In the Hothouse

I've got a new piece up over the weekend at Hothouse Magazine. In it, I borrow some friends' language about community justice & peacemaking, and I use it as a framework for how art and literature is a form of activism.

Enjoy!

skyline

purview of the Boston AWP conference 

I love Boston. I love it even better in the snow. Socked in, hushed, humbled, warmer inside than out. Filled with 12,000 writers from all over the world. We took over the city, or at least our corner of it, leaking out of the convention center and dashing into restaurants and bars. Talking shop. Talking life. Talking horizons.

on words

Truth is elusive.

Truth avoids institutional control.

Truth tugs at conventional syntax.

Truth hovers at the edge of the visual field.

Truth is relational.

Truth lives in the library and on the subway.

Truth is not two-sided; it's many-sided.

Truth burrows in the body.

Truth flickers.

Truth comes on little cat's feet, and down back alleys.

Truth doesn't always test well.

Truth invites you back for another look.

From the Hebrew proverbs: "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver." 

In the book Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, which I found at my sister-in-law's house and also contains the above list describing truth, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre says

A felicitous word choice is one that so precisely names an idea or experience that it produces for the reader or hearer a shock of recognition, a surprised "Yes! That's it!" and a gratifying sense of having put two interlocking pieces of a puzzling world perfectly in place.

My father-in-law loves to do jigsaw puzzles, it's his way to unwind. And when all of the siblings go back for a visit, he loves when we join him around the card table, the pieces splayed across a felt mat. One time he packed a puzzle in his suitcase when he visited our house, and we spent our spare time over the four days of his visit assembling a picture of Mickey Mouse, a mosaic of screen shots from Disney movies.

There's a rush of satisfaction almost like adrenaline when out of thousands of pieces I find the one that perfectly fits the shape and picture. It's the same with words. My friend, who just read Nabokov for the first time -- Lolita -- described one of the reasons she loved the book: the author's turns of phrase were both surprising and perfectly apt.

A word fitly spoken is truth.

I don't always do this well, and I know in these blog entries I rarely do it well. This kind of fitness takes time. Lots of time. Fit words are a gift whenever and wherever they occur, a gift to both the one who hears or reads them and to the one through whom they pass. But they won't be found if we won't listen for them. They're just off to the side, near our blind spot. They're deft paws on dry asphalt.

There's a lot of noise today, a lot of words flying around our atmosphere, and most of them are cheap, unfit, flabby words. They're 25-piece children's puzzles. They're quick and easy. Easy to make, easy to digest. That's why good words require us to do the work, the work of taking time to listen.

I hope that today we all get a chance to hear and perhaps give a word fitly spoken, a true treasure.

sending love and poetry after hurricane sandy

Walt Whitman knew it; we'd be wise to remember it. We're all in this fragile world together. From "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry":

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

"It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd"

Read the rest at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174738

Much love to all affected by the storm. 

memories asking to be written

"Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!"

- John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

How important is memory for a writer? For an artist of any kind? Sometimes I feel like I have a horrible memory for details from the past - stories people told me or that I witnessed when young. Every once in a while, though, something pops up without seeming to be triggered by anything. Mostly during the monotonous, repetitive parts of proofreading.

And if I don't write it down, it's gone when I get home from work.

Like today during work I remembered I had a friend in elementary school whose last name was Fuchs. They pronounced it "fox," but that was probably so it was easier for Midwesterners to say. I remember the first time I saw someone raise their eyebrows at the name on a roster & stumble to pronounce it. I wondered why they looked embarrassed to try to say it. I knew the name didn't sound like it was spelled, but I didn't get what the big deal was about the way it looked.

What an odd burden for my elementary friend to bear - being from a conservative Christian family - to have to learn that you must always explain to people that no, your name does not sound like one of the most vulgar swear words in "worldly" vernacular. Did my friend even know what that word was, or what it meant?

I don't know if that makes a story, or at least one for me to write, but it raised the question of memory. How much do writers rely on those memories from childhood that come back almost asking to be written about? Do many writers use these as inspiration for stories, poems, or essays? I sometimes do - maybe even want to be more intentional about doing so.

That thing you do: using action to show feeling

A couple days ago, I wrote about reading to learn and mentioned one way my writing needs to improve: 

"One of my tendencies in fiction is to summarize action in analytic, explanatory terms rather than using concrete, sensory details and in-the-moment action to let the reader jump into the story themselves."

And today I came across this in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. All you need to know is Portia is Doctor Copeland's grown daughter, William his son. Doctor Copeland, an enlightened, philosophical man, had high ideals but ended up alienating his four children with his intense hopes and expectations. Now that the children are adults, Portia is the only one who visits her father on occasion, and he clearly misses having a relationship with all of them. She is about to leave from one such visit while her husband (Highboy) and William wait outside Doctor Copeland's house.

"Wait a minute," said Doctor Copeland. "I have only seen your husband with you about two times and I believe we have never really met each other. And it has been three years since William has visited his father. Why not tell them to drop in for a little while?" 

Portia stood in the doorway, fingering her hair and her earrings. 

"Last time Willie come in here you hurted his feelings. You see you don't understand just how---" 

"Very well," said Doctor Copeland. "It was only a suggestion." 

"Wait," said Portia. "I going to call them. I going to invite them in right now." 

Doctor Copeland lighted a cigarette and walked up and down the room. He could not straighten his glasses to just the right position and his fingers kept trembling. From the front yard there was the sound of low voices. Then heavy footsteps were in the hall and Portia, William, and Highboy entered the kitchen.

I love how those two sentences I italicized show Doctor Copeland's feelings without using any analytical phrases, or even adjectives (other than "right position"). In fact, as a test, I read just those two sentences, with no background information, to my husband and asked him what he thought Doctor Copeland was feeling. "Stress, fear, nervousness?" Exactly!


A student writer (myself) would have written something like "Doctor Copeland paced nervously..." And that he fidgeted with his glasses. But those two sentences Carson McCullers wrote describe just the right actions to show nervous pacing and the kind of obsession with tiny details we do unconsciously when we're nervous. 


Plus, the actions carry a secondary meaning, a deeper weight. The Dr. didn't just fidget with his glasses--he couldn't "straighten his glasses to just the right position." That detail implies failure, the sense he had of really trying to do something right but never succeeding. He couldn't "straighten" his kids out either, nor could he seem to repair the damage once he'd done it. 


I love it!

saving daylight

So I realized today that this Sunday is the first day of daylight savings time. How come I accidentally happen upon this information twice a year? I still haven't missed it, miraculously. Just curious--does Canada have Daylight Savings time? (you know who you are, dear Canadian readers) ;) So if you have to change your clocks, make sure you set them all one hour later (8:00 to 9:00) Saturday night.

[Incidentally, I always forget whether "spring ahead" means skip ahead numerically (8 to 7--as in 7 comes before 8) or skip ahead chronologically (8 to 9). Am I the only one with this mnemonic dyslexia?]

 I was going to blog about the speed of reading, anyway, but what better segue than announcing daylight savings? Set your clocks, people....

***

So I've often felt that compared to other fiction readers, I'm fairly slow. You hear of the proverbial reader who devours a novel a week or something like that. It takes me a lot longer and I used to think that was bad.

Until now. It occurred to me that I read basically a little faster than the pace of someone speaking aloud. This is especially true of fiction, memoir, poetry, etc. But this might actually be a good thing. Writers who care about the words they're writing, who work over each one to make sure it's the right meaning, the right sound, the right rhythm, are working to make what literary people call the "voice" of a piece.

If I speed-read, skim, or otherwise hurry over the words, I might get enough words to know what the story is "about," but I've completely lost out on the voice--the story behind the words on the page. I'm not saying this as well as ROB, so I'll quote him:

You should read slowly. You should never read a work of literary art faster than would allow you to hear the narrative voice in your head. Speed-reading is one reason editors and, not incidentally, book reviewers can be so utterly wrongheaded about a particular work of art. By their profession they are driven to speed-read....A speed-reader necessarily reads for concept, skipping "unnecessary" words; she is impervious to the rhythms of the prose and the revelations of narrative voice and the nuances of motif and irony. This makes a legitimate response to a work of art impossible.*

To me, it's like the difference between taking a plane from Maine to Georgia versus hiking the Appalachian Trail. On a plane you might get from the beginning to the end, but you know nothing about the flora, fauna, people and towns along the way. I think of A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins, which describes his time traveling on foot along the back woods and cities of the US. I read it in high school, and his descriptions still stick with me. There's an intimacy to traveling on foot through a terrain, just as there's an intimacy to reading a book at a walking pace, hearing the words at the speed at which they would come from a storyteller's mouth. [See also Ireland, by Frank Delaney, as a great recreation of the beauty and intimacy of live story-telling.]

As a fiction writer, I appreciate a reader who takes their time. My first drafts (technically drafts 1-5ish) are full of easy word-choices, lazy turns of phrase, and cliches. I take pains to get more than the story onto the page. It takes me a while to figure out what the story's about, first of all, then how to polish it and let it shine and become something apart from me and my rough-hewn strivings. Because my fiction is so important to me, I spend a lot of time trying to make it more than words on a page.

So there it is: with the extra hour of daylight we'll get next week, take some time to slow down in that book you're reading. If you don't already read slowly, maybe try reading the book out loud to yourself or someone else. Let yourself hear more than just the story, let yourself into the voice, to walk about inside the book.

*Robert Olen Butler From Where You Dream, page 117

writer's block--

You try to write every day--you take off work so you can really focus on writing, and the most you get all day is one new paragraph. 


You've written for a month-and-a-half and produced six drafts, some a page, some five or six pages, none of which feels right. 


You realize you have no idea what you're doing. 


Some people call this writer's block, but there's got to be a better term for it. 

From my own experience (see above), writer's block is synonymous with self-condemnation, a crisis of confidence. And it doesn't apply only to writers... Artists. Musicians. Parents. Designers. Entrepreneurs. Teachers. Plumbers. Mentors. Someone going through a "mid-life" crisis. We look at what we've done and see that it doesn't amount to what we want from ourselves. So we try again, and when that doesn't work we begin to doubt who we are or what we do.

I don't have the be-all, end-all remedy, but I can tell you what helped me. I stopped striving and had faith. I took Ira Glass' words to heart.

“What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. . . .

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. . . . 

It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile.”

Listen to yourself: do you really care about making what you do matter? Do you care about making it great? Then you've got what it takes. Every person on this earth has the spark of a creator within them, somewhere between their heart and mind. Whatever it is you do. You are an artist, or have the capacity to be.

One thing that fosters artistry is child-like curiosity. Wonder. Coming at a project from every angle. What gets in the way of artistry? Striving--trying, grudging, contending. Instead of letting the inner spark ignite and swinging the doors wide open to let the winds of imagination fan it into flame. Which takes repeated, regular practice.

Once I got through those six drafts that weren't going anywhere, I tried a seventh. I don't think I could have gotten to the seventh without the first six dead-end drafts. But I stopped trying to write the story I thought would be good to write. I allowed my imagination to illuminate a path I couldn't have conjured and the road kept opening up before me. A little at a time, just a couple of footsteps ahead, but the flame was living, it was breathing, and I was following.

copyright Sarah Shaffer 2011

slow down fast train

Writing a first draft is a lot like an act of prayer. You're stuffing your conscious self behind a wall of surrender and then waiting, hoping, for the spirit to give rise to the truth that is beyond conjuring or controlling. You're constantly battling distractions the conscious mind wants to assert: "Do this. No, don't do that. That's a dumb idea. This'll never work. Don't you need to feed the cats?"

In prayer, as in writing, you have to guard against the conscious self, catch it off-balance with a change of scenery, stretch it out with physical exercise.

Sometimes you have to cry, make it feel bad so it'll go sit in the corner for a while and let the subconscious, the Imagination, out to play. I know cause I spent 3 hours yesterday with my notebook in my lap, wordless.

Brenda Ueland said it well in her book If You Want to Write:

You have the creative impulse.  

But the ardor for it is inhibited and dried up by many things; as I said, by criticism, self-doubt, duty, nervous fear which expresses itself in merely external action like running up and downstairs and scratching items off lists and thinking you are being efficient; by anxiety about making a living, by fear of not excelling.  

Now this creative power I think is the Holy Ghost. My theology may not be very accurate but that is how I think of it. I know that William Blake called this creative power the Imagination and he said it was God. ...  

Now Blake thought that this creative power should be kept alive in all people for all of their lives. And so do I. Why? Because it is life itself. It is the Spirit. In fact it is the only important thing about us. The rest of us is legs and stomach, materialistic cravings and fears. How do we keep it alive? By using it, by letting it out, by giving some time to it.

Quoting W.B. again, she later said,

"Reason, or All we have known, is not the same it shall be when we know More." And how will we know more? Only through the Imagination which comes from God, and from which the prophets and all great people have spoken.

I can't think or reason my way toward a good story, or well-drawn characters. When I write what I think would make a good story, then put the pen down and read, there's no life in it.

When I wait, when I give my imagination time to come out and play, when after 3 hours I finally cry the self-conscious conscious self away, that's when the authentic story shows itself to me. It still takes work--no golden-egged goose here--but I'm learning that in the work is waiting, praying, writing, and playing.

Quotes from pages 10 and 170, respectively, in the 1987 Graywolf Press edition. 

Poetry Month

In honor of National Poetry Month--every April, all April:

Poets do not necessarily all make a practice of writing in lines on a page, though I love those who do.

What makes a poet?

irish sea / construction wall / old man / pup

Poets can hold both sides of the coin to be true. Poets, plumbing their unique pains, reach universal insights into life on earth. Poets create meaning in the very act of wrestling with meaninglessness. Poets know that the shortest distance between two points isn't always a straight line. They'll ride an old bike when a car would be efficient.

The world needs more poets--people who know things without having an explanation for them. People who know that often Truth doesn't arrive to us in data, nor even words, but around and in between words.

Wall Street needs more poets,

Washington needs more poets,

Churches needs more poets (albeit Jesus was a poet),

School boards need more poets,

Banks need more poets,

Every family needs a poet,

Every person needs a poet in their life.


Go find a poet today and be their friend! Or better yet, go practice being a poet today!

Essay

I was up till 3am this morning working on an essay for school. Today I mailed 10 pages of rough draft looking at representations of nature in fiction. I have read and re-read Ernest Hemingway's "The Last Good Country," Andrea Barrett's "Theories of Rain," Lydia Peelle's "Phantom Pain," and Wendell Berry's "The Boundary."

That last story, "The Boundary," makes me weep every time I read it. On our camping trip, I read it to Andrew, and I could barely get out the last zinger of a sentence. Even when you know it's coming, it knocks the air out of you. If I could write just one story in my life that had that effect on people.

Translating Humility

From Granta.com

One of my projects this semester is translating a contemporary short story from Spanish to English. The author of the short story "En la Estepa" is Samanta Schweblin, an emerging young writer from Argentina. I found her work through Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish Novelists.





I've only ever translated a poem before, "el Octubre" by Juan Ramon Jiminez, when I was in college. Because I'm not very experienced, I wanted as straight-forward a project as I could make it while still being challenged. There are many reasons translating "En la Estepa" should be a straightforward task: 

• The author is in my generation, and in this globalized world, that ought to mean something. 
• The Spanish is contemporary rather than archaic. Imagine a native speaker of another language trying to translate Shakespeare versus trying to translate Nicholas Sparks. What I'm getting at is it's hard enough for some English-speakers to understand Shakespeare. The more modern the dialect, the easier to translate.
• Spanish and English share a ton of Latin-based words, though Spanish is a Romance language, and English is primarily West Germanic and Anglo-Saxon.
• The story's language is spare and exact; think Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, or one of my favorites, Lydia Davis.

But in spite of these ground-leveling facts, I found out for certain that translating is never, not ever, straightforward. Take this Google Translator literal translation, or "trot," of the opening paragraph from "En la Estepa." 


First the original:

No es fácil la vida en la estepa, cualquier sitio se encuentra a horas de distancia, y no hay otra cosa más para ver que esta gran mata de arbustos secos. Nuestra casa está a varios kilómetros del pueblo, pero está bien: es cómoda y tiene todo lo que necesitamos. Pol va al pueblo tres veces por semana, envía a las revistas de agro sus notas sobre insectos e insecticidas y hace las compras siguiendo las listas que preparo. En esas horas en las que él no está, llevo adelante una serie de actividades que prefiero hacer sola. Creo que a Pol no le gustaría saber sobre eso, pero cuando uno está desesperado, cuando se ha llegado al límite, como nosotros, entonces las soluciones más simples, como las velas, los inciensos y cualquier consejo de revista parecen opciones razonables.

The Google literal translation:

No easy life in the desert, anywhere is just hours away, and there is nothing else to see that this big clump of bushes dry. Our house is several miles from town, but it's good: it is comfortable and has everything you need. Pol goes to town three times a week, sends magazines agro notes on insects and insecticides, and the shopping lists prepared following. In these times when he is not, carried out a series of activities that I prefer to do alone. I think Pol would not want to know about that, but when you're desperate, when it has reached the limit, like us, then the simplest solutions, such as candles, incense and any advice magazine seem reasonable choices.

Say what??


And here is my very first, very rough, halfway literal halfway literary draft:

It’s not easy, life in the steppe, when anywhere else is hours away, and there isn't anything more to see than this field of dry shrubs. Our house is several kilometers from town, but it’s OK: the house is comfortable and has everything we need. Pol goes to town three times a week, sending the farming magazines his articles about insects and insecticides, and going shopping, following the lists that I prepare. During these times when he is not around, I carry out a series of activities that I like to do alone. I don't think Pol would like to know about these, but when one is desperate, when you have reached your limit, like we have, then the unsophisticated solutions, like candles, incense, and whatever the advice columns say, seem like reasonable options.

You can see where I had to make changes to the literal, exact translation just to make it make sense and to match the spirit of the text. 


I venture to say that even when we read or hear something in our own language, we translate. The "meaning" adapts through each person's filter of experiences and imagination, for better or for worse. We've all experienced mis-translation: anyone who's been married, in a serious relationship, worked in an office, dealt with kids. You say something like, "Next time you do X, make sure not to forget Y again," and they hear, "You failed the last time you did X, so try to be smarter next time." When they slink off crying, you're left wondering what you said. 


Working on this translation has reminded me of the value of humility in the way we communicate, read, form and share opinions. I'm a spiritual person, most familiar and involved with the Judeo-Christian tradition, so when I hear people say things like "The Bible says it, so I believe it," my heart starts beating faster and my scalp starts itching. 


I hate confrontation, but I want to ask which Bible words they're basing their unshakeable dogma upon. A modern English translation, of which there are upwards of 30 major distinct versions, some word-for-word literal, some paraphrased? (And even the "literal" have major differences between them.) An old standby, especially in the South, the King James Version, which was translated from a translation (and in some places, poorly)? The Latin Vulgate? The Greek Septuagint? The multifarious Hebrew texts? 


I'm not putting down any of these translations, per se. Whatever we read, be it in the newspaper, a magazine, a blog (yes, even this one!), or the Bible itself, inspired as I believe it may be, we must retain humility, taking the words with a grain of salt, knowing that after all, words are transmitted through humans, and humans make mistakes in the delivery and in the interpretation. 


Nowadays, mathematicians use "approaches" instead of "equals," knowing that even in terms of quantifiable, exact numbers, we can only try to come close. I hope to "approach" an elegant and faithful translation of Schweblin's work, but in process, I am learning the importance of dogged humility. 


I'm sure my husband will appreciate better translation in our communication, too!

Poetry in Web Video

The other day I wrote about the innovative power of web video, especially the potential for writers and other creative voices.

"There's something electric about hearing the author's voice in the words they wrote. There's something intimate about publicly sharing words that were written in private."

You can't listen to a well-wrought story without being engaged.


I proposed that more emerging writers should record themselves reading their work and share the videos on the web, reconnecting the written word to the stream of our oral story-telling past.


My good friend Georgia has already done just that. This is just one way to share words, but I love the way the rhythm and pacing and tone of Georgia Pearle's poem, "Lil' Allen," falls in step with original music by Marcella O'Connor. Visit Project Words and Music for more videos like this. But first, sit back, listen, and enjoy.