One for me, Two for You: Writing Community and Paying it Forward (and Sideways, and ...)

What does it mean to be part of a literary or writing "community"? At every level: it means the world. To have writer friends and acquaintances who have your best interest at heart? Alliances built on the idea of mutually assisting one another as we blunder, write, and make and break our way through this life. My own literary community delivers gifts to me every day. Two very recent examples:

1. The play's the thing: Deborah Lerner Duane and I have been friends for 22 years. She's had a successful corporate, then solo PR career (during which we often collaborated when I too was running a small PR agency), then went on to complete a master's program in a totally unrelated field. Now, she will soon also be a produced playwright,( not once but twice!). Deborah and I have met for breakfast once a month, every month, for many years, a kind of two-person board of directors; we're there to encourage (often push!) one another, cook up strategies, check in on goals, set deadlines, vet plans; keeping each other honest when we say we're going to do something. Over the years, she's helped me get over many self-imposed hurdles, urged me to seek bigger opportunities, agree to do something challenging, and achieve goals. 

Last fall I challenged her to begin entering play festival script contests. We set deadlines. She wrote, entered, won. I am so proud of her, and reminded again of the power of two friends seriously committed to each another's goals. 

Did I mention that I only knew of the existence of 10-minute play competitions because a student of mine in a workshop at The Writers Circle last year was a fledgling playwright who had entered and won a particular competition, and that's how I could recommend it to Deborah – with a link at the ready – that first time we talked about her moving from writing to submitting?

2. From her to me to you, etc.: Last month, Alyssa Martino, a writer completing an MFA at University of New Hampshire, mentioned she was moving to Brooklyn, and maybe we could have a cup of coffee in Manhattan? I asked if she'd be at the ASJA conference (American Society of Journalists and Authors), and sent her the link to the ASJA Education Foundation's annual conference scholarship. You know the rest. She won, and we'll be having that coffee at ASJA next month where I'm on a panel because Candy Schulman, who I met on Facebook through our mutual writing friend Liane Kupferberg Carter, invited me. 

Did I mention I won the first ASJA conference scholarship in 2011, and only because my writing friend Erika Dreifus clued me in?  That I attended my first ASJA-sponsored event 30-odd years ago, because Bill Glavin, my college magazine professor, took the time to recommend it? And at that panel, a freelance writer named Arky Gonzalez, gave me his card and when I moved to Southern California two years later, met me for lunch and shared editorial contacts? Did I mention Alyssa was once a private student of mine? That I was so pleased to write her a letter of recommendation for UNH, where she would study with Meredith Hall, who once lectured at my Stonecoast MFA program? And who took the time to let me interview her the next year?

I have dozens of other such stories. This may sound like I'm tooting my own horn – look at me, I'm such a good literary citizen; but in each case, I was only able to do what I did because another writer had done what he or she did.

Many other people have similarly helped me in small and large ways. When I tweeted about Alyssa, she noted "writers pay it forward."

My goal is to always be paying, and not as often looking to see who pays me. Because sometimes, though only occasionally, that reciprocal payment is withheld. And it stings.

Sometimes, though happily only very occasionally, people I've assumed are part of what I'd thought of as a mutually supportive literary community have let me down. Behaved badly. Just a couple of weeks ago, in fact. When it happened, I briefly considered (hell, I wrote), a rant of a post about it. 

Then, semi-smart 50-plus-year-old human and writer I am, I put that messy, needy draft aside for a while. Yes, it hurt like hell. Then, the moment passed (okay, it took two weeks), and I deleted the draft of that whiny rant. Decided the better approach was to write this post – the one about how much I love helping other writers, and how much I appreciate when another writer helps me.

Onward.

Images: Stage: Flickr/Creative Commons-Justin S. Campbell; Hand: Flickr/Creative Commons-GrowWear; ASJA Conference: ASJA.

Stuff My Writing Students Say, Part 16

"You're kind of cranky. But in a good way."

Last night, the final night of an 11-week memoir and personal essay class, a writer who attended each session (despite complicating situations in her life), said this to me by way of explaining why she'd always turned up. "It's partly because you're a bit of a grouch, in a good/funny way," she said, and she wanted to see what I might grumble about each week. She assured me my crankiness was limited to instances of lazy writing, sloppy editing, and last minute, half-hearted revising, and that otherwise I'm a nice person.

Okay, I'll take that.

Which gave me a chance to reiterate what I say on the first day of every class or workshop, but students tend to forget: I'm not the sort to spend our scarce few hours together telling you how wonderful your precious prose is, how talented and gifted you are, that your every word sparkles. I don't tell writers, or frankly, expect writers to believe, that I love everything about their work, that they are going to get published somewhere wonderful and quite soon, that an essay or chapter is nearly perfect as first submitted.

I don't laud praise all over a manuscript, and then slip in a few small quiet words about something that you may, perhaps, possibly might consider changing just a bit, because, at least in my opinion, and I may be wrong, it could use, you know, just a bit of tweaking.

I developed this philosophy from having been on the other side of the table for years, sitting across from all kinds of writing teachers, workshop leaders, and editors. Long ago I concluded that if I wanted to grow as a writer, praise is lovely but not entirely helpful. And, it's not what I'm paying for, what I'm there for.

If I'm in the student/client chair, I'll take cranky and tough--which I'm fairly sure is mostly another way of saying demanding--over sweet and nice. Mind you, cranky/tough/demanding has to come along with: helpful, resourceful, encouraging. So I may be cranky but I try hard to be all those things, too.

Cranky/tough/demanding works if backed up by precise feedback, and focused, specific editing suggestions; with questions that help/force a writer to re-think, re-imagine, re-see (revise!) their work. So I work hard to do a lot of that.

Cranky/tough/demanding, when coupled with genuine interest in seeing the student writer challenge him/herself, also requires a willingness--in order to push that writer's craft toward growth--to sometimes not be liked. (Kind of sounds like parenting teenagers, huh?)

I'm occasionally, no maybe frequently, not liked by some folks in the early stages of working together. Most of the time, they like me again later on. But not always. That's okay.

My students and clients can think I'm grouchy or a bit of a crank, or tough or demanding, and I don't mind. As long as they also think I'm helping their writing develop, go new places, leap forward.

Growth, development, leaps forward usually aren't the result of patting anyone on the head and telling them how wonderful their work already is. Let's face it, you can get that from Mom, your best friend, your sweetheart.

The teachers, mentors, workshop leaders, and editors I had who were tough, who seriously challenged me, who were daring and smart enough to draw a line through a paragraph of mine and write in the margin "Who cares? Rewrite," are the ones who propelled me to work harder, to revise, rewrite, shred, and start again-- and to raise my own standards. The ones who were sweet and soft left me feeling good for a few hours -- and then very soon after, I felt cheated, out of money and time.

Anyway, I'm not always cranky. Sometimes I do tell students how much I admire their writing, but this typically occurs when writers have gotten through three or six or 16 drafts, and by then are beginning to be a little tougher, a little more demanding too, of their own work. 

When I can see how hard a writer has worked to make each word sparkle, each page shine – and that they've moved on in their writing development, I've been known to say, "This is GOOD."

I could say "great" I suppose. But let's not get carried away.

Read the other 15 installments of  Stuff My Writing Students Say.

Image:  Flickr via Creative Commons / mootown

Guest Blogger Nancy Gerber on A Teacher's Legacy

One cool aspect of teaching online is reaching writers across the country and globe (Mexico, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Australia, and Canada so far). But often, writers enroll who live within a few miles, and when that happens, we have a coffee together when the class ends. That is how Nancy Gerber and I met in real life a few months ago. Nancy is the author of Losing a Life:  A Daughter’s Memoir of Caregiving (2005), which chronicles the aftermath of her father’s massive stroke, and “My Mother’s Keeper” (2010), an illustrated chapbook about her mother’s descent into dementia.  She holds a doctorate in English from Rutgers University and taught English and Women’s Studies at Rutgers-Newark for eight years.

Please Welcome Nancy Gerber. 

I was nine the year I fell in love with poetry. Ellen Lane, my fourth grade teacher at Woodside School, introduced me to the power and beauty of poetic language, a lesson that has stayed with me to this day.

Ellen Lane was a tiny woman, maybe five feet, small framed with curly gray hair and steely eyes behind her wire-rimmed glasses.  She wore starched blouses and sensible shoes. We thought she was ancient and called her Miz Ol’ Lane behind her back, but she was probably in her sixties, not that much older than I am now. Even then, I was uncomfortable with this show of disrespect toward her but I was trying to get in with the popular girls and went along.

Mrs. Lane loved the work of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Carl Sandburg and I think she saw it as her patriotic duty to teach her young charges about the literary contributions of great Americans. I recall her standing in front of a beige laminate desk in our cinderblock classroom, reading with such precision and force that “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” or “I’m Nobody. Who are You?” became etched into my developing brain. 

One of her favorites was Sandburg’s “Primer Lesson.”  She had us memorize it:

"Look out how you use proud words.
When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them back.
They wear long boots, hard boots: they walk off proud; they can’t hear 
you calling ---
Look out how you use proud words."

       The poem contains an important truth for fourth graders fond of name calling, as we were.   Come to think of it, it’s a good lesson for adults, too.

That year I blossomed as a writer. We wrote weekly book reports for Mrs. Lane,  an assignment that encouraged reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. The discipline of writing those essays paid off. That same year, during Jewish Book Month, I won an award from my Hebrew School for a book report I wrote on a biography of Henrietta Szold, founder of the organization Hadassah. The committee chair called my mother to ask if a parent or teacher had helped me, and my mother assured them no, this was my own work. I still have the prize, a copy of The Book of Jewish Knowledge, inscribed: "To Nancy Frankel, 1965, from the Ada L. Goldberg Library of Temple Emanuel, Westwood, New Jersey." 

       That early success in literary criticism and the satisfaction of being recognized as a writer were important early influences that guided me on the path to pursuing a doctorate in English. I wrote a chapter of my dissertation on one of the longer works of Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in poetry.   

I’ve looked for traces of Ellen Lane on the Internet. She must have passed away years ago.  I found a street named for her in River Vale, New Jersey, where she lived and taught, and also a service award in her memory sponsored by the River Vale Fire Department. I think she’d be pleased to know that her legacy as an inspiring poetry teacher lives on.


Note from Lisa:  Nancy suggests that teachers looking for online poetry resources consult 180 Poems a Day, sponsored by the Library of Congress, or the educators section at the Academy of American Poets.

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers, April 13, 2012 Edition

►Stuck in a "creative drought"?  Julia Cameron, beloved advisor to thousands of writers, has tips on "Soldiering Through". (hat tip Michelle O'Neill)

► Ben Yagoda is one of my favorite current-day craft and style gurus, and he has excellent commentary here on the comma.

► Standard submission advice -- to be familiar with (to read!) the publication first – is often frustrating:  how to afford subscriptions, or even single copies, of every journal that might be a good fit?  One literary journal editor discusses why the advice is still solid (and after all, today a writer can study a publication's tone and vibe from their website, online submission guidelines, and (often) posted sample pieces).

► Whoever says the publisher-sponsored book tour is dead (okay, it pretty much is, but still), needs to check out the Atria Great Mystery Bus Tour, now ongoing, with four mystery authors currently traversing some 2,375 miles, stopping at 12 book stores. Check out the video from opening night in Manhattan, and the schedule, at USA Today's Book Buzz blog.

►Shout-outs to two former writing students who work on short personal essays. Lisa Singer recently published one of hers, with a distinctly Baltimore bent, in Eight Stone Press. Alyssa C. Martino's piece, in Author magazine, combines thoughts on writing, inspiration and what she saw in a boy's face on a trip to Target.

► Finally, Hilma Wolitzer's lovely homage to her now-gone writing mentor, Harry Crews. May we all be lucky enough to have that in our literary lives. (via Christina Baker Kline)

Have a great weekend!

Of Writing Advice, One-Liners, and an A Game.

Once I met with a writer who had asked me to evaluate her memoir-in-progress. It was time to return her pages and my report, and over coffee, maybe pass on some tips for moving on. I wanted to convey both encouragement and a realistic idea of the amount and type of work still ahead for her.   

It was mid-morning, and possibly because I had been awake until 2:00 a.m. watching old episodes of Downton Abbey working on another project, I worried that I wasn't saying anything particularly hlepful. But then she told me that something I had mentioned weeks before, just one sentence which I barely remember saying, had already been a big help as she worked on additional material; roughly this: "Your experience itself is not so unique, so just tell the story you can tell." Or something like that. I don't think it's especially brilliant, but I was pleased to have been of help.

This reminded me that so much of the useful, memorable writing advice I've gotten over the years, has come in the form of a one-liner. I can recall one writer I admire telling me, "Nice writing, but what is this really about?" Good advice, coming after several drafts in which I was spending a lot of time trying to write elegant prose, while avoiding writing about anything. 

Another mentor in a workshop once asked me to explain, out loud, something I had made overly obscure and complex on the page, and after I did, she simply said, "Okay. Now write exactly that." One author's offhand remark, tossed out during a panel at a writer's conference on creating the *I* narrator in memoir, has also stayed with me: "Get over yourself; you're not that interesting." Or something like that.

One more I remember was an MFA faculty member who had read a lot of my work, and reacted to a new, lackluster piece I'd written with, "If you settle for your B game, you may not get the A game back." Ouch.  But, she had gotten through, and to this day, I swing for an A game every time. I sometimes strike out, but that's okay; and if I knew more about baseball, I'd find a clever way of saying it's not the home runs that count, but a decent batting average. Or something like that.

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers, January 6, 2012 Edition

On Fridays I post links I like. It's called Friday Fridge Clean-Out because on many Fridays, I concoct a dinner plan for my family by pulling out everything that's been accumulating in my refrigerator that week, choosing the freshest looking stuff, tossing it together, and hope everyone at the table will find something they like. Here, the "fridge" contents come from my Google reader, email inbox, Facebook and Twitter feeds, favorite news and writing sites, blogs I follow, etc.  Enjoy!

►Ever get the feeling, as you're contemplating ideas for personal essays, that you just don't have enough turmoil in your life to compete? Then this hilarious McSweeney's personal essay by a personal essay is for you. (via @ChristinGeall)

►A first time novelist wonders about boundaries, subliminal influences, and creating characters, in connection to her profession as psychotherapist and living a visible life in a small community.

►As a writer, are you easy to contact? Do you understand the link between opportunities and being easy to find, especially online? Chuck Sambuchino – and 100-plus commenters – share some terrific tips.

►Over at her Dollars and Deadlines blog, Kelly James-Enger rounds up eight useful posts from 2011. Some of the posts are round-ups too, so there's plenty to explore on a number of useful topics.

►Ever wonder what your shower curtain has to say?  Apparently Dave Eggers has, and the resulting monologue is printed on -- wait for it -- a shower curtain.

►To mark the one-year anniversary of the publication of her excellent short story collection, Quiet Americans, Erika Dreifus is giving away three copies (print or electronic).

►British novelist Harry Bingham runs a helpful blog for the Writers Workshop in the UK. I liked this guest post he featured about finding mentors, especially this line: "A willingness to listen and learn is just as attractive to a potential mentor as a high level of native talent, perhaps even more so."

►You have until Jan. 13 to enter Gotham Writers' Workshops huge giveaway of more than 63 items – writing books and other products, e-readers and tablets, subscriptions and class tuition.

► Finally, for the writer who has everything, a doll of your favorite author?  (via Diane Lockward's poetry newsletter)

Missing a Writing Mentor: RIP Bill Glavin

When I learned last week that he had died, I had not seen Bill Glavin in about 26 years. I had tried- sort of – to see him about 10 years ago, but the colleague in the office next door to his told me I’d missed him by 20 minutes. I had his home number, but didn’t use it, figuring my one-time college magazine journalism professor would not want to swap tales with me when I had my husband and two young sons in tow. I was wrong of course, he would have, I know, welcomed the whole tribe because he was much more than a teacher – Bill Glavin was a mentor.

Three times I was privileged to sit in Bill’s classroom at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, where for 37 years he taught in the magazine journalism department (part of that as department chair). It’s still sort of astounding to me that, nearly three decades since graduation, when I sit down to write and especially when I edit, so many of the most important aspects of craft at my fingertips were first learned in Bill’s classroom. It’s often his booming voice and incisive advice I hear in my head even now. Plus, he was riotously funny, a rare and wonderful commodity in any teacher.

Bill was still in his 30s, a relatively new face at Newhouse in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and, though he’d worked for more than a dozen years by then in newspaper and magazines, he was still closer in age to his students than most of the other faculty. This kept things interesting in the classroom, where Bill strove to recreate real-world journalism scenarios for the wannabe feature writers and magazine editors he taught. But he did so with a twist.

At the time a major country music fan, Bill once assigned us to fact check, restructure, line edit, copy edit, lay out, and write headlines and subheads for a disorganized piece about singer Willie Nelson. The Willie Nelson who was Bill’s idol.

He must have written the piece himself and then dismantled it, because even in its chopped up form, it was loaded with so much obscure information about the super star, that the fact-checking portion of the assignment alone sent many into paroxysms. It turned out the information was not so obscure, but buried under the more well-known prattle that was normally written about Nelson. In those pre-Internet days, however, that much fact-checking research meant dozens of hours, and not only in the library, but also in record shops (where we went, two or three at a time, to read every word on the backs of Nelson’s albums), and in one insane afternoon (resulting in a sobering bill), on the phone with assorted secretaries and one confused PR person in Nelson’s manager’s office. Ferreting out the easily confirmed facts from the less-easily-confirmed, and from the apparent untruths Bill had tossed in to challenge us, became a contest as much as an exercise in completeness.

Nelson was a singer I enjoyed but didn’t think much about and yet acing that assignment meant more to me than a lot of other more traditionally "important” college projects. In hindsight I can see that it was one of Bill’s gifts to not only teach the fundamentals of magazine writing and editing, but to mold students into the kind of curious, meticulous, insatiable, probing people who would not only be good at, but be happy, to work with words for the sake of shaping them into stories that in turn are gifts to readers.

Bill was honored as the Meredith Professor of Teaching Excellence—Syracuse University’s highest teaching honor—the first year it was awarded. His office door was forever open, his schedule always flexible enough to handle any student’s urgent question, perceived dilemma, or half-baked idea, and it seems nothing changed since I was a student. He got excited any time a student landed a real-world magazine article assignment, and made himself available as a pre-submission editor, if that’s what the student wanted. When I was about to graduate, students were making the strange transition to computers and word processing, and I recall Bill attacking that with both eager curiosity and a curmudgeonly resistance which I always suspected was a bit of a show. No matter what was happening around Newhouse, in technology, or the media world, when you talked to Bill, it was always about helping students learn how to tell the story.

Later, when I was living in Syracuse training for the horse show circuit and working as a freelance writer, Bill briefly dated a friend of mine, and a group of us each weekend tried out one country music club after another, over the course of one particularly languid summer. To cap off that halcyon time, Bill scored tickets for us all see Nelson perform at the New York State Fair, and while I can’t remember how it transpired, we found ourselves, after the show, in Nelson’s trailer for 10 minutes, sharing a drink and listening to his stories. And while I never knew Bill deeply or for long, it was one of the few times in my life (pre-motherhood), when I was truly, completely, incomprehensibly happy watching someone else grabbing life.

After a few years of full time freelancing (and part time worrying if I’d clear enough for rent AND food that month), I took a more lucrative job in public relations in Manhattan. When I told Bill he sighed a little, but never chastised me for abandoning journalism or my writing goals, and ever the mentor, gave me this advice: Just remember, always find the real stories and tell them with art, honesty and grace. Not always an easy thing to do in PR, but his words stayed with me, even as our contact grew more sporadic and then pretty much ceased.

Twenty years later, when I did return to my writing roots to pursue an MFA in my 40s, I let Bill know and he wrote me the most effusive, supportive email, which of course I failed to print out and is now lost. In the low residency MFA program I attended, one is assigned to work with a single faculty member over the course of a semester, and that faculty member is called, officially, one’s mentor. Bill wasn’t officially my mentor, he was simply my professor, and then later, for a short time, my friend. But I like mentor. When someone taught you, guided you, cared about your life as well as your writing and your career, that’s a mentor, and even if you haven’t spoken to or seen that person in years, you miss him when he’s gone.

Writing, Horses and Mentors on the Rail

I once made a sizable part of my living writing about equestrian sports (so long ago there's nothing to link to), and so when I read that Maryjean Wall retired, it struck a nerve of sorts. Wall was the first full time sportswriter to exclusively cover horse racing. I rarely wrote about racing, instead concentrating on the horse sports like show jumping, three day eventing, dressage, hunter competitions, equitation -- even endurance riding, barrel racing and polo.

I never met Wall, though I had heard of her. But someone not too unlike her was an important mentor to me – Nancy Jaffer, probably the most prominent and skilled writer covering domestic and international equestrian sports today. Decades ago she convinced editors at New Jersey's major newspaper that an occasional horse show column needed to be a permanent fixture in the sports pages -- where it belongs, still under her byline.

Jaffer has covered the equestrian events at the Olympics, World Cup, Pan Am Games and everything in-between, written or co-authored several books on training and equestrian athletes, and has made the leap to web writing look like trotting over a six-inch rail. Nearly 30 years ago, she took me under her wing when I was a college journalism student doing volunteer publicity for a New Jersey horse show, and she was incredibly gracious when about five years later, I landed on the equestrian journalism ladder and we became colleagues of a sort (she already had a secure position at the top rung, and while I left that arena long ago, she still is at the top of her game).

Wall elbowed aside the outdated thought that a racing writer had to be male, and Jaffer trounced the notion that covering horse sports belonged on the society pages. I'm sure in many ways I later benefited from both. So I'm hoping Wall has a wonderful retirement from the daily newspaper grind, and I'm also hoping the equestrian journalists who'll head to Beijing this summer – along with Jaffer – will have some sense of both of their efforts.

Thank you, I suppose, seems in order.