Tag: WriterHouse

Categories
Arts

Sharon Harrigan puts her heart on the page

Sharon Harrigan reads from her memoir, Playing with Dynamite, at New Dominion Bookshop on October 12. She will discuss the genre with Jennifer Niesslein at WriterHouse on November 2. Publicity photo

For most of her life, Sharon Harrigan has been haunted by questions surrounding her father’s death: He died in Michigan when she was 7, and the exact cause was shrouded in a fog. Her debut memoir, Playing with Dynamite, is about finding the courage to ask questions, to question her own memory and ultimately to question the stories we tell ourselves. But as she writes in the book, “It’s harder to untell than tell a story.” But this is what her memoir does. It pulls at the threads to unstitch a story she has told herself all of her life, and then stitches together a retelling.

She began by talking to her family about her father. “The first thing I found out is that my brother and I remembered things very differently,” says Harrigan. “That was kind of the impetus for the book.” She wondered, “how does the way that we block memories, even as small children, not knowing what we’re doing—maybe as a coping mechanism—how does that change our ideas and memories?”

Given this premise, Harrigan structures the memoir as a journey of discovery as she sifts through her family’s collective memory. The reader perches like a fly on the wall as she moves from Michigan to New York to Paris to Charlottesville. She realized, she says, “I had to make my search, my quest, visible.”

This requires a certain amount of vulnerability that, perhaps, fiction does not. “I think there’s a reason that a lot of people who eventually come out with a memoir start by telling the story in a different genre,” says Harrigan. “It is very hard to be that naked on the page.” She, in fact, did first attempt to write her family’s story as a novel. But, she says, “I was still obsessed with my father’s story and I realized that to go deep enough I actually had to tell the truth.”

Piece by piece, memory by memory, she reconstructs her father on the page. The resultant man is someone who adapts to life with only one hand after a dynamite accident, who feels compelled to perpetually prove himself and remains a risk-taker, a characteristic that pushes him to drive in dense fog where his life is cut short. Yet he is not the only one in the story who takes risks. Harrigan explains that the jacket design of her book—the cursive text of the title igniting an explosion—is “supposed to show that it’s the words themselves that are the fuse. That the person playing with dynamite is not only my father but me, the writer. Writing our stories is inherently taking a big risk.”

In writing memoir, Harrigan sees the risk from potential judgment by others or causing harm to people she loves. The self-examination and introspection required also left her open to self-judgment. There is a moment in the book when she realizes that one of the stories she told herself was that her brother was the kind of kid who got bullied, rather than considering the possibility that her father could be a bully and she, herself, a victim, too. She recognizes how victimhood in our culture can be this monolithic thing that doesn’t allow for complexity, for strength. She writes, “We tell ourselves stories, sometimes, at the expense of others.”

And as much as the book is about her father, in her journey she learns more about her mother, too. “I realized at a certain point that I went looking for my father and found my mother,” she says. “I started with a lot of questions and some of them I don’t have definitive answers for, but some of them I feel like I do.” More importantly, she is no longer afraid to ask.

Categories
Arts

Winner of Flash Fiction Contest announced

Thinkstock photo

Each year, C-VILLE Weekly and WriterHouse team up for a fiction contest. Some years have centered around themes, while others have been completely left up to the writers’ imaginations. This year, the only caveat was that the piece had to be a work of “flash fiction”—500 words or fewer. David Ronka’s “The One I Think I Shot” was crowned the winner by judge and fellow writer Bret Anthony Johnston, who said, “The author uses language and syntax in unusual and interesting ways, and has an impressive knowledge of the terminology and process of war.”

The winning story depicts the emotional complexity of combat—fear, guilt, love—that will be forever etched in the memory and dreams of a Vietnam War veteran, Ronka says. It’s adapted from a scene in a longer fictional work.

“I find flash fiction extremely demanding,” Ronka says. “The challenge of attempting to weave a complete fictional dream in no more than 500 words is formidable.”

Ronka wins $500 and a one-year membership to WriterHouse; runner-up John Ruemmler wins $250 and a one-year membership to WriterHouse.

First-place winner

The One I Think I Shot

By David Ronka

We wanted the beach bunker that night, Eddie and me. Would have had it too if First Sergeant Shaeffer’s not on emergency leave burying his father back in Omaha. Best duty there was, pulling guard in the beach bunker. Nice salt breeze all night long. Watch the surf roll in, smoke some reefer, shoot the shit. Keep an eye peeled for the VC Navy in case they built one since last you heard. Pussy duty, Eddie called it.

The shaved-head beanpole lifer who was filling in for Shaeffer put us on the perimeter wire. Perimeter duty wasn’t like the beach. Even when things were quiet, you couldn’t help imagining some VC sniper in the village steadying your forehead in his night scope.

I took first watch. It was pretty outside the bunker, all silver and shadowy from the moon. Rice grass swaying slow in the paddy water. Real quiet. Then some sounds floated over from the village. Click, click, like city traffic lights changing color late at night. A baby crying, or maybe a cat wailing at something. I thought of nights at home sitting on the porch swing when it was too hot to sleep.

Then I’m hearing the mortar tubes cough. Hollow-like, steel inside steel. And for a half second I’m back at Fort Polk, sitting in the bleachers with retired lifers from Leesville, watching the Saturday morning fire power demonstration. Hearing the mortar shells rattle in their tubes. Covering my ears until the Louisiana dust clears downrange and there’s nothing left of the squad of cardboard Viet Cong but little bits of paper floating down like snow.

The shells fall short into the paddy muck—thwoop, thwoop, thwoop-thwoop, like gas burners sucking the pilot light—before they hit hard ground. Then Eddie’s balled up on the plywood floor screaming oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck! I’m thinking we’re in a goddamned shrapnel storm. When it goes quiet someone up the line is hollering load and fire, load and fire! I haven’t shot an M16 since Fort Polk, but next thing I know I’m on my knees, half-blind with sand, emptying the magazine at whatever’s out there.

There were six of them, but the one I remember is the one I think I shot. When I see him now in my dreams, he’s bent in half, falling away. Black pajamas shredded in a wind of hot steel. Canvas satchel charge swinging from his neck like a little girl’s school bag. Then I see his knees poking out of the moonlit paddy water. As still as smooth dark stones.

I crawled to Eddie and cradled his head in my arms. He hugged me like a baby. We sat like that, trembling and not saying a word, until the Jeep siren came wailing down the bunker line. And I remember finally letting go of Eddie and feeling the cool night air seep into the place where his wet cheek had been.

Runner-up

Cicatrix

By John Ruemmler

They hadn’t spoken in the two hours since leaving home. Her face was covered by the grey hoodie she had worn for what seemed weeks, since the attack. “Should be close,” he said, unnecessarily. The GPS device was silent, the screen a blank green rectangle. They were “off the map,” in the heart of old growth forest, away and alone, almost lost.

The twisting gravel road ran through a dark grove of hemlocks and spruce before delivering them into a stark highland landscape. Around one hairpin turn, Neal had to swerve to maneuver around a rock slide.  It was after four o’clock.  This high up, the sun would be setting soon.

Beyond the plunging landscape to the west, he glimpsed the sparrow-colored Shenandoah Valley and 20 miles further, the familiar blue haze of mountains and low clouds.

The cabin was theirs for the weekend, the gift of a well-meaning friend. You two have been through enough, he said, your boy is in a safe space. Go be yourselves for a while, okay?

He spotted the three-foot high stone pyramid they’d been told to watch for and turned sharply off the road and onto a rutted drive. Their first view of the log cabin, its stone chimney and front porch cast deep in shade-the darksome setting—was hardly  welcoming.

Inside, he found newspaper and kindling in a wooden box on the floor beside the hearth. He cautiously lit a rolled up paper and checked the draw. The flue was clear, a flame briefly licked upward before dying.  “Good.  We’ll have a fire.”

While she opened the bottle of wine, he laid the table with sardines, tomatoes and a baguette. In the cupboard she found drinking glasses. The fire he’d laid shed a comforting glow, softening the room’s frontier austerity.

‘Well, it’s not the Greenbrier,” Karen said, and he laughed, relieved. This is going to be okay, he thought, she’s talking. She pushed back the hood; the scar that ran from her ear to her lip caught the light from the fire. He wanted to say something reassuring or clever, like: You must be the courtesan who mocked the pirate king and paid the price in flesh. But in truth, he didn’t know if her face would ever heal, if they would stay together, if their tortured brilliant violent son would ever come home or go to college or get a job. Or say Sorry. Or outlive them.

The sap in the wood popped, a gunshot. She jumped and he took her hand. “You’re cold.” He held her close. She was bones and sinew and anxiety in his arms.

She checked the bolt on the door, the windows too. As they lay in bed, he said: “He’s in good hands. He’s alive.”

“Is he?” Neither slept.

Later, he doused the fire as she packed the car. The drive home was harrowing in the dark.

But the stars shone and a lopsided waxing moon rose to light their way.

Categories
Arts

Face time: Painter Caroline Nelson gets personal with her subjects

Caroline Nelson’s large-scale portraits are on display at WriterHouse through August 31. Photo courtesy of the subject.

For fine artist Caroline Nelson, a person’s face speaks volumes.

“The smallest details, the wrinkles and the pores, are very telling,” she says. “There are people who I see and I immediately want to paint them. It can be their eyes or their skin tone, but there’s always something that I’m drawn to.”

Her large-scale portraits, currently on display at WriterHouse through August 31, feature luminous eyes, vibrant skin and shadows, people whose faces are splashed by water (and whose expressions are, frankly, priceless).

“I love doing faces because I see them as someone’s identity,” she says. “I’ve never been drawn to doing landscapes or abstract works because a face can tell you so much without reading anything about it.”

Though she’s only a sophomore at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Nelson has been creating oil paintings for the last five years. She spent years painting her family members. “I am one of six siblings, so I have a lot to choose from,” she says. “Plus, my family was accessible. Like, ‘I’m going to splash you in the face with water, and you have to deal with it because you’re family and it’s for art.’”

Now a double major in sculpture and extended media and painting and printmaking at VCU, Nelson explores different methods of art making, though her work tends to revolve around realism and the richness and vibrancy of oil paint.

“I love the texture [of oil]. You can use varnish and glazes and make it really smooth. You can go as thick as you want. You can have that look that Leonardo da Vinci got because as it builds up, it looks like it’s glowing,” she says. “I have paintings that won’t dry for three months because I’ve laid it on so thick.”

In addition to experimentation in her studio, Nelson learns about glazing and layering as a decorative artist with Warnock Studio in Richmond, an ornamental painting studio that creates home murals and paintings on marble. She also researches classical art techniques, drawing from Rococo and Baroque styles to complement the contemporary training she receives at VCU.

These days, she’s focused on expressing personality through portraiture.

“People who have distinct life experiences, and it can show on their faces. Maybe they have dark times in their lives, and my work can reflect that,” she says. Describing “Maddie II,” a portrait of her older sister, she explains her choice of a dramatic light change to highlight the duality of human personality.

“[‘Maddie II’] isn’t specifically about the subject,” Nelson says. “Her face is really expressionless, which is what I wanted to go for. I wanted the color and tone to speak for itself. Because there’s a side to your face most people don’t see, a very vulnerable dark side that is typically hidden. It’s common for people to smile instead of opening up and expressing how they really feel.”

She considers it “a huge privilege” to be able to capture someone’s identity on canvas.

“I am in awe of people who say, ‘You can paint a picture of me and show every blemish.’ That takes courage,” she says. “I never want to paint myself. Portraits are a way for me to express myself through other people.”

Nelson says she’s really comfortable with some parts of herself—and not so much with others. After all, she points out, “I’m still trying to find myself. I’m only a sophomore in college.”

Categories
Uncategorized

Self-published and small-press authors connect for book signing event

Author and (self-appointed) marketing guru Carolyn O’Neal organized an area author book signing. “Buying local also means local authors. Books are biodegradable, eco-friendly gifts. And you can have a book signed by the author, or dedicated to a friend as a gift,” she says. Photo by Farine Benz

For many artists, the act of promoting their own work can feel counterintuitive, a business that necessitates turning outward to the public after so much time spent turned inward in order to create. For this reason, local author Carolyn O’Neal says with some surprise, “I’ve become, oddly, a marketing guru.” Her firsthand experience with marketing began last year when she launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the publication of her novel, Kingsley, a work of eco-fiction about the last boy on Earth. “It’s a lot of work to market the book, more than to write it,” she says.

But once she started building relationships with local and regional bookstores she reached a point where she’d booked herself almost every weekend. She pondered what to do next and came up with the idea of cross-marketing with other self-published and small-press authors for a one-day book signing event, which takes place on Sunday at WriterHouse.

While Charlottesville has no shortage of big-name authors who sign with large publishing houses, O’Neal says, “I specifically wanted authors who didn’t have a thousand other avenues to publicize their work to be included in this. …And two of them are launching their books on this date, so it’s a celebration.” Those two authors are Pamela Evans and AM Carley.

Evans, a preschool teacher, will be signing and selling her book, The Preschool Parent Primer, alongside picture e-book authors Marc Boston and Amy Lee-Tai in a room designated for young readers and their parents. Evans’ book grew out of the classroom notes she has accumulated over the last 14 years at Chancellor Street Preschool Co-operative regarding challenges and solutions. Each chapter begins with a list of key factors on which she elaborates with examples and anecdotes. “It’s not so much telling you what to do but sharing best practices, examples and resources,” Evans says. She also details what to look for in a preschool and what kinds of behaviors are appropriate for children of this age.

Evans decided to self-publish after receiving what writers affectionately call a “positive rejection.” A small press told her they liked the book, it just wasn’t in their wheelhouse. Rather than changing the concept of the book to tailor it to a publisher, she decided to move forward with that bit of encouragement and publish her original concept according to a timeline that worked for her.

Meanwhile, professional writing coach Carley is debuting her book, FLOAT: Becoming Unstuck for Writers. Similar to Evans, Carley’s book grew out of the notes she kept for her profession, helping writers develop their books. “It’s different for each writer,” she says, “but I noticed patterns that kept coming up for different authors and thought, ‘People could want to know this stuff.’”

The title is an acronym that stands for Focus, Listen, Open, Analyze and Tool. It is a craft book with exercises to stimulate the writing process, and each is independent of the other so the reader is free to pick and choose. It’s a practice in “having a conversation with yourself or asking for help from the cosmos, or however you want to frame it,” Carley says. “The point is that there are ways to pull in inspiration…that work for each writer. They often find that they can solve their own problem. This is to jump-start it.”

Perhaps what sets this apart from other writing craft and prompt books is that she keys the exercises based on their impact and how connected the reader is feeling. “We’re all living with a tension between our hardwiring to want to connect with others and our primate need to distrust everyone,” she says. “They’re both in there so how do we negotiate that?” Her answer regarding the creative process is to start with a tool based on how connected you’re feeling on a given day.

A total of 12 authors will be signing their books. “We had more people who wanted to join us,” O’Neal says, “but we’re limited by the space.” The range of books by participating authors includes a coffee table book on Wintergreen, a travel memoir about Italy, mysteries and political fiction.

“Carolyn is our curator,” Carley says with a smile.

Categories
Living

Complementary cancer therapies help survivors heal

Carolyn O’Neal and Cora Schenberg first met at a WriterHouse class, and reconnected years later after receiving the same cancer diagnosis. The two hope to help cancer patients, survivors and their families find complementary healing through writing. Photo by Martyn Kyle

It’s difficult to find a single person who hasn’t been touched by cancer. According to the National Cancer Institute, an estimated 1.6 million new cases will be diagnosed in the U.S. this year alone. And while we know that surgery, radiation and chemotherapy are the most common treatments for cancer, few people know about complementary therapies that can help patients and survivors alleviate stress and pain while on their way to recovery.

Healing through writing

When Carolyn O’Neal and Cora Schenberg first met at an Open Mic Night hosted by WriterHouse a few years ago, they couldn’t have realized how many similarities they had in common: They were both award-winning writers, they both have one son–each named after a Biblical archangel—and they both had uterine cancer. Specifically stage I, grade 3 uterine cancer.

As fate would have it, they also shared the same oncologist, who reintroduced them two years later, after Schenberg told her doctor she wanted to teach a writing class for cancer survivors in Charlottesville. “It just seemed like such a wonderful match,” says Schenberg.

Schenberg mainly creates nonfiction, poetry and stage plays (and has had several pieces published in magazines and produced at Live Arts), while O’Neal has her own blog and writes fiction. Last year, O’Neal published her first novel, Kingsley, an ecological thriller partly inspired by her struggle with cancer.

“Cancer is like a supervillain,” says O’Neal. “You can fictionalize these horrors that you face. Kingsley allowed me to write about a lot of the scary stuff without it being me [at the center], and that was fun.”

Both women will be leading an eight-week Writing in Response to Cancer workshop at WriterHouse starting later this month. The class is open to cancer patients, survivors and caregivers, and O’Neal and Schenberg plan to shape the class based on the needs and goals of their students. Throughout the course, students will be free to experiment with a variety of writing styles and prompts and will also read work by cancer survivors.

But, above all, O’Neal and Schenberg want their class to be a safe space for healing. “We’ve both had [many] healing experiences through writing, and art and expression,” says O’Neal. “If we have somebody that doesn’t have a support system, perhaps the class can offer a little bit of that.”

Both these women know all too well how cancer can be the “embodiment of chaos,” as Schenberg describes it, which is why they turned to writing as a way to create order in the midst of their disease. It took half a year of abnormal bleeding, chronic pain and biopsies from six different doctors, all assuring her that she didn’t have cancer, before Schenberg finally received her diagnosis. From there, it was a rapid and draining procession of surgery, radiation and chemo until she entered remission.

As for O’Neal, although she was diagnosed quickly (and to add to their lengthy list of coincidences, she had the same surgery at the same hospital within the same month as Schenberg), her journey with cancer had its own tribulations, involving medical mistakes that endangered her health, painful post-surgery complications and traumatizing invasive inspections.

“When you create something, you do the opposite of chaos,” says Schenberg. “At the very least, you arrange words, you arrange a story in a sequence. …You have a certain amount of control over the way you create, the way you tell your story. And so it seems like an anti-cancer.”

Custom comfort

Sue Spencer invites me into the main space of her private oncology massage practice, Hands at Work. It’s a small room that feels simple and intimate. Light, soothing music plays in the background as she discusses one of the few decorations in the space, which sits atop a side table. “I have a piece of sculpture that my sister did. She’s passed away. [It’s] a hand holding a family, which I just really like.”

The massage table, draped with soft white blankets and towels, is the heart of the room. Spencer says it can be heated or not, depending on how her clients are feeling that day. “This is the space that is for them. It’s their time just to relax. And they know, from their first session with me, or if they’ve been seeing me for 15 years, that anything they need, as far as comfort, gets taken care of,” says Spencer.

Spencer has received years of training and certification to practice oncology massage, a customized massage session designed to meet the unique needs of someone in treatment for cancer or with a history of cancer treatment. As a complementary therapy, oncology massage can relieve the physical side effects of treatment as well as emotional distress. Spencer says the difference in her clients’ spirit before and after a massage can be like night and day.

Spencer left her 25-year career in medical administration to go to massage school after she spent a week in the hospital with her sister, who was pronounced terminal from a lifelong struggle with diabetes.

“The clincher for me was when she said, ‘Nobody touches us.’ And that broke my heart,” says Spencer.

For decades, it was believed, even among the medical community, that massaging cancer patients would have negative effects. To this day, oncology massage is not very well-known, Spencer says, even though the American Cancer Society considers it “one of the most supportive complementary therapies available.”

Eleven months after her sister died, Spencer’s father passed away from melanoma. And a few years later, her mom died from her third bout of breast cancer.

“It’s not going away, and I want to be there for people that want me there and feel that need,” Spencer says. “I have a wonderful, heartfelt feeling when I’m in the presence of somebody who has fought this battle, or has decided not to fight it, and I get to be with them in their transition.”

By doing this “soul-feeding” work, she feels that she is celebrating life in honor of her sister. She smiles, and gestures to the green-glazed sculpture of a family holding each other together across the room. “I’m just really grateful that I get to do this.”

Contact Sherina Ong at living@c-ville.com.

Categories
News Uncategorized

Enter to win C-VILLE Weekly’s fiction contest

Thinkstock photo

Calling all authors!

Dust off those manuscripts—submissions are now being accepted for the C-VILLE Weekly/WriterHouse fiction contest. Short works of previously unpublished creative fiction that are a maximum of 3,000 words are eligible for entry; the winning story will be published in the August 10 issue of C-VILLE Weekly. The first-prize winner will receive $500 and a one-year WriterHouse membership; the runner-up will receive $250 and a one-year WriterHouse membership. Deadline for entry has been extended to June 14.

This year’s contest judge will be Ann Beattie, who was the Edgar Allan Poe professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Virginia. Her work has been included in four O. Henry Award Collections, in John Updike’s American Short Stories of the Century and in Jennifer Egan’s The Best American Short Stories 2014. In 2000, she received the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story form. In 2005, she received the Rea Award for the Short Story.

Contest details:

  • Entrants must be 18 years of age or older.
  • Entrants must be residents in the C-VILLE distribution area.
  • Submissions must be postmarked by June 7. Mail to WriterHouse, P.O. Box 222, Charlottesville, VA 22902.
  • Submissions must be in 12 point Times New Roman font, double-spaced and paginated, with the title in the header. The author’s name cannot appear anywhere in the document.
  • Previously unpublished work only (includes print or online). No erotica.
  • 1 entry person. $10 entry fee, paid by check, money order or cash.

The contest is not open to staff or family of staff of C-VILLE Weekly or the WriterHouse board, immediate board family members, WriterHouse staff or 2016 instructors.

Please note: Failure to adhere to the guidelines automatically disqualifies entry, with no refund. Read guidelines carefully! If your questions are not answered above, email programs@writerhouse.org.