StoryStudio student Anne Laughlin is published again (the woman’s a publishing machine!), this time in Best Lesbian Love Stories 2009.  Anne’s story is called “On Retreat,” and seeing as how she workshopped it in the Advanced Writer’s Workshop, I think she’d agree that she couldn’t have done it without us!  Let’s hope she’ll show her gratitude by bringing us cookies.  Cookies, Anne, cookies! 

Seriously, we’re ever so proud of her, and excited to hear that she’s finished her second novel, which is now being shopped around to publishers.  You go, girl! 

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.  Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.  Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.  ~Carl Sandburg

I recently finished my first novel, but I began my writing life as a poet.  For ten years, I wrote and studied poetry with the intensity of an apprentice, filling notebook after notebook with verse.  I studied poetry in college, and at the zenith of my poetic career Tillie Olsen, then 88, wrapped her hand, birdlike and tiny, around my own and made me promise to keep writing.

I wrote three short stories in college, and they were all abysmal.  After graduation, I began working on a novel at a friend’s suggestion, just to see if I could write one.  It, too, was mostly awful.  I knew nothing of plot, of emotional logic, of character development or dialogue or scenes.  What I did know, and what made my plotless actionless stories rather readable despite their definite lack of any kind of direction whatsoever, was language. 

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry. ~Virginia Woolf

Ten years of poetry ingrained in me the beauty and importance of rhythm, syntax, and word choice.  Poetry taught me the potential for shades of meaning in each line, the depth and history of words, and how you can never divorce a word from its connotations.  Poetry taught me how to write beautiful sentences, how to shape a thought, how to pack phrases with meaning so they soothed or sliced.

Always be a poet, even in prose.  ~Charles Baudelaire

I often think of writing as building.  Writing a novel is like building a house, with similar concerns about foundation, structure, architecture, logical process, and so forth.  If you’re building an entire house, you might have moments of zen-like concentration as you engage in each task, but you might also keep all the big questions of structure and form in your head as you put up drywall and check levels.  Writing a poem, though, is like building a garden wall, stone by stone.  As you work, you hold each stone in your hand, feeling its texture and weight, without bigger questions like “What is this?” and “Where is it going?” to distract you from your task.  It’s a wall, you answer quietly.  It’s going along the back of the garden.  Now pay attention to how each stone fits against each other stone, how they grow warm in the sun.

Years of writing poetry gave me a mason’s knowledge of words, even as I tackled the larger questions of structure, plot, and pacing.  Now, when I get stuck in fiction, I go back to my roots and consider my prose from a poetic standpoint, or write poetry in a character’s voice, or distill the meat of the chapter into verse.  I turn to poetry for truth. 

We have seldom been in such dire need of poetry.  ~Mark Baechtel

I have long recommended playing with other genres to push yourself out of a rut, for insight and re-inspiration.  If you’re a fiction writer, delve into poetry for a bit, or attempt a few scenes in a screenplay.  If you’re a poet, tackle a short story or an essay.  As old Uncle Darwin knew, there is evolutionary strength in diversity.

Do you dip into other genres for inspiration?  Do you find yourself doodling poems in the margins of your notebooks?  Chat about your inspiration and perspiration in the Writer’s Lounge.

This semester, I signed up for the unthinkable: a poetry workshop.  I’ve never really written any poetry, other than prose poems (but as one of my poet friends said to me, “that’s not stretching yourself enough.”) She’s right: as writers, we need to constantly challenge ourselves, constantly take ourselves out of our comfort zones so our words do not become stagnant. 

So I took the plunge.  I signed up, and it’s passed the add/drop period at my school, so it looks like I’m in this for the long-haul.  The class is on 20th Century poetry, and many of the writers we’re looking at (besides Pound, Williams, and Ginsberg) I’ve never read: Lorine Niedecker, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jean Toomer, to name three.  And today, I sent off my first poem to workshop (we had to write following a strict form, so I chose a sonnet to ease myself in).

Every writer should try the unexpected.  If you mainly write prose, try a poetry workshop.  If you’re a screenwriter, go for memoir.  There’s a world of value in looking at writing from a different perspective, and you may be amazed at where you end up. 

This weekend, I was back in the small Wisconsin town where I grew up, which currently claims title to both Home and Not-Home.  It’s Home because it’s where I spent my first eighteen years on earth, from conception (and believe me, this is information I did NOT need to know) to the summer after high school graduation.  My mother still lives in the same house on Main Street, in front of which I learned to ride a bicycle, to rollerskate, to chalk an elaborate hop-scotch course, to hit black walnuts into the street with a wiffle bat.  To write: after school I would climb the ash tree, settle on a branch a third of the way up with my back against the trunk, and scribble in my notebook.  I liked to spy on people who walked, unknowingly, beneath me.  I recorded their conversations and the way they travelled, hurriedly or leisurely, striding or strolling. 

And of course, it’s Not-Home, because I haven’t lived there in a decade.  Where once it was impossible to run a simple errand without seeing someone I knew – my teenage classmates staffed every store in the strip mall, the grocery store, the Ben Franklin, the video rental store, the Hallmark, the Subway, the Hardees, the hardware store – now I can push my cart around the grocery store for an hour and see no one familiar (aside from a weathered woman who looked like an older, shrunken version of my fourth grade reading teacher).  I drive around town and compulsively explain the differences between then and now: “This whole neighborhood is new… when I was a kid this was all cornfield… when I was little these roads didn’t connect… this park was full of wooden equipment and an awesome merry-go-round that they ripped out after the third kid in a year broke her arm….”

I move through town with less ease now, feeling like an outsider.  My partner and I made up an imaginary movie in which a long-gone townie returns to find everything different – not an uncommon theme – and kept referencing moments that would go into the movie.  Our prodigal townie would be a friendly outsider whose every joke falls flat.  The moment in the grocery store where we tried to joke with the guy handing out wine samples and he just stared at us – in the movie.  Joking about the notices hanging on a community bulletin board – failing miserably at dog park small talk – navigating bizarre road construction – teasing teenagers at the petting zoo – all in the movie.  As we described it, the movie wouldn’t even have a plot, really; it would just be a wild collection of moments, a long montage of homecoming awkwardness.

Film can be such a rich medium for storytelling, because it naturally lends itself to comparison in juxtaposition.  You show a scene where a character moves through the grocery store with ease, laughing and chatting with everyone she encounters.  In the very next scene she’s older and every attempt at conversation falls flat.  You don’t have to explain that something has changed: the juxtaposition speaks for itself.  Also, film almost forces you to engage setting in the story.  After all, you can’t film a scene in a vacuum.  Every scene has to take place somewhere.  As such, film is a great medium for evoking place and its impact on character.

When they make the movie of my life, this weekend will probably look like a cross between Grosse Point Blank and The Big Chill, funny and twisted and a little sad, with an 80s soundtrack and a bunch of hilarious cameos.  In the meantime, I’m going to use the principles of filmmaking to inform my fiction, focusing on place and juxtaposition to enrich my story. 

Interested in Filmmaking?  Check out our Screenwriting I class, Thursdays, September 18 to November 13; 6:30pm to 9pm.  Call 773.477.7710 or email for more information.

I’m always begging students to send in some of their work to post on Cooler. Especially the folks in the beginning classes. My summer Beginning Fiction class for instance was filled with amazing writers who only got better as the term went on and we had occasions to experiment with forms and concepts.

There are some poems posted in the main section, and here is a short exercise submitted by Logan Turner. Enjoy!

Henry
by Logan Turner (Beginning Fiction Summer 08)

The park shone with the energy of a hundred suns.  Children shrieked with delight as they spun endlessly on the rusty, paint-faded merry-go-round.  The noise of the trees hushing with the wind seemed to scold them, but still their tinny voices carried through the air.  The breeze traveled sluggishly through the damp August air, the moisture sitting like a cloud on the backs of everyone’s necks.  The sand from the park was encroaching on the grass, errant pebbles lying helplessly so far from home. 

The only shade came from the old oak tree, the soggy innards from last night’s rain threatening relief-seekers like a menacing KEEP OUT sign.  Despite the heat, no one went near the tree, and when strangers would ask all anyone said was “It may be shady, but it’s sure as hell dark,” as if they all had recited it from a manual.  The tree looked harmless enough, though oddly still.  The sun blazed, the birds chirped, the air tickled hair, but the tree did not move. 

In the blink of an eye, the sun seemed to dim.  The day withdrew to forty watts.  First one, then two, then suddenly tens and hundreds of clouds filled the expansive sky.  The bright blue afternoon turned gray, fading quickly from ash to granite.  Like a throaty German Shepherd’s growl, the thunder began to rumble in the distance.  Scattered raindrops started to ping to the earth and bright flashes of white-hot lightning pierced the formerly calm afternoon.  With a deafening roar, a booming sizzle reached for the tree, and in one fell swoop split the mighty tree down to its roots. 

The air crackled from the bolt of electricity and Tasha dropped to her knees, her hands over her ears.  The storm had moved in so quickly no one had time to search for cover, and the wails of the frightened children sent all the parents into a frenzy.  Mothers and fathers raced in all directions and finding their children became a blind search as the rain came down now in sheets, as if the lightning had torn right through the clouds.  The water spilled down Tasha’s face, blurring her vision and streaming into her mouth as she screamed for Henry.  He had been tangled up with three other boys on the merry-go-round, which now stood empty and abandoned, slowly turning with the winds of the storm. Tasha felt people brush by her but saw no child unattended, and as she searched frantically with her eyes, she dropped to her knees, her hands seeking contact with tiny four-year-old shoes.  The wind whipped her words from her mouth and her eyes and hands found nothing.  Unable to tell the rain from her tears, she shook with fury and panic. As she took one last look around, she saw a glimpse of Henry’s red jacket in front of the tree.

Next Page