Tag: Literary Arts

Last year, UVA creative writing department director Chris Tilghman was trying to convince a prospective MFA graduate student to enter his program when he dropped a quiet bomb.

“I said we were hoping to welcome James Salter as a writer-in-residence,” Tilghman recalled. “There was this long pause on the phone, and then there was this explosion, with her going, ‘I can’t believe it! I just finished reading his most recent book!’”

Salter has that effect on writers, and presumably, the candidate wasn’t disappointed when she joined the program’s annual class of 10 creative writing students. Salter is leading a weekly MFA fiction workshop this semester, part of his duties as UVA’s first-
ever Kapnick Distinguished Writer-in-Residence. He’s the first author to hold such a position here since William Faulkner, who spent the springs of 1957 and 1958 at the University. Like Faulkner, he’ll also give a series of public lectures. The first is set for 6pm on Thursday, October 9 in the auditorium of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. Two more follow on October 14 and 27, same time, same place.

UVA could hardly have revived the tradition with a more exalted guest. Salter is often called a writer’s writer, a master craftsman treasured for his spare, crystalline style—his dialogue uses no quotation marks and few descriptors to tell you how a character says what he says. He’s known, too, for flawless sentences dropped like diamonds into his prose, so perfectly executed and gorgeous they leave the reader agape. 

“The lines that penetrate us are slender,” he wrote in his 1975 novel Light Years, “like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers.

He is also, at 89, a blunt interview subject.

“You can’t really teach writing,” he said from across a dining room table in his temporary home on Kent Road.

That notion, that creative writing can’t be taught, is one he’s been known to trot out before. He likes to quote Vonnegut, who once compared his role as a faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to that of a golf pro correcting swings here and there. But is it hard to hold onto the conviction, wedged as he is among academicians at the moment? 

“I suppose so, but they assume that the creative program is a little bizarre anyway,” Salter said. In workshop, he said, he’s more moderator than instructor. “You give your opinion, also, but you’re not really telling anybody to do it this way or that way. A good writer may not be particularly good at this kind of job. A writer who’s not so good may be excellent.”

Salter’s reputation as an author, anyway, goes so far beyond good that he’s been thrust into a literary realm occupied by few living Americans. To call him a household name would be a stretch, though. The 2013 New Yorker article “The Last Book,” which heralded the publication of All That Is, his first novel in nearly 35 years, bore the following subtitle: “James Salter is a revered writer. Can he become a famous one?”

“All of us writers of faculty age have been revering him at least since the ’70s,” said Tilghman. For him, it started with A Sport and Pastime, the 1967 novel that follows the erotic explorations of a Yale drop-out in France. More than four decades later, All That Is returned to Salter’s familiar themes of flawed men reaching for meaning, with varying degrees of success and failure, kindness and cruelty, in war and work and love. It also evokes a powerful sense of place. Before he wrote it, he spent a good deal of time knocking around Summit, New Jersey, which he ultimately made the hometown of the novel’s protagonist. 

He won’t get to know Charlottesville in the same way.

“It’s a nice town,” he said, but his time here is short. He has taken a drive out to southern Albemarle with creative writing professor John Casey to visit Estouteville, the early 19th-century estate owned by developer Ludwig Kuttner and his wife, artist Beatrix Ost. And he’s made a point of visiting the Confederate graveyard on Alderman Road, he said. Salter, who graduated from West Point and flew fighter jets in Korea, said he found the little corner of Grounds interesting.

Mostly, though, he’s writing, preparing for the three lectures he’ll give before the winter recess.

“That’s as big a part of it as anything else,” he said of the residency. That, “and, I assume, appearing on the campus in a white suit.”

The first lecture will focus on three writers, he said, and the second will be about how to write a novel. The third? “You’ll have to wait and see.”

There it is again—the idea that anyone, even a writer of Salter’s stature, can make the creative process transferable and teachable. That’s why he’s here, after all. So how do you write a novel?

“You learn from reading,” Salter said. “And then you learn from trying to write. And everybody learns the same way. I’m no different than anyone else.”

The first time I read my work in front of an audience, I knew something had changed. The piece evolved as it left my lips, transforming the frisson I’d felt at the writing table into a brief but visceral tether with others. Listening to authors read their works, I understand the real invitation: to connect across private, deeply personal expression in a public space.

“As with a concert, or a play, or an opening, you’d come to experience art,” said Julia Kudravetz, one of the organizers of The Bridge PAI’s reading series. “But again, there’s that group energy that can’t be discounted—hearing a piece performed out loud can be totally different than on the page.”

The series, which hosts monthly readings by local and well-known non-local authors of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, aims to build literary connections across a number of boundaries.

A writer herself, Kudravetz (who received her MFA from the Johns Hopkins writing seminars) partnered with poet Amie Whittemore, who received her MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, to create a live experience in a social and non-commercial environment, to encourage word lovers to engage with writing and each other without an overly academic emphasis.

“The location allows us to draw on the energy of Downtown while also bringing in graduate students from UVA,” Whittemore said.

This month’s reading promises the best of many worlds. Co-sponsored by The Virginia Quarterly Review, in special collaboration with the UVA Contemporary Poetry & Poetics Working Group, Friday’s event will feature widely published poets Brian Teare, a former NEA Fellow and assistant professor at Temple University, and James Thomas Miller, who teaches creative writing at the University of Toledo, as well as short story writer and novelist Elliott Holt, recently named one of Time’s “21 Female Authors You Should be Reading.” 

The Pushcart Prize-winning Holt described how a community of kindred spirits encouraged her evolution to full-time creative. The VQR contributor began writing fiction as a very young girl, but her father’s suggestion that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a copywriter stuck with her. “At age 8 I got it into my head that I could write ads to pay the bills and write on the side,” she said, “And that’s exactly what I did.”

After stints with agencies in Moscow, London, Amsterdam, and New York, she applied to the MFA program at Brooklyn College. “As soon as I started [my program], I felt like I was with my people,” she said. “I didn’t quit my full-time job right away, but as I was starting to get published, I thought ‘O.K., I’m never going to make it just writing,’ but I felt secure enough to freelance.”

Now the author, who edits manuscripts and teaches when she can, finds inspiration in “the absurdities of advertising speak” as well as her childhood in D.C. The “political machine” informed many ideas in her first novel, You Are One of Them. “You can’t grow up here and not be aware of the way people are constructed and presented. Politicians focus group their personalities,” she said. “I love reading and writing stories about the secrets we keep, the tension between the self we reveal and the self we hide.”

But more than anything else, “language itself really excites me,” said the author. “Writing that has some sort of crackle below the surface….There’s a kind of fire in it.”

Hear Elliott Holt, Brian Teare, and James Miller read from their work at 7pm on Friday at the Bridge PAI.

As C’ville residents, we often hear, “Charlottesville has changed so much since I moved here.” Some see this as a positive, others less so. Either way (and regardless of how long you’ve lived here) it’s likely that we all have indeed witnessed some evolution.

Recent development has obviously changed the landscape of familiar areas including McIntire Park and West Main Street. On top of that, the constant ebb and flow of the University community ensures that a migratory pattern is carved lightly into the bricks and mortar of daily life. Every few years, the collective cry goes up: “Everyone is moving away!” To be fair, it’s often true that students move away when they complete their degree. But this constant development and turnover pushes us, as a city, to embrace change and find value in the new. It allows Charlottesville to be, at once, a small college town in the South and something more.

This “something more” is frequently what we write about here, and it’s important to remember that Charlottesville has had to evolve significantly to achieve this state of existence. Local photographer Stacey Evans demonstrated this evolution in her “Charlottesville Then & Now” project with UVA Magazine. And with his prolific collection of historic photographs, Ed Roseberry reminds us of what Charlottesville used to be. There are countless other local examples, and these stories of growth are true in most cities.

An upcoming event at local nonprofit WriterHouse seeks to explore how this physical evolution can be an important element for writers to use in their own lives and in the creation of characters on the page. Entitled “Growing Up on the Page: How Characters and Their Writers Evolve,” the event features Virginia-based author Sheri Reynolds interviewed by Susan Gregg Gilmore. Both are women writers from the South. Together, they provide a forum to learn more about the strategies for taking risks in writing and the merits of imbuing characters with the freedom to evolve and grow.

As the author of six novels (including The Rapture of Canaan, which was featured in Oprah’s Book Club), Sheri Reynolds has a knack for fleshing out characters from the South. She admitted that “the places I live find their ways into the landscapes of my novels. My early ones were located in South Carolina, and my most recent novels have taken place on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.” When describing Southern characters, there’s always the temptation to pile on cultural stereotypes just as you would pile real whipped cream on a fresh slice of pecan pie or throw empty Budweiser cans into your pickup truck. Ahem.

Reynolds tactfully avoids these clichés and creates characters that breathe from within the pages. Whether it’s Tessa getting abandoned by her mom in the The Firefly Cloak, a stowaway named Hellcat in The Homespun Wisdom of Myrtle T. Cribb, or the scalding burns rained down on Finch in A Gracious Plenty, the sundry trials are but challenges to overcome, pushing characters to grow. By placing unexpected and challenging circumstances in the paths of her characters, Reynolds’ storytelling feels like we’re experiencing the events as they happen in real time.

Some writers create a sense of predetermination in their work: even if you don’t know where it’s going, it feels like the writer is leading you down a path that he or she planned out from page one. Instead, Reynolds’ writing gives the reader the impression that she allowed characters to determine their own actions as each book progressed. She takes the time (sometimes lots of time) to create characters who are dense and realistic, and then has respect enough for the strengths of these people to let them guide the action. 

When speaking about the next book she’s working on, Reynolds related, “I only have 50 pages of notes and sketchy scenes, so it will be years before this one is finished. The entire story takes place between the time she topples and the time the ambulance gets there (if it ever arrives—I’m not sure yet if it comes).” If it ever arrives. Characters will be pushed in unknown ways and make unpredictable decisions before that part of the narrative, so Reynolds herself is still tracking the course of the next story she’s trying to tell. A lot of writers employ similar methods of allowing the story to evolve and take its own course rather than setting out with an end goal in sight. Reynolds does this in a unique way that gives a concerted push for characters to grow over the course of a book, evolving the narrative as they do so.

In the same way that she lets her characters react to and push the narrative in unexpected directions, she also takes risks in her work and allows it to adapt to outside forces. Discussing her draft of Orabelle’s Wheelbarrow, Reynolds remembered that, “when I turned it in, my editor said it was ‘too theatrical’ for fiction. When I got over the despair of having a big book rejected, I decided to actually use that story to learn to write a play.” The resulting work won Reynolds the Women’s Playwrights’ Initiative playwriting competition in 2005. Until then, she’d never written a single play. This adaptive quality pushes Reynolds, as a writer, to embrace change and find value in taking risks. It allows her to be, at once, a writer with deep roots in the South and something more.

Off the page, she also finds ways to push herself and evolve her craft. With dual careers as a writer and creative writing professor at Old Dominion University, Reynolds said that “the two feel mostly like separate worlds. But certainly they influence one another. In classes, I find ways to articulate what I do intuitively in my writing.” It is this experience, intuition, and wisdom that Reynolds will bring to WriterHouse on August 15.

Which writers or books have influenced you to change?

Tell us about it at www.c-ville.com.

It takes a village to raise a writer, or at least it did in my case. When I was in eighth grade my best friend applied to a local performing arts high school, where she was accepted as a creative writing major, and I—propelled by love of adjectives and X-Files fan fiction—did the same. Four years of group critiques, genre experimentation, and contest submissions led me to discover my voice, its value, and eventually you, dear reader, by way of this article.

More than a decade after I first opened a journal, the creative cycle begins again as a group of young writers from Charlottesville and Albemarle County celebrates the publication of its first anthology. Crossroads II is a collection of essays, poems, and photography, the culmination of a year’s worth of workshops, craft discussions, and literary projects led by Tupelo Press Teen Writing Center (TPTWC).

The fledging group on a mission to “foster, discover, and develop emerging writers, and connect them as a part of the larger writing community” and open to all high school students in the area. Members include local and regional award-winning writers and participants of in school and community programs. They write in a range of prose and poetry, including lyrics, slam, and other modern and more formal styles.

“If we only teach writing as a skill, we miss the opportunity to provide our children creative expression as part of the problem solving process. That’s the key to unlocking the kind of world solutions we need,” said Kirsten Miles, the director of the Teen Writing Center. She’s connected the program with McGuffey, The Bridge, Piedmont Council for the Arts, the Virginia Art of the Book Center, and WriterHouse, where the group has met throughout the year. 

“The Teen Writing Center aims to support existing programs and encourage the community to send a vote to our young writers that creative writing is a valued art,” said Miles, who found “phenomenal support” for the idea of nurturing young writers. In her work as regional director for TPTWC, Miles has met writers locally and from across the country who aid the mission.

One such poet is Cecilia Llompart, a graduate of UVA’s MFA in Creative Writing program and author of The Wingless, a recently published book of poetry. In March, Llompart led a discussion on poetry and women with students and judged the TPTWC’s first writing contest.

With submissions from across the area, Llompart said, ”The decision was a very, very difficult one to make. There was excellent work here.”

She chose a piece by Albemarle High student and TPTWC intern, Mike Dolzer, as one of the runners-up.

Dolzer said he appreciated having a friendly and safe environment to practice his work. “Creativity allows students to express themselves in a way that is not all too common in any other aspect of their life,” he said, “so I think having a place like the Teen Writing Center where you can nurture that is such an amazing thing.”

What’s being nurtured is the illumination of inner lives, the type of exploration and observation that can be clouded by age. And Crossroads II asks perceptive questions, tackling love, alcoholism, and the Landmark Hotel, among other subjects.

“It is one of the most exciting things to see students emerge with a sense of confidence,” Miles said.

It’s also a glimpse into a very local zeitgeist. “This is our offering to the community for an opportunity to hear the voices of our young writers,” Miles said. “This is our future speaking.”

Hear author readings at the reception for Crossroads II on Friday at 5:30pm at New Dominion Books.

“Who I am is not really defined. Most of the questions you asked I’d probably answer differently two weeks from now,” said Raven Mack, smiling under his long beard. “I always reserve the right to change suddenly.”

Mack’s a poet without pretension, scribbling sonnets on his lunch break and supporting a wife, three children, and their home compound on “four dilapidated acres” in Fluvanna County.

“I grew up in the country,” he said. “I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m disgusted by society, but I’m not enchanted by it. I like to disappear.”

Working largely in metered forms, Mack writes about train yards and talking to birds and digitalization as domestication.

“I spent a lot of my life being self-destructive, so I try to turn it into writing you can stab people with—writing that’s real,” Mack explained. His work tends to pitch (or combine) philosophical challenges to contemporary ideology with everyman imagery and offbeat humor. To wit:

Identifying

birds by yelling “What the fuck 

is you?” doesn’t work

He’s self-published three books [under Workingman Books] and countless zines, including Football Metaphysics: World Cup 2014, Vehicular Tankacide, a volume of Japanese tanka poetry, and 1,000 Feathers, a series of pamphlets with titles like Primordial Traditionalist and Naked Polaroids.

Mack rejects the idea of ownership and intellectual property. “A lot of times people have a selfish notion of what creativity is,” he said. “My thinking is it should be a party for everybody. We don’t need to create the creative 1 percent.”

He promotes this artistic cross-pollination through Rojonekku Word Fighting Arts, the bimonthly haiku poetry slams he hosts in Richmond and Charlottesville.

Last month, the event—a single elimination tournament in which participants present traditional 5-7-5 syllable pieces or 17-syllables-or-less poems to three judges and the audience members—featured some off-the-cuff creativity.

“This sweet little soul from Richmond who wrote about plants made it to the final round with my bearded tattooed friend Benji,” Mack said. “During the battle, he read one about being broke or broken or something, and she actually stopped and wrote one on the spot about how he’d used poor grammar in his haiku. The room just erupted in laughter. She definitely had the highest moment of the night even if she didn’t win the battle.”

Mack hosted his first Rojonekku (a term that means “whatever someone wants it to mean,” he said) during his 40th birthday party. Borrowing elements from fringe poetry slams to create something he wished existed, Mack made every partygoer participate. The series has grown over time, morphing from a “drunk hipster type of crowd” into a “family friendly-ish” event with teenagers and adults.

“When I was younger I still had dreams of being a professional writer,” said Mack, who started making zines in high school. “I’m not as controlled by the notion of a career doing that now. I try to be not too serious about what I do, but it is kind of serious.”

As host and organizer, Mack considers himself less an owner of the event and more of a space keeper, a host that promotes a safe space for all and shares weird, funny stories that break the tension for newcomers.  He’s making  “uncomfortable people more comfortable.”

“I call it Word Fighting Arts because I wanted to take the notion of that world I was in, the cultural poisons that some of us are born into, and reframe it. Instead of destroying myself, I’d screw with the world,” he said. “But I try to make things fun and inspiring and keep it light. If you get too serious about anything, it kind of sucks.”

He grinned. “There’s a reason medicine is sugar coated.”

Rojonekku Word Fighting Arts hosts its Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournaments in Charlottesville every second Thursday of the month. Join the competition on June 12 at BON Café.

http://vimeo.com/77660026

In a world increasingly dependent on text messages, two-sentence emails, and other abbreviated missives, why do artists do what they do? Why slave over word choice or perfect lighting, or attempt to sculpt poetry from the confusion of everyday experience?

As she edited the new ebook anthology Back Talking on the Mountain of God, author and founder of indie publishing group Still Mountain Bookworks Deborah Prum decided to find out. “I asked each person [with work in the book] to give me one word as to why they write and two sentences to expand on that,” she said in a recent interview.

With answers like awe, beauty, and faith, a central theme became obvious. “Everybody is contending with issues of the spirit,” she said. “These are not necessarily about one religion or another, but about communing with God.”

Poet Elizabeth Bohlke, for example, said her writing “addresses God” in the same way the psalms of her childhood seemed to. “In the confusing sea of the Old Testament, [the Psalms] was guttural and desperate—a place to put longing, a way of working out why God allows pain.”

Similarly, poet Stephen Hitchcock described his work as a form of welcome, “writing existing on the threshold of prayer and correspondence.” Susan Cunningham, another contributor, imagined her poetry as a one-way conversation “to express my heartfelt, ongoing search for meaning in this life,” she said. Kaili van Waveren described writing as a compulsion driven by awe, “the sudden awareness that the voice of God resounds everywhere if we listen.”

Back Talking pairs the work of five poets, including Prum herself, with images by photographer Stuart Scott. He, too, described the impetus of faith in art, triggered by encroaching deafness in one ear and limited hearing in the other. The handicap, he said, “has prepared me to see the glory of the world around me, to capture portions of God’s beauty and to give back through my photography.”

Scott chose tangentially analogous photos to illustrate the three poems by each poet. Prum encouraged non-linear thinking throughout the process, believing that “when you bring together two unusual ideas, things get interesting,” she said. “When you get people in a room jamming together, you get something beautiful, a synthesis rather than a blurb.”

Prum’s ebook also includes audio recordings of each poet reading their work. “You think you know what the poet meant, but when you hear them reading you hear something different,” she said. She hopes the multisensory appeal of the iBook format encourages greater appreciation of the work. “A person that might have trouble decoding normal words on a page can have multiple ways to absorb information.”

Ultimately, Prum said, she likes to bring people together, to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. “I feel that people have gifts, and frequently they labor in obscurity and their gifts are never bestowed on the world,” she said. On one hand, writers who work full time as therapists or homeless shelter directors do not market their work, and on the other, reluctant or disabled readers can be stymied by traditional publishing formats. Back Talking tackles both sides of the issue, creating a little more room for everyone to engage with art.

It’s also the final answer on why Prum herself creates. “What fuels the writing, regardless of how bleak the stories, is my belief that good can be found in the rubble of life,” she wrote. “That, for me, is redemption.”

The book and corresponding exhibit, Back Talking on the Mountain of God, launches at CitySpace on Friday, June 6th with an evening of readings and music.

On any given day, you’ll find author Earl Swift writing in one of three places: the third floor of the VFH offices, Alderman Library, or Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar on the Downtown Mall. As he types in the company of academics and baristas, you’d never guess that he once lived in a canoe for 22 days, crisscrossed the country exploring America’s highway system, and traveled alongside an army archaeological unit in Laos and Vietnam, searching Indiana Jones-style, for the remains of fallen soldiers.

Swift’s larger-than-life experiences are the reason he began writing in the first place. “I tend to be attracted to stories of people dealing with intense emotional junctures,” he said. “The Vietnam book is called Where They Lay, and being able to go to the Arlington burial of the four guys we were digging for in this jungle setting, having that bookend the experience was pretty amazing. I realized as I was sitting around the campfire with tigers roaring in the dark around us that this was a great newspaper story, but it was also a much bigger story.” 

Swift is a thirty-year newspaper veteran whose work has appeared in PARADE, Popular Mechanics, America’s Best Newspaper Writing, and many others. After stints as an intern, a metro columnist, and a military editor, he joined The Virginian Pilot’s newly formed narrative team. “Long-form journalism was coming into its own in 1998,” Swift said, and over time he expanded several serial stories into books.

The writer held what he called “the best job in journalism” for a decade, but after the market collapsed, he took the Pilot’s proffered buyout and approached writing books as a full-time job.

“Writing a 2,500 word story for the Sunday feature is like making an assent of a Matternhorn, requiring brief use of a complicated skill set,” he said. “Writing a book is like climbing Everest and building base camps along the way.”

Those base camps must include characters who can carry the weight of a narrative. Lack of a strong leading character stymied the creation of Swift’s latest book, Auto Biography: A Classic Car, An Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream, for nearly a decade. In 2004, he had the idea “to find an old car that had passed through a lot of hands and track down everybody who had owned it,” he said. “I figured if I picked the right car, over time you’d see the socioeconomic status and success of owners shift downward, so you’d wind up with a pretty accurate mosaic of modern America.”

After a long search, he found a ’57 Chevy that fit the bill. Squinting between the lines of redacted DMV documents and examining forgotten insurance cards, he pieced together a history of ownership. But it wasn’t until several years later, when Swift substituted at Old Dominion University, that he learned his story was complete. During his lecture, Swift referenced the Chevy, and afterward a student said his father, a go-go bar owner/felon whom the reporter knew from past articles, now owned the car.

This combination of luck and reportage peppers not just Auto Biography but the majority of Swift’s work. “In nonfiction, the truth defies belief with much greater regularity than even the most imaginative fiction does,” he said. “So many of my stories, I’ve thought to myself while writing, ‘There is no way anyone would believe this if I were writing a novel. It doesn’t pass the smell test.’ And yet it happened, and I can prove it.”

Earl Swift will read from Auto Biography: A Classic Car, An Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream at New Dominion Bookshop on May 22.