Registration Open for My 6/18 Prompt Class

I'll be teaching another session of my prompt writing class in June at Politics & Prose. I'd love to see you there!  I promise low-stress and lots of fun!


Tuesday, June 18, 1-3:30 p.m.

Right Brain Writing: Guided Prompts

Politics & Prose Bookstore, Washington, DC

Explore your creative side at this afternoon of guided writing exercises designed to get your subconscious flowing.  No writing experience necessary!  This is a great class for beginners and also for those fiction writers and/or memoirists with more experience who might be stuck in their current projects, looking for a jolt of inspiration.  The goal is to have fun in a supportive, nurturing environment and to go home with several promising pieces to work on further.  Please bring lots of paper and pen/pencil or a fully charged computer.  We will be using as our inspiration work fromSpeed Enforced by Aircraft, a book of poetry by local author Richard Peabody. It will be helpful if you bring a copy to class.

More information

Nebraska Update #3 and Wrap-Up

So much to report on…so much food, so many words, never enough books, always train whistles cutting through the night, and lord knows how many church bells ringing from all corners of town! (Oh, and I finished my book, too...but more on that later.)

Let’s start with some food of note.  First, potato salad.  I know that potato salad is highly personal, so I won’t be offended if you think I’m crazy, but one strain of the potato salad family that I love is the “very creamy Midwestern potato salad,” usually made with Miracle Whip (which is called “salad dressing” out here).  This potato salad is sweet, and in the ideal world, slightly tart—with lots and lots of creamy stuff and definitely no weird additions like tarragon (which is a fine addition for other potato salads, but not the Midwestern kind).  Anyway, I discovered that the local Fareway grocery store does a pretty excellent version, which makes for a nice lunch.  Um, I mean a nice SIDE DISH at lunch.  Who would ever eat grocery store potato salad as an entrée?  (Or, well, for breakfast, as I did today.)

There’s an excellent Mexican restaurant here, called, I believe Tacos el Pueblito, but everyone knows it as “the pink place” because it’s painted a very bright, salmon pink.  (I overheard men at the Windmill Museum [see below] trying to direct an out-of-towner there for lunch, and none of them could remember the name and simply referred to it as “the pink place.”)  Anyway—you can’t miss it because it is that pink, and while everything is good, Thursday is notable for the chile rellenos special and Saturday is tamales day!  Both versions are good enough for my fussy, I-lived-in-Arizona palate.

Back to the deli counter at the Fareway…tear yourself away from the potato salad section, and check out the smoked pork chops.  I don’t know why these are so hard to find outside the Midwest, but smoked pork chops are incredible, and so easy to cook—just heat them lightly in a frying pan.  They taste like ham, except more so:  meatier, choppier.  Oh, yum.  And the breakfast sausages were also excellent—I was pleased that I could buy only four (so worried about my heart health, obviously!) and that the purchase set me back seventy cents.

I went to the lovely Lewis & Clark Missouri River Visitors Center where I learned about the amazing journey up the Missouri River.  Impossible to believe that only one member of the party died (appendicitis).  And lovely trails around the grounds which were called “nature walks,” which, honestly, left me panting and breathless.  Nebraskans are hardy people, obviously, if these are the types of walks out-of-shape museum-goers like myself are expected to manage.  All worth it, though, for a lovely bluff view overlooking the river and the hyper boy on the school trip who ran to inform me that they had found “a huge copperhead outside in the boat outside and someone chopped its head off,” not a word of which was true except that there is a replica boat outside.

In the more quirky vein of museum-going, I went to the River Country Nature Center, which is a museum based on the taxidermy collection of one man who lived to be 99 years, 9 months, and 9 days old.  It’s really a stunning array of animals, arranged thoughtfully, and I was able to appreciate the artistry in this field of work; upstairs were rows and stacks and piles of old nature magazines and taxidermy publications and books about nature and books about taxidermy that Joe Voges read and accumulated over his life (he took up taxidermy in 1933).  The wealth of that collective knowledge was evident in his work and the way he organized his life to devote it to taxidermy.  Really, it was a beautiful thing to contemplate.  Also of note:  100 different types of domestic chickens (stunningly varied and gorgeous…some would give peacocks a good run for the money; many are or are on the verge of extinction at this point), and for the people who like the creepy chills up their spines: an albino porcupine (there were other albino animals on display, but I thought this was the creepiest one) and a three-legged chick from 1934.  (I hope it died naturally, because wouldn’t you be just the least bit curious to see what happened when it grew up?  Plus, THREE drumsticks for fried chicken!)  I had a lovely conversation with the lady working the front desk who knew Joe, and then I bought some pretty rocks.

The Kregel Windmill Museum had its grand opening during the Arbor Day festivities, and I stopped by.  What a visually arresting place; machinery and belts and forges…everything left exactly as it was in the 1950s, just right there in place when the owner closed the shop and locked up in 1991, down to the papers on the desk.  It was interesting to gain a larger appreciation for windmills, which contrary to what you may be thinking, are NOT merely decorative ornaments outside fake “Dutch” restaurants, but are vital parts of farming life:  that’s how the water got pumped.

Hands down, the quirkiest place I went to was the Antiquarium Bookstore, 30 minutes away in another river town, Brownville, NE.  The Antiquarium is a bookstore that used to be in Omaha and moved in 2008 (and is still a work in progress); it’s housed in an old school, and books (and miscellaneous ephemera) are stacked and shelved and shelved and stacked in every square inch of the place.  Literally.  I cannot exaggerate how many books there are in this place.  The owner, Tom, is happy to give a tour and then let you roam around at will…I knew I could spend days happily engaged (plus, I may tend to get obsessive), so I tried to maintain my focus, but it was virtually impossible with so many temptations.  For example, when passing over on my way to the fiction section, I discovered an old movie scrapbook with signed photos of old-time stars, each individually for sale.  It seems I missed Clark Gable for $1.50, dang it!  I was tempted by Phyllis Diller and Fanny Brice (both pricier), but the books, the books!  Moving forward with the ruthlessness of a shark, I found in the rare book room a first edition of Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge that I decided to splurge on, and a SIGNED edition of Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead that, alas, was too expensive, even given Tom’s willingness to bargain a bit.  There was a reasonably priced first edition of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, priced to sell due to its rather ratty condition, and I decided that ratty condition or not, it’s Hemingway!  (Plus, tucked inside the cover was a charming black & white photo of a family inside labeled, “Seasons Greetings from the Dempsters” from the late 40s/early 50s.)  And then—call me narcissistic, but I was delighted to find a paperback of my own Pears on a Willow Tree, which I signed to Tom, who carefully placed it on the tip-top of a teetering stack of books that he planned to read.

Oh, I could go on…the Arbor Day Parade that lasted an hour, with kids lined up with plastic bags to carry home all the candy they planned to score; Kim at the tasteful and impeccably organized Warehouse Antiques; snow on the ground in May; tremendous thunderstorms; the computer crash that knocked my poor computer out of business for two days but which resulted in my getting to know the guy at the computer repair shop who is an online foreign/cult film critic and who got to vote for the Oscars (a Hungarian film, The Turin Horse, was his Best Picture pick; “you must have known in your heart that it probably wouldn’t win,” I noted, and he nodded); the fun local radio station KNCY that keeps me informed on top 10 country music and soil conditions (planting is waaay behind; the soil is still too cold!); dollar beers at The Wheel on Thursdays and the regulars who greet me with a smile when I walk in…. 

I’m not sure if I’m ready to head home on Friday.  It seems as though there’s always one more thing to see or do or wonder about or eat (do you think those red Husker hot dogs at the Fareway deli counter might be incredible??), one more question to ask, one more place to go.  My immense and sincere thanks to the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts for making this all possible.

It’s like the way the whoo of the train whistle passes through the night and then lingers gently in the dark.  Nebraska City—all of it, all—will linger gently with me after I pass through.

What Willa Cather Thinks about Facebook, Nebraska as Setting, and Writing Novels

I went to the Nebraska City Public Library yesterday (the original building was built in 1896 and has been beautifully updated while maintaining the historical senseto keep the historic feeling intact). While they didn’t have the book I was looking for, in a room full of books, I found books I didn’t know I was looking for (always part of the joy of any library), including On Writing by Willa Cather, published in 1949. Being in Nebraska at the moment, and loving Willa Cather’s work (My Antonia is firmly on my favorite books bookshelf), of course I have to share a few tidbits:

This is from an essay called “My First Novels [There Were Two]”:

My first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, was very like what painters call a studio picture.  It was the result of meeting some interesting people in London.  Like most young writers, I though a book should be made out of “interesting material,” and at that time I found the new more exciting than the familiar….

            O Pioneers! interested me tremendously, because it had to do with a kind of country I loved, because it was about old neighbours, once very dear, whom I had almost forgotten in the hurry and excitement of growing up and finding out what the world was like and trying to get on in it. But I did not in the least expect that other people would see anything in a slow-moving story, without “action,” without “humour,” without a “hero”; a story concerned entirely with heavy farming people, with cornfields and pasture lands and pig yards,--set in Nebraska, of all places! As everyone knows, Nebraska is definitely déclassé as a literary background; its very name throws the delicately atuned critic into a clammy shiver of embarrassment.  Kansas is almost as unpromising.  Colorado, on the contrary, is considered quite possible.  Wyoming really has some class, of its own kind, like well-cut riding breeches.  But a New York critic voiced a very general opinion when he said: “I simply don’t care a damn what happens in Nebraska, no matter who writes about it.”….

 

As for what Willa Cather might say about Facebook, I think I can extrapolate from this piece titled “The Novel Demeuble”: 

“One does not wish the egg one eats for breakfast, or the morning paper, to be made the stuff of immortality.”

 

Okay, a bit more context!  She goes on to write:

            Every writer who is an artist knows that his “power of observation,” and his “power of description,” form but a low part of his equipment.  He must have both, to be sure; but he knows that the most trivial of writers often have a very good observation.  [Here comes a quotation from Merimee on Gogol that is probably brilliant and amazing, but it’s in French so I have no idea.]

            There is a popular superstition that “realism” asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme? Is the story of a banker who is unfaithful to his wife and who ruins himself by speculation in trying to gratify the caprices of his mistresses, at all reinforced by a masterly exposition of banking, our whole system of credits, the methods of the Stock Exchange? Of course if the story is thin, these things do reinforce it in a sense,--any amount of red meat thrown into the scale to make the beam dip. But are the banking system and the Stock Exchange worth being written about at all?  Have such things any proper place in imaginative art?

            [She argues against her own point, citing Balzac, and then comes to Tolstoy:]  …Tolstoy was almost as great a lover of material things as Balzac, almost as much interested in the way dishes were cooked, and people were dressed, and houses were furnished.  But there is this determining difference: the clothes, the dishes, the haunting interiors of those old Moscow houses, are always so much a part of the emotions of the people that they are perfectly synthesized; they seem to exist, not so much in the author’s mind, as in the emotional penumbra of the characters themselves. When it is fused like this, literalness ceases to be literalness—it is merely part of the experience.

            If a novel is a form of imaginative art, it cannot be at the same time a vivid and brilliant form of journalism.  Out of the teeming, gleaming stream of the present it must select the eternal material of art…. [She cites The Scarlet Letter as a quick example of a book that doesn’t discuss Puritan dress and interiors and yet:] As I remember it, in the twilight melancholy of that book, in its consistent mood, one can scarcely see the actual surroundings of the people; one feels them, rather, in the dark.

            Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear by not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself….

            The elder Dumas enunciated a great principle when he said that to make a drama, a man needed one passion, and four walls.”

 Onward, to spend my day contemplating the four walls of my current story-in-progress....

Thomas Wolfe's Beautiful Deathbed Letter to Maxwell Perkins

This has to be one of the most moving letters ever written, the letter Thomas Wolfe wrote to Maxwell Perkins on his deathbed, by hand, against doctor’s orders, after Wolfe had had a falling out with Perkins and Scribners and had moved to another publisher, though Perkins remained loyal to Wolfe and was the literary executor of his estate:

August 12, 1938

Dear Max:

I’m sneaking this against orders—but “I’ve got a hunch”—and I wanted to write these words to you.

I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close; and I don’t think I was too much afraid of him, but so much of mortality still clings to me—I wanted most desperately to live and still do, and I thought about you all 1000 times, and wanted to see you all again, and there was the impossible anguish and regret of all the work I had not done, of all the work I had to do—and I know now I’m just a grain of dust, and I feel as if a great window has been opened on life I did not know about before—and if I come through this, I hope to God I am a better man, and in some strange way I can’t explain I know I am a deeper and a wiser one—If I get on my feet and get out of here, it will be months before I head back, but if I get on my feet, I’ll come back.

—Whatever happens—I had this “hunch” and wanted to write you and tell you, no matter what happens or has happened, I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that 4^th of July day 3 yrs. ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out on the café on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below—

Yours always,

Tom

(from Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins selected and edited by John Hall Wheelock)

"Seeing, Hearing, and Reading": Maxwell Perkins on How to Write

Here’s some excellent writing advice via Maxwell Perkins, gleaned from Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, selected and edited by John Hall Wheelock:

The editor notes that this letter was written to a “writer of distinction” who had to stop working for a while and take a rest for health reasons.

March 11, 1941

Dear ---:

…And turning things over in your mind, and reflecting upon them and all, is something that a writer ought to have to do in quiet circumstances once in a while. That is one of the troubles with writers today, that they cannot get a chance, or cannot endure to do this. Galsworthy, who never over-rated himself as a writer, but was one of great note in fact, always said that the most fruitful thing for a writer to do was quiet brooding….

 

Being bitter about all the too-many accomplishments of your Facebook friends doesn’t count as brooding!

May 17, 1945

Dear Mr. Mulliken [a young man who was in the service at the time and wrote asking for career advice]:

…I think, in truth, that the best writing of all is done long after the events it is concerned with, when they have been digested and reflected upon unconsciously, and the writer has completely realized them in himself….Long ago I went to visit Ernest Hemingway, after he had been a couple of years in Key West. We went fishing every day in those many-colored waters, and then also in the deep blue Gulf Stream. It was all completely new to me, and wonderfully interesting—there was so much to know that nobody would ever have suspected, about even fishing.  I said to Hemingway, “Why don’t you write about all this?” and he said, “I will in time, but I couldn’t do it yet,” and seeing I did not get his meaning, he pointed to a pelican that was clumsily flapping along, and said, “See that pelican? I don’t know yet what his part is in the scheme of things.”  He did know factually in his head, but he meant that it all had to become so deeply familiar that you knew it emotionally, as if by instinct, and that only came after a long time, and through long unconscious reflection….

(It would be interesting to see if there's a pelican in The Old Man and the Sea, just for kicks.)

June 22, 1945

Dear Jim [another young man in the service who wrote for career advice]:

…You see plenty, and you hear plenty, and that is much more important even than reading. You remember how when Swift was a young man he would go to the inns on the highways and sit in the bars and listen to the teamsters and coachmen talk. He never used the language that he heard—and I suppose he really listened just from interest anyhow—but the rhythm, the tempo of living speech is in the talk of the regular run of people. And so, though you can’t write as you wish now, you are probably going unconsciously through the best education you could have.  Seeing, hearing, and reading….

 

And, to quote the master:

January 4, 1946

Dear Jim [the same man as above]:

I delayed answering your letter because I wanted to quote from Scott Fitzgerald, and it took me a long time to find the paragraph:

“So many writers, Conrad for instance, have been aided by being brought up in a métier utterly unrelated to literature. It gives an abundance of material and, more important, an attitude from which to view the world. So much writing nowadays suffers both from lack of an attitude and from sheer lack of any material, save what is accumulated in a purely social life.” …

 

Okay, seriously…no more Facebook today for any of us!

Nebraska Update #2

A hodge-podge of things I’ve done/thought/seen/ate during the recent days of my ongoing residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City:

--I finally had a runza, a Nebraska specialty that, despite the fast-food appearance of the Runza mini-chain of restaurants, is based on an old-time recipe.  Dough filled with seasoned ground beef and cheese and jalapenos…pretty darn good!  (The original, which I will have to return to try, is ground beef and cabbage.) Also, who can argue with the brilliance of “frings,” a mixture of French fries and onion rings?

--A fun night around the firepit...on one of the few non-rainy, non-cold nights.  Poets can build lovely fires.

--Mostly I’m doing simple cooking for myself, and in this back-to-basics mode, I’m being reminded that perfection of taste can be humble.  One night I had one of the best baked potatoes of my life—cooked exactly the way I like it by which I mean horribly overdone so the skin is a lovely crust with a slab of butter—and for lunch yesterday, the grilled cheese sandwich was elegantly gooey and delightfully buttery.  ( Maybe at this rate I WILL go through the four sticks of butter I bought at the store?)

--The Wheel is a fabulous bar with a good mix of leave-you-alone and so-are-you-from-around-here conversation.  Thursdays are dollar beer nights (in DC, I don’t even think you’re allowed to utter the word “beer” without paying a buck), and I had some fried jalapeno cheese balls that were so satisfying that I find myself dreaming of them.  (This was not on Wellness Wednesday, the day I eat hyper-healthfully!) I don’t really like the phrase “dive bar” because it sounds sort of condescending to me, but if you’re a fan of that word and of the concept, you need to get yourself to The Wheel.  Frankly, though, what I love most about The Wheel is meeting people from around town and getting a glimpse into Nebraska City life.

--I got to hold IN MY OWN HAND a letter written by TOLSTOY—his own hand!—to William Jennings Bryan.  Some Nebraska friends were going through the scary boxes at the back of the scary corner of the scary area where all the scary ancient ancestral clutter had accumulated, and lo and behold!  Tolstoy!  Pretty cool, I must say. And very casual…we were sipping drinks as we passed the letter around.

--I saw wagon traces from a section of the Oregon Trail.

--Nebraska City has a public charging station for electric cars.  Okay, one car at a time, so not cars, but still…I’m impressed. Will I be seeing Ed Begley Jr. at The Wheel one of these Thursdays?

--I’m in love with the Missouri River.  I try every day to walk down to the industrial area where I can stand at the river’s edge and watch the currents and ripples and the water’s fast, flat flow.  On the other side of the river is Iowa—not at all far away.  In fact, there’s a plaque at the post office about slaves who escaped over to Iowa at that point of the river.  The town was once a major port and did a big business in the freighter industry in the 1800s, provisioning wagon trains. Every day when I stare at that river I feel like I’m somewhere different.

--Train whistles in the dark soothe me. The days and night are criss-crossed with train whistles, some lonely, some companionable, each urgent…I like to think of them as I write.

Rejection Letters by Maxwell Perkins

What’s it like to be rejected by legendary Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins?  Here are two examples, both pretty cutting under that veneer…and both offering excellent advice on writing, relevant still today.

[Note: the redacted names and titles are due to the book’s editor, not me; I’m reading Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, edited by John Hall Wheelock, published (by Scribners,natch!) in 1950. I suspect later editions of the letters contained the recipients’ names.]

Jan. 10, 1936

Dear —:

            It is hard to be obliged to tell you that “----”does not seem to us acceptable for publication. The fact that we also feel that it is now unlikely that it can be made acceptable compels us to speak plainly about it.

            We ought to tell you at the outset that we think you are both creating and writing too hurriedly, which is not fair to your considerable talent.  Your novel seems to us to show the consequences of this in both conception and execution.  We were not disturbed by faults apparent in your original rough draft of the first half, because you told us that it was the product of the time you could spare from income-bringing writing in the course of several weeks only, and we felt that they would be taken care of in a more leisurely rewriting. But the faults, we think, are still there, in the second half of the story as well—which we now read for the first time.

            The story still seems superimposed upon its background , and not in any real sense to grow out of it.  Many characters are introduced who do not touch the story.  It is as if you had carefully gone over the local newspaper files of the [eighteen] eighties, made copious notes, and used this background material valiantly, with the result that much of it seems dragged in, and awkwardly handled. Very often, too, your exposition is disproportionate: things really important to the story are set forth briefly and indirectly , whereas some of the local and political detail, of no real consequence in the novel as such, is given the emphasis of exposition by dialogue.

            The fact that we were willing to pay you an advance, provisional upon acceptance, is evidence enough that we believed in your talent. Empathetically, we still do. But we apparently over-estimated your faculty for self-criticism. It seems to us now that you must have written this book when you were only half ready to begin it.

            If you were to rewrite it now, from stem to stern, we don’t think that it would come to life, even though you might succeed in integrating story and background more effectively.  Your right course—unless we are wrong in our opinion of this manuscript—seems to us to be to put it aside, take up one of the other novels in the plan you outlined to us, and then write this entirely anew a few years from now.  If you write another novel, we believe that you ought to put it away, once you have finished it, until the impulse that led you through it has gone quite cold; then take it up again and see if you are ready yourself to accept it.

            All of this gives you brutally less than your due; you have created some sympathetic characters, and done much effective writing.  But we think that your rapid writing for income has got you into an attitude toward your material that you will have to lose….A novel of this kind should come out of long reflection upon the characters and upon the scene, so that the background and the people and the events all, in the end, become part of a true unit. It is a harder kind of novel to do quickly, perhaps, than any other. …

March 6, 1936

Dear —:

            I have read over your “----” several times. I do not think it is successful, but it is very hard to explain to you why, except that it has the technical disadvantage of being told by a character within the story. That always somewhat diminishes the vividness and sense of actuality by removing the reader further from the things recounted. But it is, of course, a method that has been followed by the best writers.* Otherwise, I think the story failed mostly in not giving the reader a keen enough sense of the reality of what happened, so that he is moved in reading.  This has nothing to do with technique, or structure, or anything of the kind, but only in the ability of a writer to feel with intensity himself, and then so express himself as to make the reader feel in that way too.  If this is the case, I do not know of any way of telling a writer how to get the result. Some men can do it by nature, even though in every technical way they write badly. It has been learned by many, too, who did not seem to have it at first, but they had to teach that to themselves entirely, for it is not at all a technical matter.  Many of the very best writers of narrative, such as history, etc., have been unable to succeed with fiction. You write very well, but this story is not successful, in spite of that.

            It is also true that it is hardly the material for a short story, from an editor’s standpoint, but that has nothing to do with its intrinsic interest.

Ever sincerely yours,

*The Great Gatsby, perchance, Maxwell?