Count up to Lit Fest: 11 Days (Also, an Invite to Meet Your Brood)

Over a decade ago, leaving the cozy, inspiring, crazy-making, inbred culture of our graduate MFA program, Mike Henry and I ventured west to see what we could see. Were there eight writers to every ten strangers you met, as there were in Boston? Would they be interested in finding each other? Really, we all know that writing, per se, cannot be taught—though learning the craft can be accelerated, the learning curve shortened—so why start a nonprofit, independent writing center?  As our brilliant volunteer copywriter J. Chris Rock so eloquently put it: “Sometimes, what a writer needs most is other writers.”

We’re a strange and diverse enough crowd, everyone from apprentices to full-timers working on their fourth novels, ages 10 to 85, all walks of life, probably all political persuasions. So what do we have in common?  A tendency to see things in terms of the story, the poetic line, the image, the scene. We try to be, as someone famous said, people upon whom nothing is lost. That might not go over so well with some of our family and friends. In that way, Lit Fest becomes a time to let it all hang out there—every writerly impulse, every bad draft, every I-love-it-but-I-hate-it attitude toward our strange, shared compulsion. People here will understand… even without your “treatise on why I do this” that you send out every year to your e-mail list.  

So begins the count up to the Third Annual Lighthouse Lit Fest.  Over the last two years, we’ve seen writers immerse themselves in weekend-intensive writing courses like Writing Through Character, Navigating Your Book, Environmental Writing, and Emotion On & Off the Page (not to mention the already waitlisted Novel Bootcamp). Some have gone on to their own wonderful writing careers outside of Colorado, like our friend Sarah Ockler, whose Twenty Boy Summer catapulted her to a 2-book deal with Little, Brown, freedom from a day job, and a return to the city she loves, New York. Others, like Gary Schanbacher (author of Migration Patterns, winner of an honorable mention for the 2008 PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction) and J. Diego Frey (author of the forthcoming Umbrellas or Else, from Ghost Road), continue to take part in Lighthouse events and will make a featured appearance at the Lit Fest participant reading on Tuesday, June 17.  Both Schanbacher and Frey received book deals after meetings at our first- and second-annual Lit Fests. Hear them read (for free, of course) on June 17, 8PM, Forest Room 5, [OOPS! Edited: it's at the Mercury Cafe] along with other scribblers who sign up for the Participant Reading. If you’re participating in Lit Fest and you’d like a 3-to-5 minute slot to read, contact moi: andrea@lighthousewriters.org.

See ya’ll there!

 

Mark Strand Podcast, with Jingle ™

So, here we’re beginning to get a feel for what a podcast might sound like. But we ain’t there yet, partially because of some volume problems and the fact that the recording cut off the last question, so it ends abruptly and awkwardly. And to avoid some coughing jags from Sr. Strand, I cut some applause from the audience (which wasn’t really captured with the audio anyway), so one of Strand’s jokes gets mangled by editing. (Isn’t that how it always is?) But that gives us new heights to shoot for! Right? Right.

Let us know what you think of the original Lighthouse Jingle ™. And the lovely voice of Lighthouse, Meghan Wilson. We’ll be figuring out how you can subscribe to us on iTunes in the next, well, year or so. We’ll be sure to let you know!

Use your own listening device (right click on this and save it to your desktop or music library), or just put your cursor over this file and hit the triangle and it will start playing:

mark-strand-podcast-962

 

Dateline Boston: Gary’s Report from the Hem-y Awards

Boston, MA, John F Kennedy Presidential Library, Sunday March 30, the 2008 PEN/Hemingway Award 

In the early spring of that year we sat in the auditorium and looked across the bay to the city.  On the shore there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and blue in the shipping channel.  On the podium, Patrick Hemingway stood and read aloud and it was a fine reading, clear and strong, and the sun sparkled off the water, and…..

Sorry, I got a little caught up in the moment.  In truth, being just a bit of a cynic (in a healthy, good natured way) I feared Poppa’s son reading from the opening to A Farewell to Arms might come off as hokum.  But his voice really was clear and strong, and the audience of between 300 and 400 did get caught up in the cadence and rhythm of the piece. 

Sherri and I were in Boston over the weekend of March 30^th to attend the 2008 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for “distinguished first works of fiction,” and for the L.L.Winship/PEN New England Awards (kind of like our Colorado Book Awards).  My book, Migration Patterns, was selected an Honorable Mention, and we had Mileage Plus credits stacked up, and what better excuse to visit a great city?  The ceremony was held at the JFK Presidential Library overlooking the bay and the city skyline.

 

 

The ceremony itself featured short readings not only by Patrick Hemingway but also by Joshua Ferris and the poet Ann Killough, winner of the L.L. Winship poetry award, and a feisty, short (yea!!) keynote by Alice Hoffman.  But the real fun of the weekend was in attending the Saturday night reception at Beacon Press (see pic below) in the heart of the Beacon Hill district, about a block from the state capital, and the

 

Good things afoot

Lighthouse instructor Janis Hallowell’s new novel, She Was, comes out later this month. 

Guess who’s already read it? He kind of likes it.

I read this beautiful and compelling novel straight through in one sitting. Janis Hallowell writes with great compassion about the heart of the heart of our country and of our culture. She Was brings back the Vietnam era and elucidates our current wars and tribulations. The story is a family novel that touches all of us. Amazingly, it is also a shocking thriller that is impossible to put down. The writing is clean and honest; the message moved me. It is one of the best novels I have read in years.”
—John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War

 

In search of the elusive “pleasure-burst”

I was reminded, reading James Walcott’s fairly coal-raking review in Bookforum  of the trio of new books coming out on Donald Barthelme, of this great George Saunders quote from a recent McSweeney’s:

When I was a kid I had one of these Hot Wheels devices designed to look like a little gas station. Inside the gas station were two spinning rubber wheels. One’s little car would weakly approach the gas station, then be sent forth by the spinning rubber wheels to take another lap around the track or, more often, fly out and hit one’s sister in the face.

A story can be thought of as a series of these little gas stations. The main point is to get the reader around the track; that is, to the end of the story. Any other pleasures a story may offer (theme, character, moral uplift) are dependent on this.

Saunders is talking about a story by Donald Barthelme, and goes on to say something referred to by Walcott: “[Barthelme] knows that… the real work of the story… is to give the reader a series of pleasure-bursts. The story is just a repetition of this event: the reader leaves a little gas station at high speed, looking forward to the next one.”

I was thinking about this when trying to pinpoint the elusive “extra thing” that makes good writing great. It’s understood that a certain mastery of sentences, of storytelling and characterization, is part of the package, but that competence is pretty hollow if not accompanied by the pleasure-burst. When reading (or when writing, I suppose) the PB tends to come in the form of a shock—something completely unexpected yet deeply true. I can think of any number of these from fiction I’ve read in the past few weeks: the moment, in Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, when the eccentric Colonel Sands, standing before a group of US soldiers engaged in duty of questionable relevance to the war, recounts in strenuous detail a Notre Dame game in which Knute Rockne showed a moment of cowardice; the moment, in Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise, when a French woman who seems to have fallen in love with an occupying German soldier, betrays him to win back her cold and embittered mother in-law; the moment, in Charles Baxter’s “Gryphon,” when the bizarre and enchanting Ms. Firenczi scolds a boy to “stop fossicking” at his desk.

Of course, the pleasure-burst principle is the definition of subjectivity. I’d love to hear about the little gas stations that have kept you going through a recent book. Got any?

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The Outermost House

Here’s one of my all time favorite quotes:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather maginified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by the man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not breathren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

—from Henry Beston, the The Outermost House (192

Sure, I like this because I am teaching a nature writing class right now, but I also love it because of its democratic way of seeing the world. And I think all good writers know this: namely, to witness—not from above or below. And without judgment.

Jeesh. Sorry. Perhaps I should put my red velvet robe back in the closet, and stop drinking cognac.

–MJH

 

Out of blog shape

… is what you get after a month of not bloggin’! Oh, my aching joints.  As a means of re-entry, I thought I’d take on something that seems, for now, manageable.  The sentence.

We went to hear Claire Messud a couple months back, thanks to the generous donation of two tickets by Mary Ross, a fabulous Lighthouse member.  (Thanks, Mary!) I jotted down a couple of Messud’s lines:

The long sentence, to me, is the only way to fully capture reality.

And

My apprehension of the world is entirely digressive. 

Both of these things bear out in her novels, if you’ve read any of them (which I have, and I enjoy very much). Here’s a random couple of sentences from Emperor’s Children:

She showered, dried, and dressed in the bathroom in the hall—the house was Victorian, and had only the one bathroom in spite of four bedrooms—and emerged in her favorite blush turtleneck beneath the avocado angora cardigan she had knitted last winter. In truth, she had knitted it for her niece, Marina—God only knew why, because they weren’t close; except that she loved to knit and had already made a dozen sweaters for her daughter and her grandkids.

Now, some can (and do) take Messud to task for her long sentences, as we see in that democratic literary metropolis known as “Amazon Customer Reviews,” which is where one can lurk, like an anthropologist, and study what the reading masses think:

I agree with other reviewers. It appears the author likes very long sentences; many paragraphs are absolutely incomprehensible. Are we to be impressed with the overuse of commas and dependent clauses so that it often takes two or three readings to render a sentence understandable? If this is the new era of grown-up writing, I’ll stick to my mysteries and nonfiction.
                                                                 –D. West “Bones” on Amazon

No doubt, Bones is off with a Grafton novel as we speak, hoping she doesn’t run out the alphabet.  Great! More power to Bones. 

So, instead of spending time defending Messud’s sentences for what they are–intentional, crafted, artful digressions that reflect the very vision or “apprehension of the world” that comprises her signature, I might pause here to point out that I, too, love tight sentences. I’m in the middle of Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke right now, and the tight prose, the clean sentences–you could dive into them and come out squeaky clean! Also, who doesn’t like a nice direct sentence from, say, a writer like Tobias Wolff? But I find it equally lovely to get messy in a sentence, to follow the associative currents that ripple through an occasional Woolf, Munro, Messud, or Faulkner line. 

What about you? What do you think? Can we all just get along, sentence minimalists, maximalists, and those who go both ways?  

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The Trouble With Titles

I have a book manuscript due at the end of December. My very first book. Yippee!

But, there’s a problem. It’s untitled.

I’ve come up with a list of possible titles. I’ve mailed the list out to friends and family, and have compiled votes. I’ve fretted over the results. I’ve ignored them. I’ve pondered them. I’ve felt happy with them. I have wept over them.

What should I do?

Mind you this is a book of poetry. So the title should be a little bit artsy-fartsy, maybe a little pretentious, maybe a bit enigmatic, maybe a bit self-referential, maybe a bit ironic. Right?

Here are the results.

1. Awake In The Night Room (4 votes)
2. I Whisper, In a Dark Suit (4 votes)
3. The Velvet Body (and other Subjects) (2 votes)
4. It Cannot Walk, But Aspires To (1 vote)
5. Like Nothing At All, Like Air (1 vote)
6. No Light To Make Brighter (1/2 vote)
7. We Learned This and Walked (1/2 vote)
8. A Tree For You (No votes–one voter called it “saccharine”)

I mean, yuck, right? They all kind of suck.

So I guess I’m kind of like a dictator, who holds an election, then takes over the military and declares it invalid. but it’s my country, my poetic land. So there.

The other night I went to the Pen & Podium lecture with Clarie Messud. She said that she had major troubles titling her first book. Originally it was called When the World Was Steady. (What’s so bad about that?) Her editor told her that it was a crummy title, so she came up with twelve others, and sent them to him. He said they each of the 12 was worse than the original. So out it went, as is.

Her words helped, and I walked out of the theatre very happy.

But then I got into the car and realized that I never had an original (bad) title to go back to.

Sigh.

So whatsitsname gonna be?

Easy. No Stranger Than My Own.

–MJH

 

And Kudos to Carleen

Check out workshopper/board member Carleen Brice’s Publisher’s Weekly review!  Her novel, Orange Mint & Honey, the first of a two-book deal she signed with Ballantine, comes out in late February. We’ll of course have parties.

In Brice’s accomplished debut, African-American Shay Dixon, a burnt-out grad student, has a “visitation/fantasy/fever dream” featuring Nina Simone, the high priestess of soul, who counsels Shay to “go home.” To do that, she must face Nona, the drunken failure of a mother she’s not spoken to in seven years and blames for a harrowing childhood that left her emotionally scarred. Still, she takes Nina’s advice, heads home to Denver and discovers that Nona’s now an A.A. member with a good job, a lovely home and an adorable three-year-old girl, Sunny, Shay’s half-sister. Their reconciliation is complicated by Shay’s stubborn anger, Nona’s A.A. sponsorship of a troubled young woman and Shay’s sexual awakening. Brice’s straightforward prose is dead-on in describing the challenges Shay and her mother face as they reconnect. 

 Congrats, Carleen, on the stellar writeup!

 

We like Nick, we like Gary, let’s have a party

Check out this full interview with Nick Arvin in the Rocky. Here’s a nice little nut:

Critics have compared the author’s writing to that of Ernest Hemingway and Stephen Crane. His short story “Along the Highways” appeared in The New Yorker — a coup for any emerging writer. And he’s picked up many awards for Articles of War, including the Colorado Book Award and honors from the American Academy of Arts and the American Library Association.” (See an extended version of the interview here, on the New West site.)

Nick’s One-Book-culminating reading is at Manual High on Wednesday, Nov. 14, 7:00 PM, featuring intros by Mayor Hick and our own Poet Laureate Chris Ransick, award presentations for young writers who won the One Book writing contest, a reading by Herr Arvin, and an original guitar solo by Roger Green. All to be followed by Nick passing out, face down, on the dais after more than a solid month of book marathoning. Hope everyone can make it. Free, original  entertainment on a Wednesday night.  

While you’re on that fabulous Rocky site, check out member Gary Schanbacher’s “A” review for Migration Patterns. To wit: “Schanbacher’s unflinching prose is also lyrical. With the accuracy of a laser, it lays bare the deepest emotions of the human heart.”

Gary and Nick: People dig you!