving home for a place you (or your character, if you’re writing fiction) have never gone before. Part two: write about arriving in that new place, using all five senses.

Amitava recommended a daily practice of writing a small, achievable amount, citing “as much as it takes to cover a Post-It” from Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird. He sets his students a mantra: “Write every day and walk every day.” 150 words and ten minutes of mindful walking. It all adds up.

BEVERLY DONOFRIO, “The Telling Detail”

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BEVERLY DONOFRIO‘s first memoir, Riding in Cars with Boys, has been translated into sixteen languages and transformed into a popular motion picture. Her second memoir, Looking for Mary (or, the Blessed Mother and Me), began as a documentary on NPR and was chosen as a Discover Book at Barnes & Noble. She is the author of two picture books illustrated by Barbara McClintock, and a book for middle-graders. Beverly is an award–winning radio documentarian and essayist and can be heard on All Things Considered. Her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Allure, Cosmopolitan, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, O, Marie Claire, and Spirituality & Health. She lived for four years as a lay Carmelite at Nada Hermitage in Colorado, where she began her new memoir, Astonished, published by Viking in 2013. Beverly lives in Woodstock, and teaches at the low residency MFA program at Wilkes University.

Read Nina Shengold’s Chronogram profile.

“The Telling Detail” 9/25/14 – The Exercises

Beverly Donofrio delighted the Word Café crowd by reading an exuberant new piece called “Anthem” which she’d just written in a TMI workshop.
 

Nina Shengold and Bev Donofrio
Nina and Bev
Bev Donofrio in action at Word Café. You can tell what a wonderful reading she gave--the manuscript pages are vibrating!
Beverly Donofrio and class
Bev Donofrio's
workshop
Another full house at Word Café with Bev Donofrio
Nina Shengold and Bev Donofrio
Nina and Bev
Fielding questions from the group

 
Our subject was “The Telling Detail,” and we talked the way in which a carefully chosen detail can paint the whole picture.

Bev said that though many writers spill out a lot in the first draft and then cut, she tends to write short and then fill in more and more detail. But rewriting can also be a winnowing process. She described a short chapter in Astonished about a bunny, which started out with a lot of step by step detail. Something about it didn’t feel right, and she set it aside for awhile. (Her process includes a lot of stopping, walking away to do other things, and starting again–what she cheerfully called “ADD.”) When she reread it, she realized the story she wanted to tell began midway through her draft, and cut nearly half of the chapter.

Asked if there’s such a thing as too much detail, Bev asserted that if you’re really passionate about something and every detail excites you, the reader will share your excitement.

She also said that the most important thing about writing memoir is “being absolutely and completely who you are.” Writing “is not therapy, but it is therapeutic,” and telling the truth about difficult things is cathartic.

Here are the writing prompts we gave in class, all of which inspired wonderful work from participants:

  1. Bev read a short passage from Margaux Fragoso’s memoir Tiger, Tiger written in third person sentences which all begin, “Picture a girl who…” Write a series of sentences beginning with “Picture a girl (or boy) who…,” revealing how you became something you still are today.
  2. Write about a moment when everything changed, an event that divided your life into a “before” and “after.” (Bev)
  3. Nina’s exercise borrowed a two-step process from Mark Wunderlich’s word-list poems. Describe a significant room from your past in as much detail as possible: list everything in it, sounds, smells, textures. Then go back over this list and circle three details that gave the room its characteristic feel and atmosphere.