Keeping my characters talking

It's a whirlwind writing semester for me, as I bounce back and forth between writing fiction and poetry and trying to simultaneously market two novels and a collection of stories. Well, maybe "market" is a loaded word when it comes to the story collection, Island Fog. I've been editing it again recently and have submitted it to a couple of contests. I like the historical fictions I've written since last summer and added to the first half of the book. It's on account of these fictions that I've remade the book and am excited again about finding a readership for it. (I wrote about this in a previous post, I know.) But, like all historical fictions, this group of stories does raise various questions about what I can and am "allowed" to do. I was confronting some of these questions the other day when I looked over one story called "King Philip's War," set in 1823. The two key characters in the story are boys, one twelve years old and the other ten. The older boy is caucasian of English descent; the younger is a mixed-race child, half Wampanoag and half Irish. They live on a relatively deserted part of Nantucket island, and thus the two are more friends by necessity than choice.

It's a somewhat dialogue heavy story, at least compared to the other historical fictions in the collection. And this raises the complicated question of how a writer can effectively mimic the speech habits of an earlier era. I think this is one of the hardest aspects of composing historical fiction, one in which a writer, if he allows himself or herself to, can feel very straightjacketed. The "rules" for writing exposition--at least the practices I follow for myself--seem fairly straightforward: try to name things as they would have been named at the time; avoid contemporary slang or any expression that sounds too much of our own time; avoid blatantly anachronistic technical or medical knowledge; be true to attitudes that would have prevalent in the era, while recognizing that just as in our own time different people will different opinions. Beyond that, when writing exposition I simply try to compose good sentences. For a twenty-first century author to try to directly imitate the written English of the 1700s, let's say, or 1452, is, in my opinion, to risk something that comes across as forced and phony--and thus not alive. (What written English to use to suggest the written version of a non-English language from long ago is a whole other question.)

When writing dialogue, the matter gets more compicated, but the issues are similar. The characters ought to sound like they could exist in the given time period, but they can't sound like stick figures either. And the latter, to be frank, is the bigger issue, in my opinion. Some authors, like Geraldine Brooks in Caleb's Crossing, try to make the speech of her characters sound like what she imagines 17th century New Englanders might actually have sounded like. This might seem like a self-evident strategy to employ in writing historical fiction, but it's never a straightforward matter, because if one is writing about an era prior to the invention of sound recording, one's decisions about what spoken language sounded like is inevitably based on written language. And then, of course, one must ask, Who's written language? It gets fairly dicey fairly fast. Imagine if someone in the future made decisions about how we all talked in 2012 based solely on our written language, or only on the written language of a minority of the population. Now, this isn't to say that a historian or linguist or creative writer can't locate written documents that might reasonably suggest how some people talked in a given era--I know there are documents out there that linguists rely on--but, even then, if you base your dialogue strictly on what can be found in such sources, you are acting more as the copyist than the writer. In my opinion. Will your characters be able to say what they need to say, and more importantly, will their speech sound alive to your readers' ears--as alive as speech sounded to real speakers back in the real time--or will it sound stereotyped? I bet that if one conducted a study of historical fictions from various decades or centuries one would find that the "historical" speech of the fictional characters comes relatively close to the sound of speech in the era when the book was written. There's a reason for that. We don't want our characters to sound like--or be--stereotypes. Ever. Stereotyping means a character's--and a book's--death.

So what I decided, finally, to do with my two Nantucket boys is to allow them to sound incompletely of the 19th century. I've denuded their speech of any modern terms or slang, of course, and I took away some of the many contractions I originally inserted. But I also left several contractions. Because to my ears and my readers' ears, characters that speak without contractions will sound stultified, overtly mannered--and neither of these boys are mannered people. Even if their speech is not very accurate to the time; it's accurate to their character. And that's what I've decided is more important.

AWP Day 3 (Haiku in the hall)

Well, the conference is over. All that's left now is thousands of leftover flyers advertising literary journals and last night's off site literary/drinking events. And the occasional wine bottle stranded in a sitting area in front of an elevator. Most conference goers, if they haven't left yet, will be on their way this morning: driving or catching a plane.

Yesterday was a chilly, blowy, and even snowy day in Chicago. I got out of the basement for one session but spent many hours again in the bookfair. UCA's table did a brisk business, especially after we slashed the price of Toad Suck Review in half. Ken Waldman, Alaskan fiddler-poet and tireless self-promoter, came around with his fiddle and his backpack full of free Waldman CDs and poetry books. The day before I'd gotten his "Sonnets from the 43rd Presidency" (that's George W., folks) so yesterday I wanted to hear him fiddle. He claimed to be looking for a good place to set up, but he never really did. Davis Schneiderman was in the hall, dressed in his body covering white lyrca costume to advertise his blank book Blank, but I never saw him in costume only street dress. He kindly showed me a picture someone had taken of him in costume. In the afternoon, I walked a cold five blocks to the Palmer House to hear a session on long poems. While it was good, I guess, to grab some fresh air, the session was disappointing. The panelists were fine poets all, and a few of their favorite long poems were discussed, but there was not as much discussion of their own processes, and reasons for, creating long poems as I would have liked. And there was no talk of teaching the long poem in a writing workshop. (Maybe that would be asking too much.) Late day and late conference sessions do tend to disappoint as a rule. I think because all involved, both audience and panelists, are brain dead. So I can't really hold it against these folks. On the whole, from the program I saw and the reports I heard, this conference's sessions were better than average.

A few random notes from Day 3:

1) "Magazine on a postcard" the sign announced, and that's exactly what Hoot magazine is. Each edition is a single poem or short short printed on a postcard with background art or photography. Gorgeous stuff, actually. 2) An editor from a journal for sports poetry came around handing out spongy faux-baseballs with the URL of the magazine printed on it. Cute idea, but because of the odd shape I couldn't easily slip the ball in with the rest of my stuff and I ended up leaving it behind. Now I can't remember the journal's name. 3) In the last day many journals start looking for ways to dump their excess products. Some journals use lagniappes. Toad Suck Review gave away a free collector's item issue of Exquisite Corpse Annual for each purchase of TSR. Another journal found a more direct pitch. A small (airplane size) bottle of wine with each purchase! The question is: Did they just happen to have the wine around or did they actually buy it to use as a promo? 4) It wasn't even that far into the day when someone came on the overhead speakers and announced that no alcohol should be consumed in the bookfair. Now I wonder why that announcement came on yesterday but not Thursday or Friday? Because on Saturday, per tradition, AWP lets the general pubic into the bookfair? Because the tempation to celebrate is stronger on the last day? I can tell you that as I left the hall yesterday, the good and obviously tired folks from 32 poems magazine had quite a large bottle of red open in front of them. Cheers, guys. 5) Former UCA student and recent Roosevelt University MFA grad Heather Cox recommended Featherproof Books to me, specifically the short story collection The Universe in Miniature in Miniature by Patrick Sommerville. It is, she said, her favorite story collection ever. I trust Heather, so I bought it, fortunately at a discount.

My New Year's resolution this year (I almost never make them) was to write creatively every day, even if that only means 5 minutes of hurriedly scrawled poetry. Well, at this conference, hurriedly scrawled poetry is what I had to rely on. But I made it a project, which made it fun. In occasional pauses at the bookfair table I started scratching out short observational poems. Without my even trying to, these poems wanted to become, and thus did become haiku. (No, I did not bother--at least not yet--with counting syllables. I think that's asking a bit much.) So among all the other stuff I'm carting home, one item will be a couple pages of bookfair haiku. If nothing else, they kept my resolution intact!

AWP Day 2 (Bookfair busyness)

Sitting at the UCA table in the AWP bookfair you can certainly feel the record size of the conference. The browsers came in waves yesterday, especially after 11:00 or so. Today the room(s) should be even more jammed, given that conference allows the general public to access the bookfair on the last day. Many people who came by our table were taken by the name of our journal, Toad Suck Review, and about hundred times over we had to explain that Toad Suck is not just a quirky title but a real place name in Central Arkansas, not far from where the journal is produced. And of course we recounted the story behind the place name. Centuries ago, ferry boat captains used to dock at that spot on the Arkansas river, head into the local bars, and then drink so much that "swelled up like toads," or in other words, they became "toad suck drunk." The story, apparently a true one, always gets a laugh and a smile, if not a sale. But sales aren't the only point of being here; national exposure is actually more important, especially now that the journal is affiliated with a brand new MFA program, a program that has not even assembled its first class of students. We're actually hoping that being here at AWP leads to more applicants for that first class.

While I did not attend any sessions yesterday, I did browse the other tables at the bookfair, just as I did on Thursday, and uncovered some sweet finds. One small press called Scout Books publishes pocket sized, hand illustrated versions of classic short stories like "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "To Build a Fire." I was excited to find them, since a former student of mine, Gus Carlson, is a superb illustrator and enjoys drawing pictures to accompany the stories he writes. He seems an ideal candidate to illustrate one of their later books. I told them this, and they seemed interested. (Now I have to tell Gus.) Some interesting finds also came to our table. One fellow was passing around postcards for a web site called Instafiction, which posts one link each day to a short story posted on line. It can be any kind of story anywhere on the net. Sounds like a fun idea, and possibly a way of giving my fiction writing students an eccentric, ever changing textbook. (I'm sure they'd appreciate the free price tag.) Later, a young, kind-looking middle eastern fellow came around asking if I knew of any international students who were good writers. Yes, in fact, I do, I said. Apparently, Notre Dame University is assembling a collection of stories written in English by foreign students, and after publishing this collection--I'm not even sure what that means exactly--they will host a reading on their campus. I mentioned that the student I had in mind was Russian. He seemed a little befuddled by this. He said that if he selected my Russian student's story he also have to find a Russian poet and songwriter and theatrical performer(s). It wasn't clear to me why one good short story wasn't enough for his venture, but the guy walked off before I could get a full explanation. Our neighbors in the bookfair room are from a New York journal called First Inkling. They are noteworthy on several counts. First, the journal only publishes student writing, be that graduate or undergraduate. Second, they actually pay money to their contributors. Third, they've got a great attitude. Students do a considerable amount of work for the journal. I mean real, experientially valuable work. They edit the content; they interview writers for profiles that the journal publishes; they write grants; they organize literary events. That's a magazine that respects the intelligence of its students--freshmen and sophomores in college, no less--and in return gets great work from them. If you're a student, sent First Inkling some fiction, nonfiction, or poetry to look at. If you're a teacher, spread the word.

After the bookfair ended, the second big business of the day started: a reception honoring our new MFA program and the release of Toad Suck Review #2. The event got off to a rough start when we arrived a half-hour ahead of time to find that the hotel staff had set up only three card tables, a modest serving of chips and dip, and a water cooler. We'd been telling everyone about this reception--and we'd been promising "food and drink." Apparently, the Hilton Chicago staff was merely following instructions given on the work order. So we flew into action, begging them for several more tables and chairs and for a cash bar. At first it appeared that no bartender would be available, but a manager appeared moments later to say that, yes, they did indeed have someone. Whew. A bar was wheeled a bit later, just in time for the start of the event. It all went off well, although my wife and I felt obliged to buy one round of drinks for the (21 or older) students to whom we'd promised food and drink. (Many thanks, by the way, to the Hilton Chicago staff for being so helpful and so patient with us. They were truly superb and truly professional.) A representative from AWP came around to the recepton, kindly welcoming our program to the organization; several friends of TSR wandered in, and finally, around 7:30 we began a short reading featuring five contributors to the journal. They all read exceptionally well and showed off the quality of issue #2. Afterwards, we invited some current and former students up to our suite where we caught up and shared UCA stories. It was a late, but wonderful evening.

Now it's off to day #3. One session looks promising, and will get me out of the bookfair for an hour or so: a session on the long poem. Since this semester I'm teaching a course on this form, I figure I better go and hear what is said about it.

AWP Day 1 (10,000 stories)

Here I am at the biggest AWP ever, a scary thought given what a monster the conference always is. This year we've completely taken over not one but two landmark hotels in downtown Chicago, to say nothing of all the conference goers who are staying in other hotels throughout the city or with friends--and that's a considerable number, at least based on one idiosyncratic sample: the people I've talked to. You know AWP is in town when poetry is being broadcast in the elevators, when wine is flowing like tap water, when not businessmen but creative writing teachers occupy the fancy end-of-hallway suites at the Hilton Chicago (yes, we actually got one, by some strange turns of events), when almost everyone you pass in the street looks between 25 and 35 years old and is carrying the signature white canvas bag with red straps as well as a look of quiet, elevated intensity. True story. I was walking down the sidewalk to a breakfast place yesterday morning and happened to pass two women. One woman clearly had the other pinned, talking in a loud, aggressive voice only inches from her face, her hands cutting arcs through the air for emphasis. I came closer, close enough to hear. What was the first woman yelling about? City corruption? The price of gas? The job situation? Hardly. She was describing an exercise she uses in her poetry writing class! How many times do you hear that walking down a city street at 8:00 in the morning?

Welcome to my updates from AWP 2012. It's a different conference for me this year. Normally, my university extends some (rather limited) travel funds with the idea that I go to sessions that will inform my teaching. And I do. Some years my head is so full of session talk there's barely room for a stray thought. This year, however, I received funds to present in a session and to man UCA's bookfair table. We're promoting both our new MFA program, the Arkansas Writers MFA Workshop, and Toad Suck Review, our national literary magazine. This is just to say that I won't be wandering the session hallways as much this year and any report I offer from AWP can't pretend to be comprehensive, just one conference goer's conference story. One of 10,000 such stories being written this weekend.

Yesterday I went to two sessions. My own session, about the value of undergraduate creative writing exchanges, was put in an unncessarily large room, but the crowd was respectable and very interested in the subject. A few of them came up to us afterward and said how thoroughly they enjoyed the session, which was very gratifying. I know how thoroughly unenjoyable some AWP sessions can be, and so as we were talking I kept wondering how we and what we were saying was being received. The other session I attended was about novel writing workshops in MFA programs: how many are actually taught, how they are taught, how they might be better taught. It was a very crowded session with a passionately interested audience. Clearly the subject mattered greatly to them: graduate students who would love to write novels for their MFA theses but currently get very little support for doing so from their workshop classes. Run by Cathy Day, that invaluable agitator for allowing longer forms in workshop classes, it was a fasicnating session, both pragmatic and inspiring. It's fascinating to see the extent to which the idea of a novel writing class has caught on recently. I remember attending a session on the novel writing workshop at the 2005 AWP in Vancouver. The session was run by a British writing program, the one at Bath Spa University, and it seemed like such a novelty. I know most of the American audience members for the session were completely befuddled by the idea. Now, seven years later, novel writing workshops are popping up everywhere, and taught in drastically different ways, and not always in beneficial ways. (I heard some really bizarre anecdotes in the session yesterday.) It's a fertile, exciting time for the Novel Writing Workshop. There's no one fixed pedagogy and there's an awful lot of experimenting going on, mostly by committed, inventive teachers who simply want to give their students a chance to work on novel inside the program curriculum not outside it, as if almost always the case.

The rest of the day I hung out in the bookfair. I saw many of the magazines and programs profiled that I always see profiled at AWP, along with some quirky new ones. I bought the new book of poems by Megan Kaminski, a writer who teaches at the University of Kansas and who introduced UCA to the idea of the undergraduate creative writing exchange. Her book is called Desiring Map (Coconut Books). I also happened upon an enthusiastic indie press called Write Bloody. Among the books they were selling was a volume of zombie poetry. I had to

laugh--and I had to buy it. I know so many people--students, former students, colleagues--who truly get a kick out of all things zombie. Not sure what that says about our times. The book, by the way, features some very serious poems. It was a fun time chatting with folks who came by our table and visiting with folks at other tables. We sold some TSRs and talked up our new MFA. I also ran into several old friends and colleagues, which always happens at AWP, but I will have to talk about that phenomenon in another post, as this one has already gone on too long.

Off to AWP

I'm not there yet, but I soon will be on my way. Tonight--as in late tonight--I will hop on an Amtrak train at the station in Little Rock, Arkansas and take that train to Chicago, the site of this year's AWP conference. AWP is always a wonder--and a madhouse. I've blogged about this before. The largest creative writing conference in the world, it is also the most maddening and perhaps the most depressing. My high expectations for certain sessions always seem to end in disappointment, and with so many many many writers and aspiring writers around, the endless market talk--who's trying to sell what to whom--can become disheartening. In certain quarters of the conference, there's a distinct smell of desperation. But AWP always brims with energy too, and a real, palpable optimism. And a real, palpable love for the written word. AWP is also an unequaled place to revisit old connections and forge new ones. It 's a place to see everyone you've ever known in your creative writing life and a few you've always hoped to know. (And maybe a few you wish you didn't know.) So it's not really a conference one can miss.

This year, I have extra incentives to attend AWP. For one, I am part of a panel on creative writing exchanges; that is, the growing phenomenon of undergraduates at different universities traveling to each others' campuses to give readings, attend readings, and--that's right--forge connections. It's a great idea. My students had a wonderful time exchanging with the University of Kansas last year, and this year we are in the middle of a so-far-successful exchange with Auburn University. (They just came to Arkansas; we go there in April.) So I'm excited to talk about, and promote, the idea of these exchanges. It's also my very first AWP panel presentation! Second, and more importantly, I'm there to represent Toad Suck Review at the giant AWP bookfair. As many people will tell you, the bookfair is probably the most useful aspect of any AWP conference. Just by walking around, a writer can learn about hundreds of literary magazines, small presses, and graduate programs. I've spent many a valuable minute browsing the bookfair, talking with editors and readers from various journals and presses. Now I get to take a turn on the other side of the table, talking up Toad Suck Review. I serve as Associate Editor of the magazine, and I can honestly say it's a terrific literary endeavor. Not only is it beautiful, but it's full of lots of provocative writing, from both well knowns and unknowns. I'm flat out excited to tell people about this Issue #2 that I, along with editor-in-chief Mark Spitzer, worked so hard on. Hopefully, we'll sell a few copies too.

I hope to put up a few posts about the conference while I'm there, as I have in the past. So keep tuned--and wish me luck!

The Power of Social Media

You might think it's odd for someone who makes a habit of writing blog posts to wonder at the power of social media. Now, blogging is not quite social media; a blog is about a good deal more than making and maintaining social connections. As blogger Ben Davis said yesterday when he visited my campus for a literary festival featuring Arkansas writers, a blog isn't about keeping a diary of what you did in your day but "sharing your intellectual capital with the world." In fact, that is exactly how I view my own blog. That said, it's undeniable that one benefit of blogging is that you do make social connections, even if those connections are purely internet ones. You can be read, potentially, by anyone anywhere in the world. And you, conversely, are able to read the blogs of anyone else anywhere in the world. It's impossible for that give and take to not render real, direct, personal, and important connections. So it's no surprise that most everyone who blogs also uses Facebook and Twitter, along with a host of other media platforms.

True confession. I've never tweeted in my life. But I'm sure I should and will learn to do so. Because a recent development with my Van Gogh novel has proven to me, if ever I doubted it before, the power of social media. As you know if you read this blog, I recently concluded a mysterious and befuddling relationship with a New York agent who had worked closely with me on preparing my manuscript for publishers. My friend and UCA colleague Robin Becker (the author of the zombie novel Brains) tweeted about my post, sharing a link to it. What do you know, within hours an agent who follows Robin's tweets read my post and contacted me, asking me to send her a query. Of course I did, and at present the manuscript is in her kind, capable hands. I can never scorn Twitter again, which was precisely Robin's reaction when I told her that the agent had contacted me. You are right, Robin. Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

So thanks to Robin. And thanks to Twitter. And let's (meaning me) never doubt social media again.

Little lagniappe: Given how nice one writer was to me, I feel I should pass on the good will and suggest that you check out the new blog of my colleague Garry Craig Powell. Garry Craig will soon be publishing a fascinating collection of short stories, called Stoning the Devil with Skylight Press, a British outfit. The book details the lives of both natives and expatriates living in the United Arab Emirates in the early 00s. On Garry Craig's blog, stoningthedevil.wordpress.com, he provides background about the settings for the stories, including pictures he took during his years living in the middle east. Cool stuff. Check it out.

Going long in verse

In the fall of 2010 I taught a course on novel writing to 15 undergraduates at the University of Central Arkansas. Or rather I was the faciliator of the semester space that allowed them all to finish first drafts of novels in the span of just a few months. It was a powerful, mind-opening experience, one that taught me a lot about the limitations of the conventional workshop and the need for our creative writing "system" to be open to allowing students to pursue longer forms. As I quickly found out, other teachers had been thinking the same thing and trying their own experiments in their own undergraduate classes. I heard from some of them in response to my blog entry. And I was honored to be interviewed on writer/teacher Cathy Day's own blog, The Big Thing.

The experience got me thinking about other ways in which we college teachers of creative writing could and should encourage our students in their ambitions to "go long." One of these ways, it occurred to me, was to run a course on the long poem, a form that is at least as discriminated against and underutilized in the workshop as is the novel. If you've ever taken a poetry writing workshop, ask yourself: Did anyone bring in anything longer than 2 pages? 1 page even? I'm betting the answer is no. Given my master's degree is in poetry writing (strange but true, I know), and given how much I enjoy working with students on poetry--despite my own current and longtime emphasis on writing fiction--I decided to propose a Topics in Creative Writing course that focused on the production of long poems.

Did that mean I would make the kids write epics? No, of course not. I decided, arbitrarily, that I would define "long poem" as anything 8 pages or more. And I decided to require students to submit four poems of 8-15 pages length. Additionally, if they wanted to make each assignement an installment on what would eventually be a 30-60 page poem, that was fine. So they kinda sorta could write an epic if they wanted to. Finding a textbook was tricky, but I did locate an actual long poem anthology (The New Long Poem Anthology from Talon), a book that features Canadian poets exclusively, many of them--let me say--doing very fine work. It's a superb text. Sniffing around the bookfair at AWP last year, I was shown a book called Collected Longer Poems by Hayden Carruth. I liked the idea of reading in depth one poet's lifelong engagement with the form combined with the survey quality that the anthology provides, so when book orders were due I ordered the Carruth book too.

Now the class is up and running, and the students are bravely taking up the challenge. I heard some rather big gulps when I told them they were going to have to write 8 page poems--more gulps than when I told my novel class they would finish novels in one semester--but we had our first "workshop" session the other night and everyone, every single student, posted his poems to the class web site days in advance, as required. And the peer group discussions were gratifyingly animated. (Btw, I put myself in a peer group and submitted an 8-pager of my own.) I've assigned them, I think, rather too much reading--given the necessarily slower pace of reading poetry--but so far they've kept up with that too. This class is still a work-in-progress, but I think it's going to turn out great. While some students are there simply because they feel comfortable with me as a teacher, others are there because they really are looking forward to the opportunity for engagement in the longer form, something that's never been encouraged or allowed them. Similar to my novel class, half our class time each week will given over to simple (or not so simple) composing, and I'm forgoing the usual workshopping routine for small peer group discussions. (I'll explain more about that on a later post.) It's brand new territory for me as a teacher, just as it is for them as students, but so far we're having a good time keeping our heads above water.

I will surely let you know how it goes.

Speaking of The Workshop: Anyone interested in an animated discussion on the pros and cons of traditional workshopping as well as MFA programs should check out this recent item in the Huffington Post.