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Last week the New Yorker’s fiction department serial tweeted Jennifer Egan’s story “Black Box,” which appears in the magazine’s science fiction issue. Egan structured her story in prose bursts of 140 characters or fewer—the limit for a single tweet. Challenge yourself to write a story that could appear in small installments by shortening the length of the story’s paragraphs to one or two sentences. Try to advance the story with each terse paragraph.
Write a poem in which you give the reader directions about how to assemble an object or an emotional experience. Think of the various sensory stimuli your directions provide and experiment with the order of the lines. For inspiration, read Matthea Harvey’s poem “Setting the Table.”
For the month of June, poet, educator, and inspirational speaker Carole "Imani" Parker blogs about her work with the P&W–supported Jobs for Youth Apprenticeship Program (JFYAP) at Medgar Evers College, a job readiness program she once directed.
As former director of JFYAP, I write this entry with a sense of joy, sadness, and pride. When I first started working at JFYAP in 1995, it had been closed for two years. I am privileged to have been able to watch the program grow for more than fifteen years. Unfortunately, due to the current recession, the program, which was funded by the New State Department of Labor, lost its funding and was forced to close in December 2011. Because of its collaboration with the GED Plus-Division of the New York City Department of Education and Medgar Evers College, however, the remaining students in the program have been allowed to complete their education at the college.
JFYAP was established as an academic enrichment/career development program. The program was designed to provide services to “at risk” youth as well as young people who had either dropped out of traditional high schools or migrated to the United States from other countries. For more than seventeen years, JFYAP assisted hundreds of students to reach their academic and vocational goals.
Some students came with a myriad of issues, including gang involvement, illiteracy, and substance abuse. With a caring staff and creative P&W–supported writers, such as George Edward Tait, Abu Muhammad, and Radhiyah Ayobami, many of the students were able to transform their negative conditions and behavior through the art of creative writing.
Photo: Carole Imani Parker.
Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and Friends of Poets & Writers.
In May, P&W-supported poet Andrei Guruianu, author of Postmodern Dogma and several other books, taught a workshop sponsored by the Center for Gender, Art and Culture in Binghamton, New York. Participants Lois Westgate and Kit Hartman blog about the experience.
Andrei Guruianu led a group of writers in the process of creating poetry at the Cooperative Gallery 213. The Gallery provides a space for local artists and photographers, and has welcomed writers’ workshops. Andrei has long been an inspiration to fledgling writers in Upstate New York: He taught at Binghamton University and Ithaca College, published a journal of work by writers from his community workshops, founded The Broome Review, and served as Poet Laureate of Broome County.
Our Saturday workshop was a small group, which Andrei prefers “…as it promotes intimate conversations and sharing, and allows people to feel more comfortable once the group settles into the work of writing.” He recommended we try to remove our biases and allow the subject of our poetry to live on its own.
Andrei showed scenes from the movie Iris, in which Judi Dench as British writer Iris Murdock says: “Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth, pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty, and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour.” We contemplated the archetypes of the unconscious, which are sometimes impossible to convey in words.
The movie includes a montage of Iris and her husband swimming, Iris nude in youth, and in a bathing suit in old age. Andrei asked us to identify concepts this scene evoked and capture these through images in our poetry. For our second poem, he asked us to respond to a scene in which Iris, now suffering from Alzheimer’s, places beach stones on rows of blank paper from her journal, then removes the stones. The papers are swept away.
We read our poems aloud and Andrei pointed out the strongest parts of each. His critiques were honest, but not brutal. An example of one person’s best line inspired by the stones-on-paper scene: “…her fingers remembered the need to create.”
Andrei’s philosophy is this: “I continue to enjoy leading community writing workshops because it helps me stay true to my initial impulse, [which is] to take creative writing out of the classroom. The creative space that opens up when there is no pressure to create or publish is genuine, is as close to the ‘spirit’ of the art as you can get.”
We in Binghamton felt fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from him.
Top photo: Andrei Guruianu. Credit: Kit Hartman. Lower photo: Workshop participants. Credit: Andrei Guruianu.
Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and Friends of Poets & Writers.
Last week the PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced James Salter as the winner of its twenty-fifth annual PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction. The author, whose collection Dusk and Other Stories (North Point Press, 1988) won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award, will receive the five-thousand-dollar prize named in honor of story writer Bernard Malamud on December 7.
Salter is also the author of the story collection Last Night (Knopf, 2005), as well as novels such as A Sport and a Pastime (Doubleday, 1967), Light Years (Random House, 1975), and The Hunters (Harper, 1956). Also recognizing his contribution to short story form, he was awarded the 2010 Rea Award last summer.
Below is a brief digest of online access points to the literature and life of the author PEN/Malamud juror Alan Cheuse said "has shown us how to work with fire, flame, the laser, all the forces of life at the service of creating sentences that spark and make stories burn."
In a 1993 Paris Review interview (with Edward Hirsch), Salter said, "I've never had a story in The New Yorker; everything has been rejected." (Salter's story "Last Night" is available online in the November 18, 2002, issue of the New Yorker.) He also discusses practice (in solitude, in longhand), revision ("Normally I just go a sentence at a time"), and his own short fiction influences (Babel, Chekhov).
The Paris Review published a number of Salter stories, including "Am Strande von Tanger" (Fall 1968). Last year the journal awarded Salter the Hadada Prize, and celebrated the author with a month of coverage on the Paris Review Daily blog. (Online literary review fwriction paid similar tribute.)
The video below, the first in a series of four, Salter reads "Palm Court" from Last Night. The reading took place at an event held by the literary journal Narrative.
In Bird by Bird (Pantheon, 1994), Anne Lamott's classic instructional treatise on writing and life, the author says: "Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't—and, in fact, you're not supposed to—know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing." Keeping this in mind, write the beginnings of an essay whose direction and ending you don't yet know. Start small, focusing closely on a single place, person, or incident, without thinking ahead. Then keep going: Allow the writing to tell the story, and see what develops.
The sixth literary pairing in the biennial Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative was announced earlier this month. The program, launched a decade ago, offers emerging artists the opportunity to spend a year under the tutelage of established professionals in their respective fields.
The 2012–2013 literature mentor, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, selected as her protégé thirty-seven-year-old British writer Naomi Alderman. The author of three novels—Disobedience (Viking, 2006), which won the Orange Award for New Writers, The Lessons (Viking, 2010), and The Liar's Gospel, forthcoming from Viking in August—Alderman is also a game designer (her latest, Zombies, Run!, is available as an iPhone app).
"The future is a subject of interest for both Margaret Atwood and me," Alderman says in an interview on the Rolex Arts Initiative website. "I have another life outside literary novels: I write computer games. I think games are going to be an important art form in the next hundred years. They’re only just beginning to approach what they'll be. Margaret’s work is grounded in the present, but also the same desire to look forward."
Atwood's thirteen novels include the dystopian classic The Handmaid's Tale (1985), the speculative work Oryx and Crake (2003), the Booker Prize–winning The Blind Assassin (2000), and, most recently, The Year of the Flood (2009). She is also the author of seven short story collections, as well as volumes of poetry and nonfiction and books for children.
In addition to time spent with her mentor in both London and Atwood's home city of Toronto, Alderman will receive twenty-five thousand dollars to subsidize her work during the mentorship year, followed by an additional twenty-five thousand after the program ends. Atwood, for her service as a mentor, receives an honorarium of fifty thousand dollars.
The finalists for this year's mentorship award, all interviewed by Atwood as part of the months-long protégé selection process, were Malaysian novelist Preeta Samarasan, author of Evening Is the Whole Day (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008); American author Claire Vaye Watkins, whose debut short story collection, Brattleborn, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in August; and South African writer Mary Watson, who won the Caine Prize for short fiction in 2006.
Past mentees include Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet Tracy K. Smith; Togolese novelist and Prix Goncourt finalist Edem Awumey; and Australian novelist Julia Leigh, who recently made her debut in the medium of film as writer and director of Sleeping Beauty (2011).
Think of a dramatic situation in which there is one main character. If you need to, steal a situtation from the news, such as "Man Dangles Child Over River" or "Woman Follows Couple Home From Mall." Based on this situation, write a sketch of the main character that explains how and why this person did what they did. What is it about his or her personality, past, and relationships that has brought him or her to this moment?
An ekphrasis is a poem about, describing, or inspired by, a piece of art. Rather than writing a poem based on a piece of art, try writing a poem inspired by an existing ekphrasis.
Social justice activist and Cave Canem fellow Ama Codjoe blogs about writing in form and five days in the woods.
In September of 2011, equipped with lessons from the P&W–supported Cave Canem workshop with Marilyn Nelson and with Annie Finch's A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women, I drove to a friend's country home in Pine Plains, New York. I spent five days alone in the woods (with deer, wild turkey, trees, and books as worthy companions).
Most writers acknowledge the benefit of retreat. Getting away enabled me to turn off technology and turn any distractions into sustenance: cooking, watching the lake shift and move, or watching a deer watching me. In this way some retreats are a coming towards: towards nature, towards community, towards solitude, towards discipline. I am grateful to have benefited from different kinds of retreats where I have learned about the craft of poetry, the power of community, and the sacredness of solitude.
Writing is a creative act that one performs alone, but when I began writing sonnets after Julia Alvarez, I was communing with the poems I had read and the poets I had heard. I am not sure that I would have decided to write thirty-three sonnets without my time in the woods. I know that I wouldn't have begun writing a series of sonnets without the P&W–supported regional Cave Canem workshop with Marilyn Nelson in 2009. We explored the virtues of formal poetry, and it was then that I first dipped my toes into the waters of the sonnet.
Since September, I have crafted sonnets about mermaids, desire, fishermen, and seascapes. They are the most personal poems I have written. They are poems that benefit from the syllabic, rhythmic, and aural constraints of formal verse. The word sonnet comes from the Italian word sonetto meaning "little song." Through composing and revising sonnets, I am singing to myself, to Alvarez, to Nelson, and to the deer and turkey in Pine Plains too.
Photo: Ama Codjoe. Credit: Matthew Goldberg.
Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and Friends of Poets & Writers.
