Word Café

a master class for readers and writers

MARK WUNDERLICH, “Rhythm & Image”

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MARK WUNDERLICH was born in Winona, Minnesota and grew up in rural Fountain City, Wisconsin. His first book, The Anchorage, was published in 1999 by the University of Massachusetts Press, and received the Lambda Literary Award. Voluntary Servitude was published in 2004 and The Earth Avails, both by Graywolf. He has published poems in The Paris Review, Yale Review, Slate, Tin House, Poetry, Ploughshares, Boston Review and elsewhere. His work has been included in over thirty anthologies and has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. His work has been translated into Italian, Bulgarian and Swedish. Wunderlich has taught in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, Ohio University and San Francisco State University. He has taught undergraduate writing and literature courses at Stanford University, Barnard College and Stonehill College. Since 2003 he has been a member of the Literature Faculty at Bennington College in Vermont. Wunderlich lives in New York’s Hudson Valley near the village of Catskill.

Read Nina Shengold’s Chronogram profile.

“Rhythm & Image” 9/18/14 – The Exercises

At our third class, the delightful Mark Wunderlich read four poems from The Earth Avails (Graywolf, 2014) and a new poem he wrote this summer. He talked about his writing process (it involves a lot of getting up and washing dishes, going back to work, splitting kindling, going back to work) and how poetry involves breath and music. “Whenever we speak, we’re singing to each other.”

mark wunderlich
mark wunderlich

Mark Wunderlich

mark wunderlich

Mark Wunderlich



It’s also a visual form. Mark pointed out that prose is fluid, flowing from margin to margin, where poetic lines are specific. They don’t “break” so much as “breathe.”

MARK’S EXERCISE:

Imagine a place from your past and spend five minutes listing favorite words you associate with it. (Examples from his family farm: muskrat/chokecherry/milk pail.) Don’t overthink or censor yourself. Keep your pen moving constantly. If you can’t think of the next word, keep writing the same one till a new one comes to you.

Choose ten favorite words from this list and print them on a separate sheet of paper.

Now trade pages with someone you don’t know. You have ten minutes to write a poem using all ten of the words you’ve been given. Go.

NINA’S EXERCISE:

Describe something you find beautiful in as much detail as you can, without using any adverbs or adjectives. (Examples: it can’t be “big,” but it can dominate the room. It can’t be “green,” but it can smell like pine.) Ten minutes.

Both exercises impose limitations (time limit, rules about what words you must or can’t use). Mark observed that writers can become overly invested in producing a product–a finished thing–and lose their sense of playfulness, invention, and accident. “All of poetry is a conversation between freedom and restraint,” he said. “When you engage the good soldier with rules and patterns, the reptile part–the id, the wild woman–gets to come out and do its thing.”

He also proposed some uses for “those little notebooks people always give you as gifts when they know you’re a writer”:

— A book of possible titles

— A book of quotations and overheard dialogue

— A “good lines” box for things you wind up cutting: Recycle your darlings.

If you can’t clear the decks to give yourself uninterrupted blocks of writing time, you can always find 20 minutes to check in with your creative work. Make lists, do exercises, get something started.

VALERIE MARTIN, “Narrative Voices”

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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

Nina Shengold and Valerie Martin
Nina Shengold and Valerie Martin
Valerie Martin and Nina Shengold
valerie martin and workshop participant
Valerie Martin in conversation
with workshop participant.
Valerie Martin and workshop participant
valerie martin and nina shengold
Valerie Martin and Nina Shengold
Valerie Martin and Nina Shengold


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!

ABIGAIL THOMAS, “Getting Started”

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ABIGAIL THOMAS, daughter of renowned science writer Lewis Thomas (The Lives of a Cell), is the mother of four children and the grandmother of twelve. Her academic education stopped when, pregnant with her oldest daughter, she was asked to leave Bryn Mawr during her first year. She’s lived most of her life on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and was for a time a book editor and for another time a book agent. Then she started writing for publication. Her memoir, A Three Dog Life, was named one of the best books of 2006 by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. She is also author of Safekeeping, Two Pages, and Thinking About Memoir. When Thomas can’t write she paints on glass. She lives in Woodstock, NY with her four dogs.

“Getting Started” 9/4/14 – The Exercises

Nina Shengold and Abigail Thomas
Word Café with Abigail Thomas
and Nina Shengold

Nina Shengold and Abigail Thomas together in conversation

Abigail Thomas by Jana Martin
Abigail Thomas

Abigail Thomas at Word Café

word cafe salon
The writers
filled the house.

The place was packed!

Writers at outdated: an antique café. SRO.


Word Café got off to a spectacular start with Abigail Thomas reading selections from Thinking About Memoir, and a sneak peek at her upcoming book What Comes Next and How To Like It. Here are a few of the insights I gleaned:

— Use a notebook to write down everything and anything. Don’t call it a Journal (or worse yet, “journaling”) and don’t worry about writing well. It’s for you, not for posterity. It’s the equivalent of singing in the shower.

— If you don’t remember something, write two pages about not remembering. One thing can lead to another.

— The places you resist most are where the live coals are. You can say, “Hot dog, I’m onto something.” Or you can take a nap.

Here are three exercises we gave out before the break. (You’ll always have a choice, and whatever you don’t start writing in class, you can try at home. Go ahead!)

  1. Write two pages describing any decade of your life using only three-word sentences. (Abby’s example: “Slept with Israelis. Needn’t have bothered.”)
  2. Write two pages in which the second sentence is “It wasn’t funny.”
  3. You are going someplace and you find a box. What does it look like and what do you do? Two pages.

If you’re sensing a theme here, Abby’s published a book of exercises and writing prompts entitled Two Pages, available from The Golden Notebook Bookstore.
Come back for more!