All posts by Lisa Hase-Jackson

Converse College MFA Open House May 31

Discover why Publishers Weekly named the Converse College Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing “a program to watch” in 2015. Join us at our Open House information session on May 31, 2015 from 6:30-7:30 p.m. in the Barnet Room of the Montgomery Student Center on the Converse campus.

Meet current students, published alumni, and faculty, including Robert Olmstead, Denise Duhamel, Marlin Barton, Leslie Pietrzyk, Susan Tekulve, Albert Goldbarth, C. Michael Curtis, Suzanne Cleary, and program director Rick Mulkey. Learn about the program’s new concentrations in Young Adult Fiction and Environmental Writing, plus scholarship and Teaching Assistantship opportunities, along with information on recent alumni successes in fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Then stay to mingle with current students who are on campus for their summer residency, enjoying live music with Nashville-based folk rock band The Hart Strings beginning at 8 p.m.

More information on the Converse College Low-Residency MFA is available at www.converse.edu/mfa.

About the Converse College Low-Residency MFA

As South Carolina’s only low-residency MFA program in creative writing, the Converse College MFA offers students opportunities to focus in fiction, Y.A. fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and Environmental writing, plus opportunities to pursue internships in publishing and editing through our C. Michael Curtis Publishing Fellowship at Hub City Press. MFA students may also participate in editing opportunities with the program’s national online literary magazine, South 85 Journal, and pursue teaching opportunities with our Teaching Assistant program, a unique opportunity for low residency students.

“One of the strengths of a low-residency format is how it introduces students to the real writing life,” said program director Rick Mulkey. “Most writers have family and career obligations in addition to their writing. While students spend part of each academic year on the Converse campus during the residencies, they continue work on their writing and academic projects during the rest of the year without disruption from their family and career. Plus they study in a true mentor/apprentice relationship with a gifted writer. It provides both an intensive learning environment and the flexibility that most of us need.”

Converse MFA faculty members include National Book Critic Circle Award winners, best-selling novelists, award winning short fiction writers and essayists, plus some of the top editors in the country. “In addition to being outstanding writers, our faculty are energetic and dedicated teachers who have been honored for their classroom instruction,” said Mulkey. “In some graduate programs, a student enrolls to discover that the writer she planned to work with only teaches one course a year, or is on leave while the student is in the program. Here you have the opportunity to work with a large number of writers, editors and agents in a very personal mentoring relationship.”

In the last few years, Converse MFA graduates and current students have distinguished themselves with honors and awards including the AWP Intro Award, a Melbourne Independent Film Festival Award, and the South Carolina Poetry Initiative Prize, among many others. In addition, they have published work in a range of literary venues from Colorado Review, Shenandoah, Ploughshares, and Southern Review to such noted publishers as William Morrow/Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Random House, Negative Capability Press, Finishing Line Press, and others.

In-House Readers

Mark Brazaitis

My older daughter had a few suggestions for a draft of one of my stories:

“We need to know this character’s last name.”

“We need to know what that character looks like.”

“This third character is too mean.”

I began to offer reasons why she was wrong. But they weren’t good reasons. My daughter’s criticism was thoughtful, insightful, and ultimately helpful. Thanks to her, my story improved.

At the time, my daughter was nine-years-old. Although she had been asking to read my stories since her first sweep through the Harry Potter series two years earlier, this was the first time I’d let her. In the copy I gave her, I’d edited out two expletives and a mild reference to sex. Otherwise, she read the story straight, at whatever grade-level it was on. There were subtleties in my story she missed—at least, I’ll flatter myself to think there were—but she understood the essence.

I was of course proud of my daughter, literary critic. But my pride was joined by a selfish delight: I had ensnared another family member to read my drafts!

Why bother to seek readers in workshops, on-line, or even around the block when you can find them in the next room?

My sister, whom I have bombarded with my drafts since we were both in college, is usually entirely complimentary about my work. Occasionally, however, she pinpoints exactly what I’ve done wrong. For example, on a long story I’d labored over for months, and which had continued to confound me, she offered: “I wonder if this is Maria’s story rather than Tom’s.”

“Well, no,” I began to argue, “it’s Tom’s story because…” But of course she was right. The source of my months-long agony was revealed: I had employed the wrong point of view.

It might hurt to have a family member criticize one’s work, especially if the family member isn’t a writer and is therefore un-credentialed. (My sister is a psychologist; my daughter is years from choosing a career.) But it’s a worse feeling when a family member won’t criticize one’s work and it’s at risk of stepping, un-groomed and smelly, into the world.

When I was twenty-three, I gave my mother the first novel I’d ever written to read. In retrospect, my nine-year-old daughter could have written something more coherent and mature. My mother’s assessment, written on the final page of my manuscript in bold, blue strokes: “Make way for the new Shakespeare!”

Presumably she was referring to Gilbert Shakespeare, William’s younger brother, a haberdasher.

(That particular novel has been erased everywhere but my memory.)

My mother’s critique was echoed, in a fashion, by my fiction workshop leader at Bowling Green State University, where I earned my MFA. After expounding on the faults of a story one of us presented in workshop, he would sometimes stop suddenly, gaze solemnly around the table, and say, “These may be mere quibbles,” then, in his booming voice, advise, “Send it to The New Yorker!”

We might have recognized his imperative as hyperbole if one of his students, a few years before, hadn’t had a story plucked off The New Yorker’s slush pile and published in its august pages. The story also appeared in that year’s edition of The Best American Short Stories, which made our professor’s send-it-to-The-New-Yorker advice all the more tempting to heed.

I contend that one doesn’t need to be a writer or have an MFA to offer helpful advice on a manuscript.

I drafted my wife, a marketer with an MBA, as a reader even before we were engaged. Although I couldn’t have been consciously auditioning her as a life’s partner based on the feedback she gave my fiction, it didn’t hurt our courtship for me to read: “This is fantastic. Wonderful. Maybe add a little more description in the opening scene. Also, slow down the ending. Let us linger. It’s lovely.”

My wife is still my first reader. As is befitting of where we are in our marriage—sixteen years, two children, 127 arguments, including, most recently, one over cupcakes—her critiques skip the pleasantries and hone in on the heart of the matter, often with a single word: “Redundant.” “Pretentious.” “No!”

Recently, she solidified her case as the bluntest of my critics when she said, midway through a gnarly section of what had pretensions of being a novel, “If this appeared in a book I’d bought, I would put it down now.” What she didn’t have to add was, “But because you’re my husband, I will grudgingly keep reading.”

One reason I love having those near and dear to me read my work is that even when they hate it, they feel obliged to keep going.

But my favorite of my wife’s criticisms is one of her one-word masterpieces: “Yuck!”

A writing friend of mine once told me she would never give her husband her drafts to read. “I need unconditional love,” she said.

For me, however, love is never having to say “Nice” when you mean “Yuck.”

 

Brazaitis P&P 3Mark Brazaitis is the author of six books of fiction, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and Julia & Rodrigo, winner of the 2012 Gival Press Novel Award. His latest book, Truth Poker: Stories, won the 2014 Autumn House Press Fiction Competition: http://www.autumnhouse.org/product/truth-poker-mark-brazaitis/.

His book of poems, The Other Language, won the 2008 ABZ Poetry Prize.

Writing for discovery

Why I Write: Discovery vs. Self-Expression

Terry Lucas

For the past fifteen years, during my morning appointment with the muse (I’ve shown up most days, even if she hasn’t), I play a game. I pretend that language is older than life on this planet, older than life on any planet, the planets themselves, stars—even this universe. I assume that language is built into the fabric of reality itself and, therefore, due to both its age and experience, has something to teach me. Thus, I come to language every morning in order to discover myself, rather than to express myself. This difference involves more than semantics; it is as important a distinction as can exist for writers, dividing them and their work into two camps with, I believe, two entirely different results.

1. Writing as expression tends to be predictable; writing as discovery tends to subvert the reader’s expectations. We’ve all heard the maxim “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Writing to express means that the writer already “knows” (on some level) what’s going to be written before it comes out. Writing to discover oneself means that there is an open-endedness to the drafting of each line or sentence that always leaves room for lightning to strike.

How often in a workshop have you heard a writer defend a particular word or phrase against a suggested change with “but that’s not the way it happened!”? I love Dorianne Laux’s response: “We love you, but we really don’t care”—meaning that what’s important is the poem, the story, the end result, not that you are faithful in providing a precise chronicle of events or expressing your particular take on them. In poetry—Laux’s and my genre—language trumps the writer’s experiences, opinions, and beliefs every time because, as Lewis Turco points out in The Book of Forms (University Press of New England, 2000), “poetry is the art of language.” But even in other genres, it is the emotional truth conveyed in a fresh way, rather than mere historical facts, that maintains the reader’s interest.

2. Writing as expression tends to deplete a writer; writing as discovery tends to enrich a writer with even greater potential for creating new work. From Larry Levis, in “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage,” we learn that one characteristic of a voice so absorbed in self-expression that it diminishes into silence is its increasing lack of particularity:

Like the voice that went on whispering ceaselessly its dry rage
Without listeners. He said that even if anyone heard it,
They could not have recognized the dialect

As anything human . . .

. . . he began to lose interest in stories, & to speak
Only in abstractions, to speak only of theories,

Never of things.
Then he began to come in less frequently, and when he did,
He no longer spoke at all.

Then near the close of the poem, Levis gives us these astonishing lines:

What do you do when nothing calls you anymore?
When you turn & there is only the light filling the empty window?
When the Angel fasting inside you has grown so thin it flies
Out of you a last time without your

knowing it, & the water dries up in its thimble . . .

. . . I’m going to stare at the whorled grain of wood in this desk
I’m bent over until it’s infinite,

I’m going to make it talk, I’m going to make it
Confess everything.”

The it in these last lines is literally the wood in the poet’s desk, but metaphorically it is the page and the language of specificity that fills it when the poet writes. This process of listening to one’s own writing until it “confesses every thing” is what achieves the quality of poems Levis wrote; expressing one’s abstract thoughts about it leads to a drought of words—“the water dry[ing] up in its thimble.”

3. Writing as expression is like breathing out without breathing in—try that for a minute or so and see what happens. Writing as discovery is inhaling the words of great writers and watching that language evolve into something new that you exhale into the world. This is a corollary to number 2 above. I’ve long held to the idea that writer’s block is really only reader’s block in disguise. When writers come to me for help, one of the first questions I ask them is what they are reading. Most of the time they’re not reading anything. When I’m in a slump, I read those writers whose language speaks to me (like Levis). Or—here’s the open-ended aspect again—I read against my own grain—writers I don’t particularly like, to see what their language has to say to me.

Then I go to sleep, and wake up in time once again for my appointment with the muse of language, and see if she has anything to say.

 

Terry LucasTerry Lucas won the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. His most recent chapbook, If They Have Ears to Hear, won the Copperdome Award from Southeast Missouri State University Press, and his full-length collection of poems, In This Room, is forthcoming from CW Books in February of 2016. Terry is Associate Editor of Trio House Press, and a freelance poetry consultant at www.terrylucas.com.

Remembering How to Write

Karen Ashburner

After giving up writing for close to five years, I am writing and submitting at least one thing every day now. I have been rejected twice in the last three weeks, and accepted once. At first the rejections were bothering me, but now I am easing into it, remembering what it felt like: yes, no, yes, yes, no…maybe. The writing is becoming a part of me again, like growing back a long-lost limb. My writing limb was lost in a fire, along with all my books and my clothes and my house and my sense of well-being.

After it all burned down, I put my mind to tangible things, concrete things: raising children, making jam, cooking dinners. I put everything poetic into a box labeled “silly” and hid it away because to write means to feel in a way non-writers can’t understand. It hurts. It makes us fall in love with melancholy; it makes us long for impossible relationships with far-away people.

I am starting to feel things again, remember things, bad things and good things. Bad things make for good writing more often than good things so it is sometimes difficult and it sometimes makes me sad. To disassociate and to connect with the sadness, at the same time, I listen to the same song on repeat while I write. The repetition clears my head. I don’t even hear the words. I don’t even know how many times I repeat it. Over and over, some disco song from the seventies that reminds me of my childhood. Some indie rock song that makes me feel like a teenager.

Outside, it is snowing, On the television, the studio talks to a reporter driving on the highways with a camera to prove how dangerous the roads have become. I flip through the pages of a book that tells me how to raise honey bees. I am storing it all for later and when it gets too crowded in my brain, I will write it all down, combining the sadness of my burning house with the swirling white snow, and the trick to retrieving a summer swarm of bees that has settled into the branches of a tree.

 

karen-ashburnerKaren Ashburner is a sci-fi prop artist and lives in North Carolina. Her prose is published around the Internet. You can see her sci-fi designs at www.sweetrocketsky.com and view her list of publications at www.karenashburner.com.

The Dunce of Listicles

Denise Low

1. In a 1970s poetry class I read “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and begin writing numbered, sectioned poems. I feel very cool.
2. In 2014 I discover “listicle,” the word for numbered, sectioned trivia like “Five Ways to Shampoo Your Poodle” and “Eight Origami Folds for Trash Sacks.”
3. A fellow writer tells me she makes a good income teaching “How to Write Listicles” workshops. She seems very cool.
4. In 2008 I find one of my early books of numbered, sections poems in a used bookstore, inscribed to a frenemy who decided to purge bookshelves of my presence. Every poet in town goes to this bookstore, so this private gesture is a public announcement. This is a brilliant passive-aggressive coup.
5. In 2009 at the same bookstore I discover one of my earlier books marked up with corrections and suggestions for improvement. In the front leaf I see this assignment was due March 8 for the Advanced Poetry Class. Only on the last page do I find praise—“The image of wheeling Orion works okay.” I feel less cool.
6. I do not have the cash to buy this book and burn it. I decide to let it travel through the time listicle known as the calendar until the paper pages are recycled for toilet paper.
7. In 2010 my new book of numbered, sectioned poems appears in the mailbox. It is not yet a book of listicle poems. On the first page I realize the printer cut off the last section.
8. The poem works better without it.
9. In 1984 I take my children to the special collections library to find a review of my numbered, sectioned poem, a sequence of quilt pattern names. The librarian gives the kids free pencils and brings the review. The brief, unsectioned review praises the typography, handmade paper, and abstract designs derived from quilt patterns—but finds my poems “lackluster.”
10. The children draw me happy faces with their stubby library pencils after this big Ow-ie.
11. The same day the mail carrier brings a rejection letter for a numbered, sectioned poem.
12. Rejection always comes in listicles.
13. This one says, “The T’Ang poets already did what you are attempting. Give it up.” I burn the letter. Later, I regret its loss because when I tell the story, no one believes it is true.
14. It is.
15. In 2015 I realize everything I write is a listicle, snaking through the bowel of Mother Wormhole, like Stephen Hawking’s arrow of time only wriggling forward in eel-like motions. Sometimes numbers appear on the page. Sometimes pages are unnumbered, and sectioned episodes of my existence simply disappear into the white field beyond all listicles.
16. I wake up in the pure air of the 1970s and hear blackbirds call my name thirteen times.

Poet Denise LowDenise Low, 2nd Kansas Poet Laureate, is author of 25 books: Jackalope Walks into an Indian Bar (forthcoming); Mélange Block (Red Mountain Press); Ghost Stories (Woodley, a Kansas Notable Book; The Circle – Best Native American Books); and Natural Theologies: Essays (Backwaters Press). Low is past president of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs board. She blogs, reviews, and publishes Mammoth Publications. She teaches professional workshops as well as classes for Baker University’s School of Professional and Graduate Studies. She has British Isles, German, and Delaware Indian heritage. Her MFA is from Wichita State University and PhD is from Kansas University. Find her online at www.deniselow.net.

The Beast and the Muse

Brit Graham

Complacency, she’s a tricky beast. She sneaks. She is like the speckled frog plopped into the dark teakettle set to boil. She lies and she waits, she lulls you into an uncertain sense of security. She makes you feel good. She is my enemy to productivity. We don’t realize how comfortable we become sitting on our overstuffed purple couches, fuzzy Jack-Skellington-socked feet propped up on our lime green ottomans with cinnamon spiced tea in our favorite chipped mugs. We hardly feel her quadrupled-jointed fingers hooking themselves around our writing and jerking us left and then down.

I cannot say what, precisely, untethers me from my coma-like stupor. It always seems to accompany travel, like an errant stowaway tucked into the tiniest corner of luggage. There is no other perspective like the type belonging to open sky, cities crippled in her wake. Displacement. The sort shakes the mind’s closet, rattles those dust-riddled thoughts loose.

You see, the muse, she gets bored, tired of the same old hat. She needs to go on a walk-about every now and again. No matter how much I read, or have that feeling in the pit of my gut about something brewing, something maturing, something is going on writing wise that which my conscious is not privy. And then she has to run amok for a few days before she parts those white filmy curtains and says, look here.

It’s like those burbling basaltic hot spots in the pacific. They move, flit along a course, for the most part we are unable to see. A path of destruction, a path of new life. There is always a burst of written work whenever the scenery shifts slantwise. It pours out, not always glistening, not always clear. But the root of something fresh is always buried beneath. The best thing of all, is the consistent change. The ever shifting place, that stays rooted just where it has always been.

My creative thesis consisted of so much nautical imagery, that I started to believe I was destined for the coast. This was the result of a two month stint of South Floridian living. Currently I reside in the landlocked state of South Dakota, where it’s negative ten before the wind chill, the streets are littered with ice and what are attempting to be slush piles, are in fact not slush piles because they’ve not been given the opportunity to slush thoroughly. I fell in love with her in the summer. South Dakota has more lakes and sloughs than one would anticipate, and the sky should be considered a celestial body itself. The stars breed in the sky like rabbits out here, overhead so thick it looks more like salt and pepper than a black abyss pinpricked with careless constellations and light.

More and more I find myself writing in attempts to unearth answers, to widen my perception of a thing deemed impossible to decipher. Scrawling it out on a napkin at the local Irish pub, or etching it along lined pages tucked in the coffee shop across the street, writing enables me to flush out every angle, every shadowed nook and cranny, and it brings about the gift of reflection and time. It slows down the thought process enough so that one can fully observe the layered surroundings, the issues at hand, the people connected to it all. To put it simply, it seems as if suddenly and inconsequentially there is so much to write about.

Living as a hermit in South Dakota, partly due to the cold, mostly due to the gray permeating even one’s good socks, it’s easy to lose a self in one’s self. It’s easy to forget about the rest of the world. And with no less than a cattle prod-like insistence shoving me out my 70s orange door I’ve come to beautiful south Florida. A witness to its glory of crumbling asphalt bleached and cracked gray, and the aged blood-tinged rust that seems to underlie ever metal thing in the area. And I have found a solution to my problem, and perhaps I’ve identified a problem for you, and unearthed just one possible solution.

 

Photo of poet Brit GrahamFor now Brit Graham traverses the tundra that is South Dakota, while tripping over things while stargazing in the all too brief summer months. She is the crux of an ongoing love affair between the Pacific and Atlantic. She managed to pry an MFA in Poetry from the grasp of Converse College. You can read her poetry things in publications like Devilfish Review, The Night Owl, RealSouth Magazine, and The OWL.

Stalking the “Warrior’s Path” with Author Casey Clabough

Interview by Eric Wallace

In early 2007, associate professor and official overseer of Lynchburg College’s department of graduate studies in English, Casey Clabough, made what he has categorized as a bizarre and high risk gamble. Fascinated—perhaps even obsessed!—with the migration of his ancestors (a troupe of hardy Germanic pioneers who, swearing off the domesticity of Virginia’s tidewater region, cut out for the Smoky Mountains in the late 1700s), Clabough decided to follow in their footsteps, to seek out—if there was such a thing to be found—the “spiritual resonances” of their 500-plus-mile trek through the ancient, mythic hills of Appalachia.

What follows is a discussion inspired by The Warrior’s Path, the hybridized travelogue x memoir x historical exegesis Clabough penned about that adventure.

*****
So, being from the same town—Appomattox, VA—I have to ask if a) if you were born and raised there, and b) what was it about place that led to your staying? Having roamed around a bit myself, I can’t help but wonder did you find it bizarre growing up in the rural south? How do you feel about that rural, small-town world now?

I entered the world in Richmond, VA but my family moved to Appomattox when I was very young and I grew up there, which is largely what my recent memoir, SCHOOLED, is about. My mother was a research scientist—one of the few women in the field then—at MCV, but she wanted me raised away from there. Incidentally, I think my best piece of prose writing to date—“The Skeleton Woman”—is about she and I. However, the dominant cultural influence in my family came from my father’s people, who had lived in the Smoky Mountains for nearly two centuries. They were displaced to a Virginia farm when the park was created and so I grew up surrounded by Appalachian culture in piedmont Virginia, close to the Blue Ridge but still piedmont southern. To sum up, the country South of Appomattox didn’t seem alien to most of what my Smokies kin talked about, although there were some major differences.  Obviously, I have a farm now in Appomattox, but the mountains still call to me and I’ve spent a lot of time in them—I feel most at home among mountains. As far as belonging, I don’t think I really belong anywhere, so I try to make the best of wherever I happen to find myself. I’m one of those people who doesn’t romanticize places since life remains life wherever one goes.

In an interview with Oxford American, you described yourself as an obscure writer whose work would probably be more-or-less forgotten after you died. In that same segment, you stated you had something of an epiphany that led you to accepting/adapting this mentality. Could you elaborate?

Well, I don’t know that there’s anything very profound about it, although I do know writers who maintain that is their position but still network and operate their asses off at conferences and residencies [laughs]. I think the body of someone’s work tells the truth of the matter. Take my scholarly books, for example. I would have written them all about big, dominant canonical writers and used the theoretical flavors of the day if I had wanted to try to become a big-shot scholar. Right now I’m working on the October essay for the Hollins Critic. It’s entitled “The Best Appalachian Writer You Likely Never Heard Tell Of.” So, yes, I’m attracted to good writers who just do or did their thing. I’ve also found they’re the most useful writers to talk to since it’s all about the writing and topics like literary politics and gossip never seem to come up.

As a guy making a living in academia, how do you navigate that differential between scholar and artist? Is there any distinction for you between those two?

I think it harkens back to the last question. I am what I am and do what I do. In terms of myself, I don’t think about genre divisions or that there’s even a schism between teaching and writing—to me it’s all the same. But it does seem to surprise some people when I suddenly generate a biography or a novel or a creative writing textbook or a book of poems in another language. It’s like they’re thinking, “Wait, you’re supposed to be just a critic. Get back over there” [Laughs]. I mean, I’m not even just a writer; I have many other interests, passions, and avenues of expression, If various people choose to take the writings of Casey Clabough and the person behind that particular name as the same thing, then that’s their problem.

You’re a rather prolific writer. How do you move from the realms of inchoate idea, conceptualization, work-in-progress, to realized manuscript? What does that process look like for you?

At this point in my career it’s pretty much defined by the next publishing deadline: that’s the project I need to work on. I have to be very organized, too, due to my current lifestyle. I mean, winter doesn’t wait for your woodpile to get large enough; spring doesn’t wait on the plow; etc. And then there’s the academic schedule in which I love interacting with the students, but find many other time-consuming aspects distasteful or even pointless. But going back to your question, I guess my process is a big chaotic mess (notes scribbled in a meeting, some snatches of typing here and there) that I then have to organize. So I would say organization and discipline are key. I am proud of the fact that, in so far as I can recall, I’ve never missed a deadline.

You’ve said that in hopes of making it a more sellable thing, your publishers wanted you to commercialize The Warrior’s Path. Can you talk a bit about the line between making something more widely available and compromising the integrity of the work itself?

That may be an unanswerable question, since there are writers who can cut loose with what they take to be all their artistic chaos and the end result is perfect for a trade publisher. In other words, their product just happens to naturally resemble whatever is “hot” or considered good literary work at a given point in time. Other writers deliberately, even cynically, “chase the monster,” as it’s called, with the aid of their agent, editor, and writer friends. In the grand scheme of things, though, when you read literary history, you come across all kinds of now-canonical writers who published with small presses or even not at all. And then there are the names next to Pulitzer prizes that no one reads or even recognizes anymore. Here’s an example: Some writers I know consider Moby Dick the greatest American novel ever written, but if you read the initial reviews of that book you’ll find them quite mixed. And then consider Melville’s career: It was one long, slow downward slide. The early novels—not Moby Dick—sold best and then down went his sales until no publisher would have him. Not a coffin to be found in that whirlpool [Laughs].

The whole road-hiking trip that comprised / led to your writing The Warrior’s Path seemed, to me, an insane idea. How did you arrive at wanting to do that book?

It coalesced gradually. As I child I spent long hours alone in the woods and I also had a love of maps. One day, while looking at a county topography map, I discovered the same large creek that ran through my farm was also the small creek that I played in at a friend’s house some ten miles distant. So naturally I decided to follow the creek to my friend, but also discovered a great many things along the way. When I finally got to his house people kind of freaked out. Did your mom drop you off? How did you get here without a car or a road? I still have an image in my head of my buddy’s panicked mom running to the phone [Laughs].

Anyway, with that book, I already knew I had the physical ability to accomplish the goal, barring an accident—and I did underestimate the danger. And then there were the spiritual and intellectual catalysts: Following in my ancestors’ footsteps and comparing what I saw to 1700s accounts of the same places. So many people followed that route, I thought it would might be appealing to others to know something about it, then and now.

Was writing The Warrior’s Path in any way cathartic for you? Do you think making the journey changed you in anyway? Has it (the trip, those reflections and thoughts) stuck with you? Do you ever think about it now, in the present? I think what I’m wanting to know is if this was just an open/close art/scholarly project or one of those I’m-driven-to-and-have-to-do-this kind of somethings that really fundamentally alters who/what you are as a human-being.

I think the answer to those first two questions is in the affirmative and then negative for the next two. For one thing, I’ve kept on writing and thus lived in different worlds, real and imagined, as vividly as when I wrote about the summer I hiked Athowominee. And then there’s the ever-present world of the real: I had a serious bout with illness a few years ago that nearly killed me. So I had to get self-recalibrated, so to speak. And then various things, good and bad, many of us go through. Anyway, no, I don’t think about that book very much, though I have been working on a sequel of sorts: It follows the life of one of my Smoky Mountain relatives—a great uncle. He interacted with bootleggers and the Overhill Cherokee, fought in World War I, and lost his land to the park. He lost the world as he knew it and, I also believe, himself. That happens to people, you know.

On top of all the other engagements and responsibilities you maintain, you live on, and run, a farm. Why?

Farming, at least to this point, has been synonymous with being. I cursed it as a child when my father would wake me before light from downstairs with lines of Smoky Mountain spang and I’d have to get up to do chores before school. At one point I swore it off in all earnestness. But then I found in college and graduate school that I really missed it. I think different people have their different connections. I’ve had urban-based house guests who have been so genuinely disturbed by the lack of sound and artificial light on my farm that they couldn’t sleep. One might argue their connection to their environment is equally strong and formative, even though it is much more shaped by human influence. I mean, my city instincts are terrible: I get lost easily, move at the wrong times in lines, etc. So I don’t know.

At various points you’ve talked about trying to help students, sometimes to your detriment. You wrote a book about teaching, and I was wondering if you might share a couple of stories, horrific and successful alike?

Well, I guess I’d say read SCHOOLED if you’re interested in that dynamic. I will say I don’t help people in the academic arena as much as I used to since it is so easy for a helpful intention to get misinterpreted or intentionally twisted by malicious people into something bad. So these days I prefer more community-based forms of help, whether it’s doing a free workshop at a library or using the chainsaw to help people clean up after a storm. I do still read lots of manuscripts folks send me, both those of friends and people I don’t know.

I’m sort of into tracing literary heritage. Could you name me a list of, say, your top-ten most beloved books and authors? The game-changers in both your literary world, and your life.

How about this instead: My forthcoming Hollins Critic essay is about a writer named Naton Leslie. I think everyone should read his book of short stories, Marconi’s Dream. It won the George Garrett Fiction Prize after being rejected by nearly a hundred publishers. It’s out of print now and no one ever bothered to review it. It’s a good book.

About the Author

caseyhimself-2Casey Clabough is the author of the novel Confederado, the travel memoir The Warrior’s Path: Reflections Along an Ancient Route, the memoir SCHOOLED: Life Lessons of a Professor, a biography of legendary southern writer George Garrett, five scholarly books on southern and Appalachian literature, an edited collection of women’s Civil War writing, and a creative writing textbook. His work has appeared in over a hundred anthologies and magazines, including Creative Nonfiction, the Sewanee Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Fall 2012 issue of South85 Journal. Clabough’s awards include the Bangladesh International Literary Award, an artist’s fellowship from the Brazilian Government, and several U.S.-based fellowships. He lives on a farm in Appomattox County, Virginia and teaches at Lynchburg College.

About the Interviewer

Eric-WallaceEric J. Wallace is a freelance writer based out of Staunton, Virginia. His work has been featured in The Atlantic Monthly, All About Beer Magazine, Canoe & Kayak, Post Road Literary Journal, and he is a regular contributor to Blue Ridge Outdoors. For more info., select publication history, newsletters, and inquiries, visit www.ericjwallace.com.

Photo Credits: Annie Laura, 621studios.com.

The Healer

Clinton Crockett Peters

As I watched Robin Hemley get healed on the Filipino island of Siquijor, I was surrounded by three dozen writers, part of the 2011 Iowa Overseas Writers Workshop, most with their notebooks out; only eight or so were with me in the bamboo room, raised above a chicken coop. The rest were outside the thatched hut, wilting in the tropical balm but jotting away.

The writers were scribbling thoughtfully, probably the same details Robin noted later: how the healer made a cross with coconut oil on the back of her patient’s neck. How the healer was 87-years-old, barefoot with rough, taunt skin and cropped hair. How she blew bubbles through a straw into a glass and circled Robin on her knees (and awkwardly passed his crotch). The once-clear water in the glass changed to a chummy red and then a dark green. The healer paused, still on her knees, took out two bits of jagged material, and handed them to Robin. These were scales from his attacker, the healer informed.

The healer was all purpose, whatever ailed you. A cultural immersion project for most of us, but Robin was on a mission. He intended to remove a curse given to him in New Delhi by a beggar holding a basket of baby cobras. The lady held the snakes out to Robin (to his face as he recalled), and seemed to be expecting money. He meant to supply, but in going for his wallet, his wife called to him that their taxi was waiting. So he left, but before he could, the woman pointed at him and yelled obscenities that made the crowd in the market turn and stare and quiver. He assumed he’d been cursed.

It’s good for a writer to be cursed. “Imagine how good my life will be if I get rid of it?” he said. “Think of the story.”

Robin, one time director of the Iowa MFA program in nonfiction, author of eleven books, Guggenheimed, is not exactly without success. This story was one he planned to sell to Lapham’s Quarterly, one of those Barnes & Nobles glossies that had already accepted his pitch.

It would be hard for me to match Robin’s ability to render this healing. But imagine thirty writers in the same room or standing just outside in the mud and grass with the local men and children singing karaoke next door, these writers with their notebooks out like good students noting every detail. That sounded like a curse if I’ve ever heard one. I put my notebook away: who needed three dozen reports about the same incident?

But, and here’s the crux, even if all thirty did publish Pulitzer-prize stories, essays, poems and plays about Robin’s curse, that wouldn’t reflect or detract the notes I took and the story I kept for later.

Far from the rigors of the Russian ballet, or the meat-grinding nature of pro-sports, writers are not gladiators. We are not the adrenaline-saturated, bloody thirsty cohorts of New Rome’s underwear ad-generating spectacle. Thirty writers do not enter a dome expecting only one to leave.

Sure, there are contests and limited funding; getting aboard this Overseas Workshop was competitive. But we’re a breed engineered, thankfully, to distrust trophies.

What signals our profession, calling, broken hearts to bleed on pages is that, if we battle at all, we wage war with the self. I can tell this anecdote because it’s mine, but only if I’m tenacious enough to overcome my self-distrust. The lie was that there could be only one story, one poem, one essay. But countless great works of literature are poised on the cusp of one person falling for another.

I was going to get healed after Robin. But, instead, after Robin’s curse was removed I gave up my seat to another writer who scribbled away as the Healer’s bubbles turned the water brown.

I knew I could get healed the next day (we were on the island for three), and I did. The story of my healing, surrounded by staring children and curious chickens beneath the floorboards where I dropped my pen seems less interesting, more of a classic neocolonialist escapade than the irony and bizarre nature of three dozen writers scrawling notes about a story that was and wasn’t theirs. In other words, writing is not about originality, but piecing together the fragments of memory and observation, about reconstituting reality with the salt of imagination. The world we write about, and, indeed, what we write is never just our own.

 

Clinton Crockett PetersA native Texan, Clinton Crockett Peters has an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa. He is pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of North Texas and has work published or forthcoming in Shenandoah, Green Mountains Review, Upstreet, Waxwing, The Rumpus, American Literary Review, Los Angeles Review, and Denton Record Chronicle. He has worked as a wilderness guide, an English teacher in Japan, and a radio DJ.

How Acting and Improvisation Improved My Writing

Jacob Allard

I am a writer.

I am an actor.

I am an improviser.

I am a teacher.

All of these titles are a part of who I am and each one has influenced my writing in some way. Today I’d like to look at acting and improvising.

Throughout my life I’ve focused on two main art forms: acting and improvising. Use of dialogue in both is essential to each art because it shapes how a scene works out in plays and movies. I had read probably over a hundred plays before I hit college to obtain my Bachelor’s in theatre education and then had to read yet more plays. Plays were important to us actors–not just to perform, but to understand how a playwright gets us to say what he/she wants us to say.

So, Jake, what the hell does this have to do with writing fiction or nonfiction? Simple: DIALOGUE. I spent most of my life learning how to perfect the art of speaking to another actor or actress on stage. More importantly, I spent my time learning how to read a script to see what the writer is telling me. Not just their literal words, but the same literary techniques we use as writers.

For example: Shakespeare (I know…starting tough) would use the sounds of the words to help show what a character is feeling. Here we have A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene II:

How low am I, thou painted maypole? speak;
How low am I? I am not yet so low
But that my nails can reach unto thine eyes.

The sounds in this passage are sharp, biting. Letters like “t” are abundant in this passage; rumors abound that Shakespeare used this alliteration to show the character’s feelings on wanting to “cut through the other character.” Some modern playwrights have taken on this technique, and we as fiction writers can do the same.

Look at how your dialogue sounds. Listen to it in your head, say it out loud, record it and listen to it, or even have some friends or family read that part out loud and really listen to how it sounds. Can you cut another person down with your t’s? Can you show sadness by having someone speak with more long vowel sounds, so it almost sounds like they’re crying with consonants? One of my favorite directors’ dialogue mantra was “vowels are the emotion of a sentence; consonants are the intellect holding it together and helping it make sense.” How much of this can you apply to your writing?

The art of improvisation has a simpler way of helping me in my writing. Many times (mostly when I was starting out after getting a better handle on the language) I would stop myself and re-read what I was writing only to trash the whole thing. Many other writers have their own way of saying it (i.e. Lamott’s way is “write a shitty rough draft”), but with improv, you are working with your teammates to create something that is brand new and comes from absolutely only in the creative part of the imagination. Rule number one of improv to allow this creative process to continue is called “yes, and.” This idea of “yes, and” is a beautiful one; it means “yes, I accept what you’re giving me, and I’ll move the story forward.” Improv, as well as all acting, really, is nothing but story showing. Actors get up on the stage and show the audience a story (I say showing and not telling because an acting mantra is “show us, don’t tell us.”) In improv, we’re not just showing a story–we’re creating one that stays true to these characters we’ve envisioned. It’s truly the most organic form of story creating that I’ve gotten to experience. We commit to our characters and allow him or her to carry us on a story, and if we deviate from what that character would do, our audience will notice it–and most likely wake from their fictive dream.

The same can happen to us as writers. We create a story and a couple of things can happen. We decide half-way through our rough draft that the story created is utter bullshit, we change the character’s personality and make him or her to do things that don’t ring true, or we just force the story to go a way that’s unnatural. One thing I’ve incorporated in my more current writings is this mentality of “yes, and.” I create my characters, I commit to the characters, and during the rough draft I don’t EVER say “no.” I let them make up their own minds. I let their actions push through, and I let their actions dictate what happens in the story. I will go back and edit later, maybe removing an action that doesn’t fit as well as I thought it did initially, but I find that my “shitty rough drafts,” to snag a line from Lamott, are significantly less shitty than I thought they were. It makes my edits go much more smoothly. So, the next time you hit a snag in a story, look back at what happened and say to your characters “yes, and” and then build your story further.

Keep writing!

Jacob AllardJacob Allard is the Managing  Prose Editor at South85 Journal. He graduated Converse College with his MFA in creative writing in 2014. When he’s not writing or editing he is usually found teaching, improvising, acting, or enjoying the outdoors or the City of Richmond, where he calls home.