The AWP High

AWP 2013 is over.

Sigh.

Frankly, I’m already excited for 2014’s Seattle conference. How could I not be stoked about a west coast adventure?

I’ve been going to AWP since I started grad school. When I started going, it was an excuse to get out of Boca and see a new city. Oh, and listen in on some panels. The end result, at least the first year, was a brief and embarrassing moment in a museum (there may have been an incident with a crucifix, the YMCA, and a professor), the top of the Sears tower (or Willis tower—whatever), and this extreme high.

Since, AWP has served its important purpose of reminding me, especially when times are dark, that yes, I do want to be a writer. That my M.F.A. was a good investment. Totally worth the student loans.

AWP as a grad student can simply be described as overwhelming. There are not enough minutes in the day to go to panels, navigate the book fair, and see a pretty awesome city. At the conference, you find yourself wishing you had clones in order to do everything.

As a non-student, AWP is more of a jarring realization that you’re not publishing enough, your hair is not cool enough, and that you probably should invest in more clothes from Urban Outfitters, despite your age and desire to dress they way they do in the Hamptons (minor digression). But what makes AWP an important pilgrimage for me is the high. It’s inebriating being surrounded by others who love the pain and suffering of being a writer, as I do. The intellectual conversations about writing and craft are intoxicating.

The buzz begins upon arrival to the airport. Since I live in Charlotte, my airport is often a stop for many AWPers. I can usually spot a fellow AWPer at the gate with his or her hip clothes and small press books. Often they travel with a friend who is there to boost his or her ego. So and so wrote a blurb for my book and such and such press wrote I was a revelation. You know the type. Regardless of the fact that I can’t boast any such thing to anyone, I still get excited to see my peers at the airport, then again at the book fair, or at a reading.

The high peaks at the conference thanks to all the energy of the fellow writers around you. It’s like you’re home.

In my Charlotte life, I don’t have a circle of writer friends. Most of my contacts are either high school teachers (like myself) or work in racing (like my husband). My daily conversations are not about craft and books or stories found on small presses. Most of my friends don’t know what Ploughshares is. At AWP, it’s different. Everyone there is a writer. This is so comforting because writing is a lonely experience.

Then when you actually get home you have all these ideas, which you hopefully wrote down. Your writing year has been refreshed. You remember why you signed up for all the heartbreak and nights of bad food choices and reading theory.

For all of this: the pain and suffering, the memories, the kick in the ass to get writing and published, the ideas, the confirmation that you are following your calling,  you can only thank AWP. 

Gloria Panzera resides in Charlotte with her husband. Her writing appears in The Inquisitive Eater, Chicken Soup for the Soul: NASCAR, Chicken Soup for the Soul: Campus Chronicles and others.

 

On Browsing Wisely

Due to time spent in front of a computer that’s over the years led to a vast knowledge of things that matter very little – Taylor Swift is 5’11,” everyone! – I’m known among family as President and CEO of the Internet. I’ve also developed a bit of a reputation in the MFA program for excessive Googling (my classmates’ names, mainly). So I really felt I’d earned it, felt I’d finally arrived, when I received an email from our friendly graduate advisor soliciting a blog entry on blogs. She’d apparently heard from our creative writing director that I “had a good understanding of which blogs are reading-worthy.” My status as blog stalker in residence preceded me, and I was gleeful triumphant proud.

Until I realized she’d heard wrong.

I do follow twenty-three blogs (TWENTY-THREE), and sure, I can point the way if you’re looking for commentary on celebrity children from the perspective of a celebrity child (Suri’s Burn Book). If you’re interested in nonstop hilarity that involves taxidermy more often than not, hit up The Bloggess. Fav resource for all things pop culture? Vulture. Looking for somewhere to revel in feminism and femininity (along with Zooey Deschanel)? HelloGiggles. In need of DIY inspiration? Young House Love. Have a friend/acquaintance/frenemy whose wedding website you can’t seem to find? You just let me know. Have a meme to show me I that I haven’t seen yet? It’s adorable that you think that. I have Googled “Google,” people. I kept webcam vigil over a pregnant giraffe in the days leading up to the birth. I have seen the whole internet.

Oh. Except for all the literary sites, that is. Of which there are many. Of which many are good. And it’s shameful (not as shameful as the giraffe thing, but shameful) that I – that many of us, I’d guess – have not been taking advantage. It’s not that I’m suddenly down on downtime (People.com, I don’t even want to know how to quit you), it’s that I’ve realized that we as writers should be spending a little more of it on literary pursuits.

The beauty of blogs is that they’re a direct line to the lives, thoughts, insights of others. To news, to opinions, to questions that might get us thinking, that could get us writing. There’s nothing wrong with doodling around in less-than-intellectual corners of the internet, but easy access to the wisdom and musings of other writers and readers is something we should not be passing up.

So I made it my mission over the past month to squeeze some blogs of a literary nature into my busy browsing schedule. Here’s the deal:

         -     Many of us are probably aware of Writer’s Digest, but check out the editor blogs for thoughts on everything from craft to publishing.

         -     Another publication you may know of that has a blog you should know of: Brevity. Visit for the self-described “creative nonfiction miscellany,” which is, as promised, miscellaneous, and also helpful or thought provoking or humorous or all of the above.

         -     If you haven’t yet experienced The Rumpus, you, my friend, are in for a TA-REAT. You can peruse blog posts here, but the whole site is like a playground for fans of pop culture and the arts, only with essays, reviews, poems, comics, interviews, etc. instead of slides and swings and stuff.

         -     Bookslut is, first of all, called Bookslut. If that’s not reason enough to visit, in this monthly online magazine/daily blog “dedicated to those who love to read,” you’ll find, as the site says, “a constant supply of news, reviews, commentary, insight, and more than occasional opinions.”

         -     At Writer Unboxed, you’ll find posts on writing and the writing life from countless contributors (I mean, I guess I could have counted them), which means multiple voices, multiple perspectives. Really, no one person has all the answers when it comes to writing, so here you have a shot at finding a voice, or voices, that might speak to you.

         -     OK, so, The Second Pass, brainchild of the New York Times’ John Williams, has been on hiatus for more than a year, but hear me out: it’s really worth clicking around. The content might be ‘old,’ but it’s good. Some of the last blog posts from before the break feature correspondence between writers, and the letters are really neat to read.

         -     In addition to her writing blog, new media guru and editor Jane Friedman (former Writer’s Digest publisher) offers on her site a “Writing Advice Archive” where you can find (wait for it…) writing advice in one easily accessible, user-friendly spot.

         -     Maud Newton, widely published and praised (check out her About page), writes a great blog that offers, as she puts it, “occasional literary links, amusements, culture, politics, and rants.”

         -     I’m not exactly sure who’s behind Moody Writing, but I know I liked the first entry I saw, in which the writer mourns not being able to snoop at what others are reading on public transit because of coverless e-readers… while pulling out a Kindle. The blog is full of lengthy entries on various elements of craft. It’s worth perusing and deciding for yourself which ideas/advice hold merit/resonate.

         -      I stumbled upon Kim’s Craft Blog in doing research for Teaching Creative Writing and find author Kimberly Davis’ craft lessons to be quite accessible and often illuminating.

         -     And clearly I’m not the first person to attempt such a compilation, so here are some “best” lists:

            http://robertleebrewer.blogspot.com/2012/02/best-blogs-for-writers-to-read-in-2012.html

http://writetodone.com/2013/01/07/top-blogs-for-writers/

          -      Also, Twitter, if you’re into that sort of thing*. This is obviously a very brief and kind of random selection, but most publications and a great many authors tweet. Following their feeds is a fantastic way to ingest writing-world goings on in small and timely bites.

@nprbooks

@nytimesbooks

@poetswritersinc

@PublishersWkly

@cnfonline

@IowaReview

@judyblume (Her tagline is “Are You There, Twitter? It’s Me, Judy” – !!!!!)

*I am. @RisaAriel if you’ve a tolerance for nonsense.

Risa Polansky Shiman, who lives on the internet and also in Delray Beach, is in her third year of FAU’s MFA program. You can find her latest published work, a piece on comedy as feminist rhetoric, in Harlot.

An Expat in Amsterdam

Moving to Amsterdam has changed me. 

No part is untouched. All of me imprinted. 

I’ve learned to let it come. I’ve watched the shelf of self tilt, almost all of the things placed there (look! this is me!) fall, some crash, some crack, some slip to be swept away, and some don’t move at all. I am curious to see what stands when the shelf is still. 

Those strong remains will be me who writes. 

In a new country, married to a man from this country, my eyes have had a chemical peel, and I can see things. Beautiful things. The light is different, pavement different, letter boxes different, high-tops different. Smells different. Warm socks on, but feet are always cold. I see two men pass my window, and I recognize them as he from California and him from Florida. They are not. But my peeled eyes see, and say to my brain, ‘all is familiar.’ And the brain makes its branches longer, seeks to connect what I don’t know to what I do. 

And that takes a lot of energy. I sleep more. I write less. Everything takes twice as long. Shopping. Cooking. Navigating. Present-buying. I’m staring at the differences; my eyes noticing with the sharpness of a baby, and my brain seeking to connect, always straining to connect to what it already knows. 

Supermarket. Small. Shopping cart. Key in cart? Coin slot. Coin needed. Coin. Thick gold? Euro. 20 cent piece. Slide in, key out. Push the cart through rail into the entrance. Foreign words on jar labels, smaller isles, people pushing, faces set, eyes at the horizon. Seasick? No. Northern European. Not personal. These are the things that fill my mind. The nominal, the daily. 

Less comfortable, but more alive.  

The poet Denise Levertov speaks of such changes. Born British, Levertov was self-taught, botanical, musical.  She fell in love with an American poet and left England for America’s Black Mountain poetry and the likes of Kenneth Rexroth. She called herself a pilgrim in the country of art. She called herself rootless.

She catches her nutrition, her inspiration, like an orchid’s roots catching dirt on the back of the wind. 

Writing still takes discipline. There’s this romantic idea that writing depends on place. I will write well when I am. There. Anywhere. Just far away-there. Even in Amsterdam, the land of dykes and docks and canals and crooked houses and bikes, coffee shops and cafes, where inspiration is fully visible, writing still takes discipline.  

Most of my familiar goods were brought here by suitcase, and the word kilograms now has a worthy meaning, like hours or months do.  I saved some of those golden kilos for my Levertov poetry.  

They sit on a shelf in my home below the Dutch children’s books I hope to read soon. The snow falls outside, and inside I look at my computer. Rootless, I must write. It is a discipline I need, to help me make sense of this new world.

Born in Oklahoma and proud of her Midwestern roots, Erin van Santen-Hobbie obtained an MFA from Florida Atlantic University and currently lives in Amsterdam with her husband Frans. She is a freelance writer and editor who enjoys compiling soundtracks for the pieces she writes. In fact, she suggests that you listen to Annie Betancourt’s song “Birds of the Air,” from the album Three Hundred Songs while reading this blog post.

Patterns in the Noise

The ability to allow sloppy prose to fill the page, ignore MS word’s blood-red squiggles and green-grammar nagging is certainly an act of faith. When I first tried this method, I had strong doubts that I’d understand my early drafts, much less find anything of value in them to make the effort worthwhile. This was not the case. Instead, I found myself able to decode haphazard gibberish days, weeks, even months later. Discovering meaning in messy drafts led me to create them with abandon. Now, I write them with a feeling that’s suspiciously close-kin to confidence; where I once feared drowning in a sea of noise, I now find, on the worst of days, the lack of comprehension only reaches my waist. 

 

Against the repeated warnings of my attorney, I’m going to argue that fiction writers not only listen to but trust the voices in their heads. Of course, for some of us this may not be the best guidance – but let’s imagine Joe Stalin adjusting the garnish of a picture-perfect omelet in the foreground (ignore the charnel house just behind him) and talk some serious shop. After all, writers who aren’t ruthless in the pursuit of crafting better fiction cannot hope to produce work that’s even remotely interesting.  And, frankly – if writing a story doesn’t strain your emotions, if it doesn’t make you feel somewhat vulnerable, you’re probably not doing it right.

But what about the worst of writing sessions? What about the crabbed notes scratched out during some constipated-creative drought? What about fever scrawling, produced in a cold sweat with three bottles of Robitussin down the gullet and a Thrill-Kill Cult track blasting on auto repeat? How can I argue something worthwhile can come from the hot mess generated in such a state?  I don’t know how it happens. It just does. In the majority of my roughest of drafts, I can locate patterns of meaning within the noise. More importantly, these patterns often lead to something raw and genuine: unlikely angles, weird points of entry, or disconcerting descriptions that I’m unlikely to produce otherwise.

Watch this hustle to be clear: I’m not saying the explosive, bottled-up frustration I describe is something universal, normal, or healthy. Nor am I prescribing some insipid activity like free writing or the use of chemicals. How you do what you do is your business. What I’m advocating is the hyper-development of negative capability. I’m advocating a wholehearted embrace of ambiguity and faith that the chaos and clamor of the roughest draft might lead to improvements and innovations that are substantive and worthwhile.

Don’t limit yourself to trusting the drafts that are going well; shit – those are cause for celebration.  Instead, trust there is something worthwhile in those scrawled pages damp with coffee or that word document typed all in caps. What’s worthwhile may end up being the majority of what’s on the page, or it may only be a fragment; but trust that something of value will happen within the noise. Then get loud.

 
AJ Ferguson holds an MFA in fiction from Florida Atlantic University where he teaches writing. Most of his free time is spent working on a novel-in-progress and various other projects. You can keep up with his most recent forays and misadventures at: aj-ferguson.com.

When the Cats Eating Their Food Gets Too Loud, Simplify

Lately I’ve been staring at blank screens, the cursor blinking, unable to write. If there was no computer in front of me, an onlooker might think I was meditating or sleeping. I start sentences, build opening paragraphs, then highlight them all at once and demolish them with the delete button.

I don’t believe in writer’s block in the same way I refuse to acknowledge being sick. I’ll fight it off, with drink, inspiration, pacing, and often all three at once. Starting a story, confronting the blank page, is one of the hardest things a writer has to deal with, and despite my constant starting, deleting, starting, deleting, in the larger scheme of things I believe I’ve actually learned something important. Well maybe two things, but they’re related.

First, some pressure is good in most endeavors because pressure (even self-imposed) produces action, and sustained action leads to improvement. However, too much pressure is usually counter-productive, as I feel it has been for me. Athletes and writers aren’t much different; a tense body, or a tense mind in this case, doesn’t allow for proper functioning, and so you end up missing free throws, or ruthlessly deleting sentences. You over-think, grow frustrated, and maybe start yelling at your cats for eating their dry food too loudly. How to pull back from this kind of mental paralysis is the second thing that I learned.

As I was about to break an empty beer bottle on the edge of my desk and threaten my cats with it for distracting me with their relentless appetites, something simple and seemingly profound occurred to me. I scrambled to write it down on a sticky note; it has been my North Star ever since. In black felt-tip pen it said: “It’s all about themes you choose to explore.” There are many ingredients to consider when you sit down to write: where’s it happening? What are the character’s names? What’s the first line? Etc, etc, etc. These are all important, but in my own experience, the theme of what you’re writing is often overlooked, but maybe it shouldn’t be. Like a bear hit with a tranquilizer I felt myself relaxing, I lowered the bottle slowly, and I was finally able to approach my writing with a renewed sense of purpose.

By thinking more about why I was writing a story, and less about how I should be writing it, I found that deciding where a story takes place, or what point-of-view it should be told from, could be answered more easily by thinking about what I was trying to say by writing the story in the first place. By choosing to focus more on theme, I simplified my approach and was thus able to stop myself from over-thinking, and my mind seemed to exhale as a result. As writers with arduous careers in front of us, it’s easy to let the pressure to produce wear us down, but finding ways to build ourselves back up might be just as important, for us and our loved ones.

Dan Kennard currently teaches at Keiser University in Port St. Lucie, FL and lives with his wife and three cats.