Jamison Crabtree, Editor of Spork!

Alison H. Deming, University of Arizona

We began the evening rather quietly, with Alison asking each of us to reflect on Steve Orlen, beloved poet, teacher and friend, who passed away quite suddenly last week. “There was no bitterness,” Alison said. “He accepted his fate.”

January 22^nd has been marked as the set date for a time of remembrance. There are also plans to archive Steve’s office—really his second home—for the Poetry Center’s collection. All donations are requested to be sent to the Poetry Center.

Then launched into the topic at hand:

Talk about your background, how do you each begin your process?

Simmons: “The journal actually started before it ever came into existence. As a young, budding poet, I wanted to combine the literary context with environmental concerns. I wanted something technical, that addressed the environment, but also pieces that expressed the literary element.

But, we had no money and no experience to start a print journal. So that’s how we decided to go online. This was 1997, when the Internet was still fairly new. At the time, we didn’t really see

Jamison: “It’s really important, having those technical skills. That’s kind of how I started, and it gave me a really good feel as to how journals can streamline their process. I moved to Arizona and started working for Sonora, and then hooked up with Spork!, hand binding the chapbooks, using the letterpress. You need just basic equipment and an affinity with arts and crafts stores. Materials are everywhere,” he said, as he told us the newest issue of Sonora Review has a spine that’s made of Whole Foods paper bags.

Alison: “I’m the imposter,” she joked, but then went on to share with us her experience living and working within the writing and publishing arenas during the 60s and 70s. “Everything was low-production cost, nobody cared what it looked like. Now, the object speaks to its own aesthetic value. The result is that we get an absolutely exquisite object that goes along with a literary threshold.”

Both Alison and Jamison brought materials with them to share: chapbooks, high-cost production journals like Orion, broadsides.

Is going online really the least expensive way to start a literary journal?

Simmons: “Right now, yes. The only costs are paying for your domain name and website. We currently don’t pay our writers, but we’re able to be selective in our process. Our next step is to apply for nonprofit status. You really can’t get grant money unless you are nonprofit.”

Jamison: “We mostly pay for the costs. Book-by-book. But they’re not really expensive putting together, just time-consuming.”

How many books are in a run?

Jamison: “We currently print out about 50-100 at a time. We pay about $100-200 for the website per year, and about $50 for the designer.”

Given how many journals there are, how necessary is it to have a theme or a niche, a deliberate focus?

Simmons: “I don’t think you need that niche, but it certainly helps. We’ve been able to partner and collaborate with a lot of writers just because of our specific focus. I really think of Terrain as a journal about place, internal or external, and so having that theme also helps in terms of press releases: different environmental businesses, companies, and other presses.”

Jamison: “Having a clear idea for your audience and caring about your tick on things. Steve Orlen, for instance, would read poems through line-by-line. He read the work without his ego. I feel this is really important for any literary publication. You want to get the work out there and let it stand for itself.”
Simmons: “I really think a journal is only as good as its editors. You really have to care about the work.”

Jamison: “Actively try and push the work further. Simmons, for instance, nominates pieces elsewhere (ie: Pushcart Prize).”

How else do you push your work?

Alison: “Book fairs, AWP. Great venues for getting your name out there.”

Jamison: “If you can give away stuff, give away stuff. But be friendly, be available.”

How many people are helping you at a time?

Jamison: “We have about 3-4 pretty steady people, and then 5 or 6 people who come and go.”

Simmons: “It’s really helped having the MFA program here. Up until about a year ago, I didn’t have any assistant editors; I was doing all the work myself. Now I have genre editors and am getting an intern. All these steps are helping us expand.”

Overall, I got the sense that having people work with you not only helps balance the workload, but also helps balance the journal’s direction and future.

What exactly is the advisory board’s relationship to these magazines?

Alison: “It varies from publication to publication. Part is as a contributing editor, and then, as in Orion’s case, they like to bring all the members together in a sort of think tank setting. The board is sometimes there to keep the editor from feeling lonely. It’s also a big part to get the magazine well-known writers and therefore adding cache and a reputation for the magazine.”

Jamison: “We’re really set up more as a collective, where the editors decide which projects we want to work on, and then pursuing those projects.”

Simmons: “Ours is not really a hands-on role…but I’m still pretty much a control freak, so we’ll see how that goes!”

The discussion took a turn here into multi-media production and re-thinking page layout (and even what a page means). A huge deal is color printing versus online color.

Alison asked the group our own involvement in presses and publications, and some of us mentioned writing blogs. “The quality of work,” Jamison offered, “whether a blog or otherwise, is crucial.”

The issue of quarterly versus bi-yearly came up, and Simmons mentioned how important it is to make comments and have a blog, to “extend the life of the publication.”

From the other side of things, those of us who are looking to publish are wanting insight into what those publications are looking for, how they function, etc.

Simmons: “We always send pieces back for review before publication.”

Jamison: “Going back to the ‘put a piece in a sock drawer for six months’, I feel as though that’s almost equivalent to putting it in the drawer.”

Alison: “You have to be the final judiciary voice in your publications. You don’t want to be so hungry for publication that you embarrass yourself in the process. And a rejection letter from an editor doesn’t mean the piece isn’t good: it might just mean it’s not good for that particular publication.”

Find a group of editors with which you can build a relationship.

“We spend a ton of time in our classes talking about craft and essentially deconstructing writing — ours and others’.  What there’s not so much of — at least so far in my genre is conversation or instruction designed to help us with the thing that most writers spend the most time struggling with: finding the place in us where good writing comes from and a way to keep on finding it.  I know that for myself, just about anything good I ever wrote did not originate with worrying about craft or anything else external.  It came from some inner relationship that all of us have.  And it’s a damn tricky thing, that.  I struggle to describe it, but maybe the idea of ”the Muse” is the most universally understood.  People say things like, “You just have to show up and keep writing,” but it’s obviously easier said than done.  Someone I talked to in the program complained to me one day, “I havne’t written in a few days; I can’t write when I’m in a bad mood.”  I’ve heard people say, “I have to be in a good space to write,” and I talked to one of our poets the other day who said he had to practice ritual to create his writing space.  When I started applying to grad schools, I was so naive, I just assumed there would be entire classes designed to support and nurture this writing space.  Meditation classes designed especially for writers, maybe. I know in the world outside of school, it’s really the main issue.  Friends and acquaintences who have graduated from MFA programs tell me, though not at first, that they haven’t been writing much the past few months.  “Much” meaning at all.  “Few months” meaning the past year.  And with these guys it’s not for lack of craft.”

We met in the courtyard of Arts Marketplace to discuss some of the questions and insights addressed in the email. Our guests were Fenton Johnson and Jane Miller, both creative writing professors at the University of Arizona and published authors. Below you can read some of the highlights.

Julie: “We spend a ton of time deconstructing writing…What about conversation on construction…the place in us where good writing comes from…?”

Fenton: A place to begin is to tell my story, how I literally started writing. As some of you know, I’m the youngest of a very large family. No one paid attention to me, so I did what I wanted to do. I took workshops in college, went to Washington, worked on Capitol Hill, saved $4,000 and decided I was going to be a writer. I moved back to San Francisco, moved into a group house, and went down every morning to the library to write. I said to myself, “I’ll give you 2 years to do this, and if you haven’t published something in a nationally distributed publication, then you’ll have to go to law school.”

So I went to the library 9:00 a.m. M-F, stayed till noon, and just wrote. If nothing came, I wasn’t allowed to leave.  I did this until I ran out of money, then wrote for a French film series, but still had my mornings free. I then edited for a small, independent film and video organization. In that job I insisted they let me not show up till 10-6.  I got up at 6:30 and wrote for 2 hours before biking to work, then told myself that each weekend I must write one day (didn’t matter which one).  By the way, I don’t think I could maintain that discipline now, so do it while you’re young.  It took me 11 years before I was published in a national publication–I underestimated my own stubbornness. I took that film job when I had $200 left, wringing my hands, but it allowed me to make lots of connections.

The path is mysterious. Most of the time it’s not revealed to you, but revealed in its experience. Writing has been a north star in my life, and I make decisions based on what things mean for my writing. The best thing about writing is that it did give me a north star.

In the end, I discovered there is no one path: it’s your path. Two final words: stubbornness and grapefruit.

Jane: When I work, I work because I have to, and either it’s convenient or I have to make it so. I have gone from being very bad at this [making space for my writing], but now I’m much better at it. Now I can make space for writing without screaming (graciously). In the past, I have ruined relationships over this. I consider myself a powerful woman who is energetic and proactive, but I am no stranger to being overwhelmed by circumstances out of my control.

I cannot write with others around; I have to cram myself into a pleasant room with a window.

Julie: Do either of you carry a notebook?

Jane: I have a good memory. If I don’t remember it, I don’t need it, but I think if I don’t remember, it’s only for a moment. I have the actual language in my head.

Fenton: I tell my students that the only piece of advice that I’d never qualify and the most valuable advice is to carry a pen…I feel naked without one.

Jane: Whatever you are doing, change it up…

Fenton: Anne Lamott carries notecards around. In the end, remember that you are figuring out what your process might be. You have to figure it out. In past days, I used correspondence, I wrote letters…I love writing letters…the cultural milieu has destroyed the epistolary relationship. It used to be one of my standard things to do. I wouldn’t have been able to write a memoir without the letters. It’s something I think about that I’ve lost.

Jane: I think prose writers need that, poets have to empty out. It’s a different process. I have to disregard any notes I have taken in order to really sound the depths of my feelings. If I don’t do that, all the images in the world won’t amount to something that has power. Those emotions are where all power resides.

Patti: Do you dabble in other arts?

Jane: Yes, I play piano, and I was a painter, I love to go to the movies to enjoy that art form. One cannot be a poet and not be in the artistic world; this is why I love teaching.

Fenton: (singing) I love to sing, but I’ve been trying to figure out how music can fit in with prose; music has a narrative line; how a composer works with line. I think probably the most visual arts would be the most useful just because …Back in those days, I took a couple of drawing classes, and the intensity with which they forced me to look at things was really helpful.

Every time I’ve dabbled in another art form, it has radicalized my perspective for my writing. I never realized how much time is an illusion and everything changes, everything is in constant flux. I never saw how artificial it was–social realism in fiction–it’s all crazy–the realistic painting is just as extraordinary and bizarre as abstract impressionism—and I didn’t realize that until I took ballet for the male dancer.

Chris: Have you ever felt compelled by a muse or some other force to work on a project that maybe your reason told you you shouldn’t’ work on, perhaps because it would be trite or that it had been done before?

Jane: That would be the project that eludes reason.

Fenton: You use the word compel–so few things do really compel that if something is compelling, I don’t have any choice but to drop what I’m doing and go to that–at least pay attention at some point.

Patti: What about writing about family?

Jane: Reason is not what art is about–you don’t have any choice in the matter but to expose yourself and probably expose other people as well–YOU are doing it, you control every aspect of it and can choose to publish or not, but one has to write what one has to write–writing has a destiny–you are meeting it half-way–it has already got you, but reasons for not writing are beside the point.

Even if tomorrow you take up refrigerator repairs, you will still be writers–you have passed that line. It’s about time. You can’t think, “I’m still a young writer” –I’m trying to give you authority–a metaphoric place where you have to come to terms with your fears and nightmares and fudge–life–there’s no time to waste.

Fenton: Be wary of the censoring voice!–because what one discovers is that people would rather be written about badly than not to be written about at all. It’s very easy to let that voice say, “I can’t write this because it would offend so and so.” Well, go check with so and so–I’d never give them the final say, but!–I have found some really good writing when giving my writing to people in certain circumstances.

Mythologize your own experience. Mormonism, for example, acknowledges the fact that gods, demons, and angels are present in our lives. The principal is that our world and Homers’ world are not that different. Don’t think your life isn’t as important as Jesus’ or Ghandi’s–see your life as the journey…and whatever comes…

Chris: Do you ever work on projects simultaneously?

Jane: Normally I have no project–then I feel like I have to contribute to the universe and hopefully a project will find me; I really bow to prose writers–I’m lucky if I can get my granola together each day. Poets I know don’t work that way (every day) should it happen?  You just have to deal with it. I don’t have enough hours in the day to be a whole person, but love will carry the day. There are no substitutes for real life. Occasionally one has to shut oneself off because there is more than one project…

Fenton: Zora Neale Hurston was married five weeks and then said, “My work is more important than you are so we have to get divorced.” Rilke married to write letters…

Joel: We’ve talked about solitude and noise; I’ve had trouble turning off the Internet. I don’t know how to create solitude.

Jane: I have confidence in all of you because you did get this far, you have already dealt with it, so you’ll get there…it’s part of your process… I don’t think you need to turn all that off…maybe to a certain degree…you can be a writer, I’m positive.

Fenton: I was at a panel in SF years ago and Kay Boyle was living in Paris with Hemingway and Fitzgerald and her career wasn’t valued because of being female–at that point Al Young was asked, “Would you describe your writing process?” He replied, “Coffee, jazz riffs, then 9:30 or 10:00 I hit my stride, then I’m on, then lunch, then take the afternoon.” Kay said, “That sounds great.  I write for 15 minutes at 2 a.m. and for half hour in the afternoon–the reason my stories don’t have narrative drive is because my life doesn’t have a narrative drive.” You have to learn how to adapt to circumstances in your life–in a way, it’s an advantage.

Jane: At home, as opposed the office, you will be distracted with your computer. There will only be a certain time when you are creative, and it will nudge you out of the computer life; it’s a very natural process and I don’t think you need to design it; I think it’s like revving in neutral (Al Young); that computer will be very helpful when you need it and it’s such a beautiful, natural process being an artist. In a relationship, you can’t kill someone; through all that darkness, you have to be polite. The secret to poetry is cruelty, Jon Anderson said–in life you can’t be inappropriate–there are no rules with art, that fierceness must attach itself to the heart. That’s why you aren’t a chemist, because you can’t be unconscious there; but in art you can. “That wine is $900, and he pays for it with the earnestness of his soul.”

Fenton: I do work on pieces simultaneously. I try to pace it so when I finish a draft, I try to have a 6-8 week project that forces me to not look at the piece for that amount of time.

Jane: Nothing leaves the house for publication unless someone else sees it, even a letter of recommendation.

Hang on to each other. We have very little else in common, and I highly recommend you don’t go it alone.

A special thanks to Patti H. for securing this awesome new venue for our upcoming Salon (and potentially, more Salons in the future). Arts Marketplace is located at 40 W Broadway (between Church and Stone) and we’ll be hosting our second (and last) Salon of the semester here on Saturday, April 24th, 6:00 p.m. Professors Fenton Johnson and Jane Miller will be giving a talk on “Nurturing Our Muse: Creating and Sustaining a Writer’s Life.” Please come and join us! As always, food will be provided.

Cheers!

In our discussion, we asked both Manuel and Aurelie to share with us tips and past experiences about the conference, since for many of us, this marks our first time to AWP. Here’s a rundown of what they each had to say:

For selecting which panels and presentations to attend (the schedule is over 70 pages long!), Aurelie suggested breaking up your choices into two categories: those that serve a practical function (ie: publishing information, craft discussions) and those that serve a personal interest/passion. In order to keep from becoming rundown, it might be best to limit yourself to between 2 and 3 panels per day (and, as a past attendee pointed out later, it also helps to allow yourself ample amount of time to trek from one room to another–there’s only 15 minutes between each slot!).

One observation that Aurelie made was that AWP can be an extremely stressful and intimidating time: the conference hosts thousands and thousands of writers, editors, participants and guests, and you really have to force yourself to be social. So, she says, GO to the readings, GO to the Book Fair, GO to the after-hour events…but also take care of yourself.

Both Aurelie and Manuel talked about networking, and the fact that for many of us, that idea can be rather “dreamy”: we may want to meet our favorite author, we may want to hand out sections of our manuscripts (don’t, they both say), or we may just want to hide in a corner. The more important focus, however, is to strike up conversations with those around you: don’t look so far forward that you neglect to see someone right in front of you. Strive to make friendships rather than connections: you never know where those friendships will lead you, because, as Manuel pointed out, ten years from now, those same people will be published writers or editors at some of the top literary agencies in the country.

Most of these chances to unite with our peers, Manuel says,will occur during the big showcases at night and during panel discussions during the day. The Book Fair is also a great place to mingle and see what others are reading. Small presses will usually host “cocktail parties,” and these pose another great opportunity to take the writing discussions ”outside” their normal settings.  In any case, the essential point to take away is to BE NICE, and don’t feel as though you have to make things happen this year. (Aurelie: “I realized later that connections that were important to me were those of my peers.”)

Manuel: “Wait until Saturday or Sunday to go to the Book Fair: you can usually get something on the cheap” (ie: free!). Look for a variety of presses: small, midsize and large; try and come home with at least five that you’d be interested in submitting to.

The two pieces of advice that sum up the whole experience? First, HAVE FUN! and two, Permit yourself to have a mad moment. (Scream, rant, rave, take the bus to downtown Denver, walk into a coffee shop and swear that’s the last writer you’ll ever try to talk to…and then collect your thoughts, get back on the bus, return to the conference hall and walk into another room.)

Aurelie Sheehan said that in her experience, the overlap between practicalities and aesthetics has yielded interesting and fruitful moments in her art. But she didn’t glorify the journey. She left her MFA program at City College with loads of debt. “I can’t even describe the pile of paper from student loans,” she said. “The deferments, the letters explaining why payments were late.” She took work as an adjunct instructor because she felt it important to keep her foot in the academic door, but the teaching didn’t pay enough to live on, and she had to take on temp work—“which was fun and everything”—to survive. She realized that the weird schedule and the juggling of jobs was “manipulating and deforming my life, and my writing was suffering from a lack of continuity.” As her credit card debt increased, Aurelie decided to take on full-time work as a secretary. “I remember buying the shoes and the dress—it was like a Halloween costume,” she said. “I sashayed into the office to convince them I had what it took to be a good secretary. And I did. Worst of all, I was a good secretary.” The job was simply something she did for money. She would write early in the morning before going into the office (she was writing a novella set in France and would listen to French radio while she worked which was her way of “traveling on the cheap”). In the end, Aurelie’s secretarial work became the creative impetus for her first novel, The Anxiety of Everyday Objects.

In addition to inspiring her own writing, Aurelie’s administrative skills led to jobs “semi-related to writing” at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, and the Folger Shakespeare Library in D.C. She taught part-time at Sheridan College and then at Johns Hopkins. Aurelie said, “All of these positions—teaching, Folger, Wyoming, secretarial work—prepared me for my current position in arts administration … There were some bleak months and years, working full-time, trying to find time to write on my lunch hour or before work.” But she found ways to discipline herself.

Stephanie Balzer, who earned her MFA at the University of Arizona in 2004 and is now the Executive Director of Voices, Inc. and the winner of the Mary Ann Campau Fellowship, has also sashayed into offices where people were convinced to hire her. After graduating from college in Flagstaff, Stephanie moved to Phoenix with the idea of getting a job in marketing. “So I ended up at The Business Journal thinking I’d buy their Book of Lists and a lady there offered me a temporary position answering phones. I thought this would buy me time.” Eight years later she was still at The Business Journal, but now as a business reporter on the legal beat, winning state and national journalism awards. Stephanie said it was gratifying to have essentially earned an “MBA on the streets” but said that her journalism career was challenging. “It was exhausting to care so much,” she said. She also realized that for years she had only been reading news. She applied for MFA programs.

When she began her MFA degree she felt behind her peers. She felt like she had no vocabulary in poetry, so she began a self-directed reading program. “I read fifty books in the summer between my first and second years,” she said. Although she began the program with the idea of becoming a professor, after teaching composition and introductory poetry to undergraduates she realized she “didn’t like it. I had a hard time really investing in students.” She also realized that while she enjoyed the fantasy of the academic life, she just wasn’t a scholar in the way that some of her peers were. Stephanie said, “After I graduated it took a year for me to get a job. I must have written 60 cover letters. I free-lanced to support myself, but mostly, I had a killer writing year. Nothing mattered. I cobbled stuff together to make it work.” Eventually she got a job as a communications officer for a local non-profit, which was practice for her current position as Executive Director of the non-profit Voices, Inc., which serves low-income, at-risk youth through the teaching and creation of documentary arts. “It is my first authentic job,” she said, “pulling together my reporting self, my non-profit desire, my creative writing self.”

Although both writers have come into their own professionally and artistically, Aurelie admitted to “many lonely moments as a writer, staring out of the window, wondering, is anyone out there?” She also said that through the MFA, she came to realize that she was “not crazy for wanting to write, for having that impulse. We, in the MFA, were collectively crazy. It gave me the strength and stupidity to do the sending out.” She described “this internal journey” of looking at years’ worth of work and noting patterns. “What was with all the green and the small animals?” she laughed. During the 10 years between her first short story collection and her first novel, Aurelie wrote two novellas that didn’t sell, and then realized she was “the captive of certain things in my subconscious—a type of relationship, an image.” She decided to approach these things directly instead of metaphorically, and she wrote a collection of “intensely personal, non-fiction essays, the stories of my life.” She used a variety of forms, finding that as she wrote “the form would emerge intuitively.” She wrote about things she was “ashamed of, afraid of” until she felt liberated and emptied out. She spent the next five years working on her first novel, which was much harder than she’d imagined. “I’m not a natural novelist,” she said. Still, she embarked on her second novel, History Lesson for Girls, “trying to write what mattered.” The novel is about “teenage girls who felt small in the eyes of the world and I had the feeling of rescuing these two teenage girls from oblivion, and I was passionate about it.” Aurelie continued to write stories, and also book reviews, which she said allowed her “to be part of the conversation” even during the years when she wasn’t publishing.

Of her own aesthetic journey Stephanie said, “Poems were not a refuge for me. I was drawn to poetry because it’s short!” Even now, she said, she is somewhat embarrassed to be a poet. “I tell people I’m a writer, not a poet,” she said. She has tried to write in other forms. She tried to write essays, “but they were too short so I turned them into prose poems.” She tried to write plays but “I’m terrible at plot. In the first draft, nothing happened! Then, in the second draft, too much happened, and everyone thought it was parody.” Stephanie said, “I rarely send out my poetry. I am a very slow writer. I give myself projects – books that have a dramatic arc, prose poems that are all connected. It takes years though.” Winning the Campau Fellowship and “headlining” at a reading has been affirming, but it is still hard to “slough off the cultural weirdness attached to the ‘poet’ title.” Stephanie has kept her art alive by relying on a small group of writers and readers, by “blog-skulking,” and by giving herself permission to drop the pressure of being an academic. Her biggest fear is “being a hobbyist poet—there’s nothing worse.”

When asked about patterns of discipline in keeping their craft alive, Aurelie said that “my writing time has adapted to fit my working life and my family life.” While working at the law firm, she wrote early on weekday mornings, and played on the weekends. At Folger, she wrote during her lunch hour (which meant that she wrote very short scenes—scenes that could be written in 45 minutes). When she became a mom, she “just had to become really concentrated with my time. I knew I couldn’t fool around; I had to get down to business. I have to do it or I get crazy.”

Stephanie said she uses the same computer for work and for personal stuff, “so I always have my poems with me. I can edit while I’m at work, in short spurts, but I can’t write like that.” Stephanie described herself as a sprinter—she takes months off, and then pushes. “I am not a routine person,” she said. “I go to work at different times every day, get home at different time, so I don’t really structure myself like that. I am not a creature of routine.” Living alone, she has the luxury of taking time when she wants it. Taking time to write in the evenings is a treat. “Whenever it happens, it happens,” she said.

By way of closing, Aurelie said, “The day you graduate will be just like the day before. You’ll be a writer no matter whether you are working at Starbucks or wearing a suit.” She joked that “colorful scarves are important.” She said sometimes you’ll think, “What kind of cosmic joke is this?” But if you “keep sashaying it happens.” In other words, “uncertainty and determination live hand in hand the whole time.” Stephanie added, “Why write unless you have to?” She called her writing path “a manifestation of faith. I kept doing these crazy, directionless things because that’s the only way I know how to live.”

]]> http://salonseries.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/getting-it-on-getting-on-with-it-after-the-mfa/feed/ 0 salonseries http://salonseries.wordpress.com/2008/11/25/salon-notes-on-beauty/ http://salonseries.wordpress.com/2008/11/25/salon-notes-on-beauty/#comments Tue, 25 Nov 2008 06:25:42 +0000 salonseries http://salonseries.wordpress.com/?p=117 Continue reading →]]>

On Saturday, Nov. 15^th, we ate enchiladas (courtesy of PR Griffis) and talked to Richard Siken and Manuel Muñoz about their thoughts on beauty.

Richard Siken started off the evening, asking us to think of beauty in terms of “units.”  For the prose writer and the poet, there are sentences and lines, words, paragraphs, essays, stories, poems. “I’m not sure morphemes and phonemes are where beauty is meant to accumulate,” he said, giving us a limit. Somewhere between sentences and sounds, beauty exists. 

He talked about how poets play with the friction between sentences and lines, but how others, like Gertrude Stein, insist “emotion only happens in a paragraph” where you have sentences pitted against sentences. Richard acknowledged: “the fact that beauty can come in units is weird,” wishing that there was a way to measure such things. “But,” he said, “it’s not the metric system.”

Here, Manuel Muñoz picked up, agreeing. When working on his first book, he said, “I forgot about character, I forgot about forward movement, I sometimes forgot about plot.”  What he focused on were sounds, sentences, and beautiful language. One unit of beauty took precedence over others – sound and language dominated. Not that that was wrong, or his new focus on character is right. It’s about consciousness, and style, and knowing where your style is coming from.

To elaborate, Richard talked about massage artists.  He noted one technique they have is to imagine their wrists as dead, as if their hands were separate from their bodies.  Sculptors do the opposite. Their wrists are low filters, direct channels into their arms, their heads, their hearts. Both Richard and Manuel agreed: we are grander than just writers – as artists, we’re working with representation. In Richard’s words, “the world is being filtered through us.”  We have to watch how high our filters are, because “somehow, I have to get it out of my head and into your head. It’s not just whether it’s beautiful or not; it’s how it’s packaged.”

Beauty seems absolute, yet while we tend to agree on what is not beautiful, there’s no consensus on what is beautiful. What do our professors consider beautiful?  Manuel’s first memory of this came from watching his grandmother put on knee-high stockings. He saw a scar from a black widow bite she got on a trip to the outhouse, and felt for the first time the danger and her mortality. Richard’s grandmother, a stroke victim, would try to crack eggs with the half of her body that wasn’t properly coordinated. He still remembers eggs slammed on the countertop. Their grandmothers were gorgeous and memorable; for Manuel, it was proximity; for Richard, it was the breaking of social mores. 

Proximity happened to be one of Richard’s favorite words (along with cleave, braniac, and pistachio).  It turned his memory to waiting tables at The Cup, where he had to say “behind” as a signal to his co-workers, constantly touching them on the back.  The wait staff developed the illusion of closeness because of this physical proximity, but spending time together outside of work, realized they had little or nothing to say to one another. Still, in that proximity, that closeness, there was beauty.

“We all know, for ourselves, what beauty is,” said Manuel.  “What I always found beautiful was loneliness and darkness – the austere. I write about Chicanos in the Central Valley – that’s not beautiful.”  Richard was on the same page, since he celebrated conquistadores in his work – with all their genocide and trampling, he said, “they’re really shiny.”  And he’s right.  Conquistadores are really shiny.

Ugly and beautiful are not opposites. Ugly is exciting for many authors, and ugly beauty is “highly vested,” said Richard. He argued, “there are a lot of things you don’t want to put words around. If you don’t believe in the sacred, sit down and make a list of all the things you won’t write about and you’ll realize you believe in the sacred.” He went on to argue that people want two things, to belong and not to be left behind.  If we, as writers, can make sense of either of those two, people will listen to us and find it beautiful.  But if we pretend that something is beautiful when we don’t think it is, our readers will be able to tell.

Authenticity is hard to come by, and sometimes comes about through odd means.  For a long time, Manuel did not write stories with people’s names in them.  He had gotten the reaction too many times – “Who the fuck is Ancelmo?”  He resorted to pronouns and realized “the woman next door” was much closer to Chicano reality than naming names all the time. It put the woman in relation to others and created an interconnectedness that came closer to what he was trying to express. At this point Richard changed his mind from what he started with.  “Beauty doesn’t come in units.  Maybe beauty happens within connections, but not in things.”

When asked for closing remarks, Richard warned us about process and the dangers of creating beauty. ”Somehow you have to take the world in and let it out.  Generate your text.  It’s much easier to revise towards beauty.  If you end up creating beauty, people will hold you to it.  They will celebrate you or get aggressive; they may not allow you to change.”  His advice:  “Stay as liquid as you can and as centered as you can.”

PS NOTES

Manuel suggests reading, as a work of beauty, Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica, even though half the people he recommends it to end up hating it

Manuel Munoz and Richard Siken will be there to discuss one of the more ineffable elements of being an artist: how to create beauty and meaning on a regular basis.

This Salon will focus on the sentence, phrase, and word level to consider more fully how language works, and how we as artists can make our words more beautiful and powerful in service of a piece as a whole.

If you missed the first Salon of the semester, no worries, Salon Notes is here to fill you in. 

Alison Hawthorne Deming admitted to us, “My life as a writer has been very strange.”  Her family, descended from Nathaniel Hawthorne, is chock full of well-to-do writers and intellectuals.  As a teenager, she strayed. After two months at college, she dropped out and began a picaresque life:  a shotgun wedding, flight with her two-year old daughter to Vermont, work as a dishwasher, a welfare mom, then as a sex educator and program manager for Planned Parenthood.  This last job lasted her 14 years; she was writing all the while.

After completing the MFA program at Goddard, she received the Fine Arts Work Center fellowship in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which supported (and still supports) early-career writers.

“Having a year of freedom,” she told us, “has a profound effect on your imagination as a writer.” She published her first book in her mid-40s, after a steady career in public health.  “Without fellowships, I don’t think I would have been able to do it.”

When Shannon Cain, fiction editor at KORE press, heard the news, she broke out into a cold sweat and began jumping around her house.  She won the National Endowment for the Arts grant. “Everything changed after that,” she said, “agents came out of the woodwork…I interviewed them all, very New York, very caffeinated.”  After three interviews, she picked the agent who treated her stories as works in progress, and avoided agents who were eager to send her babies into the world too soon.

They both confessed that there’s no secret on how to win fellowships.  The competition for most of them is top-notch, and Shannon reminded us, we’re up against the cream of the crop.  Having both worked as judges, they told us about a quarter of the manuscripts are at that level: good.  From there, it gets very, very difficult to narrow down the winners.  For the NEA grant in particular, 1000 manuscripts are read; 20 are chosen.  Alison chimed in—it matters what you put on page one, because “when you’re on the jury, your mind goes numb.” They both agreed, “It all comes back to the work.”

There are tales of cronyism about these things, but for the most prestigious fellowships, Alison said, “It’s not like it’s a cabal,” and Shannon gave us some insight, “We’re all under microscopes.  For the judges, integrity is important.  We’re hypervigilant about our ethics.”

And they were both quick to temper the value of fellowships.  Shannon told us, “There’s always something tricky about measuring success…it does a lot for your self-esteem to win a fellowship…it doesn’t mean success, it means you found your audience.”  Alison was blunt, saying “I won’t lie about recognition or success. I love it. On the other hand, you can’t be living for that. You will never get enough.”

Even when you get a fellowship, it’s easy to freak out about how much time you suddenly have on your hands to write. Shannon would accept those moments when she found herself doing nothing with her day but “sit in the shed, fiddle-fart around. I would feel crappy until I finally realized this was my pattern.” Goal-setting worked for her, so she would aim to write 1,000 words each day. Alison had a more physical approach, “I have two necessary distractions. I go out and get my hands dirty [by gardening], or I play the piano.” Working with her hands in a way that avoided writing would refresh her to write some more.

Despite success, their biographies admitted something writers are loathe to consider, that any list of successes is followed by an exponentially longer list of failures.  Alison didn’t start publishing until (what we would consider) “late” in her career.  Shannon submitted 240 stories for publication in the last four years. Only six of them were published. She summed it up by saying, “I’ve been rejected everywhere.” They both noted that for women in particular, it is difficult to “be firm with your children and your loved ones [about your need to write].” There’s always something working against writers; they strongly suggested we surround ourselves with family and friends who are sympathetic to our need to write.

The benefits of a fellowship are clear, said Alison, “to pull yourself out of the velocity and distraction of a sort of culturally-enforced ADD life.” She then mentioned some extreme fellowships – the National Science Foundation’s grant that sends writers to Antarctica for five months; a fellowship in Oregon that requires you being comfortable with a chainsaw.

If that’s not your thing, then still, she said, “I don’t think there’s any better gift you can give to yourself than that freedom and time to write.” Alison ended her story by telling us, “I’ve sold houses to be able to have another year to write.” The stock market is troubled and we may not have houses to sell, but Shannon shared some positive news:  a friend of hers, a fiction writer, signed a two-book contract with Random House last week, on the day the Dow sank 700 points.

For a smattering of fellowship and residency options, check our pages here. For a more comprehensive list, Alison recommends The PEN Guide to Grants and Awards for American Writers, AWP’s Grant Listing, and Poets and Writers Grants and Awards page, all linked below.

PEN Guide to Grants and Awards for American Writers

http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/1763

AWP’s Grant Listing

http://www.awpwriter.org/contests/index.htm 

Poets and Writers Grants and Awards Page

http://www.pw.org/grants?apage=*&

Quick contest plug: KORE Press has a fiction short story chapbook competition coming up. The deadline is October 31^st.

http://www.korepress.org/KorePressShortFictionAward.htm

Also, look for an announcement of our next Salon, The Art of the Sentence, with Manuel Munoz and Richard Siken. We’re shooting for mid-November.