Carolyn Forché and the “Poetry of Witness”

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By Alexia Paul and Lisa Rubenson

As part of CPCC’s 2019 Sensoria Festival (April 5-12), the public will have two opportunities to hear acclaimed poet and memoirist Carolyn Forché discuss her work and her recent memoir, What You Have Heard is True. Forché is Sensoria’s 2019 Irene Blair Honeycutt Distinguished Lecturer. Both events are free and will take place on CPCC’s main campus, Tuesday, April 9 at 8 pm in Tate Hall and Wednesday, April 10 at 10:30 am in Halton Theatre.

We’re grateful to Ms. Forché for taking time to answer these questions shared by Charlotte Lit members and Sensoria volunteers, Alexia Paul and Lisa Rubenson.

Q: Why did you choose the written word as your path to storytelling over other means of self-expression?

A: I have always written poetry and stories, since I was nine years old, so there was never a question about my mode of expression.

Q: What role does poetry play in today’s social discourse?

A: Poetry has been called “the natural prayer of the human soul.” It is the oldest of the arts, related to ritual and song, and so it remains a powerful force in the human community, although stronger in some cultures than in others. In today’s social discourse in the United States, poetry is almost invisible, but it is culturally vibrant and ascendant, particularly in those communities who have been silenced or subject to repression. In times of crisis, poets are called upon to speak, even in the United States. This has been especially true in the first two decades of this century.

Q: Please tell us about the first time you discovered the power of words to change people’s understanding of the world around them.

A: My first experience of this would have been in childhood, reading and listening to stories and poems at home and at school, and the discovery of the power of words would have happened again and again. But as I grew up, I perceived that not everyone felt this way. Not everyone understood the power of language. But I have seen its power at work throughout my life. It is not only experience that changes human understanding. It is the articulation of that experience.

Q: Does empathy drive you? Hold you back? Is empathy rooted more in hope or despair?

A: Empathy is a gift, and it is one that can be nurtured and expanded. It is absolutely essential for writers to cultivate the empathetic imagination. This is the portal into the larger world of human experience beyond the self. I don’t think empathy is rooted either in hope or despair. Empathy gives us the capacity to touch others, to move beyond the bounds of ourselves. I would say that the capacity for empathy is the foundation of everything else in our spiritual, artistic, and social lives. There is no art without it. If hope is based on clear awareness, then empathy provides it.

Q: Tell us about your writing practice. When do you know it’s time to shift from experiencing/observing/asking and start writing? Or is there a dividing line at all?

A: I keep notebooks, small notebooks that capture my scribbles, that preserve moments I would otherwise forget. When I write, I must be alone if possible, and for a stretch of time uninterrupted. That is all that writing requires: time, solitude, paper, and pen. The poem begins always with a blank page, in a state of not really knowing anything. One discovers the poem as one writes. For prose, especially prose about a certain subject, place, or time, we must sometimes do research, or otherwise prepare ourselves, but there comes a point when such preparation must be set aside. The writer is again one with the paper.

Q: How was the experience of writing a memoir different from writing poems?  Is it a different muscle?

A: For me, the experience was very different. I am a slow writer, and I write many versions of something before I find the right one. That is true of both poetry and prose. But one must hold the whole work in the mind at once. That is a more difficult task with poems, which tend to be shorter, than with long-form prose. One must stay inside the work, live in the world, and this requires a greater commitment of time: days, weeks, months, and years of time. I wrote my prose memoir over a period of fifteen years. In the first phase, I narrowed my subject down to one particular part of my life. In the second, I wrote many hundreds of pages. In the final phase, I found the shape and structure. And I discovered the story that was trying to be told.

After beginning her career at The William Morris Agency, Alexia Paul honed her writing and editorial skills at the Joy Harris Literary Agency in New York, where she sold books to publishers such as Random House and Little Brown. Since the launch of Alexia Paul Editorial here in Charlotte in 2005, she has helped over one hundred clients create or perfect their work. Alexia lives in Plaza Midwood with her husband and two children. Learn more: alexiapaul.com.

Lisa Rubenson is a writer, editor, arts appreciator and Charlotte Lit member. Read more of her work here.

CPCC’s Sensoria Festival 2019 – April 5-12

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Editor’s Note: Please join Charlotte Lit and CPCC on Monday April 8 to celebrate Judy Goldman, Sensoria’s 2019 winner of the Irene Blair Honeycutt Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Arts. A reception in Tate Lobby at 6 pm is followed at 7 pm by the Award Presentation and a reading by and conversation with Goldman. Charlotte Lit is honored to partner with CPCC to present this award.

The writer’s role as truth-teller

By Alexia Paul and Lisa Rubenson

A thriving literary community demands diverse voices. So it’s a point of pride in Charlotte that Sensoria – CPCC’s annual literary arts festival – attracts a wide spectrum of writers.

Last year, U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith left Sensoria-goers beautifully awed. Her searing take on our country’s forever us-and-them struggle hit close to home for a city seeking healing in the wake of civic unrest and protests over racial injustice. The year before, Sensoria welcomed George Saunders, who received the 2017 Man Booker Prize for his novel, Lincoln in the Bardo.

Sensoria now continues its 26-year tradition of showcasing a range of literary talent. Poet-turned-memoirist Carolyn Forché has spent her career chronicling the painful intersection of the individual and the larger forces of war, violence, and protest in Latin America. Her term, “poetry of witness” reflects a life spent giving voice to those unable to share their own in times of turmoil and persecution.

Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib is himself a poet of witness, using his kinetic wit to tap into the often devastating reality of growing up black in America. Music is a through line in his work, welcoming us in to his worldview and giving us a beat by which we can stay connected to his story.

Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché’s haunting new memoir begins in 1978 when Leonel, a mere acquaintance, requests that she travel to El Salvador to bear witness to a civil war in which 75,000 civilians would die at the hands of a repressive regime. At the time, Forché was a 27-year-old American poet. Doubtful of her purpose on this mission, she continually asks, why me? Why not a journalist or historian? Does her role as a poet augment or diminish her credibility?

As we read, we are witnesses to her witnessing this historic atrocity unfold. The book is almost painfully intimate and demands we not look away, just as Forché chose to not look away. What You Have Heard is True asks the questions: what is the responsibility of storytellers to record and reflect the world around us? What role do poetry and prose have in pursuing and achieving social justice? As she weighs the decision to go to El Salvador, Forché accepts the weight of responsibility: “I knew that if I didn’t accept his invitation, I could never live as if I would have been willing to do something, should an opportunity have presented itself. I could never say to myself: If only I’d had the chance.”

What You Have Heard is True is a testament to the power of the written word to remember – even the most horrific circumstances. In a 2017 interview, Forché said:

 [Leonel] believed that poetry would affect the world. And it would affect the world not only in our time but in the times to come, because in Latin America, and in many other countries, and in our own country, I would argue, poetry does survive the age. We’re still reading Walt Whitman’s poems about nursing soldiers wounded in the Civil War. We’re still reading. [Source]

We’re still reading. We’re still writing. And, it matters. – AP

Hanif Abdurraqib 

Photo by Andrew Cenci

As poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib tells us on the cover of his new book, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, he has written “a love letter to a group, a sound, and an era.”The memoir is part homage to the rap group whose music foregrounded the author’s experience growing up black in the 1990s in Columbus, Ohio, part autobiography, and part primer on the black community’s contribution to music-making through time.

Abdurraqib seamlessly intertwines the rise, fall and reimagining of A Tribe Called Quest with his own coming-of-age story. His writing moves in and out of the personal and universal, the cultural and historical, amplifying the impact of artists in a community and a shared cultural experience on the journey of a people.

Large lessons emerge from Go Ahead in the Rain. For one, we needn’t have grown up listening to hip-hop or rap to understand their importance and feel their legacy reverberate across a generation. Abdurraqib shows us that music can anchor us in time, place and visceral emotion, before setting us free to imbue it with our own meaning.

And, we don’t have to have experienced another’s pain in order to bear witness to it. One way we do this is through art, by allowing ourselves to be moved to the edge of our senses by the lyricism of an image or feeling, turned to prose. Meditating on the idea of mercy as a momentary suspension of fear, Abdurraqib writes:

All of this is about mercy. I’m talking about what it is to be from a place that promises to love you while holding a gun to your neck. I’m talking about what it feels like to have the gun lowered, briefly, by the hands of some unseen grace. Sometimes, it is a protest that stretches long into a night, or sometimes, it is a reading where a room hears familiar words and cries along with you as you read them out loud. But sometimes, it is a perfect album that arrives just in time to build a small community around you. To briefly hold a hand over your eyes and make a new and welcoming darkness of the world outside, even when it is on fire. (p. 186)

More than a love letter to a group, sound and era, Go Ahead in the Rainis also a love letter sent straight to the heart of every reader. – LR

Carolyn Forché has two appearances at CPCC’s main campus on Tuesday April 9 and Wednesday April 10. Hanif Abdurraqib speaks at CPCC’s main campus on Thursday April 11 and again later that evening at Goodyear Arts. See the Sensoria website for full details about the weeklong lineup of events. Note: in some cases, an event might be associated with more than one time and location.

After beginning her career at The William Morris Agency, Alexia honed her writing and editorial skills at the Joy Harris Literary Agency in New York, where she sold books to publishers such as Random House and Little Brown. Since the launch of Alexia Paul Editorial here in Charlotte in 2005, she has helped over one hundred clients create or perfect their work. Alexia lives in Plaza Midwood with her husband and two children. Learn more: alexiapaul.com.

Lisa Rubenson is a writer, editor, arts appreciator and Charlotte Lit member. Read more of her work here.

Center City Literary Festival Offers Time and Space to Contemplate Artful Language

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We’re busy. Monumentally busy. Our technology-fueled world, with its manic glut of information, steals our sleep, seizes us by the scruff. We spend hours trapped in cars and cubicles and comment sections, our eyes lost in screens, our ears tuned to beeps and clicks, our thumbs typing tiny screeds.

That is precisely why, though it seems counterintuitive, I offer you one more thing to do: the 2019 Center City Literary Festival.

After two decades of attending and planning literary events, I am more than ever convinced of their power, of how they let us express our shared humanity—our joys, our sorrows—and show us how writing and art can sustain us, especially in times of change and upheaval.

But they also force us to slow down, to redirect our attention to the contemplative space of artful language. Even more than reading, listening to a poem or story engages the mind and body; we listen with our ears, eyes, and hearts. Such attention allows our poor inundated senses to recharge, electrified by words and voice. Further, like theater, we immerse into this space as an audience—individual and collective.

Heck, at the very least, we get to sit down. Rest. Drink a (free!) beverage and nosh a (free!) snack. Gaze slack-jawed at the luminescent Charlotte skyline from inside UNC Charlotte Center City building, that translucent green, off-kilter stack in the heart of the city.

The free public festival runs in two parts. During the day, we feature children’s storytelling such as dancers and puppetry along with fun kids’ activities such as creation stations (coloring, crafting, and character-building) and scavenger hunts.

In the evening, we welcome award-winning authors for a reception, readings, book signings, and socializing. We are committed to inviting a diverse lineup of renowned and emerging writers, including those from UNCC and the Charlotte area. In the past two years, we have hosted Nikky Finney, Jill McCorkle, Eduardo C. Corral, Gary Jackson, Dustin M. Hoffman, Paula Martinac, and Siobhán Campbell.

The 2019 festival on Saturday, March 30 2019, will bring you Tony Earley, acclaimed writer of five books and North Carolina native; Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, poet and prose writer and winner of a Whiting Award; Patrice Gopo, a Charlotte-area creative nonfiction writer and 2018 NC Arts Council fellow; and Allison Hutchcraft, a poet and creative writing instructor at UNCC.

Please, come and take a load off for a couple of hours. Revel in language. Remind yourself of the best of who we are.

2019 Center City Literary Festival

Saturday, March 30, 2018

UNC Charlotte Center City campus
320 E. 9th Street, Charlotte 28202

(Adjacent to First Ward Park and a quick stroll from the 7th Street Market and light rail station)

Bryn Chancellor’s first novel Sycamore (Harper, 2017) has been hailed as a “hypnotic debut” (O: The Oprah Magazine) and “a transporting vision of community, connection and forgiveness” (Publishers Weekly). Her story collection When Are You Coming Home? won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and her fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals. Honors include the Poets & Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award. A graduate of Vanderbilt University’s MFA program, she is an assistant professor at UNC Charlotte.

4X4CLT in 2019: Love, Animals, Larks and Lola!

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We couldn’t have asked for a better start to this year’s 4X4CLT poetry and art poster series, with February’s release featuring poems from Terrance Hayes and art from Susan Brenner and J. Stacy Utley. We’re excited to announce the rest of the 2019 4X4CLT lineup coming in May, September, and December. Read on to learn how you can help bring this series to your part of town and earn your own personal set of 4X4CLT posters.

May 2019 4X4CLT: Nickole Brown & Jessica Jacobs — as part of their Love and Animals Tour
Friday and Saturday May 17 & 18

Asheville poets and former Authors’ Lab coaches Nickole Brown and Jessica Jacobs are back for a return engagement as 4X4CLT poets. Their poems were featured in the first year of the series and we’re grateful to share their work with our expanded audience.

Nickole Brown is the author of Sister(2007), with a new edition by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2018. She is the editor of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program, the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA, and the Hindman Settlement School. Her chapbook, To Those Who Were Our First Gods,won the 2018 Chapbook Prize. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville.

Jessica Jacobs is the author of three books of poetry. Her second full-length collection, Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going, has just been released from Four Way Books. She is on the faculty of the Brandeis Collegiate Institute and serves as Associate Editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal. Jessica lives in Asheville with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown.

May 4X4CLT Release Party at Free Range Brewing: Nickole and Jessica will be with us for a reading at Free Range Brewing in NoDa on Friday May 17 from 7 to 9 pm. Free and open to the public.

May 4X4CLT Master Class at Charlotte Lit: They will team teach the master class “Writing Through Conflict” at Charlotte Lit on Saturday May 18 from 10 am to 1 pm. In this workshop, after a discussion of ways to approach those moments or events that sometimes feel too difficult to fully think about let alone put on the page, a multi-part writing prompt will help you build a foundation of facts before feelings, from which you will then be guided to consider multiple perspectives—enabling you to write through conflict with both nuance and power, as well as empathy and compassion for yourself and others. Register

September 2019 4X4CLT: Jennifer Chang
Friday and Saturday September 6 & 7

Poet Jennifer Chang is the author of two books of poetry, The History of Anonymity Some Say the Lark. She teaches at George Washington University and co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a non-profit that supports Asian-American literature.

December 2019 4X4CLT: Lola Haskins
Friday and Saturday December 6 & 7

Lola Haskins is the author of many collections of poetry, including Asylum, to be released in June 2019 by Pitt. She’s also published a variety of other writings including her excellent book of advice for poets, Not Feathers Yet, and essays about the natural world regarding her home state of Florida. Haskins has collaborated widely with musicians, dancers, and visual artists.

Love 4X4CLT? Want to serve as an ambassador?

4X4CLT is growing! Thanks to the hospitality of many local businesses, our poetry and art poster series is now on display at upwards of 90 locations across the greater Charlotte area. These hosts invite their patrons to have chance encounters with poetry and art. We’re grateful for their support.

The task of spreading the 4X4CLT love across town has become more than one or two people can handle. We’re looking for a few volunteers to adopt a part of town and make deliveries to these friendly locations. The number of locations varies in each part of town, but is usually between four and ten. 4X4CLT posters are released quarterly and the deliveries are made within the two weeks of the release party. Areas of greatest need are Steele Creek, Beatties Ford Road corridor, and Davidson. We’d like to expand our reach in the University area and Pineville/Matthews if anyone has contacts with local businesses in these areas. As a thank you, ambassadors will receive their own personal set of posters each quarter. Interested in helping out? Contact Lisa Zerkle at lisaz@charlottelit.org for more details on adoptable neighborhoods.

Poetry, Wellness, and “The Slowdown”

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Because I am a writer, my attention can become very centered on craft. I also teach. One afternoon, my creative writing students at Queens University pointed out that I’d failed to remark on the fact that all the poetry examples for the day were about death—I’d been too intent on exploring how the figurative language functioned. They surely had a point. As Lucille Clifton said, “Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.”

Poems ask us to stop and think. We reread a poem to unpack the compressed power of its metaphor, diction, and arrangement. Appreciating this fully warrants focus—something a healthy mind requires. After a period of intense focus, I know I feel better. Time seems to both stop and to impossibly extend itself. By objective measure, more time has actually passed than it seems. I look up and wonder: Was that really two hours?

What makes me feel less well? The pull of my attention onto too many interrupting and competing tasks, considerations both important and frivolous, near and far, swirling together and visually vying for my attention to screens. These days I sometimes find myself working on multiple undertakings simultaneously, and less successfully, without fully realizing that I’m jumping from one to another. (How did this happen to my brain?)

Poetry is the perfect antidote for today’s particular malady. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, poetry readership is on the rise. Now that I’m looking, the connection between poetry and health seems to be everywhere. William Sieghart recently ran a poetry pharmacy for which he prescribed particular verses for readers’ problems (this is now a book). The Paris Review has a similar project, a blog column Poetry Rx.  And like literary fiction, poetry is sure to improve empathy. Poet Linda Gregerson has reflected on how it can help repair the damage evident in our current civic discourse.

In her latest project, Tracy K. Smith, the nation’s poet laureate and April 2018’s 4X4CLT featured poet, centers on the personal, daily value that poetry provides. If you aren’t already, become a fan of her podcast The Slowdown, produced in partnership with the Library of Congress and the Poetry Foundation. Every weekday, she offers an episode detailing how a poem matters to her personally, what it makes her feel and remember, or how she reacts to its music.

Then she reads the poem in her practiced, calm voice. This tends to be my favorite part of the experience. Five minutes is all you need. “Life is fast, intense and sometimes bewildering,” explains Smith in the introduction to the series. “But poetry offers a way of slowing things down, looking at them closely, mining each moment for all that it houses.” She argues for the necessity of “living more deeply with reality” through poetry. She models for listeners how a poem engages her. Poems express what is relatable yet has felt beyond expression. Poems can be a call to action, connecting us to family and to society. They can also just be a pleasure to say out loud, and whatever they might mean can be beside the point.

In The Slowdown, you’ll find another Charlotte Lit connection, June 2018’s 4X4CLT featured poet, Tyree Daye, Episode 60, Tamed. You’ll find Queens University MFA faculty member Ada Limón, Episode 27, The Raincoat. You’ll find older poetry too, such as Emily Dickinson, 64: I like to see it lap the Miles. What resonates most deeply for you will be for reasons of your own. For example, for me, Episode 48, Elegy for Smoking by Patrick Phillips resonates not because I was ever a smoker, I wasn’t. But in the 1990s, I boldly asserted my right to what I called a smokeless smoke break. I would follow the addicts (including my boss, someone I miss) out to the patio and take a work-break too. Who would have argued with who I was back then, both earnest and mouthy, asserting my right to stare at the trees for the length of time a cigarette would require? Smith has her own way of connecting to the poem. Connecting is absolutely the point.

A few spaces remain for Julie Funderburk’s workshop “A Poem That Sings” on Saturday March 16 from 10 am to 1 pm. Register here.

Julie Funderburk is author of the poetry collection The Door That Always Opens from LSU Press and a limited-edition chapbook from Unicorn Press. She is the recipient of fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work appears in Best New Poets, Cave Wall, The Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Ploughshares. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Queens University in Charlotte, where she directs The Arts at Queens.

Featured links: 

William Sieghart’s poetry pharmacy

The Paris Review’s poetry Rx

Linda Gregerson on civic discourse

An invitation from Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s Community Read

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By Marline L. Casseus, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Library

This year’s Community Read with Charlotte Mecklenburg Library is bigger, bolder and better than ever before. There are important topics to discuss, many partners hosting events and discussions, and plenty of ways for readers of all ages to get involved. Best of all, the Library is bringing award-winning and New York Times best-selling author, Angie Thomas to Charlotte for a sold-out event at CPCC on March 19.

Everyone in the community is invited to participate in Community Read 2019 by reading the books, talking about them, and attending library and partner programs. Together with its sponsors, partners and local community, the Library strives to open books and open minds.

This year’s main Community Read title is The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. The novel deals with sometimes controversial issues that are important nationally and locally in the Charlotte community. Community Read will launch conversations in Library and partner locations that will help the community heal, strengthen ongoing relationships, and ultimately help make a stronger community. This year’s complete selection of companion titles with related themes are:

  • For adults and teens: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
  • For middle grades: Wishtree by Katherine Applegate
  • For young children: Love by Matt de la Peña

Community Read is presented by Charlotte Mecklenburg Library in collaboration with more than 30 community partners, including Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, Community Building Initiative and many more.

This year’s goal is to engage 10% of the Charlotte community – 100,000 people – with Community Read through the Library and with partner organizations.

How can I get involved?

Community Read is for everyone. Everyone is encouraged to read one or more of the Community Read books. While The Hate U Give is intended for teens and adults, companion titles Wishtree and Love are suitable for younger readers. The Library hopes families will read them together and participate in programs designed for children. Everyone in the community is also invited to participate in at least one program or discussion. The current listings of Library-led and partner-led programs for all ages are linked to the main web page. Everyone is also invited to get involved through social media (#CommunityRead2019) to celebrate a love of reading together by posting and sharing relevant contents.

Where can I get a copy?

All three titles are available at Library locations in print and digital formats. Also, the Library expanded its digital license to permit simultaneous downloads of audiobooks and e-books during the month of March.

Additionally, generous investments from presenting sponsor Bank of America and from the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Foundation and Foundation For The Carolinas have allowed for the purchase of more than 2,000 copies of the book for distribution at Library and partner locations, while supplies last.

Editor’s Note: Jaime Pollard-Smith and Elizabeth West, CPCC English instructors (and Charlotte Lit workshop leaders) have expanded their “Levine Reads” book discussion to include all CPCC campuses in collaboration with the library’s Community Read of The Hate You Give. More info is here.

We’re throwing a(nother) party!

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If you know Charlotte Lit at all, you probably know we like to throw a party.

Every year at this time, we do something interesting, party-wise. Four years ago we made our debut with a 100-person event at The Light Factory featuring poet Linda Pastan. A year later, in February 2017, we celebrated our first birthday and the 100th of Carson McCullers in the very house where she lived while writing The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. (It’s now Copper Restaurant.) Last year, we went to play in the garden—Wing Haven Gardens, that is—where we paid tribute to trees (and gave all participants a seedling to plant), and were entertained by Bryn Chancellor, author of Sycamore, and Martin Settle, reading from his collection Maple Samaras.

This year on March 3, Charlotte Lit celebrates its third birthday at Mint Museum Randolph, with special guest Judy Goldman. Tickets are $50 and include hors d’oeuvres from La-Tea-Dah’s, dessert from Sunflour Baking Company, wine and beer and other beverages, and a signed hardcover copy of Judy’s new memoir, Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap. (Charlotte Lit Supporting Members receive one free ticket, and McCullers Society Members receive two). Register here!

Staying in the Flow: Advice for Memoir Writers and Others

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Gilda Morina Syverson will lead a workshop on memoir, “Traveling Home, Again:  Memoir’s Enlightening Path” at Charlotte Lit on Thursday, February 21st, from 6 to 9 p.m. Register

Only two years. That’s what I told myself when I first began to teach memoir writing at Queens University. I would do it for two years. My plan was to spend more time on my writing. But something happened. I not only fell in love with the process of writing my stories, but I fell in love with everyone else’s stories, too.

That was over 19 years ago. I am still in awe of what people discover when writing about themselves, their families, relatives, in some cases distant ancestors. We can write compelling stories by capturing flashes of memories, obsessions, dreams—night or day, an inspiring line from a poem or article and more. Then we take the thought or line, let it lead us as we write and write and write.

What I’ve told my students over the years is to capture the memory that comes to mind after giving them a prompt or reading them a poem. Do not think about editing, grammar, punctuation marks, and so on. Just write what flows! We’ll deal with crafting later.

I learned this process over thirty years ago when Natalie Goldberg wrote in her books about keeping that hand moving. NO THINKING ALLOWED. Not out loud! Although there is something valuable to learn about “Why not out loud?”

When a person says to me that he or she wants to write and starts telling me their story, I carefully, sometimes not so carefully, stop him or her and say, “Don’t tell me. Write it down.”

I’ve seen frustration on faces. Yes, they have a story to tell. But my intention is to get these people to their office, bedroom, back porch, or wherever they feel comfortable and put down that tale in written words. I imagine them saying to themselves, “I’ll show her. I’m telling that story anyway,” and then pen it in a journal, on a piece of paper, or type it into a Word document.

Ah-ha! A start! It’s where all writers—beginner or advanced—return to again and again.

Even though memoir (and poetry) are my loves, keeping that hand moving is a starter for all genres. When I sit down to write something new, brand new, I let it spill out—a morning dream, a cousin who has revealed a family secret, relatives from Italy who appeared on my grandmother’s doorstep. I let the story lead me where it wants to go. While writing, if Uncle Joe or Aunt Jane appear on your shoulder (metaphorically, of course) and have something to say, do not swat those voices away.

When it is time for crafting, editing is a creative process all its own. Since I am drawn to the editing process as much as the initial discovery, when I go back into the story, that’s when I play with the language, add specific and descriptive details, dialogue if need be, cut, paste, develop scenes.

The structure and spine of the story will slowly evolve. I let it lead me remembering what Anne Lamott said years ago when visiting Charlotte, that she edits each chapter seven, eight, nine times. It is in this process, where I get honest with myself or bring my writing to one of my critique groups; I can count on them to be open with me.

After all these years, I am still in awe of the stories that have grown out of people’s lives, their families, the places they have come from. I hope to hear a bit of your story one day—written down, of course!

Gilda Morina Syverson is an award-winning author for the memoir, My Father’s Daughter: From Rome to Sicily, and two poetry collections, Facing the Dragon and In This Dream Everything Remains Inside. She is at work on her second memoir. Gilda has been teaching and coaching memoir writing for over 19 years and is also on the faculty for Charlotte Lit’s Authors Lab. She has recently been featured on Charlotte Readers Podcast.

Research First, Then Write?

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Editor’s note: We occasionally take a look at the standard bits of advice given to writers. This week, guest blogger Andy Thomason takes on the notion of research first, then write.

When I told one of the editors at my office that I was writing a book, he offered what I thought was a strange piece of advice to give right off the bat: Mix up the reporting and writing. Don’t try to cordon off each task by, for instance, spending the first six months reporting and latter six months writing.

This goes a little against my experience. When I edit long stories, the reporter has usually done the vast majority of the reporting before they sit and write. The processes are somewhat distinct. It’s only when they’re armed with pages of notes and transcripts that the reporter enters Writing Quarantine (only to come out days later with a draft, shell-shocked, regretting they ever entered this line of work).

I didn’t ask my editor to elaborate on his advice, but I didn’t need to. After a few months of reporting, the paralysis I felt made his point for him. I had contacted a wide swath of people for interviews, talked to the fraction who were willing, followed some of their leads, and dutifully pestered the people who still weren’t answering my calls or emails.

As I’ve detailed previously in my real-time newsletter in the course of writing this book, my reporting yielded promising material. But the more information I had, the more directions this book could go. It could be about the process of admitting athletes into colleges like UNC. It could be about academic support offices. It could be about the NCAA. It could be about the athletes themselves. Each focus would require a different structure, different reporting, a different process. The number of potential paths I could carve up the mountain seemed exponential.

It was around this time that I remembered another piece of advice that some of the editors in my office often dispense. When writing an article (or anything, I guess, including a book), ask yourself, what is this about? Not what happens, or who’s in it, but what’s the concept at the heart of it? Doing this exercise well can often get you down to one word. Power. Corruption. Money.

This exercise has a focusing power. For instance, if you were writing a book about college sports that you decided was mostly about money, then you would naturally want to dig into conferences’ revenue sharing agreements and media deals. But if you were writing another book about that same topic, but this time decided it was about exploitation, you might want to focus more on the stories of the athletes themselves.

Answering this question can help you set your sights on what you really need. There are no longer a thousand routes up the mountain, but just a few.

So one day between Christmas and New Year’s I took my laptop to the Caledonia conference room and opened a blank Google doc, with the goal of free writing my way to the heart of the book. One word seemed ambitious, so I decided to aim for one page, double-spaced. And if it was good, a version of what I came up with here would likely appear in the book itself, probably in the introduction.

Real book writing. This was going to be a big step forward.

I wrote a bad sentence.

I wrote another bad sentence.

Enough with sentences. Let’s try a scene. I wrote a bad scene.

Back to sentences. Here was an OK sentence, but not really on topic.

I wrote a paragraph. It was a fine paragraph, but it didn’t answer the question.

This was not going well. I got in the elevator and headed to the sandwich place around the corner. On the way I took more stabs at the question, chattering topic sentences entering the Untitled Document of my brain. Bad. Bad. Maybe. Meh. Somewhere between the CVS and the Zapp’s chips I began to make inroads on an answer. I walked quickly back to the office, storing sentences in my head as I went. I sat down at my computer, gobbled up my sandwich, and started typing. Forty-five minutes later, I had a page-long answer. This was not great writing. But the argument made sense, and that’s what mattered.

This was the mini book, and I could use it as a roadmap for the big one. I went sentence by sentence and asked a question of each of them: What information would I need to prove each claim? Who would I need to talk to? What would I need to ask them about? I made a bulleted list, and deposited the results into the “tasks” pop-out in my Gmail.

Only by writing could I figure out what I needed to do next. My editor was right.

Rather than hail this as a breakthrough, I kicked myself instead. This is the kind of thing I should’ve been doing with one year left, not nine months. What was I even doing for those three months? As the days until my October 1 deadline tick away I’ve become more anxious about time I spend not writing and not on the phone. I’ve even started to lose a little sleep out of fear that I’m too far behind. And with no book writing experience, my only logical response is low-grade anxiety and fear.

When I mentioned this to a friend this weekend he said, “Well that’s the point of the first book, isn’t it?” I’m learning a lot. Hopefully I’ll come away with a book, too.

Andy Thomason is a Charlotte native and senior editor at “The Chronicle of Higher Education.” He’s a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, where he was editor-in-chief of The Daily Tar Heel. Andy is writing a book about the relationship between colleges and the big-time sports programs they house, using the recent UNC academic-fraud scandal as a narrative lens. This is his first book, and he’s chronicling his reporting and writing process in a real-time newsletter. You can sign up here: tinyletter.com/arthomason 

The Power of an Author’s Note

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I have a confession to make: If a novel contains an author’s note, I read it before I launch into the first chapter—even if it falls at the end of the book.

I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember—both before I ever tried to write a book, and now that I have a bunch of published novels under my belt. It’s the perpetual writing student in me who is always looking for a glimpse into the writer’s mind and process. Sometimes, I’ve found, the author’s note can be as fascinating as the book.

Second confession: I’ve been known to recommend an author’s note to other writers and to students, the way someone else (someone less nerdy, maybe) might endorse the novel itself.

Now, because you seem to still be reading this, I’m going to offer an author’s note suggestion to you. This one relates to a class I’m offering at Charlotte Lit on Feb. 5: “Beyond Stereotypes: Writing Diverse Characters with Dimensions.” The note is in Jodi Picoult’s Small, Great Things, a novel well worth your reading time. But even if you aren’t a Picoult fan, it would be a shame if you missed her author’s note, which is highly instructive.

Small Great Things is told in shifting third limited POV, with a protagonist who is an African-American nurse accused of jeopardizing a white baby’s life. The other POVs belong to a white supremacist and the nurse’s white lawyer.

Let’s skip to the author’s note. What we learn there is that Picoult, a white woman, tried early in her career to write a novel “about racism,” as she puts it. She failed miserably.

“I started the novel, foundered, and quit,” she writes. “I couldn’t do justice to the topic. I didn’t know what it was like to grow up Black in this country, and I was having trouble creating a fictional character that rang true” (p. 459).

She then discusses moving on to write all those successful novels with characters unlike her—men, suicidal people, teenagers, rape survivors. Why couldn’t she create a person of color facing racism? Because racism is hard to discuss, she says, so white authors often don’t.

What changed that made Picoult feel like she could tackle the topic of Small, Great Things? Obviously, it wasn’t that racism suddenly got easier to write about. When she set out to write the novel, based loosely on an incident she’d read about, it was Picoult’s intention that changed.

“I wasn’t writing to tell people of color what their own lives were like,” she notes. “I was writing to…white people—who can very easily point to a neo-Nazi skinhead and say he’s a racist…but can’t recognize racism in themselves” (p. 460).

Powerful stuff. You’ll have to read the author’s note for details on how she actually went about crafting her protagonist (and a skinhead we actually feel something for)—and for more about this topic, you can take my Charlotte Lit class.

I’m going to leave you with this thought: The uncomfortable things we think we can’t possibly write about just might make powerful fiction.

And here’s one last confession, too: I read the acknowledgments right after the author’s note.

Paula Martinac is the author of four novels, including most recently, The Ada Decades. She teaches creative writing at UNC Charlotte and is a writing coach in Charlotte Lit’s Authors Lab program.

Join Paula for “Beyond Stereotypes: How to Create Diverse Characters with Dimension” on Tuesday, February 5, 6-9 pm. Members $55, non-members $65. Register here.