Poet Heather McHugh Wins a Genius Grant

Heather McHugh–a poet I must admit I am not all that familiar with–just received a MacArthur Fellowship, which, for a poet, is winning PowerBall. The sum total: $500,000. (I wonder what the taxes are on that payout?)

Anyway, listen here for an engaging interview with Ms. McHugh on NPR.

And here’s a link to her Web site, where she’s got a few poems: http://www.spondee.com/poems.html.

Once, when I got a grant, I went right out and bought a mountain bike. Wonder if she’s going to splurge on anything?

–MJH

 

Oprah’s going to save us all.

Okay, saving us all is a bit of an exaggeration (hyperbole is the best thing ever!), but goodness bless that Oprah: she’s selected a short story collection for her latest book club read. I can’t say how many articles I’ve read that wax harbinger of the state of the short story: it’s alive, it’s dead, it’s experiencing a resurgence. As a short story writer myself, I had resigned myself to the sad knowledge that the only people who really read short stories any more are those who write them (yes, that too is an exaggeration; didn’t we already establish me as a truth-stretcher?). Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it would be nice to think that there’s a smidgen of hope that I may actually be able to support myself through this passion of mine. The fact that a collection of short stories is in all likelihood going to shoot to the top of the bestseller list pretty shortly here is quite encouraging. Thanks, Oprah!

 

Great Opportunity for Veterans

Lighthouse is very honored to take part in an amazing program–Operation Homecoming–which is sponsored by the NEA. (Look here for a video about the program.)

So, if you’re a vet–or if you know one–please consider this as your mission for next weekend.

We’re Looking for a Few Energetic Writers

To take part in a free writing workshop for veterans of all stripes, walks of life, and areas of service.

Do you have a story to tell? Want to express your experience as a combat veteran?

Who better to tell the story of the armed forces than the U.S. troops and veterans who have served? That’s the idea behind a new series of writing workshops for veterans hosted by the Denver’s Lighthouse Writers. The workshops are open to veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, as well as veterans of earlier conflicts., and are part of the NEA’s Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, a groundbreaking program that documents and preserves the wartime experiences of men and women in uniform and their families.

When: Saturday and Sunday, September 26 and 27
10:00 AM to 4:00 PM
(Lunch included)

Where: Lighthouse Writers Workshop
2123 Downing Street, Denver (Free parking across the street)

Register now by calling: 303-297-1185!

Operation Homecoming is presented by the National Endowment for the Arts in cooperation with the Southern Arts Federation, and is made possible by The Boeing Company.

 

Experiencing Reading ADHD May be Good for Your Writing.

I used to be a one-book kinda gal. (Not to be confused with Hickenlooper’s One Book, One Denver program).  Whatever book I was reading, that was it. I stayed with it until the end, never straying into the pages  of another writer’s work. Even the occasional magazine article made me feel guilty if I was in the middle of a novel; like I was somehow cheating on the narrative by diverting my attention elsewhere. And it had a noticeable effect on my writing. I started to sound like whatever author I happened to be reading at the time. Kent Haruf gives the narrative voice in my head a slow country drawl, Margaret Atwood turns me into a sinister fabulist, and Michael Chabon gives all my characters otherworldly smarts and quirky charm. I went through a phase of reading every Lorrie Moore story I could get my hands on, and noticed a dramatic increase in my use of parentheses. All of this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I am human; I learn by example–monkey see, monkey do, as it goes. My love for writing comes from my love of reading. And after all, if we can’t learn from the Greats, whom can we learn from? But in the last several months, my one-book-at-a-time rule has fallen by the wayside, and I’ve found myself entrenched in as many as seven books all at once. Jon Krakauer has fought for space in my head with Steinbeck, Anne Enright, Chinua Achebe, Charles D’Ambrosio and Robert Heinlein, on any given day. Not to mention the gazillions of short story anthologies I own and pick up on a whim, New Yorker and Sun articles, and whatever internet web news happens to catch my easily-distracted-and-highly- prone-to-procrastination eye (Kanye did what?) It’s a writerly cacophony, and  it has made a marked difference on my writing. With all those writers’ voices drowning each other out, there seems to finally be room in my head for my own voice to develop, and rather than any one voice strongly influencing my writing, they seem to be working in harmony to support a (hopefully) new and unique style all my own.

 

With a name like this, she had to be a writer

Kendal Muse, winner of the Lighthouse-Stories on Stage contest

News Alert! 

Kendal Muse, a dazzling member of Jessica Roeder’s dazzling Online Fiction Workshop, recently learned that her story, “A Message from the Sarge,” was selected by Stories on Stage to win our collaborative contest.  Kendal lives and muses, we assume, in Colorado with her husband and son.  Along with the rest of us, she will get to see actress Elgin Kelley (photo below) read her work on stage at Nobody Likes a Smartass, performed at the Jones Theater  (Denver Center for the Performing Arts) on Saturday, Sept. 26.

Writers—and, well, people in general—may not agree with the premise “Nobody Likes a Smartass,” but Kendal and 38 other members of the August Lighthouse short story workshops were invited to submit a story that touched in some way on that theme. At the deadline for submission, September 5, I had in my e-mail inbox 25 great short stories written by our members.  Our partners for this experiment, the nationally recognized Stories on Stage, were given the unenviable task of deciding which story would be performed along with a lineup of virtuosic pieces from Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore, and Flannery O’Connor. SOS Artistic Director Norma Moore ultimately fell for Kendal’s “vibrant personal voice.”

You’ll see what she means with this little preview of “A Message from the Sarge”:

We shouldn’t have been there that night. Henry was only ten, still too young for a role in the Christmas pageant, and I had sworn to never be in it again. I had been cast every year since we’d moved to town, once as a bearded wise man and last year as Mary. Mary was the worst. The church leaders didn’t leave you alone when you were Mary, everybody going on about how a Mary was chosen for her beauty and grace, and wasn’t I just thrilled with myself? As if I were the kind of girl who gave a crap about beauty and grace. For such an important role you barely had any lines; you attended rehearsals so you could practice gazing lovingly from your baby to your husband. There is nothing like trying to portray godly love for a plastic baby doll and a kid with pimples and wandering hands that really puts your life into perspective.

Kendal wouldn’t have written the story were it not for the contest. “When asked to consider writing a story based around the idea ‘nobody likes a smartass,’ this story slowly started to piece itself together,” she says. “Having an opportunity to workshop it with other writers and then having a place for it to be heard has been a great experience. “

Her instructor, Jessica Roeder, engaged with Kendal’s original take on the topic:

“A Message from Sarge” was the first story submitted for workshop this session, alongside the week’s reading of O’Connor and Wolff. Kendal’s story looks at the smartass the other way around, leaving him where we’d often like to leave him in life, on the periphery. The narrator’s voice combines her father’s toughness with a teenager’s understatement, and she proves herself much smarter than her smartass rival.    

Elgin Kelley will read Lighthouser Kendal Muse's winning story.

Come hear the rest of Kendal’s story, along with Lorrie Moore’s “You’re Ugly, Too,” Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” on the September 26, either the 5 or 8 PM shows. For a limited time, $15 discount-rate tickets are available to Lighthouse members by clicking here and entering “lighthouse” as the discount code, or by calling 303.494.0523.

 

That recurring dream of being back in high school? Doesn’t have to be a nightmare

Don't blame the books for your traumatic memories of 10th grade!

Over the past year or so, I’ve reread four or five books that I at one point read grudgingly and with heightened suspicion back in high school. I know, I know. It almost seems like a waste. We’re all trying to machete through the Modern Library-type “100 Best Books” jungle, and those members of the high school canon, despite having suffered the diminishing returns of our aging and overstuffed minds, are reliable hackaways. Freebies, if you will. Yes, I’ve read that one. Check! But returning to The Great Gatsby, Madame Bovary, The Bell Jar, and, most recently To Kill a Mockingbird (this year’s One Book, One Denver selection) has taught me a few things:

• I have an absolutely terrible memory. Sieve-like! I didn’t even remember the murder at the end of Gatsby, let alone Scout’s pitch-perfect voice: “Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.” (Imagine: when you first read To Kill a Mockingbird, you didn’t likely know that the character of Dill was based on Truman Capote, and you didn’t picture a miniature Philip Seymour Hoffman as you read.)

Tell me that's not Dill twenty years after To Kill a Mockingbird!

• Reading as a writer is not the same sport as reading as a put-upon teenager. Despite his plot’s semi-degeneration into what might be termed (today) a series of melodramatic conniptions, Flaubert captured a thing of perfect narrative beauty in Emma Bovary’s journey from bored doctor’s wife to vampy suicidal vixen. Okay, that’s not a very literary interpretation (send hate mail directly here), but it puts you on notice: stuff should happen in fiction. Especially crazy stuff! Take note you moderates (she said to herself).
• It takes hardly any time to re-read most books. The effort should not derail your attempt to get through the aforementioned “100 best*” list.  It will take mere moments for you to plummet back into the bell jar, for example, and wonder how you ever deluded yourself into thinking you were sane. Those second reads are quick and centering, somehow. Am I wrong?

Be sure to join William Haywood Henderson this Saturday for our Writer’s Buzz: Write Your First Novel workshop, Saturday, September 12, 10 AM to noon, Highlands Rec Center (2880 Osceola St.)   

*But please try to replace and rescramble the official list with your own completely random list, like this one that keeps cropping up everywhere.

 

Raves accumulate for Lorrie Moore’s new book

If you’re an author and Amazon reviews get you down, the best revenge is winning over Michiko Kakutani, who has the following to say about A Gate at the Stairs, Moore’s soon-to-be released novel:

Ms. Moore has written her most powerful book yet, a book that gives us an indelible portrait of a young woman coming of age in the Midwest in the year after 9/11 and her initiation into the adult world of loss and grief. It is a novel that illustrates just how far Ms. Moore has come in the last two and half decades from her keenly observed but jokey 1985 collection of stories, “Self-Help,” which showcased her gifts as a writer but also underscored her — and her characters’ — emotional reticence, their reluctance to open themselves to deeply felt experiences.

The rest is here.

And did we mention (I’m sure we didn’t) that she’s our next weekend residency guest at Lighthouse? More details here.

 

Blood on our hands: Literary Death Match Denver

First let me explain something about what we do at Lighthouse. You would think, with the name and all, that we spent long days and nights showing the light to writers who are lost in a sea of confusion and solitude and other metaphorical stuff like that.  No.  We actually spend most of our time ducking into the refracted light that already shines on our members.  More accurately, we should call ourselves “house of refracted light.”

Literary Death Match's Todd Zuniga and Jody Reale "work the crowd" (picture compliments of Stephanie Hight)

Like so many in the Thursday night short story workshop, Nick Franciose is one of the members who’s graced with a natural talent for the short story. His verbal acuity is ferocious.  So this is what we did: we sent Nick Franciose out to represent Lighthouse at Denver’s second Literary Death Match.

For those of you unfamiliar with the LDM, it’s an international sensation, led by the tireless and satellitically haired Todd Zuniga, who manages both air travel and witty repartee on a daily basis. A regular diet of either would exhaust yours truly, but not this guy. He does it, he tweets it, he moves on.  So, after he promised us laughs and ribaldry, many Lighthousers and other literary types packed into Forest Room 5 on Wednesday night, hungry for a showdown.

The evening did not disappoint. Battling it out were two fiction writers—Nick for Lighthouse and Sharon McGill for Opium Magazine, and two poets—Jessy Randall (A Day in Boyland) for Ghost Road and Nicky Beer for Copper Nickel magazine. All, it should be noted, were cute as buttons.  That they also oozed talent was a bonus.

The short summary is that Sharon McGill wowed the crowd with mention of mediocre sex in the kitchen, an image that haunted the judges  (poet Chris Ransick, nf writer Curtis Pesman, and the dynamite Tara Anderson) for the entire night ; Franciose floored them with his tale of a law school dropout who wakes up in drag in the back of a police cruiser; Randall had us all in fits of giggles with various poems about the haplessly lovestruck and men-as-dawgs and whatnot, finishing with the swashbuckling “Unt Not Invent System.”  Nicky Beer had us at “perineum” but continued to bewitch us with her rollicking, smart poetry.

The two finalists were Randall and our own Franciose.  Because there’s no video of Nick’s performance, let me just give you this taste, from his opening:

Coming out of blackout is like emerging from a fugue state; one second you’re hunched over staring unperceivingly at your crotch, your head lolling with the movements of the police cruiser, and the next, consciousness returns to you and an ocean of worldly particulars rushes at your senses.  On TV you once saw a team of marine researchers attach weights to a life-sized Styrofoam head and lower it on a cable into an ocean trench.  When they pulled the head back up the tremendous pressures had squeezed it, preserving the proportions perfectly, to the size of a plum.  That’s what your head feels like, like ocean tonnage and compacted Styrofoam—and like a plum, the flesh gray and sweet with bruise. 

–From Nick Franciose’s “Foreclosure”

Franciose Wins! Accompanied by Lighthouse Scream Team MVP Stephanie Hight

‘Nuff said about our guy.  He killed the crowd. (Thanks also to the Lighthouse Scream Team—we are not above it, though such premeditated hollering is annoying/offensive/cruel at graduations, it’s required at duels-to-the-death.)  We had already guessed this wouldn’t be a typical reading when the young woman with the hula hoop showed up, and you can hear a great summary of the Franciose siblings’ virtuosity in the writing and hula hooping world here (scroll down the comments to see Papa Franciose’s wry, off-the-wall and allusion-studded note—it explains a lot about the Francoise talent pool).

As they often say, it’s not who wins or loses, but how strong the drinks are during the performance. What a fun night, all, and looking forward to the November Literary Death Match. More to come on that.

 

Moore, Please!

I do not claim to be an expert on either Lorrie Moore or the short story. But I am a huge fan of both, so when I heard that we’d be bringing Moore to Denver for this fall’s Writer’s Studio, I was thrilled. Lorrie Moore is, in this young writer’s humble opinion, one of the best living contemporary short story writers out there. I was first introduced to her work in the pages of the Best American Short Stories series (every volume of which, from 1978 to the present, colorfully lines my bookshelf). This was before, of course, I discovered the joys of reading the actual magazines and reviews from which the annual collection is culled—I was in high school when I began collecting them, give me a break—but I still go back to them again and again, and Lorrie Moore has been well represented among their pages.

It’s no surprise, then, that in 2004 Moore was asked to be the annual guest editor of the series. Aside from choosing a remarkable selection of stories to include in that year’s anthology, she wrote an introduction that gets me excited about the short story all over again every time I read her words. It is my intent to dissect one Moore story at a time, discussing in these illustrious blog postings precisely why I admire her so. And I’d like to begin with just the introduction to BASS 2004, (Houghton Mifflin, 2004) as it reminds me why I so love not just short stories as a genre, but specifically her stories: she’s smart, she’s funny, and she has as complete a grasp of the short story form as anyone ever may.

In describing the futility of strictly defining the short story, Moore says “no matter what one says about…short stories and novels, a hundred exceptions support the opposite case.” (pg. xiv) Yet I defy anyone to argue with the metaphors she gives as examples: “A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film” (xv), and my favorite: “If a story is not always, therapeutically, an axe for the frozen sea within us, then it is at least a pair of brutally sharpened ice skates.” (xvii) Even (and maybe especially) when she’s contradicting herself, Moore does so with intelligence and grace.  She talks about the “interest in beautiful pain” (xv) that the short story takes. The phrase beautiful pain perfectly  what is so good about her writing. This is not to say that she is painful to read—quite the opposite—she is a master of finding the beauty in pain.

In discussing her criteria for selecting the stories that she did, Moore questions her “own visceral responses,” asking herself, “was I riveted? Did a story haunt me for days?” (xvii), reactions I’ve had to nearly every story of hers I’ve ever read. (Beg pardon if this is turning into one big gushfest; I do confess to feeling a bit like a Spiderman fan must feel at a Stan Lee signing.)  As she says herself, stories “are interested in the value, beauty, and malarkey of words that people utter to themselves or others” (xvi), and what are stories if not that: beautiful, valuable b.s. we put down on the page.

But it’s Moore’s dry wit that, for me, makes her prose complete. Whether it’s comparing the short story to Napolean, “with its narrative version of a short man’s complex” (xviii), or parenthetically deprecating herself and other writers who are “asked to speak publicly of their art (oh, dear) or …their craft (that alarmingly nautical phrase)” (xiv), the intimacy of her sharp tongue at once brings the reader into a close camaraderie while keeping her at arm’s length through the deflective nature of humor.  She refers to her introduction and others like it as the result of what “may be simply the desperate, improvised creative-writing yack of good people uncomfortably far from their desks” (xiv), but if this is uncomfortable territory for her, just wait and see what she can do when she really settles in.

 

Intern’s Report: Young Writers’ Camp

Ed. note: Our trusty intern Laurel Smith is back, reporting on the events of last week’s camp, run by the supersonic Amanda Rea. Here’s what Laurel had to say.

One of our young writers on the town

For five days young writers sailed the seas of creativity. They wrote their way through brainstorms of poetry and survived the resulting flash fiction. On Friday the Lighthouse guided them to the shores of the Platte River where they disembarked their crazy adventure at the Tattered Cover, reunited with their parents and stood up to tell a packed room of curious onlookers about their voyage. But before they could tell us about the fruits of the Sea of Creativity they had a bit more writing to do.

            Around forty kids went out into the heart of Downtown Denver looking for what inspires them. I was lucky enough to be taken aboard by the fifth and six graders. They watched people walking their dogs, noted the alarming amount of black spots on the sidewalk from chewing gum, and investigated the simmering smell of hotdogs. They turned these observations into poetry and stories, most of which I swear are better than the stuff I’ve read in intro to creative writing classes that I took in college. 

The inspiration for Laurel's nautical metaphors?

            They wrote and read their stories to each other. They even begged for more when a writer stopped short of the end. They would huddle around as she scribbled a few more words on a page, taking note of every waft of the hand and scrunch of the nose, like they were watching a sporting event.

            When their time to speak came, they took the microphone and the room came to a hush as everyone tried to grasp onto every word of their thrilling stories. Parents looked at their children proudly and instructors beamed with satisfaction and I realized the tables had turned. They were the ones teaching us. They showed us the endless possibility of young minds and what it means to be inspired. Shari Caudron, who worked with the high school students, even sent along a message that her students restored her faith in teenagers.

At the end of the event, they beamed with pride holding onto their writing framed and behind glass and left with their parents.

Young writers read at Tattered Cover in front of an audience of over 100

 Do all good things have to come to an end? I asked myself. I saw students clutching onto notebooks packed with blank pages waiting to be filled. Students lined up to hug their instructors and say goodbye. I saw a fifth-grader give cheeky wink followed by a wave. “See you next year,” she said.

End? No, this is only the beginning. I bet in a few years we will even see some of our high students back to sail the seas of creativity and teach young writers just like them what it means to love writing.

 

Cheers,
Laurel Janeen Smith