Author’s Note

The three short stories published in Hunger Mountain were written as part of an ongoing collaborative project with cellist/composer/instrument inventor Rafaele Andrade called Un-bow. The stories are named either for bow techniques or musical styles that Rafaele drew from, based on her classical training and Brazilian roots. Read the stories in Issue #25, available for purchase here.

Sul Ponticello

Baião

Martelé

Query Letters: Reflections on Bulldozing Writing Walls

Now that my wife, Jennifer, and I have been living in York, England for six months, some of the immediate gratifications of moving abroad have worn off. Instead, the steady monotony of life, raising a toddler, and writing have settled in, and I find Winston Churchill’s slogan during the war, “Keep calm and carry on,” has become a rallying cry of sorts for us here.

As we’ve been going through intense withdrawal from the car, the job, the microwave, money for real-coffee-rather-than-instant, the drying machine, a second pair of pants—all of which we bade farewell in our jump across the pond—Churchill’s slogan compels me to keep moving forward.

When my son, my wife, and I all received the glorious Winter Vomiting Virus (as the National Health Service so articulately and properly named the nasty bug), there were Churchill’s words again, rallying me to continue moving forward.

And when our boiler broke in the middle of the frigid winter, leaving our home heat-less and forcing us to camp out within our walls for a night—buried beneath various clothing articles and watching our breath rise to the ceiling—yup: Churchill, with his pudgy self and wise words, was there again.

Keep calm and carry on.

It strikes me now that this is also excellent advice for a writer. If you love the way words sweep, sleep, or creep together, then chances are you’ve hit your moments of crisis. Perhaps you’ve hit that wall where you sit down at your computer, and all your brain can say to your fingers is, It ain’t happening today, man. No way, no how.

And even though you respond to your brain by saying, Hey, I promised myself I was going to at least get one page a day, no matter how terribly awful and dreadful the writing is, your brain simply lies back and falls asleep, while the little blinking cursor of Microsoft Word still mocks your efforts in perfect rhythm.

Or maybe you’ve written those glorious 200 pages of a middle-grade novel, and you’ve revised it, and you’ve reworked it, and then you’ve revised some more, and you’ve asked a friend who is also a writer to read it, and you’ve incorporated her revisions into further revisions, and then you look at it and you speak to it as if it were a real, live human: You exist! YES! You are here, all 200 pages of you! But then agents and editors aren’t, for some strange reason, as thrilled about your 200 pages as you are.

Or perhaps you’ve crafted two novels—one YA and one MG—and both have been published. Yet you sit down again at the computer, and your brain still won’t release the critical voices that would prefer you sit quietly and do something else with your time. For goodness’ sake, clean out your belly button lint already, will you!?

Whatever form your writing foe takes, keep calm and query on.

No matter how little you feel like it, no matter how futile it sometimes seems, you must keep writing. You must continue to send out queries. You must continue to make contact, believing that the words you write do possess all the possible power and beauty in them to affect one life.

One small life. In one—just one—possibly big way.

Back in the states, when I was in my third year of teaching English at a public school in Connecticut, I gave my 11^th-grade students a novella assignment to complete. Over the course of three months, they would be required to write 50 pages of fiction.

They flipped (and rightly so).

Meanwhile, I relished the chance to challenge them with a task they thought they couldn’t possibly complete.

But every one of them rose to the challenge. Week after week, they crafted their pages and brought them into our classroom, and we shared our woes, joys, hopes, and fears about writing. I gave them the challenge because we learn best by doing and because, Lord knows, I needed it myself.

Sometimes the process of writing can seem mystical and surrounded by an aura of secrecy, or placed on the top of some hierarchy, only accessible to the smartest, or the most educated, or the “talented” or the “gifted.”

And all of that is one load of crapola.

I would have to side with Toni Morrison on this front: The Nobel-prize winning author claimed, “If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn’t about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything.” Some of the best stuff I have ever read wasn’t produced in the highest echelons of society, or by those who would seek to make a name for themselves for that purpose alone.

Indeed, to this day, the best poem I have ever read was one written by a former seventh-grade student of mine named Mike. He called it “Walking at Night,” and it moved me even more deeply than my other favorite poem, “When You Are Old,” by the great Yeats himself.

All this is to say that to write you only need two things: a heart and a pencil. (Well, maybe a pair of hands and some paper would help. And while we’re at it, throw in the brain, and a desk, maybe a room with a view….)

You do not need a degree. Indeed, one of America’s greatest authors, Gore Vidal, never even graduated from college. You do not need permission. Many of the world’s most powerful works were written by people who had teachers who told them they would never do anything of value. You do not need money. Look at the words of Anne Frank: They burn with the fire of redemption and love, yet her room certainly had no veranda. You do not even need praise (though if you are a writer, you certainly think you do). No matter what anyone says about your writing, there is only one person’s opinion and voice that truly count: your own.

And should you choose to wade through the waters of fear, worry, criticism, and lack of discipline, you may find that the words you craft do, indeed, end up making a difference in one life.

(And that life may be your own.)

So yes: keep calm. When it seems a hopeless endeavor, and you’re onto your fourth novel, and you feel like something isn’t clicking…keep calm! Just keep writing. Keep reading. Let yourself continue to believe that you need to create, and that the words you craft may, indeed, reach the village one day.

And yes: query on. When it seems that most of what you write never enters the world, remind yourself that this is the case for all writers—even the truly remarkable ones. They craft pages and pages and pages that will never see the outside of a desk drawer or a hard drive.

Keep writing, and keep sending your work out into the world, whether to magazines, publishers, agents, or even the trees and the birds (more than a handful of poets have honed their own lines by reading them aloud to the birds and the bees). Query on!

You never know when one word may meet another and start a relationship that just won’t quit, and hey, don’t you want to be around to watch what happens from there?

 

By

Luke ReynoldsSports Shoes | Air Jordan Sneakers

 Walter Dean Myers

(1937-2014)

We asked writers, editors, and educators to remember Walter Dean Myers, the author of more than 100 books, whose profound contributions to children’s literature go well beyond the printed word. In his New York Times essay  “Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?”, Mr. Myers argued that “books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books? Where are the future white personnel managers going to get their ideas of people of color? Where are the future white loan officers and future white politicians going to get their knowledge of people of color? Where are black children going to get a sense of who they are and what they can be?”

The following memories only scratch the surface of the mountainous legacy Walter Dean Myers has left behind. –The Editors

---

My lightning bolt Walter Dean Myers moment came when I first read his article in the New York Times Book Review, published in 1986: “I Actually Thought We Would Revolutionize the Industry.” I was a young person aspiring to shape my own editorial list, and Walter’s article about the lack of diversity in children’s books affected me deeply and was instrumental in the identity I took on as an editor. (Sadly, Walter felt compelled to publish an article about the same theme in the New York Times almost thirty years later.) I used Walter’s article as a bible of sorts and would read it every so often. About twenty years after it was published, I gave the article, now yellow and crinkled from many reads, to his longtime editor, the brilliant and caring Phoebe Yeh, with the following inscription: “Walter has always been my hero.”

I first got to know Walter not as his editor, but as Ross Workman’s mom. Walter has long been my son Ross’s favorite author. When Ross was thirteen, he wrote Walter a fan letter, and, astoundingly, Walter wrote back to Ross and asked him to write a novel with him.  Who else would do such a thing but generous, kind Walter Dean Myers, who mentored so many children and teens, and was always willing to take a young person under his wing? Walter and Ross worked on the book together for several years, with Phoebe’s guidance. Kick was published by HarperCollins when Ross was seventeen, in 2011, and he and Walter made various appearances to talk about it.  I tagged along, as mom. I remember sitting in a restaurant in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, with Walter, Ross, and Phoebe after a school appearance, and listening to Walter talk about a wide range of subjects with dazzling knowledge and intellect. When Walter spoke, his listeners would want him to go on and on. He knew about history and literature and music and theatre and sports. He knew about how children and teens should be treated by society. He knew about life.

When Phoebe left HarperCollins for Random House last year, I had the great honor of being asked to be Walter’s editor. We met for lunch with his longtime agent, Miriam Altshuler, and HarperCollins Children’s Editor-in-Chief Kate Jackson, and again, I just wanted to listen to him talk. He was so charismatic and brilliant that he defined the phrase “lights up the room.” We worked on several wonderful books over the past year, which will be published in 2015 and 2016. As an author, Walter was the consummate professional—a gentleman and a scholar. There were days when I still couldn’t believe that I was working with the Walter Dean Myers. Never mind actors and sports stars: modest, ever-humble, kind Walter was my idea of a celebrity. He was a great man who revolutionized the world in his own way. I miss him, and I’m staggered by this loss.

-Rosemary Brosnan, editor

---

The first time I met Walter Dean Myers, I was fourteen years old, and we had already written a rough draft of a book together. His books had such an impact on me that when I was thirteen, I felt compelled to e-mail him to let him know how I felt. His writing spoke directly to my fears, hopes, and emotions. Even though I hadn’t necessarily experienced the same situations that were in his books, the thinking processes of his characters were similar to my own. When Walter emailed me back (within minutes), he suggested we write a book together. Such was Walter’s incredible generosity.

When I walked in to meet Walter in the HarperCollins offices with our editor Phoebe Yeh, I was nervous and self-conscious. What would he think of me? When I first walked into Phoebe’s office, he shook my hand, smiled, and said, “’Sup, man.” I immediately felt at ease. It shocked me how such a brilliant and intelligent man could be so down to earth. Walter never put on “airs” and always had the time and patience for me. His intellectual but down-to-earth demeanor was part of what attracted so many readers to his books. He connected with them on a level few other authors could.

While we worked on our book, Walter was not one to give too much praise, so when he did offer praise, it was meaningful. When my writing was not up to my ability, Walter let me know this and was always there to offer advice and mentorship.

Whenever we met, Walter would talk eagerly about the latest books he was writing. And when he talked, everyone around him listened. He knew something about everything.

Even now it is ironic that I can’t find the right words to do justice about the man who taught me so much about finding and using words. I will always miss Walter as a writer, but I will miss even more the Walter I knew as a person.

-Ross Workman is the coauthor of the novel Kick, written with Walter Dean Myers. He is currently a student at Cornell University.

---

I first discovered Walter Dean Myers when I was looking for books about my students’ lives. They weren’t connecting with the books I knew. How could they?  Their lives had much more serious things to worry about than dances, boys, and summer camp woes.  They lived in homeless shelters.  Their parents were in jail and witnessed shootings of family members. And they were only six!

But, Walter knew my children. He helped me know my children. I couldn’t believe that in all my English classes and even African American Studies courses that Walter Dean Myers was never mentioned. But Walter knew why…and said it best in the New York Times piece this past year.

One year, when I attended the SCBWI-LA conference, Walter was a keynote speaker.

And while I was walking down the street on the way to lunch and gushing about his speech, I hadn’t realized he was right behind me! Slightly embarrassed, we all walked to lunch together.

This was when I dared to ask my haunting question: “Do you think someone like me (Jewish) could write African American books?” I was afraid of the answer, but I had to know. Or maybe I just craved The King’s blessing.

Walter asked why I wanted to. I told him. He responded, “Writing from the inside is never wrong.” At the time, I wasn’t sure what he meant, I thought it meant like “write what ya know.” Really? This was all you got? After much thought, I understood. Don’t write outside of your culture because you think it would be “cool.” Write because you believe a voice needs to be heard. Write because it scrapes your soul and you will not rest until the story is told.

Walter taught me to write from the inside out.

-Lisa Rose, writer

---

A few years back, shortly after I signed my first deal with Simon & Schuster, and had written When I Was the Greatest, Walter Dean Myers came into the store I was managing at the time. I think I was helping a woman with a pair of shoes when he stepped in with his son, my brother, Chris.

“Pops said he wanted to meet you,” Chris said.

I stood straight, and looked Walter in the eye, his presence filling every corner of the room. I reached for his hand and he gave me a very “informal” handshake, Harlem all over his fingers.

“I’ve read your work,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Do you write every day?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s your schedule?”

“Some in the morning, some at night.”

He went on with a few more questions, prodding at my work ethic, my discipline, my passion. And once he was done with the questions, he said, compassionately but firmly, “Son, you will not fail.”

Those words will ring in me for the rest of my life. The way that Baldwin made it okay for Walter to write our lives, Walter gave me the confidence to do the same. He made me feel like my voice was necessary, and that there was a place for me in this legacy.

Walter Dean Myers, thank you so much and I promise to do my very, very best.

–Jason Reynolds, author, When I was the Greatest

---

Walter Dean Myers was the man who ushered me into the role of Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. I said to him, “I don’t know if I can do this.” And he said, “Of course you can.”

He sat next to me at the induction ceremony, and sitting beside him made me feel brave.

Today, the day after his death, I am thinking about his words, his stories. I am thinking about the gentle man he was. I am thinking that no one can ever discount the power of words, because the life of Walter Dean Myers embodied the power of words.

I am also thinking that I would give anything to sit next to him one more time.

–Kate DiCamillo, Newbery medal author, 2014 Ambassador for Young People’s Literature

---

When I first read The Blues of Flats Brown by Walter Dean Myers (Holiday House, 2000) I wasn’t sure what to make of it because it defied my expectations for what a contained and focused picture book should be. Since that time, it’s become one of my favorite books to read, teach, read to my daughter, and use as an inspirational challenge when I write.

I first came across it when doing some research for a class unit I was teaching on animal stories and fables. Yes, the main character of the book, Flats, is a dog, and yes, there might be a moral or even two, but there is a lot more going on in this book. A lot more… If one were to read the basic summary on the jacket: “To escape an abusive master, a junkyard dog named Flats runs away to make a name for himself from Mississippi to New York City playing blues on this guitar,” they might think how the hell could Myers build a story around this premise in a thirty-two page illustrated picture book? But it works without being confusing, contrived, or silly. It just does.

It could be argued the ambitious book exposes oppression, animal rights, and class issues, while teaching about music, jazz in particular, regional dialect and geography, culture, and friendship. I would agree. Yet it could also be argued that it’s just a really good and entertaining story that sucks the reader in without getting too caught up in any of its own eccentricities.

The Blues of Flats Brown, along with some of Myers’ other work, has strengthened my understanding that intriguing children’s fiction doesn’t need to be just about one thing or follow one theme, but instead can open up an entire quirky world for a reader to explore and leave with their own conclusions. It can be relatable, but it doesn’t need to be the exact world we live in. Just like with work for adults, it can and should defy expectations. Similar to the rumor referenced on the last page of the book about Flats and his aging best friend, Caleb, playing their favorite tune, “The Freaky Flea Blues” on the waterfront in Savannah: “Some people don’t believe that. I do”.

–Katy E. Whittingham, writer 

---

I was first introduced to Mr. Walter Dean Myers by way of reading Monster for an African American Literature course in undergrad. He returned to me when I took up a master’s degree in school library media and signed up for the requisite young adult literature course. But I can still recall the moment we become best acquainted.

My 4^th grade students and I kicked off National Poetry Month by reading Sharon Creech’s Love That Dog, a middle grade novel written in verse from the perspective of a boy who is required to keep a poetry journal for school. Without sharing too much of this moving plot, Creech weaves a tale through free verse of a boy whose beloved dog has passed. The boy discovers a platform to explore and share his feelings through poetry, and one poem, Walter Dean Myers’ “Love That Boy”, reaches the boy in that special way that perhaps you yourself have experienced. For the boy in Love That Dog, he feels almost as if Myers has written the poem precisely for him at this exact time.

Poetry is magic like that.

Poetry has the power to transcend time and space and to connect with us no matter what the circumstance or brevity through which the poet communicates.

“Love That Boy” reached me. It spoke to the boys in my class who were hard to love. Those who demanded my unwavering attention and who challenged my ability to manage behaviors. The poem’s title became a mantra that I repeated to myself then and continue to speak today. And it’s not just for my boys. It’s for every kid that walks into my library.

I love those kids.

No matter what baggage they bring into school with them, I love those kids.

How they struggle or why they act out, I love those kids.

If they’ve grown too cool for me or if they roll their eyes at me, I love those kids.

When they lose a book or two or three and I know and they know there’s no way their parent is going to pay to replace it, I love those kids.

When they seem like life just keeps throwing them curveballs and they just can’t seem to get a break, I love those kids.

And every time I love those kids, I think of Mr. Walter Dean Myers and the way he taught us that we’re different, each of us, and that’s something to celebrate. No matter how hard it gets or how few people understand, each and all of us are loved. You don’t need to know by whom. You just have to know it.

–Matthew Winner is an elementary school teacher librarian in Elkridge, Md. He is a 2013 Library Journal Mover & Shaker and was named a White House Champion of Change. Matthew is the host of the popular children’s literature podcast Let’s Get Busy and the author of the Busy Librarian blog. Find Matthew online at @MatthewWinner or by visiting BusyLibrarian.com.

---

Myers’ Monster

“Mr. Mena, stop giving us this boring crap to read,” she said as she hurled The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde across the room. “Don’t worry, I’ll send myself to the ISS [In School Suspension] room.”

And this was how a good portion of that first semester of teaching the high school reading program went. I would choose a book on the shelves left from my predecessor and we would read a page or two into it before the students would lose interest and act out in order to get sent out of the room. Jekyll and Hyde, The Gift of the Magi, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Flowers for Algernon (which, due to poor inter-school communication, they had all previously read in middle school). All with zero luck in attracting student interest.

Now, I feel I should explain that these weren’t the typical high-achieving, need-to-please students of my blue-collar town’s high school. No, this reading program was designed to teach them how to actually read, because at 15 and 16 years old, it was a skill they were still lacking. And while only in high school, these students were already in and out of rehab and juvenile detention centers, consistently absent from school—often for the mandatory court appearances of their parents, or their own—and were already on a first-name basis with their parole officers. Needless to say, my first year of teaching high school was a challenge.

And then Walter Dean Myer’s Monster found its way into my life. And for the first time in my incredibly short high school teaching career, I actually had students volunteering to read out loud. I, surprisingly, even had to develop a “first come, first served” system for calling dibs on the parts. “Well, Nick, if you want to read Steve’s part again, you better get here before Jayden tomorrow and call dibs.”

Now, I don’t want to sugarcoat and say everything that transpired over the next month while we read Monster was magical. Life rarely works that way. Still, because Myers’s novel had people of different ethnicities, different social classes, and different prejudices, I had 90% of my class thoroughly engaged. I had kids actually reacting to the text and telling me, yeah, my dad was in prison and this seems pretty accurate. Or, my favorite: “I hate that Pitro—Pechel—Petrocelli girl. Why is she so mean and dumb? Can’t she see Steve didn’t do it?”

Which, of course, then warranted my favorite response, “Why do you think she’s trying so hard to convict him? What does she have to gain from it? Would you do the same thing in her shoes?”

This then led to our first class discussion that was not completely one-sided. One that took us out of the text and into the students’ own lives and hypothetical choices. And for that, I owe everything to Walter Dean Myers.

–Gerardo Menais an ex-Spec Ops decorated Iraqi Freedom veteran turned high school English teacher with pieces published and forthcoming in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Poets & Writers, and Ninth Letter, among others.

---

My Fabulous Life with Walter Dean Myers

I like to pretend Walter Dean Myers and I are BFF.  In fact, I refer to him as WDM.  In the summer of 2011, Catherine (one of my co-graduate assistants) and I were insanely excited to be WDM’s “keepers,” as he called us, when he was a visiting writer at VCFA. I didn’t know much about WDM’s life, but I do know and love his work, and so do my students. Of all the moments we had, from leaving a maple bunny on his pillow before he arrived, to the drive back to the airport with Diane Stanley, the moment I will forever remember was during his Saturday morning talk. It’s not because his talk was insightful, which it was, or inspiring, which it also was, but because it was a much delayed foot-in-mouth moment that began on the way back from the airport the day before.

In the car that day, WDM, Catherine, and I had some meaningful conversation.  Oh, it was the usual run-of-the-mill, getting-to-know-you type of conversation about politics, the state of education in the country, juvenile criminal justice, and the foster care system. Thinking I had some insightful info, I launched into a rambling about a documentary I had seen about adopting older children who are in foster care. “And you know,” I had said knowingly, “many foster kids who age out of the system wind up joining the Armed Forces.” As I continued, WDM nodded and smiled, a truly attentive listener.

So you can imagine my horror during WDM’s talk when he told us all about 1) being a foster child and 2) his time in the Armed Forces. His story wasn’t exactly like those of the children about which I had spoken earlier, but it became clear to me that anything I had told him was not news. It also became clear to me that not only is WDM an amazing writer and speaker, but he’s also a truly amazing, gracious person. What could have been an awkward moment in the confined space of the car wasn’t. He didn’t even mention it, and I sure wasn’t going to.

-Danielle Pignataro

---

A Letter to Mr. Myers

Dear Mr. Myers,

Excuse me if I cry during this letter, because we never got to meet. I always thought we would one day, with little brown faces listening intently at our feet. We’d both read from our best-selling works and you’d say, “Well done.” And I’d try to hide my fangirl smile.

You’re gone now, Mr. Myers, and I’ll never get to hear you say those things.

As a Black writer, Mr. Myers, I thank you for all the work you’ve done. You’ve made it possible for someone like me to be accepted and seen. The Legacy, in your hands, has manifested into many books instead of just one dream.

Always,

-Necole Ryse, YA author

---

Walter Dean Myers will forever be an influential author in my life. As a reader, I first discovered Walter Dean Myers through his books: Scorpions and Monster. He had a way with language, and he had a way to make you feel as though you had become a part of the story. He was a pioneer in young adult literature, both in fiction and nonfiction. He made reading young adult stories feel authentic. In my English class, we watch a video every year on how to write a short story. My students watch Walter Dean Myers explain how he puts pictures up in his writing room and creates characters from those pictures. He explains in the video how he was born in a small town, and if he continued to live in that small town, his stories would have been much different. Instead, he grew up in Harlem, wrote about Harlem, told the stories of Harlem. Influenced by James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” Myers’ stories have that same feeling of jazz and growing up during such uncertain and oppressive times as the Civil Rights Movement.

As a writer, Walter Dean Myers influenced me in this way: He said that when he sits down to write, he writes for the reluctant reader. He wanted to reach kids that weren’t the typical reader. He wanted to reach out and turn non-readers into readers. He wanted his passion to become their passion. It is clear that, in so many ways, Walter Dean Myers achieved the goal that he set out to accomplish. In bookstores, libraries, and classrooms all over the United States and the world, the books and the influence of Walter Dean Myers are read and enjoyed by both young and old. His stories are powerful, influential, and didactic without being preachy. He had a way with words that pulled you into the story, allowing you to spend some time with his characters and see their world. After reading a story by Walter Dean Myers, you would come away a better person.

When I was growing up, I didn’t like to read. It wasn’t until I came across young adult authors like Walter Dean Myers that all that began to change. So now, when I sit down to write, I don’t think about best sellers, or fame and fortune; my purpose for writing is to write the story for that reluctant reader. In writing my novel, The Final Play, I wanted to write a story that young adults could relate to and engage with. I wanted to show that literature is about more than just words on a page. It is an experience in which readers can submerge themselves and truly become a part of in so many ways. Walter Dean Myers accomplished his goal of getting reluctant readers to read. Even though we say goodbye to a legend, Walter Dean Myers will live on in our hearts, our minds, and his stories.

–Leonard Spacek, YA author

---

The first time I ever met Walter Dean Myers was at the SCBWI-LA conference in 2007. It was my first time going as an actual author–well, almost. My book Chess Rumble was coming out in a few months. I didn’t even have an ARC, just the proofs, which I had in an over-sized envelope in my bag. Walter was the first author I ever really wanted to meet, so I eagerly waited in the autograph line to see him. I had all kinds of things to say to him, important things, as if I was the first to ever tell him how his books changed  my life, how they inspired me to write, etc. etc. When I got closer, I had second doubts. Was I any good, really? Did I dare call myself writer? Compared to Walter?

When I found myself in front of him, I was dumbstruck. I handed him a copy of his book Monster to sign. Feeling the pressure to say something, I blurted out the first thing to come to mind –”uh, I have a book coming out too.” Brilliant.

I handed him a postcard with the cover of my book on it. He thoughtfully took it, looked it over. “You don’t have a copy yet?” I shook my head. “I have a proof,” I said, clutching my bag. He looked at me with his Yoda eyes, waiting. I didn’t know if he wanted me to leave but somehow I gathered that he wanted to see it. Now. I looked behind me at the line of people eyeing me, like why is this doofus hogging the line? I fumbled for my bag and pulled out the envelope and handed it to him. He slid out the  glossy proof and immediately stopped when he saw the opening page of a boy with his fist held straight out at us. He looked up at me and smiled, nodding and flipped through the other pages, pausing now and then to read a line or look at one of Jesse Watson’s amazing paintings.

I didn’t say a thing, didn’t dare explain what it was or what I was trying to say with the story. I may have asked him something like “Do you play chess?” He didn’t answer. I kept looking behind me and shrugging at the impatient line, but Walter seemed determined to flip through all the pages of my slim novella. When he was done, he put the pile down on the table, put his hands on top of them and nodded. “Yes,” was all he said, quietly, then nodded again, one more time. “Good.”

He finished signing my book. I didn’t know what he meant. Was that it? When he was done, I awkwardly shook his hand, scooped up my pile and my autographed book and got out while the getting was good. I’m pretty sure I thanked him. I ran to a quiet corner, dumped my stuff on the ground and cracked open the copy of Monster. In it, he wrote: To Greg–A writer.

The Master had spoken.

–G. Neri, YA author

 Best Sneakers | Footwear

Sin. Such a little word.

But what does the word tell us? According to John Fredrick Nims and David Mason in Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, the sounds of “sin” are meaningful. Our lips are drawn together as the hiss of s escapes the lungs, struggling between teeth and tongue through friction. Ssss—the serpent’s sound. From this beastly fricative, a slight jaw drop allows the little i, a middle frequency (tenor) vowel that Plato considered “especially apt for movement.” This i slithers the serpent’s s through the mouth to end with a nasally n that is more irritating than its siblings m and ng, with its higher tone and whiny sound. Sin: Movement that irritates and interferes; a whiny beast in constant struggle.

We’ve all danced with, told a secret to, or bedded one—most likely all—of the Cardinal Sins: Envy, Sloth, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Wrath, and Pride. The seven deadly sins that engender all other sins. A quick Internet search reveals various contemporary ways these sins (or the idea of them) have been interpreted: seven deadly sins of investing; seven deadly sins of JavaScript implementation; seven deadly sins of social networking; of blogging; of a relationship; and—Suzanne’s and my favorite—seven deadly sins of Gilligan’s Island.

And yes, there are plenty of lists devoted to the seven deadly sins of writing. A popular one resides at Hamilton College’s Writing Center: passive voice, incorrect punctuation of two independent clauses, wordiness, misuse of the apostrophe, misplaced and dangling modifiers, pronoun problems, and committing pet peeves. The topic of craft not only dominates most writing sin lists, it’s the top priority in workshops, essays, lectures, and coffee shop discussions. As well it should be—it is craft that makes an artist. A close second priority in the writing community, especially among emerging writers, is cracking into the Fort Knox that is publication. A distant third is conversation about the writing life.

Yet, our writing life is where we are most vulnerable to sin. Crafting stories, poems, and essays is not sinful. Neither is publishing. Our characters and speakers on the page, they too can sin; but no matter how much blood we spill with their hands or anger we pour into their hearts, our characters only fall to sin if we let them. It is we, the flesh and blood—far from perfect—writers, who are primed to fall into a life of sin; a life of faults, transgressions, and constant struggle against temptation.

Traditionally, stories about the deadly sins were meant to teach sinners how to travel through a long trial and back to virtue after a fall from grace. So too does a fall from grace exist in the writing life. The difference I see, is that the path back is not one toward virtue, but toward the work of writing. (Perhaps virtue and the work of writing are one and the same; a question only the writer can decide.) In my own writing life, I do find my way back to the work but I never stay there, falling again soon enough to publication Greed or a Slothful writing schedule. I have to wonder if I am lengthening my own pass through the long trial, with this cyclic fall. Perhaps the struggle satiates an innate desire for the apprentice’s initiation; the longer the fall, the greater my lesson. Maybe I simply enjoy tempting the whiny beast. A sin masochist.

Last Spring Suzanne and I brainstormed over email for a lecture we planned to present at a writing retreat. As we threw out ideas, our opening (and often, closing) paragraphs vented struggles with integrating a writing life into lives that included, but were not limited to, raising a teenager, a difficult pregnancy, aging parents, spouses, working non-writing jobs to pay bills, paying those bills, and the (very) occasional leisure time. As we fought Sloth and Wrath toward domestic responsibilities and dreamed of giving in to the Lust and Gluttony for our words, we found ourselves cycling through the seven sins without notice until Envy reared its green head and heckled us. No longer could we turn from our sins.

Addressing sin in the writing life, we decided, is a tool for traveling the multifaceted work of writing. From stark loneliness at the keyboard to workshop with peers to reading in front of a crowd at a coffee shop to a national book tour, the journey of writing is in constant motion. To maintain the dedicated path, the writer is forced to consistently re-establish her footing, while (hopefully) building stamina instead of breaking spirit.

So we divvied the sins between us. Each of us penned an individual essay on our ‘sin of the week’ and then worked together on editing and formatting the series as a whole piece. To broaden the discussion and to deepen the scope of experience with sin in the writing life, we surveyed seven writers at various stages in their careers. We asked how and when they encounter the deadly sins, and—this is what we were truly greedy for—what tricks they used in overcoming them. Our hope now is that you, reader and writer, will add to our investigation.

Despite the ever-present temptation of the whiny beast, the act of writing returns writers to their work. And return we must. What happens then, when we do accomplish our goals of so many words per day, so many submissions per month, or the publishing deal of a lifetime? Here we ought to let Virgil guide us, as he does The Pilgrim: “Remember your philosophy: the closer a thing comes to its perfection, more keen will be its pleasure or its pain.” And so the long trial continues.

~

We invite you to read, think, and live with us in sin.

Comment on the Hunger Mountain Facebook page to join our discussion, share your stories, and teach us your tricks for taming the beast that tempts you away from the writing life.

Next up: Envy ….. Series Page

~

.

---

.
Alghieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy; Volume 1: The Inferno. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
.
Nims, John Frederick and Mason, David. Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry. New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2000.

.Nike footwear | Sneakers

Sloth, real Sloth, is easy to recognize. Greasy hair, potato chip crumbles down the shirt, dirty dishes stacked at the sink and on the coffee table. The sun rises and sets while one lies on the couch with eyes transfixed on a TV screen. A writer can be Slothful exactly like this, but Sloth in the writing life is a kaleidoscope of images: I click through random articles on the Internet, rationalizing that I need to know the most current events; I run more errands than I need to in a vain attempt to “get ahead”; or I cook a new recipe that takes hours to prepare because I feel as though my family needs this from me. My most destructive Sloth is convincing myself that I can let the afternoon or evening go by without writing because tomorrow will be more productive than today. Then the morning comes and I’ve slept in, so I promise to write that night—a promise I easily break.

When we asked what Sloth looks like in the lives of our surveyed writers, we heard a lot about the vortex of social media. “I worry about how many times I stop in the middle of writing to play Words with Friends™ or Draw Something™, or to make the rounds of Twitter, Facebook, email, etc.” Risa Nye admits. “It certainly doesn’t help me work with greater focus, and I find it really exhausting.” Jason Mott confesses: “Facebook is a terrible time sink. Probably the worst. Five minutes can turn into an hour on there so fast your head will spin. I’m very guilty of falling victim to Facebook’s charms.”

As I researched Sloth for this essay, the soft, arboreal leaf-eater asleep in the trees morphed into a snarling, snorting beast pacing in front of my desk, ready to charge. I always recognized Sloth as “sluggishness, laziness, and physical or mental inactivity”—behavior I do not want to give in to, but at the same time not the worst sin I could commit. There are days so full of activity in my house and in my family’s lives, it feels as though the sluggishness toward writing is justified. Earned, even.

It never occurred to me that Sloth is an active deadly sin: “failing to utilize one’s talents and gifts.” The inaction that is failing to write leads to some nasty, active verbs: Sloth cheats the world of art, Sloth silences voices. How did I miss this?

I’m appalled that Sloth is not simply having a lazy day. By ignoring our writing we cut ourselves off from the rewards that stem from this deep thinking and creativity, and we fail a community that needs the respite of a compelling story after a long, hard day, an essay that helps them feel less alone, or a poem that provides courage during a tough time. By not honoring the writing life we are not honoring our thread in history, our connection to the great writers before us, the ones in our midst, and the ones yet to come. It took these words—failing to utilize one’s talents and gifts—to strike a chord with my inner Sloth, to stop the beast from running wild and free in my writing life. Now to tame it.

It’s not as if no one ever talked with me about how to identify Sloth or showed me, through action, that it doesn’t have to be a negative force in my life. For two years I worked for architect Ligon Flynn. My job consisted of writing about his design philosophy and weaving it into the pattern of architectural history. Given the breadth of the work he produced during a career that lasted more than five decades, Ligon could be described as anything but Slothful.

In a building designed by Ligon, tucked in a nook behind a stairwell where the window was a floor-to-ceiling sliding door, my writing space looked onto a courtyard oasis. A soothing trickle from the water garden; climbing vines that carpeted one-hundred-year-old red brick walls; and lush foliage from dwarf pittosporum and fatsia to Japanese maples and seasonal flowers providing splashes of eye-catching color. But being paid to sit at that desk—this dream job that I had not yet earned as a writer so early in my career—made me feel like enjoying the view was an act of laziness. I kept my head down and concentrated on putting words on the page. I pushed myself through the work day until my eyes grew hazy and my mind threatened to explode from information-overload. To alleviate the pressure, I often went to the restroom when it wasn’t necessary or poured one more cup of coffee when I’d already had plenty—two valid reasons for leaving my desk.

Throughout the day Ligon would visit my nook. Sometimes he sat across from me in his comfortable leather chair and stared into the courtyard, saying nothing. Usually he wanted to read something I had written, or he thumbed through pictures in one of his many architecture books. At first I wasn’t sure how to respond to his sitting across from me in thoughtful silence. This was my job, after all, and I assumed something was expected of me. But I learned that the routine of leaving his desk to stare out the window or peruse inspiring images was integral to his creative process.

When Ligon left his desk, he didn’t leave his work. Quite the opposite; his work was allowed time to mature in his mind. Though he had walked away, he remained active and engaged in his creative process. Ligon had trained his Sloth-beast as a companion; something he tended to without being deterred from his work. When I realized this, I understood that I needed to figure out what the creative process should look like in my life. Soon enough, when I needed a break from the mountain of architecture books and my writing on the computer screen, I simply sat back and watched water fall into the fountain or bamboo grass sweeping in the breeze.

Finding one’s process in the face of Sloth is not simple. The beast needs consistent discipline for proper training. “I wouldn’t call it a routine, but I do schedule breaks, promising myself I can watch a guilty pleasure show on Bravo if I finish a piece,” says Nye. “An old-school To Do list actually helps motivate me to get things done so I can cross them off. Not groundbreaking, but it keeps me on track and cuts down on my wanderings away from what I need to do.” Mott keeps his Sloth tethered to the desk: “I literally force myself to sit at my keyboard—while keeping the internet turned off on my computer—until I write or edit a certain quota for the day.”

Yet writing is not just…writing. Writing is reading, organizing, researching, editing, submitting, and staring out the window with a faraway gaze. Poet Nancy Eimers, one of my graduate school advisors, enlightened me after I apologized for staring out the window and sending her fewer poems than promised:

It’s funny about the relationship between intense reading, staring out the window, and writing. Anyone watching a writer work would think some real laziness was involved, but I find that that ‘empty space’ is integral to the process though perhaps just what exactly that vacancy is can’t be put into words. All I can say is that it is somehow meditative and that something is happening that has a profound connection both to what has just happened and what is about to.

The “empty space” Eimers speaks of, I believe, manifests in many forms. Sometimes it includes a mundane task that moves the body and lets the mind unwind, a task that might feel Slothful—Why am I not at my computer?—but that, as it turns out, serves the writing. It could be sweeping the porch or the slow folding of laundry, down to the meticulous creasing of underwear. For Nye it’s “Ironing! Great distraction, occupies the hands but not the mind, really—and after a couple of shirts or whatever, the respite allows me to carry on with renewed energy.” Suzanne, my co-author for this essay series, told me about what she calls her “and” space.

Most of my better ideas come after a period of silence on the page. I draft something and I come back to it to revise. The space between—that tiny little ‘and’—is just that. A bit of space that separates the two actions. What I ‘do’ inside that space changes, but it never looks anything like writing. It usually involves cooking. I chop a LOT of vegetables in my ‘and’ space.

Two years ago, no longer seated in my nook by the courtyard but in a new house in a new town, I found myself forgetting to engage in the “empty space” that had become important in my writing time. Trying to coordinate writing with the dynamics of my family’s new schedule, I felt the same pressure I did when I first began working for Ligon. I had to produce pages.

Similar to excessively visiting the bathroom, as I had done before I learned how to build an empty space at my desk when I worked with Ligon, I began leaving my writing to wash dishes. Unlike the bathroom and coffee breaks I had taken at work, washing dishes appeased something within me that I couldn’t immediately identify. When I first started, my body was tense and I questioned my motives, even put myself down for not being a dedicated writer. After a few weeks, my shoulders slackened and I stopped being self-deprecating. Freed from negative thinking, my mind began to wander through my writing as I scraped the morning’s eggs from a skillet. Similar to Nye’s ironing respite and Suzanne’s “and” space, my ideas had time to mature—not unlike the mental engagement Ligon’s courtyard once gave me (though certainly not as aesthetically pleasing). Soon enough cleaning dishes became integral to my creative process. I purposefully left the dishes for when I needed to walk away from the desk—when I needed an active empty space.

Today, I’m working again and my schedule has changed, so the time for late-morning dishes has ceased. Instead I’m trying a new approach to keep my Sloth-beast trained. With scissors and glue and markers, I trace, paste, write, and draw in a visual journal. Perhaps this new space in my creative process will be with me for life, or maybe I won’t finish the one journal I have started. Either way, I have to keep allowing time for my active “empty space” if I want the Slothful beast to be my companion and not my master.

Everything I’ve learned about Sloth tells me to be less focused on how much, how often, how many. Still, I feel incredibly Slothful when only a small number of words end up on the page after sitting at the computer for hours, and Nye agrees: “I’m ‘in the chair’ a lot of hours each day, and there are times I wish I had more to show for it.” Writing holds a small time-slot in my current schedule; it’s upsetting to feel like I’ve wasted time, given that it takes a lot of planning to arrive in the first place.

But Mott reminds me, “You can have episodes where solving some writing problem takes time, but that just means you spend that time writing on something else. One doesn’t bang their head against the vault door, they take their time and pick the lock.” And that’s it, I realize. A writer must learn the right finesse for their writing time: how to traverse the ebb and flow of production; when to walk away; what task encompasses the “empty space.” It takes tolerance and experimentation and dedication to do that. But if I can manage it, Sloth will rest nuzzled at my feet while I work into the wee hours of the morning.

~

Join us as we read, think, and live in sin.

Comment on the Hunger Mountain Facebook page to share your tricks for taming the sinful beasts that pull you away from the writing life.

Series Page….. Dear Sinner ….. Envy

Next up: Lust

~

The writer friends quoted here…

 

Jason Mott holds a BA in fiction and an MFA in poetry. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and his debut novel, The Returned, will be published September 2013 by MIRA Books.
.
.
Risa Nye’s essays and articles have appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Skirt! Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and others. She co-edited Writin’ on Empty, an anthology that guides parents through the transition to an empty nest.
.

The questions we asked…

Do you distract yourself from writing? (e.g., Facebook, email, dishes, shopping)

Is Sloth a mental block that keeps you from writing?

Do you have a routine in which you have curbed Sloth behavior?latest jordans | Air Jordan Release Dates 2021 + 2022 Updated , Ietp

Cheryl Wilder would like another helping, please. And maybe just one more?

While studying poetry as an undergraduate in UNC Wilmington’s Creative Writing program, I became obsessed with line breaks. For me, the magic of poetry resided in a well-rendered line break. I marveled at how the decision to move a word from one line to the next created suspense and anticipation in the poem. And if I tried hard enough, I could create double meaning in the poem by choosing which words stood together on each line—a story within a story. I was in love. This poetic tool influenced every decision I made during revision. For two years, nothing mattered more than the line and the line break that made it possible.

The problem? My obsession drove me to revise even a “finished” poem. I wanted the line breaks to be more poignant and the images to be richer with double meaning. I sat for hours making a single line break decision, only to change it back, or change it in a different way. When I finally stopped, the poem sat chopped-up on the page, barely breathing. Perfectionism had overpowered both me and my poem. I was a revision-Glutton.

Over-indulgence in revision brings up the age-old question for writers and artists alike: is a piece ever truly finished? During a Sarah Lawrence Summer Writers Seminar, poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar told our class a story when this question came up, as it often does. She was honored with being one of a few readers that “opened up” for poet Galway Kinnell. As the readings of the night proceeded, Bosselaar watched Kinnell penciling edits to his Pulitzer prize-winning book in preparation for his reading. If the Pulitzer does not persuade an artist that his work is finished, than what in the world could?

When Suzanne and I asked a handful of writer friends about Gluttony in their writing life, Jason Mott said this about revision: “No piece is ever finished. That’s just a rule of art in all forms.” But the endless tinkering can come at a price. “For me though, gluttony always makes me suffer. In my world, a project is done when I’ve read, reread, and edited it until I’m utterly and completely disgusted with it. That’s the ‘walk away’ point. Or, rather it’s the ‘walk away or I’m torching my computer’ point.”

Risa Nye knows what it feels like to labor over a much-revised piece. “I have one particular piece in mind here.” I marvel at her: Only one? “I have revisited and made a number of changes to it. Sent it out, got rejections. Gave it a long rest. It’s out in the world right now, and I’m determined to get that sucker published somewhere. Wanna read it?”

Over-indulgence in revision is just one form of writing-Gluttony, but it happens to be the only kind I currently suffer. One of the most resonant lessons I am learning while writing this essay series—working with co-author Suzanne, reading the comments of our surveyed writers, and hashing through revisions with our editor, Claire Guyton—is that the deadly sins play out in the writing life in a stunning variety of ways. Maybe one of the reasons we formally discuss the writing life so much less—as opposed to the time and space we devote to solving the mysteries of craft and publication—is precisely due to its individual nature; its utter subjectivity. At best we can only learn how others traverse their writing process, but inevitably we have to make the writing work in our own lives, addressing our own nuanced, sinful transgressions.

As we’ve discussed elsewhere in this series (most notably in Sloth and Lust), writing includes other tasks besides putting words on the page. One of these is research, which brings the Gluttony out in Jennifer Lunden. “I am an information addict. There. I said it.” And what’s wrong with that? “Well, here is the problem,” she continues. “I love information. And when I am doing research for an essay, or for my book-in-progress, one curiosity leads to another, and another, and another, and pretty soon I’m a long way down the rabbit hole… [which] makes for a very slow writer.”

Jason Mott suffers a form of Gluttony that I Envy: adding words. “I tend to overindulge in description. Settings, scenes, characters. I can go on for pages just describing everything about them if I don’t edit myself.” How I wish I could silence my internal editor, who commands a halt to any impulse to Gluttonous writing, then calls for the Gluttonous revision to begin.

Adam Arvidson’s Gluttony should be the Envy of any writer. “My writing process was once described by Kurt Caswell (a VCFA advisor and environmental essayist) as ‘binge writing.’ I tend to do all my research up front, then sit down and write in one big fell swoop. It’s not unusual for me to crank out a 3000 word essay or article in about 2 hours. That’s gluttony at its best, and because of it (and the exhaustion I feel after gorging myself at the keyboard), I would love to just put a bow on my writing and walk away.”

I’m inspired by Arvidson’s Gluttonous writing, even by the exhaustion he feels afterwards, which I see as the natural coda to a satisfying hard day’s work. I’m determined to experience that feeling.But Arvidson and I are natural opposites. Whereas I’m editing before words even appear on the page, his binge writing leaves him with no energy nor desire for revision at all.Never looking back is as fatal to a piece as over-revising.We need tofinda balance between the two extremes. So far the best method I have found for tempering my revision-Gluttony is totiltmy laptop screen toward my fingerson an angle that hidesthe wordsappearing across the page, taunting me to revise them.Arvidson’s balance comes from a methodical approach to revision that preserves his early, impulse-driven material.

“When I attended workshops with Barry Lopez at VCFA,” says Arvidson, “he spoke of the ‘genius of the first draft.’ Lopez feels that there is some magic in those first words and that any revision (even for flow and grammar) should be considered carefully.” So Arvidson created a revision process that honored the first draft. “[O]ne must revise, to some degree, so I do. Taking Lopez’s advice, though, I save a new copy of my file and run some revisions. Later, the next day, say, or sometimes after even months, I save a new copy and run the revisions again. So I end up with files called ‘Essay’ and ‘Essay2’ and ‘Essay3.’ At some point, either when it feels near finished or when I feel it has lost something, I go back to earlier versions and read those again. It’s not unusual for bits of the original feast to come back in.”

There is always one slice of pie that is cut larger than the rest, one that makes us feel queasy as we loosen our belt and scrape the last pieces off the plate toward our mouths—a deeper, darker over-indulgence, and I’m not talking about Hemingway’s drinking, Burroughs’ heroin, Byron’s sex, Dostoevsky’s gambling, Rand’s amphetamines, or Dickens’ “repulsed attraction” to the morgue. I’m talking about the over-consumption of advice from other writers, something Rich Farrell knows a lot about:

I consumed craft books by the dozens. I read whatever more successful writers read. I followed superstitions and practices. (Write before breakfast! Write to music! Write in nature!) I gobbled up aphorisms and advice and stuffed myself with wisdom: You attend, said Annie Dillard, and I did. I searched earnestly for Robert Olen Butler’s white hot center and I wrote moral fiction as John Gardner preached. I practiced a sort of ascetic discipline that involved forced hours of bad writing. All of this became a desperate prayer, a cry for help that had less to do with the words on the page and more to do with my unfulfilled sense of self.

I, too, have hungered for the knowledge and experience and words of successful writers. I hasten to admit it looks nothing as seductive as Farrell’s search for the “white hot center.”

When I decided to pursue writing as a high school student, the first lesson I took in was to find my own voice. I considered this advice to be absolute and I didn’t Gluttonously work to capture Sexton’s emotional anguish or Poe’s attention to internal rhyme. Instead I bounced from William Blake to James Joyce without any real direction. Back then I was a Glutton for words and I did write pages and pages of awful material (which may be why I grew to over-compensate with my revision), but I did so because I selfishly wanted to discover something within myself. The advice that struck a chord with me was not bad advice—a writer has to find her voice—it was incomplete advice.

When I returned to college in my late twenties as a single mother of a three-year-old, I had no time for indulgence in craft books or hours of producing pages (good or bad). Instead, I indulged in the wondrous Gluttony of education. In Spring 2005 I began my last year at UNC Wilmington. It was finally time to gorge on poetry—I had just been introduced to Symborska, Pastan, and Hoagland.

That semester, poet A. Van Jordan was a visiting writer for our Writers Week and I was one of a lucky few students scheduled to receive a one-on-one critique from him. I also planned to attend the Sandhills Writers Series that April, where poet Thomas Lux would provide a one-on-one critique as well. After years of revising many of my poems to the point of waste, I was determined to figure out how not to over-indulge in revision-Gluttony. In part, this meant I needed to trust myself—my decisions—during revision. And learning how to do that meant learning how to trust myself as a writer over writers whose work I admired and respected.

Workshop is a valuable tool for writers, but as a new serious writer, finding confidence in my revision process was not easy in the wake of advice from an admired writer. In those early years of undergraduate school, I was Gluttonous for any successful writer’s feedback, and took it in voraciously—because they knew better than I did. They had books to prove it. But if you’ve ever been in more than one workshop, or you have had two writers leading one workshop, you quickly learn the varying opinions on how to revise one single poem. It was enough to make this beginning writer crazy.

Determined to trust my revision choices, therefore freeing myself from over-indulgence in revision, I gave Lux and Van Jordan exactly the same poems. Once I gathered the revision suggestions together, I read them over and over, absorbing their differences. Fireworks shot off in my private writing life. I was elated at their conflicting opinions; it validated that I could make a divergent choice too. It was one of those moments when I felt my brain grow.

Learning how to stop putting too much emphasis on what another poet said about my work was an important step in actualizing myself as a writer. Before then, it seemed as if I was only playing writer, not being one. And as I had suspected, freeing myself from writer-advice-Gluttony in turn helped me address my revision-Gluttony.

Mott empathizes with feedback overload and has found a way to avoid it: “Getting lots of feedback from lots of people is mostly useless and serves only to cause confusion. I’ve been lucky enough to find a core group of about three really strong readers who I’m able to send my work to for feedback. I definitely listen to what they have to say.” And Farrell has addressed his writing-advice-Gluttony by leaving half his slice of pie on the plate. “I had feasted on my own need for validation. The belly-ache from such on over-indulgent binge came in the form of a year’s worth of rejection letters. But then a strange thing happened. As the initial sting wore off from the impersonal rejections, I began to feel a sort of relief, a slow, somewhat painful but liberating realization that my gluttonous ambition had been misguided.”

When I look back at the poems that took the brunt of my indulgent revisions, I see the initial beauty of the words that I loved so much. I’ve even pulled a few from the dredges to bring back to life. And over these last weeks, as Claire and I tinker over every last word in an essay late into the night before she publishes it, I realize that my history of Gluttonous revision is not wasted. I’m not afraid to cut my favorite sentence if it doesn’t work for a piece. I don’t feel guilty for staring at a word for ten minutes in hope of finding a more descriptive one. And I’m comfortable taking constructive criticism. Though writers approach Gluttony in their writing life differently, what we’re really saying is, “I’m not going to stop until I get this right.”

The truth is, Gluttony may be the most productive sin for writers. “To me,” says Lunden about her over-indulgence in research, “That rabbit hole leads to a fascinating warren of interwoven facts and stories, and that makes for a good essay.” Revision-Gluttony, writing-advice-Gluttony, writing too many pages of description, researching ourselves into that rabbit hole—all of these variations of Gluttony mean one thing: the writer is engaged in the writing life. Those chopped-up, barely breathing drafts of yesterday are stepping stones to the completed manuscripts of today.

~

Join us as we read, think, and live in sin.

Comment on the Hunger Mountain Facebook page to share your tricks for taming the sinful beasts that pull you away from the writing life.

Series Page ….. Dear Sinner ….. Envy ….. Sloth

Lust ….. Next up: Greed

~

The writer friends quoted here…

Adam Regn Arvidson is a landscape architect and nonfiction writer. His writing has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, flyway, Michigan Quarterly Review, and many design magazines. A Minneapolis resident, he will graduate from VCFA’s MFA program in January.

Richard Farrell is upstreet’s Creative Nonfiction Editor and a Senior Editor at Numéro Cinq. His work has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Numéro Cinq, and A Year in Ink anthology. His essay “Accidental Pugilism” received a Pushcart nomination.

Jennifer Lunden is a glutton for information and proud winner of a Pushcart for “The Butterfly Effect,” which appeared in Creative Nonfiction. Another essay will appear in Orion. Her book-in-progress, One Canary Sings, won Honorable Mention in the 2010 Maine Literary Awards.

Jason Mott holds a BA in fiction and an MFA in poetry. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and his debut novel, The Returned, will be published September 2013 by MIRA Books.

Risa Nye’s essays and articles have appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Skirt! Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and others. She co-edited Writin’ on Empty, an anthology that guides parents through the transition to an empty nest.

 

The questions we asked…

How does a writer learn when to walk away from a piece and not over-indulge in revision? How do you know when a piece is finished?

What do you do with those pieces that have been suffocated by your over-revision? Do you revisit? Try to revive them?

How about the over-indulgence in an admired writer’s feedback? How does their critique influence your revision?

Is there something else that you over-indulge in when it comes to writing?

Is this more of a sin for beginning writers?

 jordan release date | New Balance 991 Footwear

Wrath doesn’t sound fierce enough for its meaning. It starts with a liquid consonant and ends with a breeze through the teeth, and it’s comprised of a single syllable that contains the first vowel sound we teach to children. Taking a cue from my co-author Cheryl’s introduction to this series, however, I listen for fury in the word, and at the right frequency, I hear it. The flowing r deepens into the growl of a cornered cat. The short a escalates to an open-mouthed scream. The th whips into a spitting curse fixed on the enemy.

I’ve been afraid to look closely at Wrath. Because my husband produces for a television news magazine, we frequently watch episodes about rage—between neighbors, ex-spouses, co-workers, siblings, classmates—festering and building until someone winds up dead. There’s a difference between Wrath and anger: anger can smolder indefinitely, the ominous thundering that never becomes the storm, whereas Wrath explodes and destroys. The firenado.

I once came close to publicly releasing my own small firenado into the center of my writing life. For years I had idolized “Jamie,” a well-known author who produced the kind of work I wanted to write. Her books seemed to target me specifically. They plucked me from the reading multitudes, pushed me into my writing chair, forced me to face my work—work that wrangled with a complicated loss—and showed me how to shape it into something whole. Because of Jamie, my work found its literary cousins. It belonged somewhere. Jamie, a hologram hovering over my laptop on a perpetual writing date, became my mentor and trainer. She wouldn’t let me give up or even get up.

I badly wanted to meet Jamie in person, to narrow the gap between idol and fan, and, at the very least, to thank her. And my secret self wanted something more: I imagined Jamie as a wise and gentle guide who would throw her arm over my shoulder and welcome me to the writing world. But my fantasy-Jamie took a direct hit when a friend told me something terrible about real-life-Jamie. He had gotten to know her and said she fulfilled every unflattering cliché of the successful author: arrogant, condescending, pretentious. She was dismissive, he said, too caught up in her circle of big names to spare a few minutes for a small name like him. According to my friend, she did pay attention to one thing: she took an idea of his and ran with it as her own.

Not Jamie. Not my Jamie.

Years after discovering Jamie on the bookshelves, I had the chance to meet her at a literary event. There she was, center to a group of fans like me, so accessible. A hologram turned human, a byline and black-and-white headshot become flesh. And not on-a-panel flesh or behind-a-podium flesh but in-our-shared-space flesh. She had walked in with someone I knew, so now we had two people in common. The degree of separation between us all but eliminated, I bounced and beamed and fussed with my hair until a moment opened. Setting aside my friend’s warnings about Jamie, I unloaded my fanhood without pausing for breath. I love your work. My writing would be a scrapheap without you. In fact, I referenced one of your ideas in a piece I just published. I’d love to talk with you about it.

Jamie let me flare out. Expressionless, she said, “You did cite me, right? For that idea?” I stumbled. “Yes … of course I did.” I don’t remember if I said anything else. But I do remember that Jamie turned her back on me—literally—and took the elbow of a man close by. I didn’t know him. I’m sure he was adorable, eloquent, perhaps with a book on his CV or a choice seat on a conference panel or a madly popular upstart journal. Was my writing idol nothing but the archetypal high school mean girl?

With a couple glasses of wine already working their black magic on my self-control, I nearly spat something out. Something loud. In the middle of a room of fellow writers. Something along the lines of: Wow, my friend was right, you really are an ass!

Even now I cringe when I think of how I seethed and nearly behaved like a fool. Hindsight tells me that I wasn’t being fair to Jamie—how could she possibly know what she had meant to me, and, quite frankly, why should she care? If I’d indulged myself and blasted her, I might have crippled some of my writing aspirations. Ours is an intimate world—an outburst would not soon be forgotten, and bridges might burn on the spot. Worse, I would have betrayed my friend’s confidence. Worst of all, erupting at a literary event would have felt inimical to the best part of my writing life, my commitment to and participation in our good will for one another. Our esprit de corps.

I wish that were the end of it. I wish I could have separated Jamie-the-person, who had snubbed me, from Jamie-the-mentor, who had spoken to me from the pages of her work. But in private I cursed Jamie. I refused to attend her readings and panel appearances, and told my closest writing friends to steer clear of her, too. I stopped reading her words and believing in her wisdom. I don’t regret guarding myself and my friends from a well-known writer who could act so superior. But it was destructive for me as a writer working through an all-consuming project to banish, so suddenly and painfully, my on-page guide. I came to hate those of my pages that seemed to have been influenced by hers. What kind of writer was I if I’d been molded by someone so contemptible? Nothing, not even my writer-self, was safe from my Wrath.

When we asked our writing friends to talk about the deadly sins, Rich Farrell said he believes the sins resonate with writers because “the uninitiated must pass through a period of long trial.” He goes on: “The sinner becomes the saint, but only after passing through hell.” Wrath, for its heat, its terrifying ability to end things irreparably, its consumption of the self, its sheer noise, epitomizes hell.

Nothing compares to the Wrath of nature. As I write, reports on Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath scroll across the muted television. The devastation in my city—New York—is worse than anything we’ve ever seen. What strikes me most: the six-alarm blaze in a Queens neighborhood that destroyed over one hundred homes; the multiple power failures at our local hospital that led to the evacuation of even the tiniest babies in critical care; the carbon monoxide poisonings due to poorly placed generators; the mangled construction crane dangling ninety stories above Fifty-Seventh. When a hurricane is coming, we plan for wind and water. We can’t fully plan for the myriad other disasters that arise in a catastrophic ripple effect.

No, nothing compares to the Wrath of nature. And I hesitate to mention that truth in an essay on the writing life, when lives and homes have been lost or changed forever. But as I think about how Wrath acts—a blind, chaotic, and unstoppable force—it alarms me that should it go unchecked in our writing lives, it could destroy much more than just our writing.

Wrath has a sinister way of messing with us by propelling us down false, unproductive, or ruinous paths. Furious with negative reviews? Threaten the reviewers, squashing anyone’s inclination to write a positive one. Incensed at not selling a manuscript? Rage against the industry in a bout of self-blacklisting. Upset at how your piece is treated in a workshop? Blow up at the leaders and get kicked out. Bitter toward a journal that rejected yet another submission? Insult it, thereby insulting all the writers who have been published there. Mad that the book isn’t flying off shelves? Fire the publicist and writhe, alone with the stack of still-unsold books, on one side of the burned bridge. Jason Mott admits, “I’ve gotten angry at editors or journals for rejecting my work and wasted valuable writing time trying to write in a certain way just to prove that their feedback was wrong.” If we let it, Wrath can steal energy from writing, break professional connections, and destroy nurturing personal relationships in the writing community.

In this series, we have pursued both peril and potential in the sins, and Wrath is no exception. How do we see the bright side of an emotion that brings us to hell? How can Wrath’s destructive force be turned to good? Wrath can in fact be productive by igniting creative output. “Being pissed off can be a great inspiration,” says Risa Nye. “I wrote a blog post that was fueled by some really old wrath.” The key for Nye was to tap into her Wrath and employ it as a device. “I used an approach I learned in a writing group: write about something you hate as though you love it, or write about something you love as though you hate it. I went with the hate as love version, and wrote about how being a victim of some mean girls proved to be Another Fine Opportunity for Growth.” For Nye, Wrath was just what she needed to fire off a fresh piece of writing. And now that the tap is in, more pieces may follow. “Mean girls?” says Nye. “Bring it!”

Productively using Wrath is like burning the underbrush to prevent a forest fire. Adam Arvidson describes this process of Wrath’s controlled release through the writing process: “As an environmental writer, I feel some wrath toward the wanton disregard of our planet and the people and creatures who inhabit it.” By the time Arvidson sits down to draft, he writes carefully and with purpose, but not angrily. “This causes me some conflict, and sometimes I feel my writing should be more wrathful, but I just can’t do it.” Wrath remains, however, something like a silent partner to Arvidson. “My entire writing life (both my freelance work and my personal essays) is driven by deep personal convictions that, on some level, rise from frustration, anger, wrath. … So though the anger rarely appears in my writing, it is one of the driving motivations for me.”

Jennifer Lunden names Wrath as a primary catalyst for writing: “My book-in-progress combines memoir and social criticism to tell the story of how everyday chemicals are causing increasing health problems for Americans. In the prologue it says that I’m writing the book to protect others from getting sick, and that is certainly one of my motivations, but what fires this book is wrath. Don’t tell anyone, but secretly I think of it as my manifesto.” Yet Lunden believes that in order to serve the writing, Wrath must be mitigated with an opposing force. “The wrath-fired artist is fueled by a drive to foment change. But art birthed from wrath must be tempered with love. Love helps us craft rich and textured multi-faceted characters. Without love, everything would be flat and ugly. Love is what makes it beautiful. Love makes people want to turn to the next page.”

Tavia Gilbert’s Wrath is aimed at circumstances that make writing, among other activities, arduous. Dysfunctional feet that have required multiple surgeries, and corresponding problems with her spine, force Gilbert to live in chronic pain. “This, at times, has made me wrathful—resentful, frustrated, discouraged, despairing. It is enough of an undertaking to write at all, without adding in a level of serious physical difficulty. At times I am reluctant to sit down to work because my neck is in spasm … or my feet are overtaken by stabbing, lacerating, burning pain.” It’s the process of overcoming her Wrath toward her circumstances that gives Gilbert the motivation—and the capacity—to write. “Because of what I’ve endured and still endure, however, I am more compassionate, wise, gentle, forgiving, and intuitive than I would be with a body free of pain. … So, I suppose it is not wrath that fuels my writing, but what is on the other side of wrath—after-wrath.”

Wrath is a potent, potentially endless source for material. Our surveyed writer friends tap, channel, manipulate, and overcome Wrath in order to produce new work. Like them, I’m furious at a lot of injustices—a trusted school maintenance worker who stole my purse, the negligent parent of one of my students, a dentist who pulled my tooth without permission or anesthesia—and most wind up in my writing. I don’t feel ashamed of committing the sin of Wrath. In fact, my Wrath tends to be based on an indignant feeling of being right, and my prose is how I get—literally—the last word.

But the Wrath I felt toward Jamie, someone within my writing life, didn’t fuel me to write. It made me question the identity I’d dreamed of building and the type of work that spoke to me. As for my writing, it left me stunted. As I twisted in my Wrath, I turned away from the manuscript I had been piecing together, and from the enrichment that Jamie’s work might have continued to offer. And then I fell into a deep hole.

Time passed. The firenado didn’t incinerate me. The flames died down and I crawled out of my hole. I can’t really claim this as a triumph over Wrath. Rather, I coped with it until it became less scary, then surveyed the damage and found some unexpected benefits. I saw that my Wrath had torn apart not my work, but the limits I’d imposed on it by focusing so intently on a single source of inspiration. And I discovered new role models who might have remained hidden were I not forced to seek them out. There’s resolution in that, a sense of accomplishment that I didn’t let Wrath defeat me. And at long last, I’ve found a way to channel my Wrath directly into writing, by laying it to rest right here, on this page.

~

Join us and 7 other writers as we read, think, and live in sin.

Comment here on our site or go to our links to the essays on the Hunger Mountain Facebook page to share your tricks for taming the sinful beasts that pull you away from the writing life.

Series Page ….. Dear Sinner ….. Envy ….. Sloth

Lust ….. Gluttony ….. Greed …. Pride

~

The writer friends quoted here…

.
Adam Regn Arvidson is a landscape architect and nonfiction writer. His writing has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, flyway, Michigan Quarterly Review, and many design magazines. A Minneapolis resident, he will graduate from VCFA’s MFA program in January.
.
.
Richard Farrell is upstreet’s Creative Nonfiction Editor and a Senior Editor at Numéro Cinq. His work has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Numéro Cinq, and A Year in Ink anthology. His essay “Accidental Pugilism” received a Pushcart nomination.
.
.
Producer, actor, and writer Tavia Gilbert has appeared on stage and in film, as well as having narrated over 150 multi-cast and solo voice audio books. She will complete her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts in January.
.
.
Jennifer Lunden is a glutton for information and proud winner of a Pushcart for “The Butterfly Effect,” which appeared in Creative Nonfiction. Another essay will appear in Orion. Her book-in-progress, One Canary Sings, won Honorable Mention in the 2010 Maine Literary Awards.
.
.
Jason Mott holds a BA in fiction and an MFA in poetry. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and his debut novel, The Returned, will be published September 2013 by MIRA Books.
.
.
Risa Nye’s essays and articles have appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Skirt! Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and others. She co-edited Writin’ on Empty, an anthology that guides parents through the transition to an empty nest.
.

The questions we asked…

Has Wrath ever hindered your writing?

Has Wrath ever fueled your writing?

How can we move past Wrath, not just in name, but really, truly move past it in spirit?

.Best Authentic Sneakers | UOMO, SCARPE

1.  The donée is the unasked for, the inescapable thing that is given to you.  For Lowell it was
history, for Berryman it was the Freudian myth of the Id, for Hughes it was forms of
blackness, for Dickinson it was devotion and skepticism.  What is your donée? 

2.  Are your poems cloud chambers or well-wrought urns?  Are they puzzles or
dreams?

3.  Of Water, Air, Earth, and Fire which is your predominant element?

4.  Is your poetry Greek (idealization) or Roman (realism)?

5.  Do your poems follow story lines or song lines?  Do they coil or arc?

6.  Is your poetry more Ariel (Ethereality, invisibility, velocity), or Caliban (earthiness,
nature, gravity), or Prospero (control, shape, mastery)?

7.  Are they more mirror (accurate depiction, the actual) or lamp (expressionistic,
metaphorical)?

8.  Are they more concerned with Society or Self?

9.  With Self (historical, political) or Soul (private, individuated)?

10.  “Mad Ireland hurt you into Poetry,” Auden said of Yeats.  What has hurt you into
poetry?

11.  If a central dilemma of poetry is a compulsion to understand the world versus a desire
to see beyond the details, to which side do you belong?

12. Is your poetry interested more in wedding or division?

13. What two living, American poets do you most admire?

14. What two poets do you most admire with no temporal or geographic restrictions?

15.  Is there a distinct male and female sensibility?  Is poetry gendered?
              Is it raced?

16.  Is your work more concerned with association (metaphor – what it is like) or
attention (what it is)?

17.  Is the poem a metaphysical window through which we see  deeper realities and the poet
a medium — like a pianist or spiritualist or an actor (transparency theory).  Or is the poem
an attempt at embodiment, to clot the emptiness by drawing attention to itself — a reality
(reality theory)?

18.  Is your poetry more concerned with ardor or irony?  The sublime, however you
conceive it, or the shabby?  The vertical or the horizontal?

19.  What two qualities do I most admire in a poem?

20.  What quality do I wish I had more of in my poems?

21.  From a workshop I most want Judgment, Clarification, Support, Validation, or
Sustenance.

22.  Larry Brown, former coach of the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers, said of his [former] star
Allen “The Answer” Iverson, “He doesn’t know the difference between criticism and
coaching.”  What’s the difference between criticism and coaching?

BONUS QUESTIONS:

             1 .  “But the strongest single determinant of a person’s poetic imagination is the
                    state of negotiations between that person and their idea of the Creator.” Ted
             Hughes, Winter Pollen pg.109.  True or false?

             2.    “Poetry generally is a verbal configuration of personality” True or false?

             3.      True or false: When a poem would neither praise nor blame, it ends up praising;
                   its figural language heightens any subject and gives it, in capable hands, a
                   nobility.

             4.      Cat or ox?  Hummingbird or crane?

---

I begin the year with my second year workshop students at the MFA program here at Syracuse by giving them Ten Rules for Writers (and an encouragement) and this quiz I’ve harvested from my reading. Bring back the quiz, I say! Bring back sweating on the first day!  This quiz asks students to assess and categorize their own work with these largely impossible binaries.  I take them home and read them and respond to them as I read for the first time their poems.

Best Authentic Sneakers | Best Selling Air Jordan 1 Mid Light Smoke Grey For Sale 554724-092

 

• Finish storm cleanup. Wipe slop from porch, shovel up mush of leaves. Wash windows a third time. Sweep walk. Pick up torn shingles, torn papers, loose plastic. Hose off white table to make it white again.

• Stop thinking about the fact that you now live in a part of the country where there can be a combination hurricane-Nor’easter one week and a freak snowstorm the next.

• Patronize businesses in town. They need it now.

• Finish rereading Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies for Book Fight podcast next Wednesday. Read Joy Williams’ intro of novel. Then read it once more. Joy Williams!

• Talk to your landlord about what to do with recyclables you’ve been heaping in the basement since August.

• One less glass of wine today.

• Make playlist for Largehearted Boy.

• Schedule that forearm tattoo you’ve been thinking about since July. An anchor is an anchor is an anchor.

• See beach.

• Write to editor and explain why you haven’t sent her the new manuscript, even though you finished the manuscript two months ago. Be clever and fun about it.

• Send out more copies of Unbuilt Projects.

• Read Diane Williams story for Monday three times. Read three student stories by tonight. Stop trying to write an epic about each one. Be concise. Duration is not depth! Multiple feedback pages do not translate to care and concern.

• Reread Forrest Gander for Tuesday.

• Decide what the hell you’re teaching in that potentially huge undergrad class this spring. Ask Famous Poet for his syllabus. Why haven’t you sent him that email yet? Examine.

• Think about what you’d like to plant out front come spring.

• Start the search for a new apartment come spring. Ocean Grove? Bradley Beach? Get in touch with (very hot) realtor you once had (very hot) sex with. Talk to others at the coffee place for apartment suggestions. Stop isolating yourself.

• Put a limit on the time you spend on Twitter. Write blog entry. Find a way to reinvent your blog.

• Start running again. What’s it been—two months?

• Go through files and revise abandoned stories. All right, one story.

• The boxes your ex dropped off in September—put them in storage unit. Why have you been avoiding your storage unit? Why should a storage unit make you tired? Is tired the same thing as sad? Oh, God.

• Text buddy to let him know you’re still thinking of him.

• Text ex about having dog (Ned) stay some days in December.

• Go to police department and ask about getting fingerprinted for the new low-residency job. Try not to stutter and blush when you tell them it’s for a background check. Why do you feel like a criminal?

• Course preference forms! Due last week.

• Write course description for summer workshop you probably shouldn’t have said yes to. (Three summer residencies-workshops! What were you thinking?)

• Reduce towers of folded clothes on closet shelf. Put summer clothes in boxes—summer ended. Leave two pairs of shorts out for trip to Miami Book Fair next week. Reserve rental car. See how you’re going to get to Newark Liberty with no train service on Thursday.

• Try to write a to do list in a bright-enough voice when the very idea of a to do list swamps you with dread.

~

url clone | Nike Shoes