Redux Open Reading Period Sneak Peek & New Story

1.  Redux will have an open reading period, October 8 through October 31.  Guidelines can be found here.  Basically, we’re looking for previously published stories/poems/essays that are not found elsewhere on the internet.

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2.  Check out Nathan Alling Long’s story “Thrown,” just posted on Redux:

His body was stiff from the fall, but the snow had cushioned him from breaking any bones.  He yelled out for Mosby again, and after the horse did not appear, he did what he often did in infrequent encounters with terror.  He thought of the mundane, listing what was certain. “This is snow,” he whispered into the wind.  “My feet are dry and my boots are on tight.”

 

And be sure to read the writing process that led to the story:

“I recall sitting down to write one day and finding myself bored with any image or idea I came up with.  I decided then to write about how one writes a story, seeming from nothing.  I thought of an all white environment, and came up with the cowboy in the snowstorm, akin to a writer lost in the whiteness of a black sheet of paper.”

Read on.

"What good is sitting alone in your room?": Okay, Not a Cabaret, but Upcoming Readings!

Don’t forget to send along your advice for incoming MFA students and anyone taking their first writing workshop:  lesliepietrzyk@gmail.com

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Here’s an eclectic, incomplete list of writing-related events that I’m especially hoping I can get to…some big names here and some personal favorites:

Arts Club of Washington

Meghan O’Rourke ~ September 18

Fall for the Book festival, George Mason University

Davy Rothbart ~ September 26

O.B. Hardison Poetry Series, Folger Shakespeare Library

Eduardo C. Corral ~ September 17

Mark Strand ~ November 19

Billy Collins ~ April 29

 (If you’re a big Billy Collins fan, note that you can get an invite to a private, fund-raising dinner where you can meet him in a smaller environment—and everything I’ve heard indicates that he’s VERY fun to hang out with!  For more info on that: tdavis@folger.edu

Lannan Reading Series, Georgetown University

Orhan Pamuk ~ October 26

Mark Strand ~ November 13

PEN/Faulkner Fiction Series, Folger Shakespeare Library

Jeffrey Eugenides ~ September 24

Chad Harbach & Karen Russell ~ February 5

Geraldine Brooks ~ March 28

Politics & Prose Bookstore

A.M. Homes ~ October 6

Joyce Johnson ~ October 11

E.J. Levy (my former writing group colleague!) ~ October 14

Sherman Alexie ~ October 17

Zadie Smith ~ October 18

Junot Diaz ~ October 22

 (whew...busy month!)

How Much Do You Spend on Literary Contests?

Submission season is almost upon us...the journals open their doors, begging us to send in our work.  As I started thinking ahead to where I might send out some of my new work, I also started wondering about contests.  How much money do I spend on all those fees?  How much is too much?  Should I enter more contests?  What about reading fees?  And--I guess what I really want to know--how much do other writers spend?

Here's a four-question survey, just for fun since I totally avoided taking any classes remotely related to statistics.  But I think it will give us an idea of how much money swirls down the drain (I mean, how much we invest in our art).  Please take a minute to answer.  I'll report on the results later, as well as offer some semi-coherent thoughts about the whole contest scene.

Oh, and please feel free to pass along this survey to other writers.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SJHD7KG

ISO Tips for Surviving MFAs and Workshops

I’m going to write up a “back to school” post about how to make the most out of your MFA and/or workshop experience.  I’d love your suggestions and recommendations.  All genres are welcome, and any aspect of the overall experience.

--What did you wish you knew on your first day that you know now? 

--What was something you started doing (or stopped doing!) partway through the program that led to better results? 

--How on earth does one learn to deal with those egotistical writing teachers?!

--Any suggestions about managing time?

--How did you get through your first critique?

--Money…tips for getting by without going totally broke?

--How to deal with that annoying person in your workshop who knows everything about everything?

--Etc., etc., etc.

Please email your thoughts to me— lesliepietrzyk@gmail.com  – and let me know if you’d like your contribution to be anonymous or, if you don’t mind being attributed, then how (i.e. Jane S., fiction writer; Jane Smith, MFA, State U; a poet from Poughkeepsie).

I can’t promise I’ll use everything, but I’ll try! 

Work in Progress: My 4AM Pep Talk

Often I wake up at 4AM, with a busy, full mind—and never a busy, full mind ready to accomplish useful tasks or write brilliant sentences,  but a busy, full mind that wants to obsess about worries and woes, inventing worries and woes if none are immediately available.  Last night, it was rejection and the writing life.

Since I have a full week ahead where I’m able to focus completely on my writing, I had to combat busy, full mind’s downward spiral.  So here’s my pep talk to myself.  And please remember this was all taking place at 4AM, where tangled analogies make much more sense:

1. My busy, full mind made a suggestion:  Isn’t that latest rejection a sign from the universe that I shouldn’t be writing, that it’s time to give it up?

It’s always easy to jump down this hole, looking for signs and reasons and explanations, that there’s some larger force looking out for us and that everything happens for a reason.  And maybe so.  I mean, really, we don’t KNOW:  we construct a story in our mind to make that assumption true if we want it to be true.

As harsh as it sounds, it is actually liberating to realize that the universe does not care if I write.  Does.  Not.  Care.  Writing is my choice and therefore my responsibility.  I can stop looking for signals, stop trying to interpret whether the fact that my name was misspelled on the rejection “means” something.  I can write or I cannot, and I think I will.  There is something pleasant about anonymity.

2.  My busy, full mind thought back to the Olympics, imagining that other swimmers must be frustrated by someone like Michael Phelps, so dominantly good in the sport.  It’s a sport in which the difference between gold and fourth is fractions of a second (which is shorter than the time I spent typing the word “fractions”). What if, my busy, full mind wondered, you’re just not Michael Phelps?

It took a while to get beyond that one, because it’s so tempting.  I mean, not everyone is Michael Phelps or can be.  The difference that separates him from the rest of the pack seems infinitesimal to a casual viewer of swimming like me, and yet whatever it is that’s different does separate him—over and over and over.  On the other hand…swimming has a definite goal, to touch the same wall first.  Writing has many walls (oh, ain’t that the truth!—but let’s focus on the metaphor of wall = goal).  Someone writing a great mystery novel is in a different event than someone working on a memoir—and you don’t see Michael Phelps in the long-distance events.  

But I decided that the major difference in the writing world is that our walls are arbitrary:  no one really knows where the end of the race is, as we’re swimming through.  It could be a sprint, it could be a marathon.  That wall could show up in front of you at any moment, and Michael Phelps could be in a different part of the pool right then—on lap 2000 to your lap 55…but the wall shows up in front of you:  You wrote a vampire book right when vampire books are taking off!  You meet the editor of a small press on an airplane and she happens to love generational novels about mothers and daughters and you happen to have finished yours!  Your book gets selected for the lead review in the New York Times Book Review!  The wall is right there.

So, I think our walls move around and are arbitrary and maybe we’re all in the same pool, but we’re each swimming our own events.  Let Micheal Phelps do his thing, while you do yours. The wall will show up…as long as you stay in the pool.  Keep swimming.  Tread water if you must, but stay in the pool.

3.  Well, my busy, full mind asked sarcastically, then why in the hell did you get that rejection?

There are lots of reasons.  We all know the possible failures: bad agent, bad match, bad writing, bad timing.

But what came to me in at 4AM is the reminder that what we have—the only thing we have—is the story we must tell, the story that is ours, the story that no one else could possibly have.  Have I been telling that story?

I believe that every writer has one core story—i.e. I’m gay.  My father abandoned me.  I will never belong—and any time we’re not writing that core, deep story is wasted time.  Obviously, a core story is very broad, so you must find the voice and the narrative and the form that will make your core story feel unique while also universal.  For all its wizards and invisibility cloaks, at the core, Harry Potter is a story about a boy coping with the loss of his parents.  (I’m not suggesting that J.K. Rowling’s parents died when she was a kid, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was significant loss somewhere in her life.)

I thought about the death of the TV sitcom, that period of time recently when all the network shows seemed to be unscripted reality shows or hour long crime procedurals and TV people were freaking out.  Then a few sitcoms struggled forth: “Modern Family” came to mind because it’s well-respected and watched by the general public and it’s on ABC, an old-school network.  I’ve watched it from time to time, and at its core, the show is about family love—hardly an original idea;  for example, “The Brady Bunch” or “The Cosby Show” were both about family love—but the writers have taken this old, core idea and found their own way to explore the push and pull of family, their own voice, narrative, and form.  It’s a core story, told in a unique way.

I thought about oysters and pearls.

I thought about my own work.  Which pieces were about my core story? Which weren’t?  Which were published?  Which weren’t?

Find your own true story, and tell the truth.  All of the truth.

It’s definitely possible that I’m wrong about this core story and that I’ll feel totally differently when 4AM next rolls around.  But I can’t believe that Faulkner is wrong:

…the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. (from the Nobel Prize speech)

 

I’m SO ready for my week of writing!

From the Way Back Machine: My Job Interview at The New Yorker

I was interested in this new book, a memoir by a woman who worked as a receptionist at The New Yorker for 21 years, from 1957 to 1978: The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker by Janet Groth.  

I’m always up for the gossipy element:  (All quotations below are from Heller McAlpin’s review in the Washington Post, found here.)

Readers looking for juicy tales of the quirky denizens of West 43rd Street will find a few — including accounts of weekly lunches with blocked writer Joseph Mitchell, and courtship by poet John Berryman, who tried to convince Groth that she would make a good third wife for him. Much of the book, however, concerns her extracurricular rather than professional life, including her many self-destructive affairs seeking a replacement father figure and husband, and her subsequent struggles with the “dumb blond cliche.”

 

And then there’s the evocation of the era:

Ultimately, it’s not her sexual saga but her evocation of the “Mad Men” working environment that makes Groth’s memoir interesting. “The Receptionist” vividly depicts a largely vanished Manhattan in which Ritz Crackers were the foundation of hors d’oeuvres, martinis were the mainstay of lunches, and pliable, overqualified women were stuck in lowly jobs forever.

But ultimately, it’s this bit of information that struck me most:

In her 21 years at the magazine, aside from a brief stint in the art department, she was never promoted. Yet, in that same period, she studied for her doctorate in English, taught composition at Vassar and wrote book reviews for Commonweal. When she finally left, in 1978, it was for a teaching job at the University of Cincinnati. She eventually published several books on Edmund Wilson and became a professor of English at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh.

 

Yikes.  I’m not surprised, but of course I am.  I always want to think better of The New Yorker.    (At least the magazine paid for all her education…and her analysis!) 

Of course, this is only one story of one woman who took one path.  And I know she's the one who chose to stay for all those years. But I think I’m especially interested in all this because way back in my ancient life, I had a job interview at The New Yorker. 

My boyfriend and I took the train up from Washington, where I had recently graduated with my MFA from American University.  I had several interviews in a short span of time:  Random House, The Hudson Review, and—dream job!— The New Yorker!  We stayed with my boyfriend’s friend in a Greenwich Village apartment that I found exotic because the shower was in the kitchen while the  toilet was in a little, locked room down the hall.  The friend shared the three-room place (total: two bedrooms plus the kitchen) with a woman who was a struggling stand-up comic (talk about a hard field for women…I remember her being a little bitter).

I can’t remember what I wore to my interviews, but I’m sure I would scoff at it now…probably some cheap “interview” suit. 

I showed up early for the interview at The New Yorker, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, my head swimming with the excitement of being in The Building.  I’d read and reread Brendan Gill’s Here at the New Yorker and James Thurber’s The Years with Ross, so I knew a little about the layout of the office and the inner workings:  the Fact department, the Fiction department, Mr. Shawn, and so on.

I wish I could remember the name of the man who interviewed me—but it wasn’t anyone I’d heard of (I probably was half-expecting James Thurber or Harold Ross).  We exchanged pleasantries, and I could tell he liked me, or my gung-ho enthusiasm.  Some chit-chat about my many qualifications—my MFA!  The literary journal I had started and worked on in grad school!  Finally—probably to amuse himself—he asked what sort of position I had in mind.

I said, “Well, probably something in the fiction department.  Or maybe in editing.”  I’m sure I expanded upon this theme: I was born to work in The New Yorker fiction department.  Brendan Gill, etc.  My extensive experience starting my literary journal.

He smiled.  Then he said, “We often interview people who seem promising and hold onto their resumes, but it does turn out we actually have a job opening right now.”

I held my breath.

“In the typing pool,” he said.  (I told you this was in my ancient life!  While I personally owned a computer at this time, they hadn’t taken over yet.)

In either the gutsiest or stupidest move of my life, I let my mind race for barely a moment—what would it be like typing memos for the famous Mr. Shawn?—but then I said, “Thank you, but I think I should hold off for something that involves writing or editing.”

I’m sure he smiled again.  I’m sure he told the story to his colleagues and wife.  I’m sure he thought I was silly and young and naïve, and I’m sure I was. 

I wish I could say that the job I took at The Hudson Review was high-powered and important and advanced my career in some significant and exciting way and didn't involve typing.  I also wish I could say that there were never days where I didn’t spend some time regretting my decision:  I could have worked at The New Yorker…I could have slipped a story to Mr. Shawn instead of his typed memo and he would have loved it!...The New Yorker would actually READ my submissions because my cover letter would remind them I had worked there…I would mesmerize the crowd at Bread Loaf with my insider New Yorker gossip!  It’s true that anything could have happened, and surely I would have learned something.

But reading about Janet Groth’s book made me somewhat less regretful.  I would have been a typist.  A girl, expected to smile prettily when the real writers handed over their messy sheaf of paper five minutes before five.

And writing up this little reminiscence—a “casual” in old-time New Yorker parlance—has reminded me that one of the hardest things to learn about being a writer in general and a beginning writer in particular is to always, always take yourself and your art seriously.

My Fall Writer’s Center Classes

I will be teaching two classes at the Writer’s Center this fall.  I’ve led sessions of both of these classes before, and if I do say so, I’ve been very pleased with the results.

The First Pages:  What Makes a Good Beginning?

A One-Night Workshop

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

7PM-10PM

Most writers know that they have to “hook” their reader from the start of the story or novel, but how exactly do we do this? What are the elements that make a great beginning to a story or novel?  You’ll find out in this workshop, as we explore ways to strengthen your opening pages.  Everyone is invited to bring 15 copies of the first two pages of one of their stories/novels/essays/memoirs for some hands-on advice.  For more information, go to www.writer.org and click on “workshops.”

Flex Your Creative Muscles!  A One-Day Workshop

Saturday, October 20, 2012

10AM-4PM (with an hour for lunch)

Spend the afternoon doing a series of intensive, guided exercises designed to shake up your brain and get your creative subconscious working for you.  You can come with a project already in mind and focus your work toward a deeper understanding of that—or you can come as a blank slate (that will quickly fill up!).  Fiction writers and memoirists of all levels are welcome.  Please bring lots of paper and pen/pencil or a computer with a fully charged battery. For more information, go to www.writer.org and click on “workshops.”

You can learn more about other great classes the Writer’s Center is offering:  www.writer.org.