49 Writers

Ela: 49 Writers Weekly Round-up

2012-01-27T07:00:00.000-09:00

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

2012-01-26T07:00:00.009-09:00

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

2012-01-25T12:05:00.004-09:00

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

2012-01-24T07:00:00.002-09:00

“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

2012-01-23T07:00:00.006-09:00

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

2012-01-20T07:00:00.004-09:00

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

2012-01-19T13:06:00.006-09:00

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....

Vivian Faith Prescott: The Dunce Chair

2012-01-18T07:44:00.001-09:00

At five years old I was sent to the dunce chair. Back in the day, my kindergarten teacher didn't call it a "time-out" chair— it was a place for dummies. I'm not sure if I wore a pointy dunce hat or not, but I wouldn't doubt it. It was the first week of kindergarten, which was held in the Episcopal Church in Wrangell, Alaska. I was deep in mid-story when the teacher asked me to be quiet. I continued talking. Likely I was telling my friends Dawn and Scotty about the strange happenings at my house. Momma and her friends were always talking about the flying saucers that came and went above Elephant's Nose, the island out in front of town. A man named Einstein was helping them learn to fly the space ships. But he could only help them when they had their eyes closed.

After I was sent to the dunce chair I spent a half-hour turned away from the class staring at the cracks in the wall and the tapestries of Jesus (It was probably a needlework of Jesus talking story with people gathered around). Undeterred, I spent my time twisting my braids and thinking about yet another story. After all, at the age of five, I already knew a good story when I heard one, when I experienced one.

You'd think after spending time in the dunce chair I would've stopped telling stories. Actually, I almost did. After that day, I suffered from an acute sense of shyness. Instead, I started observing human behavior. I wondered why my friend Yoko could dance better than I could. I watched my big sister punch a boy for calling me names. I wondered why Momma and her weird friends said that orange Volkswagens were really dragons. I'd touched an orange Volkswagen and it didn't bite me.

Had I been living in another culture, another time, I might've been encouraged to continue telling my story. In fact I might've been recognized as a promising storyteller. Some adult might've stepped forward and mentored me. But instead, I almost lost my courage. That's why I'm telling you this story now, so that you can muster up the courage to tell your own story, whatever that may be. I don't want you to have to sit in the dunce chair. Speak up. Tell it like it is. Tell it like it isn't. But however you tell it, as a writer you must be able to train your brain to recognize a story or a poem.

I don't know how many times I've been in a situation with another writer while something spectacular is going on around us and I'm the only one who takes out a notebook and starts writing. The other writer doesn't. Maybe the other writer has a better memory than I do (or maybe he's more polite). Sometimes when I overhear something really fascinating, I nearly jump out of my skin, Oh, oh, that's a good one! It's like the T-shirt says, "Oh, this is So going in my next novel." It doesn't matter if those words or images slinking across your brain aren't a complete story, one with a beginning, middle, and end, or even a poem with deep insight.

Someday that note might work itself into a cohesive form. Besides if you don't write it down it'll be lost to someone else's muse. Maybe mine. You should write it down.

No, I don't mean you should text while driving. Find a safe place to pull over and write. It's okay to rub your temple like Carnac the Magnificent and say to your friends, "Just a minute, there's a poem coming." It's okay to pack a pencil and notebook with you everywhere you go (author Craig Childs does that). And right now I give you permission to go into a corner and pull out a chair and write something. Just write it down.

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: Rabbit Trails

2012-01-17T07:00:00.001-09:00

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life. ~James Norman Hall

We’ve been dumped on this winter, record-breaking snows that challenge plow crews, threaten roofs, and evoke an all-around readiness to be done with winter even though it’s only half-spent. I hate driving on icy roads but love to walk in fresh snow. My dog trots in my tracks, hemmed in by snow berms, the model of obedience, though in truth if she gets into doggy heaven it will definitely not be on good behavior.

Away from town, our tromping makes tracks alongside those left by scampering voles and plodding moose and hopping chickadees. My favorites are the loop-de-loops of snowshoe hares, never a straight line from point A to point B, the proverbial rabbit trails. But what appears aimless wandering is actually purposeful. Lacking much in the way of defenses, these big-footed bunnies meander to throw off the coyotes, the wolves, and the owls that are looking to have them for lunch.

Pay attention, we writers are told. Be the ones on whom nothing is lost. But it’s the rabbit trails that often yield the most interesting writing. More often the trouble is not that we daydream or drift but rather that we trot too intently along a straight path that leads away from the creative potential of our project. We beat a plot thread into submission, manipulate a character to act as we need her to act, steer a poem in the direction we think it should go.

Strategic meandering actually enhances our work. As Jonah Lehrer reports in “The Importance of Mind Wandering,” people who daydream purposefully score significantly higher on measures of creativity. To stimulate daydreaming, researchers had subjects read a slow section of War and Peace, then timed how long it took before they start thinking about something else. All the subjects wandered eventually. Those who experienced an uptick in creativity as a result of their drifting were those who were aware of their daydreaming. Those who simply drifted off but didn’t recognize it got no creative benefit.

“Letting the mind drift off is the easy part,” Lehrer explains. “What’s much more difficult (and more important) is maintaining a touch of meta-awareness, so that if you happen to come up with a useful new idea while in the shower or sitting in traffic you’re able to take note; the breakthrough isn’t squandered.”

In The Half-Known World, Robert Boswell suggests that writers do their best work when they’re only partially cognizant of the worlds they create. “A fully known world is devoid of mystery,” he writes. "The writing process often begins with instability, not necessarily the dramatic act but the shifting ground."

Rabbit trails aren’t procrastination, which is nothing more than pure and unproductive avoidance. The idea isn’t to stumble around aimlessly, but to meander with purpose, to open ourselves fully and completely to possiblities, to imagine “what if” not only at the beginning of a project but all the way through. Though it appears chaotic, we remain acutely aware in our bounding.

It would be safer to stay in our nests, not venturing into fresh places where we’re likely to run circles, chased by scary possibilities. But if we hope for a story or poem operating at another level of experience the way Flannery O’Conner suggests it should, we must expose ourselves, meandering with purpose, making notes along the way.

Try this: What is the most unlikely move one of your characters might make at a particular point in your narrative, the most unlikely act of a persona in one of your poems? Write that scene. Let it meander, then glean for truth.

Check this out: Robert Boswell’s The Half-Known World explores the idea that for writers, what we don’t know is as important as what we do know. Though his focus is on writing fiction, chapters on “Process and Paradigm” and “The Alternate Universe” will interest all writers. His concluding chapter “You Must Change Your Life” is a pointed reminder to all.

Deb's "Self-Made Writer" posts are also archived at www.selfmadewriter.blogspot.com.

Faces of 49 Writers: Board Treasurer Eric Larson

2012-01-16T07:00:00.001-09:00

Less than two years ago, I trudged up the hill from my apartment and stepped into the 49 Writers’ “Raven Place” house on L Street. They put me to work scraping paint from the door jam. Kneeling on the porch, I elbowed a scraper through layers of red and white paint to create swirling patterns that looked like storms on the surface of Jupiter. Absorbed in flaking colors, I eavesdropped on a nature writer talking with a TV screenwriter who wrote scripts for the SCIFI channel. Who knew Alaskans wrote for the SCIFI channel? How cool.

Inside “Raven Place,” there were two bloggers pulling together a vacation rental for the summer and dreaming about writing classes for the fall. I didn’t know much about their blog, but I was impressed they were making a real place with chairs and a roof, where writers could meet and talk. They seemed to be making it up as they went along, but they were sure motivated. And they did feed us good pizza at the clean-up party.

They must have liked my paint-scraping job, because they invited me back to help with budget spreadsheets for 49 Writers’ application for non-profit status. I added colors to the spreadsheets – reds, oranges, blues, and greens – to highlight particular expenses. Maybe it was my coloring scheme or perhaps my number crunching, but they asked me back again to help with the next budget too. Sitting across a table at Snow City Cafe, I talked with the executive director about what would happen after the lease at the “Raven Place” house fell through.

Back then, we had a few grants and income from classes that arrived in fits and starts. Contributions and memberships were coming in, but how long would it last? Who’s going to take all these classes? How is this going to work? Things were getting more serious, so this time I kept the budget spreadsheet colors simple; I highlighted crucial lines in red and watched them carefully.

Over the last year, as a 49 Writers board member, I’ve gradually stopped worrying as I’ve seen what keeps this organization going. The other board members amaze me with the things they do to make this non-profit fun and interesting. Youth program coordinators create teen writing programs that we had not imagined less than a year ago. Professional grant writers have volunteered to look for sustainable sources of income.

Many others helped convince me to stop worrying. Students kept returning to take more classes, web designers kept us connected online, guest blog writers added their voices, donors continued to give money, a graphic artist made beautiful posters, members renewed memberships, volunteers kept programs running, instructors taught interesting classes, and hundreds of people came to Synergy, Crosscurrents, and open mic events. With this much interest, I became convinced this thing called “49 Writers” is going to thrive.

In the latest version of next year’s budget, I used only a few red highlights. I’ll still watch the bottom line, but I’ll also look for ways to make sure the classes, events, and programs offered by 49 Writers remain high quality, innovative, and fun. That way, the people who already participate will want to keep coming back. And those who don’t know us yet will be impressed when they arrive at the doorstep and come to their first 49 Writers event.

Ela: 49 Writers Weekly Round-up

2012-01-13T07:00:00.000-09:00

Thanks to all who turned out for our first 2012 Synergies, “Poemgrass: a Poet and a Banjo,” with special thanks to poet Peggy Shumaker and musician Robin Child as well as volunteer coordinators Jeremy Pataky and Susanna Mishler.

Coming up: statewide Resolve to Write events, when we gather to share our writing resolve for the new year. In Anchorage, the event (members and volunteers only) will be on January 20 at 7pm. 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!

Eagle River writers, your event (open to all writers) is Friday, January 20 at 6:30pm at the home of Monica Devine (email monicadevine@gmail.com to RSVP and for directions). In Homer, the event (open to all writers) is on January 24 at 6pm at the Homer Library; we hear there will be plenty of snacks for those who come straight from work.

And this year, our first Resolve to Write for young writers: 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. Bring your own writing resolution, and you might win a door prize! Young writers of all ages are welcome: Friday, January 20, 4-5pm, Teen Underground, Loussac Library. If you’d like to Skype in from out of town, email write.young.alaska@gmail.com.

Ever wish you could apprentice with a published writer, to get in-depth critiques of your work and personalized advice on how to build your career as a writer? We’re now taking applications for Fiction Apprenticeship with novelist Mattox Roesch. The Fiction Apprenticeship is an individualized option for writers who need to dive into greater depth and detail on their work. Over the course of eighty pages (maximum) of fiction submissions, preferably broken into two or three segments, participants will receive comments and a letter for each submission as part of a conversation in growing both the work and the writer. You’ll set goals for your writing and frame a conversation based on finding a path toward those goals by the end of the exchanges, to include at least two 30-minute sessions on the phone or in person. The program is open to three participants. Interested applicants should send 20 page of his/her fiction project and a brief statement of goals for his/her work to apprenticeship@49writingcenter.org by January 31.

Registration is brisk for our spring term. 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!

Applied for your PFD yet? 49 Writers has to wait one more year to be eligible for Alaska's Pick-Click-Give program, but don't despair: you can pledge here to support us when your dividend check comes in. We'll remind you on or about October 15, 2012 that your pledge is due. If you’re interested, we’ve just uploaded financial files on the Stewardship page of our website. Thanks so much for supporting 49 Writers/49 Alaska Writing Center, a 501c3 nonprofit.

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

Tomorrow, Saturday, January 14, 2pm, Glenn Shaw will be presenting and signing at Gulliver's Books, 3525 College Rd, Fairbanks.

On Sunday, January 15 at 5pm, VOICE Open Mic for folks aged 14-21 will take place at Kaladi Brothers Coffee, 591 Parks Hwy, Wasilla. This meeting will feature the vocal stylings of Allie Poe.

On Tuesday, January 17,5.30pm, UAA faculty Sharon Chamard will facilitate a discussion on “Criminalizingthe Working Poor” as part of UAA/APU’s “Books of the Year” Conversation SalonSeries in partnership with Loussac Library: a series designed to give allattendees the opportunity to discuss issues relevant to themselves. LoussacLibrary.

PoetryParley, usually held on the third Wednesday of each month, has beencanceled for January due to unfortunate circumstances. Stay tuned for a returnin February.

The Alaska Center for the Book will meet Thursday, January 19, 6pm at Loussac Library, 4th floor, Staff ConferenceRoom.

Artist and poet Sandy Gillespie will be offering a Journalingworkshop in January. It will consist of one evening meeting (Thursday, January 26, 6-8pm) and oneweekend meeting (Saturday, January 28,10-2pm). This is not a writing class, but an exploration of mark making andmeaning inherent in the act. Participants will make writings and journals asart objects. Bunnell St. Gallery, Homer. Pay as you can sliding scale $25-75;suggested $50.

“Opento Interpretation: Intimate Landscapes” is currently open for submissions.Visit their online galleryto browse the selected photographs, write to one that inspires you (poetry orprose) and submit byMarch 29, 2012 ($10 fee per entry)

Andromeda/Your Turn: Make them laugh, make them cry -- if only writers knew how!

2012-01-12T13:25:00.007-09:00

Today, I was working on a creative nonfiction essay about lachrymosity, a.k.a. tearfulness, including my own increasing, often unexpected susceptibility to brief bursts of emotion. While I won't necessarily well up during a sad song or movie and rarely cried as a kid (not when pressured by bullies, not at funerals), I do find myself moved to tears now--more often joyful tears-- at very odd moments: seeing demonstrators waving political signs at 10 below, or listening to an especially effective National Public Radio fund drive. I can be watching a commercial for an item or brand I don't like, or a trailer for a movie I don't plan to see, feeling myself being strategically manipulated, and even so, that little tap will turn, and I feel the itch behind my nose and the threat of tears on the way. (Yes, I know, I'm a middle-aged sap.) The prospect of attending a high school graduation this spring has me weak in the knees. I'll be blubbering for the kids I don't know even before my own son accepts his diploma.

My essay was a short investigation of the science behind this: why my stepfather, after several strokes, would break into unexplained tears. What tears contain (some really cool chemicals that affect both the crier and people nearby, actually). Why, evolutionarily, we started crying.

And I found out about this.

University of California Berkeley researchers Robert Levenson and James Gross spent years screening over 250 films to narrow down the best clips for eliciting a short list of singular emotions, from surprise to laughter to sadness. Their results were published in 1995; Levenson and Gross have been cited in over 300 scientific articles. In the weepy category, their second-best film moment was the death of Bambi’s mother. The first-best was a scene from a less-fondly-remembered 1979 movie, The Champ, about a down-and-out boxer trying to make a comeback. During the movie’s most poignant scene, a young Ricky Shroder breaks down as he watches his boxer father, played by Jon Voight, die. Cue the violins. It makes little difference that the movie received lukewarm reviews.

According to a 2011 Smithsonian article, this single scene is so reliable at stimulating tears that it has become a key tool in the emotion researcher’s toolbox. It has been used to test whether depressed people cry more easily than non-depressed people (they don’t) and whether older people are more sensitive to grief than younger people (they are)—both findings that corroborate with my own experience as a mid-life sap. (By the way, the most successful movie scene of all time for eliciting laughter, according to Levenson and Gross: the orgasm simulation scene from When Harry Met Sally.)

(If you want to test yourself on 2-minute, 51-second Champ film clip, go here.)

As a writer, I was hugely envious of the Levenson and Gross movie-emotion studies. I love knowing that people cried twice as reliably watching The Champ as they did watching Kramer vs. Kramer, for example, and knowing that a scene from Silence of the Lambs made the top-two ranking for most frightening. How cool is that. But it does it help me as a writer? No! (Turn your attention to books, L & G: please!)

I recently attended a lecture by a very good writer and teacher (this will not be one of my pedagogical rants) who exhorted us not to attempt to stimulate common emotions. To really push the boundaries in literature, we need to present new juxtapositions of ideas, and we need to stimulate unfamiliar emotions.

I admire the idea and the effort; I understand what he was saying, about not lowering oneself to cheap sentiment. But in truth, I don't think most of us know how to inspire even the old-as-humanity emotions, just as most of us don't know how to emulate high-quality-albeit-formulaic plots and authors-- you know, like Jane Austen and Tolstoy and Shakespeare. (Those trite panderers.) Making a reader laugh out loud, or cry, is not an easy thing to do. It's certainly something I want to be able to do (which is why I wish Levenson and Gross had studied books as well).

A few years ago, I asked myself: If I could have the ability to swamp a reader with an unexpected shower of either melancholy or hilarity, which would it be? The answer suprised even myself: while I admire quirky humor the most in what I read, sadness -- hopefully, of the fleeting and cathartic kind, fading into a poignant resignation not incompatible with mellow, hard-won contentment -- is the bull's-eye for me as a writer.

Laughter or tears: which is the greater emotional height for you in your reading, what books made it happen, or which emotion would you most want your own writing to elicit? Let me know.

(And P.S, about those little eruptions of sad or joyful crying: if you get briefly teary, too, even in the absence of depression, don't worry. They defuse stress, bring on a sense of calm, and may be good for your health.)

Andromeda Romano-Lax has a new novel coming out in one month -- The Detour (Soho Press)-- and she hope it makes some readers out there laugh and cry. She'll be talking about the novel and interviewing debut Snow Child author Eowyn Ivey at a 49 Writers Crosscurrents event on Feb 22, 7 pm, at the Anchorage Museum. To learn more about The Detour, a novel set in 1938 Italy, go to www.romanolax.com or the book's Amazon page.

Vivian Faith Prescott: Good Writing and Good Luck

2012-01-11T10:57:00.005-09:00

Welcome to our January featured author, Vivian Faith Prescott, who helps us kick off the new year with this timely post.

Many traditions around the world include rituals to ensure good luck in the coming year. The New Year is celebrated in Scotland with a four day party called Hogmanay, which includes bonfires and ritual house cleaning. So in the tradition of my Scottish relatives, my husband and I cleaned house, especially our offices, in preparation for good luck in the New Year. Americans seem to enjoy the New Year's kiss at the stroke of midnight. The midnight kiss is alleged to bring good luck. In Norway, rice pudding is cooked and served with a single almond inside and whoever gets the almond is the lucky one.

As writers we can be a superstitious bunch. I've heard of writers lighting candles before working on a project, or starting a new novel in a brand new notebook. Some writers wear favorite slippers or drink their favorite coffee from a "special" mug. Victor Hugo took off all his clothes and wrote naked. Myself, I live on a Coast Guard base with a lot of neighbors surrounding me, so I don't think Hugo's ritual would work for me. In fact, it might bring bad luck.

H.G. Wells must have figured that he'd write better using "special" pens. He carried two different pens with him: a short one for writing shorter works and a longer pen for longer works. William Wordsworth's ritual included a daily walk with his dog. I'm up for that. Though, evidently his dog was quite the critique partner. Wordsworth would recite a poem to his dog and if his dog barked or appeared distressed he figured the poem needed revising. Now why didn't I think of that? We've all heard the term "lucky dog."

There's nothing wrong with believing in luck. My Finnish ancestors believed in luck. Our ancient fishing and hunting rituals were based upon luck. I've been known to spit on the herring dangling my hook before I drop my fishing line in the water. I learned that one from my father, who likely learned it from his father.

Whether you spend an hour or hours every day writing, creating a new ritual for the New Year is a good idea. It can spice up your writing life and maybe bring you some luck. My new talisman is a Northern Lights Fairy. She's a felted fairy given to me by the teen writer that I mentor. Her mother made it and was inspired to name the doll "Northern Lights." I thought it was a sign since my middle-grade fantasy novel Keeper of Directions features northern lights.
I also keep a handful of seaglass in a large clamshell sitting on my desk. It's not that I can't write without seaglass glinting beside me. I can, but I'd rather not. The seaglass is the symbol for the beach, my greatest muse.

I think it was Alaskan writer Nancy Lord that told me that a successful writer is one who's persistent and never gives up. That may be true, but maybe there's some luck involved. Maybe this year I'll be both persistent and lucky.

If you've been in a slump or need that extra push, maybe it's time to find a new talisman or a new ritual to bring you luck. Think about it. What could it be? Or maybe you have a tried-and-true ritual that's been working for you for years, something that gets you in deep into the muse. I'd like to hear about it. Well, maybe you shouldn't tell everyone that you're writing naked or sharing your prose with your dog while you walk. Unless, of course, you're out naked walking your dog while reciting your prose.

May you have good writing and good luck in the coming New Year! After all it's 2012, and I heard a rumor that the world is ending at the close of this year—we may need all the luck we can get.

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: Rhythm and Solitude

2012-01-10T07:00:00.001-09:00

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make. ~Truman Capote, McCall's, November 1967

Christmas Eve, one hundred miles from Anchorage, silent and still, a crisp, clear night pillowed with two feet of fresh snow, lit by a small string of lights hung on a small spruce tree. Blissful, radiant quiet broken only by hooting of horned owls, calling one to the other. We are the only ones here. The only people around for miles.

Out of the darkness my friend hears a human voice, sharp and close and clear. A little girl, calling “Mommy.” Later we’re told an unmarked grave lies on a neighboring lot. A little girl, five years old.

I don’t know about ghosts. But I know about solitude. A spirit, a child, alone on a wintery holiday eve, calling for her mother - this doesn’t seem so far-fetched, knowing we’re hard-wired for companionship, perhaps even from beyond the grave.

In her essay “Telling is Listening,” Ursula LeGuin points out that in preliterate societies, stories are communal, a way of connecting. Audience is central. Rhythm, in particular, is relied on not only to help the tellers recount long narratives, but also to bind the audience with the storyteller. She applies a concept of physics, entrainment, which she calls a “beautiful, economical laziness” to explain how things that are physically close tend to lock in and pulse at the same intervals, as the audience and the teller will do through a story.

Perhaps that explains our ghost, pulsing on a crisp, cold evening. It also explains how writers connect with their readers, through beats of language, through rhythm and repetition and silence.

I am not a café writer. I do my best work in solitude. I expect those who write best in cafes and other lively places enjoy a strong ability to resist entrainment, or perhaps even better, the ability to riff off it. I cannot, I confess, even write with classical music in the background, despite research that points to the Mozart effect , the idea that certain classical beats stimulate activity in the creative parts of the brain. The rhythms in the music butt up against the rhythms in my head, and I get nowhere.

Other research suggests that rhythmic activities like walking and ironing have a similar positive effect on creativity, which is why on a long walk, a fresh approach to a scene or a character will often reveal itself even when I’m not consciously puzzling over my work. The reason, scientists say, is that repetitive motion occupies a dominant left brain so the more creative right half can push insights forward. I like this, since walking and ironing can be done alone.

No matter how you work best, it’s useful to consider how rhythm connects us with readers. As scenes find their place on the page, I become a slave to sound, arranging and rearranging for maximum effect. I used to believe this was a problem, slowing me down and turning my focus from larger, more important considerations like character and plot. But I can’t help it. For me, rhythm is the pulse of the story. LeGuin would say it’s how I connect to an audience I can’t see.

Here’s how Virginia Woolf explains it in a letter to Vita Sackville-West (1926):

“As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sigh, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.”

What could be more personal, more mysterious, more profound than this wave in the mind? No wonder some of us require solitude to recapture it.

Though if that all seems too weighty, you should know Woolf also added, “No doubt I shall think differently next year.”

Mysterious, indeed.

Try This: Settle into your favorite setting, communal or solitary. Starting with either a scene in rough form or a promising piece from your journal, play with the same material by writing first in staccato rhythm (sentence fragments work well) and then in a long, complex sentence that undulates with its own rhythm. Don’t be rigid; if the rhythm leads you in another direction, go with it. Let it be a door to discovery.

Check This Out: Ursula LeGuin, The Wave in the Mind, titled from Woolf’s lines quoted in the epigraph. A prolific and versatile writer, LeGuin is smart and savvy without pretension. In this eclectic collection of talks and essays on writing, reading, and the imagination, LeGuin also touches on issues of gender, beauty, and anthropology. A joy to read and contemplate.

Deb's "Self-Made Writer" posts are also archived at www.selfmadewriter.blogspot.com.

Submission Workshop: A Guest Post by Katey Schultz

2012-01-09T07:00:00.001-09:00

“But, is it done?” I often ask myself this question when I’m about to submit a short story or essay for publication. Sure, I’ve spell-checked. Even had a few good writing pals look over the draft. But have I pushed the writing to the edge in the best possible way? Have I surprised myself? Have I revealed something that resonates with the human predicament? The only things that will help me see what’s missing are time and critical distance—two very hard-to-come-by commodities in the writing life. Well, dark chocolate helps, too.

But haven’t you noticed that the draft of a story or essay you just finished often feels like the best thing you’ve ever written? And, two months later, how that same writing feels bland and unformed? One remedy for these highs and lows is what I like to call deep revision. Author Claire Davis is known for giving this precise directive to her students:”Imagine…Now, imagine deeper.” Easier said than done, of course, but with deep revision writers can use what is already on the page as keys to unlock other doors in the narrative.

Another common problem is what my writing friends and I call the nervous itch. You have a decent first or second draft on your hands. You’d like to submit it for publication, but there’s a nervous itch in the back of your brain telling you that something’s not right with the piece. The easy thing to do is send the work out to magazines anyway and hope the editors reading it don’t get the same itch. But chances are if you’re suspicious, they will be too. So, what do you do next? How do you take a piece to the next level when you can’t quite identify what the problem is in the first place? Enter: Submission Workshop.

Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, the mini-lectures and exercises we’ll be doing in this February’s Submission Workshop will help writers improve their manuscripts at both the thematic and line levels. Where does a scene need to open up? What needs to be cut? What can I do at the line level so my descriptive prose isn’t buried? Is it too late for metaphor and, if not, how can I add it in? We’ll map narrative tension, get to the heart of stubborn scenes, and slash and burn unecessary words. We’ll read and discuss a few excerpts by published authors and study them in light of what we learn about deep revision. Then we’ll apply that learning to our own manuscripts, workshopping 1 piece for each participant in the class.

If this sounds exciting (and maybe a little intense), then Submission Workshop is for you. Commit to 4 Tuesdays in the month of February and come away with techniques for a lifetime. Register today at 49writingcenter.org.

Katey Schultz grew up in Portland, Oregon and most recently lived in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. She is spending 2010-2012 traveling across the United States as Writer-in-Residence for various arts organizations. Her fiction has received five awards in the past two years, including the Linda Flowers Literary Prize, Press 53 Award for Short Story, and the Greensboro Short Fiction Award. Her short stories have appeared in Fiction Daily, River Styx, The Outlet, Calyx, Cold Flashes Anthology, Flash Fiction Magazine, and more. Her nonfiction has appeared in Oregon Quarterly, The Nature Conservancy Newsletter, and Generations. Since graduating from the Pacific University MFA in Writing program, she has received writing fellowships from Jentel Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Madroño Ranch, and served as Writer-in-Residence for Interlochen Center for the Arts, Weymouth Center, and Fishtrap. Katey is also editor of TRACHODON, a dinosaur of a little magazine.

Ela: 49 Writers Weekly Round-up

2012-01-06T07:00:00.000-09:00

Tomorrow, Saturday, January 7 at 7pm, come out to Pioneer Park, Bear Gallery, Centennial Center, Fairbanks, for the Fairbanks Arts Association's Literary Reading Series "Ice Fog Open Mic," featuring Heather Warren, Donald Crocker, Michael Shaeffer, Jasmine Stokes, Raif Johnson-Kennedy--and you!

The 49 Writers Synergies Series opens up 2012 with "Poemgrass: a Poet and a Banjo," featuring poet Peggy Shumaker and musician Robin Child. Wednesday, January 11, 7pm. Anchorage Museum, Brian E. Davies Chugach Gallery (4th Floor) 625 C St, Anchorage.

Next Saturday, January 14, 2pm, Glenn Shaw will be presenting and signing at Gulliver's Books, 3525 College Rd, Fairbanks.

Next Sunday, January 15 at 5pm, VOICE Open Mic for folks aged 14-21 will take place at Kaladi Brothers Coffee, 591 Parks Hwy, Wasilla. This meeting will feature the vocal stylings of Allie Poe.

Poetry Parley is coming up on Wednesday, January 18, 7pm. Out North, 3800 DeBarr Rd, Anchorage. A different well-known poet is celebrated each month, as well as a local poet reading their own original work. If you are interested in being a reader, or in submitting your own work for possible inclusion, please email DC McKenzie.

Anchorage essayist and author Bill Sherwonit will teach a 12-week nature and travel writing class beginning Thursday January 19, 7-9.30pm, in the Sierra Club office downtown. Participants in this workshop-style lass will explore and refine their own writing styles, with an emphasis on the personal essay form. The class will also read and discuss works by some of America's finest nature and travel writers, past and present. The cost is $240. To sign up, or for more information, contact Sherwonit at 907 245 0283 or akgriz@hotmail.com.

"Resolve to Write" events are shaping up around the state. In addition to the Anchorage event on Friday, January 20, if you're in Homer, mark your calendars for Tuesday, January 24, 6pm at the library. They're planning to have some substantial food on hand so that folks can come on straight from work.

Mark your calendars for Thursday, January 26, when 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.

Registration for the 11th Annual Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference is now open! It will take place June 8-10 2012 at the Lands' End Resort in Homer, with a post-conference workshop held at the Kachemak Bay Wilderness Lodge June 10-12. The keynote speaker will be Barry Lopez. See the website for registration, full faculty line-up and bios, and other conference information.

Andromeda: Grit -- Do You Have It?

2012-01-05T12:02:00.004-09:00

The top national spelling bee champions are not the kids with the highest verbal ability or the kids who simply have short-term self-discipline. They have something else: what researcher Angela Duckworth calls "grit." It very likely applies to all of us determined to log those 10,000 hours-- which I mentioned yesterday -- in order to get our basic writing toolbox in order.

Duckworth, a former student of positive psychology researcher Martin Seligman, developed the grit concept and a 12-question test -- free to take here, but you have to register -- to measure the trait which she likens to tenacious, dogged perseverance in pursuit of a long-term, focused, passion-fueled goal. In other words, grit goes beyond simple persistence or resilience.

(That and other definitions here at wikipedia, if you really want the nitty-gritty on grit. For example, the difference between grit and "need for achievement" is that grit encompasses unwavering dedication to a goal, regardless of the presence of feedback. In other words, the truly gritty are willing to go it alone, even without an immediate audience or reward; indeed relevant to writing, yes?)

Duckworth has employed the grit scale in several settings, including West Point, where it was found to be a better indicator of which cadets would survive a summer training course, called Beast Barracks, than the academy's own previous complex metrics, which included everything from physical fitness to academic grades.

In September, the New York Times ran an article, "What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?" suggesting that for schoolchildren to do well, and to rebound from the necessary failures and esteem-shaking trials that true education requires, they may need certain performance character traits, as distinguished from the moral character traits that schools sometimes encourage ("be kind," "be fair" and so on). Everyone agrees those moral traits are worth promoting, but performance character includes traits like self-control, optimism, and Duckworth's "grit," which may be necessary for all kinds of high achievement, inside and outside the classroom.

The New York Times article got me thinking about how we excel as writers, as well as how we teach and encourage other writers, including our friends and peers. Initial talent may not matter very much-- that's a point I've heard from teachers, editors, and authors alike. Deliberate practice seems to be required, and what makes that kind of practice different from the more typical kind is that it focuses on what is hardest and most uncomfortable.

In other words, just getting words on paper -- impressive as that is -- may not be enough. Truly deliberate practice may mean targeting weaknesses, studying models, focusing on the elements of writing that do not come naturally to us. And keeping going at that deliberate practice -- staying focused, and staying passionate -- may require grit.

Duckworth has studied how to measure grit, but I haven't found any solid info yet (despite the youtube video's opening premise) on how instill or increase grit. For now, perhaps just knowing that grit matters is a step in the right direction. Whether we're considering our own achievement trajectories, or trying to cheer up a writer friend who hasn't yet achieved his or her goals, we might want to focus on applauding long-term, passion-fueled stick-to-itiveness. If you love something deeply and you're giving it your all with no intention to quit, you're ahead of the game, no matter what any publishing scoreboard says.

Stay gritty, friends.

Andromeda: How many of your 10,000 hours will you log in 2012?

2012-01-04T13:53:00.006-09:00

I heard/read it twice in the last 12 hours, and I've heard and read it before (including from Alaska's own talented Talent Code author, Dan Coyle): that to attain even an initial level of mastery in most artistic and athletic pursuits, 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is required.

Today, I heard it in a youtube interview with screenwriting structure expert Robert McKee. He said it takes about 10 years and 10 scripts to learn how to write -- and that doesn't mean to learn everything, but just to get the basic working toolbox in order. Ten scripts is about the same number of pages as three good-sized novels, and I've always believed that three to four novels is what it took many of my own favorite authors (E.M. Forster, Ian McEwan, Lionel Shriver, and many more) to find their groove. (Think of your own favorite writers with a healthy ouevre; are your favorites their first novels, or their fifth or twentieth?) Stephen King has said something about learning by writing your first million words. That might be ten thick manuscripts, probably a mix of unpublished and published, with the former nearly as helpful as the latter.

McKee added another principle: that in addition to the 10 years, you need about 20 years of life experience. He didn't say it in a condescending or provocative way, and he admitted there are some things that can be written well at an earlier age or in collaboration with others, as well as some exceptional individuals. But for most of us, we may not have all that much to say until our late thirties or forties.

Last night, I came across the 10-year/ 10,000 hours of practice idea in another form, in the research of Angela Duckworth, who studies the character trait she calls "grit." More on that tomorrow.

In her post yesterday, Deb announced her plan to write a post a year about the subject of being a self-made writer, which seems fitting for a blog that has engendered many posts on the notion of learning, practicing, persisting, and enduring.

It also happens that I spent two hours this morning talking with a bright, younger writer, answering his questions, which circled back frequently to this idea of how long it takes to master the technical and emotional aspects of writing, to which I couldn't stop from adding the concept of simple life experience. We need to know not just about writing, but about the world. I didn't mean to be gloomy, suggesting the road is overly long. (On the other hand, our culture worships youth and novelty more often than middle age and dogged routine, so I suppose I don't mind being a champion for the mid-lifers and long-haulers.)

Does this seem depressing to anyone out there? To me it doesn't, because it gets past the notion of writing as early genius or lightning-strike inspiration. If talent (especially early-blooming talent) were the most important thing, many of us would give up now. Instead, long-term cultivation, including lots of deliberate practice, reading analytically, taking classes or learning from peers, and writing, writing, writing. I'm happy to know that I haven't peaked yet.

With that, I wish you a Happy New Year with about 8640 hours left to spend. Many will be spoken for already (darn that sleep), but somewhere in those thousands are surely some hundreds to help you along your path to mastery.

Deb: The Self-Made Writer

2012-01-03T07:00:00.003-09:00

I’m a teacher by training, and a writer by – well, that’s what I mean to find out, the proper way to complete that little prepositional phrase. By fortitude? By delusion? By luck?

Self-madeness (perhaps also self-madness) is embedded in our culture. Emerson comes to mind, his lovely aphorisms fitting and useful for an adolescent nation struggling to find its legs. Rugged individualism, striking out on one’s own, up by the bootstraps, that sort of thing. Emerson extols these virtues as if with a large broom, broad sweeps, stirring dust. To thine ownself be true! Foolish consistency, hobgoblin of little minds! Imitation is suicide!

As it turns out, Emerson never used the term “self-made man,” at least not that I’ve found. Still he managed to make a decent living on the lecture circuit promoting the concept, even as he admitted, “all my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.”

Originality, yes. But to what extent is a writer self-made? What of the writer as apprentice, at the feet of the masters, watching and learning? What of the community of writers, struggling together?

In a series of posts, one for each week of 2012, I’ll explore the idea of the self-made writer - to what extent it is myth, to what extent it’s not only possible but necessary. I’ll take up Emerson’s challenge to “study with hope and love the precise thing to be done,” which is, in our case, to write. Habits, attitudes, community, discovery, craft, even promotion – these we’ll ponder in this series of instructional musings.

You might recall that around this time last year I posted on a related topic, my DIYMFA (Do It Yourself MFA) program. I explained that while circumstances have kept me from pursuing a formal degree, I wanted to fashion as best I could for myself a program that included as many MFA-type opportunities as I could: meaningful critiques of my work, voracious and systematic reading to enhance the quality of my work, a dynamic community of writers who share my goals. The ultimate goal of my self-fashioned program is to produce writing that is better, richer, and truer than any I’ve done before. In eschewing a formal degree program, I of course mean no disrespect to the formal process of schooling. I’m a teacher by training, remember, and I also think a fair number of Emerson’s sweeping admonitions about striking out on one’s own are hogwash.

My DIYMFA program is now entering year three. It’s looking like this may be one of those long-term programs. Five years, six, maybe ten. A lifetime, even. The self-made do tend to self-wander. Of the 45 books on my DIYMFA reading list, I only got through 21 (which means you can still join me in reading if you like). I finished the novel I began, and it does feel stronger than any of my previous efforts. I also spent a good chunk of 2011 researching a narrative nonfiction project that should go out in proposal later this year – a project that had no place in my DIYMFA plan. And while I wrote another children’s book, happily accepted for publication in 2013, I stand with Alfred Kazin when he says, “The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.”

Try This: List at least three of your aspirational writers, writers whose work feels so perfect and true that you can’t imagine ever writing as well as they do. Then choose from reviews of their work three or four phrases that you would love to have someone use to describe your writing someday – “achingly wise,” “sensitive and deeply insightful,” that sort of thing. Keep this as your watch list for the year. As you read new books from each of these writers, search actively for how they earn their praise – the exquisite sentence, the character pushed past her limits, the detail lovingly rendered.

Check This Out: The Portable MFA in Creative Writing from The New York Writers Workshop. “The education I received for over $30,000 can be condensed to eight easy-to-forget points, and I offer them all for the price of this book,” writes Tim Tomlinson in the introduction to this pithy and practical handbook. In sections devoted to fiction, personal essay and memoir, magazine writing, poetry, and playwriting, instructors from the NYW Workshop offer succinct thoughts on craft supplemented by exercises and further reading. The fiction section of my copy is heavily dog-eared and marked – my sign of an outstanding resource.

Deb's "Self-Made Writer" posts are also archived at www.selfmadewriter.blogspot.com.

Linda: On Transition

2012-01-02T07:00:00.003-09:00

This week marks the closing of one interesting chapter in my life and the opening of another – how appropriate that this transition should coincide with the end of the old year and the beginning of the new. I like it when life comes neatly packaged, and if you wait long enough sometimes it actually obliges. 2011 has been a year of major change. Our only child graduated from high school and disappeared to the East Coast, where he’s studying engineering. There was upheaval in my family back in Scotland. The funding for the position I’ve held at the university for the last four years has come to an end. And after what feels like the longest apprenticeship ever, I’m wrapping up my MFA thesis at last.

Three months ago, I truly didn’t know what 2012 would hold, and what I was going to do with the rest of my life. But I’ve come to believe that change brings opportunity, and eventually that opportunity presented itself. It’s a great privilege to be asked to join the 49 Alaska Writing Center as the new executive director, as it’s an organization for which I have much admiration. Suddenly, my calendar for the next six months is crammed with interesting workshops and events. I’m being introduced to a whole new group of wonderful writers and volunteers, and learning of exciting opportunities to grow our literary network.

Writing is such a solitary pursuit, and writers in our state can experience isolation to a greater degree than anywhere else in the country. The 49 Writers blog and now the writing center have brought this scattered community together in ways which did not seem possible when I first heard about the concept less than two years ago. But I did not yet have the full measure of Andromeda Romano-Lax and Deb Vanasse, the two extraordinary women who created something out of nothing through their vision and commitment. Community takes many forms, and in Alaska I have found my real community in the company – both actual and virtual – of the writing friends I have made over the years, who have sustained me in many ways. Many of you I have yet to meet, and I look forward to connecting with you in the weeks to come.

Happy Hogmanay!

Ela: 49 Writers Weekly Round-up

2011-12-30T07:00:00.001-09:00

The holidays for the kids at McLaughlin Youth Detention Center were brightened by the efforts of 49 Writers volunteers and other community volunteers who came together to Bring the Outside In. This mini-conference, planned by 49 Writers volunteers Lizbeth Meredith and Lee Post, was designed to introduce detained youth to creative opportunities accessible to them upon their release. Workshops on drawing, the spoken word, Scottish country dancing, and cooking connected the youth with adult presenters, reminding them they will soon re-enter a community that cares.

Trey Josey of BNAV

Thank you to Trey Josey and Kima Hamilton of Brave New Alaskan Voices, Lee Post (who also taught a well-attended 49 Writers Comics workshop at Teen Underground this week), Barry Yabyabin of KLT Diner in Wasilla, and Amber Rose and Anne Freitag for generously donating their time and talents to make a difference in the lives of troubled teens. The kids and the staff at McLaughlin were truly grateful.

Lee Post of 49 Writers

On January 1, online registration officially opens for our spring term, though faithful round-up readers can secure their spots beginning today. From our “Publish and Promote” series to plot, poetry, submissions, and more, we’ve got something for pretty much everyone. Make 2012 the year you get serious about writing! Courses are posted on our website.

January 1 is also the day we rush to register for our Permanent Fund Dividend checks. It’s a great time to support your favorite nonprofits. 49 Writers has to wait one more year to be eligible for Alaska's Pick-Click-Give program, but don't despair: you can pledge here to support us when your dividend check comes in. We'll remind you on or about October 15, 2012 that your pledge is due. Thanks so much for supporting 49 Writers/49 Alaska Writing Center, a 501c3 nonprofit.

Keep in mind our first events of 2012: January 11, the first 49 Writers Synergies Event of the year, “Poemgrass: a Poet and a Banjo” featuring poet Peggy Shumaker and musician Robin Child at the Anchorage Museum, Brian E. Davies Chugach Gallery (4^th Floor) from 7-8:30pm and our statewide Resolve to Write events on January 20, when you’re invited to gather with other writers to share your writing resolve. Scheduling is already underway in Anchorage (one gathering for adults, one for young writers), Homer, and Eagle River – details to follow soon. If you’d like to host a Resolve to Write event in your community, email us at 49writers@gmail.com.

On January 25, 49 Writers Executive Director Linda Ketchum will participate in the Anchorage Association for Volunteer Administration (AAVA) annual training event. This event is attended by a number of representatives from the Anchorage nonprofit community and professionals in the volunteer management field. Linda will participate in a panel discussion titled “A Few Excellent Volunteer Programs,” a lively conversation amongst three to four representatives from the local nonprofit community. In extending the invitation, AAVA wrote, “49 Writers is doing a fantastic job engaging Alaskan volunteers and we would be honored to hear more about your success.”

In case you haven't yet seen the delightful Quinhagak Alleulia chorus, 49 Writers board member sends this link: http://jetreidliterary.blogspot.com/2011/12/so-you-thought-you-knew-this-one.html. For a comprehensive calendar of literary events throughout Alaska, visit http://www.alaskalitevents.com/.

Anne Coray's poem "The Art of Being," from her recent collection A Measure's Hush (Boreal Books 2011) is currently featured on the American Life in Poetry website. The column, selected and introduced by Ted Kooser, has a current readership of about 4,000,000 per week from all over the world, and is featured on the New York Times education blog, "The Learning Network," with commentary by a Times writer. Click here to see the column (through Monday).

Next Saturday, January 7, at 7pm, come out for Fairbanks Arts Association's Literary Reading Series Ice Fog Open Mic, featuring Heather Warren, Donald Crocker, Michael Shaeffer, Jasmine Stokes, Raif Johnson-Kennedy--and you! Bear Gallery, Centennial Center, Pioneer Park.

Congratulations to 49 Writers member and instructor Sandy Kleven. Her poem, "Orestes," was nominated for a PushCart Prize by Stoneboat Journal in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Kleven says, "The poem is a lament over the suicide of Sylvia Plath's son Nicholas Hughes, who hanged himself in Fairbanks in 2009. It was written in the Fairbanks Airport because I was traveling this route to remote villages just about every week. My brother died the same way the previous summer." Another of her poems, "Remnants," was nominated by F Magazine of Anchorage. Kleven describes it as "a tale of desire and hope, set in memory's fragile sanctuary." Here is the Skyped reading of "Orestes" at the launch of Stoneboat.

Issue #5 (Vol. 3, No.1) of Cirque is now live online at http://www.cirquejournal.com/index.php

Hard copies are on sale at MagCloud at http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/317800

Andromeda: Buy Fresh Fish Here: Rick Moody and Why Great Writing Is Hard to Teach

2011-12-29T12:03:00.009-09:00

A few of you asked me what I learned at my latest MFA residency. You may have expected a shorter answer, nonetheless….

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of attending a graduate seminar taught by visiting guest Rick Moody (Ice Storm, The Black Veil), often lauded as one of our top chroniclers of contemporary culture, a 1990s peer of post-post-modern stars like (RIP) David Foster Wallace. Moody had great stage presence. Wearing a stylish hat and slouchy jeans, he spoke slowly and leaned in close to the microphone, delivering his advice on the subject of revision in a gravelly, wry, Tom Waits-kind-of voice.

The large audience of faculty and students, myself included, enjoyed Moody’s sense of humor and his aura of hard-won success. I appreciated that he came to the seminar prepared (some don’t) and that he came with strong opinions. Exposure to other writers’ “rules,” beliefs and attitudes helps us create our own sense of authority. Whether we agree or disagree, at least we find, in pressing up against others’ sharply defined opinions, the shape of our own.

However.

However, not only did I not agree with some of Moody’s basic precepts, but much more troubling, I did not think that Rick Moody agreed with Rick Moody’s basic precepts. Which raises an issue: what can we learn from writer-instructors who say one thing but do another?

I’m tempted to coin a new term for this: pedagogical irony. Dramatic irony, as we might recall from high school or college, is that gap between what characters know and what readers know. Pedagogical irony could be a new label for that gap between what a writer-instructor believes and what he says, or even more complexly, between what he thinks he believes and what he really believes unconsciously (or uncomfortably, with denial and literary angst helping to mix the signals) and then further, between that and what he says and what he does.

Examples from my own teaching life.

I advise peers and students to edit by reading their work aloud. It’s great advice, it really helps, and I rarely do it, or only for a few paragraphs or pages here and there.

More complexly: If asked, I’ll tell you that a story should arise organically from well-developed character, and I do believe this would be optimal. However, what comes to my mind first in conceiving a novel is often a scene at the very end—whether in detailed or very hazy, imagistic form—and I have been known to mold and nudge characters to become the people who would end up in a such a climactic scene. If they refuse to go, I will occasionally kick them. And then I will run after those characters, apologizing, and begging them to wear long pants in order to hide the bruises, because the last thing I want fellow writers or readers to know is that I mistreat and stifle my characters. (Full disclosure: the final imagined scene or key image usually changes, often reversing from what I first imagined. Nonetheless, it’s a starting point.)

But see? I’m still using examples of the gap between what I say and what I do, not really, truly, the gap that starts way back at unconscious belief and results in unacknowledged inconsistencies.

Example from Moody.

Moody started his lecture, as he probably often does (given that I found these great lecture notes from another MFA lecture, online), with an anecdote from his pre-novelist days in the 1980s, when he worked as a New York editor. A superior gave him a crash-course in editing with this mental exercise, which he guided the rest of us through, to much approving laughter.

There’s a sign over a fish stall. It says BUY FRESH FISH HERE. Which word, if any, is unnecessary?

(“One at a time, please, one at a time!” Moody drawled sardonically as people clamored to point out multiple words.)

The exercise was stretched out, as words were discarded as unnecessary. Discard “Fresh” – what fish seller admits his fish isn’t fresh? Pointless even to claim. Delete “Buy” – what else are you going to do at this fish stall? Delete “Here.” Obviously, it’s here. When Moody learned this anecdote from his editing superior, the point was that “Fish” was the only necessary word. At this particular MFA lecture, someone suggested that even “Fish” was unnecessary (who needs the word instead of the thing, right there in the fish stall or sidewalk cooler?) and Moody laughed and happily discarded that word as well. Leaving no words on the sign at all.

This anecdote was a lead-in to his number one rule of revision: “Omit Needless Words.” (Borrowed from Strunk and White, of course.)

There are many problems with this anecdote.

As any advertiser knows—but also as any poet, novelist, or creative writer of any kind also knows—the conveyance of literal, stripped-down, unambiguous meaning is not language’s only, or even main, purpose. The best poetry or prose is not delivered by telegram. The alliterative, suggestive, oceanically sibilant sound of “Fresh Fish” may be just the thing needed to make a stroller stop and think, “Yes. Fish sounds great.” “Buy” and “here” are authoritative words – the first an active verb (and active verbs are generally good) and the second a word that does indeed have meaning: “Here, not there across the street, where they don’t change the ice as often.” The four monosyllabical words have a cadence suitable for putting someone in the mood to eat pure, good, clean fish instead of some polysyllabic, overly complicated or starchy dish, like ratatouille or spaghetti carbonara. Put a blank sign on the street, and frankly, I may just keep walking, especially if that cooler (the question of how the fish was stored or displayed was not well-defined) is closed and I can’t see what’s for sale and hopefully, can’t smell it either.

So yes, there is a reason to write, “Buy Fresh Fish Here.” And if you become such a word-pruner that you end up even deleting “Fish,” then what kind of point are you making about writing? That we shouldn’t write at all? Is this a postmodern statement or a satire? Was Moody pulling the legs of the hundred-plus writers present, only to find that no one yelped back, challenging him?

After all: in Moody’s latest novel, The Four Fingers of Death, a 725-page hysterical-fiction spoof set in 2025 and involving a severed, crawling arm, the character Monty Crandall has become obsessed with trimming his own prose. He succeeds, in the novel’s opening pages (which had me laughing out loud), in becoming an expert author of six-word fiction.

Here is Monty’s first innovative erotic novella, trimmed from an unwieldy 45 pages to six perfect words:

“Go get some eggs, you dwarf.”

Monty’s wife asks the author where and how he will get it published: a run of hardcovers? Instead, he places it in an online periodical. An entire page to itself. No title. No byline.

Are we still to think Moody wasn’t being a little facetious in his lecture? (I’d be tickled to think he was making fools of us all.)

But maybe not. Maybe this idée fixe is so “fixe” precisely because it’s the idea that Moody himself not only can’t seem to follow in his own writing (hear ye, my fellow tuition-paying apprentices— the novel is 725 pages long!), but doesn’t even want to follow, though he insists on prescribing it to others.

Here is what Moody has said elsewhere about why he has “contempt for Twitter”: In general, I think the way to describe the world is to get longer not shorter. Twitter, by virtue of brevity, abdicates any responsibility where real complexity is concerned, because it forbids length.

Here is what Moody does in his own fiction (excerpt from Four Fingers of Death, in a review written by an effusive fan-critic who nonetheless wished that an editor had taken a “hatchet to this entire novel and whacked it down to a size where readers other than Moody devotees):

“Night fell over the desert ... and the stars were like the future perfect of an uncommon verb. Or the stars were the filaments of discarded human aspirations. Or the stars in the night sky were the innumerable preschoolers of September, afraid to climb onto the bus in order to have their liberty abridged. Or the stars in the night sky were like so many holes into which our heads were to be stuck. Or the stars in the night sky were the innumerable computations of some frail and overburdened supercomputer .... Or the stars in the night sky were the total sum of responsibilities, grievances, loves, of a certain nation listing to the end of empire. Or the stars in the night sky were an example of every possible color in the spectrum of all colors ... Or ..."

This is the author who prescribes, “Omit Needless Words"?

This is the teacher who tells us about, “Buy Fresh Fish Here,” a.k.a., revised = “Fish”?

Moody is in effect one of the most manically verbose, digressive authors publishing today. Instead of “Omit Needless Words,” a better opening principle for his lecture might have been, “Why I love words and let myself get carried away with them, who gives a fishy fart what old Strunk and White – or even inappropriately savage critics like Dale Peck -- have to say about it, and here's precisely when and why I break the rules and how it has led to the evolution of my current style, because I know that's what you're all trying to figure out, and Strunk and White have very little to do with it.”

(Disclaimer: Moody did go on to discuss other revision practices, including the writing of more complex sentences. But he also came back frequently to the paring theme, including points about cutting the ends of stories, abstaining from use of adjectives, adverbs, metaphors, and so on.)

A kindly fellow student approached me at break wondering if I was feeling okay (because I hadn’t asked a question—and I always ask a question). So after break, I took a deep breath and decided to ask Moody one question regarding his feelings about plot. He answered that he has “no interest in plot or character.”

By this, I think (hope) he means that he has no interest in mechanical, preconceived, formulaic conceptions of plot or character at the early-drafting stage. He emphasized, under further questioning, that he really does trust the laying down of precise language (rather than any kind of planning) to get him where he needs to go. Yes, yes, the discovery process: a familiar concept. Storylines change, characters surprise us. Whether we’re kicking them or not.

And yet: I still think he didn’t answer the question. The seminar was about revision, but he did not address how he revises for plot and character. Surely, after giving birth to 700-plus pages, there must be elements of plot and character and larger structural issues that require revision, just as individual sentences do.

Moody’s talk, I want to emphasize a final time, was not at all a bad one, and I wish it had gone longer. Perhaps what frustrated me more, as I think about it now, was less his performance than the audience’s limited response. Very few challenged Moody’s over-the-top or oversimplified prescriptions, and none, that I recall, made any connection between what he was saying and anything he had written and published. People laughed and clapped but they let him end the seminar twenty or so minutes short, when the very few questions ran out. The audience had sensed, I think, what I too had sensed—that this was a very entertaining one-man show, but not a true dialogue. (And yet it might have been: Rick Moody has a wonderfully sharp mind, as is clear in both his fiction and his essays, and perhaps that was the problem-- that few attendees wanted to risk his withering disapproval.)

If we are to learn as writers, we need to do more. We need to narrow the pedagogical gap. We need to know what other writers really believe, and what they really do. We need to question and probe. We need to look more closely at process: for example, how does someone who doesn’t care a fig about plot and character come up with winning and cinematic plots (Moody’s Ice Storm and Garden State were both made into successful movies) and intriguing characters? How does imagination and early-drafting really work? How does revision and re-drafting really work?

Here’s what Moody told the Paris Review, when he was asked about how he wove the three parallel narratives that make up his story, “Ring of Brightest Angels”:

Moody: “The best work, for me, has to come from organs that are removed from the brain: liver, pancreas, pituitary gland. So the prose was first, and then I realized what I was getting at, and refined the structure to cohere with where the prose seemed to want to go itself.”

Sounds like we're on the right track, and my own mute glands are envying his glands’ intelligence, moxie, and ambition, but I want to know a little more. So did the Paris Review interviewer.

Interviewer: When you revise, is the process generally additive or reductive?

Moody: It’s both additive and reductive.

OK. I’m still needing more.

I still want to know, from all the opinionated and complex and contradictory writers of our generation (as well as generations past): how do imagination and initial composition and revision proceed through successive drafts, and how does revision operate differently in a poem, a story, a novel? How do the different strategies operate differently for different people?

It’s hard to figure out, and even harder to teach. I’m not giving up yet. I hope you won’t, either.

Andromeda/Your Turn: Resolution Time

2011-12-28T09:20:00.003-09:00

Last year around this time, I asked you what your resolutions were. Ideas mentioned: dedicate the year to novel writing, quit a day job, send a query letter, revise a manuscript. Any progress on your own personal 2011 goals? Any new ideas for 2012 resolutions? (And do stay tuned for more info on the January resolve-to-write event.)

I tend to make long resolution lists. This year, I decided to focus in one category: how I organize my time. This week, I started making notes on what exactly I mean by that, and I came up with five weak areas, the most significant one not being procrastination or simple wasting but time fragmentation. Just when I'm starting to write well, I take little breaks to check email or go online (sometimes for research, sometimes to check on unrelated work issues). It's like my brain needs a little reinforcement hit, whether the work is coming well or poorly. I recognize this as a sign of our increasingly distractible society (read this Scientific American article on multi-tasking and how it builds on and leads to greater distractibility).

Sherry Simpson provided us some amazing tech tools and anti-distraction inspiration in her December posts as featured author, and included within my time resolution is the plan to check out at least one of the apps she recommended (Write or Die).

What are you resolving to do this year?

Deb: 2011 Retrospective

2011-12-27T07:00:00.003-09:00

Hats off to whoever came up with the idea of celebrating the transition from one year to the next. Without this annual rite of passage, we’d barrel ahead without taking time to look back and see all we’ve accomplished together at 49 Writers/49Alaska Writing Center.

Instruction, events, and outreach are our primary focus as we embrace our mission of supporting creative writers from throughout Alaska at all stages of their development while building an audience for Alaska literature. In 2011, we offered fifteen affordable, high-quality writing courses, several of which were sold out, and we began recording select courses for podcast statewide. In addition to outstanding local instructors, several visiting authors taught courses for us, including Brett Dillingham, Bruce Hale, Mattox Roesch, Dave Hunsaker, Kim Rich, Leslie Hsu Oh, Melinda Moustakis, and David Vann. In addition, fifteen lucky retreat participants got to study with Dani Shapiro at our Tutka Bay Writers Retreat, expanded this year to four days and three nights.

We launched a new youth outreach effort this year, thanks to an amazing slate of volunteers and a teen advisory council. Through WYAK (Write Young Alaska), we offered four free workshops for young writers at the new Teen Underground center at Loussac Libraray. We also sponsored two contests and started two young writers groups that meet monthly at Teen Underground. Thanks to the volunteer efforts of visiting travel writer Jenna Schnuer, we also launched an online zine for Alaska’s teens, Alaska Out Loud.

In 2011, we also launched a full event series for Alaska’s literary community, beginning with Resolve to Write gatherings in Juneau, Homer, and Anchorage last January. Our Crosscurrents series of onstage conversations featured authors Nancy Lord, Marybeth Holleman, Charles Wohlforth, Susan Orlean, Julia O’Malley, Dani Shapiro, and Sherry Simpson. Mark Weber and his crew at the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Bookstore have been fabulous partners for these events. We also hosted a Synergies event featuring poets John Morgan and Kelsea Habecker as well as two Open Mic events at our 49 Writers Café at Out North Contemporary Art House, where we also hosted open studio Sundays for writers.

Another successful effort was our first annual Alaska Book Week, where we invited readers and writers across the state to join us in celebrating books by Alaskans and about Alaska. Panels, seminars, book clubs, displays, posters, book marks, and giveaways were all part of the tremendous statewide outpouring of support and participation.

The 49 Writers blog – our birthplace, so to speak – keeps on growing. Guest posts, interviews, featured authors, our annual Ode to a Dead Salmon Contest, plus musing by co-founders Andromeda Romano-Lax and Deb Vanasse – all these continue to make our little blog one of the most-trafficked literary sites in the state.

We gained our 501c3 status this year, an important milestone as we grow from a labor of love to an established and respected member of the nonprofit community. We are humbled by the thanks we’ve received from so many of you throughout the year, including an official thank-you from the Alaska Center for the Book, which honored us with a CLIA (Contribution to Literacy in Alaska) award.

None of this could have happened without your support. As volunteers, you logged over 1500 hours this year to help us bring programs to writers. As individuals, you’ve contributed over one-fourth of our small but growing budget. Several businesses have offered substantial support, including Within the Wild Adventure Company, Evergreen Films, Great Harvest Bread Company, Raven’s Brew Coffee, Epicenter Press, and the University of Alaska Press. We are also profoundly appreciative for foundation and grant funding from the Usibelli Foundation, the Rasmuson Foundation, and the Alaska State Council on the Arts.

Thanks to your support, 2012 promises even more in the way of instruction, events, and outreach to Alaska’s literary community. Under the direction of new Executive Director Linda Ketchum, visiting authors Katey Schultz and Steve Almond will be teaching this spring, and we’ll be offering several workshops with local authors, including a new Publish and Promote series. Our Synergies series is expanding to included events with acclaimed poets Peggy Shumaker, G.C. Waldrep, and Linda Gregerson. We’ll be offering our first online apprenticeship opportunity, workshops in Palmer, workshops in several Anchorage schools, the expansion of the WYAK Alaska Out Loud project to include a print anthology, and outreach to McLaughlin Youth Facility and Covenant House.

2011 has been a great year for Alaska’s writers, and we’re looking for 2012 to be even better. If by chance you’re doing some year-end giving, check out our new stewardship page and donation links. Thanks for joining us in making Alaska a great place to write!

Sherry Simpson: Write or Die

2011-12-26T07:00:00.000-09:00

Once upon a time, most writers used a quaint device called a "typewriter" to produce their work. (Here's what it looks like, young people.) But that venerable tool has never been a necessity, even for modern writers. Most of Vladimir Nabokov's novels began on 3-by-5 index cards. John Le Carre composed his books in longhand. Fortunately, they also had access to cutting-edge technology known as "wives" who typed their drafts.

I know of one contemporary poet whose refusal to use a typewriter hasn't prevented him from producing more than 25 books and winning major awards. Maybe it helped. Responding to an appreciation of the notebook by poet Charles Simic, British writer Lee Rourke recently wrote that he prefers the thoughtful pace of longhand to the annoying tap of a keyboard.

It all comes down to your druthers, doesn't it? I've half-filled dozens of notebooks fancy and plain with thoughts, passages, and ideas, but I can't imagine composing anything longer than a poem without a computer and its lovely cut-and-paste, delete, and undo functions. Still, it never occurred to me until a few years ago that there's a big difference between writing software and word processing. No offense to our overlord, Microsoft Word, or its open-source alternatives, but sometimes a writer just wants to write, not spend 20 minutes trying to turn off autoformat. Not to mention the exasperating need to open 10 different document windows to refer to sections I wrote 45 pages ago, or to store deleted but not dead passages.

Sadly, no program actually does the writing, no matter how much you beseech or bribe the Magical Computer Elves. God knows I've tried. But for some of us, software designed for creative writers offers a better way to do our work by including such features as character tracking, plot outlining, and more. Also, many writers don't work in a linear fashion, as Keith Blount argues in "Removing the Stigma from 'Writing Software.' " He asks, "Word processors enable us to produce good-looking documents—but do they encourage us to focus on the content?"

With scads of programs available, how do you find the right one for your style and budget? Investigating what other writers use is a good start, with the standard caveat that what works for one person might not work for you. For example, fantasy writer Michelle Sagara West describes her favorite tools in two posts here, and a National Novel Writing Month author lists useful programs here. This roundup of "25+ Pieces of Writing Software You Should Know About" includes many suggestions from commenters. Most offer free trials.

If you don't like the choices, you can always create your own software. That's what Keith Blount did with Scrivener, a Mac-based program so popular that he recently released a Windows version. I love Scrivener with a white-hot passion for many reasons. It's stable, includes excellent tutorials and support, and is a bargain at $45 for Macs, $40 for Windows (less for students and educators).

More importantly, it's flexible and powerful. It stores and organizes notes, outlines, multiple drafts, and immense amounts of research. Everything is instantly accessible while you're writing. Use features you like, such as full-text writing, a virtual corkboard, or script formatting, and ignore what you don't. The backup and autosave systems are reliable (though I'm not sure Scrivener has ever crashed on me), and it's easy to export chapters into one word-processing document.

One reason I'm a fan of Blount is his practical, generous philosophy toward finding the best tool, even if it's not his product. He links to numerous writing and word processing programs that he likes, including free alternatives.

Among those that he doesn't mention is Storybook. This free, open-source software helps novelists organize and track plots and characters, as does Storyblue. Scripped is an on-line scriptwriting program that comes with a community. Aeon Timeline helps novelists track arcs and characters and synchronizes with Scrivener. Smatterings links to many focused apps, such as name generators and plot banks.

For stripped-down, sit-your-butt-down-and-start-writing programs, the website 750words.com encourages a daily writing practice. If fear and shame motivate you as much as they do me, you'll appreciate the negative reinforcement offered by Write or Die. Set the time limit for your session and choose among Gentle, Normal, and Kamikaze modes. Stop writing, and you'll incur either a gentle reminder, an unpleasant noise, or the horror of seeing your words erase themselves. The web app is free; the $10 desktop app helps you avoid "the gigantic kitten of distraction that is our modern internet."

But whether you write with crayons or a Cray computer, never forget the essential truth expressed in this review of minimalist writing apps: "When it comes right down to it, there’s one way to get your writing done: You write."

Ela: 49 Writers Weekly Round-up

2011-12-23T07:00:00.000-09:00

What a year! Next week we’ll run a 49 Writers 2011 retrospective, but in the meantime we’re looking ahead toward 2012. Mark your calendars first for January 1, when online registration opens for our spring term. From our “Publish and Promote” series to plot, poetry, submissions, and more, we’ve got something for pretty much everyone. Make 2012 the year you get serious about writing! Courses are already posted on our website.

Next up – January 11 – is the first 49 Writers Synergies Event of the year, “Poemgrass: a Poet and a Banjo” featuring poet Peggy Shumaker and musician Robin Child at the Anchorage Museum, Brian E. Davies Chugach Gallery (4^th Floor) from 7-8:30pm. On the eve of the 2012 Alaska Arts and Culture Conference, join current Alaska State Writer Laureate, Peggy Shumaker, (Gnawed Bones, Just Breathe Normally) as she reads from her poetry in the cozy and reflective Chugach Gallery at the Anchorage Museum. Music by local banjo player Robin Child and friends; a book signing will follow. Free admission, but donations are welcome to support this innovative reading and performance series.

And don’t forget our statewide Resolve to Write events on January 20, when you’re invited to gather with other writers to share your writing resolve. Scheduling is already underway in Anchorage (one gathering for adults, one for young writers), Homer, and Eagle River – details to follow soon. If you’d like to host a Resolve to Write event in your community, email us at 49writers@gmail.com.

“Comics: Turning drawings into stories” debuting at Teen Underground Dec. 27-29 from 3-5 pm, for ages 12-14 is now FULL. To waitlist, email 49writers@gmail.com; include a phone number. Thanks much to the Friends of the Library for sponsoring this workshop.

Alaska authors Ernestine Hayes and Deb Vanasse are featured along with the Alaska Aces, the State Troopers, Iditarod champion John Baker, and even Santa Claus, among others on the Governor’s “Heart of Alaska 2011” web page. Wonderful to see authors honored in this way!

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

Poet Sandra Alcosser invites all students of Poetry, Junior High through Graduate School, to document their environment in Poetry.

Together with Senior News Analyst Cokie Roberts NPR/ABC, she will select work for the National Archives and the Environmental Protection Agency's Documerica Project. Read about it here.

Poems may be previously published so long as there is no copyright on them. The National Archives will share the poems on Archives.gov, EPA.gov and blogs on Archives.gov and Tumblr. Some or all of the poems will be part of a larger exhibit on the Documerica collection that will launch in March 2013 and go through Fall 2013 at the National Archives building in DC.

Andromeda shares this: World Book Night is an annual celebration designed to spread a love of reading and books. To be held in the U.S. as well as the U.K. and Ireland on April 23, 2012, it will see tens of thousands of people go out into their communities to spread the joy and love of reading by giving out free World Book Night paperbacks (chosen from a list of 30 top titles, both classic and recently published; more info at the website). To get involved, and/or offer to distribute free books supplied by the organization, go to http://www.us.worldbooknight.org/about-world-book-night/what-is-world-book-night.

Do we have anyone in Alaska already taking part, or willing to take part?

Andromeda: Foreign Rights-One Part of the Changing Book Market

2011-12-22T13:54:00.007-09:00

Eowyn's Ivey The Snow Child and Andromeda Romano-Lax's The Spanish Bow: Alaska books that have found their way into foreign markets.

Why might I need an agent? Because the book market becomes more complicated every day, and various rights—from electronic to foreign—need to be handled with care. I’ll be teaching a three-hour clinic, called “Agents: What You Need To Know,” on Feb. 11, Saturday, 1-4. (That morning, Debbie LaFleiche will be teaching a clinic on Getting Published, making it an all-day opportunity for learning about the business side of writing.) One of the many topics I’ll cover are foreign rights, an exciting opportunity that is gaining importance for more Alaska writers, who are starting to see their books published in translated editions.

Today, I’m filling out some IRS paperwork to ensure I don’t overpay on foreign taxes for foreign editions of my novels. I’m glad to have the help of an agent, or I wouldn’t know how to fill out these forms—and probably wouldn’t even know they exist. Most likely, I wouldn’t need them in the first place, because without an agent, I’d be published in only one country, at most, instead of a dozen.

Some of those deals were very small, but they’ve extended my reach as a novelist. Lately, it seems that most visitors to my blog are from places like Argentina, the Philippines, or Taiwan. Cumulatively, these little deals add up. My second novel isn’t out yet, but already, my advances from two foreign editions, Australia and Poland, have surpassed the modest advance I received in the U.S. With my first novel, I earned twice as much abroad as at home.

The publishing world has changed, as we all know. (Today, when we were talking about print runs, my editor told me that about half of her company’s book copies are sold in e-book form. I would have guessed 10 or 20 percent, but 50? We ignore that fact at our peril.)

The rapidly changing global book market, less talked about, is just as important for a writer to understand. About ten years ago, I met Alaska author Lynn Schooler at the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference, and I remember marveling at the fact that his The Blue Bear had been translated into Italian. Schooler was humble about his international status, as was internationally-renowned Alaska author Velma Wallis before him. But I was hugely impressed, and confused: How the heck does that happen?

Ten years later, globalization has picked up the pace, and it runs both ways. Ever heard of Girl With a Dragon Tattoo?

Palmer author Eowyn Ivey has a first novel coming out in February. The Snow Child has already appeared abroad, and Ivey’s website shows images of six gorgeous covers, with more to come. Anchorage novelist Don Rearden recently tweeted about an Australian book deal for his first novel, The Raven’s Gift.

According to the New York Times, “These days... the sale of foreign rights to American books - a sleepy backwater of publishing a decade ago - has become a fiercely competitive area. … now, foreign sales often represent as much as a third of the revenues for the rights to publish leading American authors.” That article ran twenty years ago. I’m still searching for numbers reflecting what portion of authors’ revenues are coming from foreign editions today.

When an author sells a book to a publisher, that publisher may retain world rights and use its own connections to sell them; the earnings get rolled into the author’s original advance, helping the publisher earn back some of what it spent, sometimes before the U.S. book is released. Or an agent may decide to hold onto those rights, and sell them herself, often traveling to world book fairs (the most famous is in Frankfurt) to make the pitch. Some agents excel at this; some don’t. The agent nearly always gets help from subagents in each foreign country being approached. That means that a novelist now has not one agent, but many—each getting their cut, each generating emails and paperwork and a web of relationships. It’s complicated, which is why that original agent’s organizational role is even more important. He will decide what rights get sold, which are kept, how hard to push in the foreign markets, and hopefully, he’ll keep track of all those advances coming and going (often, in different currencies) and make sure that an author really does get paid for some bargain paperback printed in Russia, for example.

Sound exciting? It is. Sound hard to manage as an unagented or self-published author? Indeed. We’ll talk about that on Feb. 11. In the meanwhile, do you know of other Alaska authors with foreign editions, or have you recently read a translated novel that might not have found its way into your hands just a few years ago? (One of my favorites was Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses.) Let us know.

Notes from the Old Mint: A Civil War Guest-post by Ann Chandonnet

2011-12-21T11:19:00.005-09:00

Ann Chandonnet, pictured above at the "Old Mint" in New Orleans, is co-editor of “Write Quick": War and a Woman’s Life in Letters, 1836-1867.

In Write Quick, the book my cousin, Roberta Pevear, of Bethel and I created, dozens of the letters written by Henry Foster to his wife Eliza were penned in the cramped attic of the New Orleans Mint. Henry wrote about his uncomfortable bed on the rafters, and of once using a drum head as a desk. The Mint had been under construction for many years, but remained unfinished. Henry was able to get up onto the roof and view the wharves along the Mississippi and the business of cotton and other goods going on there. He waited for ships arriving from New England, hoping they would bring mail from Eliza in Massachusetts or from other members of his extended family. Soldiers away from home "lived on mail," as his brother-in-law once wrote.

For nearly two years, Henry was stationed in New Orleans with the 26th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. His duties were chiefly to guard Confederate prisoners. Occasionally, his unit was sent to other places in Louisiana, and he wrote to Eliza from those camps. But he kept returning to the Mint.

In the early 1860s, the Mint not only minted money but also served as the Post Office for the city. The Post Office closed at 5:00 p.m., a fact that Henry mentioned several times in his correspondence.

Today there is a new Mint several blocks away. The Old Mint, located near the popular French Market on the waterfront, lost its copper roof during Hurricane Katrina (2006); sheets of it flew far and wide. It took until November 12 of 2011 to refurbish the building. I had heard that the Old Mint opened for business during the summer, so when I showed up on its doorstep on November 13, I didn't realize how lucky I was. The Park Service historian was very kind, listening to my story of Henry and his letters. I wanted to see the view Henry had from the roof, but that was not accessible. I also wanted to see the attic, but it wasn't available to the public. However, the historian and her fellows quickly realized how important it was for me to get a glimpse of this area. They scouted up two sets of original cast iron steps—closely resembling some of the famous iron balconies of the city, and then allowed me a peek into the attic. It had been transformed with batts of insulation and air ducts, but I got the general idea of how low and dark it must have been when Henry and his comrades lodged there. I was thrilled!

Descending to the ground floor (now a mint museum) again, I noticed the enormous granite steps of the staircases. I could imagine Henry running down the cast iron steps and then down these granite steps—trying to make the 5:00 p.m. deadline for another of his letters to Eliza. The Old Mint is now equipped with a large performance space on the second floor, and will be a jazz history museum.

A New England native and longtime Alaska resident, Ann Fox Chandonnet is the author of numerous books, including Alaska’s Inside Passage (Fodor’s, 2009). Her food history, Gold Rush Grub (University of Alaska Press, 2005), won an Outstanding Book award from the American Association of School Librarians. She currently resides in the Hickory, North Carolina, area.

Deb: Welcome, Linda!

2011-12-20T07:00:00.001-09:00

Linda Ketchum, new 49 Writers Executive Director (as of Jan. 1)

Last week we announced that the 49 Writers board of directors selected Linda Ketchum from a field of truly remarkable candidates to serve as our Executive Director. Linda will do a proper introduction of herself when she takes the reins in January, but in modesty she likely won’t share the details that so impressed the board.

Born and raised in

Scotland

, Linda arrived in Alaska in 1985 by way of Brussels, London, and the rest of the world. She was determined to be a travel writer on the strength of some freelance work for a small London magazine, but became sidetracked for 20 years until enrolling in the MFA program at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Meanwhile, she gained experience in Alaska’s nonprofit sector as a volunteer, program manager, executive director, and board member, and as a consultant focusing on nonprofit capacity-building. Her volunteer work includes terms as board president of an adult literacy project and the Mat-Su Borough Library Board.

Her background ranges from serving as executive director of a nonprofit with a $3 million budget to running a small all-volunteer organization as board president. She has led strategic planning, developed and monitored budgets, developed and designed a small business web portal, initiated fund development, developed successful grant proposals, recruited and trained instructors, and promoted a variety of programs. She has won awards for her work in literacy and for excellence in partner development.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in languages at the University of Edinburgh and completed her Master of Education in Adult Education at UAA. For four years, she taught a graduate course in social entrepreneurship at UAA’s College of Business & Public Policy. In spring 2012, Linda will graduate with her MFA in creative nonfiction.

Linda has been a supporter and member of 49 Writers/49 Alaska Writing Center since our beginning. “I have been impressed by how much the organization has already accomplished in less than two years through the dedicated efforts of its founders and volunteers,” she wrote in the cover letter that went to the board. “I believe wholeheartedly in your mission.”

She’ll officially take over on January 1, but already Linda is volunteering her time to help plan board training and other upcoming activities. Those who know her can attest to our good fortune; those who don’t can look forward to making a fine friend. Beyond Linda’s tremendous resume, she has a gracious presence and a true passion for the literary community. Welcome, Linda!

Information Wrangling: A Guest Post by Sherry Simpson

2011-12-19T07:00:00.004-09:00

Nothing makes me feel like I've accomplished something heroic more than reading a book like Getting Things Done by management guru David Allen. Alas, I prefer reading about grand plans rather than instituting them. Apparently I'm not organized enough to become that organized. (For less overwhelming ideas about time management and productivity, see 43Folders: Time, Attention, and Creative Work, zenhabits, or Creatures of Habit).

Actually, the problem is not that I'm disorganized. It's that I have so much information to organize. My office is jammed with several filing cabinets, supplemented by plastic crates and banker's boxes, everything arranged by a scheme that makes perfect sense to me but would defeat any cryptographer. Then there's vast computer real estate dedicated to storing files. Someday A&E will air a Very Special Episode of "Hoarders" featuring writers—maybe me!—and it will be both horrific and a tearjerker.

The more time wasted frisking my files for an article, fact, or idea, the less time for writing. To amend this insight from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi that I quoted a couple of weeks ago: "The only way to stay creative is to oppose the wear and tear of existence with techniques that organize [information], time, space, and activity to your advantage."

Writer Steven Johnson argues in "Tool for Thought" that information-organizing software can influence the creative process by helping writers make connections and build ideas. Some people, of course, need nothing more than a binder, some index cards, a few stickies. Been there, done that, but computer tools have helped me cobble together my own ground-breaking system: Getting Some Things Done Most of the Time With a Minimum of Shrieking and Hair-Rending. What works for me won't necessarily work for you; maybe you like shrieking and hair-rending.

Information-wrangling begins with making and organizing notes. Like most writers, I scribble on bar napkins, scraps of paper, and magazine margins that maybe I'll find later. Smartphones and tablets are ideal for gathering notes, and new developments in cloud storage and syncing can corral those brilliant ideas and useful facts in one place. [Note: I speak only Apple, so please suggest programs for other platforms. Also, I haven't used everything mentioned here, and 49 Writers isn't endorsing any product mentioned.]

Approximately a zillion note-taking apps are available--some free, some expensive--so the challenge is finding the right system for your working style. AppShopper lists about five pages of note-taking apps for Mac devices. Other flavors are available in Android Market, Amazon's Appstore for Android, and WindowsPhone Marketplace. Web extensions like Thinkery also allow you to make notes as you're browsing online.

If you use multiple computers, then you need a system that synchronizes notes so they're accessible from any computer or device. Microsoft's powerful OneNote now works on multiple platforms. Simplenote is a well-known free app that developers have customized. The popular, free Evernote takes notes, snaps pictures, records audio, and saves entire webpages. An amazing number of associated apps record phone calls, scan documents, turn PDFs into edit-able documents, and more.

To help sort through possibilities, The New York Times reviews some products here, Apple programs are described here, and Lifehacker readers recommend their top five note-taking apps here. Notetaking.net tracks apps and lists review sites. This MSNBC article surveys apps and suggests useful ways to organize notes.

Once you're knee deep in notes, how do you find them again? I rely on the Mac program Yojimbo, a virtual filing cabinet with an infinite number of drawers that I can paw through instantly for passwords, serial numbers, PDF documents, bookmarks, story ideas, notes, images, and more. It's simple, flexible, and not cheap.

Notebook 3.0 is set up visually like a scrapbook; I use it for brainstorming. Curio is another Mac project organizer that also allows mindmapping. Windows users might appreciate ConnectedText or Writer's Blocks, but check out this list of Windows-friendly writers' software.

If you're tired of emailing yourself drafts so you can open them from another computer, the free file syncing service Dropbox may rock your world. I can revise an essay in the Dropbox folder on my desktop computer and open the same draft from my laptop, as well as store files accessible from any computer. This review describes similar cloud services, like SugarSync, but notice how many readers praise Dropbox's simplicity.

Mac users wrestling with complicated projects involving lots of research might like DEVONthink's information management programs. The database for my last project organizes almost 5,000 articles, notes, web links, e-mails, interview transcripts, photographs, and more. DEVONthink researches online, searches quickly, and links phrases and documents. The company's site describes how writers use it. If it's good enough for Michael Chabon, it's good enough for us.

No computer tool can help unless it's easy to use consistently. But if nothing else, organizing your notes is an excellent way to procrastinate. Or so I hear.

Ela: 49 Writers Weekly Round-up

2011-12-16T07:00:00.001-09:00

Last week we promised great news about our new Executive Director and the unveiling of our Spring 2012 Literary Season.

First, the ED. Since May 1, Deb Vanasse has been serving as 49 Writers Interim Executive Director. While she loves this feisty little nonprofit, it has never been her intent to run it permanently. Enter our dynamic board of directors, which launched a full-scale ED search that yielded applications from a number of distinguished candidates, many holding MFAs, MBAs, PhDs. From this competitive pool, the board is pleased to announce their selection of Linda Ketchum, who’ll start as 49 Writers ED on January 1, 2012. A founding member of 49 Writers and a UAA MFA degree candidate in Creative Writing, Linda brings an incredible background in nonprofit management and a passion for all things literary. We promise a full introduction soon, right here at the 49 Writers blog.

Equally exciting is our Spring 2012 Literary Season. Ready to rev up your writing in 2012? We’ve got an incredible lineup of courses, including a Submission Workshop with visiting writer/editor Katey Schultz and two workshops with nationally acclaimed author Steve Almond. Want to work one-on-one with a published author? That would be our Fiction Apprenticeship with Mattox Roesch. And check out our new “Publish and Promote” series, with workshops in Getting Published, Agents, Self-Publishing, Social Media, and Copyright Basics. Of course we’ve also got a workshop from our popular Elements series, this one on Plot, and a workshop for Intermediate Poets. Finally, for the first time we’ll offer a course in the Valley, “Writing Your Place.” Registration opens on January 1, but you can take a sneak peek at the line-up.

Without getting into too much detail, let’s just say we’ve also lined up an exciting season of events in our popular Synergies, Gatherings, R & C, and Crosscurrents series. You’ll want to mark your calendars now for the first 49 Writers Synergies Event of the year, “Poemgrass: a Poet and a Banjo” featuring poet Peggy Shumaker and musician Robin Child at the Anchorage Museum, Brian E. Davies Chugach Gallery (4^th Floor) on Wednesday, January 11, 7-8:30pm. On the eve of the 2012 Alaska Arts and Culture Conference, join current Alaska State Writer Laureate, Peggy Shumaker, (Gnawed Bones, Just Breathe Normally) as she reads from her poetry in the cozy and reflective Chugach Gallery at the Anchorage Museum. Music by local banjo player Robin Child and friends; a book signing will follow. Free admission, but donations are welcome to support this innovative reading and performance series.

And of course don’t forget our statewide Resolve to Write events on or about January 20. If you’d like to host one of these gatherings of writers in your community, email us at 49writers@gmail.com by December 20. The commitment is small – pick a location (a home or café is fine) plus a date and time on or around January 20 – and tell us so we can help spread the word. The idea is for writers to gather and share their writing resolve for the New Year.

Young writers: Our WYAK young writers group (ages 12-14) meets this Monday, December 19, from 6:30-8pm at Teen Underground, third floor Loussac Library. Bring work to share, or just come hang out with other writers. And don’t forget “Comics: Turning drawings into stories” debuting at Teen Underground December 27-29 from 3-5pm, also for ages 12-14. No special drawing or writing talent is required. Teens need to register soon, as the workshop is more than half full. The workshop is co-sponsored by the Friends of the Library.

Visit www.wyakwriters.com for details.

Speaking of teens, kudos to 49 Writers WYAK volunteer Lizbeth Meredith, who in her day job at McLaughlin Youth Center has helped organize a holiday session called “Bring the Outside In.” The idea is to give incarcerated youth a chance to explore skills they can continue after release. Besides offering our Comics class at Teen Underground, illustrator Lee Post has volunteered to teach “Awesome Drawing” at the McLaughlin event. Contingent on funding, watch for continuing 49 Writers involvement with youth at McLaughlin and Covenant House.

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

Tonight, Friday, December 16, 7pm, the Mountain View Boys and Girls Club will host the second of six V.O.I.C.E. Youth Open Mic's. Wang Gat will be the second featured reader. Wang was one of the Brave New Alaskan Voices youth poetry slam team members who traveled to San Francisco this summer to participate in the Brave New Voices national youth poetry slam.

Congratulations to Susan Pope, who has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her essay entitled "Canyon," which appeared in the Spring 2011 Issue of Bluestem, a journal of the Department of English, Eastern Illinois University. Her essays have also been published in journals and anthologies including Pilgrimage, Damselfly Press, The Southeast Review, Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment, Cirque: A Literary Journal of the Pacific Rim, Persimmon Tree, and others.

Ann Chandonnet's book Write Quick was reviewed last week in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Check it out here!

Featured Writers Coming in 2012

2011-12-15T09:01:00.002-09:00

A sneak preview of the featured authors and writers who will guest-blog for us in 2012:

January, Vivian Faith Prescott
February, Teri Sloat
March, Maia Nolan
April, David Marusek
May, Ross Coen
June, Nicole O'Donnell
July, Amy O'Neill Houck
August, Lucian Childs
September, Kathy Tarr
October and November, Students of APU
December, Jen Funk Weber

We hope you find this list a mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar, expanding what we all know about who is writing (and reading) in Alaska. We look forward to their insights and stories in 2012.

What Now?: A Guest Post by Sara Loewen

2011-12-13T07:00:00.000-09:00

Truman Capote said, “Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the yard and shot it.” Maybe that’s a little dramatic. John Steinbeck said, “The book dies a real death for me when I write the last word. I have a little sorrow and then go on to a new book which is alive. The rows of my books on the shelf are to me like very well embalmed corpses. They are neither alive nor mine. I have no sorrow for them because I have forgotten them, forgotten in its truest sense.

I got a taste of that “little sorrow” when I turned in my MFA thesis this year. It wasn’t even a book yet, just a book-length collection of essays, and still, hitting send felt kind of awful. It meant the end of mentor comments, summer residencies, school-imposed deadlines, the end of a nurturing community that had given me a glimpse into the writing life.

Sure, I felt celebratory for a couple of hours. I left the library and took a long shower—my first in days. Standing in the shower, I wondered how these years had gone so fast. How I would justify babysitting expenses without MFA deadlines. Having turned in the final submission of writing I’d worked on for three years, I was suddenly free to think about how I hadn’t exercised in three years, or cleaned the house thoroughly, or thought about whether we lived in the right town, or what, exactly, I hoped to use my MFA degree for. Was I hoping to be a writer or a teacher? Was it possible to do both well? By the time my hair was dry, I was depressed.

Creative writing teacher Elise Blackwell asks, “What Defines a Successful Post-M.F.A. Career?” in a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. She lists the many reasons people enter a writing program: to take a few years out of their lives to read and write, to earn a living in publishing or professional writing, to finish a novel or screenplay, to enter academe even though “There are full-time university teaching jobs available for less than 1 percent of graduating creative-writing program alumni.” Blackwell settles, in the end, on her own measure of success: “How many of our students are still making art—and making it well and ideally to the notice of others—10 years out?”

Which is exactly what made hitting send so hard for me—the fear that I wouldn’t be able to sustain my ambition or writing life for the next ten years, let alone for the rest of my life. One valuable lesson of an MFA program is learning how much work writing is. Life rarely arranges itself into tidy sessions of writing time. During my first MFA residency, I was the only one in the dorms with a breast pump. The next year, the only one wearing maternity clothes. Many times, I worried that I’d entered the program at the wrong time in my life. I’m not sure there is ever a right time. Still, before being published, it is so much easier to say, “I’m an MFA student,” than to say, “I’m a writer.”

There was an interview in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner this fall with Nobel Prize winner Brian Schmidt. His career advice was to “pick something you love so much you would do it for free.” I think the unspoken assumption is that the money will follow. But when you’re a writer, you are often working for something close to free. It’s not always easy to feel confident about writing as a career choice. Sometimes we have to work jobs we don’t love and fit what we do love wherever we can.

Last month a full-time English position opened in Kodiak. With benefits! I could replace the glasses I bought 8 years ago. We could all go to the dentist! For the past two years, I’ve been working as an adjunct and patching together part-time positions to supplement a series of slow commercial salmon seasons. We’re self-employed, and our health insurance costs nearly as much as our mortgage but covers only catastrophic accidents or illness. Benefits would be a really big deal.

I wanted the job, but I knew that taking on five new classes would leave little time for writing. I knew I’d be lesson planning in the shower, grading papers after the boys went to bed, answering student texts and emails on the weekend. I know how I teach, how easily I pour my time into planning classes and commenting on papers. Teaching is better than headlines and Hulu and Facebook and Gmail combined when it comes to stealing time.

All weekend, the little voice that Oprah is always urging us to listen to kept saying, “This is not the right time.” As I was trying to decide what to do about the job, things happened, things my friend Amy would call signs because Amy reads books about cosmic energy and trusting the universe. Like the night I got home from teaching and my four-year-old, Liam, was already asleep, looking angelic with rosy cheeks and arms thrown up over his head, and I realized I had seen him for a total of 25 minutes all day. 25 minutes of cereal eating, pajama changing, teeth brushing, raincoat zipping before it was time to catch the preschool bus. His little brother, Luke, is two. I know now, how quickly Luke will be four, how easy it would be to miss this. And I know already how much I will miss this.

Other signs: the same day the babysitter gave her notice; my MFA manuscript arrived in the mailbox from the graduate office. Steve Jobs died, which should be completely unrelated except that I followed a link to one of his speeches on Youtube, the one where he says, “You have to trust in something. You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life karma, whatever, because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”

I decided to trust that body of work in the mailbox, to live without new glasses, to floss more often, to wait for a fulltime position when the boys are a little older. When I didn’t take the job, I apologized to the head of the English department who happens to be a lovely person. He said, “Hey, you can’t control when epiphanies hit. You’re a writer—you should know that.”

So when I learned this week that my first book is going to be published, it felt like confirmation of everything that I want to believe in—the creative spirit, MFA programs, luck, mentors, hard work, Amy’s signs. Except the news came with the flu. And my husband’s flu became pneumonia and they found that his white blood cell count was so low our doctor put him into the hospital and told us to prepare for the possibility of Leukemia. Insurance kicks in after our $10,000 deductible, but of course my first thought was that I should have a fulltime job with health benefits. Meanwhile, friends and family rallied—helping with the boys, bringing food, walking our dog, texting encouragement—confirming that yes, we live in the right place.

On the way home from the hospital today, I mailed my contract. I was thinking about the way life changes, slowly or suddenly, with or without our permission. Over the last three years, my MFA classmates have moved, gotten married, changed jobs, adopted children, lost loved ones, given birth—and those are just the big things. Sometimes we sacrifice creative time to pay the bills, or to be a decent mother or father or spouse or friend. And then we get back to work, hoping for sorrows as small as a finished book, hoping for balance somewhere between life and writing.

Sara Loewen earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from the UAA low-residency program. Her family spends the summer setnet fishing in Uyak Bay. In the winter she works at Kodiak College. Her essay collection will be published by the University of Alaska Press in spring 2013. Her husband is now home from the hospital and feeling better.

Distracted: A Guest Post by Sherry Simpson

2011-12-12T07:00:00.001-09:00

It took longer than it should have to write this post on reducing distractions because first I needed to do some research using that wonderful, terrible invention known as the World Wide Web. (Sidenote: Why is it called the Web? Why not the Galaxy? Or the Labyrinth? Or the Ginormous Black Hole of Time-Suck? Just a sec while I go look that up. Wait, no. Bad writer! Focus!)

What was I yammering about? Never mind. The point is that for writers, the Web is just one of the many, many, many, many distractions conspiring to come between you and your . . .

Squirrel!!!

Many psychologists, writers and scientists have described how various technological gee-gaws are eroding modern attention spans. Writers battled distractions long before the computer age, but it doesn't help that Web surfing is one of those activities that, like eating French fries and gambling, "stimulates your medial forebrain pleasure circuit," according to neuroscientist David Linden in The Compass of Pleasure.

Distraction is closely related to procrastination, an affliction that I don't have a single useful thing to say about (although this guy does). I can, however, suggest a few strategies for thwarting technology's incessant tug of war over your attention. (To those of you thinking, "Just muster some willpower, you loser," I say: Go away. You're a freak of nature.)

Some tactics seemed obvious—after I tried them. Those Pavlovian dings, buzzes, bouncing icons and jangles that announce the super-exciting arrival of an e-mail, text message, or phone call? Turn them off. Better yet, don't allow any phone, smart or dumb, into your writing arena. Your friends, like mine, will learn that eventually (probably) you'll call back. Best of all, take writer Ron Carlson's advice and never check e-mail until after you're done writing. "If you open your e-mail, you are asking to let go of the day," he says in Ron Carlson Writes a Story.

I once sneered at the thralldom known as Facebook until I joined it. I might as well have started mainlining heroin. The day I caught myself wondering whether FarmVille is any fun, I posted a status update placing myself on hiatus. What a relief. When I came crawling back months later, the spell was broken. Now I check in once or twice a week. Book publishers can insist that serious writers should twitter their heads off, but my inner Luddite refuses to follow or be followed until I'm wealthy enough to hire a ghost-tweeter.

Even your computer set-up can create enough friction to hamper the flow between thought and word. The mental static caused by a visually busy computer background wasn't obvious until I installed simple, soothing wallpaper. That tip I learned by wasting time researching "minimalist computing," as advocated by Minimal Mac and Lifehacker, among others.

If your writing software constantly pesters you with auto-correct and formatting prompts, zenware is your friend. Setting your word processor to a full screen view blots out the desktop and suppresses menus and tool bars, but several software programs can reduce your writing environment to nothing more than words on a screen. Lifehacker, which has hoovered up distressing amounts of my time with posts like "Hack a manual cheese grater to run via cordless drill," describes their "five best distraction-free writing tools" here. Other programs include Darkroom for Windows, JDarkRoom, and Grandview for Mac, which allows you to engage with your writing one word at a time if you like.

Having devised so many enticing ways to entertain ourselves, it became inevitable that we invented technology to foil technology. A Ph.D. student named Fred Stutzman earned the gratitude of writers like Zadie Smith when he developed Freedom, which blocks Internet access for Macs and PCs for up to eight hours unless you cave and reboot. Trials are free.

Several methods allow access to, say, Google Scholar but not to guilty pleasures. Enlist parental controls or install free browser extensions like LeechBlock for Firefox. Chrome's StayFocusd rations time on particular sites and can inflict the "nuclear option." Stutzman recently released Anti-Social (Mac only) to keep your friends and "friends" at bay. Concentration uses these methods and others to help you focus. (Please leave recommendations for similar Windows software in the comments.)

If you possess an iron will, I don't want to hear about it, but you could try Sid Savara's tips for improving concentration and Matt Might's ideas for crippling technology. You could take a peek at this page whenever you feel the urge to surf. More radically, find your computer's off button, which cartoonist Randall Munroe named the "Distraction Affliction Correction Extension." Or, return to the time-honored method of writing on paper with a pencil, which was invented in . . . well, let me just Google that and get back to you.

Ela: 49 Writers Weekly Round-up

2011-12-09T07:00:00.002-09:00

It’s still December, we know, but the countdown to the New Year is on, and it’s an exciting time here at 49 Writers. We’ll be soon unveiling a fantastic line-up of writing courses and events for 2012, along with the scoop on a fabulous new Executive Director, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, we’ll just mention that in 2012 we plan to repeat our popular Resolve to Write events on or about January 20. Last year volunteers hosted events in Juneau, Homer, and Anchorage; in 2012 we’d like to expand into even more Alaska communities. The commitment is small – pick a location (a home or café is fine) plus a date and time on or around January 20 – and tell us so we can help spread the word. The idea is for writers to gather and share their writing resolve for the New Year. If you’d like to help with a 49 Writers Resolve to Write event in your community, email us at 49writers@gmail.com by December 20.

Speaking of gatherings, don’t forget the 49 Writers Café at Out North (3800 DeBarr Rd) this Sunday, December 11, from 1-4 pm. No holiday shopping excuses! This is your time to focus on craft. If you bring your 49 Writers membership card, the Raven’s Brew coffee’s on us. Thanks much to 49 Writers volunteer Anna Breuninger for hosting.

Big need, small commitment: Teeka Ballas at F Magazine has asked us to help her find ten judges for the Statewide Young Writers Competition. Only two or three hours, one evening, will be needed for judging. Two judges are needed in each of these categories:

Flash Fiction
Short Fiction
Personal Essay
Poetry
Humor

If you’re not in Anchorage, you can still help, though you’ll miss out on some of the fun of meeting with other writers to go through the entries. No judge may have any relationship with any of the young writers, of course, even though the work is submitted anonymously. If you can help, email Teeka by December 14 at publisher@fhideout.org.

Additionally, F Magazine’s statewide (all ages) writing competition has just opened. The deadline is May 1, and guidelines can be found on their website.

Young writers: Our WYAK young writers group (ages 15-18) meets this Monday, December 12, from 6:30-8 pm at Teen Underground, third floor Loussac Library. Bring work to share, or just come hang out with other writers. For ages 12-14, your writers group meets Monday, December 19 – same time, same place. And don’t forget “Comics: Turning drawings into stories” debuting at Teen Underground December 27-29 from 3-5 pm, also for ages 12-14. No special drawing or writing talent is required. Teens need to register soon, as the workshop is more than half full. The workshop is co-sponsored by the Friends of the Library.

Visit www.wyakwriters.com for details.

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

On Saturday December 10, 5pm, Hank Lentfer will give a reading, presentation and book signing at Bunnell St Gallery, Homer. His book Faith of Cranes is a memoir of his home and community near Glacier Bay. Visit his website for images of his home and the Gustavus landscape, as well as recordings of sandhill cranes.

The Society of Children Book Writers and Illustrators will be meeting on Wednesday, December 14. 6-6.30 will be SCBWI news and information on contests. 6.30-8.30 will be sharing critiques. Bring along five copies of 3-7 pages of work for feedback, or just come and offer feedback to others. Starbucks on the NE corner of Dimond and Old Seward, 1005 E. Dimond, Anchorage. If you have trouble finding it, call Stephanie Tatalias on 206 769 2728.

Also on Wednesday December 14, at 7pm, Poetry Parley will feature the work of Kay Ryan and Gretchen Diemer, Mike Burwell, John Mckay and Deb Liggett of the Ten Poets of Anchorage.

Out North, 3800 DeBarr Rd, Anchorage.

Call for entries: postmark deadline January 6, 2012. The Northwest Film Center asks Northwest filmmakers to MAKE IT SHORT: a challenge to create excellent work of 40 seconds' duration or less.

Screening will be held on January 17, 2012 in a free program for public and jury. In addition to audience choice award, there will be cash prizes, production service, and the grand prize winner will see their work screened at the Portland International Film Festival in February.

Permanent Residents of Alaska, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington may submit works of any genre, 40 seconds or less.

Open to Youth, ages 19 and younger, and General, for ages 19 and older. No entry fee. For more information, visit their website.

Fairbanks Arts Association's Literary Arts Committee is now accepting entries for the 18th Annual Poetry Contest. Juror: Frank Soos. The purpose of the contest is to encourage, publicize and reward the writing of high quality poetry. Winners of the contest will be announced on March 10, 2012, 5pm, at Fairbanks Arts Associations's Bear Gallery in the Alaska Centennial Center for the Arts, Pioneer Park, 2300 Airport Way. There are Adult, High School and Elementary/Middle School divisions, with cash prizes.

Deadline for entries is Monday, February 6, 2012, 6pm--hand delivered to Fairbanks Arts Association, 2300 Airport Way, or postmarked.

Entry Fee: Grade, Middle and High School: $3 per poem or $10 for four poems.

Adults: $4 per poem or $13 for four poems.

Open to AK residents only; no more than four poems per author.

All poems must be original and not previously published.

Each must be typed/formatted to an 8 1/2 x 11 inch sheet of paper and may not exceed 100 lines in length.

A separate cover page should include name, address, phone and division, as well as the title of all the poems submitted. AUTHOR's NAME SHOULD NOT APPEAR ON ANY OF THE POEMS.

NEW: digital submissions may be emailed to digitalfaa@gmail.com. Fees for these will be accepted via the phone, mail or in person.

List of winners will be sent if SASE is included.

Andromeda/Your Turn: Your Holiday Wish List Reading: Alaska Book Suggestions

2011-12-08T06:00:00.001-09:00

At this moment, I'm most likely on a long plane ride to MFA-land (Antioch University in Los Angeles), by way of Minnesota--my fellow Alaskans will relate to this sort of doglegging--and hopefully, enjoying some light reading. I'm still getting used to my Kindle, but one thing it does well is offer free reading samples. I've downloaded about a dozen first chapters, sort of a free buffet for the cheap bibliophile. I was happy to see that Hank Lentfer's Faith of Cranes, subject of Bill Sherwonit's Tuesday post, is available on Kindle, allowing me a quick early peek.

Faith of Cranes would be the newest Alaska book on my holiday wish list. What else are you planning to buy for others or hoping to receive yourself? Books for Christmas giving, books for Chanukah, books to get us through the shortest solstice day, books to make us better people for the new year. Chime in.

Andromeda: Following our Obsessions

2011-12-07T10:57:00.004-09:00

December 7, 1941—seventy years ago today.

All week we’ve been treated to news items about Pearl Harbor and the run-up to World War II, and I’ve felt the glimmer and pull of intriguing forgotten stories, trying to distract me from my current work, which is not set in the 1940s. (The current WIP has two storylines, one in 2004 and one in the late 1800s; one could average those two time-settings and come up with the 1940s, but that’s beside the point, I think.)

Over the weekend, I intended to read a relaxing novel (set and written in the 1970s—a real page turner) and found myself instead netsurfing in search of firsthand female prisoner-of-war accounts from Japan—or more precisely, letters from those former prisoners several years after the war, when they still didn’t feel well or fit in.

I’ve never painted a little tank or soldier model, can’t converse about famous battles, and tuned out in many of my high school history classes (though I did start paying attention in college, where my major was public policy). It’s the life just beyond the margins of war that have always interested me the most, the times before and after international conflicts, the personal storylines running parallel or perpendicular to the public storylines with which we are all more familiar.

Or maybe it’s just chance that I’ve written two novels set in the 1930s, and it has nothing to do with war at all, but only about the chronological distance, a matter of perspective. Stories set too long ago can feel like fuzzy costume dramas, inhabited by entirely unfamiliar personalities; ones set currently sometimes portray issues or foreground ephemera that don’t date well, creating a two-dimensional image of things that won’t ultimately matter. We all have our preferred vantage points, our angles of perception. For ten years, I’ve found myself inventing stories (not all of them by any means, just more of them) set two generations ago, in my grandfather’s time. Go figure.

And then there is the matter of that time period’s culture—a culture in which my other passions, art and classical music, were taken seriously. In the 1930s and 1940s, dictators not only used art as propaganda and policy, they often dabbled quite seriously on their own. Hitler was a failed artist. Churchill was an immensely successful one. Mussolini practiced violin every day.

My first two novels—one, about a cellist (The Spanish Bow), the other about a young enthusiast of classical sculpture (The Detour); both about people whose artistic desires end up having ethical and political significance—probably couldn’t be set in contemporary times. Our recent presidents have been more interested in basketball and jogging than art, and I can’t recall the last time a sonata or sculpture strongly impacted international policy—though if I’m mistaken, please inform me.

But my post today isn’t really about the World War II period. It’s about how we find ourselves drawn again and again to certain themes, questions, time periods, and places—and how, even if we try to ignore those fascinations, they just don’t seem to go away.

I’d already let Hitler play a bit part in The Spanish Bow and swore I wouldn’t use that mustachioed character again—he’s gotten too much press and screen-time already. Then I dreamed up The Detour, which happens to take place in 1938 Munich and Italy, and involves Nazi art policy. (Hard to keep Bavaria’s most famous failed artist out of that one). In the new novel, I never actually show Hitler in person and I did my best to limit mentions of the Führer at all, granting him an invented nickname, Der Kunstsammler—The Collector—to keep even the sound of his name off my pages. But of course, he’s still there.

Having mentioned concentration camps in my first novel and having edited a concentration camp scene out of my second—though I’d visited Dachau in 2009, in order to write that scene—I felt pretty sure I was done with camps. (Not that everyone knows about the Holocaust, believe it or not. There’s a reason German schoolchildren are required to tour the camps, for good reason. But at the same time, the Holocaust can feel like a too-easy subject for melodrama, so one proceeds carefully.)

Yet—what do you know—last month I was reading about the life of a significant filmmaker and discovered that she used concentration camp inmates in one of her films, allegedly returning them to their fates once she was finished with them. Suddenly, I was in research mode, turning up all kinds of fascinating new details that felt essential to my own thematic obsessions about moral decision-making and the development of 20th century artists’ careers. When my husband asked me what I was reading about one night, as he was heading to bed and I was still glued to my laptop, I said, “Oh nothing. Just an article in The Atlantic.” I didn’t add that it was an Atlantic article from years ago, about a tragic episode that took place many, many years earlier. For some reason, I did not want to confess that I felt the lure of another historical novel coming on, because I am trying—really trying—to stop living in the past. (Maybe. Or maybe not.)

As writers, we are surrounded with story ideas, questions, images. Nearly all of them will float past us, undetected, or touch briefly and melt, like snowflakes. Certain ones just keep sticking, or crystallize, or burrow under our skins, not just lovely floating things at all, but viruses that lurk, perhaps even changing our own DNA.

On this blog alone, I’ve mentioned Philip Roth, who writes again and again about Newark, New Jersey. Our own 49 writers friend, author Jo-Ann Mapson, wrote recently about including animals in her work (and she explained good reasons for doing so). We repeat ourselves not because it’s easy, but because there is some truth out there, some desperate urge still in need of expression, some new sketch that demands to be made after the subject has been turned around a few degrees, or lit differently, or placed into a new context.

When will I stop writing about the 1930s and 1940s? Not when I’ve answered my primary questions, but perhaps only when I feel that finally, I have framed those questions to my own satisfaction. The only questions that interest me have no answers, in the end.

Do you have a thematic obsession you’ve indulged or denied? A reason for reading books set in particular times or places? A philosophical question that keeps emerging in your own work?

Bill Sherwonit Interviews Hank Lentfer: Faith of Cranes

2011-12-06T07:00:00.003-09:00

Lifelong Alaskan Hank Lentfer has written a powerfully moving memoir, Faith of Cranes: FindingHope and Family in Alaska, published this fall by The Mountaineers Books. Though his author bio describes Lentfer as “a gardener, hunter, woodworker, and musician,” he also clearly is a talented writer and a devoted conservationist, husband, and father. Lentfer’s love for family, friends, community, and his wild neighbors—especially cranes and deer—is readily apparent in this book, his first. Lentfer will give a multimedia presentation about Faith of Cranes at 5 p.m. on Dec. 11, at the Anchorage Museum.

What are the roots of your memoir? Or, perhaps put another way, what sparked your desire to write the story that became Faith of Cranes?

Prior to fatherhood I was doing my part for conservation: letters to the editor, trips to D.C., responding to action alerts. When I first learned my wife was pregnant a couple of things quickly came into focus. First, nine months was not enough time to protect wild places or ensure an ecologically intact world for my child. Second, children are sponges and I did not want mine soaking up my despair for the future. If I couldn’t stop the planet from heating up or ensure the cranes would always come, what could I offer my daughter? If I didn’t want to pass on my despair, where could I put it?

So, while our child pushed and stretched the skin of Anya’s belly, I set out to grow my sources of joy. The book chronicles, in a way, that homework assignment. It tells the story of how one man, blinded to present beauty by the fear of an ugly future, regained his sight.

The memoir is episodic rather than continuous narrative; it skips around while presenting times, places, and/or events that might be described as turning points in your life. Did you have a clear vision of the book’s structure—and content—from the start? And how, if at all, did your vision for the book change over time?

The first draft, finished a week before my daughter was born, had nine chapters, one for each month of my wife’s pregnancy. I didn’t pick the manuscript up again until we were done with diapers, enough time for me to see the structure was flat, the content boring, and the sentences stiff. If not for the encouragement of a couple of close friends, that first draft would have followed the diapers out the door and I’d have kept on doing all the things you do when you’re not writing.

There was never a clear vision. No ah-hah moments. I made final tweaks to the narrative structure the day before it went to the copy editor. A friend told me that a writer’s need for good editorial advice is like an owl’s need for a good fat mouse. When it comes, you pounce on it, swallow it whole, and then puke out what you don’t need. I was well fed. A couple of great writers were deeply generous with their time. My work was figuring out which suggestions to keep and which to hack back out. I still find bits and parts of earlier drafts tucked into piles of forgotten mail or buried in the bottom of the wood bin.

In your “Thanks” section, you mention that the book is “a journal of sorts, a chronicle of an ongoing inquiry about how to keep the diminishment of beauty from making us less alive.” When did that inquiry begin? Is that part of what inspired the book? When did you first sense or experience such diminishment in your own life? And what, exactly, do you mean that the world’s diminished beauty makes us “less alive” as humans?

Urban sprawl, in this country alone, consumes over 3 million acres a year. Most all of us can tell the story of a creek or canyon, meadow or mountain that is a part of that statistic. We all see the same population graphs and climate models. We worry, to some degree, about food security and ocean acidification. Rubbed by the daily trickle of grim news, our hearts can form a protective callous. While numbing us to the bad news, such a callous can make us less alive by closing out the beauty that saturates our days. How do we respond to the grim news in a way that keeps us open to the joy of life? This is an active question for me, one I’ve pondered for decades, and it’s a motivating force in the book.

You also mention that “the conversation [about diminished beauty and its affects on us] is expanding . . .” Is one of your goals or hopes for this book that it will help to broaden that conversation?

My front yard is one of the most biologically rich places on the planet. The concentration of critters that show up to feast on the bounty is astounding. Along with the whales and gulls, salmon and sea lions, thousands of humans show up each summer. The animals are drawn by a hunger for calories. The people are drawn by a common hunger for beauty. The human capacity to not only create but to absorb, appreciate, celebrate, be struck dumb, and moved to tears by beauty is one of our most fantastic qualities.

Unfortunately, the conservation movement in general is crippled by the notion that humans are ugly, that we are a cancerous, unnatural part of the world. Even the ethic of “Leave No Trace” is rooted in the idea that a bear track is diminished by a boot track. Now imagine some bizarre critter who sat on the beach or perched in a tree, simply observing and contemplating beauty while all the other animals dashed about gathering food. If such an animal existed, it would be on the top of every totem pole every carved. Well, that creature is us and we need to carve those poles. We need to put them up every place we can. While humans are obviously capable of great destruction, we are also capable of great beauty. We need to remind each other that we have the choice.

I found that several of the book’s most vivid and riveting passages focus on death (the death of a deer, a bear, a good friend, your partner Anya’s father). Did you sense the power of those passages while writing them?

Encounters with death are the most powerful moments in our lives. I like the Buddhist’s saying that the man who learns how to die learns how to live. Holding a dying person’s hand or removing the heart from a still warm deer is loaded with lessons. In those moments, we can feel our humanity wrapped in shared mortality and grief. We can sense the insignificant flicker of our life spans. We glimpse that death is not a singular event but a constant flow. We are reminded to move slowly and love fully.

The stories of death in the book were powerful as they were experienced. I did my best to bring a bit of that power onto the page.

What were the easiest parts of the book to write? The hardest?

Easiest stories were moments of joy and beauty – the crane’s return, my daughter reveling in a gale, planting seeds, diving into the cold, rich sea. Hardest were the most intimate – washing my friend’s body [after his death], sharing prayers around a pile of bones.

The book’s title—and the story itself—make clear the importance of cranes in your life, but deer seem to play an equally important role, if not more so. One might say the cranes feed or nourish your spirit and deepen your connection to place, while deer clearly tie you to place and also feed you, in both a physical and spiritual manner. Perhaps one might say they simply feed you in different ways. What are your thoughts about that?

Deer could have easily been the book’s central character. Like the deer, I’m rooted. I hunker down through the long winter, run around and fatten up during the long light of summer. Deer hold the center of gratitude in my life. They brought me and hold me together with my wife and dearest friends. They feed me in so many ways.

But cranes were far more creative a critter to build a story around. First of all, they are ancient. They were squwarking away while deer were still a glimmer in the eye of some yet to mutate quadruped. They also migrate which turned out to be key in telling my story of being rooted. The led me places I did not want to go, forced me to acknowledge that Alaska is not as big as I wanted it to be. And through their movement, they connect my story to crane lovers everywhere, from Homer to Lodi, Nome to Nebraska. Who knew, when I built a house under the migratory path of flying dinosaurs, they’d make such a handy literary device.

What do you hope that readers will take away from your memoir?

A high school sweet heart tracked me down after reading the book. She told me she laughed and cried and closed the book with renewed gratitude for where she lived and what she wanted to share with her children. What more satisfying feedback can a writer get?

The Axe: A Guest Post by Sherry Simpson

2011-12-05T07:00:00.001-09:00

December featured author Sherry Simpson

By nature I am a fraidy cat whose long list of fears encompasses the ridiculous more than the rational: Alien abduction (all that probing). Unnervingly hairy arthropods (tarantulas). Mushrooms (they grow on manure!). The usual writerly anxieties afflict me, too: fear of failure, a craven need for approval, a sadistic internal critic who must be bludgeoned into silence.

But a few months ago, something really scary happened to me. For the first time ever, I sat at my computer and had nothing to write about. Nada. Zip. The Big Zero. It was more writer’s blah than writer’s block. I felt de-sparked, un-mused, ex-inspired. What if this hollow sensation meant I had used myself up? What if there was no more there there (if there ever was)? Terrifying.

After a couple of days of constructive moping, I diagnosed the problem. For one thing, I work at home. This is great because I like being alone, and because who doesn't want to wear pajamas all day? (For the record, I don’t. The point is that I could.) Too often, though, the circumference of my days is pitifully restricted.

Also, I’m between big, all-consuming projects. The manuscript that I finished 15 months ago is apparently being waterboarded by the editor in an undisclosed location, and it’s impossible to immerse myself in the next big thing before the last big thing is finished.

The real trouble is that I spend most days with my eyeballs affixed to lines of words crawling across a page or a computer screen. But I can’t live between the lines for months at a time. I had distanced myself from a world where actual people do and say interesting things, and unexpected events happen, and experiences connect with ideas. The painter Robert Motherwell once wrote: “The function of the artist is to express reality as felt.” I hadn’t been experiencing enough reality to feel anything worth expressing.

This encounter with the inner abyss made me see that I had taken creativity for granted, treating it like an artesian well whose origins I’d never bothered investigating because there was always water available. Then one day, there wasn’t.

What helped me was thinking of creativity not as an endowment, or a feeling, or a gift from the gods, but as a tool. Like any other implement, creativity needs to be sharpened, lubricated, adjusted, adapted, used. So for a time, I stopped worrying about the wood and started thinking about the axe.

When I tried activities that weren’t directly related to writing, what engaged me again was photography—not as a “I’m going to become the best darn photographer ever!” undertaking, but as a different way of being in the world. During daily dog walks, for example, I noticed that instead of being unable to see the forest for the trees, I couldn't see the trees for the forest. Photographing individual trees meant paying attention to bark, roots, leaves, light, shadows, the constancy of death, the stubbornness of life.

I don’t analyze, I just respond. I especially don’t worry about whether the images are any good, because the looking matters more than the result. And looking has made me remember particular trees I've climbed, burned, nurtured, decorated. Maybe I’ll write about them sometime. Maybe I won’t.

I also ferreted out concrete ways to think about creativity from The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp; Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; and the website 99%. What struck me most was this observation by Csikszentmihalyi, who spent 30 years researching how artists, scientists, and visionaries think, work, and create: "The only way to stay creative is to oppose the wear and tear of existence with techniques that organize time, space, and activity to your advantage."

As someone whose existence is a grim struggle to organize time, space, and activity, I found it reassuring to learn that creativity depends less on the arrival of fickle muses borne on the backs of whimsical unicorns, and more on practical measures that I can control. That’s why my future posts will suggest tools, techniques, and resources to help writers organize information, reduce distractions, and spend more time arranging words than cursing word processors.

In the meantime, you might appreciate ideas from the blog Creative Creativity: Inspiration and Tools for Creativity or from TED talks by Csikszentmihalyi and authors Elizabeth Gilbert and Amy Tan. If you don’t feel creative, check out people who do at I Feel Unmotivated, or try these strategies for surviving a creative drought from 25 artists.

But keep in mind, as I do, painter Chuck Close’s words: “Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.” Better yet, be creative about where you show up and what you work on.

Do you have a favorite site or idea? Share it in the comment section below.

December featured author Sherry Simpson is the author of two collections of essays, The Way Winter Comes and The Accidental Explorer. She teaches literary nonfiction for the University of Alaska Anchorage's Low-Residency MFA and at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.

Ela: 49 Writers Weekly Round-up

2011-12-02T07:00:00.002-09:00

Need a break from the holiday madness? Treat yourself to an evening at Café Felix, adjacent to Metro Books, where on Thursday, December 8 from 7-8:30 pm, our own Don Rearden will be featured in an informal talk on our collective literary obsession. Rearden, whose films have aired on TMC and Showtime, will share how he took a germ of an idea and cultured it into a full blown epidemic novel, The Raven's Gift.

Winter break will arrive soon, and with it a free workshop for ages 12-14. “Comics: Turning drawings into stories” debuts at Teen Underground December 27-29 from 3-5 pm. No special drawing or writing talent is required. Teens need to register soon http://www.emailmeform.com/builder/form/2aOG8sba01r147, as we have room for only ten students. The workshop is co-sponsored by the Friends of the Library. Visit www.wyakwriters.com for details.

Still shopping? Remembers that thanks to a generous donation by Tom Sexton, we’re offering limited edition autographed broadsides of two John Haines poems, “On the Road” and “Poem of the Forgotten.” Proceeds benefit the John Haines Memorial Poetry Fund, which will help finance the 2012 Synergies series, an exciting line-up of dynamic events featuring well-known poets. Another hint-worthy item: 49 Writers Gift Vouchers, good for one year on fees for classes, retreats, and other 49 Writers goodies.

If you’re looking for an editor to go over your work, 49 Writers member Kellie Doherty is now accepting submissions. Kellie is a freelance editor specializing in developmental and line editing; you can reach her at kellie.f.doherty@gmail.com

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

This afternoon, Friday December 2, 4.30pm, Hearthside Books will be hosting Laraine and Romer Derr and Sharon Barton, from Chez Alaska. The Chez Alaska Cooking School Cookbook will feature, with tastings from the book's recipes and Romer's famous sourdough starter! 254 Front St., Juneau.

Tonight, Friday December 2, 7-8.30pm, the Alaska Quarterly Review First Friday Series will be hosted at Jitters Cafe, 11401 Old Glen Highway, Eagle River. The event will feature dramatic readings from the Fall and Winter 2011 edition, as well as musical selections from singer-songwriter Rod Rongstad. Admission is free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Ronald Spatz at 907 786 1058 or ayaqr@uaa.alaska.edu

Also Friday, December 2, 7pm, authors Amanda Coyne and Tony Hopfinger present Crude Awakening: Money, Mavericks and Mayhem in Alaska. Barnes and Noble, 200 E. Northern Lights, Anchorage.

Tomorrow, Saturday December 3, 10am, author Tricia Brown will be reading and signing books at Gulliver's Books, 3525 College Road, Fairbanks.

Also tomorrow, Saturday December 3, starting at 10am, Fireside Books will be celebrating their Tenth Anniversary all day. Stop by for door prizes, Fireside Books memories, and special guests. 720 S. Alaska St., Palmer.

Also tomorrow, Saturday December 3, at 2pm, members of the Community Writers Group in Fairbanks will be sharing their writings during a special, free Holiday-themed reading for the Family. If you have a special holiday poem or story, please feel free to attend and join in. Bear Gallery, Alaska Centennial Center for the Arts, Pioneer Park, 2300 Airport Road, Fairbanks.

On Sunday December 4, 4-6pm, Indie-folk singer-songwriter Emily Kathryn Barry and performance poet Elizabeth Thompson, accompanied by Moss Campion on udu drums, will present a free music and poetry show. Terra Bella, 601 E. Dimond Blvd, Anchorage.

The deadline for the Statewide Youth Writing Competition is coming up soon--Wednesday December 7th! Winners will gain national recognition and become eligible for a total of nearly $4 million in Scholarships. For more information, visit http://www.artandwriting.org/

49 Writers member Ann Chandonnet recommends http://www.shewrites.com/, a multi-faceted blog and social networking site for women who write.

Andromeda: Woody Allen's Manhattan and the Self-Critical Creative Process

2011-12-01T09:58:00.004-09:00

Watch Woody Allen vs Manhattan on PBS. See more from AMERICAN MASTERS.

If it had been up to Woody Allen, audiences never would have seen "Manhattan." He was unhappy with the film -- now widely considered his best, an iconic black-and-white late 1970s portrait of New York, paired with a gorgeous soundtrack (Gershwin, for starters) and featuring the young Mariel Hemingway in a story that was far more poignant and complex than many of his earlier, slapstick films. If it had been up to him, he would have simply cancelled distribution.

Amazingly self-critical? Yes-- unlike many of today's novice writers and self-published authors, who think they should be in print even after editors and agents have expressed no interest. Lately, I keep coming across authors who don't even want their own early published works in print (Michael Cunningham has distanced himself entirely from his first novel, even though it received good reviews; Tobias Wolff is another example) and I marvel that some of our most talented authors take apprenticeship so seriously that they don't expect or require accolades or even an audience for their early works. (Too much self-flagellation, or the right amount? An interesting question...)

But for self-criticism -- and a suprising lack of egotism -- you can't beat Woody Allen. Whether you're a fan of the filmmaker, or someone who got a little tired of his work five or ten years ago (I know my own adoration waned, to be revived by the surprisingly heartfelt and satisfying "Midnight In Paris") or just someone interested in the creative process and career longevity, you should see PBS's latest American Masters documentary. It ran about two weeks ago and is available now online, in two parts.

I thought I knew a fair amount about Woody Allen; at the very least, I thought I knew my own opinion of his work. But watching the documentary, I was struck by how much I'd forgotten -- how brilliant his movies are (yes, he's had some misses, too, but that's one of the documentary's points about his process), and how much my early ideas about adult life (urban culture, Jewish/WASP culture, love and sexual relations, the depiction of morality in film) were shaped by his movies of the 1970s through 1980s in particular. Certainly, he's been embroiled in scandal, too -- the relationship with his current wife is not an easy biographical element to overlook. The PBS documentary does explore that issue, while not overplaying it.

As a writer, I pay close attention to how authors and filmmakers feel about their own work (Joyce Carol Oates has written a worrisome essay about this topic, suggesting authors are more often wrong than right), how they develop themes over time, and how they handle the productivity issue. Some of our beloved authors produce stingily, making us wait eight to ten years for each book. (I just finished two well-reviewed books by such authors, and was frankly disappointing in each one. My own expectations had risen to a point the novels simply couldn't fulfill.) Others take a workman-like approach, producing a film or book every one to two years (for the last dozen years in particular, Philip Roth has proven he can produce one strong novel after another). Will they all be equally good? It's not possible.

What often seems to happen is that the audience becomes jaded and dismissive, the author or filmmaker endures rounds of criticism, only to resurge into popularity at intervals. Woody Allen and Philip Roth have ridden this wave numerous times, too busy chronicling our culture from World War II to the present day to be terribly concered about each individual project's commercial outcome. Neither of these men are hacks; Allen has more than 40 films under his belt, and Roth has more than 30 books, but they're not interested in cookie-cutter production. Watch or read their ouevre, and the evidence is clear: they're steadily working out ideas, shifting into new directions, enduring withering reviews, surprising and delighting the audience -- maybe not every time, but often.

More surprises about Woody Allen (whose birthday is tomorrow, by the way -- he'll turn 76):

He was writing professionally from the age of 16 on, writing enough one-line gags for top columnists and entertainers that he earned more than his parents.

He never wanted to be a stand-up comic or actor -- his managers pushed him to endure the discomfort of the stage.

"Annie Hall" won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, but Woody Allen didn't show up to receive them. Awards don't interest him and he is generally more critical of his most-loved films than the critics are. "Hannah and her Sisters," another one his more mature films and one which ends happily, is seen as a cop-out by Allen himself, who intended a less happy ending.

For decades, he has typed everything, from his New Yorker essays to his film scripts, on a single, old typewriter, cutting and stapling saved sentences by hand. (This you gotta see. I made my own kids watch this part of the documentary, as a reminder of how much we all defer to technology, as if one can't write without a keyboard.)

He keeps piles of notes and sifts through them at intervals for ideas, of which he seems to have an endless supply. The documentary shows him riffling through the handwritten pages, explaining his process for thinking through and discarding plot ideas.

He gives his actors great leeway in rewriting and improvising their parts, and he directs with a very light hand, mostly preferring to stay out of the way. When he wants them to play a role, he sends a handwritten or typed note, introducing himself, as if he wasn't one of today's most best-known directors-- even when an actor has already worked with him before.

Andromeda: Your Turn to Blog for 49 writers? With links to some past favorites

2011-11-30T08:46:00.003-09:00

The call has gone out, and we've heard from a nice selection of writers ready to be our 2012 monthly featured authors-- but three or four spots remain. If you're interested, please contact Andromeda at lax@alaska.net by December 9. One question that arises, of course, is "What should I blog about?" To answer that, and to make good use of some of the great writing and community-building that's already happened here over the last three years, I'm sharing a few links from past guest-posters. These are just a very small taste, running the gamut from the professorial to the personal:

Poet Tom Sexton on the meaning of place and how he started to write distinctly Alaskan poems.

Alaska state writer Peggy Shumaker, in her role as experienced teacher and mentor, sharing the stories of five Alaskans who decided to pursue the MFA.

Don Rearden, ready to make us laugh as always, imagining an interview between an Alaska screenwriter and a Hollywood executive.

Joan Kane on top writing places, tools, and prompts: inspiration for a day when you just don't know how to get started.

Storyteller Brett Dillingham on a trip to a village north of the Arctic Circle.

Dana Stabenow confessing that's she a sci-fi geek (with the specifics on her favorite inspirations).

Susanna Mishler sharing a deliberately disobedient writing exercise called "negative inversion."

Marybeth Holleman remembering the Exxon Valdez oil spill, twenty years later.

Bill Sherwonit musing on the essays, and critiquing essay collections (with lots of suggestions for recommended readings).

Thanks to everyone who has shared their ideas and experiences with 49 writers. We hope to hear from you again, and we also hope to widen our circle to include the voices of new writers and readers.

Post-script: Thanks to everyone who responded -- we have lots of new voices as well as familiar friends planning to join us in 2012. With the featured author slots now filled, we can still use individual blogposts at any time. Send to lax@alaska.net or 49writers@gmail.com.

Checking for Doneness v3011 28 11.docx: A Guest Post by Jo-Ann Mapson

2011-11-29T07:00:00.001-09:00

In two days my 11th novel is due in New York. Right now it’s in a file called v3011 28 11.docx. This file occupies a mega folder called Finding Casey. Next to it are three other mega folders, each with different titles, each filled with fifty or more other files, research documents, and so on. Writing a novel is mostly sweat and uncertainty, trying to get to this destination vacation over a crazy, sweaty, rocky, long path. I start with an image, and I write into the void until something connects. But I’m not fully capturing the magic and other emotions that are also there, part of the process, and the more enjoyable brief stops along this long, winding way.

The seed of Finding Casey came about when I purchased a small micaceous covered pot at Indian Market years back. They’re made from mica clay dug near a river here in New Mexico. They cost a lot. My friend Judi Hendricks has several and ooh do I envy them. I bought my little pot from a young woman who was clearly uncertain about her work. The exchange we had was jarring and odd. It stuck in my writer’s mind as certain things do, and I thought about all that day while I walked the booths and wished I were a jillionaire. She was young. Her pots were small, and priced low. The guy with her in the booth seemed a little controlling and I worried about that.

Days later, when I unpacked the pot, I found a blue ribbon from the Taos County Fair inside, and an entry card that the artist had filled out. A bit of serendipity, I thought. Things like this happen. Later when I was talking to my friend, mystery writer Earlene Fowler, I told her the story. Earlene was one of my very first students to go on to publish and we are good friends. She has 18 books in print, and we read each other’s manuscripts and comment on them, usually at the finished draft stage. She told me the story I’d just explained was the perfect plot for the book I was making notes on. I resisted as I often do, but in reflection I began to see the wisdom of her words. My novel now had an object in it that could function in several ways: concrete object, plot device and wait for it—metaphor! Hurrah. Metaphors are organic sprouts. One can plant many, but few ever bloom.

My first start to this book focused entirely on the pot. I wrote about the characters shopping at the Indian Market, a chance encounter between my characters, Glory and Juniper from Solomon’s Oak, and the creepy guy in the background. I wrote 90 pages. Then I foolishly gave them to a couple of writers for their opinion. Translation: I was hungry for praise. This was a very stupid move, and my book suffered as a result. The responses were not encouraging. WTH? I’d sold this novel on the very same pages. I lost my confidence. I lost my way for several months and I could not figure out why the pages I’d written were so poorly received by these two trusted readers. After much stomach churning, and months of not writing, I started over.

I’m still not sure this was the right move.

What I finally realized was that I’d come to a new stage in my writing. The stage where I need to trust myself, keep the story close to my heart, and finish a draft before I show it to anyone. It might help to explain at this point that I’ve gone through many of these stages since publishing my first book in 1992. Early on, I took a college workshop, and 30 people read my pages every week. Thirty opinions influenced the next word I typed. Then I was in a small writer’s group, and 5 people read my pages every week. Then I stopped the group and had 2 writers reading my chapters every couple of weeks. Then I was home alone, exchanging chapters every week with one writer. Then it was down to me, pestering my husband every once in a while. Then I stopped showing him anything until it was a finished draft. Then I wrote this book, and foolishly showed it to 2 very different writers, both of who reacted as writers, not readers. I’ll never do it again. I now know I’m at the private stage of writing, where I must dwell in the story and trust my heart to know something I can’t fully understand.

Finding Casey started out as Miracle of Miracles, a title I took from a line in Solomon’s Oak. Then came the day that I was writing some catalogue copy for my book, and I typed the words: finding Casey. They were in the middle of a sentence, and when I saw them, I knew they were the title, come to me at long last, a kind of reward earned from spending a year writing about them. I changed the title, and never looked back. When I was reading through the finished draft this weekend, I saw the words had first appeared on page 93 of the manuscript, little flakes of gold, waiting for me to notice them, thank them, and make them the title they deserved to be.

This Thanksgiving my son was home for a visit. He’s on his way to becoming a R.N. and a P.A. He is a terrific reader and editor, and he went through the medical scenes in my book and helped me correct my mistakes. His overall comments on the book were favorable, and he mentioned a couple things I might strengthen. I’m fairly paranoid at this stage of a book, with no perspective whatsoever. I had to mull his comments around for a few days to believe them. That’s because at the finished draft stage all the seams and clumsy stitching and glue drips glare out at me announcing my inability, but apparently I’m the only one who sees them that way.

Imagine, I’ve been publishing books nearly 20 years and I still don’t believe I can do it one more time.

Today is the last day that I can edit the manuscript. I’ll attach it to an e-mail and send it to my editor and agent tomorrow. They’ll read it in record time and send me letters suggesting changes and sometimes they are huge and other times they are minor. I adore my agent and editor. They are right 90% of the time. We compromise and that changes the book. When it comes out next October, I will read it again and see things I am too close to see right now. The process of writing a book is a journey. I always pack the wrong clothes, am traversing uneven, icy ground, get rocks stuck in my shoes, am lugging a heavy suitcase, getting sunburned, am thirsty, don’t understand the currency exchange, and yet I always arrive at my destination.

Thanks for the opportunity to blog here for the month of November. I’d write more, but I am onto novel number 12.

Jo-Ann

Faces of 49 Writers: Board President Don Rearden

2011-11-28T07:00:00.000-09:00

49 Writers Board President Don Rearden
will be featured in a free 49 Writers Reading and
Craft talk Dec. 8 at 7 pm Cafe Felix at Metro Books

Why 49 Writers?

A couple years ago, if you asked me about the literary community of Alaska I would have answered with my own question, "What community?"

Don't get me wrong, there was no shortage of literary talent in Alaska. What was missing was community. Either that or I just hadn't arrived as a writer yet and received my skeleton key or learned the secret handshake. We all know writing is itself a solitary and --- at times --- even a lonely endeavor. Writers by nature aren't the most gregarious of creatures. Heck, some of us even don't like our own species.

Still, we do, if I may be so bold to suggest, actually want to be around other writers, if only to be around someone who understands irony beyond Alanis Morissette's definition involving the desire for a knife when you've got several thousand spoons at your disposal.

While I've never even possessed more than twenty or so spoons at a given time, and perhaps a spork or two, I did jump at the opportunity to help start this cool little non-profit called the 49 Writers. I signed on as a member and later as a board of directors member because I wanted to be a part of something that sounded pretty amazing. I had no idea.

In just a few years I have made friendships that will ensure some one writes something powerful and/or funny at my wake, hopefully many many winters from now. I have forged connections with famous authors, not so famous authors, future authors, and more importantly cool Alaskan writers I can ski with, talk shop over coffee, or just borrow a knife should the need arise.

We're teaching young writers. We're supporting working writers. We're building a writing community, and not just here in Anchorage, but across the 49th State. There are more than forty-nine of us, too, and I hope you'll want to join our ranks and become a part of this. Sign up and become a member! Or if you're like me and behind on your membership dues, then join with me and renew today.

Don Rearden doesn't really need to borrow a knife. He's being sarcastic. He recently renewed his membership in hopes we'd teach him the secret handshake.

Ela: 49 Writers Weekly Round-up

2011-11-25T07:00:00.001-09:00

In this season of thanks, we’re grateful for each of our friends and fans, and we’re hoping your holiday weekend is full of both rest and joy. Fun links to check out when you’re lounging off that turkey:

Missed our course with award-winning author Melinda Moustakis? Not to worry – it’s now available as a podcast, thanks to media volunteer Jeff Oliver. There’s a link to the readings at the bottom of the sidebar on our home page
From Kay Vreeland, in case you missed it last weekend, a Simpson episode in which Bart and Homer pen the next tween fantasy novel.
If a writer seeks powerful inspiration, Dan Henry recommends a story called Writing Amidst the Ruins," by Elif Shafak. She tells the story on The Moth podcast November 14, 2011
If you attended our April 1 Crosscurrents event, you heard Susan Orlean read from her new book Rin Tin Tin. She also appeared recently on The Colbert Report to talk about the book.

For young writers: On Monday, November 28, our WYAK writers group for ages 12-14 will meet, also from 6:30-8 pm, at Teen Underground. Stay tuned also for details on a free workshop with Lee Post “Comics: Turning drawings into stories” at Teen Underground December 27-29 from 3-5 pm. The workshop is co-sponsored by the Friends of the Library.
Visit www.wyakwriters.com or see our Facebook event for details.

Looking for a fun, informal gathering of writers? Want to hear more about craft and publishing? Look no farther than our free Reading and Craft Talks, debuting December 8 from 7–8.30pm at Café Felix/Metro Books with Don Rearden presenting “Writing is a Disease.” In this craft talk Rearden will share how he took a germ of an idea and cultured it into a full-blown epidemic novel, The Raven's Gift. Don Rearden is an Associate Professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage and is currently board president of 49 Writers. His poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared in Ice-Floe, Chronogram, Cold Flashes, Copper Nickel, and Haunted Encounters. His films have aired on TMC and Showtime. His novel The Raven’s Gift, debuted with Penguin Canada in 2011.

It’s the season for giving, and we’ve got great ideas for the literary-minded on your list. Thanks to a generous donation by Tom Sexton, we’re offering limited edition autographed broadsides of two JohnHaines poems, “On the Road” and “Poem of the Forgotten.” All proceeds benefit the John Haines Memorial Poetry Fund, which will help finance the 2012 Synergies series, an exciting line-up of dynamic events featuring well-known poets. Another great gift option: 49Writers Gift Vouchers, good for one year on fees for classes, retreats, and other 49 Writers goodies.

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

On Tuesday, November 29, 5pm, Mike Burwell and Randall Bruns will read from Chulitna II: A Further Conversation in Poems, at the UAA Campus Bookstore. Free and open to everyone.

Call for Readers: December’s Poetry Parley will feature Kay Ryan and more from Anchorage’s Ten Poets group. If you are interested in reading some favorite Kay Ryan poems, or in being assigned some to read, please contact DC McKenzie as soon as possible.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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A big thanks to all of our readers, contributors, members, and to the larger Alaska literary community. We hope you have a thankful and restful day that puts you into such a tryptophanic coma that you find some horizontal time on a couch, reading a good book.

What to read after enjoying--or surviving-- a Thanksgiving with family? Here's one particularly relevant link: favorite "tense literature" and dysfunctional family narratives for the holiday, from Ploughshares.

Thanks again -- 49 Writers definitely wouldn't be here without you.

Negative Capability: A Guest-post by Rich Chiappone -- and a call for 2012 Featured Authors

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We're turning the corner into deep winter, and that means it's time to be thankful for our wonderful audience and time to schedule our 2012 featured authors. Is it your turn to share thoughts about writing, reading, and Alaska life with our varied audience of fellow readers, writers, booksellers, and random web-surfers? Featured authors post once a week for an assigned month (posts of about 800 words or less, submitted four times). Each year we ask for volunteers and generally get a few more than we need-- but don't let that discourage you. In fact, we are eager to widen our reach and whether you've guest-posted in the past or have never left a single comment, please apply. Our call will be out until December 9. Just drop a line to Andromeda at lax@alaska.net indicating your genre or background (in brief) and whether you're requesting a specific month or are flexible. On the page links above, you can see our list of featured authors from the last two years, and you can also see general blogging tips.

This holiday season, we'll also be recycling a few favorite posts from the past. Rich Chiappone's post below originally ran on May 25, 2010. It combines literary thoughts with a personal, candid approach -- just the sort of thing we like to see from both featured authors and occasional guest-posters.

One recent restless night, set upon by a familiar coven of worries and regrets, I –having a wife who gets up and goes to work early every morning— wandered down to the spare bedroom and tried to get my mind under control by reading an old book of poems: Stanely Kuntiz’s Passing Through. In spite of the grim implications of that title (admittedly not the sort of thing for “dark night of the soul” browsing), I found there, on the first page of his introduction, a little encouragement. Kunitz says, “The poetic imagination lives by its contradictions and disdains any form of oppression, including the oppression of the mind by a single idea.” Wow. I must have one of those poetic imaginations, I thought, and knocked off to sleep in the guest bed, smugly reassured.

I needed to believe that just then. Last week, I finished correcting the proofs of my second collection, Opening Days. Having read it beginning to end for the first time, I have been a little horrified by the obvious fact that there is no single unifying idea in the book. Actually, I don’t seem too sure about any of the ones I’m trying on for size either. Contradictions? I’m all over the place.

There’s nothing like publishing a compilation of stories or essays written over a number of years to make a writer take a look in the mirror. I mean, you could argue that a single novel does not necessarily capture an author’s world view –written as novels are with a (more or less) unified thematic arc. But almost twenty pieces, written individually under the constantly changing circumstances of daily life is a little harder to deny. And the only constant in this collection of essays, stories and poems is that I’m constantly unsure about everything. So are my fictional characters --with the noticeable exception of one story that is peopled with adamant absolutists. You guessed: it’s a parody.

In the opening essay I start out whining about how much I hate winter (although I’ve lived in Alaska for nearly thirty years and have no intention of moving), and by the end of the same essay croon lovingly about this wonderful place. I talk about how I practically live for my annual tropical fishing trip, and then confess that I have never, in fact, even hooked the one specie I am mostly in pursuit of in those waters. I’m clearly ambivalent about my meat eating ethics (or lack of), but I poke vegetarians gleefully. I’m mostly certain that “catch-and-release” fishing is cruel and pointless, yet can’t wait to get back to it each summer. And so forth.

In TV shows, the police always get the truth out of suspects by peppering them with seemingly unrelated questions over a long period of time, sometimes letting an inquiry hang there a while (“Never mind,” the clever detective says to the criminal, “we’ll come back to that later.”) and always eventually trapping the fool in his own contradictions. Go ahead, compile a couple hundred pages written as autonomous pieces over six or eight years and see what happens to you.

Looking for validation for my uncertainties, I turn once again to a term coined by good old John Keats. (maybe that’s good “ode” Keats? Hah! I crack myself up, I swear.) He said (and, yes, I did have to look this up again) that a man should be able to be in a condition of uncertainty and doubt “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

As you would expect from a capital “R” Romantic, Keats finds reason and logic to be liabilities for the artist and poet. Ironically perhaps, some of us in the arts today find ourselves aligning now with hard science in various areas, particularly the evolution argument. One of my favorite thoughts from Nancy Lord’s Rock Water Wild comes from an essay in which she describes the frustration of a science-minded individual arguing with creationist critics; it goes something like this: You can not use reason to persuade a person to give up a belief he didn’t come to by way of reason.

I sort of like that fact that, once again, I want to have it both ways: hard science for the hard stuff like fossils, and sheer whimsy for all the rest. In any case, I know that I am happiest when I avoid people who know what they know is right. Personally, they scare me a little. I’ll put it this way: you have to be absolutely certain of your ideas to strap a bomb to yourself to make your point. Talk about “the oppression of the mind by a single idea”.

That much I know for sure. Maybe.

How it’s supposed to work. How it really works: A Guest Post by Jo-Ann Mapson

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When I was a kid I learned very quickly that I had a flair for writing rhyming poems, short stories and description (I’m embarrassed to say how descriptive I used to be. You’d need a rake to get through my early efforts.). Such talent got me out of homework assignments, placed in “gifted” classes where I did absolutely no work, and best of all, my writing made people laugh. At that time other girls my age were deep into Tiger Beat and Seventeen Magazine. Not me. I read Mad Magazine, loved the comics where writers took well-known songs and made up hilarious lyrics. I knew that was my job, waiting for me as soon as I finished the hell that was grades 1-12. I’d write funny things and send them to that great-unknown address only writers knew about, where they were printed and enjoyed by my fellow miscreants. Plus, I’d get a check back in the mail!

Still waiting on that one.

Imagine my surprise when writing turned out to be so much harder than being funny. And the money part—let’s not go there. I freely admit that I thought my first novel (soundly rejected for years) would earn me enough to buy a beachfront property and a chestnut horse I’d been riding at the stables near my house. But thankfully that novel is now in a box somewhere moldering. I typed it by hand on a typewriter I was paying for by the month. Agony then, but lessons I now consider gifts. The truth is that most writers never give up their day jobs and maybe that isn’t so bad a way to live. It certainly makes you take advantage of those precious allotments of writing time. It’s hard to write, and I think it should be. I won’t invoke the adage that only things that are difficult are truly appreciated, but I will say that serious effort creates wonderful products. I love the hateful process. I always think of a sculptor chiseling away at rock, dust in his hair, how slowly the lump eventually turns into a recognizable object. Next time you’re in a museum, or walking around downtown, stop and look at a sculpture. It came from nothing but an idea. Imagine how long it took for the idea to become the object.

Holy cow.

When I sold my first novel (the second one I wrote) I was given a contract for another, yet unwritten novel. The first thing the editor wanted to know was what was it about. Right then, on the phone. I stammered and made up a plot that surprisingly turned out to be quite accurate and that was Blue Rodeo, which is my favorite book, if a writer is allowed to have one. I still think about that sometimes, how the subconscious is such a massive part of writing. How it knows things I don’t. The same thing happened with The Owl & Moon Café. My literary agent called, waking me up (Alaska time and New York time have never been compatible) and said, “Quick, tell me the story for another plot, because they don’t like the one you sent,” and that’s how I embarked on that novel. The title and everything was right there. I pester my MFA students to tell me about their own subconscious moves, and beg them to articulate the role intuition takes in writing. It’s such an intimate skill, yet so vital to making a story.

In my early imaginings of what a writer does, besides sit at a desk and type into the void until something happens, was that the writer knows the germ when they type it. That turned out to be true. If only it were a matter of cultivating that knowledge and thus making the act of writing happen much more quickly and efficiently! Alas, many pages are written that never see the light of day in pursuit. Instead the writer writes and writes, tries to come up with something she does not hate, and that is what a novel ends up being, something not entirely hateful and not entirely embarrassing. Eventually after moving commas around, it’s “done” and off it goes to the reader, the agent, the editor, or the drawer where far too many novels sit.

And then what? The process begins all over again—that is, if you wish to write a second novel, or a third, or an eleventh—and many of those end up in the file drawer, too.

Why write? It’s a foolish act. Impractical. The time I spend writing takes away from much more entertaining activities, such as going to the movies and talking walks and yet I always find time for shopping. Less and less people read. I have never found an activity that makes me feel as whole as writing. I sit down at the computer, open a blank document, and all I have to do is type words! I’m a terrible gardener. I can’t sew or knit. My husband took over cooking when we moved to Alaska and is much better at it than I am. But damn, can I write a story.

A former student writes about our November featured author Jo-Ann Mapson here.