Teri Sloat: Life is Simply Complicated

Now I’m having a big problem with my present day career;
My ship, she has a rudder, but I don’t know where to steer.
Am I country, pop, or rock n’roll?
I know they are related.
I’ll just let you be the judge,
It’s simply complicated.
Life is complicated with its if’s and and’s and but’s.
It’s alright to be crazy....just don’t let it drive you nuts!

Andromeda sent me some questions after my second blog that hit close to home, so this will be less philosophy and more about combining parts of my career that call for different venues and schedules. Like the song above, my ship often heads in different directions, and I find myself “going with the flow” instead of steering against the current. It often leads to complications but always to good surprises and an interesting trip. The result is often a mixture of unexpected finishes and many projects that “drift.”

Q. Since you both write and do art, how do certain projects unfold? Have you done both things in most of your books?

A. I have given a talk several times at conferences called, WHICH COMES FIRST, THE PICTURE OR THE WORD? For the first fifteen years of my commercial writing career all the projects I worked on were headed for a book...that was my dream, and we were raising kids and putting them through college, so I had to keep my rudder headed straight to sales and marketing. If I found I had an idea that didn’t fit into a picture book, I put it away. If I had a piece of art that told a story, but did not seem headed for book form, I put it away.

But when our last daughter headed for college, I had time to take art lessons and found that I had the same passion for plein air painting and folk art that I had for writing and illustration. My worlds often split as I started having shows and took time away from my writing just to develop my art. But once in a while they came together...a picture like FEEDING TIME is now slowly working its way into a wordless book form. Only after having the picture with me for a while did I realize that the woman in the birdhouse had her own story.

The picture at the top of this post is from a set of large canvases I did for the Boston Children’s Hospital...no words yet, but a series of images of a pair of birds taking a vacation. On its questionable way to becoming a book, it has become an animated android app that you can watch on www.terisloat.blogspot.com. It is waiting for the second half of the story.

After writing JACK AND THE BEANS TALK, which was for theater, I met a duck that I could picture walking on the stage and sounding like Seinfeld’s Kramer. I had been writing dialogues, monologues, etc, for the play and suddenly could hear a monologue...so the play was a time out, but the result was a book. Writing the play with its jazz and blues songs taught me to hear our written language a different way. I wanted to be the illustrator for I’M A DUCK! So I did both for the writing and the illustrator, backed the duck up from being an adult to hatching out and being totally in love with each phase of his life, from hatching to flying to meeting a girl to becoming a dad. (That was the primary teacher in me showing the life cycle of a duck, I’m sure.) The follow-up for the book, which for one brief second I thought might be a sequel, only turned out to be entertainment at conferences. When our kids were all out of the house, we experienced a little “empty-nest” syndrome. So I wrote I’M A DUCK WITH AN EMPTY NEST...sort of the duck’s version of teaching kids to drive and being left behind, then being forced to take a migration vacation with his wife, etc. It is not a book, just something fun to read and share...it’s that reality of packaging again.

Q. What percentage is just the art, and any just writing?

A. Well, this is easy. A picture book is a unique experience for the reader. While the words and images need to add to each other, both the writing and the art need to feel like they are from the same world. My goal is to have a book that transports the reader without interruption into a story. If I feel like I am not the right illustrator for a book...i.e. the FARMER BROWN books needed a looser, more comedic illustration than what I do...I ask that the publisher to find another illustrator, and they have been great about taking suggestions. So, out of twenty something books, about seven are illustrated by someone else, and I am the illustrator for two books by other authors, one of which is DANCE ON A SEALSKIN, by Barbara Winslow. And I am just writing....often for myself until I see what happens to the story. I still write to work out my own thoughts, started two novels that are not finished.

Q. Do you prefer to do both parts, or to work with another writer?

A. If this is like which part do I like the best or which is the easiest for me, the answer is that the writing is always easier. The art takes longer, feels like more of a gamble when it comes to books. I only illustrate for other writers if the subject hits close to home or is just plain fun.

So here is my current list of preferences:

First: art work that is done for pleasure...whether landscapes or folk art. I often ask why it bothers me to put so much time into a book before it sells when it doesn’t bother me to pour endless hours into gallery pieces that may not sell. Single pieces of art are relaxing...different than weaving images together for a story.

I love creating images that tell a folkloric story from my imagination

Second: Writing...and all the research you get to do over the simplest story.

Third: Illustration....because it is the hardest, and because I am terrible at organizing a storyboard and dummy...it is the only part of creating books I am not in love with. I actually love creating the final illustrations.

But the rewards are often reversed...a written and illustrated book is my biggest trophy and connects me to the most people. My folkloric art that is in galleries has a style that is labored over with acrylic and color pencil that takes days, which is the time I spend entertaining myself by making a story I can share on a wall, but not yet in a book.

Q. Is every story or collaboration different? Those of us who only write often puzzle about how to break into the children’s book business.

A. While every story and collaboration is different, there are a few things that help people break into the children’s book business.

Join SCBWI, read their newsletter and go to their regional meetings. Most agents and editors will not look at your manuscript unless you belong. It is where you learn the basics of the business, meet art directors, agents, editors, authors, etc., and often where authors new to the medium get permission to send manuscripts to closed houses.

Read and study endless piles of picture books or chapter books. Criticize them, admire them and look up their creators on the internet and learn their stories. The internet is a wealth of background on how books are made.

If you are an illustrator, take art lessons...a part I avoided way too long. Learn the basics of drawing in general, not just your subject matter, and learn to use a variety of mediums. Your job is to choose the right medium or to perfect a medium that lets us sink into a new world.

As for the Jimmy Buffet song, the part I have to remind myself of often, is that even when I’m not steering my ship, it is headed somewhere, and though I head into other genres, they are all related to storytelling and sharing what I see and feel.

Please share some of the journeys that you have been on, both the drifting and steering.

Thanks to Teri Sloat for being our February featured author. We'll have one more post from her tomorrow. Teri has a show coming up this Friday, March 2, at Stephan Fine Arts in Anchorage.

Deb: The Writer’s Dilemma

Do not hurry, do not rest.

~Goethe

Most of my writing life has been a waste of time. I mean this in the nicest possible way.

An efficiency expert would produce a dismal report on the ratio of a writer’s time expended against her productive output. If money is factored in, the report turns even more dismal. Of the words we write, few survive the revision process, and even fewer make it into print. But then no one said the creative work was efficient. 

Efficiency aside, a common complaint is having no time to write. Years ago, when my children were young and I was teaching fulltime and I couldn’t see how writing and publishing could ever be more than wishful thinking, a colleague wisely advised me to devote ten minutes a day to my dream. Everyone has ten minutes to scribble in a journal, write a line or two of poetry, map a character.

Be consistent with your ten minutes a day, and the effort will becomes its own reward. Soon you’ll find yourself carving out more time to write. Twenty or thirty minutes a day. An hour or two, while the children nap, as Alice Munro used to do. Or Sundays, all day. Plenty of respected writers work fulltime in jobs that have little or nothing to do with their craft, like Bill Streever in his demanding job at BP.

Annie Dillard advises a schedule, saying it “defends from chaos and whim.” What makes up that schedule may come as a bit of a surprise. As one example, Dillard offers American poet Wallace Stevens. Each day Stevens rose at six, read for two hours, and walked an hour to work, where he dictated poems to his secretary. At noon he walked rather than ate. No mention is made of how he spent his afternoons, but after his hour’s walk home and a meal, he would retire to his study and would be in bed by nine.

No sense wasting valuable time pining for a secretary to take our dictation and a study to which we might retire. The point is that Stevens spent a lot of his time not writing but reading, walking, reflecting. Meaningful activities, in the right proportions. It’s not so much how much time we have as how we use it.

Think in terms of these general categories: creation/revision, reflection, immersion, community, and – as a catch-all – money-stuff.  Some might separate creation and revision, but for me they’re inseparable components of the recursive process of discovery. Reflection - composting as Ursula LeGuin calls it – results from quiet, mindful activity like walking or knitting. Immersion includes reading and research, either purposeful or general.  Community involves time spent in the company of other writers, supporting our mutual efforts, in writers groups and organizations like 49 Writers. Money stuff is anything from querying for publication to freelancing to promotion and marketing – even pre-marketing, as in the current trend of encouraging aspiring writers to establish websites and blogs and social media presence.

Given your individual ambitions and interests and stage of development, you might look at your writing activities differently. That’s fine. Once you’ve identified the major components of your writing life, consider what proportion of your valuable time you’d ideally like to devote to each. Reality has to factor in also. I’d love to spend 75% of my time creating and revising and the rest on reflection and immersion, with a little left over for community, money be damned. But lacking the financial resources to hire out the promotion and marketing chores, I have to set aside a quarter of my working time for the money stuff.

The time you devote to each aspect of being a writer is up to you. Be flexible. Purposefulness and creativity are by no means mutually exclusive. Energy and momentum are part of the mix. If your day job demands creative energy, you may need to set aside weekends and vacations for the creative parts of your work. Regarding momentum, I aspire to David Vann’s self-imposed rule: when he’s working on a novel, he schedules nothing else in the mornings, and he works seven days a week till it’s done.

The writing life may be far from efficient, but for successful writers, neither is it haphazard.

Try This: For two weeks, keep a diary of your writing activities: creation, revision, reflection, immersion, community, money stuff. Then tally up the time spent in each area, and compare it against how you’d like to be spending your writing time. Factor in energy and momentum to come up with a schedule to help you become a happier and more productive writer.

Check This Out: Spare and surprising, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life offers plenty to mull over during your reflective moments. It’s a slim, pithy book to reread whenever you need to regain perspective on the crazy lifestyle you’ve chosen.

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

Faces of 49 Writers: Lucian Childs

Until six years ago, I was a dabbler, never taking my writing seriously. Winter of 2005, I got the bug. Bad. When I finished that first (and probably last) novel two years later, I found I had a second job, so engrained had the daily writing schedule become.

To spur me on, I started attending the Saturday morning critique group at Title Wave, took a creative writing course at UAA. Mostly though, it was just me at the kitchen table, early hours each morning, burning through coffee, reams of paper, churning out short stories.

This was fine for a while, but it got lonely. I needed writerly company.

At some point, not sure when, I began hearing about this new group, 49 Writers. I dipped my toes in the water, attended a couple events. I remember thinking, “This group is for real writers, something I’m not,” and just as quickly, “if I’m not a real writer, how about all those hours banging away at the kitchen table? Get over it.”

I dove in, going to the Tutka Bay Writers Retreat in 2010 taught by David Vann. Boy, did that fit the bill: David dismantled works of fiction and in reassembling them gave us a new tool set. I felt like my head was going to explode and I fell all over myself thanking Deb and Andromeda for putting the weekend together, for being the catalyst that brought the community of Alaska writers together.

That community has helped deepen my conviction to write, has provided me with opportunities to hone my craft, and has given me the confidence to put myself forward as a writer. A real one, at that. A happy artifact of all this: two short stories published in literary journals last year, and, I just found out, another soon to be.

When I filled out the volunteer form on the 49 Writers website, I received a response right away. Now I’m up to my eyeballs but happy to be doing my part. I’m maintaining the website and promoting events on Facebook. I’m coordinating the Reading and Craft Talk Series and on the fundraising team for the upcoming Writeathon.

It’s an exciting time at 49 Writers: so much going on, so many opportunities to challenge yourself and to grow. I encourage you to go to the website, become a member, fill out the volunteer form. Dive in. The water’s fine.

Ela: 49 Writers Weekly Round-up

A big thank you to the hundred or so writers and readers who came to this week’s Crosscurrents event to enjoy the on-stage conversation between Alaskan authors Andromeda Romano-Lax and Eowyn Ivey. Andromeda read from her latest novel, The Detour, released earlier in the week, and Eowyn – just back from a book release tour in the United Kingdom – shared some passages from The Snow Child, which is currently at No. 27 on the New York Times Best Sellers list. They then treated the audience to an engaging talk about craft and the writing process.

Our deepest gratitude goes to Andromeda and Eowyn for creating such a memorable evening, to Mark Weber of the Anchorage Museum for arranging the book sales and signings, to the Museum for providing the perfect venue, and to Jeff Oliver for recording the event so others can enjoy it too. The podcast will be available shortly on the 49 Writers website. 

Our next Crosscurrents event takes place on Saturday, April 7 at 7:00 pm. Entitled “Literature in an Age of Moral Depravity,” it will feature short story writer and essayist Steve Almond, whose work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, and local writer David Stevenson, director of the Creative Writing and Literary Arts program at UAA.

This week we have three authors in Anchorage classrooms as part of our Writers in the Schools program. Carol Loftfield is teaching young writers at Turnagain Elementary how to tap into their imaginations; Kelsea Habecker is inspiring young poets at Kasuun Elementary; and Stefanie Tatalias is energizing students to write flash fiction at Rogers Park Elementary. Thanks to the Anchorage School District for the opportunity to go into the schools, which have welcomed our writers warmly.

We are already half-way through our spring schedule of classes for writers but there is still time to sign up for the remaining workshops. Tomorrow, February 24, Cherilynn Stone starts a two-part class on “Building a Strong Presence Using Social Media.” On March 7, Kelsea Habecker begins a four-week series, “Pursuing Poetry: A Course for Intermediate Poets,” and on April 7, Steve Almond offers two classes that are filling up quickly: “Obsessive Writing” and “Funny is the New Deep.”

Kelsea's poetry class is designed for intermediate students, for writers and poets interested in honing their skills in poetry. It  will include both workshop elements (with peer and instructor feedback) and direct instruction on formal poetic elements for developing craft. Contemporary poetry will be read and discussed to foster awareness of current poetic styles. Emphasis will be given to writing process. Students will complete the course with a short portfolio of poems that have been peer-reviewed and critiqued by the instructors. 

Mark your calendars now for the 49 Writers annual Writeathon on Friday, April 13, at 5:30 p.m. at Snow City Café. Plan to write, to pledge, or to help organize. If you’re interested in joining our Writeathon team just email 49Writers@gmail.com. More details about this key fundraiser to follow soon.

Tomorrow, Saturday February 25, 10am, there will be a Writers Critique Group at Title Wave Books, Northern Lights Mall, Anchorage. The group is open to any genre of writing and all levels are welcome. For more information, call Mary at (907) 569 5075.

You're invited to read Martin Luther King Jr's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and gather at Fireside Books in Palmer on Saturday February 25, 4pm to discuss the questions it raises about racial equality then and now.

Also tomorrow, Saturday, February 25, 5-7pm, The UAA Poetry Club will host the fourth of six V.O.I.C.E Youth open mic's in the UAA Student Union Den, as part of UAA Student Union & Commuter Student Service's Winterfest 2012.

Jaystone will be the fourth featured reader, and Ilina Sauceda will

serve as youth co-host for this event. Both have been active members

of the Young Writers Venue Development Committee and Jaystone served

as the youth co-host for our first Youth Open Mic at Indigo Tea Lounge

in November. The Youth Open Mic will be followed by an All Ages Poetry

Slam. Contact Brian Hutton 907 350 4580 for further info.

On Tuesday, February 28, 7pm, the Anchor Park Reading Group will meet at Barnes at Noble to discuss the month's selected book, The Big Short: Inside the Money Machine by Michael Lewis. 200 E. Northern Lights, Anchorage.

Also on Tuesday, February 28 at 7pm, come to the Wilda Marsten Theater, Loussac Library, for Persepolis Jeopardy! Calling all fans of graphic novels, comic books, current events, Iranian history and Persepolis. Teams of 3 (age 15 and up) can sign up at coliver314@gmail.com (space limited). Prizes and support from Alaska Center for the Book.

On Thursday, March 1, 7.30pm. the 7th Annual Shakespeare Polaris Lecture will be delivered by Shakespearean actor Barry Craft. ConocoPhillips Integrated Science Building, UAA. 

The Alaska Quarterly Review First Friday Series will be hosted by Jitters Café (11401 Old Glenn Hwy, Eagle River, AK) on Friday, March 2, 2012, 7-8.30pm.  The featured reader will be Jeff Silverman reading selections from the Fall 2011 edition of the Alaska Quarterly Review.  Musical Guest will Flat Baroque, including recorders, krummhorns, violin, guitar, harpsichord, percussion and vocals.  Sponsored by the Alaska Quarterly Review, the AQR First Friday Series brings together creative voices in visual, performing and literary arts.

The Alaska-based artists/scientists consortium In a Time of Change (ITOC), with several collaborators, is producing a creative project in 2012-13 that focuses on the dynamics of predator/prey interactions, entitled In a Time of Change: Trophic Cascades. Applications are solicited from artists of all disciplines and media. Full application call: http://www.nps.gov/dena/upload/Call-for-Applications-ITOC-Trophic-Cascades-FINALrevised.pdf

Selected artists will participate in a 3-day field workshop in Denali National Park, July 25-27 2012, and other daytrips around Fairbanks. These experiences will provide two-way interaction with scientists expert in predator/prey interactions and trophic cascades in Alaska. There will also be the opportunity for long-term interaction with scientists via ongoing dialogues, exchanges of ideas, and feedback. The field workshop and daytrips will be free, including lodging and food for the Denali workshop, but artists must provide their own transportation. Artists will be expected to generate original creative works on the theme of predator/prey interactions and discover new ways of expressing, demonstrating or representing some of the basic concepts that underlie complex webs of ecological interdependence among plants, animals (including humans) and habitats. ITOC's aims are to catalyze thought and creativity, connect scientific concepts with human ideas, actions, the subconscious, and emotions, and foster new social-ecological dialogue. The project will culminate in an integrated exhibit, featuring works by the selected artists. Tentative date: August 2013 at the Bear Gallery in Fairbanks, and possibly going on tour to other AK cities and beyond.

Applicants must be Alaska residents over 18 years of age.

Applicants must be available to attend the summer workshop in Denali NPP, July 25-27 2012.

Artists of all disciplines and media are encouraged to apply, including: Writers (poetry and prose), Visual artists, Musicians, Dance ensembles, Playwrights/theater ensembles, New Media artists, Video/film documentarians.

Deadline for applications: March 15. See this link for full information and details.

Andromeda: Amazon analytic craziness, ebooks, and other distracted-author thoughts

Last night at the 49 Writers Crosscurrents event, I was so gratified to hear that Snow Child author Eowyn Ivey, now at #8 on the UK Bestseller list and #27 on the New York Times Bestseller list (what must that be like? I still can't quite imagine) admit that she is obsessed with--or shall we say, occasionally distracted by-- her Amazon analytics. I suppose I'd gathered, maybe from the last time I privately grilled her, that she was known to take a peek. But I didn't quite expect her to tell a full Anchorage auditorium how much the book-launch rollercoaster invades her every waking hour. Even her mother, wonderful poet Julie LeMay, admitted to being a little hyped-up and frazzled by the excitement -- and she's just on the sidelines. But thanks to the internet, even a more distant onlooker can feel like they're at ground central, searching for the latest reviews, tracking the ups and downs, antennae tuned to all the buzz.

Personal historical/ insomniac footnote: I had my first Facebook dream last week. It was one of those boring, confusing fog dreams and it took the form of me trying to post a status report that my 17-year-old son needed to see, or trying to click on something, at his insistence, that he had posted. (He's been dealing with college applications and we're both constantly checking websites related to that, so it's all mixed up in my subconscious, I think.)

Our fiction has not quite caught up with the way we really spend our days, or the ways our brains are being rewired by technology. Certainly, there have been some novels that self-consciously include emails or social media issues. But it hasn't seeped deeply into fiction yet, becoming enmeshed with how we understand everyday routines, how character is revealed, and so on. (Just as in 1910s books, the mention of cars was foregrounded at first -- I'm thinking of scenes in The Magnificent Ambersons [1918], in which reckless driving and accidents and early automotive technology and auto-related investments all factor into the story in a more obtrusive way, while in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, published seven years later, a car accident is crucial but somehow more integrated with the entire tone of the book. And many decades later, we finally have Rabbit, John Updike's narrator, making a run for freedom in his car, with the 1950s highways still a magnificent transformative symbol, and maybe two decades after that, the narrator of Richard Ford's Independence Day toodling along the highway, staring at other drivers, his day realistically framed by holiday traffic, in a way that feels simply balanced and real. Sometimes, a banana is just a banana, and sometimes, a car is just a car.)

But can I return to the Amazon analytics issue? See how short my attention span is this week?

Today was the first day that I could access "author central" sales records for my first week (ok, 6 days) of my new book, The Detour. If you've never had a reason to peek behind this particular insidious curtain, the author central feature lets you see how many book copy sales have registered each week on Neilsen BookScan, and even divides them up by geographical regions, so you can see if that friend in Baton Rouge did really go online and order your book.

If I was crazy before, I'm really crazy now, waiting to see if any small review or online mention creates an uptick (this single published paragraph seems to have done so), and watching with horror at how quickly those little (and I do mean little) bumps settle back down, book numbers falling along with my hopes for being able to afford my son's fall off-to-college airplane ticket. We all know how Virginia Woolf ended her brilliant life. Would she have ended it a few years sooner with access to online metrics like these?

But what surprises me perhaps more than anything is what information is not included in BookScan, and therefore left out of the Amazon reports. Library purchases don't count, and from the map, I can't tell how or whether Alaska gets lumped in. Most surprising of all, ebooks aren't being tallied so far. And yet -- those ebook sales keep rising. It took four years following the release of the Kindle for ebooks to surpass print books on Amazon, and 2011 ebook growth was the fastest of all.

I've been enjoying the fact that readers--including cross-country friends who I might email about a new book launch, for example--can immediately go online, buy my book, and start reading. (With luck, they'll post a review somewhere!)

And then, just at the moment I'm thinking that the ebook revolution will be more helpful than harmful, I watch Ann Patchett charm Stephen Colbert as she explains how she just opened a bricks-and-mortar bookstore in Nashville, Tennessee, because she still believes in the old-fashioned notion of bookstore as place of community. (First thought: Maybe I'd like to open a little bookstore! Second thought: What am I nuts? I can't handle my somewhat flexibly-scheduled life as it is. Third thought: Does anyone think that Ann Patchett looks a little bit like Carrie Fisher?)

But back to Amazon etc, which will not be going away anytime soon. With expectations for ebook sales rising, I'm forgetting to offset them with realism about declining print sales. It took me years to figure out what acceptable, modest book sales figures are, and now, those Holy Grail numbers are imprinted in my brain. I'm aiming at a target that shifted. A lot.

But allow me to be a little whacked-out and alternately hopeful and fretful for just a few weeks more. Then it will be time to move on, to think of the real target, which has nothing to do with sales or media exposure, or anything else but the writing. I envision those days like a lovely, smooth-surfaced pond, framed by birch trees, no sound but perhaps the call of a loon calling -- laughing at me for getting so caught up in this sales and marketing stuff.

Teri Sloat: Packaging-- A Story's Final And Most Important Phase?

So if you didn’t know who Stephen Sondheim was before I started blogging, you must have figured out he is somewhat of a hero to me. When I wrote my only musical, JACK AND THE BEANSTALK, (about an orphaned jazz musician named Jack, who meets the Beannick at the crossroads of life and falls into the underworld of game shows courtesy of a bean root...Root 66), Sondheim was the man I was told to study. He is not afraid of his own dark side, shameless puns, the underworld, and deep dark humor. (SWEENY TODD is my favorite, followed by INTO THE WOODS).

INTO THE WOODS is the product of re-packaging. The idea was created to be a TV special, not a play. It would have involved actors from well known comedies who run into each other in a series of evolving incidents. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine did not really want to WRITE the special...they just wanted to sell the idea to Norman Lear. (How often have I hinted the same desire ...as a person with more ideas than will-power... to an editor!) The response they got from Norman Lear was admittedly well-deserved. He explained that he wasn’t interested in buying the idea, just in reading the script. That ended the conversation about the series (sadly, I’m sure). They had a gimmick, but not a story of substance.

A couple of years later, James repackaged the idea in the form of a Grimm’s fairy tale, replaced comedy actors with fairy tale characters and the dark symbol of the woods, and Stephen wrote lyrics). They kept their gimmick, and to some degree, their template for telling it, which is often what our stories start with, and created a deeper story for theater, not for TV. They re-packaged for the most suitable venue and audience that allowed them to get back that original tingle in the throat that came with their first gimmicky idea.

Off and on, I consult with writers waiting to be published, and often our biggest goal is to get past the gimmick and into the story, and what the story reflects about ourselves. When writers try to force their story into the wrong package, they often leave behind much of the excitement they started with.

Years ago, I wrote a folktale about how the animals got their spots and stripes... aboriginal peoples had found pots of paint behind their village and painted themselves. Dancing around the fire faster and faster, their spots and stripes flew off onto animals that had come to watch them. I had an anecdote, not a book length story, so I put it away. Laura Godwin, a wonderful editor from Holt, told me once that nothing is wasted, but I had no idea where this idea was going to go.

Not long after I read about a young girl, Maria, who, while her father was digging for artifacts in the caves at Altamira, discovered the famous bison cave paintings on the ceiling of the cave. I wanted to write a story about her...this nine year old and her father, on an outing that changed history in the mid-1800s. There was no information, and the story was that the discovery threatened the newest publication by church scholars that the world was only a few thousand years old. Her dad died of depression, not much was mentioned about Maria, so…not enough information for historical fiction or for a non-fiction picture book. I had to dig down to the essence of my fascination... the observant child in all of us and how threatened hierarchy and scholars can be by new information. But sadly, I had no package for either story.

So, in a lesser, but similar manner to Sondheim and Lapine, I found a new template...a new package, and wrote a parody to THERE WAS AN OLD LADY WHO SWALLOWED A FLY. The book came out three years ago and is called THERE WAS AN OLD MAN WHO PAINTED THE SKY. It is a creation story in which the Old Man hands his paints to the people to continue painting their world. The story about how the animals got their spots and stripes takes up two pages of the story or song. So Laura was right...nothing is wasted. It just waits to get folded into, or to find, the right package. And, much like Sondheim and Lapine, I needed a new way to share my enthusiasm for what I had learned...a new story. The wonderful thing about being a speaker at conferences and schools is that I can share much of the non-fiction background that prompts my stories as I speak.

In my files I have over 70 stories waiting to be folded together...joke books needing the right form to be put together in or divided into, and space stories that are waiting to be connected to a deeper theme. Of course, there are those one or two I am holding out on to find the “right” publisher because I so believe in the package and it is just a tough sell right now.

Last weekend I did a keynote and two workshops for the Nevada Library Association. I was struck by the persistence of Marc Nobleman, who wrote the cross-over picture book, BOYS OF STEEL, The Creators of Superman. If I understood the facts right, the character of Superman was turned down by every single newspaper syndicate...who would read about a man who could fly, right? Marc was gracious enough to tell us that his book was rejected 33 times...who would be interested in the men who created Superman or in comic book heroes? You wouldn’t believe the book he is having a tough sell with now!

Also, Carl Deuker (GYM CANDY, NIGHT HOOPS, RUNNER) spoke about trying to write about things he really wasn’t fascinated with in order to try to become a writer for YA. As soon as he let himself be who he was and wrote about his interests, his career was launched and has been wonderfully successful. To get the real story go to their web-sites.

I would love to hear what some of your experiences have been. Alaska seems to be the home of some of the most versatile writers.

Teri Sloat has been writing and illustrating children’s books for almost twenty years, with over twenty trade books published with Dutton, Orchard, DK Ink, Holt, Putnam and Alaska Northwest Books. She has also worked as a freelancer in illustration and educational publishing and enjoyed a visiting professorship with Hollins University, teaching MFA students in Children’s Book Writing and Art. Her books have been awarded by the American Booksellers Association, the New York Times, the American Library Association, the Children’s Book Center, Sesame Street, and State Reading Associations. She lives with her husband, Bob, a very small farm in Sebastopol, CA. For more info go to www.terisloat.com and www.terisloat.blogspot.com

Deb: So Many Books

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.  ~Samuel Johnson

There are books about how to read as a writer, but I haven’t yet read one. It’s not interest I lack, but time. Like Joshua Bodwell, author of “You Are What You Read” (Poets & Writers, Jan/Feb 2012), I’ve experienced that sad and startling revelation that I’ll never read all the books I intend to. In fact, I’m pretty sure I own more books than I’ll ever read. If logic prevailed, I’d never add a new title to my library, which thanks to the e-reader is no longer limited by physical space. But book lust goes way beyond logic.

“Reading is everything to me as a writer,” says Anthony Doerr, quoted in Bodwell’s article. “It’s where I go when I get discouraged, when I forget why it is I wanted to be a writer in the first place. And books are where I go when I want to be reminded of the mystery and magic of our shared language.” That’s all the encouragement I need to go browsing and come home with a bag full of books.

More justification: in “The Importance of Being Envious,” an essay in Naming the World, Tom Robbins contends that for the writer, reading evokes a productive sort of jealousy that he likens to literary Viagra. “It isn’t as if I want to elbow Norman Mailer out of line at the bank or steal Louise Erdrich’s ink,” Robbins explains. “What I desire is to feel for myself the rush Mailer or Erdrich must have felt when they pulled that particular rabbit out of a hat. What I covet is to have the kind of effect on language-conscious readers that Norman and Louise have just had on me.”

If envy seems too visceral a reason for reading, consider that we’re motivated to read by an equally fundamental need: security. Some of us were lucky enough to spend our childhoods cocooned in books, sheltered in the assurance we’d one day emerge beautiful. Others came to books through a compassionate teacher or librarian. Either way, the draw of a good book is as deeply satisfying as the silky edge of a favorite blanket. Even as we aim to hone our craft with a more distant and objective consideration of text, we can’t ignore this primal attraction, the comfort of story.

We all have a history with books. When I lived in a small Alaska village – a million years ago, as I tell students now, otherwise known as 1979 – I coveted a relationship with the Alaska State Library. The nice people in Juneau sent out a print catalog; you browsed, ordered, and eagerly awaited your shipment. Later I moved to a larger Bush community with its own little library, but as I juggled a household and a family and a fulltime job, I despaired of ever again reading a whole book for pleasure.

Those pressures eased, and I did of course find time again for whole books.  Yet I still shortchange myself when it comes to reading. It feels too much like an indulgence, a reward squeezed in over lunch or at bedtime, unless it’s research for “real work.” This is wrong-headed thinking. I need to expand the book time in my day, to acknowledge that the guilty pleasure of working with words includes sustained and joyful periods of doing what I love. Besides, I do read also for craft, studying how this word works, how that sentence turns, how seamless parts create meaning even as I indulge a deep-rooted desire. Sometimes that means reading twice – once for joy, again to consider how the writer created the joy. Re-reading might seem a large indulgence when there are so many unopened books on the shelf, but new research affirms its benefits.

Then there’s the matter of which titles writers should read. Classics? I taught them for years, and while I appreciate their place in our literary heritage, I’m not especially drawn to them for their own sake. Bestsellers? In the genre I’m writing? Outside the genres I’m writing, for fear of being influenced?

“I never read anything I’m not inspired by,” says author Simon Van Booy. That works for me. Though I make lists, I’m a promiscuous reader, easily distracted from the titles I pledged to. Since I’ll never get to all those books anyhow, what matters most is the approach: purposeful, and also with pleasure.

Check This Out: I read Bookforum not so much to discover new titles but to learn more about authors I already love. From a great review of Marilynne Robinson’s latest book, for instance, I learned about Robinson’s perspective on the West along with her take on religion. Time to re-read Housekeeping.

Try This: Develop your own customized book report habit, mining whatever you read for treasures of craft. Either at the end of your daily reading sessions or when you finish a book (or a story or essay or poem), write about what you loved most. As when revising, consider both the larger structure elements and the nuanced details. Speculate on how the writer worked the manuscript; if possible, affirm your speculations through research.

Deb crossposts at www.selfmadewriter.blogspot.com.

Ela: 49 Writers Weekly Round-up

The most exciting literary news this week is the publication of The Detour, the second novel of 49 Writers co-founder, Andromeda Romano-Lax, which takes place in Italy in the days leading up to World War II. Booklist calls it “a gently haunting work of subtle and surprising wisdom” and Library Journal describes the author as “singularly gifted.”  We wish Andromeda every success with this intriguing work, a worthy successor to The Spanish Bow, her impressive debut in fiction.

Andromeda is teaching one of our weekly spring courses: “Plot: Harnessing the Power of Story” begins on February 23 and ends on March 8. If you are interested in learning more about the secrets of plot from an accomplished writer, sign up at the 49 Writers website. And check out Andromeda's recent post to this blog entitled "Psssst...got plot?"

You can also catch Andromeda on KSKA’s “Hometown Alaska” on February 22 at 2 pm, before coming to our Crosscurrents event at the Anchorage Museum on February 22 at 7 pm, when Andromeda will be holding an on-stage conversation with new Alaskan novelist Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow Child.

Write Young Alaska (WYAK) is looking for teen volunteers! Our multi-faceted teen advisory council brainstorms ideas, shares feedback, and spreads the word about WYAK activities. We also edit Alaska Out Loud, help run youth writing contests, and design exciting events for young Alaskan writers.                                        
Interested in joining us or know anybody who might be a good fit? Just fill out the WYAK volunteer form and tell us a little more about yourself and your specific interests.

Don’t forget that submissions for the WYAK haiku contest, “Love/Anti-Love” are due on February 19. The best haiku in each age category will be published in a print anthology later this spring.

The podcast of our January Synergies event with Alaska State Writer Laureate Peggy Shumaker and musician Robin Child is now available on the 49 Writers website. Hear Peggy read from her latest collection of poetry, Gnawed Bones, and a selection of readings from the first works published by the new Alaska Literary Series of the University of Alaska Press, to be launched at the end of February at the AWP Conference and Bookfair in Chicago.

Ever thought about joining a writing group? Title Wave Books hosts a Writers Critique Group on Saturdays, 10 am to 1 pm, at 1360 W. Northern Lights Boulevard. The group is open to any type of writing or genre and all levels are welcome. For more information, call Mary at (907) 569-5075.

If you would like your group listed in the Roundup, please email 49 Writers with the name of the group, the date and time, and brief descriptions

Dana Stabenow is back! On Monday February 20, 3.30pm, Dana will be signing copies of her latest book in the Kate Shugak series, Restless in the Grave. Fireside Books, 720 S. Alaska St, Palmer.

On Tuesday, February 21, 5.30pm, UAA faculty Cathy Sullivan will facilitate a conversation about "Healthcare Challenges for the Working Poor." UAA/APU Books of the Year partners with Loussac Library to co-host the “Conversation Salon Series,” a series of discussions around the theme of “The Working Poor.” The sessions are moderated by UAA faculty and are not presentations, but opportunities for attendees to discuss issues relevant to themselves and the community. Contact Christina Gheen, (907) 786-6374, for more information. Loussac Library, 3600 Denali, Anchorage, AK

On Thursday, February 23, 5-7pm, there will be a panel discussion on Climate Changes: Alaska, the Arctic, and our Global Environment at the UAA Campus Bookstore. Panelists Raymond Anthony (Philosophy), Walter Parker (with 55 years governing Alaska's environmental issues) and Richard Steiner (Environmental Sustainability Consulting/Oasis Earth) discuss future developments of the Arctic. See the website for more information.

You're invited to read Martin Luther King Jr's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and gather at Fireside Books in Palmer on Saturday February 25, 4pm to discuss the questions it raises about racial equality then and now.

On Saturday, February 25, 5-7pm, The UAA Poetry Club will host the fourth of six V.O.I.C.E Youth open mic's in the UAA Student Union Den, as part of UAA Student Union & Commuter Student Service's Winterfest 2012. Jaystone will be the fourth featured reader, and Ilina Sauceda will serve as youth co-host for this event. Both have been active members of the Young Writers Venue Development Committee and Jaystone served as the youth co-host for our first Youth Open Mic at Indigo Tea Lounge in November. The Youth Open Mic will be followed by an All Ages Poetry Slam. Contact Brian Hutton 907 350 4580 for further info.

If you didn't catch it yesterday, make sure to check out David Marusek's guest post on his launch as an e-publisher. Lots to learn for writers and readers alike, and links to some free downloads of David's stories also.

Can hate, even self-loathing, be necessary to love? Kodiak writer Leslie Leyland Fields finds out after an ocean wave knocks her down. There is hope for these crooked hearts of ours, she says. Visit her new blog.

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

David Marusek: Ebook Launch and Giveaway

Regular 49 Writers contributor and noted sci-fi author David Marusek sent us this post (note the rapidly approaching deadlines for the giveaway), with more details on e-publishing to come when he is a featured author in April.

This week marks not only the launch of three ebooks of mine, but the launch of my own e-publishing imprint, General Genius Digital. In celebration, I’m giving away two of my ebooks for the Kindle and Nook.

Now, you may be a book lover who has not yet succumbed to the lure of e-reading devices. I’m with you on that score; I still prefer snuggling up with old fashioned paper bricks than with these electronic gadgets. However, the convenience of digital readers and the potential for enhanced reading experience has won me over, and I suspect that you will come around sooner or later as well.

I was an early adopter of the Kindle, buying mine about two-and-a-half years ago. Interestingly, I bought it not as a reader but as a writer. I had a project in mind that could not fit within the covers of a traditional book. I wanted the text of my novel to serve as not only a complete and thorough telling of my story but as a portal to related articles, music, videos, art, and interaction with my fans, and it looked like web-capable e-readers were the means for doing this. Indeed, they are, and I wasn’t the only one exploring this terrain. I’ve come to learn that this new direction in storytelling is called transmedia. Here’s a few good articles about it.

Not convinced? Well, look at it this way. With the introduction of blogs and flash fiction in the early 1990s and Twitter and text messaging in the 2000s, prose forms seem to be shrinking in length. People are learning to express themselves with a minimum of words. Transmedia novels offer us novelists the opportunity to go in the other direction, stretching our favorite long form out to extraordinary lengths. Consider this, why are novels these days usually around 125,000 words? Answer: Price point. That’s the amount of text a traditional publisher can pack between covers and sell for around $26.00, the price of an average hardback. With digital publishing, there is no length limit, only the limit of a reader’s interest. And a reader’s interest, my writing friends, is ours to kindle and sustain. I foresee the novel of the future becoming an open-ended affair, infinitely discursive, malleable, and collaborative.

Though I entered the digital book game as a writer, I quickly discovered advantages for the reader as well. My NYC agent gave me my first clue; he used to read manuscripts on his hour-long commute to and from Long Island. That meant lugging a satchel with several reams of paper on the train with him. Then he learned how to convert paper manuscripts into digital files for his Kindle, and he never looked back. I, too, read a fair share of pre-published stuff from students and colleagues, who send me a Word file. I hate reading on my computer so I would usually print it out. No more. It goes straight to my Kindle. Even longish articles I find online are easily converted.

I used to be a bookstore browser; I’d take a couple of books off the New Arrivals shelf and read the first chapters. With my Kindle, I can browse Amazon and download dozens of first chapters in a sitting, for free. And then there’s Project Gutenberg, that marvelous non-profit effort to digitize and distribute our cultural heritage of public domain literature. It now has over 38,000 free ebook classics ready for download and more every day.

There’s a lot more to this topic, including the nuts-and-bolts questions of just how one creates an ebook from a manuscript, but it’ll have to wait till April when I do a guest blogger stint here on 49 Writers. In the meantime, please download a couple of my ebooks for free. They’re reprints of several of my short stories (not transmedia). For the Nook until February 20 (that's Monday) and for the Kindle from February 23 through 27 only.

Teri Sloat: Hiding The Creative Sweat

I’m still reading Stephen Sondheim’s book, and perhaps he has solved a mystery for me. I have always wondered: why does everyone think writing should be easy? Why does everyone expect amazingly instant results to their writing endeavors? I found the answer in another quote from Stephen Sondheim, “Sweat poured over the final product should never show.”

As poets, writers, and artists we look at the work of others and wish we could produce something so beautiful as easily. I, admittedly, am an extremely envious person. When I see a work of art that I love, or read a novel that makes me want to back up and re-read phrases that flow like musical lyrics, I assume that those words just roll on to that lucky writer’s keyboard, or flow from their brushes. And, because my own work feels so ordinary, I envy the uniqueness people bring to their stories. Why doesn’t anyone have to work as hard as I do to make things come out the way I am hearing and seeing them in my head? And, often in the picture book arena I wonder how other authors come up with such seemingly simple books?

(And sometimes I do get to create a book effortlessly... I remember years ago, though, when writing THERE WAS AN OLD LADY WHO SWALLOWED A TROUT! I kept trying to improve it, until my editor reminded me that not ALL books have to be grueling...to take this one as a gift. New concept for me.)

Lately, I have been pulling unfinished or unpublished stories out and looking at the hard work I was NOT willing to put into them. Some of them had an editor ask for a revision, but since I already had a contract to work on, I put them away. Thinking I was walking away from a story that would never make it, the truth is that I was walking away from sweat and hard work....the part of the finished product that never shows. Somehow I had gotten it into my head that each book should be easier to get accepted than the last. The economy and changes in publishing has quickly dashed that egotistical thought, and I am now back to the only important question, “Do I want to tell the story, even if it takes a long time and has to get revised and rejected, revised and rejected...well you know the routine.”

So I went back to work on old stories. One of those stories just got split into four books and is making its way through submissions. Another, a song I have sung to my grandson, is now waiting for a dummy. And, thanks to Ann Dixon, another book that I was to illustrate while Alaska Northwest went bankrupt is under contract again...THE BOOK BOAT....a story about the library service to fish camps on the Kuskokwim River. So what made me decide to sweat again, even though it often seems that other people don’t have to? Somewhere deep inside of all artists and writers is a desire to share their work, and in the case of Ann’s book, a desire to stay connected to a place and an event we are familiar with. Eventually that desire outweighs our ability to keep a story to ourselves. So we dig the story out, find ourselves in the story again, remember what sparked the idea, the place we love and get going.

For those of you not having to sweat, I am still jealous!

Teri Sloat has been writing and illustrating children’s books for almost twenty years, with over twenty trade books published with Dutton, Orchard, DK Ink, Holt, Putnam and Alaska Northwest Books. She has also worked as a freelancer in illustration and educational publishing and enjoyed a visiting professorship with Hollins University, teaching MFA students in Children’s Book Writing and Art. Her books have been awarded by the American Booksellers Association, the New York Times, the American Library Association, the Children’s Book Center, Sesame Street, and State Reading Associations. She lives with her husband, Bob, a very small farm in Sebastopol, CA. For more info go to www.terisloat.com and www.terisloat.blogspot.com

Deb:Je Ne Sais Quoi

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.  ~William Wordsworth

Ethereal, bewitching, seductive - thus have reviewers praised Alaska author Eowyn Ivey’s best-selling debut novel The Snow Child. 

If that sounds like love, so too does the way Ivey’s book was conceived. In her day job at Fireside Books in Palmer, she came upon a children's book retelling of the Russian folktale The Snow Child. “I got this funny feeling right then,” Ivey said in a recent Anchorage Daily News interview. She ditched the novel she’d been working on for two years and started in on an adult version of the tale.

That “funny feeling” sounds a lot like the “intangible something” Rebecca Sherman of Writers House brought up in a recent discussion among agents hosted by Publishers Weekly, referring to the je ne sais quoi that draws her – and readers – to certain books. I am, by the way, a sucker for French - my minor in college. The loose English translation "an indescribable something" is a poor substitute for "I know not what," which hits the mark precisely, whether you mean writing or romance.

Can you fall in love with your writing project? Should you?

Idaho farmer James Castle used ink mixed from spit and soot to make art. Though illiterate, deaf, and untrained, he kept at it for decades, his art driven by passion and empathy, the pursuit of the tangible by way of the intangible. He didn’t discern. He didn't weigh the market. He didn’t try to get noticed. Yet his creative work eventually found its audience. “As it happens, his art – produced over more than six decades – communes with many of the twentieth century’s most salient aesthetic trends, even as it seems to have been very much a private means of understand his home and family,” says Bookforum reviewer Albert Mobilio. Castle's labor of love struck a chord.

Projects with real staying power feel different in the same way that deep love feels different from a crush. That “funny feeling” has to carry us through the long process of perfecting the work.

In solidarity with the students I taught in various classrooms during a recent writer’s residency, I wrote fifteen times from the same prompt, in ten-minute spurts. It was a lot like speed-dating. Though the prompt quickly became redundant, significant flashes emerged here and there – images, slices of character, snippets of scene. Some may find their way into a project that's emerging out of one of those funny feelings that disarmed me, out of the blue. You never know where you’ll find love, or a taste of it.

How can we know for sure that a project is not just viable but the one? In the initial rush of inspiration, our brains spin wildly, as they do when we’re in love – a dopamine high, fueled by norepinephrine that keeps us up nights spinning characters and plotting twists and chasing research. It’s only when we settle into a relationship with a project that we’re able to judge the depth of that first woo-woo feeling, to tell whether it has the staying power to carry us over the long haul, to determine whether our inspiration is not just attractive but unshakable.

Of all the emotional clichés, tough love is most apropos to the work of the writer. In revision, we must be brutal, objective, and tough - none of that warm fuzzy stuff. Yet it’s that funny feeling, the intuition, the passion, the je ne sais quoi that carries us through, that makes up for the trials and the pain and the risk.

Faithful and loyal, we can spend years with a project born out of feeling. But if we find ourselves married to it, we risk all. Not that we can’t commit wholly and completely, but if and when things get stale, when the writer’s no longer growing or discovering or excited, when the feeling is gone, gone, gone, then it could be time to break things off, to shove the manuscript under a bed as Ivey did with her first novel. In doing so we must believe fully and resolutely that nothing is wasted. The years spent with a draft that we ultimately ditch teach us about writing in the same way that failed relationships teach us about love.

We do fall in love, and we must.

Try this: Carry a notepad, either old-fashioned or electronic. Note random thoughts, flashes of inspiration, without concern for whether anything will come from them. You may jot down hundreds of images, snatches of conversation, and ideas before one begins to haunt you, coming to you as you fall asleep and again in the mornings when you wake. That’s your essay, your story, your book.

Check this out: As with love, when it comes to writing, most of us would prefer to just let it happen. But when we need a push, Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write is at the ready. “Writing is sensual, experiential, grounding,” Cameron says. “We should write because writing is good for the soul.”

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

Revision Means Seeing Again: A Guest Post by John Morgan

Note: this piece comes from my essay collection FORMS OF FEELING: POETRY IN OUR LIVES.  It will be out later this month from SalmonPoetry.

When I was fifteen I fell off a cliff. I was unconscious for three days and woke up in a Catholic hospital with a Crucifix on the wall of my room. I had been off in New Mexico on a camping trip. To wake up in that immaculate white room with bloody Christ looking down on me was pretty disorienting.

I have a poem about this which goes back in five utterly different versions to my undergraduate days in college. The first attempt transformed the situation into a plane crash. The crash took place in Juneau, Alaska. At the time I had never been to Alaska and didn’t know how dangerous the Juneau airport, girdled by mountains, can be. In any case, the poem itself is pretty awful.

In graduate school I wrote a poem about falling down a well. No mention of cliffs or New Mexico, but it was that adolescent experience that I was trying to get at. I had hopes for this version, but somehow it never quite came off. A few years later, I wrote another poem called “The Hole” about—you guessed it—falling down a hole. It was a prose poem, flat and too jokey, but it contained the germ—several key images survive into later versions.

Now, like the two earlier poems—the plane crash and the well-falling—“The Hole” had been brought through many drafts to what I thought was completion. Four years later, however, finding the original unsatisfactory, I rewrote it. I put it into lines and stanzas, shortened it, and cut out some of the jokiness. (The stock market metaphor had to go.) It was still about falling down a hole, but I added a brief note at the beginning about how I had once fallen off a cliff. The connection between that note and the rest of the poem was tenuous, but I thought it might give a stronger grounding in reality to a poem that seemed a bit too disembodied.

A few years later, still dissatisfied, I re-wrote the poem again. I kept a lot of the imagery from the earlier versions about falling down a hole, but now for the first time I managed to work in the actual incident: how I had fallen off a cliff, been unconscious for three days, and woke up in a hospital room with a Crucifix on the wall.

Why? How many times have I heard beginning writers insist, “That’s the way it really happened”? A lame excuse for a poor piece of work. But in my own case, clearly there was the same motive: four different times I had tried to imagine an event that could substitute for the experience I’d actually had. But each time some of the drama had been lost. Since I’m not opposed to altering reality for the sake of artistic truth I suppose I must argue that this poem is an exception: here at least reality exceeded anything my imagination could come up with.

The process of revision as I’ve been describing it may seem itself to be endless. In fact, though, as I work on a poem I find that I am discovering and then clarifying the subject.  “The Endless Fall” took so long because I seemed to resist the poem’s true material, or perhaps because when I began I wasn’t ready to face it.

Is that the end of it? Well, I can’t be sure. While at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., I took some advice from the poet Alan Dugan and dropped a couple of lines. Now I think it’s done, but I’ve been wrong before.

                        THE ENDLESS FALL: EL MORRO, 1958

            Stuck on a sandstone ledge

            where—god knows—I should never

            have been, I remember starting

            to slip. For three days lost

            to my body, I sank toward the

            bottom of a pool where gray shapes

            splashed around me near the center

            of a fierce design. Deeper down

            the pool became a room:

            did the mind exude the eerie

            soft blue flame by which

            the walls could be read,

            here a bone. a shell, there

            an odd repeating element

            like the sun. Meanwhile my body

            lay—skull cracked, face crusted,

            front teeth gone, male nurses

            adjusting the needles taped

            to my veins—unconscious away

            where Christ’s bloody effigy sagged

            on St. Joseph’s wall. And as the last

            light started to vacate that hole

            I met another self, there at the

            center: he drifted under my skin,

            breathed through my lungs and dreamed

            himself into my wounds. Like brother

            assassins, meeting and parting,

            we float in this vacuum forever.

John Morgan moved to Fairbanks in 1976, to teach in the creative writing program at UAF. He has published four books of poetry, most recently Spear-Fishing on the Chatanika: New and Selected Poems, and four chapbooks, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, AQR, and many other magazines. Two years ago he was chosen to be the first writer-in-residence at Denali National Park.

Ela: 49 Writers Weekly Round-up

This week we launched our new Write Young Alaska or WYAK website – check it out! Many thanks to Stefanie Tatalias, WYAK Outreach Coordinator, for the design and launch of the website, with input from the rest of our WYAK leadership team – Hillary Walker, WYAK Teen Coordinator, and Jen Walker, WYAK Contests & Anthology Coordinator. We are now soliciting submissions for the first writing contest, which has the Valentine’s theme of “Best Love/Anti-Love Haiku”—deadline February 19. The best haiku in each age category will be published in a print anthology later this spring.

Deb Vanasse, one of our WYAK instructors this term, is finishing up a two-week “writer-in-residence” stint in Bethel, where she has garnered great enthusiasm for a WYAK chapter there. Plans are in the works to Skype in young Bethel writers to the WYAK workshops being held this month at Teen Underground at the Loussac Library. Katey Schultz, visiting 49 Writers instructor, will be teaching Flash Fiction to teens on February 17 and 18.

Mark your calendar for our next Crosscurrents event at the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Auditorium on February 22, 7:00 to 8:30 pm, “Fantastic, Historic, Unconventional: Crossing Literary Fiction Boundaries,” featuring debut author Eowyn Ivey and 49 Writers co-founder Andromeda Romano-Lax, whose latest novel, The Detour, will be published this month.

Our next Reading and Craft Talk, “In Other Words: Poetry in Translation,” takes place at Metro Books on March 6, 7:00 to 8:30 pm, when poet Joan Kane will talk about the function of translation work in generating new poems and revisiting bodies of writing. Joan is the author of The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, a collection of poetry for which she received a 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award.

WYAK Writers in the Schools instructor, Carol Loftfield, has a feature article in the current issue of Alaska Wellness Magazine, “Sensing the Other,” which tells the poignant story of the inspiration for her Wellness through the Arts program.

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

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

Also tomorrow, Saturday February 11, 12-2,  Juneau author Lynn Schooler will be signing copies of his books at Barnes and Noble, 200 E Northern Lights, Anchorage.

Poetry Parley is coming up on Wednesday, February 15, at 7pm; Out North, 3800 DeBarr Rod, Anchorage.

The deadline for submissions to Alaska Women Speak is also coming up on Wednesday, February 15. Prose and poetry from Alaskan women are being solicited, preferably works of 1200 words or less. The theme is "Adventures in Foreign Lands." Email attachments are preferred: send as text or as a Word attachment via email to alaskawomenspeak@yahoo.com. Submissions may also be mailed to: Alaska Women Speak, PO Box 210045, Anchorage, AK 99521-0045

The Wrangell Mountain Center have just opened registration for their acclaimed summer writing workshop. For more information, see  http://www.wrangells.org/ww.htm.

Andromeda: Psssst...got plot?

It’s getting close now: starting Thursday Feb. 23, Andromeda is teaching a short course about that dirty word and subversive subject: plot. This will be a small, focused class that will cover lots of fertile ground. Sign up at http://www.49writingcenter.org/.

“Psssst. Let’s talk about plot.”

No, I didn’t say pot, I said plot.

So why am I whispering?

I once heard a sharp writer and really good teacher talk about visiting an MFA program and having an older, dignified teacher inform her: “We don’t talk about plot here.”

Which is why the writer wasn’t entirely surprised when a student approached in the hallway, wanting to talk—furtively—about this untalked-about thing called plot. The student knew she needed some. She just wasn’t sure how to get some.

Even writers who plot very conventionally try to distance themselves from the word and the subject. Stephen King, of all people, says “plot is shifty … and best kept under house arrest.”
More elitist writers don’t even want you to ask them about it. As I’ve blogged here, one very successful author recently told me, “I have no interest in plot or character.” Wow, not plot or character? If that leaves only artfully selected (but possibly unarranged) words ripped free of any sense of development or arc, I already own some great dictionary and thesaurus sets, thank you.

Readers love plot—by which I mean a story that is organized into a sequence of causes and effects, generally producing some sort of meaning and hopefully an intellectual and/or emotional experience.

Yet some writers are threatened by it.

They are threatened most, I think, because of a misunderstanding. When people hear “plot,” they think “pre-plotting”: coming up with a rigid and formulaic game plan, perhaps sketched out on a series of note cards. (Of course, there are successful literary writers—and many screenwriters—who do exactly that.)

But learning about plot doesn’t always mean pre-plotting. It often means reading for plot, as a way of training one’s brain to have a better intuition for structures our culture has honored for thousands of years. And also revising for plot, in other words, looking back at where a story implodes or just sags, loses tension, or fails to satisfy, and seeing if the plot or a related aspect of character development is to blame.

I’m always on the lookout for metaphors that relate to writing. My favorite is the one credited to E.L. Doctorow: Writing is like driving a car on a foggy night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but that’s enough to get you there. So true!

And yet, in that metaphor, the road already exists. That’s why you can just hug the yellow line and keep the gas pressed down. Whoops. When we write, we usually don’t have a road in front of us. We have an unpaved landscape stretching in all directions, with way too many options and lots of obstacles and hazards in our way.

Let’s say, then, that novel or memoir writing is more like hiking up a mountain, over the tundra. We’re talking an easy, leisurely hike – not a technical fast climb, not something requiring special equipment and lots of people who will need to collaborate. (That would be screenwriting.)
First, let’s admit that most of us can at least, usually, see where we’re aiming: a peak or ridgeline. If it’s totally fogged in, we may have some trouble. But generally, I hike when I can see at least part of the way and glimpse some landmarks that correspond with either map or memory.

When we write novels, most of us have not figured out “what it’s all about” (thank goodness)—but we may have a revealing scene from the middle or the end or some sort of image or central tension guiding us. I often have a scene I’m really itching to write that doesn’t come at the very beginning. Someone else might just have a feeling, a question, an indecipherable symbol. Something. At the very least we have our own taste: a preference for the way some other novels or memoirs are ordered.

If you have that place or feeling for which you are aiming—and even if you don’t, but are well stocked with food, water, patience, and time, you can pretty much get to the top putting one foot in front of the other.

Once you’re there, open up the granola, share the cheese and crackers. Hooray!

Now look back, and look down, and you see what you did. There is that patch of thick brush you hacked through not realizing that if you’d just walked further west, you could have found flatter, easier terrain. There is that spot on the ridge you aimed for, thinking it was the peak, not realizing that it was just a trick of perspective—a false peak. There is that creek you crossed, soaking your pants to the thighs (and now you really are quite chilly), not seeing that off to the side of the valley, there is a bridge, or a shallow braided area.

Your route was not ideal. Your path was illogical or unshapely. As a hiker, you can make a mental note and try a different route next time. As a writer, you realize that route and plot (also called suzhet by the Russian formalists) are related—they are the way the material is ordered, the way a place and story are experienced and perceived. And they are in your control. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.

You realize, because you have read a lot and even learned about three-act structure and some other things, that you better not waste so much time in the alder mess of that first fifty pages. Slash-slash-slash. Delete. Is the conflict clearer now? Is there a conflict at all, perhaps an outer and an inner one? (I hope so.) Do we care from the beginning? Does the structure itself communicate a level of confidence to the reader?

You realize that the middle is where a lot of energy, time, and readers get lost. It sags because of digressions. On the way up, you were just route-finding; you didn’t realize they were digressions. Now you do. Be more selective. Also look for opportunities to sharpen up symbol and theme. If you stumbled into a discovery (what a beautiful little lake hidden away between those rocks!) then clear up your signaling; make that discovery feel more purposeful, or at least frame it better by getting rid of all the dull stuff.

The end, also known as the part that people will remember even more than the beginning: does it feel like an arrival? Has the ending spoken to and overturned the beginning? Do we have a clear new view we’ve never had before? And if not—why all this climbing? I could have stayed home! Show me something surprising or spectacular! Make me weep, or rejoice, or puzzle—but at least puzzle meaningfully, in a way I couldn’t have puzzled before! (Ambiguous endings are still endings.)

This is plot. It isn’t anti-literary. It isn’t threatening or scary or antithetical to art, any more than a musical melody is. We are pleased for a reason. Our brains crave order and meaning, also known as -- you got it -- plot.

Join me on the comments page or in the Feb 23 class to continue this conversation.

Andromeda Romano-Lax is the author of The Detour, a novel set in 1938 Italy about art, adventure, and second chances, due out on Feb 14. She'll also be appearing with Eowyn Ivey in a Feb. 22 49 Writers Crosscurrents event called "Fantastic, Historic, Unconventional: Crossing Literary Fiction Boundaries," at the Anchorage Museum at 7 p.m.