Story Studio is now in official partnership with the fabulous Open Books, a literacy organization and used book store. They do very different work than Story Studio but with the same goal in mind: to promote writing skills and literacy around the city of Chicago. We’re delighted to call them our friends.

Open Books is wonderfully ambitious organization that coordinates a youth tutoring program, hosts creative writing field trips, facilitates a program called “V-Write” (through with students communicate with virtual writing tutors on college and career-related essays), in addition to offering reading and writing classes for adults. And somehow, in their spare time, they also run a used book store. I’ve actually been to their space a handful of times, and I must say – it’s one of the happiest places I’ve ever been (think brightly colored walls with inspiring author quotes and letters hanging from the ceiling). If you haven’t yet check out Open Books, definitely take a look at their website: www.openbooks.org

They are always looking for new volunteers – plus, if you’re an educator, definitely think about bringing your class to an Open Books’ Adventures in Creative Writing field trip. What a cool place – we’re just glad to know ‘em! 

Those of you familiar with Victoria Lautman’s Writers On The Record series may already know that the series has moved from Lookingglass Theatre to the Chicago Public Library.  Victoria’s first taping in her new home was this past Friday, September 12th, and she interviewed Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz about his new book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

I wasn’t really in the mood to see him speak in the first place, but like most writers, I have to force myself out of the house so I don’t turn into a lady-with-cats, and I was promised a free drink by the friend who went with me.  Plus Díaz is a hot ticket right now.  In addition to all of his fancy prizes, “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie,” from his 1996 collection Drown, appears in the anthology I use with my fiction students, and his current book was recommended to me by a member of the Oprah staff who’s required to know such things. So I pretty much had to.

I got there a little less than an hour before the show.  When Salman Rushdie was at the Library last month, I made the mistake of showing up only ½ an hour before the talk and wound up in an overflow room watching him speak on a TV, and I wasn’t about to have that happen again.  15 minutes or so before the show started, Lautman and Díaz came out.  He was completely silent as she warmed up the crowd and seemed to be looking for an escape route.  I assumed he would fumble nervously, but instead he came on like that dude on your bar league softball team who insists that winning is very important.  Every description of a passage from his book by Lautman was followed up by a “well, actually.” It got to the point where the usually unflappable Lautman presented him with an either-or question, joking that one of the answers had to be right, only to be told that “a book is not a test.” Sorry, guess you got that one wrong too, Victoria. 

Snotty-pants attitude aside, Díaz had some important things to say about authority and identity.  His attitude was, in part, explained by how he looks at writing.  His sometimes trivial footnotes, un-italicized Spanish, and the hub-bub over his character narrator (spoiler alert: the narrator’s identity isn’t revealed until later chapters of the book, but is discussed in this interview) have everything to do with his being a Dominican writer.  Like Langston Hughes, he questions those writers who want to be “just a writer,” a term previously reserved for, as Díaz puts it, “some white dude”.  He maintains that he cannot honestly claim a “universal transcendence” for his writing that he doesn’t see in his life, and he emphasizes that only through the particular can one even approach the universal.

As a “woman writer” I found these ideas to be relevant to my own search for a writerly identity; those who have been excluded from the traditional canon will always be asked these questions whether they want to deal with identity or not, and Díaz confronts it outright.  He was particularly gracious with questions from audience members that spoke to that confrontation.  Perhaps he gave them the benefit he would not give Lautman because they could better understand the source of his particular brand of what he termed recalcitrance.

I wouldn’t want to go to a tea party with the guy, lest he unleash his ire on me, but his verbal dexterity, and his passion for creating a realistic multiplicity of voices make him an important writer to know.

You can listen to the interview on Victoria Lautman’s website.  It aired on Sunday, September 14th on WFMT.

Just who hangs out at StoryStudio? We hope to answer that question with a variety of student profiles. Here, Staffer Liz talks with StoryStudio writer Stacy Hope Jones.

I understand you’re going to be published in a Science Fiction anthology.  Congratulations!  How did that come about? 

From a StoryStudio Chicago opportunity of course! I attended my second one-night workshop taught by Jason Hardy,Sci-Fi and Fantasy writing. He made the offer to the class at the end of the workshop to follow up if we were interested in possibly writing a chapter for The Wanderers Guild, a book of fantasy shorts for adults. As long as my stories are accepted, I will be writing two chapters. They are titled:
“Fairy Boat Armada” and “The Upside-Down Lake.”

Jill mentioned you connected with Tim F. and Stephanie C. on some non-related StoryStudio projects. Can you talk a bit about how these connections have spilled over from writing and stories to your careers?

Tim, Stephanie and I all met at the SSC Writer’s Retreat in 2006. Since we focused mainly on writing and building fires there, it wasn’t until many emails and conversations down the road that we discovered what we all did for a living. Turns out we are all involved in marketing and business development. Long story short, Stephanie works with American Marketing Association and arranged for Tim to lead a techno-marketing seminar based on a book he’d recently published. His trip to New York for this lined up with my trip to BookExpo America there, so we joined forces to storm the entire global trade publishing conference selling our writing wares and services – quite successfully as it turns out!

Your publishing company is partnering with StoryStudio Chicago to publish the studio’s first printed chapbook.  How did get into publishing?
My creative partner and I started writing and illustrating together back in high school. We were always doing art on our own and were the leaders of the literary magazine and yearbook back then.

After college, we lived across the country from each other, so I’d mail her poems and she’d do a painting in response.  By the end, digital print-on-demand had hit the market, so we self-published this project as the book Smoke, Whispers & Notions: Conversations Between Artist & Poet. It is a journey of art between two women and we were quite fulfilled with having our project ‘off the shelf.’ This culminated into the founding of our press, Waxing Gibbous, named from one of the poems in the book.

We focus on children’s books, mostly with a fantasy or whimsical nature to them. Our first book is Genies in Jammies, an illustrated children’s bedtime book that we’ll introduce at BookExpo America next summer in Los Angeles.

Is there one (okay, maybe two) successes that you would attribute to your time and relationships at StoryStudio?

They are infinite!

First, it wasn’t until I discovered StoryStudio Chicago that I made writing a priority in my life again. I had been searching for something that fit a professional work schedule and it is perfect! I need deadlines and a tangible space and faces to make me commit to my art and hopefully allow my art to become my work at some point.

Jill Pollack and SSC gave me my first non-academic public reading in the Writer’s Read Showcase 2007 and I’ll be reading in the Sunday Salon Series with Jill this November.

Through the writing classes, I’ve honed my writing and confidence and have written children’s material that I’ve published through my ‘day-job’ in publishing for clients such as Harper Collins Childrens’ and other publishers.

Most exciting on the front burner is the possibility of having some fantasy writing published and working on the Story Studio Chicago chapbook! The friends and writing peers I’ve made at SSC are an extraordinary support network the likes of which our writing role models have as well. The fact that Stephen King and Amy Tan sit down to discuss writing gives me hope that my SSC pals will still be going on retreats together in the years to come.

I’m holding out for an annual StoryStudioChicago “Dude Ranch Retreat” myself.  And of course, I’ll be returning to the Fall Session at SSC. 

What advice do you have for other budding writers looking to make connections to further their writing or interest in the publishing?
What role can StoryStudio play?

Want to write?
1. Find a community or make a commitment in your life to writing.
StoryStudioChicago is a great choice because it offers classes, workshops, or just a safe and inspiring writing sacred place.

2. Talk to everyone.
You never know who knows someone who is looking for someone to write something.

3. If you want to be published, join writersmarket.com as a start. Then workshop the thing over and over and over. Then you are ready to send it out to the first place.

4. Big publishers are interested in anything self-published and self-marketed that is a success before they even look at it. Think about this as now starting to follow the movie model of an indie movie being made on a small budget, getting picked up by a big studio, released and marketed in mass.

So get creative! Remember the cooking blog of the woman that cooked a Julia Child recipe everyday? Well, that was so popular it was picked up as a book. Big publishers will buy the rights to a self-published book now (think Lulu.com, Xlibris etc.) if the author/publisher has driven enough sales (10K copies) of it to give the promise of mass market appeal.

Working in publishing is just like working at any other job as far as your writing is concerned. You are around it, sure, and it inspires you all day, but at the end, you have to make time in the morning or night to do your own writing and pursue it. It’s hard to do it alone, so SSC is a great place to check out.

Wise Words Indeed. Thanks Stacy!

Stacy Hope Jones, Founder, Waxing Gibbous Press and Story Studio Chicago Member