The Imagination Has Its Orders

When I moved to a new house a couple of years ago, I went through a stack of old AWP WRITER’S CHRONICLES and saved a few articles I thought I might like to read at some later date. Not long ago, I ran across one of these saved articles from the October/November 1998 issue and finally took the time to read the interview by Bonnie Riedinger called “The Imagination Has Its Orders: Cross-Genre Writing with Carol Muske and Molly Peacock.” What I discovered were some wonderful excerpts I’d like to share with you today from two poets who are also drawn to writing prose. When Ms. Riedinger asked each of them how they would define poetry and prose, Molly Peacock said:

“Prose operates with language that’s built from phrases into clauses into sentences. These sentences are built into paragraphs. Poetry operates with the sentence plus the line. You are writing to rhythm in prose, but it’s a rhythm that unfolds out over time. The rhythm that you write to in poetry uses the rhythm of the sentence, but it is underpinned by the rhythm of the line. The poem does not unfold or expand over time, it keeps returning and it is also self-contained.

“My poems—even my narrative poems—are usually about one emotional moment. Interestingly, in my prose I’m not doing so much musing about a moment as setting a scene, as in a play. Time in poetry has to do with the intensity of a moment, but prose has to do with the unfolding of events over time. Prose works with a kind of development, whereas the poem has to do with a kind of quickening.”

Carol Muske responded with:

“Fiction requires more carpentry work than poetry. You have to really build a house unless you’re writing very experimental fiction…. You have to lay a foundation. You have to put up joists, the wall beams, the floor, and so on, all the way to the roof. Unlike poetry, where you can occasionally leap in and out of windows and fly through the roof.”

Ms. Muske also said:

” …(T)he narrative focuses the mind differently. It is incremental, as the lyric is ecstatic. …(W)hat I mean by incremental is that it does not illuminate and then go dark the way the lyric does, it holds the note, then finds the next note. It sustains the vision, rather than isolating the visionary. The imaginations of the greatest poets, I think, are esemplastic—their minds are able to “shape” experience, disparate experience, into a unified whole. These “shapes” intrigue me because they leave distinctions like lyric and narrative behind—thus “shape-making” defies categorization. All poems are shapes, they are actions of the mind….”

 

Because I write in more than one genre myself, I can also confirm an assertion of Ms. Peacock later in the article. She compares crossing genres to knowing another language. For me, the study of poetry has broadened my vision of what words on the page, along with the white space surrounding them, can do, in fiction, poetry, and in memoir. My study of prose has given me better sentences from which to construct better lines in my poems. The things I don’t allow myself to do in prose, I won’t allow into my poems and vice versa. One of my favorite writing experiences—and experiments—was writing TRASH, a long narrative in poems, in which I was able to combine what I knew and could figure out about narrative, the character’s emotional arc, the poetic line, and negative space into a work that partook of and crossed boundaries between poetry and prose.

I’m so happy that in our VCFA MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults we have been able to keep the lines of communication open between genres and our students can move back and forth between prose (fiction and nonfiction) and poetry, as well as through the ages and stages of literature for young people from picture book through young adult. With our recent foray into Poetry Off the Page, with its exhibit of visual images and reading/performance, we’ve opened another door for our creative explorations to enter. While the world of the publishing business becomes ever more “brand” oriented, we as creative artists can continue to try out new things, things that will bring new life and energy to all our work, branded or not.

 

 

What Do You Think You Are Doing?

Just after our own winter residency, I was a guest for several days in the VCFA Visual Arts residency. While there are too many wonderful things to say about that visit in this short blog piece, I find that I am often reminded of the visual artists’ statements that I read and the process papers I heard. The process papers usually dealt with the work done during that semester as well as planning for future projects. The artist statements, too, dealt with not only the media employed, but also the motivations and origins of the work produced. In the critiques, after the exhibit was viewed and discussed by other students and faculty, the artist had a chance to answer questions and to talk about the reasons, means, and objectives of their art. Often this involved consideration of what they’ve done in the past and what they hope to do in the future.

 

This got me thinking. I wondered if I could write an artist statement myself, perhaps one akin to a teaching philosophy statement. What could I say about my writing that would clearly state what I am trying to do both with my craft and with the content of my stories and poems? Could I write a statement that took into account where I’ve been in my writing life and where I would like to go—and where exactly I am right now? Could I investigate my motivation for writing in general and for each story in particular? Have I thought about the themes of the books I’ve written? Can I identify a thematic thread that runs from one writing project to another? What does that thematic thread say about me, about who I am, where I’ve been in my life’s journey, where I am headed, and whether that is my intended destination? Are the themes similar or varied?

 

When I speak to students about “the moral to the tale,” it’s usually to ask them to delete overt statements that come across as lessons meant for the edification of the child. I usually go on to say that we don’t have to impress preconceived ideas onto a story because if we are writing from the deepest parts of ourselves the themes of our lives will naturally come forth. But what about checking in on our deepest selves from time to time to make sure the themes that are flowing forth rather unsuspectingly are themes we espouse? How about checking in with our stories now and then to make sure that we aren’t inadvertently “saying” something we don’t intend? How about interrogating ourselves first to see where we are with the large issues of life and write with an awareness of them, allowing ourselves room to change and grow over time?

 

More than once in my life I’ve been asked to participate in generating a mission statement to guide a group’s course of action in the future. We decide what service we can provide and to whom, as well as what makes our group and this service unique and valuable for the target audience. I think this is a good place to start, writing one’s own mission statement, but I’d like to think that writers, especially those who write for young people, might take it further, more into the realm of the artist statement where we might consider not only our motivations for this work as well as our means of delivery, our craft, our techniques and skills. Every once in a while it might do us good to check in with that statement to see if our stories and our skills are living up to our goals and make adjustments accordingly, revising our statements over a life time of growth through language and story.

 

If you’d like to join me in this attempt, you might begin by writing a short paragraph that: 1) Describes your intentions as a writer, both in story and in craft; 2) States why you write, what drives you and what keeps you going; and 3) Sets forth what you intend to accomplish for your reader, your writing, and yourself.

S.W.E.P.T.: Making a Clean Sweep or Time Management for Dummies (like me*)

*Note:  If you are a well-organized, well-rounded, balanced, and productive writer, no need to read any further. This won’t be for you.

Woman with a Broom–Vincent van Gogh

I grew up in a family where once we started a project, we stuck to it to the bitter end. My dad spent many entire weekends overhauling our cars’ engines. My mom could make a dress in a day, even if it took her past midnight and into the wee hours of the next. My sister and I always had chores to perform and we had to get them done on the day they were assigned. I have always thought that was how a person got things done; you got up, got started, and kept on till you finished. Even our scout’s honor code included:  “Remember to finish what you begin.”

I understood why such a caution was important because, as I learned once I grew up and set about starting my own projects, if I didn’t persist to a rapid finish, I would clutter my sewing and art cabinets with unfinished projects, projects that lacked their original luster once I had set them aside for a considerable time. This happened with my writing, too. Many of those at first exciting projects were never finished. I learned through those failures, that I needed to work fast before time grew short and my enthusiasm faltered. That meant staying up way too late reading the library book due the next day, even though I didn’t like it. That meant allowing my daughters to stay up way too late to finish that overly detailed poster for school the next day. That meant being a tired-out family way too much of the time.

Time management for me back when I was raising my daughters was constrained by the hours of school or extracurricular lessons and activities. I had to fit everything that needed doing into the few and small time slots available over the course of a busy family’s week, which was not the way I naturally worked. Most of the time, things didn’t fit smoothly and, yet again, I stumbled to bed in the wee hours only to have to wake up early to get everyone ready and out the door.

Then came the time when my daughters were grown and I was divorced and living alone. I could do anything any time I wanted. I could paint the basement all night long or read all day or write for hours and produce pages and pages of material, exhausting myself with the continual drive to ‘finish’. Or I could sleep late and sit around gazing out my windows at the Vermont mountains for hours. There was no such thing as a set schedule or overall plan. I let my enthusiasms and my exhaustions lead the way. I got quite a bit done, but I also amassed a few unfinished projects, and never felt the kind of balance I longed for and thought I’d find once my schedule was up to me and no one else.

Enter the next phase of life:  A new marriage to a retired husband. Jerry, a former librarian, retired early and had been retired for a few years when we met. By then he had established his routines to fit his own daily rhythms. He told me early on that he liked to read in the mornings and listen to music in the late afternoon—those were not negotiable activities. That sounded fine to me, so we began our life together, Jerry with his slow mornings, me with the learned need to get going on whatever project with which I’d become enamored or shamed into doing, whether it was cleaning the bathrooms, painting a piece of furniture, or starting a new book.

While I continued my usual fits and starts kind of progress, I noticed that Jerry was getting lots and lots done in a day. He might read nearly all morning, but afternoon found him doing little chores, just a bit of something here, something there. I noticed this most when a huge load of firewood seemed to get split and stacked with only a half-hour here or an hour there. I would have worked at it all day, day after day, till completion and I’d be a wreck, sore muscles and nicked fingers. I would have hated it, and I would have hated that it took me away from other things I wanted to do. Jerry relished getting outside every day and watching the stack move from a jumble on one side of the wood area to a fine tall stack ready to burn on the other. He might take a long walk or bike ride that same day, do some repairs or paint a section of the house, then come in, listen to music, and enjoy an evening knowing he’d accomplished a lot. Still having things I needed to do, I often felt frustrated with my day.

That’s when I decided to make a clean sweep of it and change my low-down ways. I’d copy his process and make myself move from one task to another throughout the day and not get so narrowly and intensely focused, which too often resulted in tiredness, boredom, feelings of self-pity, futility and frustration. I analyzed what I needed to do to make my life what I wanted it to be, balanced and productive—and satisfying. Then I came up with this anagram: S.W.E.P.T. for all those things I wanted to do in a day, but usually got derailed from by another activity. I wanted to get more physically fit, get more work done, and manage my household tasks and projects. Here’s my new daily regimen:

S=Stretches—I loved yoga and ballet classes when I was younger, especially the stretches, so I have incorporated a short time for waking my body up with stretches into my mornings.

W=Work—This makes up the largest portion of my days. I include reading, writing, and VCFA work in this, with emphasis on my reading and writing time when we aren’t in packet week, and my advisees’ when we are. I tend to do my reading and commenting on student work in the morning and do my own writing in the afternoon. I have finally stopped trying to make myself a morning writer when it obviously isn’t in my circadian rhythm to be one. I’ve also found I get more writing done when I’m not focused on getting a lot of writing done. I’ll never forget hearing Kate DiCamillo in a visit to VCFA say that she limits herself to two pages a day, but keeps up that steady pace as she forges ahead daily on a new manuscript. I can’t make myself stop after two pages, but I don’t attempt to wring the most words I am capable of out of a days’ worth of writing. I like the way that placing some limits on each day’s production, makes me more ready to sit down the next because I know where I’ll start and am eager to get it down on the page.

E=Exercise—Biking, walking, hiking, canoeing, skiing, dancing. Exercise will slip out of my daily schedule unless I’m very disciplined, but the more regular I am with exercise, the more I miss it when I don’t ‘get around to it’. I’ve learned I need to prioritize it in the day or I allow time to slip away.

P=Projects—These are long-range tasks that I’m learning to break into smaller chunks to accomplish. For example, I spent a couple of months last winter organizing old photographs and filling new photo albums, something that I’d delayed doing because I thought I’d have to do it all in one huge energetic burst. I found out that what I really needed was time to enjoy or grieve as I remembered the precious events and people in my past.

T=Tasks—These are short term and usually recurring jobs, like cleaning the bathrooms or grocery shopping, and tend to take over too many of my days. Rather than exhausting myself by cleaning all day until everything is clean all at the same time, I’ve found that breaking down the tasks to only a couple a day makes the whole thing not so daunting.

I’ve reread what I’ve written above and it sounds so ordinary, not life changing at all, but these changes have made a huge difference in what I’ve been able to accomplish in the last year. However, the most important part for me has been the satisfaction that being a more balanced person gives me. I’m a writer, but not only that; I’m a teacher, wife, mother, friend, and many more things. I am not satisfied with being only one thing in my life; I want to explore and grow and not feel I’m robbing one important part of myself to fulfill another.

I don’t always get every one of these things done every single day. There are still times when one area overtakes another and I’ve given myself that flexibility. For example, I still have a hard time getting myself to exercise daily, but sometimes we take half a day for a hike or a canoe trip. I figure it balances out over time, and that’s what I’m looking for—balance.

Have you S.W.E.P.T. today?

VCFA July 2013: Summer of Love

As happens often in our residency lectures, this July several of us brought up the idea of love’s relationship to our work. We considered how love for our stories, our characters, ourselves as writers, and our readers are essential to what we do. My own lecture, on Pedagogy, wouldn’t seem to have a natural connection, but, of course, it did. I had chosen as examples of metaphor several quotes about love. Here’s a sampling:

Oh, love is a journey with water and stars,
with drowning air and storms of flour;
love is a clash of lightnings,
two bodies subdued by one honey.
(Pablo Neruda, Sonnet 12, translated by Stephen Tapscott, 1960/1986)

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.
(Lynda Barry)

Some say love, it is a river
that drowns the tender reed.
Some say love, it is a razor
that leaves your soul to bleed.
Some say love, it is a hunger,
an endless aching need.
I say love, it is a flower,
and you its only seed.
(Amanda McBroom, “The Rose,” 1979)

Teaching has become for me one of the outlets of my creativity and one of my ways of acting with love in the world outside of the written word. I love reading the stories that come from my students’ minds and hearts, hearing the voices that call to them, and watching them and their stories grow together, preparing to enter the conversation of literature in the world. I teach as a job, yes, but I do it for the love of stories and for their writers, the storytellers. I played Amanda McBroom’s “The Rose” before I started my lecture and used many quotes about love because love is a great motivator and I know that writers for children are motivated by love and intend to help build an honest experience for children and young adults through the action of their words in the world. It may be an easy metaphor, but it’s true for me: You, each one of you, are growing into your flowering and I say love is that flower and you the only seed.
My friends, my colleagues, my students-as-teachers and teachers-as-students, I say, go forth and flower.

Here Be Dragons: Placing the Story

For me, story begins with voice, a voice that fairly soon after I first encounter it, shows itself to come from a specific place. Once that place surrounds the voice, the character comes alive and moves in it. Without setting, voice and character float away. Setting anchors story in a specific place and time, in sounds and textures, expectations and surprises.

On some medieval maps, dragons or other fantastical beasts were drawn about the edges, in the open sea, in the explored regions of the world. In that terra incognita—uncharted, unknown lands—who knew what might lurk there? In those mysterious unknown climes there might dwell beasts, sea serpents, and even dragons.

What magic and mystery, what dragons and surprising creatures have come into our lives and become real through story! Think for a second of each of these places: Narnia, Hogwarts, Transylvania, Treasure Island, Cold Comfort Farm, Mr. McGregor’s Garden, Earthsea, Pemberley, Jordan College, Goldengrove, Camp Green Lake, The Garage on Falconer Road, Middle-earth, The Underneath, The House of the Seven Gables, The Night Kitchen, at Sea in a Pea Green Boat, The Hundred Acre Wood, The Road, Toad Hall, Elsinore Castle, Troy, a Raft on the Mississippi River, Sleepy Hollow, The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, the Boat with Two Wise Eyes on the Yantze River, Outside Over There, Wuthering Heights, a Kingdom by the Sea, The Forest Primeval.

THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight….

When my youngest daughter was only about three years old and her sisters around six and fourteen, their father and I took them camping high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains between the Spanish Peaks and Trinchera Peak just below Bear Lake and Blue Lake in Southern Colorado. The Cucharas Creek burbled alongside our tent site and branching trails led through the forest up to the lakes past beaver dams that formed smaller ponds along the way. We’d hiked high into the glacier valley when, just after noon, a thunderstorm rumbled in over the mountain. We ran for camp, father and two older sisters faster than the three-year-old and I could go. As the thunder got closer Stephanie and I entered the wooded part of the path with the others far ahead. Soon we lost sight of them and at the fork in the path stopped to try to figure out which way they had gone. I knew that both paths ended up back at the campsite, so we took off along the left hand path. Soon we could see a bit farther along and the rest of the family was nowhere in sight.

Stephanie wanted to go back and take the other path, but I told her, “This path will end up right where we started. You’ll see just as soon as we get out of the forest.”

She stopped still and pulled back on my hand, then she moved close to me and gazed all around at the huge looming pines and into the dark patches of shadow, fog, and mist between them. “Is this the forrrrresst?” she said. Her little eyes reflected all the mystery, magic, and terror of all the fairy tales she’d heard by that time in her young life.

We were in THE FOREST and who knew what dragons, fairies, gnomes, witches, and other beasts of terra incognita might meet us along our path? Thunder and a little rain were nothing compared to the adventure we entered in that moment when physical “real” place intersected with story. I have to admit that through her reaction—and her imagination—that wooded path became THE FOREST for me, too, and transformed into something more magical and a little more terrifying than it had been when it was just a real place on a real mountain in very real Colorado thunderstorm. It was as if the glaciers had reformed behind their mounds of stone rubble and reabsorbed the lake water back into themselves. The wind blew colder and the rain turned to sleet and we entered a time long lost to the others on that mountain. We were in the forest primeval.

As writers, we sometimes think of setting, as Eudora Welty calls it in her essay, “Place in Fiction,” in The Eye of the Story, “one of the lesser angels that watch over the racing hand of fiction,” but she also says:
…so irretrievably and so happily are recognition, memory, history, valor, love, all the instincts of poetry and praise, worship and endeavor, bound up in place. From the dawn of man’s imagination, place has enshrined the spirit; as soon as man stopped wandering and stood still and looked about him, he found a god in that place; and from then on, that was where the god abided and spoke if ever he spoke.

In our stories, setting and place are determined by character and character’s reactions to them. Character is affected by place in a wholly and even, perhaps, holy way. Voice, character, place, all bound together, inseparable—where the god abides and speaks, if ever she does speak.

Literary Tension at the Level of Language

In an interview in the March/April 2013 issue of THE WRITER’S CHRONICLE, novelist and memoirist, Kim Barnes, said this about literary tension:

“Tension has to exist at the level of the language; it has to exist at the level of the story; it has to exist at the level of the intellect; it has to exist at the level of the heart; it has to exist at the level of what we would call the soul, that archetypal tension of inherent dichotomies, the moving forward in life between morality and aesthetics.
When we write, we’re asking our readers to engage in that tension because without tension there is no resolution. And it’s the resolution, at some level, that story relies most upon. Even if it’s at the level of aesthetics or if there’s no plot whatsoever or action, we still have to have the resolution of the tension.”

Tension, that balance of opposing forces stretched to breaking point, is essential to whatever we write. So often my own writing and that of my students lacks this sense of pressure. Sure, there may be interesting characters, potentially exciting or dire events and actions, or a lively voice, but so often the characters don’t come alive through their actions and the events don’t resonate because they fail to ignite response in either the characters or the readers. The voice may sound true to life, but the character just talks and talks and talks, telling the reader about the story and keeping her at arm’s length.

What I love about this quote from Kim Barnes is her assertion that not only does tension have to exist at the level of story, heart and soul and intellect, it has to exist (and she places this first) at the level of language. This is what I find missing so often in my own work and I have to spend a good deal of time in revision working out syntax, pacing, tone, rhythms, silences and white space, both in poetry and in prose. I have to reconstruct the voice I ‘hear’ for it to work on the page.

In cinema, characterization is developed through scenes, through dialogue, action, and reaction, but despite the actors’ talents and the screenwriters’ skills, the basic tools available to the filmmaker are the camera at its various angles and revision through editing by the directors that turn the final product into a film, into that specific form of art.

In literature, the same elements are shown through the only tools writers have, words on the page arranged according to patterns that make intellectual and emotional sense to the reader and create an effect that turns our writing, our poems, stories, memoirs, essays, etc., into art.

The building up of tension and it’s eventual release is what makes the story or poem work, whether the story is a loud, high-action drama or a poem that whispers to the reader the essence of a realized, but fleeting moment. What keeps the reader engaged and reading is the suspense that the reader feels as a result of this pressure that Barnes calls the “archetypal tension of inherent dichotomies,” the conflict among and between opposing forces, ideas, beliefs, desires, and even in the interplay of sounds and silence.

Be the Radiance

“We all crave radiance in this austere world.” —Elizabeth Alexander

At the January 2011 VCFA residency I prefaced my lecture on teaching writing with this:

“Last Sunday morning as I was preparing to leave my cozy, warm house and enter a snowy world to drive to Vermont College for our all day faculty meeting, I heard an interview on NPR with Elizabeth Alexander whose new book, CRAVE RADIANCE, contains a poem with these lines: “We all crave radiance in this austere world.” While I don’t habitually consider the world I live in all that austere, I was feeling its bleakness that morning after hearing news the day before of the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords along with eighteen other people, another sad, senseless, violent act perpetrated by a person whose lack of radiance in life sought to steal another’s. Elizabeth Alexander’s poem caught fire inside my imagination in that moment and I realized that I live as I do, as a writer and teacher of writing, because I crave radiance, and that you are here studying writing because you, too, crave radiance. We are meant to be radiant beings and to share that response to life with others, teaching and learning, reading and writing, bringing stories of radiance into our world—sometimes joyful or funny stories, sometimes sad ones that reflect the reality of moments of austerity and pain, real stories and fantastic tales, ones that are read by children who also crave radiance.”

Now, as I prepare to attend the January 2013 VCFA residency, I am still feeling the dimming of radiance we all experienced on December 14, 2012 when little children, some in the act of reading our books in hopes our words would bring them comfort, courage, and escape, were shot down in the halls and classrooms of their own school, Sandy Hook Elementary. Between this 2013 residency and that 2011 one, there have been other violent acts, many others, in our world, so many ways to dim the radiance in these children’s lives and in our own lives.

Over the years I’ve assumed we would make progress in curbing gun violence, but I’ve never taken an active part in trying to make that happen. Now, that has to change. I must find a way to do whatever is in my power to make change happen. As a writer whose books these very children might have read, those books, in fact, that were silent witnesses to their last moments, I cannot write another word for children to give them stories if I do not fight for them to live to read them.

When I was a child there was a saying that went something this: “Your freedom extends to the end of my nose.” Can we not say that the freedom of the gun extends only to the beating of my heart? When a fist hits a nose, the bully’s freedom must be curtailed. After all, we always say freedom implies responsibility. Who is responsible for the terror of these children and the grief of these families if not all of us who do not act to stop the next bullet before it hits the next innocent heart? Whether we who write for children and young adults take overt political action or write stories that help change the world and save lives or stories that change lives and save the world, we will do what we can to overcome the world’s austere darkness with radiance.

Of Halloween, Portals, and Frankenstein–Sharon Darrow

As we approach that time of year when tradition and legend tell of a slippage between the world of flesh and the world of spirit, I’m thinking about portals, those openings, doors, passageways between one sort of place and another. In magical fantasy we find keys to the passages, clocks that strike thirteen in the night, and womb-like wardrobes leading to an old-fashioned streetlamp in another world. In horror, we find zombies and ghouls walking the streets of our world. In paranormal romance, we find boyfriends who are vampires or guardian angels who want to be boyfriends. In time travel or sci fi, one era bleeds into another, one faraway galaxy wormholes into another, maybe our own.

Portals, scientists have found, cause us (here on earth) to reset our brains and prepare for the new environment. That’s why we walk through a door from the living room to the kitchen to get a pair of scissors to snip off a wayward thread on a throw pillow and stand there asking ourselves what we were going after and have to return to the living room to jog our memories. Once we see the thread again, we hold that image in our minds as we re-cross the threshold and reenter the kitchen, thus making the thought move through the portal with us. This happens to us all, whether aging or school aged; it’s a phenomenon of human existence.

I wonder if that is why the idea of magical crossing of portals originated and why the idea of passing from one world to another is so powerful in story. Of course, the original portal was birth into life and the final one, death out of earthly life. What more powerful, magical, frightening, and completely normal passages are there?

Recently, my husband and I were in New Mexico where we visited my cousin and sat on her adobe house’s portal (a long, covered porch-like patio that wrapped around the back and side of the house) where we enjoyed a cool morning’s breakfast and regaled each other with stories and memories from our lives. Something about that sense of being neither outside nor inside seemed to be conducive to storytelling, just as it had been on our old southern porches with porch swings and wicker rockers. Neither outside nor in, we slipped between the old days and nowadays, and time lingered with us.

What can we make of this for the writer? For me, walking from one part of my house to the new addition where I do my creative work, reminds me who I am and what I’m doing here, resets my day’s trajectory and opens up the magic mind for story. I have one place I sit to work on my student’s writing packets and another, a window-seat, where I sit to imagine into the worlds of my own stories. Just having the outside there, so close at hand, with me half-way between the inside and the outdoors, sets my mind free to wander about in that realm between things, between the real and the imagined, the ordinary and the magical, where I can travel to the nearest earth-like planet with its orbiting laboratories or skip along a sidewalk with a little girl who lives on a houseboat on the Seine, travel back to Mississippi at the beginning of the Civil Rights era, be silly as a cartoon-like prospector who loses his voice or a young woman in the early 1900’s who gets sent aloft by a tornado, run away and write graffiti, or even imagine what it would have been like to have imagined Frankenstein’s monster.

This time of the year I sometimes visit schools and read the ghost story from Through the Tempests Dark and Wild: A Story of Mary Shelley, Creator of Frankenstein and when I do, I find the entrance portal to the children’s imaginations is our popular culture’s depiction of the monster, green stitched up forehead, bolts holding head to neck, and large lumbering frame. Through that image, I get them to focus upon the young girl who heard such ghost stories and imagined Victor Frankenstein and his creature, who at only 18 wrote the novel that came out of her own sorrows, the death of her mother, her rejection by her father, and the death of her own firstborn child. Science was opening a portal to understanding of electricity and of anatomy and physiology. The French Revolution had loosed ideas of freedom and equality, the new century had begun, and nothing would ever be the same.

A portal, a place between here and there where magic resides. As writers, every night we go through the portal of sleep and wake on the other side in a new day where in our stories’ other worlds exist with our own, simultaneously real and imagined. Like a perennial All Hallow’s Eve, our writer’s minds allow flesh and spirit to work together as one to make story. For writers that is what life is all about, making the unreal real, the real magical, and bringing the outside and the inside together, just touching, where our minds meet that of our readers’, in the portal.

Happy Halloween!

P.S. My trick or treat suggestion is for you to treat yourself to Frankenstein by Mary Shelley if you haven’t read it—or if you have, why not reread it?

Changing, One Word at a Time

When I began to study writing, I entered a short story workshop where we critiqued each other’s work in much the same way we do at VCFA. One of my first teachers prefaced her remarks about my story by saying,  “A story should be capable of changing the world or saving a life.” Changing the world? Saving a life? I was shocked. How could a story do that? How could MY story do that? I prepared myself for the worst, but then she added: “And this story is such a story.” I was relieved, flattered, thrilled—but I didn’t believe her. Not then. I do believe her now.

            Simply through the act of making story, I have seen my own world change and the life I’ve saved may have been my own. I cannot vouch for how the words have entered my readers and changed them or their worlds; I can only say how this study of writing, the act of writing and revising, and eventually the teaching of writing have all worked together to change my life. Because of this experience and my way of thinking about it, I talk all the time about the power of our words and the way our words can change us, how we, through the acts of imagining and revising, become the persons capable of writing the stories we are meant to write. Our writers’ journeys lead us to places, experiences, emotions, and to people we’ve never encountered before. This isn’t an easy journey and it’s good to have an understanding teacher with high expectations along with you.

            By the way, I just want to say that stories that change and save don’t have to be all intense and serious; humor, adventure, even silliness can make a difference in an individual young person’s life and, as a result, in the world of that individual; they just have to be true. Of course, by ‘true’ I don’t necessarily mean ‘factual’. No matter what age you write for or what genre you write, your choices change you and your world, and maybe, like me, they might save your life.

Negative Capability in Negative Space

 

Can’t see the forest for the trees? I remember laughing at that saying as a child because, of course, a forest WAS the trees, right? Right. Or maybe not. We all have heard that the whole is made up of the sum of its parts, that it’s all the trees taken together that make the forest, or, in the case of a book or a story, all the chapters and scenes with their dialogue, description, and action that make up the whole. Some writers see the concept of the whole first and work toward finding the parts to make up the sum; others are masters of minutiae and start with the smallest components and work to find the whole.
    Most of my stories have begun in voice and in place–a voice, almost disembodied, speaking into a landscape. Eventually, this voice finds its body and the place develops details and the rest grows from there. While I write, I usually feel like a wanderer in a vast forest whose only touchstones are the trees and rocks and insects and ferns. I move from one to another, searching ahead as far as my eyes can see through the shadows and hoping for the occasional glimpse of blue sky above or the guiding presence of the pole star for direction. I remember asking a friend in Chicago where her stories began and she said that the first thing she sees is the structure. I was dumbfounded. Structure, for me, came later as a kind of pattern the pieces I’d found could fit into. I thought of my own writing as if I were making a crazy quilt, building the pattern out of the juxtaposition of the colors, the connections between the figures in the design, and the direction of the weave. I didn’t remember ever starting with a distinct pattern in mind and making the pieces fit. Mostly, I just felt lucky that there was a subconscious action at work and eventually the pattern would emerge–as if it had been there all along. As far as my writing life goes, I’ve had to become capable of living in uncertainty.
    Nowadays, I find myself absorbed in another aspect of the trees and the forest:  the negative space between things. I know now a forest isn’t as simple as the sum of its trees–or ferns or lichen or stones or fungi. It’s all these in relationship, existing in space and making open patterns between them.
    Ever since I studied art in college, I’ve seen the world through its negative spaces, but it’s a concept that has been slow to enter my writing mind. When I paint or draw, I try not to allow my preconceptions of what certain objects look like to interfere with how they appear at the angle and in the light that am observing them, and instead try to draw how they occupy the space around them. In other words, I don’t draw the antique clock on the wall, but the wall around it. From those lines and shadows in the background, the clock as it truly appears emerges. My vantage point, the light in the room, and my emotional state at the time all affect the way the clock might appear from one day to the next. If my point of view is directly in front of it, I see a very different clock from the clock I see at an oblique angle. But maybe more importantly, the background changes in the light, and with the different distances and angles from which I observe it. The space around the object changes with the changing conditions and with my own movement and state of mind.
    What does that have to do with the forest? Well, here in Vermont, my home is surrounded by trees. We live in a forest. I’m getting to know individual trees as separate from their other plant kin. I also see them in relationship as a part of a larger forest, but what I really notice most about the way I observe them is that I am acutely aware of the space between things, the way the branches bend and angle away from the trunk toward the light shining through the empty space between and how that space helps determine their rate and direction of growth. I notice the changing patterns of light and shadow on the forest floor and across the breeze-stirred leaves and needles. I see the sky, blue or white or gray twilit, through the grid of branches; birds move through the spaces, alight and disappear into them. Farther away through the negative spaces, the background peeks and unseen forces appear and move.
    One day last winter I sat at my breakfast table staring down toward the brook through black tree trunks, noticing the white snowy patches beyond, their shapes and sizes, the light and color of the white subtly changing as the sun rose higher in the sky. And something moved out there. Far across the brook three bulky shapes moved through the white space I was observing. Larger and even darker than the tree trunks, indistinct, but definitely there. I believe they were moose, but I cannot know for sure. As soon as they passed through the negative space, they were again swallowed up by the darkness of trees and forest. The scene appeared as before, except that I had changed and now the forest took on a life and a story it hadn’t had before for me.
    There, in that movement, was the story. Where the birds fly, the clouds move, the leaf falls, there is the true story of the forest. It’s the minutiae and the large elements that make up a story, but they have to be in relationship in space and in those interstices is where something happens. The space can be as large as the sky overhead in a forest glen or as small as the glimmer of sunshine on a leaf in the background seen through the spindly legs of an ant scurrying along the edge of a small piece of splintered bark, but it’s the glimpse into that negative space that makes all the pieces become whole. It’s the mystery and the unspoken, the shown rather than told that dwells there, metaphor and implication, dwelling in uncertainty, sometimes fleetingly, like the wind-strewn patterns of light and shadow on the forest floor.
    Negative space isn’t empty space, although at its most basic, as the white space in a poem or between paragraphs, it may appear to be empty when it is actually time and eye movement that exists there. Only in the space between can we hear the music of a poem or the voice of a story. It isn’t a vacuum where sound waves cannot transfer. This negative space is filled with possibility. It is where the story lives.