Tag Archives: writing

Can Old Writing Learn New Tricks?

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My first blog, which I started in 2007, was devoted to exploring and admiring free public libraries. I’m the child of these spaces, having grown up with family values centered on learning, self-determination, and play. Weekend trips to our local branch or to one of the further-off library networks adjacent to my Jersey Shore town set me on a path of life-long appreciation –not just for the beguiling contents, but also for the buildings themselves, the culture(s) of patron-hood, and intriguing off-shoots like book mobiles and card catalog fan-art.

Librarytour concluded in 2012 after 52 posts and 1 guest post, largely due to traveling less, having a backlog of unwritten reviews, and ambivalence about the blog’s core purpose. Skimming through posts recently, I felt underwhelmed–the word craft and my attempts at photography lacked a certain something. Remembering back, I recall struggling to establish the right tone. Many bloggers I admired had positioned themselves as experts or perhaps obsessed connoisseurs, but I set my sights on something different. I wanted to BE with libraries, to share a living sense of the mundane and the miraculous.

Canceling the blog didn’t mean I stopped visiting libraries, of course. Nor did I delete the account. I understand that some unmake their art as a path to transformation, but I tend toward shelving completed or abandoned projects and letting them ferment . . . for decades. Librarytour will remain at its original address until a new purpose is unearthed (hopefully), the Internet tanks (unlikely), I bite it and no one left behind is aware or cares that the blog exists (pretty likely), or some combination therein, which may or may not include serendipity and/or magic. Best case scenario? This old blog sparks newness in someone else with a matching or next-level love for free public libraries as a locus of literary, auditory, and digital arts, opportunity, culture, and DIY spirit, in whatever form that takes.

WordPress stats report the posts below as Librarytour’s all-time Top 3:

1 – Old Bridge Library – Master of Dedicated Spaces – New Jersey – July 3, 2010

“Old Bridge Library is lived-in and loved. The space is one large room organized by uses: Living Room, Children’s Room, Information Services, Senior Spaces, Teen Zone, etc. Each section is additionally separated into zones. For instance –in the Living Room one might fight to stay awake on couches in one area or, in another, relax in up-right armchairs, reading a magazine under a lamp. The Senior Space offered rocking chairs and computers with screens featuring increased magnification for eyes tired of trying to figure out tiny type.”

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2 – Somerville Library, I’ve got my eye on you – Massachusetts – March 7, 2008

“Well, I’m a big fan of bulletin boards, so I walked on back there to take a gander.  I noticed a brochure titled “So Fine A Prospect,” which turned out to be a walking tour of Prospect Hill and Union Square in Somerville, MA.  First on the list is the Somerville Central Library, located on Highland Avenue.”

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3 – Bibliotheque publique d’information –  Paris, France – June 10, 2010

“The Paris library Bibliotheque publique d’information is a big fish. A big, big, fish. I have never seen anything like it. As it has become my custom to visit a library nearly everywhere I travel, regardless of whether I can actually speak the language and read the books, my cousin and I braved the crowds at the bibliotheque.”

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Phoebe Sinclair, 2018 Ivan Gold Fellow

Why Review Books? A Personal History

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Why review books? What’s the point? To what useful end is one reader’s take on someone else’s art beyond her own delight, neutrality, or regret for having engaged?

One might return a question: why review ANYTHING? Opinions, everybody’s got ‘em, right? So.

So. Memory . . .  

In the 80’s and 90’s, my brother and I rocked the summer reading club scene at both libraries we frequented. That’s right, we competed in reading against other, unseen children, jockeying for the coveted position of Most Books Read. My brother and I weren’t opponents –these races were more like track and field where one challenges his history: his past record, his younger self.

At summer’s end, we’d conclude with fistfuls of Pizza Hut personal pan pizza coupons and, for me at least, zero memory of what I’d read beyond titles listed on a colorful sheet of paper, forgotten ever more deeply as summer’s expansiveness compressed into rigidly structured fall.

Learning . . .

My brother has four years on me and, other than a few shared Spider-Man and Garfield comics, a Robotech novel or two, we didn’t have many cross-over reading interests. Despite this, I hold dear titles that I myself never read, such as Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg. The book reports he wrote for school were as amazing and sophisticated sounding to me as what he was reading. I felt eager to compose my own reports–craft construction paper covers, hand-letter the titles, staple along the edges, and present proudly to a teacher one neat bundle.

Sadly, my schooling was not his; I didn’t score any grade school teachers who assigned book reports. By the time I was invited to commune with literature, I was in high school where the culture was less about connecting with written words and more about strategizing to achieve A’s. I loved and identified with novels and poetry but still removed myself from an Honor’s English class because I didn’t care to compete and had a growing dislike of lit-tret-ture.

Memory . . .

I have a micro-myth, goes like this: I was reading The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley, so into it, awww YEAH! This book is GREAT, this book is fantastic. Nearing the final pages, situations started to feel a tad . . . familiar, and then really familiar, and then. Oh, no. I’ve already read this book. I KNOW HOW IT ENDS. 🙁 🙁 🙁

Thus, I started keeping reading journals in high school, hardbound books usually gifted to me by my brother. Curiously, the practice failed to save me from accidentally reading The Hero and the Crown a third time (consistent, that kid), but it did help cement the awareness that I shouldn’t attempt to keep everything in my head. I quickly devised my own rating system consisting of smiley faces and frown-y faces and wavy lines. The journals doubled as a study of the writing field and I recorded authors, illustrators, publishing houses and imprints, and award-winners.

Learning . . .

The result of eight-straight-years of writing instruction in high school and college is that I’ve learned systems and strategies for analyzing the narrative arts. I peek behind and betwixt typeset words for clues about work and writer both. The why of it: to read deeper, write better, understand our lives and our world(s) in the moment of the narrative, and then again and again with each unique book-poem-play, even as those books-poems-(comics!)-plays sometimes meld together into a mash of ideas. They soak through, get integrated and because of my . . .

. . . Memory, or lack thereof, I review books and STILL forget them. Alternately, there are poems I’ve heard just once that stick with me. It’s unpredictable. It’s delicious.

When the Internet arrived (for me) in college, so too arrived ingenious applications like Goodreads. At current count, I’ve posted approximately 400 reviews. Sure, one such review (for Microcrafts: Tiny Treasures to Make and Share by Margaret McGuire) is a simple exclamation: “So cute! So tiny!” but that’s an honest reaction, yeah? It’s me talking back to the writer/artist as much as my six-paragraph rant about Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Sometimes other Goodreads users click the thumbs-up button, declaring their affinity with my analysis and I get a nice energy boost.

Aaaand learning . . .

As my world has expanded via the 0’s and 1’s, I’ve grown more careful with the reviews I pen. Words on a website are not the same as ideas on paper, bound by twin case covers, sitting on my shelf at home. I’m aware that the authors I watch from afar may one day be close-up peers. Taking care is a must. After all, care is the reason I’ve engaged, why I’m talking back to a writer or artist, explaining: this is how you reached me. See? Here’s how I’ve changed.

-Phoebe Sinclair, 2018 WROB Ivan Gold Fellow

 

Writing… Or Not

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Writing. It’s not something that’s been happening since November for me. First there was the election, then illness, the end of the semester, holiday rush at the bookstore, more illness (it won’t go away), followed by turning in grades and prepping new courses. Right now I’m writing this blog post, but I’m still sick and still have a mound of grading.

My default at times like this is to cut into myself. I should be able to do everything. I should be able to juggle all my jobs and my writing and my health. After all, other people do it. Hell, even I’ve done it at other points in time. The thing that has me pausing now to reconsider is the “other people.”

life-without-envy-ego-management-for-creative-people-by-camille-deangelis-1250099358This fall, WROB member Camille DeAngelis published Life Without Envy: Ego Management for Creative People. This is not the sort of book I normally read but knowing Camille, I dove in. Camille spends most of the book focused on the dangers of comparison: because that other person published/sold/wrote/won means I should.

I saw myself in this, my sense that I wasn’t good enough not just based on the achievements of others, but also based on my past achievements. I put down the book with the begrudging feeling that I needed to be kinder to myself, but also with profound respect for Camille. Many of the examples Camille uses in the book and in discussions with bloggers are from her own life. Knowing that she struggles with the same things I do made me feel like I wasn’t alone, and that the struggle was normal.

So, if you’re currently experiencing a burst of creativity and production, I’m happy for you. But if you’re also being taken down by politics, sickness, and work, may I suggest something? Be kind to yourself and pick up Camille’s book. Get yourself a decadent drink and a cookie (and maybe some vitamins, too) and give yourself some time to check in with yourself. Maybe this takes the form of just sitting. Maybe you’re ready to pick up Camille’s book and try just one page. And maybe you find that you have the energy to write a journal entry.

As writers, we are good at empathizing with others (whether they be real people or fictional characters) but rather than giving all your energy to others, be a little selfish and give some to yourself. After all, run down, sick people can’t show up to write and, as we know, showing up to write is the hardest part.

Purchase a signed copy of Life Without Envy: Ego Management for Creative People.

-Marika McCoola, 2016 Ivan Gold Fellow

Splendid and Immense

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“Ser cronopio es contrapelo,
contraluz, contranovela, contradanza,
contratodo, contrabajo, contrafagote,
contra y recontra cada día,
contra cada cosa que los demás aceptan
y que tiene fuerza de ley.”
⎯ Julio Cortázar.

I have always believed that to write about writing is as relevant as asking a rhinoceros for its opinion about the use of chiaroscuros in the paintings of Roberto Ferri.

Any literary work, especially poetry, must justify itself without prologues or academic essays defending it or explaining it. The author’s superstitions are irrelevant. The author is irrelevant.

I don’t have writing rituals. I don’t shine my shoes, light a candle to the enfants terribles, and sit in front of a vintage typewriter praying to captivate the public. At most I take the poison of each poem I ever read, and I resurface with the drowned in the sea.

I write knowing that the universe is a word. Knowing that to write poetry is to open the door of the night and walk across the page towards the darkest sun: where stanzas draw near like mountains; there are verses shaded by trees and at the end of a word water is born, at the beginning of another the sky trembles and a bird sings again.

If I feel something mildly benign when I write, when the images of my poems arise, it is not the pleasure of creating but awe of the word…like an idiot in love with the wind.

You think you are creating the poem, but the poem creates you.

As if an electric fish has caught the end of the yarn and unraveled the fine thread mooring all the boats in your head,

Poetry transforms the poet. The poet transforms the world.

Demiurge.

I work the silence, I turn it into fire.  

A bird sings again.

Poetry is the path the individual must follow to return to our collectivity.

Poetry either transforms us or is useless.

In the most Aristotelian sense, poetry should not tell reality as it is but as it should be. Reinventing language, transforming life itself into poetry.

True poetry should be written by all and not by one.

So that the malefic voice of those who fear the poem, surrounding it with their troops, dismembering it verse by verse, deceiving the world with their white flags and machine guns, don’t force us to sing their paralyzing song.

Urgent poetry. Like daily bread. Like the magical evidence that another reality is possible. Utopia is but inalienable beauty.

We will return together to the poem, devoid of adjectives, splendid and immense.

-Ari Belathar, 2016 Poetry Fellow

 

Transformation: A WROB Reading at Porter Square Books

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Four members of The Writers’ Room of Boston will be reading at Porter Square Books at 25 White Street in Cambridge on May 17, 2016 at 7 PM. Though they will be presenting work in a range of genres and styles, each piece relates to the theme of “Transformation.” Our readers will also recommend a favorite book written by another author (available in the bookstore) relating to the same theme.

Our readers are (in alphabetical order):

Mary Bonina, memoirist and poet.

Alexander Danner, writer of comics, fiction and audio drama

Kate Gilbert, writer of children’s fiction writer and a freelance editor

Jennifer Hollis, music-thanatologist and  memoirist.

Please join us for this special event!

porter-square-books

Some Days the Sun Rises from My Head…

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Some days the sun rises from my head and I write as if I were relearning life from the letter “a.” Other days, like today, I am a meteor disintegrating — days in which everything and everybody recognizes me as a foreigner.

Exiled from a country that only exists in the shadows that nostalgia draws up (nobody chooses borders as a postcard).

Some days I forget that the language I write in is not my language, I stole it. I stole it from a bookcase the day I took a copy of “A Fine Balance,” put it under my jacket and ran back to the refugee shelter, where a pocket dictionary was the only tool I had to decipher a story that I so desperately needed to claim as mine.

I learnt English by stealing books. I taught myself both, the art of book theft and the complexities of the English language. The greatest lesson I learnt is that when you write in a stolen language each word is an opportunity of life and death. Thus it is necessary to care for every word and for the silence from which it emerges.

But on days like today it is hard to hear the silence. Fearful fascists, entrenched in their delusion that borders must remain eternal and immutable, vehemently promote the construction of walls, segregated neighborhoods and checkpoints… ignorant that the Promised Land can only be found in the poem.

When I write in my stolen language, some days I tear down walls and with each verse I liberate entire territories. Other days each letter is an impenetrable frontier.

But there is a freedom, a literary anarchy of sorts; when you take a language without permission, you take it as a whole. With its lightning and its shadows. And when no one is watching you are free to venture past the narrow laws of syntax, to look for the exact place where magic is born.

To write in a stolen language is an act of rebellion and an act of survival. It is to carefully listen to the silence between each word to hear the poem breathing, feel its pulse. To write in a stolen language is to re-invent it every day. It is to walk past the shelf of best-sellers without looking. Without concern about purity or the seals of approval of academia.

On days like today, when the gardens of the world are filled with equestrian statues of cowards, the exiled poets, believing themselves the only “foreigners on earth,” transform their wound –their exile– into a meeting place.

According to Cecilia Vicuña: “Dante Alighieri wrote in the fourteenth century that the spirit of poetry abounds ‘in the tangled constructions and defective pronunciations’ of vernacular speech where language is renewed and transformed. His vision resonates today with the faulty speech of migrants–and refugees–creating the sounds and intonations of the future”.

My only country is my poetry and it has no anthems.

-Ari Belathar, 2016 Poetry Fellow (#RefugeesWithPencils)

Writers at Work– A WROB Event for ArtWeekBoston!

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Visit writers at work in the professional work space of The Writers’ Room of Boston. Writers in various genres will answer your questions about writing craft and the writing life! Themed booths throughout the Room will allow visitors to Ask a Poet or Novelist or Memoirist, among other genres, their own questions about life in the literary arts. Members of the Writers’ Room of Boston will also display their work while visitors will be invited to craft and share their own creative responses to fun writing prompts.

Stop by the Writers’ Room between 4 and 8 PM on Thursday, March 5th. We are located on the 5th Floor of 111 State Street. Ring the call button outside the front door and a Room member will come down to get you. Or call: 617-523-0566. We’re conveniently located in the Financial District, a few blocks away from Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market.

For more information about ArtWeekBoston, visit: http://www.artweekboston.org/event/writers-at-work/

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Writing Blocked? Try Wearing a Hat

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It was a beautiful evening last Tuesday at Fenway, clear and chilly, in the low 60s, though a bit windy. A crisp night for a ball game, our first of the season. We were having a great time, my daughter and I, cutting through teenage angst and parental anxieties with peanuts and cracker jacks, until the Red Sox gave up a few late inning runs to Tampa Bay, threatening to ruin our special night.

It was rally cap time. Annie and I considered flipping our baseball hats inside out, a good luck talisman, certain the gesture would ensure a come-from- behind victory for our beloved Sox. But it was late and we were cold. We didn’t flip our caps. Our boys lost 3-0. It was entirely our fault.

I’ve never been a superstitious guy, never believed in rabbit’s feet or the Magic 8-Ball. I’ve never feared black cats or walking under ladders. Except when it comes to baseball. Then my superstitions kick into high gear.

And, it turns out, when it comes to writing as well.

There’s this fishing hat, you see, old and ugly, hanging off the top corner of the pine bookcase behind my writing desk, the one with the sweat and ink stains, red, yellow and blue-striped, and the faint scent of my Dad’s Kools. When I’m in a writing slump, when the words won’t come and my typing fingers seem glued to the home keys, I’ll spin around in my chair, laptop in lap, and stare at that hat. I might even reach for it, slip it on. And suddenly, slowly, sometimes surprisingly, the words start to flow.

Now, there’s the logical side of my brain, the part that earned a Master’s in Business Administration, the ex-journalist, the questioner, truth-seeker. That guy who knows I’m talking complete hooey. He’s the guy who knows that old fishing hat has as much to do with the words typed on my screen as my golden retriever Scout, who’s sitting at my feet this very moment. The guy who knows the odor of Dad’s mentholated tobacco smoke faded from the fishing hat’s heavy canvas decades ago.

But there’s this other guy, my creative side, the artist in me I’ve only recently rediscovered, a writer who not only still smells that tobacco smoke but knows it’s mixed with the fragrance of Dad’s Aqua Velva aftershave, who remembers the morning when he was eight and Dad bought the hat and a bag of bait at Charlie’s Fisherman’s Haven near Port Jefferson, on Long Island, before they headed to the pier at Cedar Beach, and hauled up a huge catch. This guy insists that’s the day Dad’s new hat became a lucky hat. He’s the same guy who insists it’s the hat that makes my hands fly across the keyboard.

And what about the days when I’m separated from my fishing hat? What if I’m writing away from home and writer’s block should encroach? A takeout coffee of the right size, from the right coffeehouse, with the lid positioned just so greases things, even hours old and long-cooled. I can re-tie my shoelaces twice and take a ten minute walk–exactly ten minutes, no more, no less– around the block to get the words coming.

The point is, writing is hard, and it’s supposed to be hard. To paraphrase a favorite movie, a baseball flick, ‘the hard is what makes it great.’ And like ballplayers, we writers can be a superstitious bunch. If a major league baseball player believes his performance is improved because of his quirks — the constant tweaking of his batting glove velcro, the way he digs his heels in at home plate before every at-bat or eats chicken vindaloo before every home game — who’s to say it’s not so? And who’s to say our writing quirks don’t loosen the chutes of creativity that lead from our minds to our typing fingers?

I’ve got to get to work now. Been procrastinating too long. I sure could use a little help though. Gotta focus. There’s my fishing hat, hanging off the shelf, next to my old Norton Anthology and that memoir I’ve been meaning to read.

Let me slip it on.

There. Aah. So much better.

Here we go…

-Mike Sinert, 2016 Nonfiction Fellow

Dead Time

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Sometimes not writing is more productive than writing. As someone who likes to accomplish things, this drives me crazy. (Case in point, I am writing this on a bus while traveling because I have not spent a weekend at home in over a month and at least on a bus you can get stuff done.) When I have a book idea, there’s that first delicious thrill over the idea, excitement for the concept and crushing on characters I’m just getting to know. I’m filled with vigor and just want to start writing. The important thing for me to remember is that this isn’t love, it’s infatuation. I don’t know these characters yet. I have no idea where the story is going, what my themes are, or what the bones are that I’m going to build on.

I was trained first as an illustrator and then as a writer and I think most of my process comes from my illustration training, in which one must research, develop a concept, and do hundreds of sketches before committing to refined sketches or a final. I’ve learned that this process is comparable to what I have to do when I write. After the initial ideas, I need to research: read, experience, create charts and doodles. With this period comes a gestation period, a time when I have to let the research and the story seeds sit in my brain. Walks, sitting on buses, listening to music….not writing becomes important. During this period I’m tempted to take a sprouting idea and run with it, but I can’t, I have to wait, to give the idea time to grow and mature a bit. If I start writing too much now, I’ll be committing to half ideas, concepts and themes that have not been pushed far enough. I respect myself and my readers too much to commit to these half ideas, ideas that are more likely to be cliched.

The image above is a sketch from the conference and the first appearance of the character currently growing in my head- she's had five names in six weeks. Image copyright 2016 Marika McCoola.
The image above is a sketch from the conference and the first appearance of the character currently growing in my head- she’s had five names in six weeks. Image copyright 2016 Marika McCoola.

I attended a conference earlier this year at which Chris Tebbetts talked about the creative process (I use this broadly, because I think there’s a lot of crossover between writing and other arts). There are two states to the process: will and grace. Will is sitting down to work and pushing through drafts. Grace is allowing ideas to come, it is  accepting change and inspiration. Each work is some combination of the two, though not always in similar proportions. Grace is the part of the process we idealize, the muse coming. Will is the part that makes this work. I see the dead time of not writing as a marriage between will and grace, a period in which I have to be mindful, in the moment, holding back my will to work and accepting the grace without acting. Yes, it’s infuriating, but it also holds so much promise. At this point, there’s so much potential in the concept and it is certain to grow and change into something I can’t yet conceive of. Yes, it’ll take so much work, much of which will be painful, but right now, I can’t quite see that yet.

by Marika McCoola, 2016 Ivan Gold Fellow  

What Chooses Us

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Photo Credit: Debka Colson
Photo Credit: Debka Colson

I am discussing a trio of stories with a professor, and I express concern that, after reading and rereading them as a united body of work, I want nothing more than to stab my eye out. The mothers in my stories keep perishing. And what’s with all the dead or injured animals? I don’t think of myself as a particularly troubled person–I am grateful to live, by most standards, a pretty good and happy life–and so it is somewhat alarming, to see my predilections on the page. I am suspicious of myself. I worry to my professor that I only write in one mode: melancholy. When she asks what I think I should be writing, I tell her that I feel I should try writing something funny, or light. For balance. There is a thoughtful pause while she appraises me. She says, You sound a little bit like someone trying to be well-rounded for a college application.

 Oh. I recognize myself in that comment as soon as it leaves her lips. I wonder if that really is the root of my anxiety, and whether it’s just another version of the inner critic, who worries too much about what other people will think. That inner critic is so very good at casting doubt. My professor goes on to say, then, that we all have our obsessions. People are in the period they’re in, and they have to fully inhabit that period, and at some point they’ll feel like they can move on, but they don’t have to…

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we gravitate towards our material: whether we choose it or whether it chooses us. And while I can’t really know how other writers work, I suspect that very few of us would claim that we are wholly in control. I’ve found that the muse has little regard for my intentions–I sit down to write this kind of story or that, but in the end they inevitably depart from such plans. As they should.

Sometimes I think that all we can do is pay attention, and to write where our energy lies.

It’s different for everyone–perhaps you walk through your life gathering the seeds of nascent stories. You might feel the heat coming most strongly off of your deepest fears. Or maybe your subjects simply appear to you, unbidden flashes of lightning. And who can say why these differences of approach, or why some things call to us and others don’t. Who can say why I return again and again to mothers and children, to animals, to magic. It is tempting to psychologize, or to try to apply reason, or balance, but I don’t know anymore. Maybe it is necessary for the mysteries of creation to remain beyond us. 

Tony Hoagland wrote of poets’ obsessions, though I think it an apt observation for any writer: “A mature poet may not know how to command obsession, but understands how to transfuse material into it and then to surrender. The obsessed psyche knows unerringly where to go, like a Geiger counter to uranium, or a dog to his master’s grave. Lucky dog, to have a master.” This idea of surrender–so hard, so true. Writing is a calling, and we come to answer a summons. What that summons sounds like or where it comes from is, perhaps, less the point than that we respond to it at all. 

We are lucky dogs, indeed. 

-Cynthia Gunadi, Ivan Gold Fiction Fellow