Word Café

a master class for readers and writers

Porochista Khakpour “Fabulism”

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April 30, 2015

My guest this week was the astonishing Porochista Khakpour. After she read several excerpts from her visionary novel The Last Illusion, we sold every copy on the table, and several people ordered more books from The Golden Notebook (so can you!)

porochista khakpour

Porochista Khakpour
Photo: Jana Martin

The Last Illusion is inspired by a story from the medieval Persian epic The Shahnameh, about an albino boy whose royal parents abandon him at birth; adopted and raised by a mythical bird, he becomes a great hero. Porochista’s Zal is born to a mad widow who keeps “White Demon” in a cage alongside the birds she considers her true children. Rescued by a specialist in feral children, Zal grows up in New York, where he crosses paths with a flamboyant illusionist who wants to make the World Trade Center disappear. (As a child whose family had emigrated from war-torn Iran, Porochista was panicked by David Copperfield’s disappearing Statue of Liberty illusion on TV.)

She explained that while Magical Realism usually refers specifically to Latin American literature, Fabulism is a more inclusive term for fiction that combines a magical or surreal conceit with emotional realism.

The first reading Porochista often assigns to her students, at Bard College and elsewhere, is Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Aleph.” along with a Tim O’Brien essay about it.

This helps to combat what she calls “the Wikipedia school of writing,” urging young writers to look beyond the mundane. “We’re all in our individual consciousness, isolated by these weird vessels, our minds. There is no normal,” she said. “The things we dream, that’s surreal. We die. That’s surreal. The extraordinary strangeness of life should be quite germane to us.”

Nina mentioned some fabulist stories she’s taught by Steven Millhauser (“Flying Carpets”) and Karen Russell (“St. Lucy’s School for Girls Raised by Wolves”), and Porochista added more names from what she calls “Team Sorceress”: Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, Laura van den Berg, Leonora Carrington.

nina shengold porochista khakpour

POROCHISTA’S EXERCISE:

Choose a sentence from something you’ve written (or invent a new one) that could be the ending to a piece. Now work backwards to the beginning, listing six major events or plot points.

NINA’S EXERCISE:

Write an encounter between two characters that begins in the real world, on earth, and moves into a different element: air, water, fire. See where it leads you.

The minutes-old work people shared in class was amazing. Writers, try these at home! And come to outdated: an antique café on Thursday, 5/7 at 6:30, when the brilliant novelist Pamela Erens (The Virgins, The Understory) joins me to talk about “The Storyteller’s I.”

Lois Walden “Channeling Characters”

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April 23, 2015

nina shengold lois waldenLois Walden’s reading from her novel Afterworld was a full-throttle theatrical performance, as she summoned the voices of her title character and various others in snippets of dialogue. She described how she creates characters, which is akin to her work as an actress and singer. “I get the rhythms of speech, sound, smell, how they move, which organ they speak from, the sound of their voice, how they breathe. I find what their longing feels like.” What is the most important thing to this person? What do they want most? What gets in their way, not just from their own life but from their family background and inheritance?

Lois talked about the importance of doing creative work of all sorts, “taking risks, trying to express things that are buried in the marrow of your bones.”

Asked how to proceed when a character you’re writing seems “thin” or you’re “stuck in a shallow place,” Lois suggested shaking it up by making a physical change: taking a long walk, switching from keyboard to longhand, or sitting perfectly still and waiting.

Nina suggested that if a character seems thin, you may be writing that person in too straight a line. Look for the shadow side. If the overall thrust of a character is rage, try finding a place where she’s tender or vulnerable. Characters with flaws and inconsistencies are always more dimensional.

Lois and Nina agreed that character is revealed through conflict. We learn more about people when they’re under pressure. Instead of introducing a character on an ordinary day and then having something happen to him, try jumping into mid-plot, so your character is introduced by how he deals with the unexpected.

LOIS’S EXERCISE:

Lois presented a guided meditation, starting with physical changes (close your eyes, follow your breath, uncross your legs, feel the earth beneath your feet). Create your own version of Afterworld, an objective, detached presence that observes from a distance. Introduce a character who arrives with an unresolved problem. Then add a second character who has a history with the first, and set them into dialogue with each other. (I’m paraphrasing: it was a rich and hypnotic stew, with many ingredients.)

​NINA’S EXERCISE:

Describe a person you know in motion, doing or making something, in five-senses detail. Somewhere along the way, change a specific detail into something fictional. Lie a little. See where it leads you. Fiction is not about what really happened. It’s about what could happen.

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.