Writing as Life?

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What have I learned from writing, from life as a writer, and from hanging out in the wonderful community of other writers?

1. Persistence trumps talent every time.

2. If you’re waiting on the muse to show up before you start working, you’re wasting valuable time. If you’re not where you’re supposed to be (with pen or keyboard at hand ready to work), how do you expect the muse to find you?

3. There are no born writers…or painters or race car drivers or bankers. They all work at it.

4. Everyone is creative. The lucky ones recognize it and enjoy it. The unlucky or doomed believe whoever lied and told them they couldn’t create. Everyone is creative and can develop and enjoy what calls to them, whether it’s writing or cooking or gardening or juggling or…

5. There is a special place in a very bad place for those who tell little kids [or big kids] they can’t paint or write or cook or sing or dance or color trees purple. No one has the right to take that away from another person. No one.

6. If someone ever told you that you that you couldn’t do something but you liketo do it, don’t listen to them.  Do it any way.  Don’t worry that you won’t get rich or famous doing it…what’s that got to do with enjoying it?

7. When creating anything, the first draft should be fun. Quit thinking so much. Stand on the edge of the pool, hold your breath, and dive in. The real work starts when you come up for air – and that will be fun, too.

8. How do you know you’re doing it right? If you’re a little bit afraid.

Show up. Pay attention. Play. Be grateful. Be generous. Enjoy.

Cathy Pickens’ first of five mystery novels, Southern Fried, won St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Award for Best Traditional Mystery. She has written a mystery walking tour, Charleston Mysteries (History Press), and numerous articles and case studies. At Queens University of Charlotte, she was named the Wireman Professor and won several teaching awards. She has served as president and on the boards of national mystery writers organizations and as president of the regional Forensic Medicine Board. Currently, she works with former inmates on starting their own businesses.

Find Your Place: Literary Events at This Week’s Sensoria Festival

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Charlotte Lit is a proud partner for CPCC’s fantastic Sensoria: A Celebration of Literature and the Arts, April 6-15. We’re honored this year to present with Sensoria the Irene Blair Honeycutt Legacy Award to Maureen Ryan Griffin, and to have U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith as our featured poet for our 9th 4X4CLT Poetry+Art poster series.

In March 1999, CPCC featured Anne Lamott, author of the classic writing how-to Bird by Bird, as part of their annual literary festival. It’s a date I’ve committed to memory because I was there in the mid-morning audience, my two-month old son nestled in my lap, while my oldest two children were in preschool. As a brain-fried new mother, I was desperate for words, for meaning, for support of the notion that writing was a worthy and necessary endeavor. The theme for that year’s festival was “A Sense of Place: Writers in Community” and being there opened the door to the local writing community for me. These 19 years later, that baby is a freshman in college and the literary festival has grown into the 10-day Sensoria Festival, but that sense of welcome and community remains.

George Saunders, winner of the National Book Award and the keynote lecturer of last year’s festival, called Sensoria “one of the very best of its kind in the world.” There are a multitude of events—film screenings, opera, theatre, music, and more—across six CPCC campuses, but writers and readers should take note of the following opportunities to connect with the literary community:

Monday 4/9, 10:30 am at Tate Hall, Central Campus: When Literature Becomes Myth: Celebrating 200 Years of Frankenstein. In last week’s Litmosphere, David Poston beautifully enumerated why Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel is relevant these 200 years later. Leslie Klinger, editor of the New Annotated Frankenstein, speaks about the landmark science fiction novel at this talk.

Monday 4/9, 6 pm (reception), 7 pm (reading) at Tate Hall, Central Campus: Irene Blair Honeycutt Legacy Award Presentation and Reading. Charlotte Lit is honored to co-sponsor this award, named after Honeycutt who was an early and enthusiastic supporter of our organization. This year’s honor goes to Maureen Ryan Griffin, a poet and non-fiction writer, who in her work as a writing coach has propelled her students to a deeper understanding of the art. Join us in celebrating her contributions to the literary community. Sweets deliciously provided by Sunflour Baking Company.

Tuesday 4/10, 9:30 am at Levine Campus: Local Author Spotlight–Bryn Chancellor. Author of the Oprah Magazine Top Pick Sycamore, UNCC Professor, and Charlotte Lit instructor Bryn Chancellor discusses the craft of writing. This event caps off Levine Reads, a campus-wide common read initiative.

Tuesday 4/10, 11 am at Levine Campus: Writing Workshop: Framing Our Experience: A Life in Pieces. Inspired by a micro-memoir workshop led by Charlotte Lit’s December 4x4CLT author Beth Ann Fennelly, CPCC English faculty members Jaime Pollard-Smith and Elizabeth West invite participants to explore the genre of creative non-fiction by writing small, vivid scenes drawn from daily life.

Wednesday 4/11, 8 pm in Pease Auditorium, Central Campus: Irene Blair Honeycutt Distinguished Lecturer: US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith.

“As all the best poetry does, “Life on Mars”first sends us out into the magnificent chill of the imagination and then returns us to ourselves, both changed and consoled.”  –The New York Times Sunday Book Review

Tracy K. Smith, author of four poetry collections including the Pulitzer-winning Life on Marsand the just-released Wade in the Water, reads and discusses her work. Just appointed to a second term as US Poet Laureate, Smith’s mission is to bring poetry to rural communities. Charlotte Lit’s April 4X4CLT poetry and art poster series— featuring Smith’s poems, along with art by Isaac Payne and Felicia van Bork—will be released and displayed at this event. Smith will read a second time on Thursday 4/12, 11 am in Halton Theater, Central Campus.

Thursday 4/12, 9:30 am in Tate Hall, Central Campus: Regional Author Spotlight: Jon Pineda. Pineda is a core faculty member of the low-residency MFA program at Queens University and is the author of poetry, memoir, and fiction, including his latest novel Let’s No One Get Hurt.

Thursday 4/12, 3 pm (Artist’s Lecture) Tate Hall, Central Campus and 6:30 pm (Opening Reception) Ross Gallery, Central Campus: Featured Visual Artist Felicia van Bork: color + color = space. In her “How to” series, van Bork uses her own torn and cut monotype prints to create large-scale collages, two of which are featured on April’s 4X4CLT poetry and art poster series. In the afternoon, van Bork discusses her artwork which will be displayed in an exhibit opening that evening in the Ross Gallery.

Lisa Zerkle’s poems have appeared in The Collagist, Comstock Review, Southern Poetry Anthology, Broad River Review, Tar River Poetry, Nimrod, Sixfold, poemmemoirstory, Crucible, and Main Street Rag, among others. Author of the chapbook, Heart of the Light, she has served as President of the North Carolina Poetry Society, community columnist for The Charlotte Observer, and editor of Kakalak. She is the curator of Charlotte Lit’s 4X4CLT, a public art and poetry series.

Pardon This Intrusion: Frankenstein 200 Years Later

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Leslie Klinger, editor of the New Annotated Frankenstein, discusses When Literature Becomes Myth: Celebrating 200 Years of Frankenstein at CPCC’s Sensoria Festival. Monday April 9 at 10:30 am, Central Campus, Tate Hall.  Free.

Two centuries after Frankenstein first appeared, we need to remember how eloquently the creature speaks. Not the monster who debuted on stage in 1823’s Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein, the one whose film history began with the 1910 one-reel Frankenstein from Thomas Edison. Hundreds of films, TV shows, stage plays, even musicals have followed them, from James Whale’s 1931 classic through Universal Studios’ upcoming remake of The Bride of Frankenstein. Granted, they have given us some of our most enduring cultural tropes: the mad scientist, the grunting monster, the torch-wielding mob. But they have drowned out a remarkable voice, one we need to hear now more than ever.

That voice belongs to the creature of Mary Shelley’s novel, published anonymously on January 1, 1818, and never out of print since. It is the voice of an articulate autodidact conceived by a girl a few months shy of her nineteenth birthday, motherless herself, displaced from family and proper society because of her elopement with a married rakish flake, creating what she later called her “hideous progeny” while holed up under rainy skies darkened by the global ash-cloud from Mt. Tambora’s eruption.

It is the outcast who faces Victor Frankenstein on the sea of ice and speaks the most moving words in the novel, the one who has by then found an abandoned book satchel containing the essential Romantic Era reading list and uses Paradise Lost to plead a case that convicts us all to this day. Speaking to his creation for the first time, Victor greets him as “Devil,” but the creature is far ahead of him: “I expected this reception. All men hate the wretched.” He proceeds to tell his wretched tale, beginning with the night Victor brought him to life and promptly abandoned him.

“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel,” he says, and Paradise Lost informs his tale and underscores the novel’s indictment of society. Steeped as she was from childhood in the great intellectual tradition, Mary Shelley knew very well the key scenes in Paradise Lost: Adam coming to life in the sun-drenched Garden of Eden, able to open his mouth and name every creature which presented itself to him, Eve so enchanted with her beautiful reflection that she almost refused to leave it. By contrast, the creature describes waking to darkness and cold. When he tries to imitate the sounds of night birds, the “uncouth and inarticulate” sounds he makes frighten him into silence. In contrast to Eve, the creature sees his reflection only after he has been admiring the De Lacey family from his hiding place. He has come to appreciate beauty, and with that understanding has come the recognition of how hideously he has been made.

Even Satan had his fellow devils, but the creature has no one; worse than that, he has read the great Miltonic explanation of the chain of being and found himself utterly excluded. When the creature makes his attempt to be included, when he approaches blind father De Lacey, his first words to another human being are “Pardon this intrusion.” Of course, at this point De Lacey’s children return, immediately assume a monster is attacking their father, and chaos typical of the movies ensues.

From that moment until the creature meets Victor, the series of mishaps and misdeeds that follow lead him to confront Victor and make the argument that he should have his own Eve. “I am malicious because I am miserable,” he says. He lays the blame for that misery at the feet of Victor, who created him and fled; that blame also lies on the man who shot him after the creature had saved his daughter from drowning (a scene turned around horribly in the Whale film), on the villagers who drove him away with stones and sticks, even on Felix De Lacey for assuming instinctively that because he was hideous he was evil. Give me a mate, he asks, and we will go to the wilds of South America. There, as he has learned from his reading, he and his mate will find the better Eden in each other’s arms. Victor is moved by the argument, at least until the moment when he aborts his second creation and puts the novel’s tragic conclusion into motion.

Jill Lepore’s recent New Yorker article points out how the creature’s story resembles a slave narrative, connecting it to Mary Shelley’s reading about slave rebellions in Haiti and the West Indies and also to the life of Frederick Douglass. The comparison is apt with regard to both the extraordinary way Douglass obtained his education and to his struggle to assert the full humanity of people of color to a society which considered them savage children. Lepore points out that in James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein, the monster is lynched. I think it is even more telling that in Mary Shelley’s novel, the creature has internalized society’s condemnation and decides to immolate himself.

Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws, a parallel biography of Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft, makes a fascinating case that both were hampered and unappreciated by the men in their lives: as thinkers, as writers, as full equals to the supposedly progressive and revolutionary men with whom they were intimately associated. Through her creature, Mary Shelley also speaks out against patriarchy, certainly against how the Miltonic chain of being justified the prevailing political and economic hierarchy—and hierarchy within families—as God-ordained.  Though the creature measures himself against Adam and Satan, I see him as similar to Eve, sent to gather food while the angel Raphael warned Adam of Satan’s designs. Like the creature eavesdropping on the De Lacey family (the pun is unavoidable) Eve is forced to obtain knowledge only by subterfuge, then judged as fallen by those who did not deign to teach her.

Mary Shelley’s novel has serious flaws: improbable plot devices, overwrought and silly dialogue, and a neophyte author’s attempt to make it everything from moral fable to philosophical argument to travelogue. But it is intricately and artfully presented through narrative framed within narrative, and at its heart the creature speaks what he rightfully calls the most moving part of the tale.

Today, even if the mob is carrying tiki torches or the stones are cast on-line, the creature still confronts us on behalf of anyone who is labelled Other, who is blamed, exploited, excluded or forced to assert that his or her life matters. Read the novel, or read it again, through the lens of the 21st century. Heed the voice of the creature.

Gastonia poet and writer David E. Poston taught for thirty years in public school, at UNC-Charlotte, and at Charlotte’s Young Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Broad River Review, English Journal, Pedestal, The Cape Rock, The Southern Poetry Anthology: North Carolina, and Kakalak. His poetry collections are My Father Reading Greek, Postmodern Bourgeois Poetaster Blues, and Slow of Study. He served on the steering committee for Charlotte Lit’s Carson McCullers centennial celebration in 2017 and currently serves on the boards of the Friends of the Gaston County Public Library, Gaston Literacy Council, and Charlotte Writers’ Club. He teaches writing workshops for Hospice and other venues and will talk about Frankenstein or Paradise Lost to any group that will listen.

UNCC’s Literary Festival Finds a Home in the Heart of the City

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When I moved to Charlotte in 2015 for my teaching position in UNC Charlotte’s Department of English, I discovered the campus isn’t what you’d call centrally located. Built north of the city on affordable farmland after World War II, the university has become a thriving urban institution, but a sense of remove from the city—physically and figuratively—persists. When I first met with Charlotte Lit and folks from other colleges and organizations to chat about supporting and building the literary arts, I came away with the feeling that UNCC was, well, a little out of the loop, in part because of its distance from the heart of Charlotte.

I knew I wanted to bridge this divide, to bring UNCC into the literary fold. This would help fulfill my college’s mission of community engagement but also my own. Literary events have enormous power: they give us joy, unite us, let us express our shared humanity, and show us how writing and art can sustain us, especially in times of change and upheaval.

Enter UNC Charlotte’s Center City campus, a gorgeous building located smack in the middle of Uptown, adjacent to First Ward Park and a quick stroll from the 7th Street Market and light rail station. Not only does Center City have a wonderful space, but it is committed—in spirit and, importantly, in funding—to programming community events. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences hosts its “Personally Speaking” series there, and my department had launched the Center City Literary Festival in 2013 and 2014, so the seeds of possibility were planted.

In 2017, the Center City Literary Festival was reborn.

The free public festival includes daytime and nighttime events. During the day, we feature children’s authors 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, discussion, book signings, and socializing.

We are committed, within our budget, to inviting renowned and emerging writers. In 2017, we were fortunate enough to bring prominent poets Nikky Finney and Eduardo C. Corral and fiction writer Dustin M. Hoffman; we also are dedicated to showcasing a UNCC or local writer (I was part of the 2017 festival). Here is what one attendee shared afterward:

“The whole experience delivered such a surprise gift—I hadn’t expected to be so deeply moved. The writers reconstituted my writing will—threw buckets of water my way—and reminded me how dehydrated I’d become. The presenters reminded me that language is how we reconnect with ourselves. When we make the effort to articulate those pieces that make us uniquely human, our words ‘ping’ others. Collectively we learn that we’re not alone—we get ‘re-membered.’ Isn’t that a big part of what writing’s all about? Nikky spoke of how writers ‘save’ something. I know that last night saved a part of me.”

The 2018 festival on Saturday, April 14, 2018, will offer another terrific evening lineup: Jill McCorkle, acclaimed fiction writer who this year will be inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame; poet Gary Jackson, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and other honors; Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, prose writer and winner of a Whiting Award; Paula Martinac, UNCC creative writing instructor and Lambda Literary Award-winning fiction writer; and Siobhán Campbell, a poet and critic serving as the Spring 2018 Kingston Visiting Writer at UNCC.

With the completion of the light rail, we hope to diminish the physical divide between campus and city and offer more events on our main campus, which is vibrant in its own right. For now, we hope you’ll join UNC Charlotte for a great day and night of literature set against Uptown’s luminescent skyline, right in the beating heart of the city.

Details:

Center City Literary Festival
Saturday, April 14, 2018
UNC Charlotte Center City Campus
320 E. 9th Street, Charlotte 28202

https://centercitylitfest.uncc.edu/

https://www.facebook.com/CenterCityLitFest/

Bryn Chancellor is a 2017-18 North Carolina Arts Council fellow and an assistant professor of English at UNC Charlotte. Her novel Sycamore, an Indie Next pick, an Amazon Best Book of 2017, and among Bustle‘s Best Debuts of 2017, is out now in paperback.

Immutable Laws of Writing #2: An object in motion stays in motion

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An object in motion stays in motion (and an object at rest stays at rest).

Sir Isaac Newton said this first, and not about writing. Still, writing is a natural act, possibly a force of nature, and is just as subject to physics as everything else. Applied to your writing, the “object” in question is the work you are producing. (Be it understood that we’re not talking here about writing as the mere act of putting words on paper; rather, we’re talking about writing that is becoming a finished work.) Applied to a work in progress, then: your writing both requires and benefits from momentum. Let’s break out those two key bits.

Requires momentum. Any piece of writing of any substantive length—short story, novella, novel, screenplay, stage play, epic poem, etc.—cannot continue forward unless you work on it regularly. Long works have many threads and themes, schemes and schemas, and other moving parts that need to be fresh in mind while writing. This is not to say you can’t take a break from a work; breaks can be good for your writing. But just try to finish a novel that you write in fits and starts, or even one that you write regularly but overly-spaced, such as writing it only on the weekends. It’s hard enough without adding that complexity.

Benefits from momentum. When you are working on a project regularly and with momentum on your side, your writing is likely to be more efficient and perhaps also better. Consider: the longer it has been since you last worked on your project, the longer it will take to: a) bring all the components back into your head; b) have a good sense of what to write next; and c) maintain all the voices: yours, and those of your characters. When your work has momentum, you slip easily between characters, you have your story threads and themes in mind, you know what has and has not transpired, and you know—this is important—what to write next.

Robert Heinlein provided these and some other rules of writing. The emphases are his:

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you start.

My Immutable Law of Writing #1 (“the words aren’t going to write themselves”) echoes RH’s first rule. My second supports his second: if you mean to finish, you must finish. And you do this by respecting (or, if you prefer, taking advantage of) the laws of physics.

Here are three pieces of practical advice for keeping momentum.

1. Write something you love. 

Don’t select a writing project because you think it’s trendy or easy to get published or will make you tons of cash. Write a story that you truly want to tell. That love will feed your momentum. You will write because you have to see how it comes out. (This will also sustain you later when you are in the eighth round of revisions and you hate the book more than you have ever hated anything.)

2. Make the forces (even the negative ones) work for you.

Fully expressed, Newton’s First Law is: “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force” (italics mine).* There are throughout your non-writing world “unbalanced forces” that conspire against you and your writing, even if (usually) unintentionally, almost all of which come down to commitments that require your time: jobs, partners, children, sleep, lawns that insist on growing, and so on. How might you make these forces work in support of your writing?

Perhaps: Use lawn mowing time as thinking time, for working out plot points and other story details; car pool to work so that you can write while someone else drives; enlist your family members as co-conspirators, to help by doing research or editing; establish family creative time: while you write, others practice their instruments, or blog, or fold origami, or what have you; get up 30 minutes earlier (you won’t miss it) and write 500 words while there are no distractions; or quit something that you’ve been meaning to quit, something that takes up your time, transferring that time to your writing.

3. Allow your self occasional breaks from the project. 

Short ones. Take Sunday off, maybe, but then back to it on Monday. Can’t fight physics, might as well make it work on your behalf.

——

* http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/newtlaws/Lesson-1/Newton-s-First-Law

The Grounded and the Floating

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Zadie Smith reads as part of the Lenoir Rhyne Visiting Writers Series in Hickory on Thursday, March 22 at 7 pm. Free, but tickets are recommended. Call the box office at 828-328-7206.

In Zadie Smith’s latest novel, Swing Time, two girls in a London neighborhood bond over what they have in common—their brown skin and a love of dance. Tracey has all the talent, and “her body could align itself with any time signature, no matter how intricate,” but her family life is more erratic, less motivated. In comparison, the unnamed narrator’s family is stable, and her mother in particular aspires to a better life. The narrator shares her love of old Hollywood musicals with Tracey, teaching them both something about not only the art of dance, but also about race and appropriation. Through this pastime we see the narrator, even as a child, holding back from full engagement, filtering the world through a more analytic detachment. Tracey, however, is all in—in her dance moves, emotional outbursts, or sexual forays in the schoolyard. Inevitably, as they enter adolescence, the two girls grow apart, but never completely sever their fraught relationship. Tracey dances in a chorus line before her life gets side-tracked, while the narrator becomes a personal assistant to a globetrotting do-gooder music celebrity.

Smith addresses the parallels between dance and writing explicitly in “Dance Lessons for Writers,” an essay in her collection Feel Free published earlier this year. From dance, Smith says, writers can learn lessons of position, attitude, rhythm and style. In both the novel and the essay, she compares Fred Astaire to Gene Kelly. Astaire is thin, elegant and aloof, never breaking into a sweat, appearing to float above the floor without effort. Kelly, on the other hand, shows his exertion and muscularity. For Smith, the two dancers exemplify the difference between “the grounded and the floating.” Gene Kelly provides a metaphor for “how the prosaic can turn poetic, if we work hard enough,” while Astaire’s movements are more literary, “poetry in motion.”

In writing workshops I’ve attended, instructors sometimes talk about “floaty-groundy” in terms of plot or characters, with a meaning that’s a little different from Smith’s. Groundy plots have a definite timeline, and their characters have clearly focused desires. A floaty character may lack identifiable goals, and a floaty plot may veer off course or meander. Think Hunger Games or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo vs. Lincoln in the Bardo or even Seinfeld. For me, the floaty-groundy dichotomy has more to do with my orientation as a reader. Do I know exactly where I am in time and place? Are there sensory details that keep me tethered to world of the story? Do I know what the character is doing in the moment? If so, then I think the passage is grounded. But I also want fiction and nonfiction I read to engage with ideas, and I want characters to have rich interior lives – floatier elements. Contrast these first sentences for back-to-back chapters early in Swing Time:

“If Fred Astaire represented aristocracy, I represented the proletariat, said Gene Kelly, and by this logic Bill “Bojangles” Robinson should really have been my dancer, because Bojangles danced for the Harlem dandy, for the ghetto kid, for the sharecropper—for all the descendants of slaves.”

“A Sunday in late summer. I was on the balcony, watching a few girls from our floor skipping Double Dutch down by the bins. I heard my mother calling me.”

Floaty vs. groundy, right? For me, good writing balances the two. In revising my own writing, I often notice when something is too focused on ideas and not enough on the nitty-gritty of the world I’m building, or when I’ve written a perfectly serviceable description of a subway ride, but the character does not seem to have a thought in her head. I think of Tracey in Swing Time as the more grounded character, like Gene Kelly, more comfortable in the corporeal, in effort and emotion. The narrator, like Astaire, remains cerebral and detached, perhaps more of the mind than the body.

While Tracey the erstwhile dancer never rises above her hardscrabble life in council flats, Smith’s narrator never makes a lasting connections to anyone or anything. If our fiction is to succeed at a high level, we must allow our characters (and our work as a whole) to engage with ideas, while also firmly grounding them in the world of our imagining.

Kristin Donnalley Sherman lives in Charlotte, where she works as a writer, editor, and writing coach. She’s published both fiction and nonfiction, and is currently at work on two novels. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Barrelhouse, Silk Road, Main Street Rag and Flashquake, and she has won or been a finalist in numerous contests, including Elizabeth Simpson Smith Short Fiction, the Writers Workshop Memoirs, the Reynolds Price Fiction, River Styx Micro-fiction, and the Press 53 Open Awards for Short Short Fiction.

At Least I’m Not a Dancer — An apologia

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“We seldom realize, I think, how very much we really are in the hands of
the dictionary. We think certain thoughts; we have certain experiences; and
then language, with its hard and fast boundaries, says, “You shall not say
that wonderful thing—you shall only say this—and we find on paper the pale
lifeless shadow of the thing that came to life in our soul.” — Emmet Fox

 

Writing is my weakness and it’s a nerve-wracking practice, but I can’t
help it—my blood is so doggone noisy, I have to write stuff down to make it
quiet. Plus my genes are always quarreling inside of me, not to mention all
those environmental and socioeconomic factors that contributed to my need to
scribble words onto the page. Carl Jung knew what he was talking about when
he said: “Nothing so promotes the growth of consciousness as the inner
confrontation of opposites.” Back in 1954, I plopped into the world, the
fourth child and baby girl of a profoundly sober Christian Virgo mother and
a sad, alcoholic dreamer of a father. And for the first fifteen years on Planet Earth
there was a whole lot of shaking going on.

A mother, they say, is the first book a child ever picks up and the last
one they put back on the shelf. Sounds right to me. I suppose then that a
father is the second book picked up and the next-to-the-last one put down.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve been fascinated and appalled by how unalike
my parents were. I spent years worrying about their lives and ignoring my
own. But when I finally got down to peeling the sweet Vidalia onion of
myself to its pungent core, a writer emerged, shrugged her shoulders and
said, Well, at least I’m not a dancer—which is a good thing because I lack
the grace for that muscular art.

My love affair with words began early. In first grade, I met twenty-six
lifelong friends—letters that were sometimes big and sometimes small
according to where they found themselves in a word or a sentence.
Miss Graham, my teacher was an up-to-date old maid who smelled like pickles. A
phonetic genius, she dredged my imagination for interest in Dick, Jane and
Spot, who led quite boring lives because they were forbidden to do anything
that required more than six letters just so I could learn to read. And for
some reason, the words settled into my fat brain like orphans who’d found a
good home without even trying. The part I liked most about learning to write
was erasing. I loved the way it smelled when I rubbed the pink end of my big
fat pencil across the cheap lined paper, exterminating mistakes easily, and
brushing them onto the floor as if they never occurred.

Twenty-five years ago, I wrote this sentence in my journal: My life is
about three things: words, love, and human beings. The grandiosity of that
statement surprised me, but now I understand that it wasn’t grandiose at all—it was a simple
profession of faith. Writing has helped me become a more decent person than I would have
been otherwise. It has helped me separate who I really am from my ego.

Another reason I became a writer was to honor silence. I have always wanted to make sense
out of my precarious life. As a child, I was quiet. I observed. There seemed to be something
hidden in everything I saw. My senses told me there was something Else. I could smell it. I could
feel it. Sometimes, I could even taste it. But I could not name it. But when I learned to listen to
this voiceless force, I discovered I had a voice deep within me.

“May God forgive me this sin of speech,” Nietzsche once wrote, and even
though he lamented that he was only a poet, I believe language was his only
earthly salvation. Indeed, it has been mine.  One of the most important
things I have learned to do as a writer is to acknowledge that other, bigger Author, who
sometimes shows up for work when I sit down to write. Some writers call it inspiration.
Some call it God.  I call it the Holy Spirit

Maybe it’s just Silence full of Itself, inviting me to . . . dance.

Published by South Carolina Review, January 2007

Karon Luddy was born in Lancaster, SC, the fourth of six children of hardworking, salt of the earth parents, and moved to Charlotte in 1976. During a midlife renaissance, Karon resigned from Apple Computer to pursue her lifelong passion—literature. In 2005, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Queens University, yet poetry has been a constant in her creative life. 2007 saw the publication of her first book of poetry, Wolf Heart (Clemson University Press) and her first novel, Spelldown (Simon & Schuster). Karon is currently working on a poetry collection, Circling God.

Workshops and Residencies, Spring and Summer 2018

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Editor’s Note: We’ll update this post periodically as we become aware of additional options.

Do you want to take your writing to the next level? Or make some serious progress on a writing project? Or maybe just connect in a different way with a writing community?

If so, you may want to attend a conference, a workshop or a residency this year. First, you should decide what kind of experience you are looking for. Some conferences, such as the mammoth AWP that begins next week in Tampa, offer panels on craft, perhaps publishing advice, as well as readings, but don’t offer an opportunity to get feedback on your work. Other conferences are actually workshops, which means that you will work in small groups to give and get feedback on participant work. Such workshops usually offer craft lectures, panels, readings and open mics too. While conferences and workshops provide instruction and feedback, residencies and retreats offer the opportunity to work on your own projects, with different degrees of interaction with other artists/writers possible depending on the particular location.

Opportunities within a six-hour driving distance of Charlotte

Appalachian Writers’ Workshop at Hindman Settlement School, “which is Kentucky’s premier writers gathering, provides an opportunity for aspiring and accomplished writers to immerse themselves in a community of people who appreciate Appalachian literature and who hail from or write about the region. This creative community comes to the Settlement to learn and teach the craft of writing through structured workshops and exchange with other writers. Both published and unpublished writers are urged to attend.”

  • Location: Hindman, KY
  • Dates: July 23-28, 2018
  • Cost: $850 (tuition, housing, and meals)
  • Application: closes May 1
  • Competitiveness: ?
  • Web: hindmansettlement.org

Doe Branch Ink offers three different week-long fiction or non-fiction workshops in May and June. Small groups and beautiful setting.

  • Location: 30 miles north of Asheville
  • Dates: vary by workshop. The ones listed now are in May and June
  • Cost: $1200-$1400
  • Application: can apply now, closed when full
  • Competitiveness: ?
  • Web: doebranchink.org

The Hambidge Center offers residencies rather than workshops. Fellows stay in individual studios scattered across the property. Four nights a week, they gather for a chef-prepared dinner. Usually every week or two, the writers and artists in residence share their work through studio tours. The property has miles of hiking trails, but limited phone and internet access. This is a great place for getting work done while also connecting occasionally with artists in other fields, including visual arts, composing, and dance.

  • Location: Rabun Gap, GA
  • Dates: throughout the year, except December to February
  • Cost: $235 per week
  • Applications: January 15 for May through August, April 15 for September through November, and September 15 for mid-February through April
  • Competiveness: Selective. That said, once you’ve been a fellow, because you live nearby, you are added to a list of people who can fill in.
  • Web: hambidge.org/application.html

Hub City Writing in Place is geared toward starting new work. The weekend sessions offer instruction, writing exercises, and feedback on work started there. You can stay in the dorms for $35 a night, or opt for a hotel. Critiques are available. If want to generate some new stuff, or only have a weekend, this might be a good fit.

The Porches is a private B&B-style accommodation for writers who want a space to write. The owner Judy Hale mostly takes women. The rooms are large and light-filled and, there are porches. Residents/guests share a common kitchen.

  • Location: Norwood, VA (northeast of Roanoke)
  • Dates: whenever
  • Cost: $65/night
  • Applications: just email the owner with a description of your writing project
  • Web: porcheswritingretreat.com

Sewanee Writers Conference is about a six-hour drive from Charlotte, and takes place at the University of the South, on a serene Gothic campus. Participants workshop five of the twelve days, and on days off can audit other workshops, write, or hike, swim or ride bikes in the area. There are craft lectures, faculty readings and publishing or agent panels on most days, so you can stay pretty busy if you want to. Twelve days can feel long to some people, and there’s not a lot happening in the town. However, if you want to be immersed in writing and literary community, this may be a good conference for you. The faculty tend to come back year after year, and they are generally older, often southern, not very diverse. It’s a good deal for the price which makes it competitive.

  • Location: Sewanee, TN
  • Dates: July 17-29
  • Cost: $1850
  • Applications: Close 3/20
  • Competiveness: It’s difficult to get into. In 2015, they accepted 15% of applicants.
  • Web: sewaneewriters.org/conference/

Squire Summer Writing Workshops 2018 is a weekend workshop in fiction, nonfiction and poetry offered by The North Carolina Writers Network. Over the course of ten 1.5 hour sessions, participants will share their work and receive instruction in their genre from faculty. This year the workshop is in Raleigh, July 19-22. Applications open around May 1. Final details are not available yet.

  • Location: Raleigh, NC
  • Dates: July 19-22
  • Cost: The cost in 2017 was $575 for a shared room for NCWN members, $675 for nonmembers.
  • Applications: Open 5/1
  • Competitiveness: They took only 42 in 2017
  • Web: ncwriters.org/programs-and-services/conferences

The Sun Weekend Writing Retreat. The literary magazine hosts a writing retreat aimed at helping writers improve their craft and connect with a supportive community. Four full scholarships available. Emerging writers with unique perspectives are encouraged to apply.

Table Rock Writers Workshop offers an intensive, small-group learning experience designed to stretch participants’ creative capacities and knowledge in a supportive and non-competitive environment. Held on a mountaintop on the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Table Rock Workshop is known for generous teachers, first-rate instruction, and reasonable tuition. Classes in poetry (Philip Shabazz), novel-writing (Darnell Arnoult), memoir and essay writing (Judy Goldman), writing for young readers (John Claude Bemis), and free-writing (Abigail DeWitt) are offered. Table Rock grew out of the 30-year old Duke University Writers’ Workshop, when it was discontinued in 2010.
  • Location: Wildacres Retreat, Little Switzerland, NC
  • Dates: August 27-31
  • Cost: $860 single room, $745 double room
  • Registration: Open March 1, closes when full
  • Competitiveness: open registration
  • Web: tablerockwriters.com 
Tinker Mountain Writers offers two kinds of experiences during the same week: a workshop or a retreat. Participants can choose a writer’s retreat, which will focus on generating new material through reading, prompts and discussion. Or writers can register for a workshop the focus of which might be plotting and storytelling, contemporary lyricism, an editor’s perspective, or working with an agent, among other options.

Weymouth Center Writer-in-Residence is a program for North Carolina writers only. You may stay a minimum of one week and a maximum of two. Accommodations are private bedrooms in a beautiful, historic house with shared bathrooms and kitchen. The house, located in Southern Pines, is surrounded by formal gardens, a horse farm, and abuts the Weymouth Woods Sandhill Nature Preserve with miles of walking trails.

Wildacres Writers Workshop takes place a beautiful location for a workshop, on a mountain near Little Switzerland, NC. Participants select from poetry, flash fiction, short story, novel and creative nonfiction. Daily workshops are 2.5 hours with readings/events in the evenings, leaving plenty of time to hike, write, audit other workshops, or socialize. The food is generally good, the rooms shared but with bathrooms, and the views lovely. There are plenty of shenanigans—boxed wine and dancing on the patio at night for those interested, a costume party, and a Gong Show on the last night with many skits on literary doings. There’s a greater emphasis on social events here than at some other conferences.

  • Location: Little Switzerland, NC
  • Dates: Writing workshop: July 7th – July 14th, Retreat: July 1st – July 7th
  • Cost: $850 workshop only, $1300 for workshop and retreat
  • Applications: Open 3/2, closed when full
  • Competitiveness: You have to be a serious writer, but it’s not difficult to get in if you apply early.
  • Web: wildacreswriters.com/summer-writing-workshop.html

Wildacres Residency Program offers 70 one and two-week residencies from April through October each year. Residents stay in one of three cabins that are a short walk away from the conference center. If desired, residents can take their meals in the dining hall. There’s no cost. Applications close on 1/15 so it’s too late for this year, but something to put on your radar for next.

The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts also provides room, board and individual studios where Fellows work with distraction for residencies ranging from two weeks to two months. Your studio is separate from your living accommodations. You can meet other artists from a wide variety of disciplines at meals and through studio tours.

  • Location: Amherst, VA
  • Dates: Varies, throughout the year
  • Cost: up to $150 a day. Fellows are accepted regardless of ability to pay
  • Applications: Next deadline is May 15 for October-January residencies
  • Competitiveness: highly selective
  • Web: vcca.com/main/apply

Farther Flung but Worth Considering

Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference: A highly competitive 10-day workshop in Vermont. Applications for 2018 are closed, but think about it next year. http://www.middlebury.edu/bread-loaf-conferences

Creative Nonfiction Writers’ Conference: From Creative Nonfiction magazine, a three-day conference for memoirists, lyrical essayists, and longform journalists. May 24-26, Pittsburgh, PA. https://www.creativenonfiction.org/2018-creative-nonfiction-writers-conference

Squaw Valley Writers Workshop: A competitive one-week workshop in July. https://communityofwriters.org/workshops/writers-workshops/

Tin House Summer Workshop: A competitive one-week workshop on Portland, OR  July 8-15. Faculty is stellar. $1800. Applications close 3/18. http://tinhouse.com/summer-workshop/

Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers Conference: August 13-19, 2018. A competitive conference for writers who have an MFA or equivalent experience. Offers craft workshops and critique groups with an excellent faculty. $1410. Applications open now. http://vcfa.edu/writing/pwc

Writing by Writers: Various generative and critique workshops held throughout the year in gorgeous settings. https://writingxwriters.org

And for the Exotic Writing Adventure…

https://thewritelife.com/writing-retreats/

Poet Stuart Dischell

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The Arts at Queens proudly presents The English Department Reading Series and poet Stuart Dischell, Thursday, March 15, 7 pm, Ketner Auditorium, Sykes Building, Queens University of Charlotte. More Info

The poet Stuart Dischell’s fifth collection, Children with Enemies, has recently been released by The University of Chicago Press. His first, Good Hope Road, was a National Poetry Series Selection. Those poems—that book—matter very much to me, as I had the great fortune of being in Stuart’s first class of creative writing graduate students at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

For me, Stuart has modeled what it means to be a poet: to love language well, to reach outward toward a writing community. He showed me how to navigate a writing future, assisting me whenever possible. Because of him, I internalized the importance of reading for myself in a necessary, self-guided way. He brought poets to his students’ attention as all great teachers do; Stuart also brought them to us in person, to teach us and socialize with us (even Seamus Heaney, the week before he won the Nobel Prize in Literature).Writers who are gone he made present (in particular for me, Randall Jarrell and Etheridge Knight).

Stuart’s literary gifts have carried forward in his subsequent collections, evolving in their vision and honing their strengths. He calibrates his diction, his rhetoric and structures, whether delivering the poem in third person or first. He gives voice to the herd in tall grass or the puppet with a complaint. Poems can be personas or personal lyrics, or are presented as if overheard by a silent listener. He is a master of the varied and unexpected list. He often takes us through the city, shows us the lives beyond its windows, takes us to wharves or down neighborhood streets. There are people and avenues, dogs, women in the rain, workers at a manhole cover, a mom in a ball cap, and evenings at a Paris bar. In this peopled world there is both comfort and despair.

I have learned much from his lines—so natural in how they proceed one to another, and yet each cohesive and resonant unto itself. What sets Stuart’s lines and their handling of story and music apart, though, are the ways he accomplishes all of this through image. Song and lineation, in Stuart’s poems, resound by way of his command and gift for metaphor. His images apprehend the world as captured exactly by a voice—the old horses at the fence, how “Their veined faces/ Scare me a little/ And the top lips they pull back/ Show large yellow teeth.”

His images often locate an enviable, compressed poignancy. “It’s the smile of the wire that breaks your neck,” concludes the poem “Beneath the Blast” in his new book. Many of the poems in Children with Enemies, with its notable bright green cover and red-eyed spider, summon a wild energy, achieved by tracking a ray of sunshine or invisible alphabets. Poems make wide assertions, made insistent through the particular. The stomach must be forgiven for its vomit. The lost father has become “a statue of air.” There is tension here between the harmless and harmful. Sometimes the tragedy is not getting what you want for your birthday, but this is, upon proper reflection, reason for a deep loneliness.

Stuart Dischell’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Agni, The New Republic, Slate, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and anthologies including Essential Poems, Hammer and Blaze, and  Pushcart Prize. A recipient of awards from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

Julie Funderburk is author of the poetry collection The Door That Always Opens (LSU Press). She is the recipient of fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council and the Sewanee Writers Conference. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Queens University in Charlotte, NC, where she directs The Arts at Queens.

It Is Okay to Weep in the Aisles

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It is okay to weep in the aisles
wiping tears before handling grapes,
sampling wines.
Red or white?  Just choose.
Your heart won’t know the difference.
No matter that the woman with the chic
side braid—her child pushing the cart,
training to become  a customer—
stares at you as though you’re out of line,
then quickly turns and squeezes lemons.
We all have our seasons.
She can’t know what you know—not yet.
It is okay to weep in the aisles.

 

 

From Beneath the Bamboo Sky (Main Street Rag, 2017)

Irene Blair Honeycutt’s fourth poetry book, Beneath the Bamboo Sky (Main Street Rag, 2017), sub-titled Poems and Pieces on Loss and Consolation, “is my attempt to honor life by giving voice to sorrow and joy. Much of the book is about the loss of siblings—a grief not often recognized in our culture.” Irene founded CPCC’s annual literary festival, now called Sensoria. Upon her retirement, the college established a Distinguished Lectureship in her name. Her work has been published in Nimrod, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology: VII, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and others. She lives in Indian Trail, and continues to teach and mentor poets.