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The 4 emotional stages of the Iowa Writers Workshop, summer session:
EXCITEMENT - there's always so much excitement to joining a new group, especially when I go to an exotic place like Iowa City!
HAPPINESS - downtown Iowa City is awesome. Lots of restaurants, lots of cafes, several gyms, a few grocery stores, a great library with comfy chairs and all of it within walking distance of both the campus and my place. And because Iowa City really is a writers mecca, there's this sense of being in a very special place. I love that they have quotes of authors imprinted on the sidewalks and more bookstores than I can count. Here, if you meet someone, there's a very good chance s/he is a serious writer and you can talk about the art and craft of writing to your heart's content.
DISAPPOINTMENT - our instructor is highly respected, absolutely adorable and lovable, kind, generous, funny and brilliant... but he doesn't say much in class. There are no lectures, very few pearls of wisdom that get passed on to us, no real craft discussions. He's an artist. His discussions are esoteric and enigmatic and its up to you to fill in the gaps on what should be done to improve your work.
The students are the best group of writers I've worked with -- they're all talented and skillful with interesting voices. But it's not the best group of critiquers I've seen. I'm not necessarily talking about each individual critique, I'm talking about clarity and the need to get some consensus on the feedback so the writer can put weight on a particular issue. With our group, it often feels that everyone has a different opinion on what should be done to take the story to the next level. At the end of the critique sessions, I feel that the writers often walk away with a muddied picture of what to do next.
My last disappointment was that we only get two story submissions per student for the quarter. I'm used to a much more intense workshop format. At Clarion West, we wrote a story a week for 6 weeks and critiqued everyone's submissions every weekday. It was intense and transformative. I was hoping for something just as intense and just as transformative.
CONTENTMENT - I've now reached a good balance in how I feel about my time here.
Although our prof doesn't say much, when my story came up, he caught me in the hallway before my critique and told me that it was "really amazing." He also talked about my story for 30 minutes in our private conference and lent me 3 books on heroes, myths and feminist writing. I still don't know how to improve my story exactly, but the fog is slowly clearing as I learn to interpret his enigmatic suggestions and allusions. This is his style. I've realized it's my job to fill in the blanks because it's my story. And how I interpret his comments will be strongly colored by how I see my story. I'm cool with that.
Re our critiques -- at first, I thought it was just luck of the draw that our group had so little agreement in our constructive feedback. But now, I'm thinking that this may be normal at this level of writing. It's easy to agree on what needs to be done when there are basic problems in a story. But it's much harder to agree on what needs to be done to improve that last 10% - 20% -- questions of how you modulate the voice of your narrator, get your story to breathe, add more emotional weight to your ending and questions of whether this story needs any of these things in the first place. These are very difficult questions and we're no longer talking craft, we're talking art. And because we're talking about art, which comes from the heart and not from the head, people can get quite passionate about their opinions. I've decided to stop focusing on how the overall picture is muddied and start focusing on how each person approaches a story. They're good writers -- their instincts work for them and I can learn something by opening my ears.
Re the number of stories -- by great luck, it turns out that someone else in my class is also a Clarion West Alum. Yay! I was really surprised because Iowa is not exactly known for their speculative fiction, despite the fact that they had Kurt Vonnegut on their faculty. Anyway, we've agreed to write a story a week and give each other feedback. I'm also recruiting others to give me feedback as well, although I'll only ask them to read one or two. I'm experimenting with each story. The one I turned into class was my most experimental piece ever. Wild and wacky and a blast to write. The next one was a story that mixed a literary character within a genre story. I was trying for emotional weight in a Twilight Zone-ish plot. The one I just finished is my first hard science fiction piece wrapped in a light-hearted story. My next one is going to be written backwards -- by envisioning the ending, then writing the rest of the story to get there. Each has its own challenges and pleasures. Each has its own volume of lessons for me.
ACK! This entry is way longer than I expected. I have a backwards story to write. Happy 4th!
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com/
Went to the DMV yesterday. The line was out the door and zigzagged 4 times in the building. Time to whip out the Kindle. I now have the NY Times, LA Times "The Biz" section, BBC, WSJ and The SJ Mercury bookmarked so I can read the news anywhere I can get cell reception. I also have several manuscripts of my various works-in-progress in my Kindle so I can review and comment. Some people wonder why I would bother to do these things on a Kindle as opposed to a mini-computer. It's the screen. To me, it's the difference between reading on a computer and reading on paper. The Kindle is not quite good as paper but it's pretty close. I use it as a portable "printout." Also, once you buy the Kindle, there are no mobile connection fees. So for people who don't have mobile Internet access, it's really great to get news on the fly. Besides, I wouldn't expect the DMV to have wi-fi but I would expect it to have cell reception.
Unfortunately, the commenting process in the Kindle is awkward, putting into question whether it's worth editing on it in the same way you would mark up a printout of a manuscript. I'm not one of those thumb-entry people who can type a text message in no time flat. But I'm getting more comfortable with it. The trick with the Kindle for me is that if I see something I want to edit, I thumb-type a note and I also highlight the section. That way, I get all my notes and highlighted text on one screen so that when it's time to do the actual edit on a computer, I can refer to that page the same way I would refer to a printout of a summary of comments. On my computer, I can do a word search on the text to get me to where I need to be and then make my edits.
My process doesn't make much sense if you have no issues reading on a computer screen. But if you use the Kindle as a virtual printout, it's awesome. Still haven't read an ebook on it yet but I plan to. :-)
Here are some unofficial shortcuts that can be found on Reversing Everything:
Alt-1 show current location in Google maps
Alt-2 find gas station nearby
Alt-3 find restaurants nearby
Alt-4
Alt-5 find custom keyword nearby
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com/
University of Iowa has the oldest and most prestigious creative writing program in America -- the famous Iowa Writers' Workshop. U. of Iowa has over 40 Pulitzer prizes attributed to graduates and faculty according to Wikipedia. On a whim, I applied to an 8-week summer program put on by their Workshop and taught by their regular faculty. Their application process was so easy that I had no excuse not to apply: one brief sheet of information, 3 short stories, no application fee. I just picked three of my stories and sent them in. Then I sort of forgot about it because I've had a lot of Iowa Workshop grads as teachers and with only one exception (who now heads the creative writing program at Harvard), they all detested genre. And of course, what else would I write? I applied anyway, perhaps in defiance of their snooty attitude. The literary community doesn't hesitate to claim someone like Cormac McCarthy (_No Country for Old Men_, _The Road_) as one of their own. If it's superbly written genre, then they'll sometimes relabel it as literary. McCarthy won the Pulitzer for _The Road_ which is about a man and his son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world ruled by roving bands of cannibals. How much more genre can it get? The book is awesome, by the way, and the movie is scheduled to come out late this year. McCarthy is my hero. He's managed to have his stories win an Academy award for best picture, be on Oprah's book list, be a best seller, win a Pulitzer and still write about people trapped in a basement while cannibals eat them piece by piece at their leisure. How cool is that?
Anyway. They accepted me.
Maybe this is my shot at becoming the next McCarthy! Or maybe they didn't fully understand that I'd be writing in-your-face genre ... :-)
Susan Ee
Anyways, I was chewing over a particular aspect of my thesis and I wondered, what would a world without metal be like?
Thoughts, inspirations, random revelations?
I'm open to them all.
Who knows, if this works out well, I might try it again. :)
This is a spoken word piece I wrote in 2004. I used to smoke cigarettes, too, compounding my asthmatic inability to hike up mountains at anything other than a snail's pace. The beginnings of this poem were written on a slow and steady crawl up Dog Mountain in the Columbia Gorge, which is an incredible, if not slightly strenuous, hike, especially in the spring when you will see many different types and colors of flowers all blooming together. It was here, too, that I saw my first orchid blooming in the wild (the Fairy Slipper). Not that I need ANY convincing that fairies live all over the Pacific Northwest, but this was definitely the cincher for me. The spacing is more for the spoken effect so... try for that in your head or read it out loud.
I'd love to hear your comments on it!
-----------------------------
Asthma
My shortness of breath
is a blessing in disguise -
you see, I climb hills slowly.
I take time to breathe.
I make time for the
carbon dioxide and
oxygen exchange.
I take it in.
I put out.
My shortness of breath
makes me weak in the knees.
It's my shortness of breath
that makes me talk to the trees -
I stop, send down roots
and bow to the ground
I commune with the flowers,
I hear every sound.
My shortness of breath
means I count each one
make them measured and slow -
I breathe from my depths
I fill to my depths -
face to face with a beautiful bloom
we share a moment of
shared breath and the
synergistic cycle of life
my shortness of breath
is a focus of sense
an understanding of presence
i move slowly so that i can
prolong this
my shortness of breath
is not a disease
it's a call to listen
to the wisdom of leaves:
in my shortness of breath
my heart pounds in my chest
and I'm very, very aware
that it's there.
© Dori Mondon 2004
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It's Self-Portrait Thursday. This is really recent, I took it Tuesday. I'm faking an assymetrical bob here, and considering cutting off my hair (middle of the back) I like it so much!
currently the only person collaborating with me is my sister and it's not even official or anything. usually whilst waiting for the computer to start up, i'd scribble on a scrap piece of paper and just leave it there. then my sister would add onto the scribble the next time she uses the computer. i'm always amused to see the result and watch it grow, here's a recent example:
i must say though, she did most of it, all i had done was the lame but happy eel head :-p
if anyone's interested, feel free to take the above image and add onto it. you may do as you please with whatever medium suits you, truly. seeing a bit of colour in it would be noice too.
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