Craft and Inspiration – Third Installment

Dispatches from Poets & Writers Live San Francisco, January 2017, Part 3

In the first two installments of notes from Poets & Writers Live San Francisco, which I attended the weekend of January 14th and 15th, and which carried the theme Inspiration, we shared inspirational and practical advice from the likes of U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, author Benjamin Percy, and a team of top literary agents.



This time, let’s rise above again with some thoughts on the appearance of poet/activist Ishmael Reed.

Ishmael Reed

As a six-foot-four-inch middle-aged white dude sitting dead center in the PW Live auditorium, I’m pretty sure I caught Ishmael Reed’s eye when he took the Art Institute stage with his daughter Tennessee. He seemed to be looking straight at me, and his eyes seemed to be saying, “What’s this old white dude doing here?” I’m probably making that up—a flight of self-importance, perhaps—but if he had been looking at me, and if he had been thinking that, I certainly wouldn’t blame him. In our current divisive political climate, with levels of racism and misogyny bubbling up out of their cauldrons—cauldrons being stirred, for the most part, by old white dudes like me—I can only imagine what must be going through the mind of a man like Reed, whose long career as a novelist, poet, playwright, lyricist, essayist, and educator has been devoted to studying, illuminating, and exposing issues of racial and cultural discrimination and injustice. Thoughts like I told you so, I’ve been trying to tell you, and Haven’t you all been listening to me? come to mind, but I’m sure that’s just my own pedestrian speculation, wholly unworthy of a mind as expansive as Reed’s.

On the Art Institute stage that Sunday, Reed started with a lengthy poem excoriating Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan, a poem that dispensed with traditional poetic devices like rhythm and rhyme and simply started every verse by repeating the Speaker’s name, then issuing one scathing rebuke after another. I found it interesting that Reed would choose Ryan rather than Bannon or Pence or even Trump himself as his object of poetic ire, but on reflection it’s clear the younger man, the one so many people have been led to believe is the level-headed and reasonable one, is by that misconception the most dangerous of them all.

Freed to speak his mind after the readings were over, Reed discussed the purpose and inspiration for one of his long-standing pursuits, the Before Columbus Foundation. Described as “a nonprofit educational and service organization dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature,” the foundation resists the dominance of Anglo perspectives in American literature since long before the nation’s founding. But Reed dispensed with the word contemporary in that description and urged all of us to explore the literature that existed hundreds of years before Anglos came to destroy and displace the indescribably rich cultures and storytelling traditions that had existed for millennia in what is now North America.

Reed reminded us that, in fact, the first Anglos who came to New England were fundamentalist Christians, closed-minded people not unlike today's Trump voters, people who were not curious onlookers, but committed extremists bent on destruction and ethnic cleansing. The carnage wrought by these early invaders was the beginning of a great hijacking of the literature that had existed on the continent for centuries, the work of Spanish writers and Native American writers that over the 300 years has either been shoehorned into the dominant Anglo tradition or completely set aside and ignored. Reed explained that the Before Columbus Foundation and the impressive cast of authors that make up its Board of Directors are essentially issuing a plea to thoughtful readers everywhere to reach out and expose themselves to the broad range of North American literature that existed centuries before the Anglos arrived, and the foundation’s work, including the American Book Awards, is to provide resources for all of us to do just that. As the foundation’s website explains, “Everyone should know by now that Columbus did not ‘discover’ America. Rather, we are all still discovering America—and we must continue to do so.”

And if you’ve made it this far, kudos! As if it weren’t obvious, I’d encourage any writer to watch Poets & Writers magazine and pw.org for announcements about the next PW Live conference, and If you’re able to, by all means, attend. All of the sessions were captured on video, and I assume they’ll be posted somewhere eventually, so I promise to post an update to this blog when they are. Many of these will be well worth watching.

Craft and Inspiration – First Installment

Dispatches from Poets & Writers Live San Francisco, January 2017, Part 1

Ah, the writing conference. Communing over coffee and tea with writers I’ll never see or speak to again, soaring to the words of a keynote speaker who rises above the craft to spark our creative souls, gravitating between surprise and monotony during the “practical” discussions as I hear things I’ve never heard before and things I’ve heard a million times, struggling to conjure just the right opening gambit for the editor, publisher, or agent in the expo or breakout, battling through petrified emotions to give myself that one fleeting chance to at least introduce my story. And by the end, I’m typically exhausted both physically and emotionally, and I look around me to see that others are, too, moving to seats with no neighbors, sitting quietly, question-raised hands retracted for the duration.

Yes, these are difficult and inspiring things, these writing conferences, but since I’m not the type to kill myself with booze and isolation until I’m discovered by some visionary journal reader, I am consigned to go, for the benefit of my stories, to give them that one extra chance to wiggle themselves into print somewhere.

The weekend of January 14th and 15th, I engaged in this dance between cynicism and wonder at Poets & Writers Live in San Francisco. The theme of the weekend was Inspiration, and I have to admit that, despite my own skepticism and the chilling cold of this unusual San Francisco winter, the rustic and historic environs of the Art Institute, where the conference was held, provided a backdrop to some truly inspiring talks, as well as some new, useful, and usable practical advice. As I sometimes do on this blog, I’ll share some of those with my fellow writers in a short series blog posts, of which this is the first.

Juan Felipe Herrera – Keynote

He’s the Poet Laureate of the United States, but I frankly knew nothing about Herrera, or his early days in San Francisco among the Beat poets of his youth, or his passion and joy for his fellow California poets and artists, culture warriors of the 60s, or his vision. His vision spoke of big poems, poems on billboards, poems in Times Square, poems up the side of skyscrapers like the Transamerica building. He read from work that had not yet been stamped—that is, workshopped, revised, and beaten into submission—and he encouraged all of us to do the same. I’m not a poet, but I took those words to heart and sat in Calzone’s in North Beach and wrote a poem that very evening. The poems Herrera read issued and answered a challenge to incorporate the joy of life and humanity in among the tragedy and sadness of our existence, to combine the two and even find the connections between them. And he issued that challenge to us, and I would be surprised if the poets in attendance aren’t turning out some very interesting work even as I type this.

Benjamin Percy – Set Pieces | The Art of Suspense

A simple rule I live by: If Benjamin Percy is on the roster, I’m there. Percy is the writer, in my experience, who goes straight to the practical—technique, method, edict—while at the same time inspiring and entertaining. He’s a searing presence with haunting blue eyes and a voice that is positively otherworldly, but beyond that, he’s just a super fricking smart guy. In this breakout, the indelible image Percy has talked and written about for years—Charles Baxter’s widowed image, the nugget in the screenwriter’s phrase “moments make movies”—is relabeled the set piece. It’s that compressed moment, a moment from real life or a movie or a play or anywhere, that keeps coming back into your mind year after year. A moment like this is precious, Percy growls, because that place in your mind that it has carved out for itself can be the source of great writing, like the resonant scene in Percy’s story “Refresh, Refresh,” a father commanding his young son to follow him, picking up a shotgun and leading the son out into the woods, a raven-like skree echoing off the trees as they make their way to the clearing where a young deer is trapped, terminally injured, begging to live, where the father hands the boy the gun and commands him to shoot the poor creature, shoot it dead, end its misery.

This set piece in the story, this critical moment, comes from Percy’s own life, and it became the resonant scene in a story that became the title of a collection. In any story, you’ll want one of these; in a novel, at least four. (Like I said, technique, method, edict.) These are the crescendos in the story, the places where you’ll slow down—just a minute of story present might cover 2 or 3 pages—where you’ll amplify the language, where you’ll hold the reader spellbound. So search your life, and search your memory, and find the caverns of your mind that have been occupied by these set pieces, these moments, these images. They’re pure gold.

Back in the main theatre, Percy lectured on The Art of Suspense, and oh man, if you’re not scared yet, you should be. Because if Percy reads your story, and there’s a scene in there with two dudes sitting in a bar, or on a park bench, engaging in some expository dialog that’s supposed to reveal the story, Percy might just sick a lycan on you (because you know he has some of those locked up in his basement). Instead of assuming readers are stupid and need to be spoon-fed, welcome them into your enterprise by triangulating the dialog—that is, couching a spare amount of it in a goal-driven action—and revel in the experience of creation, as a writer, by revealing not only the story, but the character as well, and do it all with vivid imagery and fewer spoken words.

Now that’s suspense. You know what else is? Offstage mythology. Think of “He who shall not be named.” Before a reader ever encounters a character—a sinister antagonist or a game-changing rescuer—introduce the myth of that character in advance through the recoiling or reaction or reminiscence of others. Make readers wonder and anticipate and fret, and then spring the ghost on them just when they’re expecting it the least.

In the next dispatch from Poets & Writers Live, we’ll tell you what literary agents say about how to pitch your book to them, and in a brief, final installment, we’ll share the insights and inspirations of Bay Area author, songwriter, publisher, and activist Ishmael Reed.