Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers -- July 28, 2017 Edition

> An end of a book review era: Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, steps down.

> At the Brevity blog, Jennifer Lang, on how she conquers the loneliness and isolation of writing alone at home, and is building a writing community post-MFA while living abroad. 

> If you can't get away for weeks, sometimes, you can still claim your own mini writing "residency," as Chloe Yelena Miller did.

> At The Millions, check out the Booker Prize longlist (including four U.S. titles).

> Department of Shameless Self-Promotion: If you are headed to HippoCamp17: Conference for Creative Nonfiction Writers, here's an interview with me about my breakout session, "Submission Strategy: Beyond Wish Lists, Tiers, and Industry Buzz," and my Lightning Round talk, "I'll Take Titles for a Thousand, Alex."  > And over at The Bookends Review, I'm interviewed by poet and anthology editor Carol Smallwood.

Have a great weekend!


Image Flickr/CreativeCommons

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers -- June 2, 2017 Edition

> In case you missed it, do read Susan Shapiro's smart, incisive rebuttal, "Taking It Personally: A Feminist Defense Of The First-Person Essay", at Forward, written in response to Jia Tolentino's piece on the New Yorker's website that declared "The Personal Essay Boom is Over."

> I'm not, like so many of my writing friends and colleagues, in Iceland for the biannual NonFiction Now! Conference, so am periodically checking out the Twitter stream #nfnow17. 

> And I also wasn't at Book Expo in New York City this week, so followed some of the action via #BookExpo and #BEA17. Publisher's Weekly has extensive coverage, too. (Oh, and a NYC tabloid says anti-Trump books were in evidence. True fact!)

> Leslie Pietrzyk has some advice for recent MFA grads, re: keeping in touch with your professors. 

> This past week, I was sad to learn of the passing of Brain Doyle, a remarkable essayist whose work I've long admired. Here is Brevity's round-up/tribute of some of his most memorable passages in their pages. If you've never read his work, go find it! (Start with "Being Brians" because it's fun and unusual.)

> Likewise, we lost Frank Deford, one of the best narrative sports writers, an NPR Morning Edition commentator, and author of a memoir about his daughter's shortened life (from cystic fibrosis)--Alex: The Life of a Child, 1983--at a time when that kind of book was an anomaly. He was one of my early writing idols (I started out writing about sports--ice hockey and equestrian.)

> Recently, as I edited a memoir manuscript for a publisher client that was mostly about the mid- to late-1960s in Haight-Ashbury (as in, it contained plenty of S, D & RnR!), I did a bunch of fact-checking. You can just imagine what my Google and Facebook ad stream looked like after that. I should have been using Incognito mode!

> Finally, do you too have a super duper, always admirable writing process like Hallie Cantor?

Have a great weekend!

Image: Flickr/CreativeCommons--FaceMePls

Beware of what you wish for. (And what you don't.) -- My Teaching Writing Update.

For the past seven years, I've tried to keep this blog filled with tips, advice, and resources that will help writers. For the past few months I've relied heavily on some generous guest post contributors and interview subjects (as well as link round-ups) to do the job. My own contributions dwindled because I was extra-busy. Thanks, readers, for supporting the guest bloggers, and sticking around! At first my busy-ness was all about writing, teaching, and editing in fairly equal portions. But lately, that shifted. I hope you'll indulge me a bit while I explain. Then, the plan is to get back to a more regular posting schedule in September. - Lisa

During my MFA program, I frequently thought (and sometimes said), oh, I'll never teach.

Ahem. 

Toward the end of those two years, a mentor who knew me well predicted, I think you are going to teach. It's clear you want to help other writers.

"Nah," I said. 

Three months later, a local library hired me to teach an adult memoir class and another in freelancing. Within six months, I was teaching creative nonfiction online via small private classes I'd developed. Within 15 months, I was teaching in the continuing education writing program at Rutgers University, and two years after that, I was asked to teach memoir and personal essay writing for a lovely, multiple-location regional organization, The Writers Circle.

In between, I created the *I Should Be Writing!* Boot Camp for writers in any genre (it's now on-demand solo course). Along the way, I developed a monthly coaching option, which brings so many wonderful writers my way.

Now, I'm setting out on new teaching adventures. And, I've been thinking of Barbara Hurd, who like all terrific mentors, sometimes say what their students don't necessarily want to hear. I've also come to understand the power of the MFA community one develops, too.

When Suzanne Strempek Shea, a faculty member from the Stonecoast MFA program I completed, called me about 20 months ago to gauge my interest in joining the faculty of a new all-online, all-nonfiction MFA program in the planning stages for Bay Path College (now Bay Path University), I didn't hesitate. It sounded perfect. 

I said yes, then tried to put it in the back of my mind, tried to temper my excitement. After all, it was nearly two years away, and needed all kinds of approvals and certifications before it could (would?) launch.  

A few days ago—after a summer of syllabus revision, training in the online course management system, and wonderful conference calls with the director and other faculty—I welcomed some 20 students into the two classes I'm teaching in that vibrant new MFA program.

Once the students began checking in, I realized that I was right where I wanted to be.

But there's more to the teaching story.

In April of this year, the Rutgers program was shut down; sad, but I'd had a good run there.

I live about one mile from Montclair State University. I've used the library there, attended literary events there. I've signed my kids up for programs there, our family has seen plays and concerts and sporting events on campus. And two years ago, I applied for a teaching job there. I didn't get it.

What I did get – about a month ago – was a call from the writing program director: Was I interested in teaching one section of an undergraduate elective creative nonfiction writing class? 

My plate seemed full already. But then, isn't it always? 

I was a kid who always loved school, longed for the smell of fresh pencils and the feel of new notebook pages. As an undergraduate college student, I jammed my schedule with as many different kinds of writing and literature classes as I could. I remember the feeling of being in those classrooms. I love September and the idea of a new semester. (And I'll be they one day unwittingly contribute to my Stuff My Writing Students Say series!)

So next week, I'll be in that classroom at MSU. I'll be online with my Bay Path students every day. I'll be writing. I'll be sending out the memoir. I'll be editing, and prepping for the fall session at The Writers Circle, and helping to get out the fall issue of Compose Journal.

It's a lot.

It's a little bit of everything I ever and never wished for, and clearly need.

Wish me luck.

Images: Flickr/Creative Commons - Old time teachers desk, Todd Petrie; Scrabble tiles, Denise Krebs; Notebooks, Kristen Nador; 

A Circle of Writing Mentors and Students and More

I love a circle. 

During my time in the Stonecoast MFA program, I was lucky to meet Meredith Hall, whose essays I had read in Creative Nonfiction. She gave a rousing guest lecture that stirred up strong feelings for many of us, about thinking bigger, about being generous with our stories, and bringing everything to the page, not holding back.  

Mostly what I remember is this advice:  Be audacious in what you go after -- and go after a lot. Age doesn't matter! Apply for grants! Seek residencies! Enter contests! Be bold! Why not you?

I went home, bought her memoir, Without A Map, read it in one afternoon. We exchanged friendly emails. I reread her book again slowly, and realized she'd grown up in the same New Hampshire town as my husband's cousin. A few quick emails confirmed that they were once good friends, and Meredith also remembered my sister-in-law, a frequent New Hampshire visitor during their childhoods. I was able to put them all back in touch, and that felt wonderful. 

It would be enough if the circle ended there.  But there's more.

After hearing Meredith at Stonecoast, I began submitting my work more often, and entered my first contest with an essay about visiting my father in the hospital in Las Vegas. It placed second in the Charles Simic Graduate Student Writing Contest, and with the honor came a bit of cash and publication in Barnstorm, the journal edited by the MFA program at University of New Hampshire.

Though energies and enthusiasm sometimes flag, I've kept entering, submitting, applying, and often while doing so, I think of Meredith. I interviewed her for my research thesis, and for an anthology of craft and publishing advice. 

The circle widens.

After I began teaching and coaching writers, I got an email from someone I would get to know as a lovely writer and delightful person. I remember Alyssa Martino's first email because at the moment it arrived, I was waiting for another flight in the Las Vegas airport, where I'd been visiting my ill mother. I was glad for a distraction from my sadness.

Alyssa signed up for an online classes, then to continue working on essays and memoir pieces, and finally to shape and polish her portfolio to accompany applications to MFA programs.

Where does she land but at University of New Hampshire, and in whose class does she find herself? Meredith Hall's. I've had such fun hearing from Alyssa periodically, about how much she's learned from Meredith, and the deep satisfaction she's experiencing developing her writing craft. Tell Meredith hello! I've often written back. Meredith says hi! she's replied.

When I send a newsletter about something I've accomplished, a reply invariably arrives from Meredith:  thinking of you...congratulations...delighted and not surprised...such lovely news. When I look back at craft notes taken during the MFA, she's there too.

Now, Alyssa is working toward graduation, building her own teaching skills, and working on the editorial staff of...Barnstorm. One of her responsibilities is to interview writers for a section called The Writer's Hot Seat. A few months ago, she asked to interview me. 

I'm so pleased the interview is now up at Barnstorm.

I'm tempted to say the circle now feels complete.  

But I know better.

Poetry for Prose Writers -- Get Your Regular Dose

Until about 8 years ago, contemporary poetry seemed alien to me; in some vague way, I used to think either I was too unimaginative to understand it, or those who wrote it were uninterested in having anyone who is not also a modern poet comprehend its meaning.

Then I enrolled in an MFA program and that was the end of that. Even those in the creative nonfiction track like me were rubbing up against poets all the time. Eventually, I sat in on more than the polite number of poetry seminars. I discovered poetry that relies on the narrative line, prose poems, and – biggest head-thumping moment of all – that not only might I like to write some, but that a poem may be the best exercise of all for a prose writer. This came clear to me in a workshop my final week, led by a poet, with an even mix of nonfiction writers and poets around the table.

In the last five years, I've developed the habit of purposefully reading several new poems each week (I try for one each day but don't always manage it). Some stumble into my path, which is easy enough to understand: I now have many poet friends, whose work is regularly getting posted, published, praised, and passed around. I watch for new work by poets whose material I was first exposed to in the MFA program, and later via my expanding circle of (all kinds of) writing colleagues, and try to catch up on their older works too.

Like several mentors and workshop leaders I've studied under, when I began teaching and leading workshops, I adopted the ritual of beginning each session by reading a poem aloud. I ask those gathered (usually all prose writers) for a bit of forbearance, and to first simply listen as I read. Then, I pass around copies and ask someone else to read it aloud again. Sometimes we're lucky to have someone in the room who also writes poetry, and knows far more than I about the art of reading poetry aloud.

Then we talk about it – just for a few minutes. Whatever comes to mind. The language, word choices, images. Rhythm, intent, what's purposely left out. The lyricism, the music. How does it make you feel?

I'm not suggesting to the writers at the table that they write poetry, or mandating that they read more than this one poem each week. Aside from learning to appreciate another form of written art, mostly I do it because the writers who've gathered have typically just arrived from the busyness of their non-writing lives -- jobs, families, chores, traffic, noise, ice or heat or bad news on the car radio -- and I want to create a transition moment, a specific line where we cross from that over-stimulated, fast-spinning world into the land of words, language, art on the page.

I can tell that some folks only tolerate this 3-4 minute interlude; they want to get on to the real business at hand. That's okay. Because once in a while, something else happens, something terrific. Like the other night, in a Memoir & Personal Essay class, when we read Gretchen Marquette's poem,"Ode to a Man in Dress Clothes" (originally published in the Paris Review, though I discovered it republished in Harper's) which has an uncanny resemblance to creative nonfiction. 

After we'd read it twice and talked briefly about the images, the writer's possible invocation of memory; about tone, and how the second half of the poem differs dramatically from the first half in form, pace, and rhythm, one of the woman at the table smiled and reported: Wow. I used to think I didn't like poetry at all. I used to think it was so dense and odd. But I now I like it.

That is all.

Photo: torbakhopper/Flickr Creative Commons

The Good, the Bad, the Uncomfortable: The MFA, Five Years Later

This weekend, while I was doing nothing writerly -- okay, I did take notes for a future essay while in a gorgeous hotel that reminded me of traveling with my parents -- a guest essay of mine was posted on the Stonecoast Community Blog.  

It's my take on what's happened for me, and more importantly, what has not (yet?) happened in the five years since I graduated from the Stonecoast MFA program, and why both matter.

I hope it instigates some thoughtful questions for writers anywhere along the MFA trajectory--before, during, upon completion and several years out.

In part, the post reads:

Some of the mile markers I had originally set for myself upon graduation—maybe overly hopeful, surely overly confident—simply fell away. Others got moved further into the future. Most are in a constant state of revision. Getting from one point to the next was, is, taking longer than I liked. But as one year sloughed into the next, and X hadn’t happened on schedule, I watched myself respond with less of the judgment that is my initial self-critical reflex. Instead: 'Oh, not now? Okay, next year will be fine too. Or the next.'

So, some days, I don’t mind at all.

I’m not lazy or apathetic, but understanding that what seemed so clear to me in 2008 was an illusion, has been freeing, until suddenly, it isn’t. Like one day last month...

You can read the entire post here.

What about you?  Did you complete an MFA program several years ago, and looked back? I'd love to hear, in comments.

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: May 21st Edition

►Real Delia’s Wednesday tips post this week was all about generating ideas, in some not-so-usual ways.

►Wondering if it’s okay to use that image you found online? Getty Images has put up StockPhotoRights, an easy-to-navigate new site to help with that and other questions.

►Who didn’t love Betty White on SNL? Can a writer learn anything from White’s career longevity? This literary agent thinks so.

►Been invited to write a guest blog post? Or wondering if guest blogging might enhance your career and/or book marketing efforts? C.M. Mayo has tips, offered via – what else – a guest post over at Christina Baker Kline’s blog.

►Check out this interview over at HuffPo, with John McNally about his new novel After The Workshop, a satire set against the backdrop of the Iowa Writers Workshop.

►Have you read any of these seven online literary magazines, given a rave review by, of all sites, ModCloth? There were two on the list I hadn’t read checked out before

►And finally: rejection is hard, but these 50 famous rejections seem cruel, at least in retrospect.

Have a great weekend.

Gold in Them Notebooks: Part 14, and -- That's a Wrap.

While reorganizing my office a few months ago, I took a break to flip through the notebooks I filled during my MFA program. Rereading the notes I'd taken at faculty lectures, workshops, panels, visiting writer seminars, and graduating student presentation, I didn't want to stop. There was so much wisdom gleaned from so many talented individuals. I decided to leave the notebooks in a prominent place on my newly-neatened bookshelves, and every week or so, randomly select something to share here on the blog. As the year winds down, I'm concluding the Gold in Them Notebooks series with these random bits of advice I gathered:


• Beware the happy ending.
• When you tell your readers, you are the only one involved in the quest. When you show them, they can participate in the quest along with you. Guess which they'd rather do?
• Memory is the mother of all muses.
• Write about what you cannot shut up about.
• When you write a story, you create a world, whether you plan to or not. So why not do it with intention?
• A sense of humor is a universal need for readers.
• At the pre-writing stage, two thoughts are usually sure signs you are on to a good thing:
1. I'd better write about that because it won't leave me alone. Or, even better: 2. Oh, I could never/should never write about that.
• When looking for prospective agents, always check the author's acknowledgements page in books that you like or that have a similar vibe to your manuscript. Authors almost always thank their agents by name.
• When writing a scene, think about the strip tease. One reveals gradually.


You can read the other 13 parts of the series here.

Gold in Them Notebooks, Part 13. Nothing unlucky here.

In this series, I'm passing on good writing advice which I recorded in notebooks while I was an MFA student.

From a nonfiction workshop:

Narrative is a compendium of modules, not necessarily just a beginning, middle, and end. It's an assembly of parts – scenes, reflection, expository, dialogue; not a chronology. You assemble them as building blocks. When considering your next revision, look for what's not on the page, where are the holes for missing blocks? And figure out, what is my comfortable length for a block – how many words or pages?

- Baron Wormser, former poet laureate of Maine, author of seven books of poetry, a memoir, and a short story collection. Baron also noted that his memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring, was an assemblage of some 80-plus such parts.

Gold in Them Notebooks, Part 12: Scriptwriting Tips for Prose Writers

One of the most spirited visiting writer seminars during my MFA was titled Scriptwriting Techniques, with a subtitle something along the lines of: what prose writers can learn from writing for visual media.

Some of the take-away were these questions to ask, particularly at the revision stage and/or when something seems fundamentally wrong about a piece, but the writer can't put a finger on just what it is:

- Did I avoid the climactic moment? Did I avoid all the chaos it would wreak so that I would not have to try to write my way out from there?
- Have I let my characters do unforgivable, wild, unpredictable things?
- Have I plucked out an ugly duckling (a segment of the piece that may at first seem off) instead of leaving it there and seeing what happens? Seeing if it
turns into a swan?
- Have I shown that all of my characters are flawed in some way? (They should be.)
- Is it very clear what the main character wants?

-Jamie Cat Callan, author of The Writer's Toolbox, and French Women Don't Sleep Alone
You can read the other 11 posts featuring the greatest tips, advice, and inspiration I accumulated in my MFA Notebooks, here.

Gold in Them Notebooks, Part 11. Meredith Hall on What's Missing

Not counting my own writing, I filled eight notebooks over two years while completing an MFA program. They are crammed with great writing tips and insights gleaned from faculty seminars, workshops, graduating student presentations, and visiting writer talks. Feeling nostalgic, I've been wandering through them at random, and posting parts here.

What is not on the page weighs as much, counts as much, matters as, as what is on the page. What you don't include is so important. You can see this very clearly in a segmented (also called a montage or collage) essay, where white space divides and acts as a buffer, and allows you to move between narrative, reflection, and scenes, in the same way as looking through a photo album. There is time to pause and consider before moving on. It seems to me a very organic form for the writer and a very intuitive form for the reader. The key is: no transitions. You can move between times and places, from memory to present, from image to introspection to metaphor. -- Meredith Hall, author of Without A Map, and Memoirist-in-Residence at University of New Hampshire

The first ten posts in the MFA Notebooks series are here.

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for writers, readers, geniuses, and people like that

►Advice, tips, and seminar round-ups from the Writer's Digest's conference, The Business of Getting Published, held last weekend in New York City, are gathered here.

►Contemplating a city without free public libraries is terrible enough. And somehow, that city being Philadelphia, historic home to many publishing initiatives, it was even worse to consider. Massive budget shortfalls in the Pennsylvania state budget meant this was slated to occur on October 2, but fortunately letters, pressure, and special legislation eventually prevailed.

►In case you're not caught up with the week's news, the MacArthur Foundation announced its 2009 list of Genius Grant recipients – individuals from various disciplines each receive half a million bucks, no strings attached, just to continue being creative in their respective fields. Literary names include Edwidge Danticat, Deborah Eisenberg, and Heather McHugh.

►I'm happy to know that The New Yorker is going to be exempt from the mandate apparently issued this week to all other Conde Nast magazines to cut expenses by 25 %. I'm a fan of TNY, and want to see it thrive. And I understand that most literary endeavors need funding not tied to profits to survive. Still, I keep hoping someone – and the folks at CN seem massively qualified – will one day work out a way to both support literature in a mass-market publication and be fiscally successful, too. Meanwhile, Go Remnick!

►Speaking of magazines, Web Designers Depot compiled some of the most controversial magazine covers of all time. Agree with the choices? [update: broken link here has been fixed.]

►Attention MFA students, alumni and faculty: What do you think MFA students should expect (demand?) from a program? Erika Dreifus is collecting opinions about this over at her Practicing Writing blog.

►Shelf Awareness bills itself as "daily enlightenment for the book trade." I'd say it's an interesting destination for anyone interested in books, period. My favorite feature is the daily run down on which authors are slated for TV appearances that day.

►At The Rumpus, in a review of Jill McCorkle's new short story collection, Going Away Shoes, Skip Horack notes: "Writers who are able to make us laugh out loud are often viewed with unjust suspicion, as some readers seem to fear that humor is somehow “unliterary,” that what makes us laugh cannot also be profound. That’s nonsense, of course, and the dark humor contained in these stories testifies to what Shakespeare knew well: that humor has the power to expose as much about our struggles and our pains as it does about our triumphs and our joys."

►I'm a sucker for anything British. Don't know why and no longer care. I just go with it. So I'm enjoying a new blog find for all the reasons any procrastinating activity ought to make one both giddy and guilty. It's written by a British author of young adult novels, and she's long winded, funny, honest, a bit crude, no-nonsense but also whimsical, and loaded with Britishisms some of which I still can't puzzle out. She calls herself "crabbit". Just read her and you'll get that one. Start with the recent post, Why Do I Write At All?"

Have a great weekend. Laugh.

Gold in Them Notebooks: Part 10

In these posts, I offer golden nuggets I heard from faculty members and visiting writers, which I scribbled into notebooks during my MFA program a few years back.

The following tidbits are from the first day of my first residency, and during that wonderful, tortuous session, I wasn't quite as careful to note who said what.

-The story must begin in the first sentence of the first page. Don't clear your throat. -Ground it in specifics before letting metaphors fly.
-Master the rules. Then forget them.
-The main character has to want something that seems somewhat unattainable.
-What's at stake? Is the character going through something difficult and can the reader root for him/her?
-There must be setbacks.
-The hunger to see things in a humorous way is a universal need for readers, even (or especially) in an otherwise sad story.
-- I believe he or she may have been paraphrasing Robert McKee.

The rest of the MFA Notebooks series can be found here.

Gold in Them Notebooks, Part 9

"Gold in Them Notebooks" is a continuing, though sporadic, series of posts, featuring what I find while randomly looking through the notebooks I filled during my MFA program. The rest of the series can be found here.

As part of a seminar titled, "Stay Happily Writing," focused on keeping future MFA grads actively writing, we were urged to:

- List five writing-related goals each for the next month, the next year, and the next five years.
- Speaking as your own inner critic, write out why you won't or can't accomplish these.
- Now, addressing that inner critic, write why and how you will work toward making these goals happen.
- Give yourself three gifts as a writer: Read some good literature every day. Write something every day. Be teachable.
- Write the author flap copy for your first book. For your second book.
- Always be open to new suggestions and ideas -- about your writing, your goals, opportunities, volunteer projects. Try it. You never know.

- Leslea Newman, editor, writing teacher, and author of 50+ books, including children's books, young adult novels, poetry, writing craft, adult novels, essay and short story collections.

Gold in Them Notebooks, Part 7

Lately, I've been finding inspiration in the dog-eared pages of my old MFA notebooks, and sharing with my readers some of the good advice I'm finding there.

From a seminar on story in creative nonfiction:

• The apparent subject lies on the surface, neat and calm. The real story lies underneath. It's very messy and has emotional urgency. Always keep asking yourself, "What's the real story?"
• Some reasons writers often don't get to the real story – shame, fear, laziness, the inner critic, time; not yet understanding the real story; not ready to deal with the real story.
• To uncover the real story, alter the way you look at things. Read other material – read what you love, and see what opens the doors. Be like a bloodhound; keep sniffing around, keep moving; do free writing to find what moves you.
• How to know when it's not there yet: You're bored. You are relying on writing and not on story. It feels dutiful. You are unable to title it. You can't imagine an ideal reading audience for the piece.

--Barbara Hurd, literary nonfiction essayist and mentor extraordinaire

The first six MFA Notebooks posts can be found here.

Writers, I Hereby Submit. And submit. And submit.

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I am a big fan of the submission process and the role it plays in a writer's development, craft, and business. (Even if one's writing is not meant to generate income, I still think of every writer as having a business).

Whether you are submitting completed pieces to literary journals, query letters and manuscript chapters to agents, or queries to obtain article assignments, I believe that having a submission plan, routine, and a healthy attitude toward the process can only be a good thing. Regardless of what stage, phase, or malaise you find yourself in, I think it's a good idea to keep the submission muscle in play.

Well.

I must fess up. It's been a while since I took my own advice. A few months, to be exact. (I know this because I checked my very efficient Excel submission tracking spreadsheet – did I mention you must have one of these?)

The lull had to do with a combination of being in a major push to get to a new stage in my teaching efforts while at the same time being in a stubborn phase of not feeling too confident about the "completed" pieces and ideas in my to-be-submitted pile. Then there were paying clients whose work had to come first. And (non-paying) houseguests. Rudderless kids galumphing about. And rain, rain, rain. Oh, and did I mention the three friends who scored major literary coups recently? Yes, I'm happy for them -- truly, madly, deeply happy. But.

So, late yesterday afternoon, after the house cleared of menfolk headed to a Giants preseason game, I got back on the submission stick. First, I had to face some of my "reasons" for the hiatus.
• Confidence in completed work. The truth is, even after a piece is accepted for publication and after it's published, I'm still not really confident about it. Not really. Not completely. Is any writer?

• Energy targeted in another direction. Spending the time and focused energy on branching out in my teaching efforts is important. (And worthwhile - I'll be teaching one class at a local university this fall, but more about that in a future post.) Still, I want to stay tuned in to students' publishing goals, and to set an example by continuing to chase my own.

• Paychecks vs. possibilities. Yes, paying clients are freelance gold, but continued attention to publication builds my list of "calling cards", keeps me personally aware of the challenges my editing clients face, and of course -- published work (whether well-paid or not) usually leads to other paying work.

• Home office vs. B-&B. Working at home while relatives are staying with me for weeks, all I can really manage is to get to the stuff marked editor's-waiting-for-it / client-wants-it / program-director-needs-it. Shoot me.

• Summer & the living is...different. When they are kicking about the house, my kids are, thankfully, very considerate of my work time/space; they don't ask me to have lunch with them, play against them in a few games of Wii Sports, or discuss the plot of their summer reading books. Those things are all my ideas, and you know what? It's a good trade-off.

• When good things happen to good people. The three writer friends whose recent success I applauded but secretly envy? One won a major contest, another was published in a coveted spot, and the third signed with an agent who sold her book within two weeks. So I asked myself: Is there any real reason to feel that their accomplishments say something negative about my own work? And the answer was, frankly to my own surprise – NO! I had not entered the same contest as my first friend (though I will, next year). I had not submitted anything in three years to the column my second friend was published in (though I could have, and maybe should). And, I am not agent-shopping at the moment (though I may be soon). So my friends' coups should do nothing more than give me hope, right?

Even if my friends' good fortune were in exactly same arenas in which I had also tossed my hat – well, so what? Letting that keep me from pushing on helps no one. What helps is to get back into action.

And so I did, sending my words off on wireless wings.

Gold in Them Notebooks, Part 6

No kidding, I've been paging through notebooks from my MFA days, and randomly posting what I find. The first five in the series are here.

From a workshop on humor writing:

Underwrite.
Ramp up details that are strange.
Bring irony into sharp focus.
Juxtapose.
Let the humor come from the material.
Edit for timing.

Tanya Barrientos, novelist, former Philadelphia Inquirer humor columnist, and NPR essayist

Gold in Them Notebooks, Part 5

The stack of notebooks I'm keeping near my desk this summer are from my MFA days, and I'm enjoying opening them at random and posting what I find.

From a question-and-answer session following a faculty presentation:

•Remember that form and genre is often determined not so much by the writer but
by how the writing is presented to us, how it's marketed to the reader.
•Characters are the symbols which move a story along.
•Commit to a length but leave space for doubt and for accidents (which aren't).
•Think of language as a character too.
•In some cases, theme, style, and structure can carry as much or even more than plot.
- Kazim Ali, poet, novelist and nonfiction writer

You can read the first four installments of the MFA notebooks posts here.

Gold in Them Notebooks, Part 4

Welcome to the fourth in a series of posts on what I find while taking a random cruise through a pile of notebooks from my MFA program.

From a discussion during a nonfiction workshop about writing while feeling stuck:

•Try this: Keep writing this sentence, filling in the blanks anew each time: "Part of me wants _____, but part of me wants _____."
•When you feel you can't write about something, write at it. Write in pieces – individual sentences, paragraphs.
•When you have something (or even if you think you don't) make your margins very wide and print it out, with text running down the center of the page only, so you can write in longhand on the sides of the paper (especially transitions), then…get some scissors and literally cut and paste. See what happens.
•Ask yourself if there is a part of you that is hiding behind the stuff you are not writing.
•Forget about explaining a concept like "forgiveness" – do it with scene, image, moment, emotional clarity.
- Richard Hoffman, memoirist and poet; Writer in Residence, Emerson College.

You can read the first three MFA notebooks posts here.

Gold in Them There Notebooks, Part 2

As I explained yesterday, I'm randomly leafing through all the notebooks I filled during the two years I spent in an MFA program, and posting what I find.

Here, a few gems, in no particular order, from a faculty presentation.

•When writing dialogue, leave out anything the reader can intuit from previous dialogue. Stop before the reader is really ready to leave the scene.
•Change pace.
•Alternate sentence structure.
•Please leave out all the boring details and descriptions of everyday activities, such as "she got into bed," "he got in the car."
•Don't try so hard to explain things. When the writing is good, the reader will be engaged.
•Incongruity is more interesting than symmetry.

– Kelly Link, author of the short story collections, Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen, and winner of Nebula, Hugo, and Small Fantasy Awards