It was wall to wall. It was genuine heart. It was Kelly Writers House celebrating the Honors thesis writers. That's Julia Bloch, who directs us all (directing only me would be a full-time job) (oh, we love her). That is Nina Friend. That's David Marchino.
We had thirty seconds each to introduce these students with whom we have learned. My words were these, below.
Congratulations, Nina and David. And so much love.
Nina Friend observes. She listens. She cares. She has, for many years, wondered what “serving” really means, also “waiting.” To write this thoughtful and deeply engaging work of narrative nonfiction, Nina has read widely, spent countless hours in the company of leading restaurateurs, major novelists, and a wide variety of servers, even donned a waitress apron herself. You may think you know what a server does. But you won’t know the half of it until you read Nina’s explications of stigma and community, addiction and freedom. With fierce, often delicious language, Nina pulls the curtains way back on a world all of us would do well to ponder—and appreciate—more completely.
In hunting down his family mythology, David Marchino has traveled far—sitting again, after years of absence, with his own elusive father, sifting through the artifacts of an enflamed past, returning to neighborhood cemeteries and family homes in an effort both to remember and to understand. To all of this David has brought a giant heart, an eye for the telling detail, and a steadfast compassion for the people in his life. David may be the product of a home that will always throb with mysterious unknowns. But David is, first and foremost, his own person—a magnificent, blue-rose tattooed writer who teaches us, with this memoir, that love, in the end, wins hardest, fastest, most.
Earlier this week,
George Hodgman of Bettyville fame joined us via Skype at Penn. I have been teaching the idea of home this semester—what it is, how writers frame it, how every book ultimately, somehow, departs from or returns to a centering place.
(Speaking of which, please join us for the
Beltran event at Penn's Kelly Writers House, March 1, 6:00 PM, when I will be joined by Reiko Rizzuto, A.S. King, and Margo Rabb—along with students past and present—to discuss this idea of home in literature.)
The winds and the rains were fierce. I had my Skype-technology jitters. My students were ready, and so were the students of dear Julia Bloch, who were joining us for the session. And, oh—George Hodgman was brilliant. He was: Looking back over
Bettyville—how it began, how it evolved. Circling then pinning the definition of memoir. Speaking of his mother's love and his enduring felt need to make her proud. Pondering the nature of, and the blasting off, of personal and writerly inhibitions. Recalling the sound of conversation above the slap of flip flops.
Next George spoke about his life as an editor. The importance of stories that don't wait to get started, the importance of writers who are willing to work, the decision an editor must make, early on, about if and when to get tangled up inside a draft's sentences. And then George said this simple but remarkably important thing: Be messy (at first). The worst books are the clean, perfect books, he told us. The ones that feel safe.
Be messy.
For the past many years I've been at work (intermittently) on a book I feel could define me. It's a novel. It is a structural storytelling risk. I thought last year that I could publish this book as novel for adults. After a great disappointment, I pulled it back. Let it sit. Returned to it just this week, fear in my heart. Was it any good? Had I pumped it up in my own estimation, without any actual basis for pride?
Open the document, Beth.
Find out.
I finally did. And what I discovered was a book that was, indeed, messy. Too pretentious on some pages. Unnecessarily fantastical in covert corners. Too wishfully literary.
But. The story, the characters, the scenes—strip away the mess of the book, and, I discovered, there was a beating pulse. Despite all the mud I had slung on top of my tale, there was a glorious gleam.
I am taking this mess. I am turning it into something. I am grateful, deeply grateful, that I made such a horror in the first place. Inside these pages are complexity and promise. Inside them is my world.
I am reminded, once again, that this writing thing is, above all else, process. Clean first drafts are a constricting bore.
The last time Julia Bloch was on this blog
she was hosting Dorothy Allison at Kelly Writers House—leading a conversation through the wickets of time.
Yesterday I was privileged to see Julia, the newly named director of Penn's Creative Writing program (replacing Greg Djanikian, about whom I wrote
here), engage in conversation with KWH Fellow Jessica Hagedorn. Poet, playwright, novelist, teacher, creator of an MFA program, provocateur, sometimes-reluctant-and-sometimes-not-reluctant pundit, Hagedorn was as bright as the sun breaking in through the trees behind her. Funny, too. Easy to adore.
I listened with care, leaning in especially close when the talk turned to the Philippines, a land that lives in my husband's blood. I listened and thought of how privileged I am to work at Penn, within the KWH frame, where, thanks to this marvel that Al Filreis stirred into being (and Jessica Lowenthal so ably guides on a daily basis), so many remarkable voices, thinkers, makers arrive, suggest, and leave some shimmer dust behind. We are never done as teachers. We never know enough. We have something to gain by sitting and listening to those who have built great worlds with words.
I went off to be with My Spectaculars one final time (an image of them
here; oh, my heart). I came home with a lump in my throat and a copy of
Dogeaters, the first novel in a series of Hagedorn novels that I will read this summer.
Dorothy Allison is one of three Kelly Writers House Fellows hosted this semester by Penn professor and poet
Julia Bloch. Yesterday she sat among us, in conversation with us. There, beside Julia, she is.
Oh, I liked her. So very much. She's everything you've been told she will be. Iconoclastic. Irreverent. Touching. A firebrand of deep opinion and great craft cares who may believe in the act of revenge on the page, but only when the author holds him- or herself equally accountable for the unforgivable past. We writers, we survivors, may not be the heroes we think we are, Allison reminds us. We have responsibilities. Work that lasts is work that is rich with a felt sense of responsibility.
Any writer who believes that writing is a mere game—a toss-off and toss-up of the randomly odd, the
relentlessly clever, the tried and true brand—must spend a bracing hour and change in the company of Allison. Sitting beside my friend Nathaniel Popkin and just one row ahead of August Tarrier (Jamie-Lee Josselyn waving a hand from the near distance, one of my students a few rows back, Lily Applebaum at the mike ready), I filled my little notebook with Allison's words. I'm going to share a few of them here—transcribed as nearly as I could, but not always verbatim. Spread them, oh ye writers and readers who care.
In response to Julia's questions about craft (comments from across the conversation, gathered here): Craft sharpens the contradictions. It produces prose that takes the reader by the throat. Craft requires writers to read as writers, not as readers, and so we writing readers cannot merely wallow; we must assess. To make a reader care, the writer must keep paring the prose down, constructing the truth, acknowledging one's purpose. You are going for the long reach, not the quick tears. You want to haunt a reader six months on. The more talent you have, the more responsibility you have.
On writing with compassion: Recognize that you will never get it right. Recognize that those who survived, who got out of there alive, are in some ways the cowards, the ones who had to compromise. Hold yourself accountable for the choices you made. Recognize that you have a higher moral authority to tell the story right. This applies, by the way, to both writers of fiction and nonfiction.
On life's purpose: I don't want to be rich. I want a different world. I don't want the hatefulness of this world. I have a conviction about justice and social responsibility, a concept of citizenship at great variance with what I see in this world.
Paradise: is having an audience.
What the world is: We don't know what the world is until it is shown to us in story.
A story, much condensed (forgive me, Dorothy Allison, for this condensed version). In response to a question I asked about when Allison knew teaching was joyful, she first spoke of how she made sure to make teaching as hard for herself as it was for her students (amen to that, oh yes, amen to that), then told a story about one of the most talented students she ever had—a woman who didn't know where sentences began or ended, but knew vivid and had material. For nine weeks, Allison worked within a workshop and outside the workshop with this "baby" writer. That ninth week, they had a conversation about the writer's future. The student writer had a question: How much would she get paid for the stories she wrote? How much for a collection of stories? How much how much how much would she get paid—and how long would it take? Allison painted a picture of the future, spoke of the rewards that aren't numerical, finally confessed, when pushed, that her own most recent collection of words had received an advance of $12,500. "I earn that in tips a month," said this student writer. And that, pretty much, was it. The end of this genius writer's aspirations.
And so, Allison reminded us, one has to have more than a gift. One has to have desire. One has to cherish the audience, the chance to speak, the conversation—for that, in the end, is what matters most, that is the gifted writer's only sure provenance, that is where responsibility begins.
Let's get less caught up in the noise about books and more invested in making extremely fine ones.
