Sue Staats Interviews January Featured Writer Renee Thompson

Renee Thompson lives on five rural acres near Sacramento.  Sharing the pasture with her goats is a critter-cam that has recently recorded video of deer, skunks, raccoons, and a prowling fox.  Renee’s love of wild things, and her thoughtful and often funny nature, is clear in her posts on her delightful website and also in her writing. Her recently released second novel, The Plume Hunter, is historical fiction, set in Oregon at the end of the 19^th century, when elaborate plumes for ladies’ hats were in fashion. Millions of birds were slaughtered for the millinery trade, and Renee’s novel explores both aspects of plume hunting – the hunters, who scoured the marshes, and the naturalists, who foresaw the inevitable extinction of these birds and fought for laws to protect them.  This conflict is brought to life in the characters Fin McFaddin, the plume hunter of the title, and his boyhood friend, Aiden Elliott, whose love of nature takes him in quite a different direction.

A selection from The Plume Hunter will be read at the 2^nd Anniversary Celebration of Stories on Stage.  Recently she and Sue Staats discussed the novel, and the historical events that inform it.

Renee, what initially inspired you to write The Plume Hunter?

William Finley and Herman Bohlman in the marsh of Lower Klamath, 1905. Photo courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society

I was reading William Kittredge’s Balancing Water when I came across a photograph of William Finley and Herman Bohlman – Oregon naturalists/photographers – in the marsh of Lower Klamath in 1905.  At the same time, I saw another historical photo of market hunters – men who shot ducks for the restaurant trade in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco.  The photos sparked my curiosity, so I did some quick research, and learned that in 1885 over five million birds were killed in the United States alone for the millinery trade, and that plume hunting, while dangerous, was also very lucrative.  I knew then I would write a story about two best friends in conflict: one who shoots birds for a living, while the other attempts to save birds through conservation and science.

So the two main characters, Fin McFaddin and Aiden Elliott are based on fact? How about the other plume hunters, LeGrande Sharp and Axel Ambrose? Or the man who inspires Aiden Elliott to become a conservationist, Frank Chapman?

Fin and Aiden are fictional characters, as are LeGrande and Axel.  William Finley and Herman Bohlman did inspire Fin and Aiden’s characterization, and Frank M. Chapman plays himself.  Chapman was a banker-turned-ornithologist in the 1880s, then served as the curator of birds for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.  He was also instrumental in the re-formation of the Audubon Society, along with Harriet Hemenway, and others.

LeGrande Sharp is quite a nasty character. Was plume hunting really that dangerous and competitive?

Yes, it was, in large part because it was very lucrative; in 1903 feathers sold for $32 an ounce, while gold fetched just under $19 per ounce.  But because the work was dangerous – one of the first game wardens was killed by a plume hunter in Florida in 1905 – not everyone was willing to participate.

How much research and site visiting did you have to do?

I spent months researching the plume-hunting trade, learning which birds were shot, and how feathers were collected and sold.  I also spent a few days at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, OR, reading about William Finley and Herman Bohlman, and studying their photographs.  And then I flew to Washington, DC, where I spent some time in the archives of the Smithsonian, looking at bird “skins” and “scalps.”  What’s astonishing, too, is the number of birds that were killed in the name of scientific study.  The Smithsonian is loaded with them.

You have a wonderful chapter in The Plume Hunter where women are trying on a variety of hats, each one more fancifully decorated with feathers and entire stuffed birds than the one before. Do you have photographs of these hats you could share with us?

Lady’s hat decorated with stuffed bird. Photo courtesy of Clackamas County Historical Society

Here’s one of my favorites.

Are bird populations of the hunted species mentioned in The Plume Hunter back to what they were? What kind of protection do they have as a result of the work of men such as Aiden Elliott?

Some birds, such as the great auk and Carolina parakeet, were lost before my characters began shooting birds, and the last passenger pigeon, Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.  But great egrets, snowy egrets, and western grebes are doing very well, in part because feathered hats eventually fell out of fashion, and because Congress passed the Lacey Act, which made it a federal crime to transport birds killed in violation of state law across state lines – which meant birds killed in Oregon, for example, could no longer be shipped to milliners in New York City.  And once Teddy Roosevelt established wildlife refuges in the Malheur and Klamath regions in the early 1900s, the birds began to rebound.

Any plans for a novel set in the present day that focuses on an environmental concern?

My publisher would love for me to do so!  When I was reading Kittredge’s book, I was researching what I thought would be a contemporary story on water wars between Southern Oregon and Northern California, but then I was sidetracked by the idea of the historical piece on plume hunters.  For now, I will probably continue to focus on short stories.

In The Plume Hunter, even the plume hunters (with the exception of LeGrande) have a favorite bird—one they won’t shoot.  I found that detail touching and humanizing, particularly for the character of Axel. I know you’re a bird enthusiast, and I wondered what your favorite bird is?

My favorite is the belted kingfisher, the bird Fin regretted shooting as a young boy.

What do you hope readers come away with after reading The Plume Hunter?

Above all, I hope they enjoy the book.  And then I hope they come away with a better understanding of how close we came to decimating so many species of birds, and how valuable the Audubon movement was in educating us about those losses.  I hope, too, readers who are unfamiliar with our wildlife-refuge system will become curious about it, and its role in protecting habitat.

Sue Staats recently received her MFA in Fiction from Pacific University. She’s currently revising her novella, “The Mitchell Boys,” and working on a collection of linked short stories. Her short story “No Hero, No Sharks” was runner-up for the 2011 Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, a finalist for the 2011 Reynolds Price Fiction Award, and will be published this spring in The Farallon Review. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have also been published numerous times in Susurrus, the literary journal of Sacramento City College.

Brenda Miller Reading & Peter Orner Workshop Dates Confirmed

Creative nonfiction writer Brenda Miller will give a reading from her latest book, Listening Against the Stone: Selected Essays (available for purchase and signing) on Friday, January 13^th,  7PM at the Sacramento Poetry Center. In addition, Brenda will discuss markets for publishing creative nonfiction, and end with a brief audience Q&A. Brenda is visiting Sacramento to take part in the Master Teacher Weekend Workshop series.

The Sacramento Poetry Center is located at 1719 25^th St (@R).

Brenda Miller is the author of the collections Listening Against the Stone: Selected Essays, Season of the Body and Blessing the Animals, and co-author of the creative nonfiction textbook Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction. She teaches writing at Western Washington University and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Bellingham Review.

 

Peter Orner’s weekend workshop has been confirmed for March 10&11^th, and is now open for registration. Workshop is capped at 12 students. The cost is $400. For more information, visit http://valeriefioravanti.com/MTWW.aspx.

Peter Orner is the author of the story collection Esther Stories and the novels Love and Shame and Love & The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. Peter taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop last year and teaches in San Francisco State’s MFA program.

There are currently only waitlist spots available for Peter Ho Davies’ workshop May 12&13th.

Kate Asche Interviews Brenda Miller

Brenda Miller is the first creative nonfiction Master Teacher featured in the Weekend Workshop series. She’s the author of the essay collections Season of the Body, Blessing the Animals, and Listening Against the Stone: Selected Essays. Brenda is editor-in-chief of the Bellingham Review, and co-author of the creative nonfiction textbook Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction. Her workshop will take place January 14&15, 2012. There is currently one space available.

Brenda, we are so looking forward to welcoming you to Sacramento in January 2012. I get the sense that you do a lot of teaching and writing in the community. I wonder if you might speak for a moment about how all that started for you, and what you love about talking and working with readers and writers outside a traditional academic setting?

I’m looking forward to visiting Sacramento, too! I love working with writers in the community, precisely because they are usually in a class or workshop for the love of the craft itself, rather than to fulfill a requirement. Passion, vulnerability, and genuine curiosity—these are the qualities that seem to emerge most strongly in community workshops, as well as a wide variety of life experience. It doesn’t take long to develop a sense of common purpose and respect, and so the work becomes energizing for everyone.

When you come together with a group of students in a workshop, what approaches do you use, and why?

I do some icebreakers that help us understand immediately why we are there, who we are, and what we bring to the table. If we’re workshopping previously written pieces, I like to have a conversation with the writer that explores craft issues the writing brings up for all of us, not necessarily to simply “fix” the writing at hand. We are acting as advocates for one another.

Turning to your own work now: this summer, you enjoyed the release of a collection of your selected essays, Listening Against the Stone. Congratulations! How does it feel to have a “selected” out?

It’s wonderful to have a collection out that so fully articulates the central concerns of my work over the years—how my spiritual life has shifted and evolved. When I was putting the collection together, I was surprised to see the new narratives that emerged by putting older essays with newer essays. I also was quite happy to have my six Pushcart-Prize winning essays all together under one roof!

I spent some time today rereading my notes on your work (I recently re-read and taught Season of the Body) and reading some of your past interviews. I love what you said last year, in conversation with the L.A. Times, about writing about things you notice in the world and in life: “I had to learn to find an external to focus on in order to allow my emotions to surface.” I am hoping you might unpack this concept a bit. What kinds of things count as “external” for you? What is it about things external that brings your deeper emotions forward?

I think this is a central concept for successful creative nonfiction, and I speak now as a writer, teacher, and editor. With personal nonfiction work, it can be tempting to write directly about the “big” things that have occurred in our lives and how we feel about them. But almost always these kinds of works become too “self-centered.” It can be difficult to fully include the reader. By starting instead with small, concrete details in the external world, we find our way to the truth of our lives in a more literary—and more universal–way.

For instance, one of the pieces in Listening Against the Stone is called “Dirty Windows.” In it, I start with the mundane observation about how a sunny day in Bellingham, WA (a rare occurrence!) lights up all the streaks and smudges on the windows, as well as revealing all the pet hair on the floor. This detail leads me to meditate on the way I’ve always longed for light that is more “forgiving,” which, of course, turns the essay into a small piece about what allows us to forgive ourselves. I started that piece with my students in a community workshop, and it was completely unexpected; I didn’t plan to write about that topic; I started merely with the external observation. That’s also what makes starting with the external more effective: we haven’t necessarily planned out what we want to say, and so the revelations come as a surprise for both writer and reader. Whenever I share that piece at a reading, I connect immediately with my audience, who nod their heads as they recall the dirty windows in their own lives, and who then are willing to go along for the ride as we head into deeper territory.

Brenda, you have said before that once a writer locates his/her material, “you have to be willing to get some distance from it and see it as just that: material. You have to work like an artist and sculpt it into shape.” I could see this being read by some as a license to secretly bend verifiable facts in service of a personal truth. How do you locate the harmonies between the constant “flux” of truth (as you’ve called it) and the demands of verifiable facts that integrity requires we acknowledge?

I don’t worry too much about shaping a piece for literary effect, as the truth I’m after is not necessarily a factual one. I wouldn’t make up whole events or significant details, but I have no problem re-creating a scene that I might remember as only a flash of memory. Often, I will cue the reader in to these lapses of memory and allow the reader to follow along as I play. For instance, the word “perhaps” is a workhorse in my lexicon, as is “maybe” and “I like to imagine…” The use of the present tense for childhood memories is also an excellent way to signal that you are not “reporting” events, but re-creating them.

I’ll sometimes tell my reader when I’m totally wrong; this happens in the essay “Blessing of the Animals,” when I remember incorrectly how my childhood dog Sheba died. I start with the phrase “For some reason, I remember….” Then re-create the scene. In the next paragraph, I tell the reader my memory was incorrect and give the factual version as reported by my mother. In this case, I leave in the incorrect version in order to make a point about memory and about how erroneous memories sometimes reveal more about ourselves than “real” memories.

Your writing has such a polished surface that, at first, it seems that it must be simple, straightforward. In fact, it is incredibly layered—elements play with and against and alongside each other in ways that are intricate yet also very inviting to the reader. How do you balance those energies—the impulse to layer and weave with the impulse to reach outward to the reader?

When I’m layering a piece, it’s happening very organically, in that I feel as though I’m simply following imagery and language where it will take me. As I am following language, a certain insistent theme will arise. Once I know that theme, I can go back and revise to highlight that theme and the connections throughout, as well as edit out sections that are no longer relevant. In this way, I allow the reader to follow a map, with certain phrases or images leading the way. The reader becomes involved in putting together the essay too, so it becomes a collaboration between reader and writer (or between the reader and the text).

I am interested in what you said in another previous interview—that when you’re drafting, “if it’s something that will lend itself to research, it’s nearly always going to end up in a braided form so that I can play cool images and facts against one another.” This comment made me wonder: When you sense that you’re writing something that doesn’t want research added in, what kinds of forms most often present themselves?

Short forms—pieces that are small glimpses or interludes. But sometimes research comes into those pieces as well. The braided essay also works without research; one of the central pieces in Listening is called “The Burden of Bearing Fruit,” and it follows a central narrative line of me having the Rainier Cherry tree in my backyard cut down. Once I knew I was writing about trees, I wrote a lot of sections about trees in my memory, especially falling trees. The narrative of the Rainier Cherry threads throughout the piece, creating a “plot” that holds all these different memories, which then become more about creating family as a single, childless woman. The phrase “the burden of bearing fruit” takes on a layered resonance in this context: the cherry needed to be cut down because the fruiting trees do not survive as long as those that are merely ornamental; and the narrator has not yet borne fruit in the traditional sense, but is finding her own form of abundance.

What are you working on at present that most excites you and/or most challenges you?

I’m putting together a fragmented memoir that is currently called “The Single Girl’s Guide to Remodeling: Dispatches from a Life in Progress.” (the title essay is a sequel to “The Burden of Bearing Fruit.”) The challenge is fitting all these small pieces together in a way that makes sense, as well as interspersing longer essays in different forms. I’m afraid it will feel like too much like a mish-mash of disparate pieces. But then again, life itself often feels like a mish-mash of disparate pieces, so maybe it’s really a brilliant strategy!

Kate Asche, M.A., is a poet/essayist and creative writing teacher. A graduate of the UC Davis Creative Writing Program, she was a finalist for the 2011 Audio Contest at The Missouri Review and has poetry forthcoming in Confrontation. She received two Elliot Gilbert Prizes in Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Award and was a finalist for University of California Poet Laureate. A trained facilitator in the Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) Method, she is associate director of the Arts, Humanities and Writing program at UC Davis Extension. Follow her and get the scoop on local writing events at www.katesmiscellany.blogspot.com.

Valerie Fioravanti & Sue Staats discuss Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, & Sacramento

Sue Staats interviewed Valerie Fioravanti over at the r.kv.r.y. blog in connection with her recently published essay “Touching Margaret Atwood.”

Here’s an excerpt about Sacramento:

SS: As a Sacramento writer, I’m very excited about the innovation and energy you’ve brought to the Sacramento literary scene. Why did you choose Sacramento? What inspired you to begin your teaching, the Master Classes, and Stories on Stage?

VF:Sacramento was meant to be a pit stop. I was teaching online and editing book manuscripts, so I wasn’t geographically constrained. I thought I would explore California for a bit, and then move to the coast. But Sacramento charmed me. I loved my Midtown neighborhood—it’s walkability; those funky, turreted Victorians; three great used bookstores coupled with a newsstand and indie bookstore with varied literary magazine selections (a combo which might lead to bankruptcy). I felt the writing community needed someone to be its advocate, to focus on what it might offer, rather than what it lacked. So I advertised some workshops and started up a reading series. Now, people bring their ideas to me. That’s how the Master Teacher Weekend Workshops began—with another writer asking for help to make one event happen. We brought the Atlantic’s fiction editor to town, and I thought, why stop?

Read the full interview here: http://rkvry.com/blog

For more interviews with Valerie Fioravanti, visit her website: http://valeriefioravanti.com/default.aspx

Sue Staats Interviews SoS October Featured Writer Leah Griesmann

Leah Griesmann grew up in Northern California and American Samoa. She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing at Boston University, and has taught writing and literature in places as startlingly different as Las Vegas and South Korea. She’s received grants for her fiction writing from the Humboldt Arts Council, the North Coast Cultural Trust, and the Caldera Arts Colony. Most recently she was a 2010-2011 Steinbeck Fellow, and currently teaches at San Jose State.

I’m impressed with the number of grants and fellowships you’ve received. Since time and money to pursue one’s writing are so important, what advice do you have for writers looking to apply for a grant or a fellowship? Is there a secret to writing a successful application?

I would say that of the fellowships or grants I have actually received (and not counting the longer list of ones I’ve been turned down for), I generally had a specific project that I was applying for. For example, with the Steinbeck Fellowship I had finished stories from my story collection, a draft of my novel, and a very clear and specific outline for both of these projects. These book projects really were underway and pretty well-realized in their intent by the time I applied. But then I know other people who have received grants or fellowships based on the excellence of completed past work with only a rough idea of what they wanted to do next. For myself, I’ve had grant projects that were very specific, and usually for work that was already begun.

Once you’ve been awarded the grant, what’s the most productive way to use it? Generally, what time span does it cover?

The time span varies, depending on the grant or fellowship. Some are limited to a specific location and have specific requirements while others may offer a free-floating chunk of money for writers to use as they see fit.

You were awarded the very prestigious Steinbeck Fellowship. What did you use the time to work on? Were there requirements of you other than writing (teaching, readings, etc.)?

The Steinbeck Fellowship is wonderful in that it has very few requirements—it offers writing time, and two readings are required, and then there are other sort of developmental activities (informal meetings, literary activities, et cetera) that are very helpful in developing work or making contacts. So there is a residency component, but really it’s a very low-requirement fellowship in that the purpose is for all the time—nine months—to be spent on writing.

I used the fellowship to work on my novel, “A Distant Territory,” a literary political thriller set in American Samoa, and to complete drafts of most of the stories in my Vegas collection. I really believe I would have never completed the novel draft, certainly, and many of the story drafts without this fellowship because it took a lot of uninterrupted time to finish these projects. In addition, I got some great editorial feedback from people involved in the Steinbeck program.

But back to your question on making the best use of grants. When I was notified of the Steinbeck Fellowship I was living out of the country, in South Korea, and I knew that I was only going to accept the fellowship if I could really use all the time for writing. That is, I did not want to have to work at an outside job during the fellowship, because that would have defeated the purpose. Therefore I made some pretty strict financial and work-related choices. For example, I lived in an Airstream trailer for the duration of the Steinbeck Fellowship—for two reasons: one, it was affordable given the expense of the Bay Area, and two, it was limiting in the right ways, meaning it sort of confined me to a space where I would be forced to write, rather than socialize or enjoy my surroundings. Not that there wasn’t a certain charm in living in an Airstream—there definitely was, but mainly it was like waking up every day in a shiny, oblong, pill-shaped aluminum office, the confines of which don’t really lend themselves to anything other than writing.

An Airstream trailer!  Are you still living in it? It sounds like a perfect studio!

(Laughs) No—after nine months of Airstream living in the East Bay during the rainy season,  I’m happily ensconced in the lower wing of a Victorian right near the San Jose State campus in downtown San Jose.

Like most writers, you’ve supported yourself by teaching, but I’m struck by the unusual variety of places you have taught – Boston University, University of Nevada/Las Vegas, and Hanyang University in South Korea. I can only imagine how different the experience, the culture, and the student body must have been. What were the highlights of your experience in each place?

The experiences were completely different. The full spectrum.  I taught Creative Writing at Boston University, and that was great—intense, challenging, in a good way. Wonderful students, very academic, yet a pretty homogenous population—lots of short stories about the suburbs. UNLV was wild—very diverse and very interesting, and the academics were…well, let’s just say there was a lot of remediation going on. But I have fond memories of those students, of our class discussions, of reading their writing, because so many of them had life experiences growing up in Las Vegas that were so far outside the mainstream. Hanyang University was fantastic. My last semester there I was teaching American literature and composition to English majors, and let me tell you, they set the bar high. They mastered material so quickly and so thoroughly.  As a group I’d say the South Korean students exceed the Americans in terms of their diligence, drive, and dedication to academics. Right now I’m teaching at San Jose State and that’s a good fit. It’s very diverse, and the students are solid, academically speaking.

Tell us a little about the story “Desert Rats.” Why did you select this particular story to be read at Stories on Stage?

It’s a comical story about a recent transplant to Las Vegas stuck in the middle of a rodent triangle. This story, like many of the stories in my collection, is set in a (fictional) apartment complex called “The Desert Rose.” It’s a good story to read out loud because of the interaction between the characters.

I noticed you were a featured reader at Why There Are Words, our “sister” reading series in Sausalito, this past April. But have you ever had your work read by an actor before?

“Desert Rats” was read at San Jose State University during my Steinbeck Fellowship, with myself and three professors reading the various roles. The professors were cast as various characters because I knew it was the type of piece that would lend itself well to being read by different voices, and also because I don’t like doing readings! So I am thrilled to have my piece read by a real actor at Stories on Stage. I plan to sit back and enjoy the show.

Sue Staats recently received her MFA in Fiction from Pacific University. She’s currently revising her novella, “The Mitchell Boys,” and working on a collection of linked short stories. Her short story “No Hero, No Sharks” was runner-up for the 2011 Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, and a finalist for the 2011 Reynolds Price Fiction Award. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have been published frequently in Susurrus, the literary journal of Sacramento City College.

Flash Fiction & Creative Nonfiction Workshop & Brenda Miller’s Weekend Master Class

Valerie Fioravanti is offering a multi-genre workshop in Flash Fiction and Creative Nonfiction, beginning Monday, November 14th. The course runs for six weeks, and is limited to six students. If you write in only one genre, but are interested in experimenting with the other, this is the perfect course for you. The word count limit of 1,000 words can be less daunting than a longer story or essay, and you are free to experiment across genres—or not, if you decide it’s not for you. You’ll be able to submit up to five pieces, and at least one revision will be encouraged. We’ll discuss the qualities that makes short work sizzle in both genres,  what sets fiction and nonfiction apart, and whether or not such distinctions matter. Flash is a good form for developing writers because economy, purpose, and precision are good skills to bring to larger works in either genre. The text for the course will be the Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction by Tara Masih (book) & craft essays from Brevity Magazine (online). We’ll also be reading sample flash fiction and creative nonfiction online and in print. To register, email valfiora at yahoo. Tuition is $225.

Flash Fiction & Creative Nonfiction Workshop
6 sessions, 6 students max
Beginning Monday, November 14th, 6:30-8:30 PM
Location: 17th & H

Visit here for more information.

Do you prefer to write longer memoir, lyric/personal essays, or narrative journalism? Author of the essay collections Season of the Body & Blessing the Animals and Bellingham Review editor-in-chief Brenda Miller will be the first creative nonfiction Master Teacher featured in the Weekend Workshop series. Brenda is also the co-author of the creative nonfiction textbook Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, and her newest book, Listening Against the Stone: Selected Essays was published last month. Her workshop will take place January 14&15, 2012. Two spaces are still available. The cost is $400. To sign up, contact valfiora at yahoo.

Workshops in the Master Teacher series take place over a weekend, include both Saturday and Sunday, roughly from 10-4 PM with a 90 minute break for lunch. Workshops are capped at twelve students, and focus on craft, narrative choices, and discussion of student manuscripts, distributed and read in advance. The weekend will usually include an event that’s open to the public, either a reading or craft lecture.

Visit here for more information.

Kate Asche Interviews SoS October Featured Writer Melinda Moustakis

 

Melinda Moustakis was born in Fairbanks, Alaska and raised in Bakersfield, California. She received her MA from UC Davis and her PhD in English and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University. Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories, her first book, won the 2010 Flannery O’Connor Award in Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. She is currently a visiting professor at Pacific Lutheran University.

Well, let’s start with the most recent press: the National Book Award’s 5 Under 35! Congratulations. How does it feel?

I am so excited as now I have to go to New York and give a reading at the 5 Under 35 event and then I am going to attend the National Book Awards where there is the opportunity to meet all of these amazing writers. I feel incredibly fortunate because my book was just released on September 15 and the announcement of this national recognition couldn’t have come at a better time. The fact that Jaimy Gordon would think my work was worth nominating is very humbling.

So, as some folks in the Stories on Stage audience will know, you and I have been writers together for a long time now. Like, ten years. I am trying to remember what class it was we first shared as undergraduates at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

We’ve known each around ten years now, which is mind boggling. We had an English class together Sophomore year at Cal Poly and one day, after class, you came up to me and said you liked the black hat I was wearing. “Reminds me of Audrey Hepburn,” you said. I said, “I love Audrey Hepburn.” And so we became friends. After that we had poetry writing classes with Kevin Clark and then lugged our Riverside Chaucers around campus to another class. You then became the queen of salsa dancing and invited me along.

Something the folks in the Stories on Stage audience most likely will not know is that you started as a poet. When did you first think that maybe poetry wasn’t it for you, that maybe you were a fiction writer?

I started writing poems about homesteaders and an Alaskan family and I remember the class said they could read a whole book about these people. Then our poetry teacher pointed out that all my poems were narrative and that I might want to take a fiction class and see the possibilities in another genre of writing. I took fiction with Paula Huston and Susann Cokal and my writing started to coalesce, especially after I wrote a story in Cokal’s class about the Kenai River. In this story, I can see the beginnings of the combination of setting and metaphor and character and lyricism that continues in my work today. Poetry taught me how to think about the structure of the line and to think about form. It’s as if I had all of this water, this material to work with, and I needed to find the proper vessel to hold it all. To me, poetry was a tea cup. Fiction was a big chili pot. I tried both, learned from both. In the end, I’d say my work has ended up being a fusion of both worlds–perhaps moose chili in a tea cup.

I remember how, in Kevin Clark’s poetry workshops, we’d always start with “what is the plot of this poem” and then move to sound, image, metaphor. Do you think that plot question could have been part of your discovering of your inner fiction writer?

Yes, that question could have inspired me to think about the situation or the narrative. But even more so, poetry taught me how to work towards an image, to wrap lines and around in image, to spin the metaphor outward, which is crucial to how I developed as fiction writer. The attention to sound in poetry, the ear for it, set me up to fall in love with dialogue and the sound of a place. When I go fishing with my uncle, Sonny, I delight in listening to him and his buddies tell stories–I learned how to write dialogue from listening to fishing stories and banter.

I remember spring 2006 and a long night at your apartment in Davis, during which we cut up and arranged and re-arranged (and re-re-arranged) your M.A. thesis project (a novel composed of many episodes of varying length, all titled) on the wall of your room. What is plot, or arc, to you these days? In other words, how have your ideas about character, conflict and consequence evolved over time?

One question I have been pondering for many years is how to make a mosaic or collage or words have the same overall effect as a visual mosaic and collage, how to have the payoff, the coming together, the appreciation that is often so immediate in the visual medium. I still want the reader to connect with the characters, to come away from a story emotionally charged, not thinking, “That was an interesting structure for a story.” To start a story, to really dive into it, I have to have a voice or point of view that takes over or an image that arrests me. Then I have to find the structure for the overall narrative. As if I have to find the characters (or the perspective that captures them) and then build a house for them to live in and then bury the house.

Lots of attention has been paid to the voices of your characters in your first book, Bear Down, Bear North, as well as to the “hard poetry” (as Ben Percy calls it) of your sentences. Place, as well, is so prominent in your writing. Dorothy Allison has written, “Place is emotion. [...] Place is people with desire.” I feel like you might have something to say about that idea.

Recently, I read the preface to The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories which was written by Ben Marcus, who edited the anthology. In the preface, he breaks down the definition of plot and one definition is the literal: a “small piece of ground,” and the setting or “the space in which a story occurs,” a plot of land where characters live and events happen. Plot is a piece of land, a place. Plot is place. Place is people with desire. In some ways, it is difficult to distinguish a literal landscape from a figurative landscape, from an emotional and psychological landscape. A character looks out onto an ocean, but it is the way she describes the ocean and what the ocean means to her that creates a particular ocean in the particular world of the story. The external is internalized, and vice versa.

Alaska is the place where all my best writing and dreaming takes place. A place can have a voice–can be heard in the structure of the line, or in the cadence of a character’s voice. One of my goals in writing this book was to include a variety of perspectives which is why there are men and women and children’s voices, and points of view such as second person and third person omniscient and first person plural.

In our years writing and talking together, we both have loved this bit from “Reunion” by Charles Wright: “I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear/ Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.” The stories/chapters in Bear Down, Bear North seem to deeply consider conceptions of grace, in all its complexity.  For this reason, it seems apt that you have won an award bearing Flannery O’Connor’s name. Would you like to speak this topic?

You introduced me to this particular passage when you shared some poetry teaching materials years ago. These lines, to me, speak to the writing process. First, the untying, the unraveling, the knots that have to become undone, when you sit down to a blank page. Then, through writing, through penance, penance with a pen, you can be absolved and dissolve, find that other place beyond the physical page. We’ve talked about the similarities between the writing process and prayer–the attempt of communion, the focus and intent, the frustration of not being able to find stillness.

I wanted to write complex characters, characters that were not just harsh people living in a harsh wilderness and so the book includes grace and brutality, lightness and darkness, hope and despair. It is an incredible honor to have an award bearing Flannery O’Connor’s name because of her ability to capture the sacred and the profane, the sacred through the profane, sometimes the profane nature of what is thought to be or thinks of itself as sacred. Her work operates on the understanding that redemption is possible through all things, including violence. Grace can come in the form of a soft whisper or a sharp nail. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t admire Flannery O’Connor, and I think part of that reason is that her work is fearless, is not afraid to be, in equal measure, cynical and hopeful. I hope to write work that has the same sense of fearlessness.

What in your book are you most proud of, or still most engaged with, that lies perhaps below, or inside of, all this lushness and expansiveness that so enthralls your readers? What is most special to you about this work? What still surprises you?

I am proud of the inclusion of a variety of perspectives and points of view in the book.  One thing that has surprised me is how many people have said they loved the more structurally experimental stories, the modular fiction or stories that include more than one point of view. Which tells me that I finally found a way to write a fragmented story that came together as a whole, that hit an emotional high note.

One of the most special things to me about this work has been the warm reception from my family and river friends and other Alaskans. They are the true test of the book and they have enjoyed it more than I dreamed they would.

I am still engaged with this world and these characters–I may be for the rest of my life. For many of the characters in this book, I feel this is only the beginning and their lives are sprawled out in front of me and I have to write to catch up to them.

Kate Asche, M.A., is a poet/essayist and creative writing teacher. A graduate of the UC Davis Creative Writing Program, she was a finalist for the 2011 Audio Contest at The Missouri Review and has poetry forthcoming in Confrontation. She received two Elliot Gilbert Prizes in Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Award and was a finalist for University of California Poet Laureate. A trained facilitator in the Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) Method, she is associate director of the Arts, Humanities and Writing program at UC Davis Extension. Follow her and get the scoop on local writing events at www.katesmiscellany.blogspot.com.

Only Two Spaces Available in October 5th Fiction Workshop

Subtext will be the theme of this fiction workshop, open to novel chapters, short stories, and flash fiction. We’ll read Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext, which is a short but challenging book, and we’ll parse out his meaning together as we discuss craft, structure, and narrative choices. Each student will have his/her work presented to the group  for discussion twice during this six week course, and receive written feedback from the group. Class is capped at six students, and is open to writers with previous workshop experience. $225. For more information, contact Valerie Fioravanti at valfiora at yahoo.

For writers new to fiction, the Beginning Fiction Workshop starts on October 18th. If you’re interested in fiction 1000 words or less, or want to get better at revising by focusing on economy, precision, and purpose, Flash Fiction begins November 14th. For more information, visit http://valeriefioravanti.com/SacramentoWritingWorkshops.aspx.

 

 

Brenda Miller & Peter Ho Davies Next “Master Teachers” Coming to Sacramento

Write memoir, lyric/personal essays, or narrative journalism? Author of the essay collections Season of the Body & Blessing the Animals and Bellingham Review editor-in-chief Brenda Miller will be the first creative nonfiction Master Teacher featured in the Weekend Workshop series. Brenda is also the co-author of the creative nonfiction textbook Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, and her newest book, Listening Against the Stone: Selected Essays was published last month. Her workshop will take place January 14&15, 2012. Three spaces are still available. The cost is $400. To sign up, contact valfiora at yahoo dot com.

If fiction is more your writing style, Peter Ho Davies is Sacramento bound May 12&13, 2012. Peter is the author of the story collections Equal Love & The Ugliest House in the World and the historical novel The Welsh Girl. Peter teaches in the University of Michigan MFA program and has taught at the Bread Loaf and Napa Writers Conferences.

Workshops in the Master Teacher series take place over a weekend, include both Saturday and Sunday, roughly from 10-4 PM with a 90 minute break for lunch. Workshops are capped at twelve students, and focus on craft, narrative choices, and discussion of student manuscripts, distributed and read in advance. The weekend will usually include an event that’s open to the public, either a reading or craft lecture.

For more information, visit http://valeriefioravanti.com/MTWW.aspx or contact Valerie Fioravanti at valfiora at yahoo dot com.

 

Valerie Fioravanti Interviews SoS September Featured Writer & Master Teacher Kevin McIlvoy

Kevin (Mc) McIlvoy will be in town next month to participate in Stories on Stage and facilitate a weekend workshop. He has taught creative writing for over twenty-five years, and recently served as Interim Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College. He was Editor in Chief of the national literary magazine Puerto del Sol at New Mexico State University, and has served on the Board of Directors of two national writing organizations, Council for Literary Magazines & Presses and the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. His published works include A Waltz, The Fifth Station, Little Peg, Hyssop, and The Complete History of New Mexico. He works with students privately via his website mcthebookmechanic.

You will be in Sacramento to participate in Stories on Stage (9/30) and conduct a weekend workshop (10/1&10/2).Will you discuss your approach as a reader/teacher of writing?

My goal is to meet the work on its own terms, and to respond to it in such a way that I am doing my best to speak for the work, specifically for the full set of possibilities already evident in the draft. If I effectively facilitate a more intense conversation between the author and her/his work, then the work will improve because the author will envision its possibilities more comprehensively. The author who can do this will naturally welcome the boldness the work asks of her/him.

When I studied with you and Robert Boswell at NMSU, I was told by each of you, in slightly different language, that a good writer serves the story she is telling, rather than the opposite. I can remember finding this idea astonishing, although I no longer do. Why is this an important distinction for developing writers?

Ah, Boz! How lucky I was to be his colleague and to have the opportunity to learn from him for so many years! We writers train ourselves to combine our intuitive skills and our conscious mastery of technique in order to discern the will of the work, not in order to exercise our willfulness. We seek “the stance of wonder” (John Berryman), not the posture of control. In our own lives as artists and in our personal lives, we soon enough learn that willfulness is emptying and exhausting, that willingness is fulfilling and exhilarating. I think Boz and I have always agreed that we wish for writers’ lives to be satisfying page by page and book by book, right from the start.

Whenever I hear theories of visual arts, I think of you, particularly the advice regarding teaching artists how to see rather than how to paint. I had read and understood writing theory before I began my MFA candidacy, but I feel I was taught to see the larger picture of storytelling and narrative choices. Is this why you eschew more traditional writing-craft theory?

During all of my life as a writer, I have found it’s a good thing to welcome the study of conventional and unconventional methods. I admit that I get restless with some creative writing instruction that is so intent on confirming established assumptions—about such things as point of view treatment, plot, story structure, etc.—that it does not invite questioning. Worse yet, some instruction proposes that writers set certain rigid rules and apply them to everything they write. That’s foolishness. Each piece we write has something to teach us about its wild nature. If we unwisely tame ourselves, we tame the work.

You’ve mentioned that you favor disequilibrium, or writing that throws the reader off balance in some way. Why?

Musicians, dancers, painters, and writers spend their lives contemplating beauty. A story, like a deteriorating rose, like a fading song note, is a manifestation of dark and luminous beauty. As I said above, with each piece we write, we should find ways to feel more fully and intensely the unique nature of the beauty in that particular piece. And we should question any assumption that the most profound nature of beauty resides in symmetry, proportion, equilibrium. The fading song note is in dynamic balance since it is about to achieve its last fullness and about to fall away in the same moment; were it merely balanced, it would only sustain its fullness.

I spend a lot of time discussing the concept of many many drafts with my writing students. Will you discuss your writing/revision process and/or a writer’s need for patience?

Willingness is pleasurable. In my own work I seek pleasure in the processes of composing and revising. I believe that in each stage of letting go of willful control, writers give themselves pleasure (I like the sound of that! And I like the image of writers reporting to their loved ones that they have spent their writing sessions pleasuring themselves!). I sincerely wish for my fellow writers to prolong their pleasure—patient composing, patient revising. At its best, I believe the process of composing is an act of generosity: here, reader, is the cause of wonder (this image, this character gesture, etc.) and engagement (this perspective, this setting, etc.), and here is another cause of wonder and engagement. The process of revising should be an act of greater generosity: here, reader, is the cause of wonder and terrible awe and engagement and estrangement, and here is another, and here is another.

We are both essentially going rogue by offering our own writing workshops, mentoring, and other forms of literary advocacy. Why do you think it’s important to offer an alternative to the university writing experience?

I’ve only been “rogue” for a short period of time; this new life as an entity called “mcthebookmechanic” is challenging me to improve my teaching methods and to question all my own first principles. I’ve always sought those terms, and I feel lucky to find them at this moment of my life. I believe I’m in readiness for this because I taught in a great place (New Mexico State University) for almost thirty years. I still miss the students there, the colleagues, the writers in the community. I continue to teach in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College, and my colleagues there and my students help me grow as a writer and teacher.

For more information about the Master Teachers Weekend Workshop series or Stories on Stage, contact valfiora at yahoo or visit http://valeriefioravanti.com/MTWW.aspx.