Word Café

a master class for readers and writers

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

joseph-luzzi
Joseph Luzzi

Joseph Luzzi

nina and joseph luzzi 2
Nina and Joseph Luzzi

Nina Shengold and Joseph Luzzi

nina and joseph luzzi
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

SARI BOTTON “Getting Personal”

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sari bottonSARI BOTTON has worked as a journalist, essayist, ghostwriter, and teacher of various kinds of writing. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, More, The Rumpus, plus other publications and anthologies. She has been an adjunct professor in the journalism department at SUNY Albany and taught first-person writing in the continuing education program at SUNY Ulster. She edited the popular Seal Press anthology Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakeable Love for New York, forthcoming in October. She also co-edited Get Out of My Crotch: 21 Writers Respond to America’s War on Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health, and is editorial director of the award-winning TMI Project.

“Getting Personal” 11/6/14

Author and editor Sari Botton arrived at Word Cafe with exciting news: her anthology Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York just made it onto the New York Times bestseller list! She treated us to a wonderful reading from her essay from the collection. See my profile of Sari in the November Chronogram.

Nina Shengold and Sari Botton Word Cafe
Nina & Sari

Nina Shengold and Sari Botton

"Getting Personal"
Sari Botton Chronogram by Roy Gumpel
Sari Botton

Sari Botton

Goodbye to All That
Goodbye to All That

Goodbye To All That

Writers on Loving and Leaving New York
never-can-say-goodbye edited by sari botton
Never Can Say Goodbye

Never Can Say Goodbye

Writers and their Unshakable Love for New York


Our topic was “Getting Personal,” and we talked about the differences between personal essay and memoir, going deep to release and explore material, and then learning to edit and shape it; reading aloud really helps. We also talked about facing fears and the importance of creating a safe space to share work when it’s still raw. Sari is editorial director of the TMI Project and writes a column for The Rumpus called “Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me.”

Sari suggested that if you resist writing about something, that probably means it’s a story worth telling. You may not choose to publish or share what you’ve written, but getting it on paper helps you unlock what you do want to write about. And often the things we struggle with are what will connect most with others. No one wants to read about the perfect surface of someone else’s life. We want honesty.

This does not mean all personal essays have to mine traumatic experiences or melodramatic events. Sari is a big fan of what she called “the familiar essay,” in which the writer conjures details of an experience that readers can relate to, or comes at something familiar from a different angle. Personal and specific detail, she said, is the route to making a piece of writing feel universal.

When participants got up to read the (excellent!) beginnings they’d written based on Sari’s (also excellent!) writing prompts, she offered a TMI rule that Nina thinks should pertain to all aspects of life, not just writing workshops: No self-deprecating remarks.

SARI’S EXERCISES:

Write a true story about:
A time when you tried to seem cool.
How NYC turned you into YOU.
The me nobody knows.
A song that is or was your personal anthem.

NINA’S EXERCISE:

Write about a time when you had to wear something you wouldn’t usually wear. Where were you going and how did you feel?