Residencies

Every semester in the MFA program begins with a 10-day residency at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon (summer), or at the Oregon coast (winter).

Residencies feature readings, workshops, panels and lectures by award-winning authors of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Residencies are scheduled twice a year in June and January.

The next residency will be held on the Forest Grove campus, from June 18-28, 2009.

 

 

 

What students are saying

 

 

Student commentaries on residency craft talks

 

By Kitty Belsey (Poetry, 2010)

 

Presenter: David St. John

Title: Poetry and Aperture

There is a moment when the surface of a poem opens up, yields to access, and creates an aperture through which a reader can enter. Like Salome’s dance of the seven veils, what is withheld is slowly revealed. This is similar to the veil in ancient Israel’s temple, behind which God is hidden in the holy of holies. In Christ’s death, the veil is rent and God becomes available to the faithful. This metaphor of revelation becomes a metaphor for epiphany—the revelation of Christ. Seeing something ordinary and having a sudden flare of revelation means for the reader a sudden recognition of experience.

An aperture in a camera controls how much light is let through to the image plane. The aperture in a poem is not always a neat, safe opening but is sometimes raw-edged, like a wound. In the course of a poem, wounds are revealed that create a space for the reader to gain admittance. The emotional impact of these wounds comes from the reader’s recognizing we are sentient beings. The wound serves as a point of enlightenment for the reader, a revelation so profound it obscures nominal reality. It may come at a moment when the tone shifts and the poet makes a statement that turns the gaze of the poem toward the reader and invites the reader into the experience. The reader is looking for discovery beyond ordinary pat observations such as “That tore me up,” or “I always knew it would be like this.” A poem tries to help readers understand their own complexity. Poetry offers a possibility of connection. We operate in language, and we aim for acts of consciousness and sensibility in the music of language.

Citing the poetry of Rumi, St. John describes how Rumi, using an image of torn robes, allows access for the reader into the political world. As the lens turns, there is always a new wisdom. In the poem, there is a physicality; a hole in the wall becomes a portal to history.  In good poems, aperture widens the scope of the experience. Examples abound. Poems by Bishop, Joe Millar, Marilyn Nelson, and more demonstrate strategies for preparing the reader for resolution. Every writer should admit it: the moment when a reader’s eyes widen—this is the focus of all the light we pour through the shutter openings in our work.

 

By Nomi Morris (Nonfiction, 2010)

 

Presenters: Marvin Bell & Joseph Millar

Title: What We Have Learned About Poetry by Writing It

This was my first exposure to Marvin Bell, and now I am among the unwashed ranks who believe him to be touched by the gods. Bell began by listing things he has learned through his writing life: 1) You can’t see into the future. 2) Know meter and iambics. 3) Standards and definitions are narrow and subjective. 4) Poetry is more of a dance than a song. 5) Talk about poetry is not poetry. 6) Accident and luck count more than knowledge and will. 7) It is a way of life, not a career. 8) Publication is the auction of the soul. (Try to keep your ego out of the submission and rejection process) 9) The writing is thrilling, the rest lasts for a few minutes and then you move on. 10) The objects of our desire are finite, but our desires are infinite.

Joe Millar seconded what is essentially a “live it, breathe it” credo for  writing poetry. Millar said he has learned you can write it: “Just write down something on the face of the deep.” Much like Bell’s “dailies” exercise, Millar believes writing something, anything, is what will lead to good writing. Millar believes in humbling yourself, just as Neil Young remarked to him: “You can’t make demands of a new song.” This back and forth with Bell culminated in both agreeing that you have to write bad work to write good work. The alternative is to remain mediocre.

Bell believes in imagination. He says poetry has lost its audience to song (and I was thinking that trend is much the same as how books have lost their audience to film).

The session was inspiring because it cut to the core of the creative process, no matter what one’s genre. It also re-ignited my interest in poetry, which I haven’t paid attention to in years. And, together with hearing Dorianne Laux’s reading later that evening, it made me think that poetry is actually closer to nonfiction writing than fiction writing. The stream of consciousness style in which both Bell and Millar speak (and write) felt to me like poetry is to narrative prose as jazz is to classical music.

 

By Gail Kretchmer (Fiction, 2009)

 

Presenter: Valerie Miner             

Title: Finding the Shapes of our Stories: Form in Fiction

It’s always inspiring to listen to seasoned authors, and Valerie’s craft talk was a treasure trove of opinions and analogies offered by many accomplished writers about the various forms of fiction. Valerie likened a short story to an affair, and a novel to a satisfying monogamous relationship. Other authors contrasted these two forms as: rust vs. a forest fire; a small water color vs. an oil painting; one night in the woods vs. a mountain trek. Baxter suggested that novels require a foray into history, and Abu-jabber thinks of them as beautiful monsters. Schumacher prefers getting lost in novels, but acknowledges that short stories have the advantage of being read over and over. And of course there’s the novella, which Valerie called the “ignored middle child,” as well as the microfiction story.

Valerie’s talk about historical and contemporary forms of fiction, and the relationship between fiction and other visual art forms, offered a visual inspiration to the writer who sits down to the blank page and needs to decide what form is best for the story about to be told. I had focused on the novel before joining the program, and have spent the last year working exclusively in short story, and now I’m anxious to incorporate microfiction, or even novella, into my developing collection of short stories.

 

By Linda Grochowalski (Fiction, 2009)

 

Presenter: Bonnie Jo Campbell

Title: Writing from Anecdotes

This was one of the most useful and interesting talks this residency. Bonnie first defined the difference between the moral universe (where the crimes are murder, theft, adultery, corruption, rape, etc.) and the story universe (where the crimes are being boring, having noting to say, and using ill humor). She suggested one way to avoid the crimes of the story universe is to use or base our stories on anecdotes, and she gave us tips on how to find these anecdotes through several short exercises. Her goal for us was to come away with 5 anecdotes each: I found 8, and since then another 12. We find anecdotes in several ways: the mythology of a group, such as family stories; anecdotes that turn into jokes; community anecdotes; and anecdotes that we are sick of hearing, but which still survive—and which teach us about survival. Anecdotes are comforting since they have endings, and this can help us end our stories. She told us to allow the human mind to find the meaning in our little stories and to use anecdotes to create characters and discord. I will use the anecdotes I "found" through this exercise to enrich old stories and begin new ones. Thank you Bonnie Jo!

 

By Deb Tenney (Fiction, 2009)

 

Presenter: Stephen Kuusisto

Title: Literary Writing and the Art of Listening

By far the most brilliant craft talk of the residency, Stephen Kuusisto’s fine-tuned awareness of his surroundings surpasses those of the ordinary masses.  His attention to the cochlea and the pars tensa—parts of the human ear that allow us to appreciate the cast iron sounds of a grand piano—gives way to his theory that the duck cannot appreciate the bagpipes of Lyle Hampton. 

“Listening beyond the narrow coil of easy expectations,” Stephen asserts, “requires effort.”  It requires a place to stand, where you can hear “the cherries falling, the shreds and tatters of fog, the hum of gnats.”  While I listened to Stephen, I began to hear what he referred to as “the hot, curdled molecules of sound.”  The 100 year-old recording of Enrico Caruso singing Gunot’s Opera Faust, left me dumbfounded and wildly inspired.  How a human voice can evoke a sense of “loving someone who you’ll never get, not in the right way,” by the way it shapes in a high “C”, broadens, then backs down, out of the note, and turns it into blues—it’s beyond me.  I left Stephen’s aria-of-a-craft talk with a deep gratification that, more than anything else, I am not a duck.

 

By Johnnie May (Poetry, 2010)

 

Presenter: Stephen Kuusisto

Title: Literary Writing and the Art of Listening

This was not really a lecture, but rather a brilliantly lush and lyrical meditation on listening. Stephen began with a quote from Stravinsky:  “Hearing has no merit; ducks hear also.”  Then, the question was posed—What advantage does the cochlea have?  The answer?  We can hear big sounds, but not from a great distance.  A precise distribution of duration and rhythm can be heard by humans, but not by ducks! So Stravinsky was wrong.  As writers, we cannot think that the senses have no merit even though the visual image has been predominant.

Stephen went on to provide many anecdotes on his own advanced hearing, developed at an early age due to his blindness, and suggested that listening is the art of leverage; that is, of influence. Stephen urged us to “stand still and hear the light” and said that he could even hear cherries falling when he sat in a field at the farm of a friend in New Hampshire. He compared his ears to “dried goldenrods listening to the hum of gnats.”  He then stated that the ear’s par tensa was quicker than all the membranes of the brain and that it is the “wild auditory language of the brain itself.”

Stephen also talked about listening to music, especially to Paganini and Caruso.  He quoted Cocteau’s statement that “’all good music resembles something’” and  said that the chance music of what happens around us is lost if we fail to listen in this post-modern world. As for poetry, he affirmed that poetry is the art of analogy, and simile is the stuff of poetry. We always describe sound by comparing it to something else. He urged writers to use the multiplicity of our senses in our writing in order to convey the complexity of our conscious minds to readers. Also, he stated that literary writing is not just creating a “news photo”—a la Hemingway, but all the senses must be used—not simply the visual image.

To illustrate his point about using simile, Stephen played for us a hundred-year-old opera aria recording with Caruso singing in high C, staying there, and then slowly backing out. Afterwards, he described what we heard as “milk and iodine,” which he later explained as two substances that do not go together.  His last piece of advice was to spend more time listening.

I have by no means done justice to Stephen’s wonderful meditation on listening—I can only say that his talk was beautiful and important for writers to hear so that we may begin to hear more deeply and fully.

 

By J. Chris Flanagan (Fiction, 2010)

 

Presenter: Jack Driscoll

Title: First Do No Harm

Jack Driscoll opened the January 2009 Pacific MFA Residency by reminding us of what it means to write, saying, "Speak what it feels to be human." He read a poem entitled "Richard Cory" by Edwin Arlington Robinson, and asked us to consider how the poem's final line—Went home and put a bullet through his head—undermines the entire characterization of Cory up to that moment in the poem. Jack mentioned that the term "persona," from the Greek tradition, is akin to "a mask," and as writers we must seek the truth in our characters, however surprising, the kind of revelations that make them at once empathetic and real as "people" as opposed to just "characters." Jack went on to add that under-imagined characters eliminate the reader entirely, spelling doom for any work of fiction.

As a practical matter, Jack suggested writers consider what he called "The 3 Ms" – Motivation; Motion; and (in a bit of etymological sleight of hand), Emotion. Motivation, according to Jack, is a matter of desire. He suggested getting characters in trouble and waiting to see how they behave. He then offered a terrific reading of excerpts from Brady Udall's short story "Midnight Raid" in order to illustrate his point. And then Jack hit-home the importance of motion and emotion by reading the opening of Pete Fromm's short story "Attack." The story begins at full throttle; it leaves the reader wondering where it could possibly go. The answer is a surprising one: the story jettisons its external conflict for a largely internal one, a rising action found in the consequences of the story's inciting event.

This last point of Jack's particularly resonated with my current thinking on the structure of the short story, that it is compelled to begin on the precipice of change and in the middle of significant action. It was a point driven home to me during a recent conversation I had with the American short story writer Charles D'Ambrosio. He asked me to consider Freitag's Triangle, the age-old representation of story structure and rising action. "Why not start at the top?" Charlie said. "Then, you will have nowhere left to go except even higher."

 

By Ryan Adams (Poetry, 2010)

 

Presenter: Kim Barnes

Title: Art and Absence of Reflection in Personal Nonfiction

At last, someone sees the connection between poetry and the personal essay. “If you just write, ‘this happened, then this happened,’” Kim said, “no one is interested, there’s no art.”  She might as well be talking about poetry. “Even though what you are writing is your story, it’s not about you.” Again, she might as well be talking about poetry. She explained that it’s the emotions that drive the personal essay, and not plot. There’s no tension in the plot because we know the author doesn’t die. We know the author is going to make it. We know the “what” in a story, but we don’t know the “why.”  So the essay must have reflection. But this is all true for poetry. There is no tension in a poem’s narrative. There just isn’t enough time for it. The tension resides in the emotions. We speak of the poem’s rhythm, its music, but these are all names for the same thing: emotion. And not just any emotion – your emotion. And not just your emotion, but the kind of emotion that is within the reader, the emotion that is in everyone, the kind that is human. “You must be a citizen of the world,” Kim said, “and not merely of your own life.” That is a description of poetry. 

 

By Devika Brandt (Poetry, 2010)

 

Presenter: Mark Spragg

Title: Editing for Balance

What an inspiration Mark Spragg is! The two points he made that I will carry with me are: Stop caring about being a writer, and begin to care about the work as a reader; and the John Gardner idea of the work of the writer being to suspend the reader in the novel’s narrative dream. Both of these points feel crucial to me.

Mark encouraged consistency in the actions of a character, that they must act within the boundaries of who they really are, or else the reader will lose faith in those people and henceforth in the book. He encouraged us to allow the reader to discover the characters in their own unfolding, to share in his or her awakening. Part of this is editing out unnecessary reporting and finding out how little you truly need to say. This has been an issue in my own writing, along with trying to sum things up at the end. Mark said that summation usually confuses a story unless it is grounded in physical reality. When it is grounded, readers will trust enough to go wherever you take them.

Mark also spoke about rhythm in writing, which is another area I am working on. He suggested mumbling the words aloud just to hear the sound of them without the sense. “If it doesn’t sing to me, it owns no voice.” I am excited to try this, and to consider all the ways of editing as techniques that will allow the writing to “transcend that process so that the reader thinks that it was the easiest thing in the world.”

Mark Spragg humbly offered such generous and substantial ideas and inspiration. He made me eager to write with the idea that we are all in this together, and he has to work just as hard as anyone else. He is a human being with the intention of  presenting words in their most evocative forms. He most certainly encouraged me to do the same.

 

By Nancy Hechinger (Poetry, 2009)

 

Presenter: Dorianne Laux

Title: The NEW New York School: The Children of Frank O'Hara

This craft talk was like recess, like lunch, like a story hour—full of energy, the best time of the day. Dorianne opened by inviting us to “take into our hearts some antic joy.” First she gave a short overview of the New New York School, and the poets influenced by Frank O'Hara, (who included Ashberry, Koch, R.D. Skilling, James Tate, Tony Hoagland, Charles Simic) and then she just read to us. “I love reading him. I love being in Frank’s voice.” No one wrote like this before. She read Personism, a fantastic wild ride of a silly rant with a serious message—but you never get  a"‘here-comes- the-message" message. It’s like a train coming at you, all conversation. It begins with silliness and moves to deep seriousness. Look at the poem "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island." O'Hara begins with something absurd and moves to something serious. The sun grows in stature and believability as an authority figure. But without the silliness, the seriousness would not hold; it would be too much. It would be heavy, didactic. The main thing with Dorianne is this: She loves poetry so much, she whoops, she flies—she loves to read it, swim in it, and the energy of O’Hara’s work jazzes her no end…and passion like that is 100% contagious. Her parting words: “Don’t take yourself too seriously and live as variously as possible.”

  

By Cathryn Braeback (Poetry, 2010)

 

Presenter: Sandra Alcosser

Title: Nocturnes and Aubades

Poet Sandra Alcosser urged her auditors to ask themselves, “What is my hymn to the night?”  She described night as the time we are alone, when the soul comes out. I find myself considering how close this remark is to Edward Hirsch’s simple suggestion (in How to Read a Poem) for relating fully to a poem: read it alone, at night or in the early morning.  Accompanied by a nocturne by Impressionist composer Claude Debussy and paintings by Monet and Whistler, Sandra firmly fixed the poetry of night to the late 19th and early 20th centuries in a recognized place in Western tradition. She also took this tradition back in time to the Orphic hymns of the Greeks. Sandra’s talk emphasized the universality of the aubade, the dawn poem of lovers, and the nocturne. Aubades were written by female court poets of 10th century Japan like Sei Shonagan and Ono no Komachi, as well as by the troubadours of 12th century France. I was struck by this reminder that the lyric tradition did not start with the Romantics and wonder how I, with a background in the medieval lyric, can incorporate some echoes of other times and places into my work. Poets and fiction writers still produce celebrations of night or morning, as contemporary poet Jenny Lewis has done, or turn the tradition upside down in the manner of Philip Larkin. I was startled to find two examples in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel the day of the craft talk.

 

By James Zerndt (Fiction, 2009)

 

Presenter: Xu Xi

Title: Globalized Narrative

Wow. That pretty much sums up how I felt about Xu’s reading and craft talk. It was a shot of youthful adrenaline at just the right time in the residency. Her story "To Body, To Chicken" was both a humorous tale about the importance of the English language and the difficulty others have in learning it. “Teacher says water is a concrete noun. She wonders about this because of water’s liquid nature.”

This segued nicely into her talk about how literature is taught in English around the world and how MFA programs are a phenomenon occurring mainly in the United States. Even Thai authors writing about Thailand are writing in English. English has become the standard for literature. Xu Xi didn’t so much go into the implications of this, but rather seemed more interested in making us aware of it as writers.

             

She asked us how we derive meaning in contemporary fiction when the world is becoming so globalized. What is the universal when there’s a McDonalds along the Seine in Paris? A Taco Bell in Seoul? Almost anything seems to go these days. The word ‘sushi’ was almost unknown to American readers thirty years ago, but due to an increasing Asian population here, readers are now familiar with it. Because of this, Xu Xi intimates that it might be time for us to re-think universals in our writing. And I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. It might, actually, be an opportunity.

 

By Aaron Kier (Fiction, 2010)

 

Presenter: John Rember

Title: Writing Mom

After Ellen Bass gave her talk about discovery, everyone buzzed about it for days. Faculty reiterated points in workshop, Craft Talks, over lunch; we chatted about it, looked at our work (and our lives and budding pieces of inspiration) through this new lens to see how the kaleidoscope’s colors might alter our perceptions, each chink’s shift a new possibility. But not until John Rember finally took the podium on Tuesday afternoon did we see this concept at work in the hands of a gifted craftsman.

Laced throughout John’s talk, lines rose to the surface and, without apparent intention, underscored Ellen’s concept. Saying, “The writer goes into the underworld without dying,” he cautioned: “You can’t do it by approaching stories you already know the ending to.” His comments and the poignant literary illustrations about mothers—drawn from sources as divergent as Hansel & Gretel to Persephone and Hades—drew broad strokes across the canvas. Metaphor and concepts, such as “the psychosis of normalcy” and a view of medical clinics as metaphor for the psyche, darkened the shadows. And in the center of this masterpiece he placed the glaring, hard-to-look-at portrait of his own relationship with his aging mother.

John may have opened his talk by lobbing to the listener the idea of writing as either expiation or witnessing, but his talk defied being neatly categorized under either heading. “Writers should learn to love messiness,” he told us. And he stood in the middle of that messiness, wallowed in it without concern that he did so in front of an audience. He laid out the difficult story of his mother’s deteriorating condition and his own anger, frustration and fear—not because he’s transcended those feelings and can place them in some neat little box and offer it up as proof of his atonement, but because he is still clawing his way through to the underworld in an effort to discover what it is he is meant to learn from this experience. In so doing, he posed provocative questions and thoughts. “What’s so bad about grief anyway?” “Nobody believes in nothing.” In reference to Hansel & Gretel bearing a theme of hunger and want: “Where does it come from in the midst of plenty?” And ultimately, his truly transcendent viewpoint of motherhood as a variation of Stockholm Syndrome—that the mother’s life, dreams, independence, identity, etc. have been “hijacked by her child.”

Wild stuff. I’ll be processing for some time. And hopefully, embarking on an illuminating journey of my own as a result.

 

By Robbie Pock (Fiction, 2010)

 

Presenter: Mary Helen Stefaniak

Title: The Secret of Once

So you’re writing along and the narrative is just getting soggy and slow and you’d give three stars off a Kirkus review just to find the one thing that would save you.  If you had Mary Helen Stefaniak on speed dial, she could gift you the secret of once.  A little mini-scene can rescue the plot, lighten the narrative, take the characters in a fresh, provocative direction.  Like every other writer in the audience, I listened to Mary Helen’s lecture with an enlightened smile.  Now I had a tool I could use to slip in a little backstory, drop in that brilliant detail to foreshadow a climactic moment.  Since that lecture, I heard over and over again the students in the program saying, “You need to use the secret of once.”  “You could drop a mini-scene here.”  How wonderful when a teacher can show you something you’ve been doing all along and teach you how to use it to maximum effect.  Thank you, Mary Helen.

 

By Helen Gerhardt (Poetry, 2010)

 

Presenter: Marvin Bell

Title: Poetry A to Z

Marvin Bell delivered a high energy talk on, well, everything in poetry, from A to Z.  My head was filled with cold medicine, so I was already a little dizzy, and Marvin came in with this talk that ran like a 100 meter dash on steroids.  Mostly, I couldn’t keep up with him.  However, I did manage to capture a few bits of truly wonderful treasure as he raced past me.  Good thing for me he is generous with what he knows, and keeps it in all in big, loose pockets that tend to allow things to spill out.As he traveled through the alphabet, one of his E’s (and there were more than one) was for Elegies.  Marvin asked, “Who are they for?”  He continued with the answer, saying, “An elegy is a poem that was written too late.” He asserted, “In place of elegies, write more love poems!”  This one got my attention, despite the antihistamine cloud surrounding my thinking. An elegy is a poem that was written too late.  I had become aware that almost half of my recently completed poems were to people who were dead. Not that there’s anything wrong with writing to dead people, per se. It’s just a little lonely, because it is difficult for them to respond in a satisfying manner.  It might also be a little cowardly, because the dead folk can’t answer you in an unsatisfying manner, either. At least, this has been my experience.  I have begun to realize that I might be missing some of the very interesting and alive people who are currently part of my life, which is what Marvin was trying to point out, I think.  

Let me make a promise based on a lot of what Marvin had to say: Marvin Bell, on my honor I will try to do my duty to God and my country and write more love poems, but I reserve the right to do this badly. I will mess with lines. I will give a damn. I will read my poetry with disregard for its meaning. I will not be myself. I will not write what I know. I will trust my senses. I will write love poems while the ones I love are alive. I will give it a try. I will fear no meter. I will remember that music arises within the body of the writer and the music always wins. Even scientists have their imperfect name for something that is as big as it can get, and they call it “the end of greatness.” I will write about that dark matter, that scientific sticky stuff of the universe, and I will do it with great love, and I will do it badly, to the best of my ability, again and again.  You told me so.  I promise.  And thank you.

 

By Abby Murray (Poetry, 2009)

 

Presenter: Molly Gloss

Title: The Ground Beneath Their Feet

Molly opened the topic of locating your writing, of landscape descriptions and how to handle them in a society spoiled by media. She essentially reminded us we’re not writing for the 18th or 19th century public—a patient crowd that absorbed lengthy, luxurious landscape descriptions because it was still new, still fresh and unseen. Then, it was the writer’s job to bring the land to the reader. Today, we write for readers who have (typically) seen fields, meadows and forests. They’ve heard the crawl of traffic in busy cities, and are no longer as patient as their ancestors with drawn-out landscape descriptions. For example, novels like those of Jane Austen’s were able to go in-depth on the “exterior” part of a story: where the characters were located, during which season, witnessing what kind of agricultural development, etc. Instead, readers today enjoy books more focused on the “interior” aspects of a story: what is happening in the minds and relationships of the characters.

But we can (and should) still realize the importance of landscape. In her handout, Molly cited examples from novels with authors as contemporary as Ann Patchett and Kent Haruf, highlighting their ability to make location clear and distinct, able to express not only a place, but also mood and metaphorical meaning. As a poet, I was glad to have been there. This craft talk elaborated on Ellen’s Discovery lecture and the significance of locating a poem. Molly gave us so many different perspectives to learn from -- one example being John Gardner’s quote: “The rain must be real for readers to understand the girl’s anger at her umbrella being stolen.” This made me want to take another look at my poems and see if I could tell what the weather was like in each of them! Was the emotion of each of my poems supported by what was physically there? Is each poem grounded somewhere?

During the talk, I looked over at my friend Adrianna, a fiction writer working on a “cross-genre” fantasy novel. Molly addressed that type of writing as well, telling us that if you’re making up your own world, you must address the landscape and “how” of it: How does it rain? How do plants and food grow? Where is waste kept? Non-fiction writers, I felt, had a place there too. “Where we come from informs where we go,” Molly said. We were all advised to remember the landscapes of our homes, our childhoods. Make maps. Examine the plant life. Then put it in writing and use it as the foundation of an entire piece.

 

By Catherine Michaud (Poetry, 2009)

 

Presenter: Judy Blunt

Title: Fundamentals of Nonfiction

Judy emphasized the difference between “truth” and “facts” in nonfiction. According to Judy, “truth is always larger and more important than the facts” in creative nonfiction. Truth is the heart of the essay, and as writers, we want to recreate the causes of emotions so that our readers can experience the emotions for themselves. People read to find themselves reflected in the pages of a story. Writers of nonfiction must “own” their stories. There are ethical boundaries; we can hurt people, so Judy warns that we must use our power wisely, carefully. In researching our stories, to be as accurate as possible in uncovering the facts and the truths therein, Judy advises us to ask others what they remember and to allow their truths to influence our research.

In nonfiction writing, there exists a spectrum of sub-genres between literal fact and literary truth. Court transcripts, formal research, biography, textbooks, and history live at the literal fact end of the spectrum, whereas journalism, opinion pieces, personal essays, self-help, and religion move toward the middle of the spectrum, and all the way toward the literary truth side are memoirs and lyrical essays. (Fiction exists squarely in literary truth, and makes no claims to being based on fact.)

Judy’s particular focus is on creative nonfiction, which combines fact and truth. She says that good creative nonfiction involves a combination of memoir, research, reflection, discovery, and above all, is a search for literary truth. In this kind of writing, the “I” often enters the picture, but quality works of this kind must be more than mere self-expression. Judy finished her presentation with a few nuts and bolts we can use in the actual writing of our pieces. Creative nonfiction uses the tropes of fiction: pacing, dialogue, characterization, story arc, etc., but it also maintains a certain narrative distance that can access the past and touch the future, for we cannot make meaning in the present. Dialogue in nonfiction may not be accurate word for word, but usually we remember conversations that mean something to us, and at least the salient details and the emotional content and the truth of the conversations tend to stick, enough to get the gist of it. If we incorporate research into our creative nonfiction, we must take pains to embed it smoothly, so that it reads as necessary and salient to the work. And finally, we must also be aware that not all details are important to our stories; we should not lard them, nor should we make too many apologies.

 

By Laura Hirschfield (Poetry, 2009)

 

Presenter: Joseph Millar

Title: The Writer and the Republic

Joe gave a great talk that left me thinking about the effects culture and society can have on language, on meaning. He framed the talk with definitions of lyric and bardic poetry:

Lyric

Bardic

Individual, personal

Collective, societal

Inner

Outer

Private

Public

Figurative

Stripped

Obtuse

Plain

Examples:

Mallarme

Rimbaud

Finnegan’s Wake

Examples:

Brecht

Neruda (during and after war)

Milosz
   

A writer’s poetics are the implicit principles behind the writing, encompassing the writer’s sense of what the world is, what the self is, what the other is, what language is. “If you write long enough,” Joe said, “you’ll start to bump up against the bedrock of your ideas, the way a landscape sits on its own geology.” Eventually writing will lead to a dialectic between whether the writer is in a lyric or bardic mode.

Joe posed the question: how much of the world do you want to penetrate/collide with your inner world? He talked about specific writers and the ways in which their language changed because of extreme environments: fascist, fundamentalist, totalitarian, etc. “Next to atrocity can literature ever again address certain subjects?” Metaphor becomes “a bourgeois frivolity.” When Neruda became a communist, for example, his poetry became utterly stripped of its lyricism. He became a bard, his poetry became collective, he wrote of labor, grime, urine, blood, destruction, etc. In Marvin Bell’s poem, “Coffee,” the line between the private and the public, the lyric and the bardic are perforated, breaking down. In Zbigniew Herbert’s poem, “Pebble,” an object (the pebble) becomes precious because it is free of human attributes, it can’t be tamed and terrified the way humans can.

“Don’t be afraid to let the newspaper in,” Joe said. (But don’t let the writing become a rant.)

As with Sandra’s talk, I’m thinking about stripping language down, getting to its essence, looking more closely, “waking up.”

 

By Jon Anderson (Nonfiction, 2009)

 

Presenter: Craig Lesley

Title: Landing the First Punch:  Writing a  Compelling Opening                                      

An opening line is to an editor what a book cover is to a reader. In this craft talk, Craig Lesley dealt with some strategies used in opening lines, particularly for prose pieces being sent to an editor for publication.  Craig emphasized how crucial the first line and first few paragraphs of a work really are, given that when a work is being considered for publication, most editors do not have a lot of time to read through pages upon pages of a manuscript.

To immediately engage both a reader and an editor, Craig provided some suggestions that writers should consider. In the opening lines, are there:

These were all helpful suggestions for me in my writing, as I often struggle with finding the perfect opening line for my work.  Craig further suggested that if a writer is seriously considering being published in a magazine or a journal, that the writer first read and watch the publication, observing how other authors are contributing to it, and try fit into the writing culture of the publication stylistically.

  

He cited several examples of well-crafted opening lines.  According to Craig, great first lines often arouse a sense of curiosity about the work.  After finishing the opening lines a reader should be asking themselves questions like: What does the character want (or not want)? What stands in her way?  How much will she give up for her goal?  Who would say that?  What is going to happen to the character?

Finally, I have found that polishing the opening lines to a work can bring a tremendous amount of clarity.  It can help both the reader and the writer to be clear about all the elements of the contract that the writer is making with the reader from the get-go.  It is then incumbent upon the writer to follow through with the contract throughout the work.   Hence, the importance of landing the first punch.

 

By John Allen (Fiction, 2008)

 

Presenter: John Rember

Title: Enkidu Died, Gilgamesh Cried: Love and Grief as the Writer’s Best Friends

As usual, John gave an extraordinary reading of a classic text, this time Gilgamesh. Does loss make you a better writer? Like anything, the answer varies. For any experience, any event, to improve your writing, it must be observed, studied. Too often in America, grief is replaced by “unbearable mediocrity.” Gilgamesh is a story about Uruk (civilization) turning away from that which gives it vitality, in this case, the consciousness of the divine feminine, as expressed in Ishtar, goddess of sex and fertility. Our culture is only comfortable with the connection to the divine female and sexuality as long as she is dead. What was sacred and conscious in Uruk is profane and unconscious in Los Angeles (Paris Hilton, Britney Spears). Feminine divinity has been destroyed. The absence of Ishtar in our culture causes an absence of power and renewal.  Patriarchy is dedicated to an abstract immortality. Our culture needs a continual supply of bad examples to enforce itself upon its people.

We need the shock of the new and the shock of recognition. Shock of the new: shows how new things can be, shows the vastness and creative potential of the universe. The shock of recognition: shows what has been forgotten, what was shipwrecked. The writer’s job is to unbury that which has been so carefully buried. A story will never achieve the power you want it to have unless you cut most of it. Ego takes the form of the narrative voice, makes the underworld accessible—and as you ascend from the depths, your mind is expanded. It is better to write as a whole person than as a half person. But becoming a whole person is hard in our culture. We don’t know what an authentic man or an authentic woman is anymore. When you write and rewrite a story, you get a sense of what it wants to become. We need to develop and experience deep and worshipful grief.

 

By Linda Weiford (Nonfiction, 2009)

 

Presenter: Marvin Bell and Glen Moore

Title: Improvisation – Prose, Poetry & Jazz

This was a highlight of my residency experience. The class had a beatnik feel to it. The only thing missing was my black turtleneck. Listening to Bell spew lines of poetry off the top of his head as Moore played the string bass was stirring, impressive. It taught me about reading and writing with rhythm. And what a delight to watch students read as Moore played his 300-year-old string instrument. When Moore plucked the strings with his fingers, it sounded like spiders scurrying up a metal rain gutter. The student readings took on a new sound, one of exploration and truth-or-dare. Meanwhile, Bell sat on a table behind the podium, swaying to the music. Had he been 30 pounds heavier, he could have been Jerry Garcia.

          

During class, I read the closest thing to poetry I’ve ever produced, “On-air Stripper.” It actually felt good to break out of the tight confinements of journalism. I really had fun.

          

Bell is right: “Poetry is much more than heightened speech.”

 

By John Gorman (Fiction, 2008)

 

Presenter: Claire Davis

Title: Sex. How Far Do We Go and Will You Still Respect Me After the Story

Davis provides many wonderful diptychs comparing romance novel book covers

with great art works. The depictions are startling since many of them are essentially the same poses, but rendered differently. The common denominator in all of them is what is left to the imagination. Beneath the cover, the stories themselves share the same dichotomy. Romance novels err in being too explicit not allowing the imagination to sort through its mystery bag of unconscious thoughts. The strongest love scenes allow the reader to draw his own implications. The same could be said for any topic, not only love. The temptation to sensationalize love scenes is great even for seasoned writers, but the masters can probe forbidden boundaries and espouse deep emotions and great resonance. Nabokov did this in “Lolita.”  He took a deplorable character, a despicable situation, and made it poignant by diverting the attention from the carnal lust and focused on the poetry of language and the quivering emotions of its narrator. A lesser author would have fallen pitifully short.

Embedding sexuality beneath the surface as in the paintings of Klimt makes for the most interesting sexual writing. Tension and texture far outweighs the surface banality that is so pervasive in modern writing.    

 

By George Wallace (Poetry, 2008)

 

Presenter: Casey Bonsi (Poetry, 2007)

Title: Bridge to Visionary Poetry

In this student presentation Bonsi argues convincingly and with analytical acumen the notion that the intuitive process which leads poets to the collective unconscious through Visionary Poetry can serve to save American culture from the constraints of capitalism. He describes Psychological Poetry, which is based in the conscious and personal subconscious, is agenda-based, and is in the same ‘realm’ as the instruments of consumer distraction, which lead to a spiritually empty existence. By contrast, explains Bonsi, Visionary Poetry fulfills Carl Jung’s belief that opening up to the collective unconscious counterbalances the pressures of capitalist society, and has the power ‘to bring excessive and repressive states into equilibrium.’ In Psychological Poetry, as in capitalist society, ‘The code for sex is violence. The code for beer is gun. The code for mother is paranoia. The code for love is false expectations.’ Visionary Poetry, on the other hand, does not ‘tweak’ code meanings of the subconscious. Instead, it reaches to communally held archetypes for its power. He illustrates his point with a statement by Li Young Li: how he hears the hum beneath language; and how words like birds come, one by one like birds to sit on the wire. Other illustrations from Gary Snyder, William Blake, Dorianne Laux and Charles Bukowski demonstrate the power of the Visionary Poetry process. A top notch presentation and thesis which should be distributed widely.

 

By Alissa Nielsen (Fiction, 2008)

 

Presenter: Pete Fromm

Title: The Voices in Our Heads

All of the graduate students at the prestigious Pacific University sat in plush chairs with fold-out desks, glasses slipping down the brims of noses as they shuffled through their daily notes. Pete Fromm began his astute craft talk on writing rich, compelling, realistic dialogue by playing a scene from the unparalleled masters of our time. Monty Python. Yes, by blasting the legendary British sketch comedy troop highly regarded for their bumbling befoolery and, of course, the  misunderstood-dialogue-gone-too-far jokes, Fromm teaches us to be better writers. Silly, sure, but perhaps a perfect example for three main points Fromm brought up in his talk: “So much of what we say is in what we don’t say, the dialogue must be doing several things at once and let your dialogue stand on its own (don’t ever prop up dialogue).” Aside from Monty Python, Fromm used examples from actual books as well, such as Richard Bausch’s story “Aren’t You Happy for Me,” where a young daughter slowly reveals to her father that she is getting married (wait for it...) and is pregnant (wait for it...) and has been impregnated by a 63 year-old man – all of this through stunning, flawless, funny and sad dialogue. The conversation, Fromm states, “jumps into the main point of dialogue right away” without the everyday polite mannerisms we have in typical conversation. Here the dialogue stands on its own: very telling of the characters, the situation, their surroundings and of the overall story. In conclusion, try to capture, “what people don’t say,” Fromm says, and maybe watch more Monty Python.