Teri Sloat: Leaving Things Unsaid

A big welcome to our February featured author, Teri Sloat.

First let me introduce myself as a writer and illustrator of picture books because that is what I am most often known as. My husband and I lived in Alaskan villages and Bethel from 1970 to 1982, and I was part of the Bethel Bi-lingual Center from its inception as a writer, illustrator, etc. I re-wrote and illustrated THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE (now back in print), THE HUNGRY GIANT OF THE TUNDRA, wrote BERRY MAGIC with Betty Huffmon, and illustrated Barb Winslow’s DANCE ON A SEALSKIN. I have many other books out now, but from those stories, as well as continued work in the villages, I am always facing how differently stories are told in the villages compared to how they are presented in the Western commercial market of the printed book. You can learn more at http://www.terisloat.com/ and more about my fine art and thoughts at www.terisloat.blogspot.com.

I have been reading Stephen Sondheim’s latest book, LOOK I MADE A HAT! Years ago, while writing my one and only jazz and blues musical, I fell in love with Stephen Sondheim’s work. So when his second book, LOOK I MADE A HAT! came out, I grabbed it off the shelf. While talking about his plays and lyric writing, he states, “Some things should remain mysterious...just beyond our understanding- a secret.” His words immediately took me to both the frustration and the enchantment of Alaska’s Native dances and folklore.....a grandmother who sees through the eye of her needle, children riding home on the back of a crane, a woman turning into stone.

Stories told out loud, in a song or dance often leave things unsaid or dropped at the end, making space for the listener fill in with their own half of the story ...to become a participant in the story. Much like playwrights, our job as writers and artists is to create a world where the reader or viewer can suspend their disbeliefs and enter the story with our own experiences.

When I first started listening to Yup’ik stories, I felt like something was missing...an ending, a form, a predictable pattern like we find in Western stories, but I soon realized the stories stayed in my memory because there was room for me to add my own thoughts. I live in California now, but years of living on the YK Delta, working with bilingual programs, and oral storytellers has given me an ever- changing idea of what makes a good story. Alaska continues to be a place to return to for great journeys of the imagination.

Lately I have been working off and on in villages with people who are collecting oral stories to put into written form for the first time. It is amazing how flat a story can fall when put into print. It is like someone sucked the air out of it. There are no hand gestures, no live audience, no eye contact to tell you whether to stretch the story or shrink it a little. And often those who are putting the story into writing are not the storytellers themselves, but those who are the most fluent in English. But most of all, there is a fear that the printed word is more permanent than the spoken word, and that, unlike the oral story, it cannot be written again by a different author in a different way. There is always criticism for areas upriver or downriver that the world is not hearing it the way they would tell it in their village. All of this criticism keeps people from playing with stories in print the way they would play with them in front of an audience.


This has been on my mind in the last few years as I have been creating my own folklore, which often has a background of Northern imagery and reflects my memories of life on the tundra. I wrote many of these stories 30 years ago in the form of poetry, but felt that since I’m not Native, I should not be telling them or turning them into stories. I finally realized with encouragement from the villages, that all folklore starts somewhere.

Like many of the village writers and translators, I share a fear of putting my stories into a publication of any kind, so I began putting them into images for galleries, and let the public either make up their own thoughts about the images or telling them the story and watching their reaction. Even now, a new audience will cause me to tell the story a slightly different way. Most often I am not adding to the story as I change it, but shortening it, leaving things unsaid so I don’t interrupt the dreamlike suspension of disbeliefs as an old woman weaves young cranes into a basket to save them for spring, or a seal falls in love with the beautiful ivory face of the moon, or a reindeer herder who has outlived his time sits out on a rock for the winter, and, with Raven’s help, becomes Snowy Owl.

Leaving things unsaid often allows the universal part of the story to shine through, without becoming clouded with trivia.

Deb: Push-ups and Poses

The limitations that any writer imposes on his work will grow out of the necessities that lie in the material itself - Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners

Isn’t it wonderful, being a writer? The joy! The freedom!  Anywhere, anytime, inspiration may strike.  And we’re ready, with our notepads and laptops and smart phones, ready to spin our ideas in whichever direction they want to go.  That snippet of dialogue, that flash of insight, that exquisite image – from any of these, an entire poem or essay or novel can grow.  We just have to run with it.

But run where?  So many possibilities. So many directions. Freedom, it seems, is also a curse. What is a novel, after all, but what UAA’s David Stevenson once described as a million ways to go wrong?

If brain research is any indicator, poets have the right idea when they work within forms.  While the rest of us run freely, poets quietly and mindfully hold the writer’s equivalent of a yoga pose, enjoying the broader creative perspective that paradoxically comes from constraint.

“We break out of the box by stepping into shackles,” Jonah Lehrer says, citing a study led by Janina Marguc at the University of Amsterdam which shows that obstacles of form force us to think in a broader, more interesting ways. Want to broaden your perception? Open up new ways of thinking? Find the connections between ideas that seem unrelated?  Find a roadblock, or as poets call it, a form.

Calling the brain “a neural tangle of near infinite possibility,” Lehrer explains that without constraints, our brains zero in on what not to notice, and as a result creativity suffers.  “The artificial requirements of the sonnet are just another cognitive obstacle,” he says, “a hurdle that compels the mind to think in a more holistic fashion. Unless poets are stumped by their art, unless they are forced to look beyond the obvious associations, they’ll never invent an original line. They’ll be stuck with clichés and banalities, with predictable adjectives and boring verbs. And this helps explain the stubborn endurance of poetic forms: because poets need to find a rhyming word with exactly three syllables, or an adjective that fits the iambic scheme, they end up uncovering all sorts of unexpected associations.”

This is why writing exercises can be so effective, even for experienced writers.  Cognitive push-ups, mindful poses – these actually nudge us toward originality, not away from it.  Plus the stakes are low, and that never hurts.

Blocked? In a rut? Stuck in the forever-middle?  Indulge in an exercise, ten or fifteen minutes of writing push-ups and poses, and see what creative ways of thinking you unleash. Then as O’Connor suggests, start looking for the limitations imposed by your work as it unfolds.

Try This:  Start by describing a fingernail – its shape, color, size, texture.  Include a metaphor in your description.  Now give this fingernail to a character and write a scene in which you mention the fingernail. The character must start out either angry or happy and by the end of the scene begin to move the other direction without the words angry or happy or their synonyms being used. Also include in the scene an object that has meaning for the character and some dialogue.

Check This Out:  In Now Write!, Sherry Ellis gathers writing exercises from dozens of authors, including Jayne Anne Phillips, Amy Bloom, and Steve Almond.  Point of view, character development, dialogue, plot and pacing, setting and description, craft, and revision are among the topics covered.  There’s also a large selection of generative writing exercises.  Though the emphasis is on fiction, poets and essayists will find good workouts here too.

Deb cross-posts at www.selfmadewriter.blogspot.com. 

Shehla Anjum interviews Julia Scully: Outside Passage

A roadhouse at Taylor, in the isolated Kougarok gold mining area north of Nome is the setting for part of Outside Passage, Julia Scully’s memoir of her turbulent, adventurous childhood in Alaska during the 1940’s. After her father’s suicide in San Francisco and two years spent in orphanages, Julia and her sister re-joined their mother in Alaska where she had gone in a desperate attempt to earn a living. At the roadhouse, 11-year-old Scully served whiskey and danced with the rough, but fatherly gold miners. In spite of sometimes primitive conditions and hardships, she managed to find a unique beauty in the barren surroundings there and in Nome where the family spent their winters.  

After graduating from Nome High School, Scully attended Stanford University and went on to a successful career in publishing, including 20 years as Editor of Modern Photography.

Outside Passage was published to wide critical acclaim, including a full-page lead review in the N.Y. Times Book Review and being named by Amazon.com as one of the top biographies of the year.

What was the impetus to write about your time in Nome, especially after so many decades had passed?

I struggled to write the story of my unusual, traumatic childhood for many years. While I didn’t fully understand the reason for the insistent urge until I had actually written it, I believe the main impetus was to try to make sense of my early experiences by shaping them into a coherent narrative.  

What was your writing process for Outside Passage?

At first, I wondered how I could form a meaningful story when my memories seemed to consist of little more than unconnected fragments.  But, as I tried to express each deeply felt memory, the effort inevitably called up other memories from the same period.  There were many, many tries and rewrites along the way until I was satisfied that I had conveyed the heart of each experience.

Why did you write Outside Passage in the present tense?

I felt it made the story more immediate.

How did your background in photography influence the writing of Outside Passage?

Many people commented that Outside Passage was a very visual book – that the descriptions are like photographs.  That surely is due to my background in photography.

Outside Passage ends with you questioning if you should go back to Nome for a visit. Why didn’t you want to come back?

Once my mother left Nome, I had almost no connections there.  Also, I have never been one to want to re-visit the past (except in the form of writing about it).

In what way did your time in Nome shape what you did later and who you became?

I am sure that my childhood in Nome as well as at Taylor in my mother’s roadhouse shaped my life in many ways.  For one thing, dealing with that rugged existence prepared me for many other kinds of difficulties in life and instilled in me the kind of perseverance and determination that are a hallmark of frontier life.  New York may seem the other end of the world from Nome (and, in most ways, it is) but in coming here alone and facing the competition and odds of making it in the publishing world, those qualities served me well.

Do you have plans to write a follow-up to Outside Passage?

I have written an as yet unpublished memoir.  Not exactly a follow-up to Outside Passage, as it deals with a later period of my life.  And I am currently at work on another memoir dealing with my long career in photographic publishing.

Ela: 49 Writers Weekly Round-up

This week our Writers in the Schools (WITS) program got off to a great start at Kasuun Elementary in Anchorage, where Teeka Ballas, publisher of F Magazine, taught two classes on “Feature Writing” to 6th graders. We’re told the students didn’t want to leave, and that Teeka was mobbed for autographs!

The WITS program continues this month and next at four other elementary schools, each of which will have their own writer visiting for a week to teach a particular topic. Coming up next: Carol Loftfield will teach “Shifting Perspective: Tools for Imaginative Writing” to Grades 1-6 at Turnagain Elementary, and Kelsea Habecker will work on poetry with 6th graders at Kasuun Elementary. More to follow!

The WITS program has been funded by the Anchorage School District Title 1 program and Kasuun Elementary PTA.

Katey Schultz has arrived in Anchorage, where she will be teaching a Submission Workshop for us on Tuesdays, from February 7 through 28. Katey has been traveling around the country for more than two years, participating in writing residencies and teaching the craft to writers of all ages, and her three-year odyssey will end in August 2012. She comes to Anchorage this time from North Carolina by way of the Island Institute in Sitka. Be sure to stop by her Reading and Craft Talk at Metro Books next week, on Wednesday, February 8, 7-8:30pm, to learn more about her current manuscript, “Flashes of War” – a collection of stories involving characters in and around the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

On February 1, Eowyn Ivey’s book launch for The Snow Child at the Colony Inn turned out to be the biggest literary event Palmer has ever seen! Sales were brisk and the Inn was packed with fiction fans seeking her signature, including neighbors from Chickaloon and even her high school teachers. Everyone in the Valley is thrilled with her success, and we wish her well on her upcoming book tour of the United Kingdom.

For a comprehensive calendar of literary events throughout Alaska, visit http://www.alaskalitevents.com/.

Tonight, Friday February 3, 7pm, The Alaska Quarterly Review First Friday Series will feature Jeff Silverman, reading selections from the Fall 2011 edition of the Alaska Quarterly Review. Musical Guest will be the UAA Jazz Combo, including the talents of Arkady Futerman, Chad Meyer, Carlos Alvarez, Andrea Maglinger, Sujin Scott. Brave the cold and come out for the warmth of a cafe among friends! Sponsored by the Alaska Quarterly Review, the AQR First Friday Series brings together creative voices in visual, performing and literary arts. Jitters Cafe,11401 Old Glenn Hwy, Eagle River.

Tonight, Friday February 3, 7pm, the University of Alaska Fairbanks English department presents poet Nicole Stellon O'Donnell as part of the 2011-2012 Midnight Sun Visiting Writer Series. Wood Center Ballroom, UAF Campus.

Don't forget the deadline for the 18th Annual Statewide Poetry Contest sponsored by the Fairbanks Arts Association: it's 6pm, Monday February 6. The purpose of the contest is to encourage, publicize, and reward the writing of high quality poetry. Winners of the contest will be invited to read at a scheduled event in their honor on March 10, 2012 at 5:00pm. Entries will be accepted in

Adult, High School and Middle and Elementary School Categories.

On Thurdsay, February 9, 7.30pm, UAA Student Activities presents Dan Savage in "Savage Love Live." Dan Savage delivers his unique brand of sex advice in the wildly popular "Savage Love," an internationally syndicated column read by millions of people every weeks. Wendy Williamson Auditorium, 2533 Providence Drive, Anchorage.

This event has been known to sell out quickly! Pricing information not available at time of posting round-up: contact events@uaa.alaska.edu or call (907) 786 1219. 

On Thursday, February 9, 6pm, Juneau author Lynn Schooler will discuss the process of writing his first book, The Blue Bear, after the death of his friend, celebrated wildlife photographer Michio Hoshino, and describe the laborious process of turning that memoir into a script for a play. Wilda Marston Theatre, Loussac Library, 3600 Denali St, Anchorage.

Don't forget that the deadline for the 30th Annual Statewide Creative Writing Contest, sponsored by the Anchorage Daily News and UAA, is 5.30pm, Friday February 10th. 

Former CWLA program co-ordinator at UAA Kathleen Tarr has an interview with poet, Linda McCarriston, published in TriQuarterly (online) via Northwestern University:

http://triquarterly.org/interviews/linda-mccarriston-interview. McCarriston teaches poetry in UAA's MFA Program.  In the TriQuarterly interview, McCarriston shares her perspective on teaching poetry, and discusses poetry's often overlooked role as an utterance of public speech and power.

Call for Submissions: Alaska Women Speak is a quarterly journal currently soliciting prose and poetry from Alaskan women. The editorial staff is currently

reviewing submissions of previously unpublished poetry, fiction, book reviews, and essays to include in its upcoming 19th year of publication. Preference for submissions is 1200 words or less. Art is also welcome for cover consideration including photography and other forms of mixed media.

Their spring theme is “ADVENTURES IN FOREIGN LANDS”. Deadline for

submissions is February 15, 2012.

E-mail submissions are preferred and should be sent as text or as a Word attachment via e-mail to: alaskawomenspeak@yahoo.com. Handwritten submissions will also be considered and may be mailed to: Alaska Women Speak, P.O. Box 210045, Anchorage, Alaska 99521-0045

Andromeda: The Agent Game

We’ve all been in writing classes or conferences where some brash, garrulous novice insists on putting the cart before the horse. Let’s call him Bob. Bob has spit out one or several or a dozen unrevised manuscripts, and may be talking about a series, and maybe even a movie spin-off, before he has learned how to control POV, or even how to spell or properly format a manuscript page. (He also has strong ideas about book covers and illustrations and who will be hired to star in the film version adaptation of his seven-book series.)

There will always be people like this, and agents surely must run screaming from them.
As someone teaching a 49 Writers clinic this February 11 on how to find an agent, I was tempted to make lesson #1 “Don’t go looking for, or speaking with, an agent too early.” That’s a good point, applicable to many writers. But it’s not always true, and success in writing and publishing is often about the exceptions.

The more true statement might be that a writer should spend much, much, much more time on craft than on marketing. But at the same time, one should be ready to pitch, to understand the market, and to make connections. Being ready is what turns luck (rare) into earned luck (less rare).

The truth is, people sometimes stumble into bagging an agent. They may think they’re not ready for representation, when in fact they are, or could be, or at least would benefit from early, low-stakes opportunities to pitch and receive professional feedback.

Let’s imagine another writer called Becky. Becky has been writing for years, revising for just as many, does not count her unpublished manuscripts as “books” (because they’re not) and may not even introduce herself at parties as a capital-W “Writer.” If she has a nonfiction project in mind, she may not be ready to commit to it publicly, out loud. She prefers to toil in private. Her house is filled with boxes of notes, outlines, and partial drafts. She may have traveled in order to do research. Maybe she has kept a blog detailing her trips or her research. Maybe she has earned a small grant. Sure, she has written several articles that received good feedback, but she isn’t going to brag about that.

Bob is not ready for an agent. Becky might be.

Here are two stories of Alaskans who got their first agents, almost by accident. They were not quite ready, but they got ready quickly. An opportunity came into view and they pounced.
Eowyn Ivey, whose much-talked-about debut novel, The Snow Child, was released on Feb.1, attended the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference several years ago. She wasn’t planning to pitch her novel but then the opportunity presented itself, and Eowyn’s mother Julie, also a writer, added some nudging encouragement. The agent, Jeff Kleinman, liked what he heard of Eowyn’s concept and asked to read her work. This wasn’t part of her fantasy, and she hadn’t brought the manuscript. She had to contact her husband back in the Mat-Su Valley, and get him to assemble a hundred pages to get into Kleinman’s hands quickly. By the next day, this top agent had read the work and liked it. The rest is history.

My own story is similar. Ten years ago, I attended a conference in Aspen, Colorado, and signed up for a 15-minute meet-the-agent session. The conference provided a choice of agents, and I had heard conference participants, including some top editors, buzzing about the intelligence and salesmanship of one particular agent present. Like Eowyn, I wasn’t actually expecting to sell anything. I had fifteen pages of a new novel on hand, but not the whole thing. Still, I figured it would be a good learning opportunity. I planned not to oversell myself, and to listen as much as I talked. I knew it couldn’t hurt to practice quelling the nervous butterflies in my stomach, and I thought this pitch session would teach me what I could do better the next time around, when it really counted.

Much to my surprise, the agent really liked those fifteen pages, as well as the entire novel concept, which—a surprise even to myself-- I was ready to discuss with conviction. She asked for the rest. I didn’t have the rest. But I promised to get another few hundred pages to her if she gave me six months. I expected her to forget about me entirely, but she didn’t. In December of that year, I sent her the first third of the novel, and we signed a contract for representation. I didn’t finish writing The Spanish Bow for another two years. I wrote without any stars in my eyes, because the agent had warned me how hard it is to sell any novel. But when I did finish the novel, she sold it.

It is important, and commendable, to be realistic. It is also necessary to dream. Learning about agents and markets can be a motivating factor. You may not be ready for an agent, or you may be, or perhaps you want to be ready a year from now.

Two resources:

One, I am teaching a three-hour clinic about agents on Feb. 11. For the next week, registrants will have the option of submitting agent query letters to me. We’ll critique those letters together, in the class. If you don’t know what a query letter is, that and more will be explained in the clinic as well.

Two, this year’s Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference, from June 8 to 12 in Homer, will feature 15-minute opportunities to talk with national caliber agent Jim Rutman. Maybe you’re ready to talk to Rutman directly. If so, do some homework. Learn his tastes, including who and what he represents. Read this great (long!) interview/roundtable in Poets and Writers.

Maybe you’re not ready for a face-to-face. That’s fair. But get ready to learn this June, so that you’re ready to pitch the next agent who flies up to Alaska. Attend Rutman’s talk, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” the description for which reads: “Gain a sense of the consideration process work goes through, in the hope of demystifying the opaque-seeming process that takes place in shadowy New York. How do agents evaluate the material that comes their way?”

There will be other great opportunities at the conference as well, including a chance to hear editors and at least one agent critique participants’ “first pages,” and other seminars, including one by our own Don Rearden about how to prepare for and deal with “the end times,”a.k.a. rejection. Knowing Don, he’ll deliver good advice along with much-need humor and inspiration.

Best of earned luck to you.

Vivian Faith Prescott: Blogging Alaska Style

I'm a blogger and it's likely that you're a blogger too. I have two blogs; one that focuses on writing for children and teens, Pocketful of Charms, and another about the human relationship to the landscape called Planet Alaska. But if you're not a blogger and you've been thinking about starting one then I have some tips for you. Be warned, though, blogging and visiting other blogs shouldn't distract you from your writing time (unless, of course, your blog is the only place you'll write).

Here are 10 tips for those who're considering a blog:

1. Think of a tagline/subtitle to your blog's title: Who are you? What are you blogging about? (What is your platform?)

Are you a frazzled mom blogging about homeschooling four children?

Are you a fisherman with a back injury blogging about changing careers?

Are you a writer in Southeast Alaska setting out to learn beadwork?

2. Decide how often you are going to post: be realistic.

3. Keep it short (I recommend around 500 words).

4. Make sure you spell check.

5. Add two photos (I love photos).

6. Add links to your work or other references; maybe a video or audio link.

7. Enable the comments box (I don't particularly like it when I can't say "Hi!").

8. Invite guest bloggers either to guest post or for an interview.

The advantage of having guest bloggers is that they'll invite six cousins, their mother and a neighbor to read their post and you might gain a few more followers. Plus, having a guest blogger means that you can slack off for a week or two.

9. Link your blog to Facebook, Twitter, and other networks. Remind people to check in on your new blogpost.

10. Be mindful of what you write. Someone is always reading it.

Personally, I love Alaskan bloggers. Throw in a reference to a moose, smoked fish, or an ice floe and you have an Alaskan blogger. Am I stereotyping? Maybe. All right I am. Some of my favorite blogs are Ishmael Hope's Alaska Native Storyteller and Tele Aadsen's Hooked: One Woman at Sea Trolling for the Truth. Now that's brilliant: salmon fishing and truth. We all knew they were connected.

I also visit author Heather Lende in Haines. Her posts are short and sweet and there might be a mention or photo of a moose. Alaskan writer and language arts teacher Samantha Davis blogs about middle grade and YA books at The Infinite Booklist. Poet Erin Coughlin Hollowell blogs at Being Poetry: Looking at life through the window of poetry. Multi-talented Monica Devine is blogging at Between Two Rivers: Writing, Art, Nature, Photography. And of course, I visit 49 Writers.

So what are you waiting for? The year is still new. Writer and mountain traveler David Stevenson says, "The fact that I don't really know what a blog is apparently doesn't disqualify me from 'having' one." So go ahead, add a photo of a moose, talk about a spectacular northern lights display; shamelessly display a photo of yourself cleaning salmon or comparing the size of your foot to a brown bear's footprint. Blog on!

Thanks for reading my featured writer posts on 49 Writers. So far we've discussed writing rituals, keeping your notebook handy, reading Alaskan writers, and blogging. It's been great way to start out the New Year and I hope I've inspired you. Happy Writing!

*If you have a great blog then please respond to this blogpost and let readers know.

Deb: The Big Picture

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. 

 ~Hannah Arendt

A dozen years had passed since my first novel came out, and for the benefit of a group of students I was launching into my spiel of how the book came to be, a preemptive response to the inevitable question of where writers get their ideas.  A nice little narrative: how a bush pilot dropped me on a tundra airstrip, how at the school there was a boy who was angry, how I created a fictional angry boy for a story and then wrote the book around the story, to tell what happened before and after the boy falls through the ice.  In describing the real-life boy, I recalled for my audience a time when he and one of the teachers had chased each other around a table in the classroom. 

Then I read as I often do from the part where the boy nearly dies, where he breaks through a frozen lake and barely gets out and then gets lost. I read the words I’d written, revised, and proofed who knows how many times, and I did a double-take.  He found himself back where he had started, at the gaping hole in the lake ice, an angry circle that mirrored the angry circle he’d trod in the snow.  

Running circles around a classroom table. The angry circle in the ice.  How had I missed that connection all these years?

A handy example, now that the “duh” moment finally presented itself, of how the subconscious works, how a real-life image wiggles its way into a narrative.  But also an opportunity lost, because had I been paying better attention, I might have done more with the circle motif.  It might have shown me new ways of thinking about my novel. It might have led to more depth, to a richer and fuller big picture.

Letimotiv, or theme, is one of six areas of macro-editing noted by author Susan Bell in The Artful Edit.  Micro-editing, at the word and sentence level, is where we typically gravitate when it’s time to revise.  Micro-editing is tidy.  You look at small chunks. There are rules. Macro-editing – concern with the “big picture” - is tougher.  The big picture is hard to see, and it’s messy.

Of the six macro-editing concerns Bell identifies, leitmotiv or theme is by definition one of the toughest to nail down.  “A theme is not a message,” she says. “It is an idea written in invisible ink on the backside of your text…A leitmotiv should not speak so much as resonate.” 

At its best, the big picture is discovered, not imposed.  When I began expanding that tundra adventure story into a novel, I soon saw that it would be about cultural conflict and forgiveness.  Had I paid more attention, had I more consciously macro-edited before whisking it off to my editor, I might have noticed the circle motif, and I more deliberately explored its implications – the spiraling effect of cultural misunderstandings, for instance, or the way blame circles back on the victim. 

The novel works, and it was well-received.  But it could have been more. These days I’m paying better attention.  Hey you. Staring at the screen. This word you keep repeating.  That’s me, your subconscious, trying to get you to see the big picture.

Try This: To explore the big picture in a piece you’ve been writing, take two pages and arbitrarily cut one sentence from every three-sentence block.  Then go back and fill in around what’s left, without replacing any of the material you’ve removed.  From the new two pages, list content words that repeat, either exactly or synonymously.  Then list the themes, images, and atmosphere suggested by the content words.  Use your lists and your slash-and-build revision to extract new thoughts about the big picture. (Adapted from exercises by Anne Harleman and Brian Kitely in Now Write!)

Check This Out: Whether you do it daily or at the end of your full draft or some combination of the two, revision is a crucial part of our process – a part that’s often glossed over because it’s messy and hard to pin down. If you’re going to consult only one book on revision, it should be The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself by Susan Bell. She gives equal treatment to macro- and micro-editing, with insightful commentary built around the work of respected authors and their editors as well as checklists and suggestions for practice. 

Deb cross-posts at www.selfmadewriter.blogspot.com.  

Ela: 49 Writers Weekly Round-up

Last week, several "Resolve to Write" events were held around the State. 

The event held at the Homer Public Library had a particularly lively turnout. Use of blogs was one of many topics discussed, and here are three different takes on the evening from blog posts by writers who were present. Here is Erin Hollowell's, here is Teresa Sundmark's, and here is Ela Harrison Gordon's.

Wondering when 49 Writers will show up in the Valley?  Wait no longer: a workshop called “Writing Your Place” begins February 2.  Sign up today at www.49writingcenter.org under "Classes and Programs." Of course, there are plenty of classes in Anchorage as well; check out the website for details.

Only three days left to apply for a fiction apprenticeship with Matt Roesch!  Check out the details and submit your work sample to apprenticeship@49writingcenter.org by January 31. 

Mark your calendars for our upcoming Reading and Craft talk at Metro Books on February 8, 7-8:30pm, featuring visiting author and editor Katey Schultz. Katey’s current manuscript “Flashes of War” is a collection of stories involving characters in and around the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She will read from this collection, then discuss her process for researching and writing about two countries she has never visited, military and civilian subcultures she is not a part of, and a lifestyle (in a war zone) she has never experienced. A question and answer period and book signing will conclude the evening. Katey will also be teaching a free workshop in Flash Fiction for writers ages 15-18 at Teen Underground on February 17-18.  Registration is required.

For a comprehensive calendar of literary events throughout Alaska, visit http://www.alaskalitevents.com/.

Congrats to Kim Heacox, Marybeth Holleman, and Linda Schandelmeier, all selected as writers in residence at Denali National Park this summer. Congrats as well to Eowyn Ivey, whose newly-released novel The Snow Child is flying off shelves (number one in Norway, Oprah Magazine book pick, and a “Waterstones 11” – one of best debut novels of 2012 in the UK).

The Alaska Quarterly Review First Friday Series will be hosted by Jitters Café (11401 Old Glenn Hwy, Eagle River, AK) on Friday, February 3, 7–8:30 pm.  The featured reader will be Jeff Silverman, reading selections from the Fall 2011 edition of the Alaska Quarterly Review.  Musical Guest will be the UAA Jazz Combo, including the talents of Arkady Futerman, Chad Meyer, Carlos Alvarez, Andrea Maglinger, Sujin Scott.  Brave the cold and come out for the warmth of a café among friends!  Sponsored by the Alaska Quarterly Review, the AQR First Friday Series brings together creative voices in visual, performing and literary arts. 

On Tuesday, January 31, 5.30pm, Juneau Arts and Humanities Council Individual Artist grant recipient Christie Namee Ericksen will talk about her spoken word projects. Juneau Arts and Humanities Council Gallery free and open to all.

On Wednesday, February 1, 4pm, Fireside Books in Palmer presents a release party for Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child at the historic Inn Cafe. This will be a great opportunity to meet the author, pick up your book if preordered, and get it signed.

On Thursday, February 2, 7.30pm, UAA presents Shihan the Poet. Shihan is one of the most dynamic spoken word artists of our generation. National Poetry Slam Champion (2004) and Finalist (2nd in 2001, 5th in 2003 and 3rd in 2005), he has been featured on a variety of media outlets.

UAA Fine Arts 150, 3211 Providence Drive, Anchorage.

Free for UAA students currently enrolled for 6 or more credits. General Public $10. High School Students: $2 at the door only. Call (907) 786 1219 for more information.

Our own Deb Vanasse will be hosting a Writers' Workshop in Bethel this week and next. Join a published author for a short, fun, informal series of workshops on creative writing. Bring your projects, ideas, or just a willingness to explore with words. Thursday/Tuesday/Thursday, February 2, 7, and 9, 7-9pm. Cost $60. Please email vtmalone@alaska.edu right away if you are interested.

Next Friday, February 3, 7pm, poet Nicole Stellon O'Donnell will perform as part of the Midnight Sun Visiting Writer Series, Wood Center Ballroom, UAF Campus.

"Writing in the Dark," an all-day workshop sponsored by the Fairbanks Arts Association, is designed to help generate new material and rejuvenate your writing.  It will be held at the Four Winds Foundation in Fairbanks on Saturday, February 11, 9-4. Poet John Morgan will be leading the workshop this year.  For more information or to sign up, visit the Arts Association website--click on Literary Arts and scroll down.

From Vivian Faith Prescott: Euterpe, the Young Adult imprint of Musa Publishing, is excited to announce its second Quarterly Young Adult Short Story-Writing Contest of 2012. The contest is always open to authors aged 11-21. The theme for the second quarter is "Fantasy." Deadline for submissions is March 1, 2012. Prize is publication of the winning stories by Musa Books. See their website for full details. 

The Fairbanks Arts Association is accepting entries for the 18th Annual Statewide Poetry Contest. Deadline for entries is February 6. Winners will be invited to read at a scheduled event in their honor on March 10, 5pm. Entries accepted in Adult, High School, and Middle and Elementary School Categories. Go to their homepage, and scroll down a little for full details.

The UAA/ADN 30th Annual Statewide Creative Writing Contest is open for entries from Alaska residents. Deadline: Sunday February 12. See the ADN website for full details.

Rich Chiappone recommends this article from Salon.com, on the agony of the male novelist. 

Deb Vanasse shares this link to an interview with Alaska author Clif Bates.

Writing Your Place Workshop: A Guest Post by Douglass Bourne

Robert Finch begins The Primal Place, a collections of personal essays about living on Cape Cod, with the line, “One of the occupational hazards of living in a place like Cape Cod is not always knowing where you are.” Finch goes on to describe disorienting weather conditions ranging from fog to storm, yet the discombobulation mostly comes from change. Cape Cod is a place with four seasons, fish and bird migrations, insects infestations, tourist infiltration, and, perhaps most importantly, humans reshaping the land. “Change is the coin of this sandy realm,” Finch writes. 

If you’ve been to the Cape, I’m sure you’ve noticed the changes Finch describes, if not from the seasonal variations then from the diversity of places within a few miles of one another. If I were to re-write Finch’s first line to be appropriate to Alaska, I would only make a slight change: One of the occupational hazards of living in a place like Alaska (or The Valley) is trying outsmart the weather. 

I’m a new year-round resident to Alaska and The Valley and find the weather defeating me time and time again. This is no isolated occurrence to cheechakos like myself. Look in the ditches of the Glenn Highway for plenty of examples. Before I go into further details, let me clarify: I haven’t been caught by a ditch. I grew up Outside, but in a corn-growing state with snow. I’m well traveled. I’ve worked and played in Denali for nearly a decade. I know the difference between foolishness and preparation. 

This is my second Alaskan winter. I had only settled in for a short time when I learned that Wasilla sucks and Palmer blows. A lady at one of the stores in downtown Palmer said we had thirty days with 50 mph winds last winter. I’ve lived in windy places, but no place has ever blown like Palmer last winter.

Despite the prevalence of wind last winter, when I shoveled the driveway, I piled the snow far into the yard to be certain I had plenty of room for more snow storage as the winter continued.  Last winter, those berms never accumulated too much. Two or three days after the storm would arrive, the winds would kick up and blow the snow into the Knik Arm, and the grass would become visible in the yard again.

No point moving the snow too far, if the wind is just going to blow it all away in a couple days, I told myself this year. This winter I have been shoveling as little as possible, expecting the wind to kick up at any moment and blow the snow into the inlet. During the past couple of weeks, my driveway has become an alleyway with chest-high snow berms. I barely had enough room to open my car doors. I could narrowly wedge the car in from the road. I felt like a groundhog driving into my tunnel. Something had to change.

Anticipating the arrival of more snow and not having anywhere to put it, I set out to move one of those chest-high berms. I need room for more accumulation and space to easily maneuver my car into the driveway. I know people with plows. I could have asked them to give the berms a push. I could have even paid them to do it; however, I wouldn’t stand for such a thing. I created the problem, so I was going to solve the problem. 

It might sound strange, but I saw moving the snow berm as an opportunity for solar power to reign over oil power. The sun grew the salad for my supper. The sun grew the grains for my hearty crockpot chicken. Who needs oil to move a berm when I have calories and time?

Moving a snow berm is much like moving a hole in soil, as assignment my Grandfather gave me when I was a child with too much energy. It may be good exercise, but it feels like unnecessary exercise. If the hole were in the right place the first time, it would not have to be moved. If the berm were in the right place . . . .

I moved that berm with my shovel. Afterwards I felt satisfied and proud. While shoveling I also decided that by next winter I want to have a four-wheeler with a plow or a neighborhood kid with enthusiastic shoveling skills. Moving the berm was a miserable experience I never want to repeat.

We all have these minor misfortunes or miscalculations from time to time. During our teenage years, the adults tell us that misfortune is part of growing up. When it occurs during adulthood, we like to think it is all part of understanding the place we live in.  These events and how we describe them say much about who we are. These events say much about how Palmer doesn’t blow this year.

Most importantly to us writers, these events come in layers. We have the obvious physical action like moving snow. But there is always more to the story: why and how was the snow moved? What does moving snow via “solar power” say about living in The Valley, Alaska, or the world for that matter? Taking advantage of these moments is our job as place writers.

Just being Alaskan allows us to describe an interesting world for our readers. For a few years, I summered in Denali and attended graduate school near my hometown in rural Illinois. Hundreds of people asked, “What is it like to see a glacier?” 

I was raised among miles of cornfields and since living here not one person has asked, “What is it like to see a cornfield?” Granted glaciers and cornfields are very different things, and I would argue both are equally beautiful and amazing just in very different ways, but this isn’t the place for that argument.

Alaska is a special place. Trying to write about Alaska can be difficult. Trying to describe any place can be difficult. We have plenty of models at hand, the most famous one being Henry David Thoreau and Walden. Thoreau described his life at Walden Pond and in turn he describe the world of man. We innately think of Thoreau as a nature writer, but take another look at Walden. The first chapter is entitled “Economy.” Ideas and values are just as important to place as plot and action.

Most nature writing has been incorporated into place writing. The nice thing about place writing is that you don’t have to live by a pond or, for that matter, in the wilds of Alaska. The place around you is important, whether it is a suburban neighborhood or a shack in the woods. 

The place-writing course I will be teaching will take place at the Palmer Library during February and March. Check out the 49 Writers website for specific dates. We will be work-shopping your writing, working with a fun method to generate more material, and reading writers you are familiar with and hopefully some new ones for your reading list. I’m still solidifying the readings, but here’s the list so far: Thoreau, Sherry Simpson, John Lane, Robert Finch, Katie Fallon, Tom Montgomery Fate.

I hope you can join me at the place-writing workshop. Regardless of your attendance, try to refrain from attempts at outsmarting the weather. They rarely turn out the way we want them to. If you know a kid in my neighborhood who enjoys shoveling, please send him my way. I have a berm on the other side of the driveway with is name on it. Like Cape Cod, Alaska is ever changing.  Why not write about this great place?

Douglass Bourne will be teaching a 49 Writers workshop Writing Your Place at the Palmer library beginning Feb. 2; registration required.  Douglass has worked as a tour guide in Denali for nearly a decade. Over many winters he earned an MA in from Western Illinois University and followed that with an MFA from University of North Carolina—Wilmington. For a couple years he served as Nonfiction Editor of Ecotone: Reimagining Place. Now he’s the faculty advisor to the undergraduate creative writing magazine, Understory, at UAA and teaches in the English Department. His screenplay won a Sir Edmund Hillary Award at the 2011 Mountain Film Festival. He has an essay forthcoming in Quay.  His poetry and prose have appeared in Cirque; Cold Flashes: Alaska Literary Snapshots; The LBJ: Avian Life, Literary Arts; Tusculum Review; and Pank. His book, Tundra Bum, is making the rounds to publishers.

Vivian Faith Prescott: No Excuses

An ex-cop that I know once said, "Never admit to anything." I'm not sure, though, if he was referring to the cop's or the criminal's perspective. Anyhow, there's no excuse for what I'm about to say: I've never read Andromeda Romano-Lax's The Spanish Bow or Deb Vanasse's Lucy's Dance.

There I admitted it.

I've also never read Seth Kantner's Shopping for Porcupine or John Straley's The Music is What Happens, or Leslie Leyland Field's Surviving the Island of Grace. Shall I go on?

When I entered the low residency program at the University of Alaska Anchorage as a part of their inaugural class, I hadn't read Sherry Simpson, Nancy Lord, Rich Chiappone, Anne Caston, or Derick Burleson. Nope. Nada. Nilch.

Why haven't you? Well, I'm not sure. I could give you an excuse: I'm lazy. I'm poor. I'm busy. I'm preoccupied. I'm lazy. I really don't know.

I'm not saying that I'm not an avid reader. I am. Like Stephen King, I sometimes read fifty books a year. I read Jodi Picoult, James Patterson, Sherman Alexie, John Grisham, and more. I've recently read Water for Elephants, The Help, Sh*t My Dad Says, The Night Circus, and Hunger Games. But where are the Alaskan authors in that mix? Well, that's my New Year's resolution: read as many Alaskan authors as I can and furthermore, to promote Alaskan authors. I want to be well read in Alaskan literature.

Now that I've made my resolution, let me ask if you've read my digital poetry chapbook Slick? Have you read my middle-grade novel Keeper of Directions? Will you read my first full length poetry collection The Hide of My Tongue when it's available next month?

I believe that Alaskan writers have a duty to support and encourage other Alaskan writers. We can do this by reading one another's work. At the beginning of this year I decided to start my daily writing process by reading. Right now I'm reading Don Rearden's Raven's Gift. Yes, it's been hard to put it down and go about my own writing. I want to finish the book in one sitting. But I feel like I'm doing something good for my spirit and I'm reading an Alaskan author.

I challenge you, dear writer, to do the same thing: read Alaskan. Even if you don't read poetry you'll enjoy Derick Burleson's award winning poetry collection Ejo, which chronicles his experience teaching and living in Rwanda prior to the genocide. Even if you don't read non-fiction you'll enjoy Ernestine Hayes's The Blonde Indian. Read poetry. Read a young adult novel or a children's book for fun. Read an Alaskan murder mystery. This year I want you to get out of your reading comfort zone and read a different genre that you write in.

One of the best places to look for Alaskan writers is 49 Writers, and also the newly formed Alaskan Writers Directory started by current Alaska writer laureate Peggy Shumaker.

My list of upcoming reads: Emily Wall's and Jerah Chadwick's poetry; Deb Vanasse's Lucy's Dance; Andromeda Romano-Lax's The Spanish Bow; Heart of the Sound by Marybeth Holleman; and Eowyn Ivey's Snow Child. And that's just the beginning.

At the end of this year I want to be well read in Alaskan literature. Will I have read everything? No way. But I want to be able to have a conversation about Sherry Simpson's The Accidental Explorer and Peggy Shumaker's The Circle of Totems. I want to recommend their books to others.

I'm proud to say that I'm an Alaskan writer and that I'm a part of a growing assemblage of very creative Alaskan authors. Are you reading your fellow Alaskans' books? If not, what's your excuse? Crack open that book or turn on your Kindle or Nook and read.

Vivian Faith Prescott is a fifth generation Alaskan living in Kodiak and Sitka, Alaska. She recently received an MFA from the University of Alaska. Vivian's poetry has appeared in Yellow Medicine Review, Tidal Echoes, Cirque and elsewhere. She's a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and was recently awarded the Jason Wenger Award for Literary Excellence. Vivian's first book of poetry, The Hide of My Tongue, will be published by Plain View Press in the spring of 2012. She also writes young adult and middle-grade fiction under the name L.K. Mitchell. Keeper of Directions, a middle-grade fantasy novel, will be published by Euterpe on January 6th, 2012. She blogs here and here, and she also tweets (@poet_tweet and @planet_alaska).

Deb: Start and Stuck

“We think before the writing, and afterward. But during the writing, we listen.”

Madeleine L’Engle

Lynn Freed had a problem most writers would die for: upon publication of her second book, her editor and agent were clamoring for the next one.  Not a sequel, her agent insisted, but something new, something fresh.

Freed had nothing.  Well, not exactly nothing.  She had a place, a bungalow she had visited as a schoolgirl in South Africa, overlooking the Indian Ocean.  The place still felt real to her, after all the years that had passed, real in the magical way that writers love.  And she had an idea, that in this bungalow a character would find herself truly at home.

So she began, as she describes in her essay “False Starts” (Writers Workshop in a Book: Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction) . She set a woman named Anita on the bungalow’s veranda and wrote a few lovely paragraphs describing how she looked out at the sky and the ocean.  Then she came to a dead stop.  She began again, this time after imagining Anita’s mad sister had been banished to the bungalow.  The mad woman proved a distraction - this Freed discovered when her project again stalled.

As Freed aptly puts it, “Fiction has an odd way of both failing the tentative and resisting hot pursuit.” But she had begun, so she pushed on. She ditched the mad woman and returned to Anita on the veranda, wrote a couple of chapters, grew bold enough even to read them at author events. “Dying to know what happens,” kind readers would say to her afterwards.  “So was I,” Freed admits.

No matter how she began, the story stalled. Two years, and she’d written forty pages.  Four years, and the agent and editor stopped asking. 

Forced to write, students spend a lot of time staring at a blank screen or page, complaining they don’t know how to begin.  But real writers know how to begin.  We set out eagerly, finger to keyboard, pen to page. Then all too often, like Freed, we stall.

We stare at the place we got stuck.  What next? What next? What next? We tweak what we’ve written, twist options around in our brains, and still we get nowhere.  Frustration mounts, circling vulture-like with the pressure to produce something, anything, to get past the stuck point.  The project gets canned, shelved, stuck in a drawer unless like Freed we’re too compulsive or stubborn to let go.

But here’s the thing about stuck points: they’re invariably useful when we work through them, or more precisely, when they force us back to the beginning, not to tweak it but to pull up and out of the stall by forcing the issue of why we started the blasted thing in the first place, because what prompts us to start a story or poem can with irksome fickleness lead us astray. Yet if we dig through and under and around our starting point, be it a place or a voice or a character or an idea, if we allow for the messy mushing together of experience and imagination – composting, Ursula LeGuin calls its – we will find our way through, sometimes at the place we got stuck but more often back at the beginning.

Freed eventually landed at the Bellagio Study Centre in Italy.  Five weeks to write, to work on “a book of fiction,” which was all she could at that point say confidently about her project.  A little mix-up: her computer wouldn’t be available for two weeks.  So she started all over. Completely. She got out her notebook and wrote “Untitled” at the top of the page.  Then, she says, “I had to lie down and sleep for the rest of the day.”

Whether it was the paper and pen or the time that had passed or the easing of external pressure to produce this particular book, the story broke loose.  It turned out to be a sequel after all, Ruth Frank from Freed’s previous book, with a lost cause of a lover and a father she thought had died but hadn’t, a story about place and displacement. The Bungalow ended up a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, beginning not with a woman or a verandah but a victim of murder.

My students hear this often: Writing is a recursive process of discovery.  Stuck points shove us back to where we began. They force us outside the circle to consider how we got there and why. They push us up and out, to try something new.  Posing as failure, stuck points offer hope.

And may we all be as candid as Lynn Freed in sharing our failures, which when we’re writing invariably accumulate faster than our successes.

Try This:  Stuck or not, return to your beginning.  Rewrite it completely, with a place or a scene or a character you hadn’t envisioned.  The idea isn’t to make use of this reworked start (though you might), but rather to see how it illuminates your project.

Check This Out: Writers Workshop in a Book: Squaw ValleyCommunity of Writers on the Art of Fiction, edited by Alan Cheuse and Lisa Alvarez .  This collection of faculty essays convinced me to apply for Squaw Valley, one of the most helpful and delightful weeks I’ve ever spent as a writer.  As Richard Ford says in his introduction to the book, at Squaw they put wonder on display. What better way to teach writing?


Deb cross-posts at www.selfmadewriter.blogspot.com.

Fiction Apprenticeship: A Guest Post by Mattox Roesch

Okay, good. Come in. You’re late but you’re here. Hurry. The class has already started. You can sit over there next to the guy with the orange hat and the homemade nametag. No need to make a nametag, he did that himself and I’m not interested in your name. Oh, and that reminds me, class, please remove all hats. What was that? No, no, there’s not a 49 Writers policy on hats, I just don’t want to spend the next hour staring at the evidence that you’ve been to Wall Drug. Thanks!

Since you were late you need to quickly turn to the first page of your story or novel. And while we’re waiting for you to peel off that cacophony of jackets, I’d like my cyber audience—the folks reading this on the 49 Writers Blog—to please open their current creative projects as well. Open to the first page. Got it? I’m serious. Okay? Is it open? Good. Here we go.

Read the first paragraph of your novel or story as if I were reading over your shoulder. This goes for my cyber audience as well. Yes, I’m serious. And please excuse my breath as I’ve had a lot of coffee this afternoon. If you don’t particularly like me right now because I embarrassed you publicly for coming in late, or because you’re very proud of your vacation through the Midwest, then, well, too bad. Pretend I’m reading it anyway.  

Ready? Okay, read …

------

This frantic, judgmental teacher/editor looking over our shoulder might be far too familiar to some of us. It’s absolutely maddening to write with him intruding. It’s stifling and impossible. While it’s important to edit our drafts with a keen and critical eye, we need that dreamy, right-brained self to add, expand, and rearrange the creative material. When the critic is around, the dreamer clams up. We can’t do it alone.

This is why we let friends and family read our drafts—we are asking them to step in so our editor-self isn’t allowed to completely dominate the process. If that guy were always looking over our shoulder, we would do lots of slashing and burning, but no rebuilding. This is where our mentors come in. They are impartial, experienced, and most importantly, they can reflect the work back to us in ways that we can’t always do on our own: Who are these characters? What do they want? How do the characters and setting and details further the over-arching story?

It is from this perspective that 49 Alaska Writing Center offers you the Fiction Apprenticeship, a one-on-one conversation based on your writing project and your writing goals. If you have a novel manuscript or a handful of stories you’re working on, you might be ready to take the next step—moving someplace between discussing your work with family and submitting it to agents and editors. Over the course of three exchanges, you will receive both line comments/edits/questions to your work, as well as a 3-5 page letter reflecting your piece back to you. The format opens the Writing Center’s doors to the whole state of Alaska (via email and phone) and is modeled after the many low-residency MFA programs throughout the country. The goal of the Fiction Apprenticeship—apart from your specific goals—is to assist you with your project while further equipping you with an arsenal of writing tools so you can move forward with your piece and with your writing talents.

That critical voice will always be around, somewhere, we just need help in dealing with him.

Mattox Roesch's first novel, Sometimes We're Always Real Same-Same, was selected as a semi-finalist for the Cabell First Novelist Award and named one of the best books of 2009 by Booklist and New West. Applications for the 49 Writers Fiction Apprenticeship are due Jan. 31.

His stories have appeared in The Sun, The Missouri Review, Indiana Review, Narrative Magazine, Redivider, AGNI online, and the 2007 Best American Nonrequired Reading. He's received a Pushcart Prize honorable mention, Minnesota State Arts Board grant, a Loft Mentor Series Award, and he was a finalist for a Bush Artist Fellowship.

Born in 1977, he grew up in Minnesota, lived in Minneapolis for ten years and played drums in an indie rock back, designed and peddled skateboards, and founded the T-shirt printing operation Screenarchy. 

Matt received his MFA from Warren Wilson College. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Unalakleet, Alaska.

Ela: 49 Writers Weekly Round-up

Today:  Resolve to Write events, when we gather to share our writing resolve for the new

year.   We’ll kick off the fun with our first-ever Resolve to Write for young writers: join

WYAK hosts F Magazine publisher Teeka Ballas and ASD senior Lauren Heyano for an

informal discussion on how to get started (and stay motivated), how to fine-tune your work,

and how to get your writing into print.  Young writers of all ages are welcome: today,

Friday, January 20, 4-5 pm, Teen Underground, Loussac Library.

The Anchorage event for members and volunteers will be tonight, January 20, at 7 pm.  If you haven’t received your email invitation, contact us at 49writers@gmail.com.  Not a member or volunteer yet?  Visit www.49writingcenter.org to sign up today!  Unfortunately, the Eagle River event has been canceled due to lack of response.

In Homer, the Resolve to Write event (open to all writers) is on January 24 at 6 pm at the

Homer Library; we hear there will be plenty of snacks for those who come straight from

work.

Registration is brisk for our spring term, which begins February 2.  From our “Publish and

Promote” series to plot, poetry, submissions, and more, we’ve got something for everyone.

Make 2012 the year you get serious about writing!  Sign up today.  Our spring line-up includes our first course taught in Palmer, Writing Your Place (begins February 2) and a Fiction Apprenticeship with novelist Mattox Roesch. Open to three participants, the Fiction Apprenticeship is an individualized option for writers who need to dive into greater depth and detail on their work. Interested applicants should send 20 page of a fiction project and a brief statement of goals for their work to apprenticeship@49writingcenter.org by January 31. 

One change to the spring course schedule: Copyright Basics with John McKay will be on

February 18 rather than March 24.

For a comprehensive calendar of literary events throughout Alaska, visit

http://www.alaskalitevents.com/.

Tonight, Friday January 20, 7pm, Ray Troll and Dr Kirk Johnson will be presenting and signing books at Gulliver's Books, 3525 College Rd, Fairbanks. Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway follows paleontologist Johnson and artist Troll as they drive across the American West in search of fossils.

Tomorrow, Saturday January 21, at 10.30am, Jim Fowler will give a presentation on The Art of Book Illustration at the Juneau-Douglas City Museum. Artist, book illustrator, educator, Fowler has illustrated over a dozen children's books. 

F Magazine congratulates the 2012 Scholastic Art and Writing Winners. They will be holding an awards ceremony for the Scholastic (grades 7-12) Art and Writing Gold and Silver Key winners from around the state tomorrow, Saturday, January 21, 4pm,  at Out North Contemporary Art House, 3800 Debarr Rd, Anchorage. The winning art pieces will be on display and the top five writing pieces will be read aloud by local actors. The even will be recorded and broadcast on KACN TV statewide, and streamed on kacntv.com and fhideout.org for later viewing. 

Also, the 10 American Visions and Voices Nominees will be announced at this event. These students will go on to compete nationally for both recognition and scholarship money. The American Visions and Voices Nominees will be published in the April 2012 issue of F Magazine. For more information, contact Teeka Ballas  (907) 244 6252.

On Wednesday, January 25, 5-7pm, at UAA Campus Bookstore, Dawn and Mark Bonfield present "Occupy Anchorage, the US and the World"--Come learn about the principles behind the Occupy movement and why it is a global phenomenon. Free and open to the public. This event is held in honor of Ruth Sheridan and UAA Alaska Civil Rights Month. See www.uaa.alaska.edu/bookstore for more information.

On Thursday, January 26, 7.30pm,  UAA Student Activities presents 2012's MLK Speaker for Civil Rights Month, Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of New York Times bestseller, The Warmth of Other Suns. This book brings to life one of the greatest underreported stories of the 20th Century, a migration that reshaped modern America. Wendy Williamson Auditorium, 3211 Providence Drive, Anchorage.

Andromeda: Keeping (brief!) notes

What an amazing time I had at the writers' conference in Aspen, Colorado in 2002, studying with Ted Conover, a writer I'd admired for years,, who had so much to teach us. About that time, I remember...very little.

And how exciting to have attended the Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference, two times-- or was it three? I know I attended many great lectures and seminars and talks (that fabulous lecture by Eugenides!), about which I remember...very little.

The problem is not that I failed to take notes on these and other literary occasions. In fact, I filled entire notebooks. I wrote so much, in such a hurried and inspired scrawl, that I dare not wade into those messy pages now.

At my MFA program I also fill a notebook each residency. But thanks to the paperwork requirements the MFA enforces--part of each day is spent filling and submitting paperwork, which can seem, on the surface, quite onerous-- I have both less and more than those notebooks. In addition to various other logs and evaluations and contracts, Antioch requires students to submit, a few weeks after each residency, a summary of every residency "learning experience," including seminars, readings, orientations, and the rest. The total summary document can be no more than five pages, which translates into no more than one good paragraph for every class or reading attended. I may take multiple pages of notes per class, but then I have to distill, and that neat, typed, carefully formatted distillation-- and the reconsolidation of memory it allows-- has convinced me that I should have started this habit many, many years ago.

These are the kinds of clean, spare records I have for no other writing conference or literary experience, and not even from my own previous graduate and undergraduate school days. I may have boxes of old folders and files, but no desire whatsoever to go through them. If I had instead, from my past degrees, a handful of pages per semester, maybe 40 or 60 in all, what a gift that would be!

Come to think of it, this very brief summary document could be used even outside formal academic settings. I think of the years I've spent in a writers' group -- nearly two decades now. If I had made myself type up a single summary paragraph per meeting, summarizing what I learned or questioned or thought about or vociferously debated, I might have gained so much more. Ditto for reading groups. How I would love to remember now the gist of those monthly discussions--but only the gist!

As we've said often on this blog, it takes a long time to become a proficient writer, which is why the shortcuts matter.

Will I be disciplined enough to create summary learning documents without an external deadline imposed? Only time will tell. But it's a good idea I wanted to share. With some great writing center classes and talks starting in February, and the writing conference season starting a few months later, this would be a great time for commiting to a new habit. Just remember (I tell myself and anyone inclined to join me): one distilled paragraph only per talk or class....