How to use BREAKFAST WITH NERUDA in the Classroom

I will be part of a panel this weekend for the Washington Library Media Association (WLMA) where we authors present ideas on how our books can be used in the classroom. THE WEATHER IS NOT WILLING TO COOPERATE, SO I AM UNABLE TO MAKE AN APPEARANCE. HOWEVER, I WILL OFFER A DRAWING FOR A FREE COPY OF MY BOOK . WLMA MEMBERS PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT ON MY TWITTER https://twitter.com/LauraMoewriter, Use the hashtag #WLMABWN . AT THE END OF THIS WEEK I WILL ANNOUNCE A LUCKY WINNER

Here is one idea.

Steps to Writing an Ode/Laura Moe

Select a person, place, or thing you like a lot or care about.  Brainstorm by following these steps: (Remind kids to keep it PG.)

In my example of a thing I use coffee.

Write 5 phrases describing how your item makes you feel, and why you feel this way.

            I like coffee because it gives me energy, coffee smells good, coffee is warm, etc.

Write 5 phrases describing the unique qualities of your subject

Coffee is strong, dark, liquid, portable, etc.

Why is your subject important to you? Why do you adore or admire it so much?

            Coffee is important because it wakes me up, makes my mornings better, helps me face the day…

Now Revise by:

-Crossing out lines or phrases where words are repeated or are too similar

-Joining some of your phrases to create lines

-Adding more feeling to meaningless or figurative language to flat lines

-Picking a good opening line

-Ordering the lines into the best sequence

-Choosing an ending line that sums up your feelings for the object. Here is MY poem:

Ode to Coffee

It swims

dark as coal

warm as summer

in my cup.

The aroma beckons,

wakens me

on black, icy dawns

as it takes the chill

from my soul

and melts the edge

off my morning meanness.

Coffee is like a gentle symphony

whose crescendo rises slowly

as if pushing up the sun with one hand.

Laura Moe, 2009

Time: 40-45 minutes.

Students may choose to revise poems as homework or in class the next day.

Standards met: Personification, Language development skills. Teacher note: Introduce this lesson by using some odes by Pablo Neruda. “Ode to a Tomato,” Ode to Laziness,””Ode to Summer,” and “Ode to a watermelon,” are favorites with MS and grades 9-10. Point out how Neruda uses simple diction yet juxtaposes and arranges the lines to engage readers. Kids who read will like “Ode to a Book.” If kids are stumped, suggest write an ode to a favorite food, pet(s), car, bedroom, phone, computer, TV show, movie, friend(s), or store.

References:

Peden, Margaret Sayers, tr., Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1990.

Tarn, Nathaniel, ed., Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems. Houghton Mifflin, New York: 1970.Happy Writing.

Students who enjoyed John Green's Looking For Alaska or Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell will also enjoy this book.

Why Do I Write YA?

When I still worked as a teacher and librarian it always saddened me to hear students say they hated to read. This was unimaginable to me. As a kid stories sustained me and were often my only friends during my family‘s frequent moves. Books were my guides to the world, a dialogue in an otherwise empty room. They were a message in a bottle.

It’s no accident I became a school librarian, English teacher, and later, a full time writer of YA. The seeds for our identities in the world are planted during middle grade and high school years. It's the first breath of independence from your parents. They may try to imprint their ideas and values on you, but during this time your personality forms its own framework.  You discover what you’re good at, what you suck at, who your friends will be, and if you’re lucky, what inner passions will drive you toward your life’s work.

I didn’t pay attention to the details of my identity, or perhaps I wanted to erase the Book Nerd stamp etched on my personality, so I wasn’t so lucky. Throughout my late teens and twenties I floundered around trying on a litany of college majors and half-assed jobs, and dating guys who, for the most part, were bad news.

Yet maybe I was lucky. These muddy side roads added layers to my experiences. Writers create alone, often sequestered in a small room in the back of their home or in a corner table in a coffee shop, but in order to create authentic work, writers also need experiences. We need to talk to people, work with our hands, know how it feels when someone breaks your heart.

In the late 80s, after finally earning my Bachelor’s degree with enough credit hours to have a PhD, I started writing. I wrote bad stories, wretched poems, and a really terrible novel. Most of that work is hidden in a file drawer. While my early work will never see daylight, to throw it out would dishonor the progress I have made. All writers start out being bad writers. Our work is derivative, filled with cliché, and often inauthentic. We haven’t learned to trust the process, to slice your heart open and bleed into the work. We get better by writing, reading, writing more, writing deeply, reading, revising, taking workshops, writing, writing, writing….

Good writing is driven by passion. I’m not talking about Harlequin romance lust, though many fine writers write romances. By the time I was thirty I realized books and words were my passions, and in quick succession earned a masters degree in library and another in writing. As a certified Book Nerd (aka school librarian and English teacher), my work opened up a new arena for writing.

Everyone has a story and writers are story magnets. If we listen, people strangers  share their heartbreaking, tender, funny, sad, incredulous, and authentic stories. They are my muses.

As a teacher my heart was further broken to hear students groan and roll their eyes when I broached the subject of poetry. To them, poets are all dead white guys who use too much flowery language and write about things that have nothing to do with their lives.

They had yet to encounter Pablo Neruda.

By teaching Neruda’s poems, my students learned “the word was born in the blood.” They were attracted to the violence in how the knife assassinates the tomato pulp and “how the sun floods the salads of Chile, beds cheerfully with blonde onion, “and parsley flaunts it little flags,” the in Ode to a Tomato.

One can't teach passion, yet my fervor for Neruda’s poems elevated my students’ concept of what poetry is, and opened the door to reading and writing poetry. It’s also no accident Pablo Neruda simmers at the root of my novel.

My characters in BREAKFAST WITH NERUDA aren't real (except to my readers and me,) yet their inception comes from an authentic place. My life experiences inform me, and allow my imaginary friends to channel their stories through me.

Digital publishing and social media have allowed everyone and his brother to easily promote their books, so a recent phenomenon for writers is to promote their ‘platform.’ Initially this concept left a bad taste in my mouth, as if I’m a product like running shoes or a bag of chips.

Platform can be defined as what we stand for or what causes we support. I believe in Pablo Neruda, poetry, books, and stories. Stories are the thread binding us together, peeling back the mysteries of our own existence.

Words are my platform.  Happy Reading!!

Meanwhile, here’s a review
http://www.cleavermagazine.com/breakfast-with-neruda-by-laura-moe/

Do You Have a Permission Slip?

A writer spends hours, weeks, and sometimes years bending over the keyboard or typewriter, suffering over sentences, scenes, and characters, creating his or masterpiece. One day, this writer reaches the end of the story. The draft is complete, the hard work is done.

Not so fast.

If you intend to get this tome published, the work has only begun, you foolish, silly writer.  There are steps they don't tell you in writer school.

First, this mass of pages is not a book. It's a draft, and if it's the first draft, likely a grainy one. But here is your chance to revisit your characters and sharpen the focus. Here you will delete scenes, correct typos, supplant repeated use verbs and phrases, and make it readable.

Next you will need to find a trusted reader or readers who will truthfully tell you what works, what doesn't, and why. Find at least one reader who writes well and is willing to be brutally honest.

You will revise and edit. If you are a typo queen, as am I, you will be smart to hire an editor before you submit or pitch this novel. This is money well spent, because this editor can also offer critical advice.

You are now ready to sell it.

You've go through the revision and the dreaded submission process. You form a band called Query Street and the Screaming Synopsis… no wait, you don’t have time to perform in a rock band.

You get a book contract (yay, ego boost) and are working with an editor who loves your book and has great plans for you. You have a due date for your final mss and a publication date.

Now is not the time to lie on the beach, dreaming of the Yacht you plan to buy with your millions…..Okay, advances aren’t what they used to be unless you’re James Patterson. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/08/authors-incomes-collapse-alcs-survey But still, the hard part is over now, right?

Unfortunately, no.

It is up to the author to secure Permissions. Unlike writing a research paper or master’s thesis where supplying a bibliography will suffice, if you quote from another work, say a song, a poem or a novel, you must have written permission from whoever holds the rights to the work.

This can be tricky, because sometimes the publisher holds the rights, but there are caveats as to how works can be used. Even though the Nobel Laureate died in 1973, he left no heirs, so the Neruda foundation in Barcelona, Spain handles this negotiation.

Permissions aren’t always free. The foundation asked for a thousand dollars to use one poem, and two lines from two of Neruda’s poems. My book is called Breakfast with Neruda, so I need at least some quotes, so we settled on a much smaller amount to use two lines from two separate poems. My original draft opened every chapter with a Neruda quote, which in retrospect would have cost me more than my condo. (Luckily an early reader said, while she loved the poems, she felt opening each chapter like that was heavy handed.)

Permissions can be a wild sheep chase. I quoted another author, and the publisher told me to contact the agency, so I wrote to him, and he told to contact the publisher. I ended up deleting this quote.

I had planned to use an excerpt from a song, but the record company doesn't own the rights, and had no idea who did. Scratch that. I just name the song.

The author of a poem I planned to use in the final chapter died three years ago, and I had no idea where to contact her heirs. I sent a condolence note on the funeral home page, but I’m not sure people check those after the first few months of the loved one’s passing. I didn’t after my brother and father passed.

Working on permissions isn't as soul wrenching as writing a query and opening the flurry of rejections, but it keeps me from writing, so it feels like work.

The benefit of permissions. Obviously getting permission protects you from lawsuits and possible scandal, but it also helped me reconsider some of my decisions. Rejecting some of my content opened me up to look at alternatives.

I’ve gone through revision and editing, and I have approved the cover art, (smaller houses sometimes give authors input on their covers. Big houses don't.) The next step is the dreaded author photo. I stumbled upon a photographer who claims she can make me look twenty years younger...

Writing the novel was the easy part.

Happy Writing.

Mining Gold from Base Metals

Recently I crashed my good friend Elizabeth's MFA residency at Ashland University. I have had my MFA for more than a decade, yet I wish I had the time and money to go for another Degree. Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m a professional student..

One of the highlights of my two days as a stowaway is the craft talk presented by poet Ruth L. Schwartz. Her topic, entitled Ruth's Tips for writing Your Way out of the Paper Bag of Pain, describes ten aspects of effective writing. While she is a mentor in the poetry program, she reminds her audience the advice applies to all writing.

Each of us has shattering moments which drive us to write; the goal is to make transformative use of this pain.

This task includes a paradox:
1. No one else in the world has experienced what you have. The experience is unique
2. However, the is nothing you have experience Ed that has not been experienced by many other people in the same way.

Truth and Beauty exist in paradox. We are like kaleidoscopes, each of us fragmented in unique ways.

There only about 2-3 human stories. We want to write as if an event has never happened before, balancing the personal and the universal. Yet if we include too much personal detail, we run the risk of self pity and self indulgence. It's not about you.

Yet if we step too far away from the experience, we run the risk of being abstract.
In both cases, the writing is dull. Herein lies that paradox.

Adrienne Rich said, “the pain in the body is not the same as the pain in the sets. " We need to write where the edges blur between the self and the world.

Pain. Our instinct is to avoid it, back away. Let's agree to forget it.
Yet artists and writers must transform pain into art.

Our task is to take the base metals and turn them into gold, into powerful, effective writing that connects with the reader. Ruth quotes someone whose name I neglected to write down. “When you are in the depths of pain, it's hard to imagine how this could lead to beauty." (Ruth says she uses quotes because someone else has expressed this, and Ro ably better.)

Ruth's provides ten tips for Transforming pain into pleasure

1. Move the lens around. This means we need to focus our perspective with wide angle and macro lenses. Ralph Waldo Emerson says, "the field cannot be well seen from within the field," or as Emily Dickinson writes, " tell the truth, but tell it slant."

2. Use the power of sensory experience. Details engage the reader so they can see, hear, smell, taste and touch the experience. This is especially important when writing about trauma.

3. Change disciplines. This advice reinforces it's not just about you: become and anthropologist , physicist, historian, etc. this is a means of moving the lens around by infusing facts . Like in an argument, this gives your poetry and prose credibility.

4. Expand and deepen your quality of vision and love. You must treat your subject, even pain, with love. She quotes [the great love of my life] Pablo Neruda, "you learn poetry moving step by step among things and beings, not isolating, but rather containing them all within a blind expansion of love."

5. Take calculated risks with emotionality. When writing about painful moments, we risk being overly sentimental, or "caring about something more than God does." we also risk detachment. She quotes poet Audre Lorde with, "the purpose of poetry[ or any writing] is to evoke feeling. To do that you have to be in contact with your own." a calculated risk is to stay as close to the emotional cliff as you can without falling off.

6. Self implicate- none of us is perfect, and it takes courage, yet it's necessary to own that.

7. Don't think you know too much. Writing is about finding what we don't know, not to show your audience you know everything. Francis Bacon sad, “the job of the artist is to deepen the mystery." Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai said, "We are all blind, but our poems are Seeing Eye dogs that lead us around."

8. Acknowledge complexity Robert Louis Stevenson said, " everything is true, only it's opposite is too, true; you must believe both equally, or be damned."

9. Remember what you write matters. - A lot. Each of our stories is a piece of the human story.

10. Strengthen your technical skills- word choice and syntax is crucial in poetry and prose alike. There is music in good writing. As Mark Twain said, " the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

An additional tip added after discussion is Do Not Judge. As writers we observe and report the experience, let the reader decide how he or she feels about it. Adding your own judgments weaken your authority. Remember 6 and 7.

At the end of her lecture she gives us an exercise.
She asks us to imagine. Photograph, and consider events around the moment the picture is taken. How old are you in the photo? She uses a photo of yourself at age 8.
Begin with the line

The best thing about being ..( age)

The worst thing was….

The best thing about the worst thing was….

In retrospect I would see ….

A social scientist might point out, or a mathematician would say( use some expert is something unlikely)….
An historian would say my family …

She asks us also to consider the history the year it s taken. What went on the year? Use quotes, or references to news stories

Between each line she gives us a minute or two to write.
Here is a DRAFT of my example. This is NOT a finished poem, so don’t judge me. And please don’t steal it.

[ still needs a title-Poem from Ruth Schwartz’s workshop]

The best thing about being thirteen is
I no longer have nightmares where the tiger hovers,
the moment before his teeth gnash my skin and I shriek awake.
The best thing about being thirteen is my long legs and slim waist.
I own the world and its inhabitants
Yet it is also the worst thing because my kingdom teeters
on stilettos when it still needs saddle shoes
It wears lipstick and a training bra
The world in my grasp but my hands are too big to fit inside my gloves
The best thing about the worst thing is my hands wear polish
Yet the worst thing was I didn't know

The gold would wear off
The polish cracked, exposed fragile layers
I didn’t know
the world was not minted by me
soldered to satisfy my precious planet.
Little did I know.
I was a speckle of dust, a measly spindle empty of thread.
Little did I know my mother would be dead in three years.

A social scientist might report that the self at that age is too selfish.
The geometry I created was a soft sided triangle,
the distance of my own importance greater than the sum of my years.
An historian would argue my train was due to be knocked off the tracks
In the year when college students demanded to ban the bomb and burn the bra
The tiger shredded me from the inside out.

Laura Moe



Bonus Exercise: Mark Strand gives an exercise that starts with the line "a train runs over me.......

Make some beauty from your own pain.
Happy Writing.

“The word was born in the blood and flew through the lips and the mouth…” Pablo Neruda, The Word.

Words are the basic tools for writers and poets, and the more skillfully we use them, the better our writing. In novels and books, writers can get away with occasional lapses of language, but in poems, every word counts. What doesn’t play a role shouldn’t exist, and passive diction should be annihilated. One misconception about poetry is that, since they are usually short, poems don’t take long to create. Sometimes it takes months and years for that draft to simmer. The real writing begins on revision. Think about the word itself re-vision- a means to see your work all over again. Sometimes the best thing you csn do for a poem is stuff it in a drawer for awhile and not look at it for several days or weeks. You will look at it with a fresh set of eyes.


Today’s prompt will show my age. Take an old record album (you can find these at Goodwill, yard sales, library shops), preferably a double album, and randomly select the titles(about 10-12) that jump out at you. Then use these titles inside lines of your poem.
Here is my example.

Henry Mancini’s Greatest Hits:

A happy barefoot boy hums
The love theme from Romeo and Juliet
As Nicholas and Alexandra leap
Across the continental bridge
Over troubled water. “El condor pasa,”
Says Mrs. Robinson, interrupting
The sound of silence at Scarborough Fair,
Thinking her own life would make a great love story.

A shaft of magnificent seven stars
Glow misty as a Hawaiian wedding song. A baby elephant
walks under a sweetheart tree with a midnight cowboy
as Peter guns the engine toward Moon River.

Michelle, the girl from Ipanema, doesn’t buy into the charade.
Dear heart flies like a shot in the dark out of Norwegian Wood
With all my loving, and I love her like a hard day’s night,
Even as raindrops keep falling on my head.

By the time I get to Phoenix the entertainer
Has played the Pink Panther theme on seventy six trombones.
It was good, bad, and ugly. Mr Mancini, how soon you left,
At high noon, during the days of wine and roses,
Leaving behind the windmills of your mind.
Laura Moe ©2006

Happy Writing.

Poetry Will Save Your Life

It is National Poetry Month, and I can’t think of a better way to begin than a PABLO NERUDA poem.

POET’S OBLIGATION

To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
In house or office, factory or woman
Or street or mine or harsh prison cell:
To him I come, and without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
And a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
A great fragment of thunder sets in motion
The rumble of the planet sets in foam,
The raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
The star vibrates swiftly in its course,
And the sea is beating, dying and continuing.

So, drawn on by my destiny
I ceaselessly must listen to and keep
The sea’s lamenting in my awareness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
And gather it up in a perpetual cup
So that, wherever those in prison may be,
Wherever they suffer the autumn’s castigation,
I may be there with an errant wave.
I may move, passing through windows,
And hearing me, eyes will glance upward
Saying, “How can I reach the sea?”
And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,
The story echoes of the wave,
A breaking up of foam and of quicksand,
A rustling of salt withdrawing,
The great cry of sea-birds on the coast.

So through me, freedom and the sea
Will make their answer to the shattered heart.

From Neruda: Selected Poems (1970), translated by Alistair Reid

Poetry exercise: Take an old failed poem, cut it into pieces, word by word, and rearrange the words in a new order. Eliminate words that don’t belong. Cutting the excess baggage may help you find the heart of the poem. Or it may end up being another failed poem.

Happy Writing.