at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

at the podium

Alida Winternheimer Thesis Reading

There is a little noise during the introduction, but it clears up once I start reading.

Thanks to Scott for sound editing!

I will be reading from my thesis novel, Saving Annabelle, this Friday. I’ll be sharing the spotlight with three other graduating MFA students.

April 27th

7:00 pm

Hamline campus, GLC 100E

Besides the songs on the playlist, I write a lot to what I call yoga music. Like: Rasa and Deva Premal.

If you’ve seen the prologue to my book, you’ll understand the first song on this playlist.

This House is on Fire                       Natalie Merchant

Flume                                                  Bon Iver

The Moth                                           Aimee Mann

Norwegian Wood                                The Beatles

Hurdy Gurdy Man                             Donovan

Mad World                                         Gary Jules

Faust Arp                                           Radiohead

Ophelia                                               Natalie Merchant

Safe and Sound                                    Azure Ray

Amidst the Movement                      Alela Diane & Alina Hardin

Draw Your Swords                             Angus & Julia Stone

Come Back, Balloon                           Sarabeth Tucek

If Children Were Wishes                     Wye Oak

Poor Wayfaring Stranger                     Natalie Merchant

Something                                           The Beatles

Scarborough Fair/Canticle                   Simon & Garfunkle

Mm mm mm mm                                Crash Test Dummies

High On Sunday 51                            Aimee Mann

How to Disappear Completely          Radiohead

Wicked Game                                      Chris Isaak

Sun Don’t Shine                                  Haley Bonar

Crying Wolf                                        Alela Diane & Alina Hardin

Original Miss Jesus                            John Wesley Harding

House Carpenter                                 Natalie Merchant

Angel                                                   Sarah Mclaughlin

Single Drop of Honey                         Abigail Washburn

Lonely Girls                                        Lucinda Williams

Rake                                                    Alela Diane & Alina Hardin

Sail to the Moon                                 Radiohead

Woman King                                      Iron & Wine

How do I know? I mean, how do I know this isn’t just hubris or writer’s fatigue talking the big talk?

I feel it.

Yes, it’s that simple, intangible, and unscientific. I’ve been living with this story and these characters for over a decade and this, draft four, feels like fruition. It’s a beautiful feeling.

Also, with this draft I engaged a different level of revision, one that confirms my suspicions. I’ll tell you about it.

Revision is about the global level concerns: is plot moving forward, are characters behaving themselves, checking the emotional, thematic, or dramatic weight, etc. Editing is about the line-by-line business of writing. Got it? In all of my revisions—that is, any writing I did to something that wasn’t first draft raw—I had both revision and editing in mind. I knew when to trash a scene and when to tweak it. I did the work that needed doing, page after page, draft after draft.

This time was different.

Draft three was close, but I knew I had spent all that time working on the trees, and it was time to work on the forest.

I went to Michael’s and bought a set of colored pencils and a roll of paper for a kid’s easel. I read my book with the colored pencils and I marked everything important in different colors. Here is my key:

Tropes: red

Characters: rust

Family History: purple

Dates & Ages: navy

Seasons & Weather: turquoise

Historical Facts: brown

Landscape & Geography: green

Fashion: fuchsia

Money: orange

Furnishings & Food: yellow

Because Saving Annabelle is historical, I was concerned with period details like clothing, furniture, and the cost of things. Because this book spans over a decade, I had to watch my timeline. As I marked the tropes, I listed them. It was good to see those things appear and reappear, spanning an entire book. Hands. Hands are a big one. Portraits mean something, but I’m not sure what.

Also, as I read, I made a list of named characters as they are introduced, the page where they first appear, and a colored dot to code which tier they belong to. I wound up with four tiers that match movie designations. I have: four tier one characters, the main characters, the stars; seven tier two characters, the supporting cast; eleven tier three characters, minor speaking roles; and thirteen tier four characters, the walk-ons.

Then I took that big old roll of paper and spread it out on the dining room table. I made a timeline that begins way before the book does. Edgar is born. Edgar leaves Norway. Maude is born. Maude lives with cousins in Chicago and gets her heart broken. These things aren’t in the book, but they have everything to do with it. These characters and this story would not exist without those events, the precursors to everything I wrote. And because this is fiction but not fantasy, I included important historical events: Minnesota’s statehood, the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment. The book opens. I have the years, the girls’ ages, the chapters, the months, and the settings listed above the line. Below, each chapter and its major events.

Sound like a plot outline? It is. But a plot outline is just more words on the page. This is a visual representation of everything that happens, when, where, and to whom. I saw my book. I saw how often and how close together major events occurred. I realized things I didn’t when reading draft three, like chapter nineteen ends and chapter twenty opens with scenes that are too similar. Something about taking the story off the pages and spreading it out like a life made a big difference. It allowed me to step back from the trees I’d been so carefully crafting and look over the forest.

One of the reasons I began this project was because I was afraid of stupid mistakes. You know, Annabelle is nine in this chapter and eight in the next. What I got out of it was the bird’s eye view, if you will, of how my book functions as a whole.

You may never bother with a pack of colored pencils and scroll of art paper, but I’m glad I did. This exercise was both review and discovery, even if the main thing I figured out was that, yes, I am very close.

The Underwood

I have always known that the tools we use to write make a difference. Until recently, I only wrote in longhand, hundreds of pages. I considered typing up those pages my first round of revisions, because I’d make small changes as I went. However, graduate school necessitated a change. To save time, I taught myself to compose at the computer, first only papers, then fiction as well. Now I mostly compose on the keyboard, but there are times when I need to return to handwriting. There is something about the kinesthetic process of moving a hand across a page, of the weight of that writing utensil against the fingers, that aids the creative flow.

Getting the whole hand moving feels apropos to working through. If I get stuck at the keyboard, then switching to paper and pencil will free me up. It effects a palpable switching of the mental gears. Granted, my body has muscle memory: that certain rounding of the upper back, the curve of the neck to accommodate a downward gaze, the edge of the right hand on the paper, pencil cradled in the fingers, the left to right flow across the page, line after line after line. I enter a new creative space. Even if you don’t have a history of writing longhand, I would bet that switching from keyboard to pen would have a similar effect, because changing the body changes the mind. One switch leads to another.

My composing utensil of choice is a fat mechanical pencil with a rubber grip and .7 mm 2B lead. When I need ink, as for a journal (pencil would smear), I use a fountain pen with a fine nib. My particularity is both a matter of aesthetic and performance. These are the tools that please me, that feel best in my hand, that write smoothly and quickly.

And now I have the Underwood.

I owed someone a thank you note, but instead of finding a note card, I fed a sheet of paper into the Underwood. The letter began blandly enough: Dear Nico and Sharon, Thank you for the…. But something happened as I typed. I felt like a part of something else, something we have mostly lost touch with in this era of sound bytes and tweets. I felt like a “woman of letters.” I realize that sounds silly, but the spatial relations shifted as I typed. The content, what I wrote, was informed by the technology, the tool with which I wrote.

Indulge the romantic for a moment longer. When communication was not instantaneous and distance posed actual hardship, letters nourished relationships. People shared not only news of the day, but also their reflections on life and the humanities. I felt that my letter should take a reflective stance, should contain more than “thank you” and “take care.”

Furthermore, the technology forced me to process words in my head instead of on the page. There is no delete key. There is no blinking cursor to move about the page. There is only the option to strike out text. I found that once a word was committed to the page, I was committed to the word. Instead of changing that word, I paused to consider the next word. My mind adapted quickly to this think-before-you-strike mode of word processing. At the typewriter, composing becomes a more considered thing, and the process of putting words on the page a more satisfying mechanical experience.

Scott has a similar experience with photography. He has dozens of cameras that range from a massive wood, brass, and bellows box circa the 1890s to a professional digital outfit. Which camera he uses determines the process involved in making an image. In the end, he’s still making an image. The image will have somewhat different qualities depending on if it’s film or digital, but by and large an image is an image. And a story is a story. Right?

Yes, by and large a story is a story. Form and function affect the writer’s process, but if we affect the process, can we avoid affecting the outcome? Aren’t the two intrinsically tied? I think they are. Next time the gears get stuck, instead of trying a writing exercise, try a different way of writing. Leave the keyboard and pick up the pen. Or pound the keys on an old typewriter for a while. See what shakes loose. It might be something that would not have occurred at the keyboard.

My partner, Scott, is a photographer. When he sees the world, he frames it and considers composition. He sees light and shapes differently than the non-photographer. It is a compulsion. The writer’s compulsion is to shape narrative. We build scenes, crafting narrative into manageable units, each one serving a larger purpose. In this way, stories take a shape. The shape, however, is conceptual instead of visual or tactile. Word choice and rhythm dictate an aural structure to prose. I strive for smooth transitions as I link paragraphs and favor white space between section breaks, but as a prose writer, spatial relations are not really a consideration. Once the margins are set, the computer provides a virtual never-ending scroll to be filled with text, and design is not a consideration.

Sometimes changing the way we work with our work, viewing it as something other than text, enhances our work as writers.

I took the Bookmaking for Writers class at Hamline University in 2010. One of the course objectives was to explore how form influences content. Because we were creating small handmade books, we studied the haiku and flash fiction. Our writing began with a consideration of its package. But the process did not stop at writing small prose for a small package. The process involved creating a unique package that would best present the story.

Committing my words to the page meant finding a harmony between word, image, and form. I developed an aesthetic that went beyond the aural to encompass the visual and the tactile. For example, in my hand-written book, I used a mock up to work out how many words would fit on each page and how page breaks would affect the narrative. I also had to decide whether to write the book in cursive or print. I invented a handwriting different from my own for three words critical to the story (see image). The book has pages that can be turned or spread out like an accordion. I used block prints and incorporated thread into the paper. The words themselves became art as I sorted out complex relationships between each element. Ultimately, I packaged my story into an experience, and every choice was an aesthetic one.

My handmade book.

By adding illustrations to my text, I found there were things I did not need to put into words. I placed my pictures in such a way as to become part of the narrative. When the pictures were not included for a different version, I had to fill the holes with words.

My handmade book.

By taking that course, I learned not only how to craft books, but how to marry form and content. A change of form is not the only way to influence the process of writing. Technology can do this as well, which is what I will consider next in “The Shape of Things: Function.”

He began the evening talking a little about language and divinity. He said that Meister Eckhart, a fourteenth century Christian mystic who was, of course, excommunicated by the Catholic Church, wrote that all languages took a vow to get it wrong when one talks about God. Therefore, almost everything anyone can say about God is wrong. As Jaime Meyer put it, no matter how tall the evangelist’s hair, he’s still wrong. This is interesting because no matter the language, the culture, or the religion, talk about God is almost entirely wrong. This is, he said, a way to acknowledge the vastness of the mystery of divinity. Jaime Meyer also asked, how could we get it right when we are just these sacks of flesh with these little tongues that flap around shaping sound into words?

This is where I had my a-ha moment.

Let’s move from questions of God and Divinity to questions of any and all mysteries: the mystery of human existence, of beauty, of evil and cruelty, of aging, of love, of death, of the seasons, of science, of serendipity, of war, of where lost socks go. How can we, sacks of flesh with wagging tongues, understand anything?

Through stories.

Humans approach mystery through story telling. It is the right way to approach the unapproachable, the inimitable, the ineffable. It is not just myths and legends that do this, it is every story that begins with a “what if?” Some of my “what ifs”:

What if a woman kept her heart in a jar?

What if a small religious sect built a parade float?

What if a sunny day at the beach went wrong?

Let’s return to God for a moment. If you assume Genesis is a literal representation of history, then it is fair to wonder why on earth Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden. (If all fathers adhered to this model of parenting, everyone would be disowned before turning sixteen.) But if you consider when the Bible was written relative to human evolution, if you consider it as a story meant to explore the human condition, then you know that Adam and Eve had to be expelled from the garden because life is hard and bad things happen all the time to people who are both deserving and undeserving. Every writer who has sat down to address a “what if” knows that evil must find its way into the garden and that evil is generally not all bad. Evil is confounding and untimely and mischievous and most of all, evil leads to change in the main characters, change which is often painful and difficult, but is real evolution.

I will give you another example, something I have dealt with recently in my fiction. Why do pedophiles exist? No matter how I try to answer this question, with psychology or biology or anthropology or religion or…I cannot find satisfaction. This aberrant behavior is a mystery. Perhaps I will never have a direct answer to that question, but I can pose a “what if.” I can write to that “what if.” I can create art around the inexpressible. In this way, I deal not in answers, but in truths.

Now, suppose I want to explain the changing of the seasons. Does the Reindeer Goddess go into the underworld and bring the sun back after the long, dark, winter months?

What if she does?

It would certainly explain a few things.

 

 

 

* In Women Writers at Work, 349-50.

 

 

 

I am pro workshops and here are some thoughts about why:

1) Giving (and Getting) Feedback

Not everyone is good at this. The writer has to sit back and listen with an open mind as people discuss the merits and weaknesses of her piece. Sometimes this requires a thick skin, but more so this requires the writer to remain open to the variety of readings possible. Each reader will view the piece differently, so it is useful to look for consensus. It is also useful to listen for what rings true. For example, the story I submitted last week, “The Herd,” has a subtle, ambiguous ending. I was rather pleased with my subtlety, but the group, all twelve of them, agreed that the ending did not quite work. There is a build of tension throughout the story and my ending leaves them wanting, it is not a big enough payoff. It would have been nice to hear that my ending was flawless, but I’m happy to have a clear direction from the group: end with panic. I can do that. This is better news than if some of my readers got it and others did not. In that case, I’d have to make a judgment call based on which readers I most agreed with. In this case, however, I know less is not more.

Critiquing is a skill like any other: some people are better at it than others and it takes practice. In every workshop, group feedback is good for learning what is working and what isn’t, which of your intended messages are being received and which are fuzzy. There are usually two or three readers who stand out from the group, people who give exceptional feedback in terms of constructive criticism. These readers don’t only tell you what they do or do not like, they raise questions that help you clarify the direction of the piece as they bring to light things you hadn’t seen in your own writing.

2) Reading

This has two major benefits. First, in reading a sampling of your peers’ work, you get a sense of what kind of work your peers are doing. Sometimes it’s useful to take stock of where you are at and to what you aspire. Secondly, you practice your readings skills on works that are not polished and at the publishable stage.

If all you read are anthologized stories, you never get a sense of how many stages a story goes through before it gets published. Reading your peers’ work with craft in mind lets you break down a story into its components and analyze what works, why, and how in a way you can’t do with already published stories. When you see a story in a journal, there is a tendency to assume it’s good because someone has vetted it. There it is in print, after all. We come to a workshop on equal footing with each other. This is the work of a peer and we are not only there to, but have every right to dissect it and learn from it.

The feedback we give the writer is hopefully valuable to him. So much of the value of workshop depends on the attitude of those involved, both the readers and the writer—and in workshop you get to be both. Reading published stories is like looking at a diagram of a frog’s innards. Workshopping our peers’ stories is like dissecting a frog for ourselves. We learn about the internal workings through direct, personal experience. For example, when you see dialogue on the page that reads like a transcript of a conversation, you understand that dialogue can be so naturalistic that it interrupts the flow of the story. This is better than simply not seeing overly natural dialogue on a page. There is something about making that diagnosis for yourself that gives the lesson more punch.

3) Help Wanted

Whenever I have a workshop, I bring a piece that is strong and solid, but not complete, not polished. If I’m ready to send it out to journals, it’s past the point of workshop. I put before my peers a work that is both worthy of their time and attention and that I still want feedback on. Bringing a very rough draft to workshop does everyone a disservice. At that stage, the writer should be able to see the flaws in it, so readers end up telling the writer things he already knows; therefore, the readers are spending their time and energy on work that is redundant.

I bring a piece about which I feel confident, but not certain. I want to know what the readers see that I don’t. Working on a story can lead to a kind of myopic vision. Often some flaw in the piece becomes obvious to me as soon as a reader points it out.

I also want to know what tropes are apparent to a careful reader. Sometimes we write things intuitively, without realizing what we’ve done. I once heard Amy Tan say in an interview that someone sent her a thesis paper about the use of sevens in The Joy Luck Club, and she’d had no idea. Her response to the thesis was something like, “Aren’t I clever?” In “The Herd,” water is a clear trope. There’s a lake, ice water in a cooler, humidity, sweat, and urine. I wrote in each of those elements because they made sense at the time, not because I was trying to shape water in its various forms into a theme. Water as a trope had not occurred to me until it was pointed out in workshop. Aren’t I clever?

The most basic question a writer brings to workshop is, “What’s working?” I think it’s wise to bring a specific question or two to the table. I was going for tension in “The Herd,” a pretty subtle tension. My burning question was whether the readers would feel that tension and if it would sustain them through a nineteen-page story. That’s a big question. The success of this story hinges on the answer to that question. Thanks to this workshop, I got my answer.

4) What’s Next.

A friend in the same workshop remarked that he learns more about what to do in the next story from workshopping than he does what to do with the current story. Absolutely! Everything we learn gets applied to everything we write from that point forward. I also leave workshops excited to revise. I like to get on my revisions while the workshop comments are fresh in my head. In fact, “The Herd” has consumed a lot of mental energy this week. I am cycling through not only comments, but the resulting changes I want to make.

5) Caveat Emptor

Not all feedback is of equal value. The writer has to go with her gut and trust her voice. Accept the comments that feel right and reject any that are off base. This is where that balance of being open to criticism and confident of your abilities and your story becomes most important.

After a workshop, I’ll skim the copies of my story for comments—again, looking for consensus—and set aside the few that resonate with me. The rest I put in a pile that usually sits around for six to twelve months before going into the recycling. Those gems from the pile I give a closer read and some real consideration. Then I set them aside for six to twelve month before they go into a file for future reference. When I start revising “The Herd,” the workshop will be behind me, the feedback absorbed into my mind, and the important, true, resonating comments will resurface. The paper copies are on hand in case I want to revisit something, but usually I don’t.

6) Ego Boost

Workshop etiquette dictates that everyone makes at least one compliment on the piece. If nothing else, when you’re feeling down on writing, break out that list of compliments and remind yourself of what you are doing well…then break out the happy dance!

When we got home, I picked up some 4×5 large format color film he had had developed at perhaps the last remaining processor in town. He could barely contain himself, pulling out each sheet of film and holding it up to a window. As he looked at each image, he assessed the job he had done creating what he now saw, rattling off the details of the moment: natural light, time of day, exposure time, aperture setting. There was one shot Scott suspected he had overexposed slightly when he took it, so he had asked the processor to pull it from the developer early to correct the exposure. His artistic process is a mixture of science and guess work.

One particularly beautiful shot of a beaver lodge on a fast running creek thrilled him. Thrilled. He jumped and danced and sang. I don’t mean to make him sound like a marionette. He did what we all do when we are experiencing joy.

And I wondered, when is the last time I jumped and danced and sang over my art?

Of course, I was thrilled to win the Confluence Prize and I will leap and shout when I land an agent, a book deal, see my work in stores. But that is not what I mean. Scott was looking at a piece of film, holding it up in front of a window. He still had to scan the positive (it’s not a negative), edit the image (if needed), make prints, and share it with the world. His creative process was far from over. His joy over seeing the image captured on film would be kin to my joy over reading a sentence captured on the page, a freshly written, unedited sentence, but one that artistically conveys exactly what I mean.

When I read a beautiful sentence, I pause to savor it. I reread it. When I write a beautiful sentence, I feel some small accomplishment as I reread and savor it. But I don’t think I have ever jumped for joy. Is a well-crafted sentence less beautiful than an image? Does it induce less feeling? Perhaps the difference is that an image communicates with us on a more visceral level, while a sentence communicates on a more cerebral level.

And yet, look what I wrote in an essay for one of my classes: “When I read Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, I have the distinct sensation that the book has created an atmosphere. ‘A mournful peace hung on the fields, as though they felt the relaxing grasp of the cold and stretched themselves in their long winter sleep.’ Such sentences make me feel enveloped by a cold, gray New England winter’s light. It is this power of language to transport the reader through a sense of place or human entanglement to which I aspire.” Is that sentence by Wharton not visceral? Is it not beautiful?

I was reading The Great Gatsby on the beach this morning. F. Scott Fitzgerald introduces us to Tom Buchanan, “Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.” What language! What an image! What characterization! I wonder if Fitzgerald did a little soft shoe next to his typewriter.

Scott did not wait to see his image printed, framed, and hung in a gallery to celebrate. He celebrated the fact that he had captured the image he had hoped to capture and communicate. Whether we want to capture an image or a feeling or a moment in time, writers do the same thing, albeit in a different medium. I do not, however, know any writers who leap up from their desks to do a happy dance after laying down a particularly pleasing string of words. Maybe if we did, every session would feel productive and every day would contain a little more joy.

I think the next time I write a beautiful sentence I will stand up and dance. I might even sing.

This is one of my digital snapshots of the beaver lodge, not Scott’s art.

One of my shots of the beaver lodge.

I am reading as part of the Cracked Walnut Series.

Sunday evening, July 17th, 6:00 – 7:30, at the Dunn Bros at 4648 East Lake Street.