A friend of mine is having a sale

Go here for details.

Journal for Creative Writing Seminar

The writing metaphor Annie Dillard uses that most works for me is the concept of writing as a miner’s pick or as a woodcarver’s gouge. It’s like we are faced with some huge, formless mass that is the collective cultural consciousness, and it’s our job as writers – or any other artists – to chip away at what is extraneous to what we are trying to tell in a particular work, and then refine it and polish it into something true. Not just “true” as in “accurate”, but “true” as in “sound”, “plumb”, “solid”, “fixed”. Stephen King in On Writing suggests that things we write are like dinosaur bones, already waiting for us in a rough form deep in the ground. Our job is to dig them up and clean them, eliminating the detritus that is not what needs to be told. It also reminds me of Michelangelo’s quote that he saw an angel in the block of marble, and took away every part of the marble that was not the angel until he had set the angel free.

My own preferred metaphor for writing, one that takes a different tack on the process but seems just as accurate to me, is that of an oyster making pearls. The grit that gets inside an oyster sometimes causes discomfort, sometimes even pain, to the oyster, which coats it with secretions that protect the soft organs from irritation. In time this makes a pearl. Similarly, writers take the grit that is unhappiness – or depression, anxiety, anger, frustration, or just simply wanting answers to why things are the way they are – and coat them with layers of distilled cultural consciousness, as filtered through their own experiences and worldview, to take away the harshness of it. This has a side effect of making something unique. 

Not all pearls are of high “quality”, in that they do not all have marketable luster and smoothness of shape, but all of them have at least done the job of soothing the oyster’s heart and the writer’s soul. The secretions an oyster produces do not come out of thin air. The food an oyster imbibes, that an oyster filters from the water,  is analogous to the stories that we take in from the moment we understand speech. Writers who have a greater, richer background of story and myth will produce greater and richer works. A malnourished oyster’s pearls will never be as good as that of an oyster well fed. The food for creative people is the stories we are told, the stories we seek out, the stories we live. They become the stories we create, because we need them to keep us safe from the roughest portions of life that otherwise would wound us too deeply to go on.

dear also means expensive - notes from peer feedback

Things in Favor:

- tone

- consistent

- form

- good opening

- concrete imagery

- non-cliche

- attention to language itself

- surprising

- relatable

- political dimension takes it beyond simple love poem

- made at least two readers actually tear up (!)

- "excellent first draft"

Things in Waver:

- shorten lines

- ground it

- slow it down

- expand on the "television" concept

- capitalize and punctuate

- let reader breathe

- be more specific and solid

- clarify "the dual meaning of dear"

- italicize foreign words and things in quotes

- reveal more

- break up sentences

- more metaphor & simile

More soon!

dear also means expensive - first draft

womanhood, says the television

is ideally slim and shaved, yet you

are covered in hairs I touch and love,

I with curves and stretch marks you touch and love,

making us, I believe, a danger to society at large.

promise me you'll never pick up a razor

or pluck those lush brows that signal your moods.

in return I will look in the mirror and try to see

what you perceive that so unaccountably makes you deem

my crinkled soul adequately housed

and your glorious tiny bitten-down fingers complemented

in my hands, or as I bring them to chapped uncolored lips.

I am a compassionate person, I hope, but I wonder more

with each day how blind and deaf and without taste the world

has been that hordes do not jostle and cajole

for your every touch and word.

to make you want is the greatest gift

I have been given, to make me content

is a miracle on your part, your voice in Russian songs

where we must not forget the dual meaning of dear,

and your hushed Hebrew prayer for my sorrows

makes me whisper the Thai suteerak, suteerak,

(most beloved of mine)

for though "dear" also means "expensive"

you are worth my fortune and fear.

Creative Writing Fiction Seminar

Hello, gentle readers. Just to alert you that I am taking Creative Writing Fiction, an upper-level seminar, for my second-to-last semester here. My big project will be writing and workshopping three chapters of Seasons Four Behind Closed Doors. Yay!

And I'm also taking Creative Writing Poetry with Pulitzer-Prize winner and delightful human being Claudia Emerson, so some poems will be showing up here as well.