Off the Road again, Or Not. Interview, Review, Barnes & Noble, etc.

FIRST OF ALL, here are links to a couple of new things out there:

NEXT GIG:

  • My fall micro-tour is over, but I’m doing one more event in town before the close of the year:
    • Barnes and Noble @ the Citadel, on Academy Blvd.
      • December 15, Saturday @ 1:30-3:30ish.
  • I hope to see some of the new friends I met today in Chapman’s creative writing class at Coronado High School. What a great class. You guys really know how to make an author feel good: laugh a lot and at the right places and say, “Read more!” It was also fantastic to see old friends Mr. “Stay Black” Ken, Tiffany, Kara, and Emily. Love you all.

WASHINGTON NOTES:

Spokane was amazing–what a cool city. But it helps to hang out with the best people:

Ligon Book Willow Springs

  • Sam’s wife, Kim, and kids Jane and Paul, who are all brilliant.
  • His friends, Kelly Chadwick, who introduced me to some fantastic wine, and
  • poet Renee Rohl, who introduced me to her students at Barker Center.
  • Other friends, novelist Jess Walter and his wife
  • Ann, who used to live in my fair city and write for our hometown newspaper The Gazette. (Both she and Jess worked for the Spokane Spokesman-Review until former Gazette editor Stevie Smith came on board and began running ruining it.)

I had a great day visiting with creative writing students at Barker with Renee’s class and also with Jim Creason’s groups at North Central High School. Special thanks to Dylan, Pauline, Cassie, and (your dad-burned name slips my mind, but you’re the best) who I met in class and who actually came out to the reading that night at Auntie’s Books.

This event was a little different for me, with the reading showcased up front and with microphone, even, which made the power of the poet’s voice truly tremendous.

Then it was a weekend of hanging out with my daughter who is the same age as Sam’s girl, Jane. Or the girls spent time together, mostly, and Sam and I stayed up until three or four every night listening to music and talking. And talking. And talking. It’s funny to think that I’m still friends with the guy I pulled a desk out from under in Mr. Johnson’s actor’s workshop class when we were in high school. But that he’s still the most brilliant person I’ve ever met is no surprise.

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next question . . . from Barrington High School creative writing students

THIS IS ENTRY TWO in my series of questions and answers from senior creative writing students of my alma mater, Barrington High School.
barrington high school
I DON’T KNOW ANYBODY in Barrington anymore except for my high school girlfriend, Claire, and my favorite English teacher, Dale Griffith.  So I spent the night in the Barrington Motel, and took a cab over to the high school.  My cabbie dropped me off at the wrong entrance, by the gym and the senior lockers, but the garrulous security guard had the authority—after checking his computer—and the technology to scan my Colorado driver’s license and print me a visitor’s ID sticker.  Then another security staffer escorted me to the main entrance, and a third called Dept. Chair Jack Bowyer, who collected me and led me up the stairs that hadn’t existed in my day.

Here’s the second question that teacher Maggie Olberg gave me from the class:
What influences you?  (Style & content)
Everything I read influences me a lot—or everything I read that’s good and substantial, because the stuff that isn’t just passes through me without leaving an impression.  When I read, the language echoes in my mind.  So I have to be careful what I’m reading when I’m writing.

Right now I’m reading I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek, and I can hear his voice, very lyrical.  The good stuff becomes part of me, the characters are real people inside me, the worlds that are created become real places within me.  I like writing that has a deep sense of place, urban or natural or both, and I like characters with a lot of love in them, or perhaps sympathy—with other people, with nature, with music and stories and all the arts.  There will be alienation, disconnection, despair—but without what I’m calling love or sympathy, the alienation has no consequence.

Sometimes the language itself expresses love.  I think Hemingway did that.  One of my favorite stories, which is in a book that I borrowed from the BHS English resource center and never returned, is “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”  It amazes me that I was so attracted to that story at so young an age, and I believe that even very young people often sympathize with the loss and disappointment of the age.  The sympathy of the waiter in that story, the old waiter, carries the story—and the reader despises the young, self-involved waiter because he has none.  Though the old waiter is preoccupied with nothingness, with emptiness, his emptiness is not nihilistic because he still feels the emptiness and sympathizes with those who also feel it.

Was this supposed to be style OR content?  I think they are of equal importance.  There is no style without content, and since the content is expressed via language, it can’t be communicated without good writing (which is one way to define style) or without a voice that arises naturally from the subject and expresses the content.

And everything influences me.  My best friend Sam, whom I met at BHS when I was a junior and he was a soph, influenced and continues to influence me.  He’s now the editor of Willow Springs and the author of an excellent novel called Safe in Heaven Dead.
But “everything under the sun”, as it says in the finale of Pink Floyd’s Dark side of the Moon, influences me.  Growing up in Barrington, coming back, meeting new students . . .   I could go on and on.  (And usually do ☺)

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Creative Writing Questions from Barrington High School Seniors

ON THE 4th OF OCTOBER, I visited with six creative writing classes at Barrington High School, about 40 miles NW of Chicago. I hadn’t darkened the doors of BHS since I’d graduated in June of 1980, and coming back was a little weird.

It’s always strange returning to Barrington, where I spent the first 18 years of my life in a big house my father built by Bakers Lake. Despite all the changes in the neighborhood, I seem to breathe memories in from the humid air, and the shape of the land (though much of it has been built over) and the sky that sits over it (the same way it always has) strikes me with strange familiarity.

Inside, the school was so different as to have little of this effect. But I knew it was the same place. And there were moments, such as looking out the window of Ms. Sultan’s classroom and realizing it was my old typing room, when I could remember sitting there buzzed on coffee from The Breadbasket restaurant, making mistakes and borrowing Jena’s typing eraser.

THIS IS THE FIRST of a series of blogs in which I respond to questions from BHS students:

How do you come up with a concept for your writing?

For the novel that I’m currently avoiding revising, I started with an image: a canoe lodged in tall cattails at the shore of Bakers Lake, and someone–me, I suppose–lying down in the bottom of the canoe. The tall, thin blades of the cattails exude coolness and green, but from the warm water the scent of decay rises: ripe with algae and the biology of fresh water, millions of organisms living in the water and the mud. The green of the cattails and the algae breathe out the fresh oxygen, converting the sun into energy, while microorganisms eat and decompose and die and are decomposed themselves.

In the canoe, the character–the more I think about him the further he goes from being me–is aware of everything around him. He knows the ecology, the relationships between the living and non-living things around him, and his imagination brings it all into his consciousness. He is himself alone in this place, but he is thinking about his friend, and something has happened. Maybe his friend has died. And a song they used to listen to comes to his mind, haunts him, ” . . .story of her boyfriend, of teenage stone death games, handsome lad, dead in a car . . .” And he thinks of his best friend’s girlfriend because of the “story of her boyfriend” line.

So my concepts come from memory, and changing memory by drifting deep into the scenes brought to my mind from memory and letting the possibilities of those scenes shift.

Aidan Chambers uses a repeating line, placed throughout his amazing novel, This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn: “All writing is memory.” Some of the shifting is very deliberate–I take a memory of my best friend, and I say, “He can’t be blonde, his hair is dark.” Or I’m thinking about his girlfriend, (only it’s the character’s girlfriend now) and I’m doing the dishes and she’s not coming to me, and I’m getting frustrated. Then I think her name might be Sophia,* and the image of a Sophia I once knew comes to me. Suddenly I realize that her name isn’t Sophia, but that she looks like Sophia, and from that memory of Sophia’s physical presence–not just her hair and her eyes and her body, but the way she carries herself, her gestures, the movement of her eyes–the character suddenly takes shape.

To BHS Seniors: Hope this answers your questions better than my random presentation!

*name changed to protect the innocent. ;-)

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