A Connection to Place

I was invited this week to post a short essay, "The Possibility of Community" about my connection to Santo Stefano di Sessanio on Helen Free's blog, Hang on to the Vine.  An Italian-American living in Washington D. C., Helen writes about her ancestral home in the Abruzzo region of Italy.We have visited the region many times--Helen more than I, yet every time we approach the hill town of Santo Stefano di Sessanio, I feel somehow stealth-like, amazed at my opportunity to enter its still-ancient world. 

Field below Santo Stefano di Sessanio               photo: Dayle Fergusson

People of the Abruzzo are proud of the region's motto, "forte e gentile," and that strength and gentility shows everywhere. 
It's in the massive, steep slopes of the Gran Sasso mountains, rising abruptly from a road where horses graze freely,where the land looks newly created.
It shows in its people's kindness and rugged know-how, their sure competence for making flavorful mozzarella, for example, from the milk of smelly sheep, its twisted shapes displayed dramatically, yet without flourish. 
Far from the tourist spots of Rome and Florence, the Abruzzo is very close to the Italian heart, and can provide a restorative and, sometimes, life changing sojourn. And now especially--three years since the devastating earthquake--a visit is a gift of support to these gentle and strong people. 


Consider joining me in Italy this May 27--June 2, as a gift to yourself. It just could change your writing life and maybe more. I have room for another writer. Go to Italy, In Other Words for photos, endorsements and enrollment information. 

Showing Writing

We hear it all the time--"Show! Don't Tell," but what does it really mean? 


When you cut through the plod of telling, and show what you mean, the reader "gets" what you're saying at a visual or gut level. Showing reaches the reader's imagination much more quickly than the more cerebral telling. Showing eliminates a level of interpretation, a filtering through the intellect. Unless, of course, your aim is to slow down the process, to encourage the reader's contemplation...then it's time to do some telling or summarizing. 

In narrative nonfiction, we show in scenes--adding dialogue, place details, characters' action, and so forth. We show with selective reporting--foregrounding the details that serve our purpose.


Case in point: I've recently added the Longform app to my reader, and the top article when I opened it Saturday, the day following Thomas Kinkade's death, was a a great piece of journalism Susan Orlean had written in 2001, called, "Art for Everybody." (Orlean's title will sound comforting to some readers; worrisome to others.) In a nearly "aw shucks" tone, Orlean reports her interview with Kinkaid, her extensive field work, and his reaction to art critics.


It's straight-forward writing, its point communicated purely through showing writing.  She doesn't tell the reader what to think or how to view Kinkade's art--which is as fiercely derided by art critics as it is embraced by its consumers. 


Orlean reports the facts of her field work in what might seem like simple narrative. Her biting interpretation of Kinkade as a self-described "Artist of Light" and her arch evaluation of his claim to be the people's artist come through in details she reveals, scenes she recreates and in the juxtaposition of details in the content. She smiles politely to her reader as surely as she skewers Kinkade, nails him, strings him up and ties him down.


Of course, Orlean is a pro and smart--like a fox. It's a delightful and instructive read, a model of showing writing.

Intention, Intuition and Improvisation

A competent teacher bases lectures, reading and activities on the requirements of a final product of some sort--whether it's a test or an essay or a painting. Yet, there's abhorrence to "teaching to the test" because such teaching stifles creative and critical thinking. Managing that task--encouraging creative and critical thinking and testing it--characterizes competent teaching.


There's a parallel in writing. Writers can't help but to be conscious of their audience as they compose. And it's important they write to their audience, but do not let the audience determine their curriculum, so to speak. Writers of serious narrative nonfiction aren't slaves to formulas and mass-market buzz topics and treatments; instead, they strive to connect with an intelligent and thoughtful audience. 

Ocean Park #79, 1975 Richard Diebenkorn

On a recent rainy Sunday, I spent an afternoon at the Orange County Museum of Art in Southern California immersed in an extensive exhibit of Richard Diebenkorn's large abstract paintings. It was easy to lose myself in the complexity he painted into these works. Their depth grounds the paintings and holds the viewer's attention at an intellectual and emotional level.
      
Curator Sarah C. Bancroft explains, "The artist worked and reworked the canvases, scraping and repainting, building up layers as well as atmospheric fields and planes, finally arriving at a solution through a combination of intention, intuition and improvisation."
      
Diebenkorn's effort creating the work, his layering of "intention, intuition and improvisation" reaps an emotional connection that washes over the viewer encountering the paintings. We realize the skill intellectually as we slow down and reflect analytically.


There's a parallel in writing. In order to reach an audience at a sophisticated level, we build layers into our writing. Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight describes Diebenkorn's layering process: "The narrative in these paintings is a story of their making--of a vertical blue line that gains a violet-rose shadow as it tracks down the edge of a canvas, turning off at an angle like a refracted ray of light and then sliding beneath a wash of luminous gray, only to emerge at the other side as a little wedge of canary yellow. Or, of a field of brushy green that, the longer you look, slowly gives up layers of under-painting in hues you can't quite put your finger on."


Likewise, we layer our stories in multiple drafts and readings to create subtle turns and refracted understandings--with, for example, tense shifts, points of view, back story, foreshadowing, flashes back and forward. We follow Emily Dickinson's vision to "tell the truth, but tell it slant." We write as Diebenkorn painted--to integrate surprise, to turn the obvious on its head. And we know the more sophisticated the reader, the more we need to fight predictability in our writing, the more we need to "solve" the word problems in our stories.


Diebenkorn said it simply in the video at the museum: "I paint for an ideal viewer, not just for myself." And he said about the end product: "Now, the idea is to get everything right. It's not just color or form or space or line--it's everything at once." Effective narrative nonfiction likewise reveals complexity, all "at once," though the process comes from all the "scraping and repainting" and "building up layers." 

A Reason for Writing, Writing Workshops, and Making Art

The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself...alone can make good writing.
                                                                                                                  William Faulkner

William Faulkner, 1943

Each Sunday, The New York Times Magazine, a pleasantly cheeky publication, contains a department called "Riff," a place for one freelance author's scat, rant, or chest-clearing bombast. In yesterday's paper, Steve Almond's "Why Talk Therapy is on the Wane and Writing Workshops are on the Rise," makes a case for writing as therapy. No, no, he doesn't suggest that we, especially memoirists, write confessional, weepy, solipsistic prose. 


He points out that the significant rise in MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs in the past twenty years may reflect "a broader cultural shift" from talk therapy to writing where writers learn  to work through "the human heart in conflict with itself."  
(On one hand, read his article as a model of logical organization, each new point of evidence building on the previous one. On the other hand, know I'm responding favorably to his "riff" because I completely agree with his overall point, which is, likewise, logical and real. True, it's real and logical whether or not I agree with it.)

Almond's student writers "are hoping to find, by means of literary art, braver and more forgiving versions of themselves." And, as we understand ourselves, our readers better understand their worlds.  We write, as E. M. Forester said, "to find out what [we] think." We write to make meaning, to make art out of difficulty so we can see it more clearly. We write to get perspective on our observations and understand them in a larger, more universal context. Or, as David Foster Wallace put it more simply, we write "to become less alone inside" and the reward of that honesty is a gift--a reader responding to our words. 


Almond is not saying that writing replaces or replicates therapy, a much messier endeavor in real time. Instead, he says that, in our writing, we "fixate on particular stories and characters and themes because they speak to the fears and desires hidden within us."
He gives us license to find sanctuary in literature, in "the refuge of stories, which remain the most reliable paths to meaning ever devised by our species."


Consider joining me in Italy to become part of a community of writers for a week--to learn the finer points of narrative nonfiction writing; to discover Abruzzese culture, food and wine; to bathe in a Philippe Starck tub by candlelight and to walk through the streets of a quiet medieval town each day. Details and enrollment information found at Italy, In Other Words. 

Planting Seeds Patiently

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant.         Robert Louis Stevenson

Even though I taught writing for decades, I kept my own writing—poetry and ramblings—to myself, bound in stacks of brown, wire-bound notebooks. Publication never interested me. 

Then one day in the mid 1990s, I set a goal of getting something published by the year 2000, and luckily, hit the mark.  

After that first essay was in print, I was surprised by my strong desire to have my more of my writing accepted, a motivation that fueled my writing days for the next decade. At the same time I found an absorbing book project that defined a good chunk of my life. 

Obstacles interfered, life got complicated or I let it, and I lost the constancy of that drive and focus. It’s nothing I regret as I think I was doing what needed to be done, but I’m ready once again to organize my free time around writing.

I miss being in that zone, that attractive groove I've touted recently. I miss settling into it, into the absorption and pre-occupation in creative thought that remains more nourishing than the harvest. I remember the disconnect I felt when my book was published, knowing for sure that all the pleasure had been in the process, and then having to summon enthusiasm for its promotion. The story I’d spent a decade eagerly researching had become a sudden artifact to me the day I sent the final manuscript to the publisher.

It’s important that writers appreciate the reward in the doing, that we don’t judge ourselves by the quantity of our publications or by the possibility of sales. Though it's said that "art without commerce is a hobby," making art with commerce in mind too often warps creativity. It’s more productive to develop the habits of a writing life, to find patience with ourselves as workers, to plant seeds in our thoughts, on the page, and in conversation. The best writing comes when we can harvest a few seasons’ worth of such plantings.

Craft—Valuing the Sentence

M. F. K. Fisher at Work

Yesterday’s New York Times published Jhumpa Lahiri’s essay, "My Life’s Sentences” as the first in “Draft, a new series about the art and craft of writing.” In it, Lahiri reveals a life-long love of the sentence, a regard that supports her careful, very focused writing. As a reader, she recognizes that “the best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail.”

Acknowledging that not all compelling writing brightens at that level, Lahiri defines the vibrancy of the most effective writing at the sentence level:

But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates.

She talks about the magic that seems to occur in certain combinations of words (the same words available to all of us). But lest you think it is magic, she reveals the power of revision:

Over time, virtually each sentence I receive and record in this haphazard manner will be sorted, picked over, organized, changed. Most will be dispensed with. All the revision I do—and this process begins immediately, accompanying the gestation—occurs on a sentence level. It is by fussing with sentences that a character becomes clear to me, that a plot unfolds. To work on them so compulsively, perhaps prematurely, is to see the trees before the forest. And yet I am incapable of conceiving the forest any other way.

Lahiri describes her process of revision. Every writer’s is distinctive. There is no rulebook for revising. There is only the imperative for revision. It’s a requirement and a joy. Both a task and a pleasure.

Why Attend a Writing Workshop?

Because it’s terribly stimulating to get away from the usual multi-tasking frenzy.

Because getting instruction from a new source can be illuminating.

Because making friends from other states and countries transforms us. 

A writing workshop, or conference, can jump start, change and strengthen writing habits. The best part might be experiencing yourself anew as a serious writer.   

As an emerging writer, I attended several writing workshops—every time getting highly stimulated by the charged atmosphere and the excitement of being with writers talking about writing. The ones I recall are Writers at Work at Westminster College in Salt Lake City (where I met Dawn Marano who would become my editor), Book Passage Travel Writers’ and Photographers Conference in Corte Madera, California (where I met many writers who are still good friends and Don George, then the editor of Wanderlust on Salon.com, who would later publish my first travel essay), and the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs (where I met the essayist Phillip Lopate, who taught me so much and who later wrote a blurb for my book). You get the idea. Life changing. 

Search the web, talk to other writers, and give yourself a gift that can expand your mind.

And consider joining one of my workshops.

I have room for a few more writers in

      

             The Heart of Memoir Writing Workshop 

                  Abruzzo, Italy on May 27—June 2. 

We stay in the lovely medieval town of Santo Stefano di Sessanio in an unspoiled and seldom traveled region of Italy. We hold class in the morning, spend afternoons in the countryside learning about Abruzzo’s ancient culture and evenings enjoying the distinctive Abruzzese cuisine and local Montepulciano d’ Abruzzo, “a deeply colored red with spice notes.” Go to Italy, In Other Words for details, endorsements, enrollment information, lots of photos of the town, the hotel, and of previous workshops.

Ciao Readers!

Getting into the Groove

Maybe you’ve found the groove, know what you want to write, have a story to tell. But, still, you’re not yet in the groove, not writing regularly, not consistently sitting down to the computer, tablet, notebook, and getting it down.

Maya Angelou claims that “there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” I think she means that a burning story wants out, but she could also be recognizing the agony of not writing. The dread of the question, “What are you working on?” The sobering anguish of having something to say, but knowing it’s not getting said. 

As long as it’s a duty, something you tell yourself you should do, it probably won’t get done. On the other hand, few of us have trouble going after what we really want—a walk in the sand, a strong cappuccino, a sail on the bay, for (personal) example. It seems that the quality of our ambition is a function of desire over duty. 

Annie Dillard says 

Writing a book is like rearing children—willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love. Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong. You don’t have to scourge yourself with a cat-o’-nine-tails to go to the baby. That’s the same way you go to your desk. There’s nothing freakish about it. Caring passionately about something isn’t against nature, and it isn’t against human nature.  It’s what we’re here to do.

On Saturday I attended a lecture by the Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee who was a personal friend of the late British artist Lucian Freud. Smee quoted Freud as saying that one's devotion to art requires "a discipline of self-indulgence." How well put. Doing "what we're here to do," going to our desks with care and passion, honors our belief in our better selves. 

Losing oneself in art-making can feel organic, its allure as essential as breathing.  Like an addiction, it can consume hours of mental energy. Like complete absorption in a good book, immersion in the creative world captivates the mind, grasping it firmly while shutting the door against all else. It can be more compelling than any lover. So, perform your purpose. Go after what you want, straight into the groove; go with love and devotion.

The Process—When to Share

Writers are challenged with so much—invention, composition, organization, style. Accuracy and honesty. Trimming and developing.  Most of us begin that process alone at a desk, with only the voice in our heads directing decisions. Too seldom do we share and seek feedback early, or regularly, in the writing process.

In his book, On Writing, Stephen King’s often quoted advice tells writers to “write with the door closed and rewrite with the door open.”

                                                         Photo by Anna Delores

We write with the door closed to the chatter of others’ ideas and perspectives. In the first-person travel essay, for example, the writer needs solitude to properly re-experience the subject of the writing. We need to take our minds back to the thwack of the soccer ball in a small Roman neighborhood, the languorous stroll of daily life in a South Pacific village, the vapors, odors, and garlicky aromas of Manhattan.

Then, when the writing is drafted—the stuff in our minds dumped onto the page—we (and each of us in our own way)—re-read and revise. But, before we alter the initial effort too much, it’s time to share with people we trust.

Most of us need first readers who can comment objectively on the writing—tell us the parts that provoke, that resonate, that sing. We need these readers as well, to point out the muddle or confusion, the parts that need clarity or deleting. Most emerging writers need someone to point out what to keep, what to dump and what to develop.

Then the writer returns to the work room, closes the door and revises—that most pleasurable of activities when we can focus on the clarity of experience and the meaning to be made of it. 

Reading the Genre—On Purpose

                                                                                    A Good Read, art by Jennifer DeDonato

It’s surprising to me that I often encounter aspiring writers who don’t read  much, who perhaps don’t understand the reading/writing connection.

Although some people seem to have a natural flair for written expression because of having a “good ear,” most achieve clear written expression as a result of, for one thing, gaining a sense for language from years of reading, from an unconscious internalization of the rhythms of language. And from reading widely—which means reading a variety of text ranging from prescription inserts to editorials to fiction to nonfiction prose.

And we read especially in the genre we write in—in this case, travel literature, essays, memoir, for example—in order to internalize the rhythms of the “language” of that genre.

It is said that aspiring to artistic achievement comes from a desire to write, paint, sing like an admired professional—an “I’d like to do that!” attitude—rather, than the brashness of “I can do that!” Humility, rather than arrogance, better sustains as a driving force.

Reading good literature is a given for professional writers, for many reasons—to jump start their writing day, to get out of a writing funk, to remember why they write. Usually writers read as often and as naturally as they would breathe. It’s not planned and not an afterthought; it’s an ordinary pattern to staying alive.  

So, if you’re a beginning writer, start there. Get to know the genre.