WriterHouse

I Tackle the Pantoum!

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I wanted to learn more about poetry from the eight-week seminar I’m taking at WriterHouse, and I certainly have moved beyond my college acumen at iambic pentameter. Last week it was the “persona poem” entering my lexicon. This week it’s the “pantoum.”

The text we’re using for this seminar is Ordinary Genius, by the poet Kim Addonizio. It’s full of reflections on creativity and exercises and prompts to stimulate the reader’s creativity. Much of what she offers in this book can be useful to prose writers as well. For example, Addonizio described one of her favorite exercises to enhance creativity: Wherever she is, she makes a conscious effort to observe and notice three specific things, which she writes down. They may not show up tangibly in a poem, but the concept each observation evokes will.

The reading for week five of the seminar contained many different exercises and prompts, including the “pantoum,” which is a fifteenth-century Malaysian verse form later adopted by Western writers. A pantoum consists of quatrains (four-line stanzas), and lines two and four of the first stanza become lines one and three of the next stanza, and so on until the final stanza, whose last line is the first line of the poem.

Confused? So was I, but Addonizio provided her poem, “Aquarium Eel,” as an example, as well as other pantoums by Charles Baudelaire, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Marilyn Hacker, Carolyn Kizer, and Anne Waldman. I was intrigued enough to give the pantoum a try.

Another part of the reading included a chapter on “Race, Class, and Privilege,” with prompts to encourage us to either explore our ethnicity or reflect on our white privilege. Ever since Thomas Duncan was the first person to be diagnosed with ebola after coming to the United States, I’ve been fascinated by a man from Liberia who shares not only my last name but also the first name of an uncle. Rather naively, I wondered how the name Duncan came to Liberia; then, a forehead smack later, I realized I knew exactly how.

Slaves were often known by their masters’ surnames, and Duncans in Virginia in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries owned slaves. I’ll never know for certain, but from Mr. Duncan’s surname it’s likely some of those slaves freed from Duncan land migrated to the new country of Liberia. Unlike some others in my “clan,” I see that as enhancing the family name: Duncans helped to build America, and Duncans helped to build Liberia. And yes, I understand as well there is a possibility Mr. Duncan and I share DNA. I won’t excuse the reason for that; that would be specious. I do, however, embrace family no matter the color of the skin.

Mr. Duncan likely contracted ebola when he drove an ill woman to a hospital not long before he took a plane to Texas to be with his fiance. He could have refused to help a sick woman, probably someone he suspected had ebola, but he didn’t. In that moment, I knew he and I were family. I knew as well I would have to write about him someday.

So, bearing in mind this is a very, very rough draft of my pantoum, here’s what I wrote for my cousin, Thomas Eric Duncan:

Brown Warrior

I know what our name means.
I’ll always wonder if you knew.
After all, “brown warrior” fits you,
But the battle was already lost.

I’ll always wonder if you knew,
When you went to hospital,
The battle was already lost.
Hero became villain after death.

When you went to hospital,
Did you have the will to survive?
Hero became villain after death,
And how did our name get to Liberia?

Did you have the will to survive?
You helped the sick, who never asked
How did our name get to Liberia.
I know the distasteful answer.

You helped the sick, who never asked
If you were frightened of them.
I know the distasteful answer
Why in death you were feared.

If you were frightened of them,
Those who couldn’t save your life,
Why in death were you feared?
Were you Thomas or Mr. Duncan?

Those who tried to save your life
Didn’t think of you as just a name.
You were Thomas or Mr. Duncan.
I know what our name means.

~~~

As usual, I’d be interested in what real poets think, and suggestions for improvement are always welcome.

I Got the Persona!

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In my last post, I wrote about having to write a “persona poem” for this week’s poetry class. My classmates received it very positively, as did the instructor. The poem is below; then, I’ll go over some of the comments I received.

Unrelenting

I am the thing you wish to ignore;
The monkey on your back,
The elephant in the room.

You think if you ignore me
I’ll give up trying,
I’ll mind my own business.

Your business is my business.
My nose will be in it;
My ears will be attuned.

You think denial will obscure me,
That if you turn your back
On me, I’ll go away.

Monster beneath the bed,
Boogeyman in the closet,
Ghost face in the mirror–

You think they are imagined.
I am real, ever so real,
And I am unrelenting.

~~~

Everyone agreed it was a persona poem, even if it was unclear who, or what, the “I” was. Some thought I should provide more clues (details) so the “I” could be identified; others liked the fact it was amorphous. They liked the strong voice and thought even though I used some cliches (monkey on the back, elephant in the room, monster under the bed, etc.) I had given them new meaning. As for that, I considered them tropes more than cliches, but that didn’t come across.

So, now the edit. What will I/should I change? Frankly, I don’t want to include details so the “I” becomes defined–because I don’t know who–or what–the “I” is. As I wrote this poem, I didn’t have anything concrete in mind; I wanted the persona to be undefined. I wanted the persona to be a little scary and ominous. One classmate referred to the persona as an “invisible bully.” Yeah, I rather like that. What I would change is the final stanza, based on a classmate’s comments about inserting a “they” after all those “yous” and “I’s.” The antecedents of “they” are the things mentioned in the penultimate stanza: monster, boogeyman, ghost-face. However, as grammatically correct as that line might be, it’s also passive voice. So, how about this change:

You think you have imagined that.
I am real, ever so real,
And I am unrelenting.

or

You think you have imagined us.
We are real, ever so real,
And we are unrelenting.

Hmm. I don’t know about either change. I’ll have to give it some more thought. What do you think? Comments? Suggestions?

Oh, and I learned a new poetry term–tercet, which is a stanza of three lines.

Poetry Class Update

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I’ve had three sessions of the poetry class I signed up for at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, VA. Time is flying, and I am having fun. I’ve received some great and helpful feedback on the two poems I’ve workshopped, enough to make me want to write more poetry.

The second poem was the one I wrote for #FullMoonSocial2014, and the suggested edits were spot on. However, Jeff Schwaner, who came up with the idea of #FullMoonSocial2014, had asked if he could include my poem, “Web of Fate,” in an anthology he was putting together of the poems written for that social media paean to the moon. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the edited poem to him in time, so he went with the original. If you’re interested in seeing the anthology and reading the other poems, you can download a copy for free by clicking here.

“Web of Fate” was actually my fall-back poem. I wrote a sonnet (fourteen lines in three quatrains and a couplet, where every other line rhymes, as does the closing rhyming couplet. I have a friend who is terminal with kidney failure, and I intended it to honor her; but I think I bit off more than I could chew. I wanted to work on it some more (a lot more!) before I workshopped it, so “Web of Fate” stepped up as the designated hitter.

For this week’s class, we had to write a persona poem–terminology which sent me to the Google for a definition and some examples. A persona poem is defined as “a poem written from the point of view of the object or person being written about.”* Sounds easy, right? Frankly, I was stymied, but a line came to me during our weekly SWAG Writers’ write-in on Monday: “I am the thing you wish to ignore, and I am unrelenting.” I found that line intriguing, especially when I split the sentence and made “I am the thing you wish to ignore” the opening line and “And I am unrelenting” the last line.

We’ll see on Thursday if those and the sixteen lines in between actually do constitute a persona poem.

*Willow Hambrick – Educator, Literacy Coach, Writing Coordinator, Royal Spring Middle School

Get Ready for Some Poetry!

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Last week I started an eight-week poetry class at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, VA. I’ve always wanted to write poetry, but perfectionist that I am I rarely set pen to paper to give it a try. When I saw the poetry course offered, I figured it would be a good impetus. The instructor, Aime Whittemore, didn’t cut us any slack; we got homework the first class: Using the first line of another poem, write your own poem. And not only did we have to write a poem, but it got work-shopped today. Oy! We had a list of first lines to choose from, and I selected “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks” from “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen. His poem, written about World War I, is pretty stark, but I’d never read it until after I selected that line. However, the first line brought something else to mind.

Oh, and just be prepared. I’ll probably post my poems, good and bad, and your comments would be appreciated.

Family History
(Prompt: First Line of “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen)

by Phyllis “Maggie” Duncan

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Their burdens hunger and homelessness,
They fall dead by roadsides and in ditches,
Teeth and tongues the color of chewed grass:
Why I don’t smile at the wearing of the green.

My grandmother hoarded food and money;
A century later the memories were too fresh
With recollections of lost uncles and cousins,
Who left and no word ever came again,
Their empty place settings sacred at table.

Always spoken of in the present tense,
As if they would one day reappear,
Pockets full of coin and victuals to share,
To tell their stories of streets paved in gold
But never mention “No Irish Need Apply.”

To America, that was a choice.
To Australia, the price of passage
Was a loaf of bread taken in desperation
From a windowsill where it cooled
And reeked of survival.

Those memories ride in my blood,
Renew in my marrow.
My grandmother made no waves,
Asked no questions,
So she wouldn’t have to go back;

Fear of deportation stretched
Across decades to my mother,
Who dreaded applying for a passport.
In our house no talk of Auld Erin,
No parsnip or turnip eaten.

Bone and sinew bespeak my history,
And it’s undeniable in my skin
(Never tanned but freckled),
The shape of my cranium (round);
The color of my hair (red).

Barely a note sounds before my feet
Move to the music of bodhran and pipes.
I don’t set out bread and milk for the wee folk
Like the other Maggie, my grandmother,
But maybe I should.

Planning How to End it All – Conclusion

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If you haven’t read Parts One and Two from Monday and Tuesday, respectively, click here for Part One then here for Part Two. Otherwise, this is the conclusion of a recap of a half-day workshop, sponsored by WriterHouse and conducted by Rebecca Makkai, I took this past weekend. The workshop was entitled “Ending it All.”

6. Endings that Rely on the Structure of the Whole Piece

The first ending under this descriptor is the Extrinsic Ending, where the story must end because of a time constraint or time period, e.g., the end of an era or some set event. When we reach that set event, we know the story is done. Examples of set events are a school year, a holiday, a war, a party, even someone’s entire life. Because of this established deadline, the tension within the story gets amped up. Examples include Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (obvious), the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm (made into an excellent movie), or the Harry Potter series, “as a whole, as well as each volume,” says Makkai.

Back in Part One (see the link in the first paragraph) when I listed Makkai’s Rules for Endings, the last one reads, “And, sometimes, it doesn’t have to happen at all.” That’s the Tangential ending, which, on the surface, has nothing whatsoever to do with what’s come before, except, Makkai says, “it has everything to do with what’s come before.” It’s an ending which is often metaphorical. Her example was Amy Hempel’s story, “The Dog of the Marriage.”

The next type of ending is the Return to an Enveloping Structure, where the ending is  like an inside joke because it may refer to something from the beginning. This is also related to the Rule for Endings, “Surprising but Inevitable.” The best example Makkai provided was the structure of John Knowles’ A Separate Peace. The protagonist returns to his old boarding school, walking around the campus; then, the balance of the book is about his remembering what happened while he was a student. Finally, the novel concludes with the protagonist walking about the campus while he compares war and life at boarding school. This type of ending is a reflection on what’s going on inside a character’s head.

The final type of ending in this descriptor is the Elegaic, which is a combination of the Philosophical and Extrinsic Endings, and it’s quite often a lament, in lyrical language, for a time gone by or a person no longer with us. The best possible example for this type of ending is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which ends in a single paragraph of such beauty it tears you completely away from the dystopian world McCarthy has just put us in and you’re glad for that break.

7. Endings that Play with Time

The first kind of ending under this descriptor is the Telescopic Ending, where you zoom out, into the future, to a point where the readers and the characters have some distance from the events in the book. From the future they have more wisdom and perspective to grasp what has happened. It’s a look back on the timeframe of the story, which up until this point was the “present.” The subjunctive tense is generally used for this type of ending, e.g., “Years later, he would look back, etc.” Makkai’s example is short enough to include here, from Alice Munro’s story, “Post and Beam.”

It was a long time ago that this happened. In North Vancouver, when they lived in the Post and Beam house. When she was twenty-four years old, and new to bargaining.

The second type of ending is the Many Years Passed…, the academic term for which is “Prolepsis.” Makkai terms it a subcategory of the Telescopic Ending, but we “live” in this ending for a while–a whole chapter or an epilogue–but just long enough to see something new happen. It is longer than the Telescopic Ending, but it’s really just a glimpse. Makkai says, “If you give too much information on too many people, it ends up looking like the end of Animal House.” Examples include the movie The Breakup or the novel by Eleanor Henderson, Ten Thousand Saints.

Then, there’s the Predictive Ending, where we’re not quite in the future but the narrator is certain where we’re going. The future tense usually characterizes this kind of ending, and for some real interest, Makkai says, you can twist this: The narrator is delusional in his or her predictions, but we, the readers, know they’re never going to happen. The ending of Jill McCorkle’s story, “Intervention,” which is about a failed intervention for an alcoholic spouse, is the perfect example of this type of ending.

And finally, we have the old stand-by, the Flashback, technically called Analepsis. The ending goes back to an earlier point in the timeline of the story, a decisive moment in a character’s life. We may know of it but haven’t yet witnessed it, or it may be a disaster we know is going to happen because of what has gone before. It can also encompass a moment of hope before that disaster and is, says Makkai, a good way to end a very sad story, i.e., with a note of hope even if it’s false and bittersweet. The example was from Israeli author Etgar Keret’s story “Joseph,” which is about witnesses to a suicide bombing. Other examples were Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, and Dan Chaon’s You Remind Me of Me.

Makkai capped all this off with a story ending which included most of the different types of endings, and that was the end to the story “Safari” from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. This is probably the best story within that novel in stories as a stand-alone. If you haven’t read it, do so. It’s beautiful and devastating at the same time, or as Makkai describes it, “It’s elegaic. It’s telescopic, but there’s a bit of flashback effect, too….There’s a revelation (in the form of some particularly devastating dialogue). It’s lyrical. It’s sensory and immediate. And I’d argue that both the telescoping and the revelation at the end are, to a certain extent, game changers.”

After all the academic “stuff,” we took a break then came back to an exercise. We took a story everyone knows–in our case it was Hansel and Gretel–and rewrote the ending using some of the descriptors Makkai had just explained. This was a very practical application of all which had come before. We had great fun doing this, and it helped to cement endings in all our heads.

Makkai sent us home to look at the endings of some of our favorite books, to see which descriptor they fit, and to write some good endings of our own. Years later, I would look back on this class as one of the most significant learning experiences in my writing career and, knew, that had I not taken it, my own happy ending would have been different, very different.

Okay, what type of ending was that?

 

Planning How to End it All – Part Two

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If you missed yesterday’s installment (Part One) click here to read it first. Otherwise, this is Part Two of a recap of a WriterHouse workshop given by Rebecca Makkai and which I took this weekend called “Ending it All.”

2. Endings that Address Meaning

The first type of ending under this descriptor is the Blatantly Philosophical, where the writer, or the writer through the protagonist/narrator, simply tells you, “This is what this whole book meant.” In this type of ending the language tends to be abstract and unemotional but evokes strong emotions. To accomplish this, says Makkai, “the language must be insanely gorgeous” and the message has to be “complex, interesting, and new.” Her examples were Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald actually switches narrators to accomplish this), and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

The next type is the Revelation/Epiphany, which is usually for the character, not the reader. The reader may know exactly what has happened, but the character may not. This kind of ending is characterized by not much happening at the ending, but the character finally realizes something about him- or herself or about the world. Makkai indicates this is an “organic” type of ending, which is mostly used in short stories. This type of ending is where the ritardando effect is most useful; it slows the reader down and allows the epiphany to occur. This ritardando is accomplished by using short, sparse sentences and a judicious use of paragraph breaks. It can appear and read almost like a poem, says Makkai. Her examples were Raymond Carver’s short story, “Fat,” and James Joyce’s story, “The Dead.”

3. Endings that Emphasize Musicality, Sound

The first type of this kind of ending is Dialogue, and Makkai says, “Leaving us with the sound of someone talking can be remarkably effective, but what is said needs to be delicately profound.” In other words, the dialogue has to conclude the story but not in a trite or expected way. Her examples were Denis Johnson’s story, “Emergency,” Wallace Stegner’s novel, Crossing to Safety, and Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People.”

The next type of ending is Lyrical, where you use consonants and vowels to evoke sound. This kind of ending should have a rhythm, one you can tap out on a table, with each sentence reproducing that rhythm. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, one of Makkai’s examples, the ending rhymes like a poem, almost in a way that presages rap music.

4. Endings that Play with Scope or Focus

The first type of this ending is the Sensory Pinpoint, where we’re focused on one, immediate moment that produces a specific sensory impression. Makkai likens it to a camera zooming in on a single object, one which has to have significance to the story. Her examples included Edward P. Jones’ story, “The First Day,” which has us focus on the sound of a mother’s shoes to her child as she leaves her at school, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and the ending of the TV series Friends, where all the characters leave the apartment and the camera zooms in on the apartment’s key.

In the same descriptor but opposite to the Sensory Pinpoint is the Long Fadeout. This, says Makkai, is a longer, looser type of ending, which has little to no symbolism. “Think,” she says, “of any Woody Allen movie where a couple walks away down a crowded New York street, and the camera pulls back until the couple is indistinguishable among the crowd.” It’s otherwise known as “extending the moment.” However, you must have resolution of the story before fading out, i.e., the fadeout itself can’t be the resolution. Examples include Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin and the ending of the TV series Cheers, where Sam the Bartender goes around turning off all the lights–no one else, no dialogue, the story’s done except for this long, extended shot to emphasize it’s over. “Of course,” says Makkai, “for this kind of ending, there’s glorious jazz music.”

Tomorrow: The third and final part, Endings that Rely on the Structure of the Whole Piece and Endings that Play with Time

Planning How to End it All – Part One

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No, no, I’m not about to jump off a bridge. This weekend I attended a half-day workshop called “Ending it All” at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, VA.

Some of us can nail the beginning of a story, novel, or essay. Some can do the middle. Some can do both. What stymies most of us is ending it all, i.e., putting those two words down when we’re finished: The End.

I’ve drafted a very complex novel about the year 2000 in what was then still Yugoslavia. The story involves assassinations of government officials, the criminal underworld, ethnic cleansing, election politics, and even disillusioned Russian soldiers. In other words, a lot of plot threads. And since the bulk of my writing has been non-fiction (government reports), I like all my threads tied up loosely.

Also, because my work is based on current events and recent history, as events move on, sometimes that affects what I’ve written. I have to go back and “finish” a thread–either by weaving some more of it or snipping it.

Some feedback I got on that draft was that the ends were tied too neatly, so much so the ending went on and on and on and…

You get the picture.

Hence, my attendance at Rebecca Makkai’s excellent workshop, “Ending it All.” Makkai is a novelist (The Borrower), short story writer, and non-fiction writer, and her workshop was eye-opening. I never knew there were so many different types of endings! Over the next few days, I’m going to recap this workshop and the useful points Makkai made.

Here are her “rules” (and she acknowledges rules are made to be broken) about an ending:

  • It has to “feel” like an ending, and the best judge of what that feels like is the writer.
  • It has to honor any promises you made to the reader, i.e., if it’s a murder mystery you must reveal the killer.
  • It needs to add to the story, i.e., “and then this happened.”
  • It needs to be poetic, even musical.
  • It needs to be “surprising, but inevitable.”
  • It needs, in some small, subtle way, to refer to the beginning.
  • And, sometimes, it doesn’t have to happen at all.

Makkai says when an ending doesn’t work, “It’s quite likely because it’s not long enough.” We’re tempted, she says, to get to the zinger of our last line when we should be imbuing the penultimate paragraphs with meaning. She uses a musical term for this–ritardando, or the gradual slowing which marks the end of a musical composition.

Despite the fact Makkai says we can’t really categorize or classify endings, she did provide “descriptors” of the kinds of endings writers have used. For each descriptor, she provided examples, some from contemporary literature, some from the classics, and even some from movies and television programs.

In discussing types of endings I may refer to the actual endings of the examples Makkai provided, so Spoiler Alert; however, I’m only talking about the ending as a stand-alone, pretty meaningless unless you’ve read the entire piece. And I was heartened that I’d read or seen most of her examples; that gave the workshop even more meaning.

Here are the descriptors of endings I’m discussing today:

1. Endings that deal with resolution, or lack thereof

The first sub-descriptor for this type of ending is Stasis, which is the intentional lack of resolution. Anton Chekov was a master of this, and the example Makkai provided was his short story “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” which is the story of two people, married to others, who meet at a Black Sea resort and fall in love (a common theme of Russian writers even into the 20th century). The ending shows both of them wondering what to do about their situations and, boom, that’s it. Makkai mentioned this is very difficult to pull off and that most literary mavens consider it a rather old-fashioned device. What seems to work better for contemporary fiction is the “stasis of a character,” i.e., a character who doesn’t change even though the world around him or her has, often in significant ways.

The next sub-descriptor for this type of ending is the Intrinsic Ending, which involves a final, decisive act or event. This is so dramatic and so final that the story has to be over, it can’t continue. Examples were Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and John Updike’s story “A&P.” If this is the type of ending you chose, Makkai says, you have to make certain you don’t just show the final, concluding event but also its impact.

Next is the Game Changer, an ending which destabilizes everything else in the story, or, as Makkai says, “pulls the rug out from under you.” Examples were the movie The Sixth Sense (where the protagonist finds out he’s been dead all along), Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (where we find out the previous 300 pages was just the protagonist introducing himself to his therapist, who is now ready to begin), and Ian McEwan’s Atonement (one I haven’t read). Other examples of the Game Changer ending are Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” and Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People.” Makkai’s only admonition about using this type of ending? “Do not ever, ever, under any circumstances, have a character wake up and realize it was all a dream, or anything equally insulting to the reader.”

The final descriptor for this type of ending (resolved or unresolved) is The Breakup, where the author abruptly pulls us away from characters we’ve come to like. Examples were Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, and John Updike’s Couples. Makkai adds you can’t do this just to be perverse to the reader, but only because it’s the right way to end the story. In each example she provided, she indicated the story could end no other way than how it did.

Tomorrow: Endings that Address Meaning and Endings that Emphasize Musicality and Sound.

My Name is Phyllis, and I’m a Writer Workshopaholic

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They say the first step is acknowledging you have a problem. In eight months this year, I’ve been to nine writer conferences and/or workshops. There, I’ve said it. I may be addicted to writerly things. Yes, I may be addicted to meeting other writers and learning from them or, more importantly, becoming friends with them. Yes, I may be addicted to picking up information or techniques to improve my writing. Yes, I may be addicted to making my craft, well, more artful. Yes, folks, I’ve got it bad, and I gotta have my fix.

What am I going to do about it?

Not a bloody thing. I think this is one addiction we can overlook. 😉

On Friday I got an email from WriterHouse in Charlottesville, VA. (I’ve written about this writer’s space before–a great place to write and a great provider of one or two-day or even longer workshops.) They had openings for a one-day workshop on Saturday–“Ready, Aim: Firearms in Fiction.”

Okay, a little diversion here. If you abhor guns and think they’re the physical manifestation of evil, don’t read any further, and have a nice day.

I read the description, and, even though I have a good familiarity with firearms and gun safety, I thought, “Why not?” As one of the workshop attendees, who is a gun safety instructor said, “You always learn something new.”

This turned out to be the kind of workshop I really like to attend–one where you bring work to be critiqued and where you get writing exercises. Thanks to the workshop instructor, Betty Joyce Nash, and the other attendees, it was a great day learning about the importance of fitting a weapon to a character and how to research to make certain you get the details right. Three of us were very knowledgeable about gun safety and the mechanics of guns. The third was a novice, who left the workshop ready to go to a gun range and get some instruction in safety.

Even the three writing exercises were informative. First, we selected a picture of a person from a collection supplied by Ms. Nash, then we had to write a bio or expository scene about the person in the picture and include a gun. After reading aloud and critiquing each other’s work, we went over some examples from literature where authors included guns in their work, how successful they were, and whether the gun was necessary or superfluous to the story.

The second writing exercise involved keeping in mind the bio/expository scene we’d written before while we wrote about the first time we each became aware of guns. Again, we read what we’d written aloud and critiqued each other’s work. Another workshopper and I decided to directly link the two exercises, and it became obvious we both had stories in the works.

After lunch, we each read a portion from the stories we’d brought with us–the story had to involve a gun, easy for me, since I mostly write about spies–and critiqued them. I had the efficacy of these workshops proved to me when I finished reading my excerpt and another participant said, “I want to read the rest of that!”

Finally, we had the third, free-writing exercise–two people arguing about money with a gun in the room. (And I forgot to mention, the instructor also participated in these exercises, and we got to hear and critique her work as well. I liked the fact she didn’t set herself apart.) Then, we had a free-ranging Q&A about guns and about writing and publishing. I’m so glad my schedule is flexible enough to able to do last minute writing things like this.

Again, if you’re close to Charlottesville, check out WriterHouse. It’s very inexpensive to join and has different kinds of memberships so you can get exactly what you need from them. I know I certainly do.

Weekend Updates

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I’m walking on air! The short story, “Marakata,” I entered in WriterHouse’s 5th Anniversary Contest (500 words, theme: emerald) won third place. It was a blind judging, where an actor read aloud all the entries. During the break, while the WriterHouse staff counted the votes, I overheard several people talking about it: “Beautiful!” “Read like a parable.” “Very engaging.” “Marakata, I loved that one.” That will boost an author’s ego. Still, there were twelve other really great stories, so when “Marakata” was announced as the third place winner, I was delighted. My prize? A writing craft book entitled Steering the Craft, by none other than one of my all-time favorite sci-fi authors, Ursula K. LeGuin. A win-win.

Through Sunday, and in honor of National Short Story Month, you can purchase for your Kindle all three of my short story collections–Blood Vengeance, Fences and Other Stories, and Spy Flash–for free. You read correctly–free. Just go to my Amazon Author Page, and you’ll find them all there. You know your mother needs some new short story collections for Mother’s Day, right? 😉

Hopeless Friday Fictioneers Romantic

/ unspywriter / 2 Comments

A good writing week. Well, any time I’m writing, it’s good. There’s one exception, though. I wanted to enter a contest whose deadline is May 17. The story can be up to 8,000 words, which, after all my flash fiction writing, seems like an enormous amount. I’m trying to adapt a chapter from one of my novels, but it’s not quite working out; however, I’ll keep at it until the deadline and make a decision then.

Tonight is the fifth anniversary of Charlottesville, VA’s WriterHouse, where you can find a quiet place to write and some excellent writing and publishing workshops. At tonight’s party, there will be a contest: You had to submit a 500-word story based on the theme “emerald.” (Emerald is the fifth anniversary gem stone and Pantone’s color of the year for 2013.) So, I’ll be there tonight for the live judging of my story, one of thirteen. An actor will read each story to the assembled masses, and then we vote. Fingers crossed they’ll like my little fantasy tale, “Marakata.”

Friday Fictioneers LogoA great photo today by Friday Fictioneer Ted Strutz brought back memories of various pick-up lines tried on me in bars. I remember one alleged Navy pilot who tried the “there-I-was-at-10,000-feet-with-MiGs-on-my-tail” approach, who then slid away after I questioned his aviation knowledge–he didn’t know I was a pilot. It was obvious he wasn’t after just a few sentences. Ah, good times.

For some reason Ted’s photo brought out the hopeless romantic in me and resulted in “If at First You Don’t Succeed…” Light and airy and very different from what I usually do, which is dark and dense, so I’ll need to go write some mayhem to restore the balance in the universe.

As usual, if you can’t see the link on the title above, scroll to the top of the page and click on the Friday Fictioneers tab. Then, you can select the story from the drop-down list.