AWP 2013: Day Three

Fantastic finish to the conference.  Can't say I attended the big, last night, blow-out dance party; can't say I met a Nobel Prize winner in the elevator; can't say a panel discussion changed my life--but it was a good day.  I actually attended three panels yesterday, each quite different from the other.  In the morning, the staff at the NEA's literature division explained the procedures for applying for a literature grant if you are an arts organization--the day before they'd presented on how to attain an individual fellowship--and also described common mistakes made by past organizations who failed to procure a grant.  This session would have been mightily helpful if I'd been able to attend it prior to applying for a NEA for Toad Suck Review last year.   Even with the help of the Sponsored Programs division at my university, there were some fundamental matters that we didn't understand and that could have changed the outcome.  Oh, well.  We'll be better prepared for next year, which is when we'll try again.

In the afternoon I attended a session featuring Richard Russo and Jennifer Haigh on setting in fiction.  Fortunately, AWP scheduled this session for a very large room because not surprisingly, given the participants, it was a very popular talk.  I didn't go figuring to hear anything new.  I know how Rick Russo feels about location in fiction, but I so much love hearing him speak about what he does that I couldn't stay away.  He's probably our best novelist--yes, I'm serious about that--and he is unfailingly honest, energetic, and self-deprecating in his commentary.  As I've told many folk, he came to UCA as a visiting writer once, and I still remember it as one of our all-time best visits.  He didn't fail to entertain yesterday either.

The last session I attended was my own, about teaching novel writing workshops.  I was honored to find that one of the other panel members was Mako Yoshikawa, author of One Hundred and One Ways.  She delivered an eloquent paper that described her own coming of age as a novelist and how she helps teach those lessons to her graduate students at Emerson College.  Given how late in the conference it was, and a couple of the other sessions we were up against, I was happy our panel attracted the audience it did.  Everyone listened attentively, no one left early, and several insightful questions came to us when we were through speaking.  Not surprisingly, the few in the audience who teach novel writing to undergraduates were quite curious about how I structure my class and asked me to email them my syllabus.  Of course, I'm happy to.  One misperception out there that I hadn't realized until I was through speaking and answering questions was that anyone undergraduate can wander into my class.  Thus, the panelists and the audience didn't understand how I could trust the students to work so well together in peer groups and on their own novels.  I quickly explained: We have a very ambitious undergraduate creative writing degree; none of our students take Novel Writing until they have already taken Introduction to Creative Writing, Forms of Fiction, and Fiction Workshop.  By the time they get to Novel Writing, I know them pretty well.  And when I put them into peer groups, I know who is likely to work well together and who isn't.  (I also have them write up an explanation of their novel plan in the first week of the semester, and this helps guide my choices as well.  Often times I will put students in the same peer group who are working on the same kinds of novels.)

A colleague of mine, Robin Becker, who was kind enough to attend the session, paid it the highest compliment possible afterwards: "It wasn't boring like most AWP panels are."  Before I leave this topic I should say that Grub Street in Boston, a non-profit that offers continuing education for writers, runs a really intriguing, year long novel writing program in which participants enter with a first draft already completed.  The draft is read by two Grub Street instructors and feedback is given.  The participants then workshop parts of the novel for the year and revise it entirely.  At the end of the year, the entirety of the (now revised) novel is again read by the two instructors and more feedback is provided.  Lisa Borders, the panel moderator and one of the Grub Street instructors, said that she and the other instructor were quite relieved to discover, in the pilot year of the program, that indeed all of the participants' novels had gotten much better by the end of the year.

The Book Fair rooms, meanwhile, were as busy as ever as publishers all slashed their prices in hope of getting rid of stock and the public was invited in free of charge.  At the Toad Suck Review table we certainly moved our merch, and, even better, we visited with a lot of interesting writers who wandered by.  Unfortunately, I missed Erika Dreifus, a great person who maintains the great blog The Practicing Writer.  Sorry, Erika!  Will you be in Seattle next year?

The end of a  perfectly pleasant day--made especially so by the sunny weather--was capped off by dinner at Lucca with my sister, her husband, and their younger son Peter.  Peter, a high school junior, is hardly so young anymore.  He's taller than I am and built like a mountain.  It was great to see him again and to compare notes on his college search with my own son's college search.  Even better, for the first time in my life, I ate wild boar!  (In the sauce with the gnocchi.)  Fantastic.

AWP 2013, Day Two

Weather continues to be the story here in Boston.  Well, weather and illness.  Yesterday, the snow, which was supposed to taper off and be gone by mid-morning, raged throughout most of the day, and the streets in the city were all but impassable.  It was so bad that Bostonians were furious that the Boston Public Schools had remained open.  If snow is enough that Bostonians want to stay home, you know it has to be bad.  (Apparently, the Boston Public Schools always makes their open/closed decisions the night before.  Given how conditions--no matter what the city--often change, either for the better or for the worse, this seems like a pretty dumb policy.)  In any case, the weather finally affected our grad students, who were snowed in two hours away.  I can only hope they manage to get in today for the last round of this year's AWP.  Sickness is taking a toll as well.  We were supposed to meet our friends from graduate school for dinner last night but they had to remain holed up in their hotel room.  My wife was supposed to meet a colleague for breakfast today but the woman canceled: sick; so sick she felt obliged to leave the house of a friend, where she'd been staying, and take a hotel room.  As I write this, Boston is peaceful, and the sky is wonderfully crisp and clear.  It's supposed to remain that way.

Despite the sordid winter weather yesterday, the conference picked up.  The Book Fair halls were jammed, and many conference sessions proved hard to get into, even sessions book for large-sized rooms.  Writers are congregating!  I visited with many small presses in the Book Fair yesterday, a number of which I'd never heard of before, and I gathered many useful impressions, bits of information, and contact numbers.  At the Toad Suck Review table, a few of our recent contributors came by, which is always satisfying.  Conversations with contributors always reminds you how vitally important a literary magazine is, no matter how broad or narrow its readership, no matter how slick or ugly its design.  (For the record, we have a very good design.)  What matters is getting good writing out into the world, and in the case of TSR it often is good writing that goes unappreciated at other periodicals with more limited tastes than we have.  We truly are in service of literature.  Of course, we had to explain the origin of our title to nearly every passerby.  In short, it's a name of a place not far from where our university resides.  For issue 3, we actually reprinted an article by a local reporter on the origin of the Toad Suck name.  If you want a truly exhaustive explanation, check out our issue!

Went to a few panels yesterday.  As is typical of AWP, the first one of the day was the best.  This was a session on historical fiction and included the eloquent Peter Ho Davies.  For a while the session seemed more like chit chat, and I was afraid I would have to suffer through another example of a uniquely AWP phenomenon: a session in which the topics addressed have little or nothing to do with the topics outlined in the session abstract.  False advertising.  But this session righted itself nicely and became rather interesting.  I think I will withhold more details for now and discuss those details in a later, separate post.  In the afternoon, I tried to attend a session on the "Post-Memoir Memoir," that is, memoir in which the first person point of view is deemphasized or broken.  Seemed like an interesting subject and of possible application to my creative nonfiction courses.  I arrived late but heard enough to want to leave.  The essays that the panelists read from and then commented on struck me as neither memoir nor devoid of the first person point of view.  The second speaker's essay was riddled with first person and was not terribly interesting to boot.  Late in the day, I attended a session on using social media in the creative writing classroom.  As a classic "late adapter" I'm always concerned with finding out what uses of technology everyone else has figured out but I've been dragging on.  The first two speakers had a few good ideas--using quick memes as a way to teach line breaks in poetry, and using Facebook profiles as a way to flesh out the characters one is writing about--but the moderator, "in the spirit of being contrarian" then turned the session over to an older fellow who proceeded to bitch and whine about how wrong these ideas were.  If you feel like you have to do this stuff, then okay, went his message, but don't expect me to do it.  It's not who I am.  All right, fine, I thought.  No one is making you do anything, and besides all your moaning is wasting my time.  If anyone attends a session about Using Social Media in the Creative Writing Classroom they expect to hear good ideas about how to do just that; they don't expect or want or need to hear a panelist bemoan the very idea of using social media in the creative writing classroom.  I saw no good reason, except to fill out time (and that's not a good reason), for having that man speak.  So I, and a colleague who had gone with me, left.  I tried to catch some of a session on using ghosts in literary fiction, but perhaps not surprisingly the room was overflowing.  Forget about it.  As I have drafted a literary novel that includes not one but two (sort of) ghosts in its cast of characters, I am actually concerned about doing that and having it accepted as literary realism--which in my opinion, it is.  Because it is. (My novel, I mean.)

Speaking of late adapting of technology, I signed on to Twitter yesterday.  Can't promise I'll be tweeting much in the near future, but my handle is JohnvanderJohn.  (This suggested by Twitter when the one I wanted was already taken.)  Sounds like a Dutch rapper's handle.  Why did I sign up--finally--for Twitter?  A number of reasons.  For one, I got tired of telling publishers I was active in social media when I'm really kind of just a little active.   For another, what the heck, it's AWP; get into the spirit of adventure.  (I hear longtime Twitter users snickering.)

I'll visit a few panels for certain today.  One is about applying for an organization grant from the NEA.  This is something Toad Suck Review has done in the past, but without success.  We're looking for some better ideas about how to go about it.  The other panel is the one I'm speaking on: teaching novel writing to different student populations.  As a nice twist, some of the students who are currently taking Novel Writing Workshop with me will be in the audience!  I can only expect excellent questions and comments from them.  Later, we have dinner with my sister and her husband, two southerners who have long since migrated to Boston and live in a historic home in Belmont.  It's been a while since I've seen them.  We're long overdue.  I often tell people that AWP is essentially a social phenomenon--I do not mean that in any pejorative sense--and sometimes the socializing extends far beyond the walls of the conference.  Far from detracting from the conference, it makes for its greatest value.

AWP 2013, Day One

Well, as I feared, the winter weather is upon us.  It arrived late Wednesday and continues as I type this early Friday morning.  While the conference seems perfectly crowded, I have to suspect that many conference goers suffered delays or cancellations of their travel plans.  After all, it's not just Boston that got hit but the whole northeast portion of the United States.  UCA's own inaugural class of MFA students is here, and they are staying two hours away.  Yet so far they have been able to fight through the snow to reach the city and enjoy themselves.  "Enjoy" has included visiting Charles Bukowski's favorite old hang out--not that far from the Convention Center, it turns out--and getting brand new Boston-based tattoos.  They've also been extremely helpful with manning the Toad Suck Review book table in the Book Fair hall.  Thanks, guys.  I must say part of my suspicion about cancelled or delayed travel plans is that the Book Fair itself seems less jammed than usual.  Now, TSR is in the second floor Book Fair hall, whereas about 65% of the other tables are on the ground floor hall, and this might have something to do with the light traffic we were getting on Day One.  But even the ground floor Book Fair hall seemed hardly so no-elbow-room-busy as in years past.  We'll see today.  This state of affairs could change overnight.

Some highlights from Day One: I went to two sessions yesterday, both reasonably interesting.  The first session was one of those classic AWP overly-crowded-into-a-tiny-room affairs, with scores of listeners spilling out into the hallway.  Hey, AWP, somebody wasn't thinking right when they scheduled the room for that session.  The subject?  Fairy tales in adult fiction.  Maybe that seems esoteric, but plenty of writers were eager to hear about it. The panel included, among others, Jane Yolin, Kelly Link, and Kate Bernheimer, a rather star-studded group, to be sure.  I was especially happy to see Kelly Link, a writer whose work I've long admired but who I've never met in person.  In my opinion she was the rock star of the panel, although her manner is anything but.  In fact, she tended to defer to the other panelists, more than I think she should have.  It was a well run session, with lots of time left for audience questions, and there were some smart ones.  One interesting issue, for which no real answer was given, was what to do when you are employing a non-western fairy tale but writing for a western audience.  How can the audience pick up on the multiple levels of meaning and of story that you are embedding by consciously employing such a tale?  The short answer is that they can't, but I don't think that's the kind of fully thought out response that the asker was looking for.  An interesting bit of information that popped out: up until just last year, the National Book Foundation, which awards the prestigious National Book Award every year in various categories had forbidden books based on myths, legends, or fairy tales from being considered for its fiction prize.  What?  I know, a head scratcher.  Apparently, many National Book Award judges were unaware of this prohibition as they had indeed considered and honored various fairy tale/myth based books in the past.  But even so the rule is clearly in violation of the spirit of creative freedom (to say nothing of aesthetic wisdom); yet it was only removed last year and only because of a conscious petitioning effort spearheaded by Kate Bernheimer.

The second panel, cutely named "All the Young Dudes," featured three youngish male writers who had recently published short story collections with small presses.  It was sort of a combination reading/how to session, as in "How did you guys get your short story collections published?"  I must say that the questions that followed their reading were fairly amateurish and even stupid ("What do you do if your girlfriend gets mad at you for writing so much instead of spending time with her?").  And this from MFA grads, no less.  (The obvious answer to the above question, delivered by one of the panelists: "Get a new girlfriend.")  I shouldn't be surprised at my disappointment with the questions.  It's been my experience at AWP that any session that professes to deliver the "secrets" of how to publish tends to be attended by desperate sounding and desperate seeming people.  They tend to be among the more unseemly aspects of any otherwise interesting convention.  The readings were okay--just okay--with one reader and one story clearly shining: a dramatic monologue written by Jared Yates Sexton of Georgia Southern University and included in his new volume An End To All Things (Atticus Press).  It was a smart story and well-performed.   We chatted afterwards.  His department, an independent writing department, is trying to found a MFA program.   Since we just did so, I figured I might be able to offer some information and perspective.

Some more Day 1 highlights: 1) The journal Unstuck, which promotes "surreal, futuristic, and fantastic literature," was running an interesting writing conference-specific writing contest.  On the back of the instruction sheet for the contest one was supposed to write a short story--and only on the back; it could be no longer--and then return the sheet no later than the close of the day today (Friday).  In other words,  you couldn't send them anything you've already written.  You have to do it here.  What's more, the sheet included a list of characters, a list of settings, and a list of items.  One element from each list had to appear in the finished story.  I picked alien invasion, funeral urn, and saloon.  (Believe it or not, it's a serious story.)  I composed it while I sat at our not-terribly-busy TSR book fair table, with some guidance from the folks at the next table on what drinks to choose for my particular protagonist.  It was fun and fairly quick and I hope they like it.  To "win" the contest is simply to have your story selected for inclusion in a special issue of Unstuck.  2)  I visited with the kind folks at the journal Versal.  This is an American-staffed magazine that is housed in Amsterdam.  Created ten years ago by expatriates for the local expatriate community in Amsterdam, it's now an international journal that comes every year to AWP and even sometimes sponsors readings and panels at the conference.  They will be publishing a chapter from my Van Gogh novel in the next issue, and the invited all contributors  to stop by their table for a taste of good Dutch gin.   I'm not a big gin drinker, but I have to admit it was strong and smooth.  3) I ran into Louise Harper, the wife of Graeme Harper, an Australian writer who directs the Great Writing Conference in the UK.  It was good to catch up with her.  She and Graeme kindly hosted us for dinner back in 2006 when Great Writing was in Portsmouth, then Graeme's home university.  I remember fondly taking the hovercraft over to the Isle of Wight and enjoying a beautiful supper and great conversation in their home.  Our kids were with us on the trip, and Louise kindly kept them the next couple days while we attended the conference.  Fantastic to see her again.  As I always tell people, AWP is all about seeing your life as a creative writer flash before your eyes over the course of three days.  It's started happening already.

On to AWP

Two days from now, I'll board a plane to Boston for this year's installment of the annual craziness called AWP.  According to the organization, it will be the biggest conference yet, which is a little scary, considering how big past conferences have been.  The conference has thoroughly outgrown even the space provided by mega-hotels; so for the 2013 edition AWP will be held in the Hynes Convention Center in downtown Boston.  One request, dear reader: please pray for no snow.   Winter weather has caused enough traveling snafus in that part of the country already; the last thing thousands of AWP conference goers need is to have their air and train schedules slaughtered by delays and cancellations.  I'm already worried about the "Sequester" and how cuts in the air traffic system might affect scheduled flights.  Thanks, U.S. government, for being so comedically dysfunctional!   (I realize any problems that the sequester causes for my travel plans is nothing compared to the trouble that will be caused to those people who will endure furloughs and severe cuts in pay.)

I am looking forward to the conference for several reasons.  First, I'm excited about the panel I'm on, which will discuss the phenomenon of single semester novel writing workshops.  As I reported in a previous post, this relatively new but fast growing type of course has seen a variety of iterations among its instructors.  Unlike the typical Fiction Workshop, there isn't a standard pedagogy yet, and that makes the class--and my panel--very exciting.  I expect to learn about the drastically different ways different instructors skin this particular cat.   And I'm eager to report on what my students are doing in their Novel Writing Workshop this semester.  Too, I will be at the conference to represent Toad Suck Review magazine.  We will introduce to a national audience our groundbreaking Toad Suck Review 3-D issue.  It really is a great issue, and I know our head editor, Mark Spitzer, and I are looking forward to showing it to folks.  We may even find ourselves soliciting for new material for issue #4!  We will also have along some of our grad students, who did editorial work on issue TSR 3-D.  It will be their first time at AWP--an important milestone for any young writer.

I will be blogging most days from the conference.  So if you're interested in how the conference "feels," at least to one conference goer, check this space, starting Thursday.

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Publication notice: An odd little short story I wrote called "Homeroom," which adopts the form of a high school homeroom announcements sheet, will be published soon in theNewerYork Press's Electronic Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature (EEEL).  I'm excited for it to land there.  Experimental, it is.


News Item:  Jennifer Egan, novelist extraordinaire and author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, Look at Me, and several other titles, came to the UCA campus this week.  She gave a great reading, followed by an extensive question and answer session.  She then followed this up the next day with a small group meeting with Department of Writing students in which she covered a wide range of subjects, from drafting and revising strategies to the phenomenon of audio books to her side job as a journalist.  She was not only encouraging to the students but offered several morsels of really sharp, shrewd advice.  She earned her money, put it that way.  And the students spoke glowingly of her for days after.  Sometimes visiting writers don't live up to their billing; Egan exceeded hers.

Followup note: I wrote a couple weeks ago about Bobbie Ann Mason's historical novel The Girl in the Blue Beret.   If the novel, or Mason, sounds interesting to you, you should check out an interview with the author published in The Pinch magazine last fall.  In the interview, Mason discusses the kinds of research she carried out for the sake of the novel.  (No link to the interview, I'm afraid.  You'll have to get ahold of the journal itself.)

Followup #2:  The novel I'm writing this semester while my Novel Workshop students write theirs is at 54,000 words.  That's only 1000 words from the mandated total word count I gave them at the beginning of the semester.  Problem is, I'm about 5/6 of the way through my plot.  So it will just need to go longer!

Once more to the photo

Several weeks back I posted a little known photograph (there it is again on the right) that some have argued is a portrait of Vincent Van Gogh taken during the time he lived with his brother Theo in Paris.   The strongest proponent of the argument is Joseph Buberger, a photographer and historian of photography, who initiated a series of forensic studies of Van Gogh's painted self-portraits and compared these to the photograph in question.  Joseph and I have emailed a few times.  In Joseph's mind, the man in the painted self-portaits and the man in the photograph are unquestionably the same.  This argument has not been universally accepted, certainly not by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which Joseph complains will not give him the time of day.   I had my own doubts--I expressed them in my earlier post--based partly in discrepancies I noticed between the disputed photograph and one taken of Vincent when he was a teenager (i.e., the one in the next paragraph, on the right).   Obviously aging changes people, but to my eyes the man in the disputed photograph doesn't look like an older version of Vincent but a different person altogether.

Joseph does have an answer to this argument.  He claims that the earlier photograph was misidentified, and is actually a photograph of Vincent's brother Theo.  He can offer no proof of this misidentification; he simply makes the claim because he is convinced that the disputed photograph must be of Vincent.   I'm very happy that Joseph keeps pushing his case.  He should; and if his emails are any indication, he will.    If the disputed photograph is of Vincent, then it certainly needs to be included in the Van Gogh canon.   But it's hard to just readily accept the misidentification theory.  First, one would have to ask why the earlier photograph was misidentified by Vincent's own family and why the error was allowed to stand for so long.  Second, one needs to realize that there is yet another familiar photograph of Van Gogh, this one taken when he was a boy.   (That's it on the left.) In my eyes, the boy in the picture does indeed look like the young man in the photograph that Joseph claims was misidentified.  So, in my mind, if the photograph from Vincent's teenaged years was misidentified then the photograph from his childhood must have been also.  And how likely is that to have happened, by members of his own family?

It certainly is true that Theo Van Gogh bore a strong resemblance to his brother, but there are distinct and identifable differences between the two men.  The pictures that previously have been identified as the young Theo do strike me as legitimate, and they are by no means identical to the pictures that have been identified as the young Vincent.  See here two photographs that have long been accepted as being of Theo, one taken when he was a teenager and the other, years later, after he had became eestablished as an art dealer.  While I can easily say that the "teenager Theo" is the same man as the man in the "professional Theo" picture, I would not say that about the "teenager Vincent" photo, which Joseph argues isn't Vincent at all but really Theo.  Using Occam's razor, I have to conclude that the pictures that have been long established, and reprinted in numerous Van Gogh biographies, were in fact accurately identified.  

But this is only my opinion.  Is it possible that Joseph will, in the long run, be proven correct?  Of course.  For now I hope he keeps pressing his case, at least until the truth is clarified, one way or another.  By the way, another of Joseph's passions is to take photographs of radiant light. Follow this link to his online gallery.

Novel class check-in

We're about a month into Novel Writing Workshop at UCA, and so far I'm impressed and also a little amused.  It's the most unusual class I teach, in that it's structured so differently than the rest of my courses: no full class workshops, a much heavier production goal, and less of an emphasis on reading (even though they are reading three books for me).  Unlike the last time I taught the course, everyone who registered for it knew the deal going in: we weren't just going to talk about novel writing; we were all going to write complete novels.  So I've gotten no pushback about that--and no one has dropped the course.  And they've almost all met the word count goal every week.  What has surprised me is how quickly some of them ran into the mid-book blues, or,  as writer Chris Baty defines it, "the second week doldrums."  Baty is the founder of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and his very entertaining book No Plot? No Problem! serves as kind of a primer and motivational message for those attempting to write a 50,000 word novel in a month.  My students are writing 55,000 word novels in one semester, so we are reading Baty intermittently, applying his First Week-Second Week-Third Week-Fourth Week lessons over broader time spans.  The chapter we discussed last week was all about how and why to defeat the doubts, boredom, and malaise that inevitably infects a novelist after the initial heady, giddy, optimistic starting period of her book has passed.  Well, wouldn't you know it, in the days leading up to last week's class, I starting seeing Facebook messages from my students--they've created a Facebook page for the group--saying how they were utterly stalled or utterly bored or utterly out of ideas or convinced they'd made the wrong choice of novel to work on.   A couple were certain they should start new novels.

I tried to respond to my students' worries and ennui with words of encouragement and a few kicks in the butt.  Some of them, I could tell, needed to expand/complicate their plots and points of view; others needed to think harder about the characters they had already invented and the settings they had already established.      They needed to decide on back story, character identities, and physical appearances.  And some of that thinking needed to find its way into their novels as what I call "fill-in work."  Not only would this increase your word count, I told them, but more importantly it would give you a clearer sense of who and what you're writing about, which will allow you to proceed into future chapters with more confidence.  I echoed Baty's sentiments that despite being tempted to, they should not just dump their books: because then they'd just find themselves, a few weeks down the road, wanting to dump the new one.  Self-loathing is part of the novel writing game; there's no magical escape.  I told them about Heather Sellers's concept of the Sexy New Book and exactly how dangerous that Sexy New Book can be.   I told them about Sellers's strategy for dealing with the Sexy New Book.   First, she insists that the Sexy New Book is almost always a siren's call that will only take you away from what you really should be working on; that is, your current book.  Her answer: At all costs, ignore the call of the Sexy New Book.  On the other hand, she admits that sometimes the call of the Sexy New Book is simply too powerful to resist; also sometimes the Sexy New Book idea can actually be a good one.  So solution number two, as Sellers explains it in her book Chapter After Chapter, is to take the Sexy New Book out on a date.  That is, for one day allow yourself to think about it, plan it, do research for it, maybe even start drafting it.  That is, give yourself one full day to find out if this new book really is worth pursuing.  Most of the time, she says, you will realize that it is not.  Occasionally, you might decide that it is.  And then--but only then--you go ahead and give in to the siren call.   (This has worked out for her in practice.  She admits that her bestselling memoir on face blindness, You Don't Look Like Anyone I know, started as a Sexy New Book idea.)    In the case of one student this semester (because I knew I could trust her), I permitted her to follow a Sexy New Book idea, but I insisted she had to be fully up to the week's required work count by the time class time came.  (Amazingly, she pulled it off.)

I could be wrong, but it seems to me this "I-hate-my-novel" reaction came a lot of quicker and a lot harder to this group than to the group I taught last time.  Perhaps this is a function of their earlier, anticipatory, much more hyped-up optimism?  In any case, they are bravely soldiering on, finding ways to make the word count.  And I should clarify that more than a few of them are perfectly happy with the current states of their novels.   This seems especially true of my graduate students.  I guess that's not so surprising.  Their extra years worth of writing experience should give them more pluck and confidence and determination.  Yes, as I mentioned in an earlier post, it's one of the curious aspects of this semester's course that I'm teaching it to both graduate and undergraduate students.  I can't deny there's something of a "grad contingent" and an "undergrad contigent" feeling to the classroom, but for the most part the groups get along; the main difference is how more sanguine the graduate students are with their budding books.  Amazingly, this holds true for three out of the five who do not define themselves as fiction writers and who have never tried to write novels!

Despite their "second week doldurms," I really am impressed by my students' output this semester.  Thinking back to my own experiences in creative writing classrooms--both undergraduate and graduate--I can swear to you that no one ever asked anything of me like a 55,000 word draft in one semester.  Not even close.  And yet my students have more or less happily accepted my word count goals as a matter of course.  I think this represents a sea change in the landscape of creative writing instruction.  Without doubt, NaNoWriMo--which several UCA undergraduates do every year, in addition to their course work--has made longer projects seem like not the impossible dreams they once were.  This is a real and powerful contribution.   And of course it doesn't hurt that more and more creative writing programs, grad and undergrad, are offering novel writing courses.  That is, my students are not isolated lab rats suffering through an experiment of my own design.  They know they are part of a nationwide phenomenon, and they are reveling in it, even when they are stuck in the doldrums.  I was inspired to teach the course this way after attending an AWP session several years ago on the subject of "allowing novels in fiction workshops."  Of the three people who spoke, only one actually taught a specific  Novel Writing Workshop, and her students were all graduate students.  I asked a question to the panel about teaching such a course to undergraduates.  I remember the ascerbic look one of the panelists gave me when he said, "What do think your undergrads would say when you tell them they have to write a novel in one semester?"  Well, so far, both times I've taught the course, they've been more grateful than anything else.  And now, given that they all keep meeting it, I'm thinking that 55,000 might be too tepid a word count goal.  While there are several examples of good, successful, and even famous short novels--we're reading a couple this semester--the average length for a novel published in this country is 80,000-100,000 words.  It's what agents, and the marketplace, seem to expect.   I'm wondering if I should have them aiming for something closer to that goal.  So, maybe 75,000 words next time?

 Don't worry, students!  Just kidding!  Or am I?


(FYI, I'm writing along with my students, and my budding novel is at 32,000 words.  I'm certainly ahead of schedule, but that's good, given all the looms for me later in the semester.)

Creating Van Gogh does the Next Big Thing

I was recently included in an email chain letter to writers who also have blogs.  The idea for the chain, launched by Cathy Day and her blog The Next Big Thing, is to answer ten questions about a project you are currently working on, or one you have already completed, while at the same time linking to other writers' blogs where they answer these same questions.  In this post you'll find my answers to the questions.  Unfortunately, most of the writers I sent the letter on to were either already involved or declined to participate.  But I encourage you to follow the link below to my wife's blog Wordamour (this is her personal one, not the one she maintains for the Huffington Post) where you can find her answers to the questions.  She has recently finished a World War Two novel called The Lost Son.  It features brothers who are separated early in life and wind up fighitng on different sides during the war.  It was inspired by a real life story in her own family--although her novel leaves behind family history to go its own way in some important aspects.  Read all about the novel and the story that inspired it by clicking here.

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I am once again teaching Novel Writing Workshop at UCA.  This means I'm making my students compose a short novel over the course of one semester.  And for the sake of esprit de corps--this class follows the idea of the "writeshop," a term Cathy Day coined--I am taking up my own challenge; that is, I'm composing a short novel right along with them.   I'll give a full update next week on how the class is going.  I mention it now only to say that the novel I'm writing for the class is so much in the process of formation that I can't possibly apply the ten questions to that book.  Not yet.  So instead I'll apply the questions to my Van Gogh novel, which I anticipate will soon finally see the light of day.  (Pieces of it have already been published or are forthcoming.)

Okay, on to the questions.

Ten Interview Questions for the Next Big Thing:

What is your working title of your book (or story)?  After an agent strongly pressed me to come up with a more compelling title for the project, I changed the name from Yellow to Days on Fire.  The color yellow is still suggested by the latter title but in a more active fashion.  The agent seemed to like the new title, and I've decided to keep it.

Where did the idea come from for the book?  I was teaching in Holland one summer and during a short trip to Amsterdam I visited the Van Gogh Museum (along with other prominent museums). Prior to that visit, I might have seen one or two Van Gogh paintings in the flesh at the National Gallery in Art in Washington, near where I grew up, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer stunning light that came off the paintings I saw in the Van Gogh museum.  Now I knew what all the hubbub was about.  My fascination with the paintings made me more curious about the man, and that set me thinking.


What genre does your book fall under?  That one is easy: historical fiction.  Although, as I've mentioned on this blog, I don't play absolute, strict adherence to what some would view as the "rules" of historical fiction.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?  As sexy and fun as it is, this is one question I'm going to have to decline to answer.  (Sorry.)  After all, if the book were ever to be made into a movie I would be the last person allowed to choose actors for it--there are people called casting directors--and, besides, I just don't know if I follow the movies and television as intensely as I  need to to effectively give an answer here.  I suppose what I really would like is a surprise choice, someone no one would expect to do the role, and then have that person do a smash up job.  Actors surprise you all the time, after all.  Think of the truly powerful performance by Bradley Cooper in Silvers Linings Playbook, for instance.  (For what it's worth, while Jennifer Lawerence has been garnering awards for her performance in that film, I think Cooper's was far more impressive, demonstrated a wider and more supple emotional range, the whole of which he carried off convincingly.)

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?  Van Gogh fails and fails and fails, costing his health, his happiness, his family, and a portion of his sanity, but in the end he succeeds where it matters to him the most.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?  At this writing, while I'm still waiting to hear from a publisher in France that was recommended to me from someone over there, I anticipate self-publishing the novel.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?  The whole process of writing, revising, cutting, shaping, adding, reshaping, and editing the book took so long, was spread out across so many years, that I'm not sure I can accurately answer this question.  But certainly it took me at least a year to finish a handwritten first draft.  (Believe it or not, that's how I like to compose first drafts, although this semester, for the novel I'm composing in class, I'm drafting straight to the computer.)  Probably it was more like a year and a half.


What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?  Painters have not infrequently been the subjects of novels; both novels generally and historical novels in particular.  There's just something about the exquisite physical torture of trying to turn messy colored fluid into a seemingly concrete reality.  A well known painter novel is The Agony and The Ecstasy by Irving Stone, his "biographical novel" about Michelangelo.  (I think I like that term, because it certainly applies to my book.)   More recently, there was John Updike's Seek My Face and Harriet Scott Chessman's Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper.  The latter novel depicts the sad tension in the Cassatt household due to Lydia's illness.  It can be compared to mine in the sense that it is set in a similar time period and country (France) and tries to make real the world of those post-Impressionist painters who are only glittery names to most of us now.  But maybe most like mine in its humanizing of a famous but not quite understood figure (i.e. Vermeer) is Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring.  My novel is broader in scope than either Chessman's or Chevalier's but I think, like Girl, brings a new and sympathetic sensibilty to a subject who has been codified by history and popular opinion.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?  As I stated in my answer to question 2, it all started with that visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?  Well, Van Gogh wasn't nearly the nut case he is commonly understood to have been, but he did have the courage or stubborness or lack of temperance, if you will, to pursue his passions with almost blind servitude.  This is to say there were extreme elements to his personality.  I show those elements in the novel, along with his softer side; I think the combination makes for a compelling read.  It should also interest readers to see Van Gogh interact with well known artists like Signac, Bernard, and Gauguin.  The latter plays quite a large and important role in the last third of the novel.