Great Reads

As we remain self-quarantined, one of the best ways to treat ourselves is to read.

MEMORIES LOOKING THROUGH A SCREEN DOOR by Gerald Bigelow is a collection of poems that are a quiet protest against racism, a tribute to loved ones, a snapshot of communities, a history of time and place, an exploration of spirituality, and ultimately, the inevitability of aging.

Read them for the beauty of language, and lines that shatter you like ones from Must where a circus parade goes through town and “lions reach out/paw the air/create a fearful silence.”

The accompanying illustrations make a great companion to each section to the text. In his early years, he shows the precariousness of the world in which he lived, where fires erupted often. In poem #6, Bigelow writes, “I guess it was just the cost of doing business” of the the Plastics Factory fire, and “in those days people just died early.” “And they didn’t complain because they didn’t know any better.”

Bigelow points out how “grown folks give you directions… but “rarely do they give instruction on the safest way to get there.” Each poem in this collection of 87 has its own power. One that speaks loudest to me are Time Knows, in which “time knows the river, the same river flows/neither greeting/nor bidding farewell.”

Read them for their exploration on race, in It no longer matters, where Bigelow explores how “Your 1950s and my 1950s were not the same.” And finally, read these poems for the universal truth of growing older. “[in the mirror] I look and see lines and creases/ must be some kind of flaw in the glass.”

Happy Reading!

I Got Schooled

Recently I was called out for using the word “shrapnel” in the title of my last blog post which discussed the Italo Calvino novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler, and how this book speaks for the reading/writing connection. I entitled the post “Days under Bombardments, watching the shrapnel fly.” I received the following comment: “Shrapnel is not a synonym for submission, splinters or fragments. Do not use it unless you know that it comes from a shrapnel shell, as used to cut barbed wire in the First World War and against aircraft in the Second World War.”

Have I just been scolded online?

The word shrapnel is often used in conjunction to explosive events, and just the other night I heard a reporter describe wreckage from a plane crash as “shrapnel.” According to the American Heritage Dictionary, shrapnel is “an artillery shell containing metal balls fused to explode in the air, the metal balls themselves, or fragments from a high explosive shell, mine, or bomb.” The urban dictionary recognizes these definitions, yet adds it can also mean “loose change of little value.”

How many of you have heard words used in a manner where they sound atonal, like a John Cage concert or off key whistling? A co-worker says, “I have literally been to the moon and back today.” Or you hear a friend describe someone as “the most artistical person I know,” Then there’s my favorite: “I’m writing a fictional novel.” These things screech inside your head as if you’re braking a rusted schoolbus down a steep slope, so I suppose my use of the word shrapnel felt that way to my censurer.

This isn’t my first semantic faux pas. I grew up in a white, Republican household where my father regularly said things like, “see if you can Jew him down on the price.” (Is it any accident his favorite TV character was Archie Bunker?) I am ashamed to reveal I inherited his politically incorrect phrases. While having dinner at a conference one evening, I remarked someone was “very Jewish with his money.” One of my tablemates, who is also a friend, said to me, “I’m Jewish, and what you just said it offensive.”  It never occurred to me a statement like that denigrates an entire culture. It’s a metaphorical phrase I grew up hearing countless times, yet it never occurred to me to consider the literal meaning behind those words.

Because we are human and flawed, each of us has diction preferences. Most of my erudite friends wince at hearing “I have went there,” and “where’you at?” and other bad grammar. A former student says the word ‘snacks’ make her cringe, and a friend of mine can’t stand hearing the word ‘panties’. I hate the word “gals.” When I am referred to as a gal, I picture a woman dressed in buckskin wearing a ten gallon hat. I am not a gal.

The word ‘shrapnel’ does not appear in my essay, only the title, “Days under bombardments, watching the shrapnel fly.” I responded to my critic to clarify this, remarking “It’s a quote from the book. The character is describing his work in the military. I used it because I like the sequence of words.” To avoid confusion, I probably should have explained the quote somewhere in my post, but I thought the quotation marks surrounding the title let readers know this was a quote.  I could have saved myself embarrassment by choosing a different portion of text to quote, or by contriving a bland title, such as “My Feelings About Italo Calvino’s Book.” I chose to use the words for their cadence, not context.

Language is not static. Just as bad now means good, and phat does not refer to weight, the word shrapnel is commonly tossed around out of context. I’ve heard it used in many contexts, such as, “ice was falling like shrapnel,” and “After the tornado, the yard was nothing but shrapnel.”

At the beginning of this post I said I was “called out” by someone. This terminology is a recent addition to our vernacular to describe a scolding. Poets understand the liquidity of language and metaphoric use of words. When poet Naomi Shihab Nye says, “Music lives inside my legs,” she does mean her bones are literally connected to speakers that broadcast songs, yet her readers understand the visceral use of the metaphor.

I apologize ahead of time for any semantic foibles I will commit in the future. As I age, the one thing I know for sure is we are, to steal a title from Anne Lamott, ‘imperfect birds.’

Happy Reading and Writing.

“Days under bombardments, watching the shrapnel fly.”

This is not a review or recommendation of If on a winter’s night a traveler, by Italo Calvino, one of the most surreal novels I've encountered. Much of it seduces the reader in second person, making the Reader part of the bizarre quest for the ideal book. Like the film Inception, the novel doesn't make literal sense, its plot is not linear, and few people I know would have the patience to slog through it, yet throughout the story lay beautiful tidbits of prose about what it means to be a reader and writer, the dichotomy between writing and publishing, and how reading binds readers together.

Through the novel’s characters, Calvino gently unfurls what may be his own beliefs about story. According to Professor Uzzi-Tuzii, an expert on a dead language, “Reading is …a thing made of writing, a solid material object… through which we measure ourselves against something that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible, world….Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be…” The professor describes literature as, “The book I would like to read now is a novel in which you sense the story arriving like still-vague thunder…”

Ludmilla, a fellow bibliophile the narrator pursues, qualifies literary novels further by saying “the novel…should have at its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth…”

These kinds of books such as If on a winter’s night a traveler may frustrate you at the time of reading, and you may have the desire to toss it across the room, yet something revealed in its pages stays with you, and you realize the problem is not with the book itself but you, the Reader.

Those of us who are writers are intimate with the whole writing- is-an-art, publishing-is-a- business blah blah blah. We are encouraged to ‘be original, not derivative,’ yet there is a sameness throughout the fiction section. If you write young adult like I do, you are doomed unless your hero has a superpower or is facing the end of the world. (Thankfully zombies and vampires are on the decline.) The publishing industry decides what we will read because the book business process relies largely on the popular novel, which is parodied in this passage of Calvino’s tale:

“In New York, in the control room, the reader is soldered to the chair at the wrists, with pressure manometers and a stethoscopic belt, her temples beneath their crown of hair held fast by the serpentine wires of the encephalogram that mark the intensity of her concentration and the frequency of stimuli…..to be subjected to the uninterrupted reading of novels and variants of novels as they are out by the computer. If reading attention reaches certain highs with a certain continuity, the product is viable and can be launched on the market; if attention, on the contrary, relaxes and shifts, the combination is rejected and its elements are broken up and used again in other contexts.”The narrator takes us to the publisher, “an enterprise that perhaps nobody else can understand…” because “there’s a boundary line: on one side are those who make books, on the other those who read them. I want to remain one of those who read them, so I take care always to remain on my side of the line. Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of reading ends, or at least transformed into something else…” As a writer, I perceive how agents and editors, bombarded with thousands of manuscripts not of their choosing, suffer the loss of “the unsullied pleasure of reading,”  and lose the patience and time to sink into a tale that arrives like a slow moving storm. In our techno-cluttered world, we must “hook” the reader on page one, or face the ubiquitous rejection.  To quote another character, Lotaria, Ludmilla’s sister, “what you want would be a passive way of reading, escapist and regressive…”

Those of us who write fiction aspire to write the kinds of novels we want to read, yet “it would seem those who use books to produce other books are increasing more than those who just like to read books.” Publishing companies love a series. A sequel to story that pulls in good numbers, such as The Hunger Games or Twilight, whether good or bad, guarantees sales because readers crave being able to retreat inside the tale and assess life through someone else’s experiences and thoughts.

My friend Cindy S. says when she dates a man, he may be Harrison Ford handsome or as rich as one of the Shark tank sharks, but “if he doesn’t read, that’s a deal breaker.” For readers, lovers should be able to feed one another’s heads and hearts.

I can be in a room with twenty or thirty people and feel utterly alone unless I find among these relatives, acquaintances  or strangers someone who reads, someone with whom “a language, a code between the two of you, a means of exchange signals and recognizes each other.”

While having coffee with my friend Cindy R, I feel heartened by sharing passages from this novel and watch her face convey recognition. In the cafe, we are two foreigners able to speak our unique language. “We need to get our book discussion group back together,” She says. Our monthly book group devolved a few months back when each of its members had personal tragedies, yet the dissolution of group could also be perceived as tragic. Just as sports fans need to yell at the television together during a game, readers need one another to dissect the fine points of what we’ve read because it “enabled me to master the forces of the universe and recognize an order to it.”

Is Print Dead?

Available now 

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Shortly after Christmas I visited Barnes & Noble. I spent a lovely afternoon having a latte in the cafe and  browsing the shelves. I walked to the registers to pay for my purchases. As I stood in line, I perused the magazines racks near the counter, and was stunned by the banner across Newsweek: This is Our Last print issue. Something in me shifted; science fiction is no longer fiction.

 Those of you who subscribe to and read my blog regularly know of my ambivalence with emerging technologies, particularly in the book realm. I own several devices, and use them regularly. I composed The draft for this post on an iPad, so arguing against technology is moot. However, my argument is not to ban existing platforms, as is happening in this Texas library,  http://news.yahoo.com/library-without-books-bibliotech-open-193118588--abc-news-tech.html

Is this a trend? The library of the future?  Look at the accompanying illustration in the artcile. What do you notice about the people? There are none, only a series of screens and empty stools. The shadowy figure behind the desk is solitary. Does that mean libraries will not only do away with printed matter, but their staffs as well?

Libraries throughout the centuries have adapted to the needs of their clientele. Every few years the death of the library is predicted, yet libraries have demonstrated a perseverance and adaptability. Yet this latest shift could put a serious dent in library services.

(Bookstores, however, are experiencing a shakier fate. see

http://laura-moe.blogspot.com/2011/12/bookstore-is-wounded-not-dead.html

Probably a gazillion of us have some access to screen technology, be it a TV, computer, laptop, smart phone, e reader, or tablet. I use all of the above to some extent, yet there is an aesthetic to printed books not found with a digital version. Perhaps this reveals my age. I grew up in a time before reliance on cell phones dominated our lives, relatively un-tethered to friends and family if I ventured out alone. Now I can update my status 24-7 via Facebook, revealing what I ate for dinner , find the weather and upcoming TV listings on my phone, yet when I use my e reader, Big Brother knows what I am reading.

E readers are great for travel. When I take a trip more than three days long, I generally like to pack 3-4 books, which now that airlines charge us for every last speck of dust in our luggage, loading a variety of books on my Kindle makes sense. The device is about the size of a trade paperback, and weighs about the same as a hardback book.

My Kindle is the second generation, which does not have a backlit screen, yet,  there are some issues with reading from backlit technology, particularly at night, the blue spectrum light emitted by screens interrupts sleep patterns. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/249592.php

This is bad news for those of you who like to curl up with your iPad or Kindle Fire and read in bed.  

 I don't hate technology. It enables me to write and post this readers in a variety of places, twitter, Google plus, and Facebook. In the old days, before blogging, when all opinion pieces  were printed through edited means, my ideas would be limited to cocktail hour chats or perhaps a letter to the editor. Now I can have a global dialogue and Instant access to feedback.

Another ironic bonus to technology is instant books.  I live an hour's drive from a brick and mortar bookstore, so if I need or want a book right away, I download it. Recently a publication where one of my stories appears (Triskaidekan,) was delayed by the printer, (see photo at top.) but the publisher posted an e book version, and I gained instant access to the anthology, which I was able to promote via social networking. Yet I still plan to also order a printed copy.

Ironically, readership is on the rise, yet print media are declining. It's the chicken or the egg. (Is digital downloading of books on the rapid rise due to vanishing bookstores, or are book stories vanishing because of digitalization? But this post isn’t supposed to be about bookstores…)  According to the Pew Research  Center , “The popularity of electronic books is increasing in the United States, with nearly one-quarter of American bibliophiles reading e-books, according to a survey released on Thursday…The number of e-readers aged 16 years and older jumped from 16 percent in 2011 to 23 percent this year, while print readers fell from 72 to 67 percent in 2012.”

But technology has its limits. Things break down. The power goes out, security leaks, files corrupted, devices get lost, or stolen, (who steals books anymore?) screens break, or go wonky. There are also economic issues.  . I live in Appalachia, where 45% of our students qualify for free and reduced lunched.  Many of our students in my HS still do not have access to computers and the Internet outside of school. Checking out books is free.

Lets hope the death of printed matter becomes, like the predicted death of radio with the advent of television, a shift n emphasis, where books and gadgets forge an alliance rather than declare war.

Please visit your local Library. Ask for information. Check out a book or other printed media. 

How to Love a Book Part 2

 

I am taking a break from nano to write a quick blog post. I recently assigned a process essay in my comp classes with the theme, How to Love a Book (or an author, genre) etc. Essentially I wanted them to focus on their process as developing readers. The initial drafts ranged from tepid to pretty good, but mostly, the rewrites are outstanding. The following are quotes I extracted from my students on the reading/writing connection:

 

Taylor writes, "I noticed my intelligence growing more and more after I began to read,." And Caitlin says, I'm not entirely sure what it was about the book I loved. It's like I had a hunger in me, and I craved the words on every page.” According to Victoria, Alice (in wonderland) made me realize everyone you meet has their own normal."  

 

After his uncle’s murder, Sloan was jarred into not “ wanting those stupid fairy tales; I wanted something with acumen that made you think…He writes about the Dexter series, and “I often wish Dexter would find the man who took my uncle’s life and show him the images of the disaster he inflicted.”

 

Jake says,”in experiencing new reading you see all the ways writing is explored.  And Regan feels “The title made the decision of reading the book itself “

 

“If the authors writing style is boring and dull,” Jerry says, “then reading the book can make me somnolent and put me to sleep."

When Tosha started reading the Maximum Ride series on a vacation, she rued about having to leave her book in the car. “I had to put the book away for the hour long lunch break, and I was literally aching from not reading.” We bibliophiles know that feeling well.

Shala realizes that characters often have flaws, and, ”Unfortunately, things in books don't always happen the way people want it to.”

 

Several students were drawn into reading early. Katie says, ”Frog and Toad are friends made me love reading, made me feel like I was pa of the nexus of book readers. It started the spark that made me burgeon as a reader, while Victor writes, “Horton Hears a Who taught me not to judge a person because a person is a person no matter how small. I was bullied as a child, so this lesson, so this lesson holds deep well within me.”

 

Ian’s essay is a thoughtful treatise on the components of needed to become a reader: free-time, creativity and curiosity. All of which, ”allows us to be open to other people and their imaginations, and aslo allows us to develop a love for the stories that come out of the creative eye of the world's authors.”

Mallory summarizes this by stating, “your wildest dreams become reality in impossible ways.” Emily points out the ineffable book love by stating, “There was something special about the books I couldn't put my finger on.”

 

While most of my students write about fiction, two chose nonfiction. Of the memoir The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, Shi writes how she “dove into 288 pages of someone else’s life.. Walls seemed to have the strongest bond with her father and as she got older…his alcoholism didn't affect her the way it would have affected me. She didn’t break down or let it deter from her goals. If anything, it motivated her.”

 

Kaitlin, a good writer who claims to despise reading, writes: I have neither time nor patience for lounging around to read a book with having to balance high school, college and work. In place of reading I enjoy watching educational or scientific television programs.” As much as she abhors reading fiction, her essay extols the virtues of reading her college Biology text, as my enthusiasm for science materials burgeoned, I have acquired a subscription to National Geographic magazine, which I read in my free time.”

 

Perhaps Kelsie sums up what all bibliophiles feel: “When I find the right book it is hard to put it down.”

 

 

Happy writing and reading. Now back to my nano novel, 23, 587 words strong so far.

 

How to Love a Book

This book may shock you, will make you laugh, and may break your heart, but you will never forget it. 

Shortly before we moved back to the United States from East Pakistan, on the precipice of undergoing a revolution to become Bangladesh, we were frightened by an event that made my family and I pack our bags for flight. We had been in Dacca three years, and for the first two, life had been sedate, albeit not normal. Nothing on the  Subcontinent appears normal to westerners. But we felt safe. We were Americans after all,  the White Gods, impermeable .

This past year, however, our status as rich foreigners made no difference to the rioters and demonstrators. Because I was young, fourteen, and lived a privileged lifestyle rendering me immune to local politics, I didn't pay much attention to outside forces unless they inconvenienced me. My brother Paul and I attended the American School, and began missing school at least once a week because of  strikes and curfews. Phone service grew sketchier, and power outages occurred almost daily. Still, I had my books. I read by lantern light.

Our house had a flat roof, perfect for watching weather or surveying happenings in the neighborhood. One  spring evening my father and i stood rooftop after supper and noticed a trail of light snaking its way in our direction. "What is that?" I asked.

Dad squinted, and said, "I don't know. Go get the binoculars."

I returned with the field glasses, and my father stared at the light, now much closer and brighter. "Jesus," he said.

"What is it." He handed the binoculars to me. A crowd of men, perhaps a hundred, carried lit torches. They were shouting, waving the torches, and heading toward our street.

One of our servants stood in the doorway at the top of the staircase. "Sahib, it is not good what is happening."

“What are those men saying, Kardir?"

"Death to the governor, Sahib."

The governor's daughter lived in a large new home caddy corner across from our compound.

My father hustled us downstairs, shouting for my mother and brother and I to pack a bag. "We may have to get out tonight."

I retrieved my blue suitcase from the godown (closet) and flung it on my bed. This bag had seen me through several trips across the United States and overseas. The suitcase was blue, yet covered with decals and stickers signifying various places i had journeyed.

"We might not be coming back," my father had said. "Take what you need,"

I gathered up my favorite books, records, my diaries, yearbooks, and a few souvenirs and dumped them inside the bag. I threw in a few clothes and sat on the case to close it.

 My father came in to get my luggage. "What the hell?" He set it down and opened it. "You can't take all these books,"

“But you said take what's important to me."

He sighed. "We can buy you new ones when we get back to the states. Now pack some more clothes. "

 

After quick negotiations, I was allowed to keep my yearbooks, diaries, a few record albums, a couple of souvenirs and one book. I filled the rest of suitcase with clothing and a pair of shoes. Dad and I dashed to the back fence where my mother and brother waited in the dark.

 

The solitary book was a paperback copy of Catcher in the Rye. The book had leapt into my hands one day when the book wallah, a man who sold books from his bicycle, every Saturday, visited our house when riots didn’t keep him away. The cover bore a picture of a young man wearing a brown coat, backwards red cap, and a red scarf. He was illuminated by lights from a strip club at night as he held a battered suitcase littered with stickers, much like my own. 

 

The text on the cover read: “This book may shock you, will make you laugh, and may break your heart, but you will never forget it.” How could I resist that?

 

I fell in love with crazy old Holden Caulfield on the first page."If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

 Having recently turned fourteen, I identified with his disenchantment with school, parents, peers and life in general. Catcher in the Rye is the first novel I read more than once, the first novel that made me laugh and cry sometimes simultaneously, such as a scene in Chapter 25, when Holden takes his little sister Phoebe to the park and tries erase all  the graffiti. He resigns himself to, "That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say "Holden Caulfield" on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say "Fuck you." I'm positive, in fact."

As a toddler  before I could read the words myself, I tortured my parents  to “read it again!”  and in elementary school I repeatedly recited lines from The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham. What kid didn't?  But the Catcher in the Rye is the first story I lived within; I was Holden Caufield, even though I was not a seventeen year old boy living in New York City. It didn't matter.  His voice lived inside me, and I became part of the story.

It's been years since I have read the book, but subconsciously I channeled Holden when I wrote my first novel, Parallel Lines. The lead character, Nick Verseau, unintentionally bears a similar voice, so Holden still lives inside me. I'm oldish now, yet perhaps still a rankled teenager at heart.  Maybe someday I will be promoted to tell you all the “David Copperfield kind of crap” about my life.

This morning I thought about how there are no original stories. All the major themes in life can be placed written on one 3 x 5 card. Yet every  new novel, memoir or book of poems released is original because each of us experiences the universal themes  uniquely. So even though all the stories seem to have already been told, there are still some great tales yet to be written. Write one.

 

What is YOUR favorite all time book? If you were being evacuated to a new planet and could only take one book, which would it be and why?

Happy Writing.

Five Writing Rules According To High School Students

Earlier this year, I asked my students what’s important to them about writing. Since teenagers are the authority on all things cool, I expected negative comments and complaints about such staid topics as writing and English, but the kids surprised me;. their responses were astute and thoughtful.

Victoria said, "If I try to add things to sound smart, it ends up making me look ignorant." Novice writers are tempted to sound writerly. In the early days of my own writing, I front-loaded stories and essays to reveal my large vocabulary. No wonder nobody wanted my work. It was pretentious.

Sure, in grad school I used ten dollar words for essays, but my reader was usually an erudite professor who ate such words for breakfast.  When I first started teaching students occasionally handed in papers with sentences like “Such cartulary  extrapolated its theophenia to provide a history of said diety.” When asked what did you mean here, the response was always a red face and a shrug.

Say what you mean in words you understand. Clarity is priority one.

2. Kayla remarked, "I never want to repeat myself so many times to where I become uninteresting or sound stupid."

Early drafts are often loaded with repetitive mantra-like words and phrases and words and phrases and words and phrases, as if the writer needs to warm up the engines, and remind themselves of the point of the essay, poem, or story. I call these false starts. For me they come in three’s: the first three lines or stanzi of a poem, the first three paragraphs of a story, and the first three pages of a novel. The holy trinity of crap.

Ok I repeated my syntactical structure there. You get what I mean in those words and phrases.

3. “Vocabulary ...can turn a bland sentence into a memorable one with relative ease," Mallory wrote. "Large words, small words, it doesn't matter, I'm happy to use them all." Words are the foundation of good writing, and fluency with them makes us better writers. I tell my students to take a foreign language. "It will enhance your English. "

Mallory is a good writer, largely because she always has her nose in a book. Readers are exposed to multiple words, and it shows in their work. Read a lot.

4. According to Katie, "Books allow a person to see the world and know things they didn't know before."

If we are doing the hard work, we aren’t relying solely on what we know; we write to explore what we don't know as if excavating for a new spin on a truth.

5.  “Writing is hard,” Tosha said. “I wish there was a handout that told me how not to make mistakes."

I hate to tell you this, kid, but there ain’t no such thing. The only way to learn how to write better is write, make mistakes, write even more failed manuscripts, screw up more of them, and eventually write something good. Next time you will write something bad, but maybe not as often, and eventually your good writing will outweigh the putrid pages. But there will be days, always, when some of your writing stinks a big one.

Exercise: I stole this from my Friend Cindy Sterling. Whenever her students were stuck, she had them remove a shoe, set it on a piece of white paper, draw an outline, then write a first person narrative through the viewpoint of the shoe. The shoe can belong to anyone famous (Madonna, the president, Clark Gable), or not ( your own shoe,) cartoon characters (Scooby Doo, Charlie Brown) etc. . What what the shoe's life like? What have they seen? Where has it been? What happens when it rains? What happens on the basketball court if you are Michael Jordan's shoe? What would the Dalai Lama's footwear know?

Happy Writing

Your Job As a Writer Is Making Sentences

If you are on twitter and you don't follow Maria Popova, shame on you. Her feed, brain picker, is rife with essential information. Check her out. http://www.brainpickings.org/

Recently she posted a piece about a book called Several Short Sentences About Writing, by controversial New York Times editorial board member Verlyn Klinkenborg.

His premise is if you master writing good, concise sentences, you can write anything in any genre.

"Writing short sentences restores clarity."

As a writing teacher, I preach clarity as the number one goal in writing, so I am with him on that piece of advice.

"Know what each sentence says, what it doesn't say, and what it implies."

In this vein, using the precise word is crucial. The car moved down the street has an abstract implication. The clunker rattled down the street has a more specific image, and it implies the driver  might also have money problems.

“There are innumerable ways to write badly,"  All I have to do is look through drafts of my own writing to confirm this.

"What you don't know about writing is also a form of knowledge, though much harder to grasp." This seems counterintuitive. But good writing is exploring what we don't know and applying what we do know. To write well you need to widen the lens beyond your familiar world. Explore unknown worlds. Take risks. I often give an assignment  where students are required to go outside their comfort zones. If you are afraid of heights, go ballooning, or if you hate crowds, go to Walmart on the first of the month. Observe, take notes. You will be a better and a more interesting person.

"The only link between you and the reader is the sentence you're making,"

 related to, " knowing what you've actually said is crucial."

Like Orwell ,Klinkenborg advises us to break the rules for the sake of the sentence, for rhythm . He also makes a case for there being no correlation between sentence length and intelligence on the part of the writer. An astute sentence can be written using simple diction.

Writing short sentences will help you write strong balanced sentences of any length." He asks the reader to recall early kid books where the language is compact, but not necessarily choppy. But the syntax was clear. Writing for children is deceptive; It's harder than you think because your audience is more discriminating. Younfg readers demand a rhythmic sound pattern to text.

"Read like a writer." Writers pay attention to the words, and the syntax. Writers also question the text, respond to it, (as I am doing now by HIS work).

 Read like a writer you can write in any form

My friends who teach Lit wil not agree, but Klinkenborg argues against trying to find meaning in sentences.Not to over analyze and intellectualize.

  

“Know how to detect what interest you.”

Second to clarity, another essential key to good wri9ting is passion. If you have no passion for your subject, be it poetry or prose, your writing will be beige.

We can all witness the same scene, but  each of us pulls out the details that interest us. For example, I am drawn to faces. If I were to witness a bank robbery, and the suspect is not wearing a mask, I would pay attention to the perp’s features, hair color, and expressions.  A fashionista might describe what he or she is wearing. A musician will pick up the tone and notes of the robber’s voice, a podiatrist will notice how he walks, and a tattooist can describe the  body art.

Good Writing is layering good sentences or lines of poetry on top of one another. Consciously.

Essentially Klinkenborg is saying as writers we should suffer over the words.

I don’t agree with everything Klinkenborg says in this book. He gets fuzzy when he reflects about “You can start anywhere and there is no order”, and “The obsession with transition negates a basic truth about writing: you can get anywhere from anywhere.” Only experienced writers can get by with taking weird tangents off the paths through a story or essay. I believe in transitions. Developing writers like high school and undergraduates still need a framework.

The book uses a meditative, mantra-like repetition that I find annoying, as if he has to remind me what I have already read. Makes me feel brainwashed.

Overall the book offers good advice, albeit in a repetitious, hypnotic, non- linear structure. He wisely advises possessing good grammar

 I agree that "good writing is significant everhwere,"

“Writing doesn’t prove anything, and it only rarely persuades. It does something much better. It attests. It witnesses. It shares your interest in what you’ve noticed.”

And speaking of sentences, check out these gems:

 http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2012win.html

 EXERCISE:

Try to write a worse sentence than one of these. Intentional bad wiring can be just as difficult as good wrong, but it's so much fun.

Here is an example I wrote waiting for the doctor in a cold exam room.

It was so cold, icicles formed on my fingernails, resembling glass shards from a windshield after a highway crash in the rain on a cloudy Friday afternoon during a thunderstorm following an endless heat wave of ninety plus degree temperatures where we all felt like melted cheese over fries.

 

Happy Writing.

More Antioch Highlights: Poetry with Jim Daniels

Part of the Antioch week involves an afternoon workshop group where participants either create work or critique existing work. In my workshop with Jim Daniels, a well known poet who also writes screenplays and fiction, we submitted ten poems a month ahead.  These were posted on a private link to view and copy so we could be prepared to discuss one another’s poems.

On the first day Jim quotes a tweet from Megan Fox “we live in a world where losing your phone is more dramatic than losing your virginity.”

Jim discusses his expectations and goals for the week. “Your packets are works in progress. You all need some help with the poems.” His goal is to help improve poems. “A residual effect of commenting on other people’s writing is that transfers to your own work. We are trying to help one another find a voice and do it better, not to rewrite each other’s poems in our own aesthetic.”

Jim feels it’s important to have strangers look at your work. “People who know you know what the poem is about, but we leave out details others need.”

He believes “Good critique is constructive and beneficial, and is not meant to discourage writing.” . (I’ve been to workshops where either one or more participant or the instructor makes you want to burn everything you’ve written.)

“Try not to focus on technique, but focus on engaging discussion,” Hh says. “Participate, avoid passing judgment, and make specific suggestions for revision. It's not an in exact process. We all have biases.” Jim’s bias is toward clarity.  He “wants to feel something below the neck” and have “an emotional payoff at the end.”

With ten participants, ten poems each and five days, we would not have time to discuss our complete packets. Jim had us pick two we felt needed the most work. In the end we had enough time to do here poems each.

While most of the week was spent work shopping poems,  Jim provides some insights, such  as” the title is the doorway to a poem.” It is a literal or tonal grounding, but not both. The poem “Autumn Comes to Martin’s Ferry, Ohio,” produces a physical grounding of time and place, whereas a poem entitled “Pity for Blondes” provides a tonal grounding.

“A good title cannot do both.”

In short poems there is more pressure on the title to provide grounding and contrast, which he terms the Zero Circle- where everything and nothingness compress together. He cites Robert Bly’s The Sea & The Honeycomb (a book of tiny poems) as an example for us to study.

Another interesting point I learned this week is the Sandwich Theory. Daniels claims in drafts we tend to begin and end with bread (My love of back-story!!!), burying the interesting stuff inside too much dry bread..

He recommends a book called Poetry is a Kind of Lying. This recommendation s made in context of a discussion around how “you can’t write about a subject in one poem. Get obsessed and stay obsessed. It may take many poems to express the idea.

While critiquing someone’s villanelle, I learned there is more pressure on the inside lines, non repeated lines. “They illuminate the tension against the repeated lines.”

If we're stuck sometimes point of view is the problem.”Second person can work by  creating a kind of intimacy not found in third person, and is less self centered than first.

Daniel’s reinforced how “Discovery and surprise is important in the poem..”

He also points out how  pop culture references like Coke, movie stars, etc. are becoming more common.,

He recommends reading journals before submitting work. Zoetrope.com helps one browse literary magazines to see one’s work fits.

While we didn’t do any exercises, Jim showed us some samples of a project he did with kids in Pittsburgh where they created Self portrait poems from objects in pockets.

Happy Writing.