Hilltop Notes

Price Tags

2012-01-24T10:40:00.000-05:00

We all realize that "literary" markets struggle to keep publishing, that they look often to contests to help them raise their profiles. To have the funds to offer prizes, they charge entry fees. I guess that's fair enough.

My problem is that my bank account is dwindling far too rapidly because without an agent, I find fewer outlets for anything I may produce that don't require a "reading fee." There's something wrong with a system meant to support writing that makes the writer pay for the privilege of being rejected.

"Tag! I'm it--again!"

To Be Loved or to Love?

2012-01-20T11:30:00.000-05:00

A recent article about a group of well-known novelists discussing their work poses the question: why bother to write novels at all?

Why bother to write fiction at all? It's not a new question, and it has been supplied with various answers for several hundred years, but none seems definitive, and all seem to be influenced by the times and customs when they were put forward. Presumably only writers of fiction are interested in the answers--and poets and playwrights.

Without repeating the article's contents, the most noteworthy takeaway for me was the notion that art and love are intertwined inextricably. An artist creates in part (in part only) with the objective to be loved. The greatest artists create with the objective of teaching the readers/observers/hearers to love.

I haven't stopped thinking about that since I read it.

New Tricks?

2012-01-06T13:50:00.001-05:00

There was a time when I looked forward to writing something either as a parody or "in the style of." An assignment for 18th C. Literature in college involved writing an essay as Jonathan Swift might have done. I had a ball. At this late stage, an acquaintance whose taste and ideas I admire has been pressing me to write a novel using a theme he suggests with a plot line he supplies. It's not anything like what I've done before, and I'm finding myself truly baffled as I try to figure out how to go about it.

The idea is a good and probably salable one. It's a mystery (he defines only the conflict). I can't seem to manufacture the train of events leading to the crime and its aftermath. Furthermore, he fails to understand how hard it is to make a story unless you (the writer) know the characters who will act it out. I can't get my head around the four main ones. I have thus far three versions of a beginning, complete with different names in each attempt.

Having just taken a look at a passage from one of my novels, I realized something that doubtless should have been obvious from the start: if my style or voice or whatever you want to call it is too set, how can I hope to create people and motives from someone else's original notion?

Apart from the challenge of producing something analogous to a work for hire, I now face a question that should have occurred to me long ago: should I try to learn flexibility again, or should I stay stubborn and loyal to what I seem to have become?

And anyone who wants to point out the old saw about an old dog and new tricks, you may keep your remarks to yourself! ;-). It's a fallacy. You can teach even an oldster if she's willing to learn.

Pleasant Surprise

2011-12-28T16:44:00.000-05:00

One should revisit places that have published one's work. I just went to Lowestoft Chronicle where a poem was published early in the year. There is a notice that the poem is in the print anthology they put out each year, and that was chosen as "Best of the Net Anthology" by Sundress Press (if I have read the news note correctly). Made my day!

Guts

2011-12-19T10:46:00.001-05:00

Like many "seniors" I find myself rereading, or reading for the first time, old books. The artistry of what is mostly in the past can cause real emotional quakes in my now admittedly somewhat unsound foundations. I recently commented on what appears to be the fashion for showing readers the seamy, unattractive, amoral, callous sides of life. The more I see of this, and the more I turn to older fashions in fiction, the more I think the new (if not young) writers should have some intestinal fortitude--enough to dare to transport their readers. Or is something we were brought up to admire now considered unworthy? Are tenderness, a response to tragedy, an appreciation of poetic irony, a real sense of joy no longer admissible in
intellectual society?

Come on, all you writers! /show us Life; make us weep and laugh out loud. Teach us empathy! HAVE SOME GUTS!

Trying Not to Be a Cynic (Honestly!)

2011-12-13T15:30:00.001-05:00

Thanks to the Internet, almost every day I find some evidence of how writers continue to bud and often blossom in an education landscape that seems to be less and less fertile every year. It isn't just the attachments to emails proving how much more a fifth grader knew in 1890 than a college graduate does today, though they are frightening. Of course, with the body of knowledge growing exponentially month by month (where once it grew year by year), I do understand part of the problem. As a one-time English teacher, I've had to learn not to get hysterical over the incredible sloppiness of diction, syntax, and punctuation even in respected places where someone should know better (i.e. "diffuse" on MSN to describe what was being done with unexploded ordnance found on the bottom of the Rhine).

Reading contemporary poetry so often humbles and delights simultaneously. I bought a subscription to Poetry. The 12th issue has just arrived. I find that as I look at most issues, probably 80% of the poems, I'm as clueless as if they had been written in Sanskrit.

It's embarrassing. I actually buy books of poetry that mean something even on the first reading; many are by prize-winning poets; all are younger than I; all articulate and describe ideas and things in ways that provide a reader with something valuable and pleasurable to add to life's lessons.

That set me wondering about the impulse to produce a poem that is so utterly opaque as so many in the most prestigious journals. It also made me wonder how a poet manages to learn what it takes to accomplish a feat like that. Furthermore, how (if as such) poetry is taught today, especially at the secondary level. Finally, I'm speechless with admiration for the editors who can evaluate such work.

Along came a kind of corollary question: could it be that there is a fraudulent wing of the little magazine establishment to go along with the gradually emerging realization that so much contemporary "art" has become exercises in self-promotion and behind-the-hand titters to make big money? Of course, there's no big money in poetry, but a big enough ego is doubtless happy with admiration coming from the right quarters.

The idea that an artist may have to educate his audience isn't new to me. To an extent, I agree with it. However, it seems to be a scam to appeal either to an audience too foolish to know it's being "had," or to one that has to be part of some kind of exclusive society of those who are in on the secret.

Maybe some reader of this complaint will help to explain this to me.

Finally, to go back to the first sentence, I get my consolation from the really impressive (accessible) poems that so many younger and just plain young poets are producing. Not only do they give pleasure and insight to a reader, they provide the hope that all is not lost when it comes to education and the arts in America.

Feast or Famine

2011-11-29T13:56:00.002-05:00

It occurs to me that so many of my blogs include complaints. Apologies. Yet I notice that so often I'm either feeling as blank as an empty bowl or else my brain is swarming with so many notions I can't start fast enough to make notes so I won't forget them in the dry times.

A friend recently commented to me that life is always cyclic. He wasn't speaking only of seasons, but of broader repetitions. Not a new idea, I know, but one about which I hadn't thought in a long time. My suggestion to anyone who might be looking for a spur to invention would be to consider that apparent fact of life.

Remember the prehistoric ages running from flood through gradual drying out, from tropical to ice and back; and seasons, naturally; el nino and la nina years; that odd repeat of perception of spans of time--from childhood when a year is a long time to maturity when ten years isn't much, to old age when a year is a long time again; from one generation to the next and the next; from fashion of one sort or another to a repetition or at least a reference recurring years afterward...you could go on at length. For me, each possibility of comment as one circumstance leads to another to be eventually repeated (in one form or another) suggests so much...I'd like to live long enough to develop every example that springs to mind.

From nothing or a barren planet to whatever will make that planet barren again, it looks as if there might be something finite in the universe, after all. In between, there's only a temporary famine of ideas that will burgeon into a feast again--if we can make ourselves wait patiently enough.

Popularity vs. Excellence

2011-11-19T13:28:00.000-05:00

I just read an incredible headline: "Is ______ more popular than Jesus?" Popular?! It blows what little mind remaining to me to consider where our so-called civilization would be if popularity were the deciding factor in religion, governance, intellectual development, any science, or any art.

What does popularity have to do with anything?

In an election year in a democracy, it's perhaps the biggest problem the country has to face. If only voters could be dependably influenced by factors other than popularity!

I wonder if the headline writer was kidding.

Assignments

2011-10-29T10:22:00.000-04:00

Everybody remembers the days of having a paper due. How do you deal with that task now? Do you set out to produce an essay, a story, a poem on a topic, a person, an experience that seems to ask to be put on paper? Do you ever consider accepting an assignment from out of left field, so to speak? No problem when it has suggested itself; when someone else pushes it on you, that's a different kettle of fish!

I've just taken on something like that. It's not my cup of tea in general, and many of the specifics being included in the proposal would never have entered my head. Yes, I've always wished I could address a writing problem like the one being proposed, and I've always felt there was no way I might achieve an acceptable result. It's turning out to be a challenge (and I do mean challenge) to try to write something that would be right up someone else's alley. I can't resist trying, even against my more realistic instincts.

With an eye to the comfortable closing in of winter, I'm trying to get some kind of start into a tale that could possibly take off, and if not run with me, at least begin to point a direction. Maybe I should have entitled this post "No Fool Like an Old Fool."

None the Wiser

2011-10-17T10:46:00.000-04:00

Nothing to say on the writing front today, but maybe I should follow up on that last post. Six days and three ladies later, I doubt there's a taker in the lot. The principle viewer of our superior community, after finding minor faults with some things that can't be changed (like dining room hours) and some that can (like artificial leaves as part of the mantel decoration) seemed unlikely to be content in any residence that doesn't have unlimited variations in routine and policies. In other words, no place I know of. Then just before departure she surprised me by saying she was favorably impressed, and will consider us--in a few years. After almost a week of lodging and a meal a day (if she and her friends were here to partake), I was not pleased. Imagine how our Marketing Director feels. A while back, we had a couple who actually spent two full weeks here, demanding a lot of special attention and information, and not just one meal a day, only to depart after letting everyone know that they intended to go to Florida--from day one. They were just "checking" other possibilities. In a store that would amount to shoplifting, wouldn't it?

The older I get, the more amazed I am at what I grew up calling chutzpah. (Sometimes Yiddish has no English equivalent.) It's the kind of nerve that an observer knows immediately is fully understood by the perpetrator as dishonest at worst, and doubtful ethically at best.

So now we go back to the ordinary business of preparing for a winter that seems likely never to materialize. Yes, cool nights, but daytimes at temperatures associated with June or July. If I ever get fall pansies to put in, I don't know if I'll be fighting the dratted hose every other day to keep them watered so they'll still be here in December! Climate change? After fewer than fifteen years here, I don't know yet.

So the next chore is to email my publisher to get at least a statement on royalties (?) I'm scared I've heard nothing because there aren't any to report.

It's another perfect autumn day, though with high cloud beginning to show. Carpe diem is the order of the day--as it's apt to be when you're my age!

Perennial Complaint

2011-10-07T16:31:00.003-04:00

Waiting to be picked up for an hour-plus drive to the airport to meet a prospective resident of the community where I live. I don't have to drive, just be available as a kind of welcoming one-man (woman) committee. The whole enterprise will take between four and five hours if there's no flight delay. The difficulty is that I can't get those hours back.

Is there a non-professional (definition of one who writes without getting paid for it) out there who doesn't feel bothered by these thefts of precious hours? The individual mentioned in my last blog has bullied me into admitting that hours I could be writing but am not, verge on the sinful. Even if he's wrong, that idea is gaining more and more traction in my head along with predictable intimations of mortality (thank you, Mr. Wordsworth).

I seem often to be asking my readers, if any, for advice. This is another of those times. Wednesday I incurred the barely concealed anger of the president of our residents' association when I refused to undertake a task I've done before. The question is, should I apologize? I've served on that board as an officer, and twice as a representative, and on several committees, some of which entailed months of work (think revision of By-Laws as one example).

I'm actually saying out loud (as my excuse for the things I no longer am doing), "I'm a writer, and I don't have the time." What if I'm deluding myself? Maybe that doesn't make any difference. I'm a writer anyway!

A Blast from the Past

2011-09-16T10:46:00.001-04:00

I find myself with a mentor. Suddenly an old schoolmate (from the graduating class behind mine in high school) phoned. I remembered his name, but not another thing about him. He was looking for some old yearbooks for a book he's writing. I had some of them. As they say, One thing led to another, and I found myself in long, intense, fascinating conversation with a man who is unable to talk without mentioning several famous (not just well-known) show business names in every sentence. This goes with the territory because he's the son of a famous actress and writer and stepson of a Broadway producer everyone has heard of.

Because he's working on a memoir, he asked me what I knew about a number of people from our school, many of whom I lost track of the minute I graduated, some of whom are no longer alive, and some of whom I happened to know about. In the latter group is a woman older than I whose life has repeatedly intersected with mine. She has led a remarkable life as basically a servant of humane causes--as a teacher. First in California, then in Nigeria, and finally in China. Her parents and mine were close friends. When I answered his question about her, I told him what I know, and he immediately said, "She became a saint. You have to write a poem about her."

After the phone call, I decided in an offhand, this-will-come-to nothing way, to try. I sent him the result. [He mistrusts the Internet, is a bit of a conspiracy nut, and has almost total recall. Hence all communication is via phone or snail mail.] He called me the night he got the poem to demand I send him a signed copy.

He calls two or three times a week with advice, lists of required reading, and guidelines about what to do about writing. (He's reading Peripheral Vision now.) He insists on discussing the novel I'm trying so hard to find some entree for into the traditional publishing world. His behavior is like that of someone who has made me a protegee. It's a stimulating experience, and sends me to bed after a couple of hours (sic.) on the phone so wired I can hardly wait for another day to get started working in the light of the previous evening's talk.

We are diametric opposites politically (beginning with the fact that I'm not at all political and he is). Our artistic tastes are apparently not similar except in a few cases, but this man is unalterably opinionated, so I listen and glean. The point to all this is that I've discovered--or rediscovered--how stimulating it can be to have reaction to your work, but also how invigorating to have someone determined to direct you whose opinion you respect. I don't have to agree with everything he says, and the freedom to choose is liberating beyond anything I've experienced since graduate school days.

Would you believe I'm looking forward to the closing-in sense winter brings?

A Light at the End of the Tunnel?

2011-09-02T14:58:00.000-04:00

I've been reading a Pulitzer Prize winner. Without Mr. P's name on the cover, I'd have stopped after 30 pages. I persevered, and have come almost to the end. The characters that in the beginning made me grind my teeth have matured or died. From the beginning, the writing was vivid, original, attractive, but the situations and people in them made me want to drop them as quickly as I could. Even now, with only a few pages to go, and filled as I am with admiration for the creativity evident in A Visit from the Goon Squad, I'm shaken.

I'm not a prude, and the Anglo Saxon epithets were realistic, suited to the mouths uttering them. I simply wondered why I should care about people who were not only crude (though sometimes sensitive), but self-absorbed and amoral. Their world seemed to offer nothing on its surface to suggest they might need to become observant, other-directed, or altruistic, but their lack of imagination on their own behalf astonished me as the material that had won such a prestigious prize. I think that was the point, and satire was evident, but I felt cheated by seeing nothing else for so long.

It got me thinking about fashion. We all know that it comes and goes. We all know it applies to a lot more in our lives than clothes. It appears to be omnipresent in either the persons or the perceived rankings of judges--of all the arts. Where (outside of that enclave known as "Inspirational") are critics who are willing to look to the effects of their judgments on viewers and readers? What has happened to contemporary art? Why is the public so ready to immerse itself (if I may refer to it as a monolith for the sake of this argument) in the down sides of life? Happiness is so often as easy as understanding Rabbi Schachtel's aphorism: Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have.

It's clear that nothing is quite that simple, but it's also clear that too many young people, especially those who have almost everything they could ever want, are the most dissatisfied and depressed and at a loss. Even today there are plenty of anecdotes about triumph over adversity, and too few of humility and gratitude. It's disheartening to see how much adult literature is devoted not just to showing the abstracted, drugged gyrations of musicians and those who look to the noise in their headphones to define themselves, but also to those who glamorize mindless sex as being as uncomplicated as the next drink at a bar, who give not a thought to how their actions may cause others to suffer, or even to the harm they do to themselves.

These days, you almost have to venture backwards in time to find pictures of life redeemed in spite of or because of depravity, dishonesty, error. The ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, Hardy, Austen, even Sinclair Lewis or Harper Lee...make your own list. Writing and painting and music hardly dare to be beautiful these days except for some poets. The cachet is in being gritty, hip, up on the latest fashionable illegality.

Being human should not be made to appear like a sentence to misery to be lifted only by discouraged compromise.

The Imp on My Shoulder

2011-08-17T14:52:00.000-04:00

I knew there was a disadvantage to beginning to write a blog, but when I started I wasn't sure which of several possibilities it would turn out to be. At the moment, uppermost is the requirement of producing posts on a regular basis. Along with my disaffection with volunteerism, I'm getting to a place where I don't want to look at the date on the last post!

Didn't we tell each other when we moved to a "retirement community" that one of its appeals was the first word in that phrase? It didn't take a month to show us the naivete of such a notion. Things are getting a bit desperate around here nowadays because people who came when we did are 15 years older, dozens have passed to their reward, and the newcomers (too few and far between owing to the housing market crash--most people sell a house to pay the entry fee) tend to be already relying on walkers, suffering from macular degeneration, or too deaf to converse. All this makes them unlikely prospects for committees, offices in the association, or even decent bridge.

I passed my 80th a while back. I don't want to do this any more. Most of the people I know well don't either. The Decorating Committee petered out a couple of years ago. Trying to persuade somebody to take an office on the Residents Association Board is getting to a place where it involves bribery, extortion, or blackmail. I've already refused to be on the nominating committee again.

Shouldn't I be spending my time and available energy on writing -- as opposed to blogging? Furthermore, I can't help thinking I have a right to claim these September Days for myself. But there's always an voice whispering in my ear that of course I can -- serve on this or that deserving committee, polish the brass candlesticks, weed the flowers, and give this spot an occasional word or two in case anyone might be reading it. On the other hand, I'm still lucky enough to be healthy if not hearty, and possessed of my faculties.

So now the guilt rises up again. These moans aren't worth bothering with. Well, maybe next week when I finish helping with rewriting the handbook, have the third meeting on revising the scholarship application forms, and get the next issue of the newsletter out (thank goodness, it's only 2 a year I have to deal with), I can make some sage or funny comment about what I'd rather be doing--and it isn't fishing!

Patience

2011-07-31T10:41:00.004-04:00

Perhaps not all, but many things do indeed come to him who waits (or her, as the case may be). Peripheral Vision is here, in print, ready to hand at last. Here's a blurb that didn't make it to the back cover.

The intricacies of human relationships is the primary theme in Joan Cannon’s fine collection of short fiction. If you're looking for a flashy stream of action, look elsewhere, but if you prefer incisive characterizations, astute observations and sly humor, give Peripheral Vision a try. Joan Cannon can take a microcosm of life and show it’s enduring effects. Translating the core of human emotions is never easy, but her prose, reminiscent of Louis Auchincloss, accomplishes that task with a few deft strokes.

In “A Home for Crusoe,” an elegant elderly woman who sells Crusoe, her beloved old car, to a parking garage attendant, imagines it taking the young man’s family on beach excursions and country picnics. Instead, it is reborn as a winner of stock car races.

At Christmas time an immigrant tailor loses his shop in a fire, but everything, he says, has “Complete Coverage.” Everything, the reader realizes, but the amazing gift for his granddaughter that he had worked on all year.

In one story a character has “hair as black and shiny as Mary Jane shoes.” In another, “his voice has a zing to it like a cicada in August,” and in a third, a dying man’s “IV bags dangled like tired party balloons.” In the final story, The Bear, a son visits the family’s wilderness camp the year after his mother’s death. He and his grieving father sit on the porch ”to watch the afterglow through the hemlocks. The chairs creaked softly as they rocked. They listened to the vesper songs of veeries and hermit thrushes and the towhee’s sharp ‘chink’ until full dark. By the time a whippoorwill began its insistent calling, the mosquitoes drove them inside.... “

Writing doesn’t get much better than that.

Joyce C. Ware

I confess the author is a friend, but she's also a well credentialed writer herself.

Poetry vs. Prose, or Poetry & Prose?

2011-07-18T10:19:00.000-04:00

I keep up with the blog, How a Poem Happens. The questions after each example are great for a tyro like me because without dissecting the poem, they stimulate ideas about how to make a poem happen. Writing poetry is for me not really like writing anything else for a couple of reasons, the first of which is that I've found a poem is in some way organic, as opposed to the manufactured quality of good prose. It really is like a happening, if the result ends up seeming satisfactory.

A second reason is that the impetus for a poem comes from a layer somewhere probably on the right side of the brain instead of the rational left. That's definitely not an original idea--just a statement of how it is. A poem does, at some point in its development, require plenty of input from that same left side, though, if it is to grow into even a free form that entitles it to be more than a kind of automatic writing.

I do find myself resentful, though, when I read much of today's academically admired poems that seem to be created for the express purpose of offering insoluble puzzles to its readers, as if one must be part of some elect aristocracy of art to decipher them.

The attraction of these contrasts is maybe the best thing about poetry.

From Two Thousand to Twelve Thousand Words

2011-07-10T17:13:00.001-04:00

That new photo is of the cover of a collection of short stories to be in print shortly. Peripheral Vision. Here's another case when I wonder what genre they fit into. Written over a period of over 25 years, they range from pretty simple stuff an insurance company used in its publication for clients to a long story serialized by one of the oldest publications in the US, to some other pieces that appeared in an occasional literary journal, plus the ones I've never found another home for until now.

Maybe they're "summer reading" or maybe not, but there's a variety of serious and some not-so-serious. If I had a million, I'd have liked to have them illustrated. Remember when even grown-up books had pictures? I wish they still did!

You might notice I've removed the picture of the title page for the Bookstogonow.com story. That's because it's been spoken for to be in a print anthology. I think it's still on their website, but I couldn't use it in the collection March Street Press is about to release.

The books (softcover) will be $15 plus shipping and available from the press at 3413 Wilshire, Greensboro, NC 27408. March Street Press has a website at http://www.marchstreetpress.com. The big retailers will be able to order them too--Amazon, B & N, and your favorite indie book store. Stay tuned...

Genre?

2011-07-02T11:24:00.001-04:00

If you're like me, you quail when asked to tell what genre you're producing. The common understanding of that term won't fit my fiction. I have recently (within the past four years, say) rediscovered nonfiction, and even more recently (within the past two years) reconnected with poetry--but that's about as far as I can push classification.

Settling isn't romance, but it is a love story. Maiden Run isn't even that easy to classify, unless you could call it a sort of love story about one family's home with subplots about the lives of the siblings who must give it up. An editor whose judgment I trust calls my third novel "literary." I suspect the first two might fit that description as well. However, I submitted an essay to a magazine seeking literary essays whose subject was an ideal fit. They rejected it because they said they were seeking "more literary" work. I guess that's an example of the usual myopia of an author.

I have a much admired friend who has published a large handful of romances in different subgenres. They are very good indeed, and each fits perfectly into the formulas that were required in the seventies when she wrote them. I was unable to bend my imagination to the plots and requirements of that kind of writing, while she relished the challenge as of a puzzle. I envy those who can both spot the necessary ingredients and how to present them within standard limits, and then craft fiction to fit. My characters are too apt to take hold and run outside any boundaries I may have decided on ahead of time.

Memoir seems to be on the upswing in popularity these days. Those I've read most recently all have some very much out-of-the-ordinary jumping-off point. One is about the peculiar (to an American readership) experiences of a woman who spent most of her life with a not too successful farmer in Africa while the upheavals of the fifties and onward were overtaking them. Another is about a very literate man who found himself not only imprisoned for a white collar crime, but incarcerated in the last remaining leprosarium in the US. Exotic places or circumstances might be enough to sell a memoir without too much trouble. It's the same appeal fiction has: the chance to experience something vicariously. It's a temptation to write a novel that pretends to be a memoir (not a new idea, heaven knows), and almost certainly, since it wouldn't be labeled as a memoir, you'd be right back where you started--that is, faced with the bare fact of your competence as a story-teller.

My main problem is how to approach an agent or publisher without recourse to classification--not because I'm unwilling, but because I don't know where my work belongs. Like most writers of fiction, I rely to a great extent on my own experience, but for a memoir, I have no eye-catching singular events to attract a reader. On the other hand, think of the poetry of a recluse like Emily Dickinson and the ruminations of an ordinary man like Thoreau.

I know you have to have a hook; I know you're supposed to be able to make "an elevator pitch;" I know you have to stand out from the hundreds doing the same thing. But even if you can follow those dicta, you have to find a way to fit into a slot before you can get anyone even to consider what you can do. You can't afford to pretend to be something you're not. This, I find frustrating.

One, Two, Three...?

2011-06-28T11:45:00.000-04:00

Did you ever notice the tendency of events to happen in clusters? You know the old saw about bad things happening in threes...and you get a new car, and suddenly you see a dozen of the same model on the road in the next three days...you get a wedding announcement, and then at least one more before you have a chance to respond to the first one, and we won't mention how one pregnancy seems to lead to another...

Today was one of those days. A couple of months ago, I was asked to do a written interview to be posted on a blog on June 28. I was flattered and gratified, and I did. It was posted, as promised, today. Here's the link: http://wwwthouhtfulreflections.blogspot.com/2011/06/poet-novelists-and-short-story-author.html. It's an interesting place to read about interesting people.

A week or so ago, someone else asked if I'd write a blog post for her to use on one of her websites. She's been a good friend for several years now, and again, I was flattered to be asked, and so I did it. It, too, was posted today. So here's another link: www.profilesandpedigrees.blogspot.com.

Now, if I can just get a release date for Peripheral Vision, maybe these will generate some interest in it?

What's a Writer to Do?

2011-06-12T15:57:00.000-04:00

It seems presumptuous and even foolish to be writing a blog about writing. No one who would bother to read it would have missed the mantras that are supposed to help us "get published." You know: write every day, submit, enter contests, write a blog, network, don't give up, write what you know, enter contests, don't just write what you know, you always need a "hook," enter contests...on and on. If those instructions were all it takes to see your work (and I do mean "work") in print, there would be an even bigger glut of e-books and print books and screen plays and poetry than there is now.

Some day there's going to be somebody who will honestly want to know why you write. Maybe it's worth considering what your answer will be--worth thinking seriously about it. My guess is that a survey would reveal a relatively small number of answers.

Then there's the entering contests question. Of course, if you should happen to win one, there's the satisfaction of a small success (unless, of course, you just won a nationwide one with a big monetary prize and publication by Random House). Do you enter contests depending on who runs them, on the size of the entry fee, on who is familiar to you who has won it before, in hopes an agent or publisher will notice you? Or do you do it because it's on the list of things every wannabe has to do?

There's a pretty interesting website on which a book on how to win writing contests is regularly advertised. I admit to being tempted. Then it occurs to me that unless you have some knowledge of the judge(s), or are just plain clairvoyant, your entry is in the same category as weekly lottery tickets. Maybe the odds aren't quite as long, but pretty nearly. The author of the book on how to win must be willing and able to be a chameleon. Either you have a voice of your own or you don't, or you're able to imitate someone else's voice. Here I'm using that word the way literary critics like to: meaning the diction and themes that distinguish you and your work from others'. Even if you write so-called "genre" material, we all know it will be better than the run-of-the-mill if only you could have written it, and a reader can spot that right away.

Whether it's contests or just getting published without paying for it, you're up against fashion, the difficulty of reaching the right audience, and, let's face it: how good you are at what you do. It's certain that not enough writers who are exceptionally good ever get the audience they deserve. So that part of the list of "Dos" for writers that says "Never Give Up" is the hardest one to remember.

To Tell the Truth

2011-06-07T10:33:00.000-04:00

If a writer feels it necessary to trudge ahead regardless of past performance, or especially past recognition--or more likely the lack of it, the notion of an advanced degree, presumably an MFA, is bound to have surfaced. There was a time when I was sure one day I'd have a chance to enroll in some program that would fill out my talent (if there were any) and lend some credibility to whatever I might write.

One of the things that is apt to take over when one is attempting to become--whatever the goal is--is that the aspirant looks to others who have reached it to provide instruction. Never mind how many scores of dollars I may have spent over the years on correspondence courses and books, the few that have been of real benefit wouldn't crowd a single shelf. A course in the history of criticism was one of the best aids to literary decision making for myself, along with only half a dozen of the many books I have bought and read. Now I'm a bit like a donkey with blinders on; I just keep plodding on.

Then, just today, a humble (well, maybe not so humble) blog once more put into a small space the most important lessons I've been able to take away from all those who have had the temerity to write about writing. It has to do with reality--with the absolute necessity--of putting out the truth regardless of its appeal or power to horrify. All writing is political, just as nearly all politics is economics. A writer who can face this at the fundamental level may turn out to be a good writer.

This is a pathetic distillation of a complex imperative, but if it interests you, stop by and read mfainabox@aweber.com.

Grey is Great

2011-05-27T11:04:00.001-04:00

The restrained but extravagant repetitions of a singing catbird fall as gently as rain onto the ear. Many mockingbirds fill the neighborhood with their boisterous notes at high volume. I remember how delighted we were when they moved north to regale New England with their brilliant, tireless musicianship. Up there, and now, even more obviously here, catbirds became either less numerous or were overpowered by the bigger, crow-related, brash and showy mockingbirds.

Now that I live in true mockingbird territory, when I hear a catbird, even more when one visits the deck or a nearby tree, I get a special thrill of pleasure from the modest and lovely grey bird that sends it.

The towhees my mother used to call “wood robins” fall in the same category of beautiful, graceful, shy birds that seem content to spend their lives and rear their young near human beings.

Plenty of others endear themselves by brilliant plumage like the blue jays and “redbirds.” Even the small house finches flash red and jewel-like past our windows along with sunny, showy goldfinches, indigo buntings on their way to the mountains and the cheeky, noisy, clowning Carolina wrens.

Those less presumptuous, perhaps more humble representatives of avian society seem like some people of similar modesty-- special treasures in our lives.

Clarity

2011-05-13T15:28:00.001-04:00

For a long time even before I began trying to write poetry again, I have been dismayed at poets who seem to be trying to outsmart their readers, playing a kind of puzzle one-up-manship. Then I bumped into a market called Lucidity Poetry Journal, and immediately figured it might be a place I could send some of my not-too-profound versifying.

I didn't win a prize, but I did garner an honorable mention (I had sent the limit of five poems). There was also a list of honorable mentions for titles--a first in my experience. I got one of those too. So, just for the fun of it, here is the poem with the title the editors liked:

Bottom Line

Where is what is lost?

Is it absent forever?

When the blossom shatters,

when the snow melts,

when a dropped earring

can’t be found, the space

on the museum wall

now bare of the image

that haunts the lover

of art—

is there some

ledger that tells us

which lacks are less or greater?

Who would bewail the loss

of a child’s first tooth?

How long will the mournful

cow keep lowing for her absent calf?

A soldier son, an aged mother,

an elder statesman, a teenaged

driver, a deer in the headlights…

are they of equal weight in

some cosmic balance,

once they’re lost?

If at last there is no finding,

how do we achieve

the full height of our being?

Only the faithful and the brave

know the courage to deny

the mortality of what is unseen.

http://lucidityjournal.00books.com/index.html

The latest issue of Wild Goose Poetry Review is online as of today. This is the real thing--not just poetry closely judged and well chosen, but graced with trenchant reviews as well. Scott Owens, the editor, was kind enough to print a couple of my offerings there.

Today was a good day in other ways: I got the first royalty check from Bookstogonow.com. It wouldn't buy a cup of coffee, but it proved someone bothered to download my story. And I came in second at a bridge club in which I was invited to substitute.

Maybe another day, I won't be the perennial also-ran?

Art, Mankind, & Nature

2011-04-27T10:40:00.000-04:00

Here comes another storm--slower than the original prediction. The iris are full out and gorgeous, most of the dogwood at peak, and I can't help wondering if they will all be ruined before dinner time. Rain is falling, flood watches being broadcast, and my dog is already feeling considerable consternation.

As seasons go, 2010-2011 has had more than its share of extremes. It's such a temptation for human beings to read significance into natural departures from the norm (which is determined by human calculations) that it makes you wonder how we got so self-important. I remember a lady we knew many years ago in Connecticut who declared that the (then beginning) disease threatening white ash trees was evidence of the onset of biblical warnings of the last days. The fact that her sense of doom occurred nearly fifty years ago doesn't change the alarms still going off as a result of so many catastrophes we've seen since then.

For anyone interested in what might be called "serious" writing, there seems to be so much gloom and doom in the human condition (wonderful locution that covers so much territory), it's often near impossible to tell a story or produce a poem that doesn't mirror awful or cruel or depressing aspects of mankind's existence. Reams have been written about the duty of artists. All the arguments don't agree.

Maybe each artist must allow self-interest to determine how much reality and how much fantasy, how much factual and how much hopeful, how much concrete and how much spiritual belong in his or her work. We are not all equally gifted any more than we are equally equipped to control what flows from that hidden source from which artists produce whatever they can. Maybe the best we can do is keep the faith in what we've been given with which to work.

I just hope we can find a way to tap into "inspiration" or catch the muses of comedy (Thalia) and her happier sisters for more of the poems we write and the music we compose and the pictures we paint. Surely an artist needs occasionally to do a bit of uplifting.

Writing About Writing

2011-04-23T12:06:00.000-04:00

Cover of A Circle of Quiet

Over a number of (20+) years I've read a good deal about writing. Some has been the standard, virtually required stuff, some has been inspired and useful for prying open the clamshell of a traditional mind, and some shakes a would-be writer up like a pebble in a tin can. I'm reasonably sure that what goes in that last category is different for every writer.

My most recent read that fits that description is (as is common with me these days) not a new one. Of course that doesn't matter. Madeleine L'Engle's Circle of Quiet is the example.

Carolyn See in her book about the literary life suggests that all writers need to be ready to send "sweet notes" to authors whose work they admire. She's not joking about that. I sent her one, and she answered it! Well, I'm about to send a note (not sure how sweet it will be) of unbridled enthusiasm to Madeleine L'Engle.

Probably this series of journal entries requires a female reader, but I'm not sure about that because I know so few male writers. If it doesn't speak to any writer of fiction, I'd be astonished, though. It's unassuming, available in paperback, and reads as if the author were having a conversation with her reader. Self-effacing, humorous, poignant, and above all, wise, her views on writing are a must read for those who want to write anything serious--maybe even for those who want to live a serious life.