Tag: writing

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Crozet Book Fest

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With a bevy of book-centric activities to pique interest and inspire, the family-friendly Crozet Book Fest brings the rites of writing front and center. Friday features Bookish Trivia with Olivia to kick off a slate of events, followed by a Saturday full of panel discussions and more. Learn about the ins and outs of being a writer, enjoy s’mores around a campfire as YA authors share stories, and partake in dramatic readings of crowd-sourced Mad Libs. The authors of Charlottesville Fantastic—an anthology of unusual stories digging into the mystical qualities of the city—will discuss the book and draw connections between the ordinary and extraordinary in our region.

Friday 10/25–Saturday 10/26. Free, RSVPs encouraged. Times and locations vary. bluebirdcrozet.com

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Arts

Sober perspective: Author Leslie Jamison’s new memoir goes deep on artist-addicts, AA, and recovery

“To me the most compelling stories will always be those investigating the complexity of emotional experience, what it feels like to be alive," says Leslie Jamison, who will read from The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath at New Dominion Bookshop on January 18.

Leslie Jamison writes in the beginning of The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, “I wanted to know if stories about getting better could ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart. I needed to believe they could.” The author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection The Empathy Exams struggled with alcohol dependence throughout her undergraduate and graduate education.

Accepted into the competitive Iowa Writers’ Workshop at 21, she drank among older writers and the legends of famous writers who drank before them. After losing memories of whole nights to blackouts, she tried to stop drinking on her own and eventually sought the structure and support of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The artistic result of Jamison’s entry into recovery is more than an account of addiction and sobriety—The Recovering is an exploration of narrative itself. Interweaving her personal experience with the lives of those she meets in AA as well as deceased writers and artists who battled their own addictions, Jamison gives shape to the “ongoingness” of recovery.

While questioning the draw of the addiction story, she examines her internal narration as well. “The questions at the heart of the book,” she says, “are about storytelling. What kinds of stories we tell ourselves and what their limits are.”

Whether our culture is preoccupied in a given moment with glorifying or demonizing the artist-addict, it is generally more captivated by “that darker energy of falling apart” than the journey to wellness. But in writing her story and encountering other addicts in person and on the page, Jamison found that stories about recovery can be some of the most interesting, precisely because of the effect sobriety has on perception.

“So much of recovery is about coming into sharper, more acute, more specific emotional awareness, and getting sensitized to the things that make a story interesting in the first place,” Jamison says. “To me, the most compelling stories will always be those investigating the complexity of emotional experience, what it feels like to be alive.”

When Jamison began attending AA meetings, she was humbled to learn her experience wasn’t exceptional. Having striven most of her life to distinguish herself from others, this knowledge came as relief. She was tired of the version of herself that pursued “uniqueness at the expense of a certain kind of self-possession and self-sufficiency,” she says. And she realized that uniqueness and commonality are not mutually exclusive. ”I think everyone is unique and the same at the same time,” she says with a laugh. “Most of our emotional experience is shared, and there’s value in investigating that sharedness.”

The structure of The Recovering illustrates this by supporting a plurality of stories within it. Jamison examines the art and addictions of Raymond Carver, John Berryman, Charles R. Jackson, Jean Rhys, Billie Holiday, George Cain, David Foster Wallace, and Amy Winehouse. Much of the book is about how these writers and artists do and don’t function creatively through addiction and sobriety. The concept evolved from the roots of her doctoral thesis, and at one point Jamison writes about having to defend the interestingness of her subject—writers writing without the influence of alcohol or drugs—to an advisor more interested in the relationship between addiction and creativity. After the encounter, she reflects on our cultural mythology: “The lie wasn’t that addiction could yield truth; it was that addiction had a monopoly on it.”

For Jamison, sobriety has fueled her writing in many ways. On the physical level, the effects of alcohol no longer impede her daily life and work. On a deeper level, she says, “sobriety is a form of waking up” that impels her to be present for difficulty and nuance, which then shows up in her writing. Her experience has also influenced the kind of work she pursues.

“The attention recovery asks you to pay to the lives of other people was part of what started to inspire my desire to bring other people’s lives into my work” through interviewing and reportage, she says. In addition to exploring the lives of addicts, her research examines the origins of AA, U.S. drug policies, and the racism embedded in policies that determine who is a victim and who is a villain.

Yet writing The Recovering also required that she address her own life in a way she hadn’t before. “The essay provides a lot of room for lateral motion and you can land where you want to land and leave again,” she says. “Drinking was lurking around the edges of The Empathy Exams even though I didn’t label it that way. People in recovery could see recovery in it even though I never talked about it.”

While the memoir form imposed “more pressure to tell a cohesive narrative,” Jamison says, “in a way there was something liberating and exciting about reckoning directly with the subject that had been a guiding force and guiding pressure all along.”

As she writes toward the end of The Recovering, “yearning is our most powerful narrative engine.” Jamison’s desire to tell a story of recovery, and to tell it well, results in a compelling and beautifully crafted book.

Leslie Jamison will read from The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath at New Dominion Bookshop on January 18.

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Arts

Winner of Flash Fiction Contest announced

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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.

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Arts

A selection of local authors’ fall releases

As the weather starts to turn cool, now is a good time to find a book to curl up with on those chilly, overcast days. Local author releases this season offer a wide array of subjects from which to choose, such as history, fiction, psychology and memoir. Here are some highlights:

Lisa Jakub, Not Just Me: Anxiety, Depression, and Learning to Embrace Your Weird

Jakub, whose first book, You Look Like That Girl, recounted her adventures in Hollywood as a child actor and her decision to leave that life, explores mental health in her sophomore effort—part memoir, part research journey. Yet she writes with an irreverence and levity that creates a comfortable space for exploring weighty subjects.

“I wanted to write the book that I most needed when my anxiety and depression was at its worst,” she says. “I wanted to explore my experience with mental wellness, offer a space for other people to share their stories and look at the science and research behind these issues.” The title arises from the fact that “We think no one else feels like this and we need to go it alone. And that’s just not true,” she says.

Donna M. Lucey Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas

In this biography of the late 19th century, Lucey details the lives of Elsie Palmer, Lucia Fairchild, Elizabeth Chanler and Isabella Stewart Gardner—all painted by American portraitist John Singer Sargent. “I’ve always loved the Gilded Age,” Lucey says, “that giddy era of excess and opulence that spawned the most wonderfully eccentric characters.” While writing her last book, Archie and Amélie, she stumbled upon the story of Chanler, Archie’s sister. After she learned that Chanler had been a subject of one of Sargent’s portraits, she “began to wonder about the lives of other women he’d painted,” and a book revealed itself.

Jan Karon, To Be Where You Are: A Mitford Novel (September 19)

The 14th novel in Karon’s beloved Mitford Years series follows the Kavanagh family through an identity crisis caused by retirement, a financial challenge for a newly married couple, a death and a birth. The recurring cast of characters will be familiar to faithful fans of the series. Karon, who won the Library of Virginia’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015, told the Charlotte Observer this spring that she began writing the series to “give readers a safe place to go.”

Sharon Harrigan Playing with Dynamite: A Memoir (October 1)

Harrigan’s life has been haunted by the absence of a father who blew off one of his hands with dynamite before she was born and died in a suspicious accident when she was 7. In this memoir, Harrigan chronicles her two-year search for answers to questions surrounding her father’s death—a journey that takes her from Virginia to Paris to Michigan. “My father’s death was the defining event of my life, and his mysterious accident haunted me,” she says. “He went hunting for a deer and a deer killed him? That never made sense.” In the process of seeking the truth about her father, Harrigan instead learns about her mother.

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Arts

Challenge Into Change writing contest allows for healing

The Women’s Initiative provides opportunities for underserved women to write about their experiences. Entries are being accepted through December 15. Courtesy The Women’s Initiative

Just two weeks after the most divisive presidential election in American history, many people are concerned that their interests and welfare will be ignored, or worse, targeted, by the incoming administration. The Women’s Initiative, which has provided mental health services to underserved populations for almost 10 years, wants people to know that they are here and ready to help. And, at a perfect moment in history to think about how we respond to challenging circumstances, the organization’s Challenge Into Change writing contest is open until December 15.

Therapist and community programs director Eboni Bugg says, “If anything, the election has taught us we can be neighbors and not know each others’ stories. Challenge Into Change is an opportunity to recognize the common threads that unite us as well as the differences that challenge us to figure out ways to bridge the gaps between us.”

Elizabeth Irvin, who has been the executive director of The Women’s Initiative since 2013, says, she’s “served over 3,000 women so far in 2016. Challenge Into Change is a way to heal through storytelling and share hope that people can overcome challenging life circumstances.” While not everyone who submits to the contest is a client of The Women’s Initiative, Irvin says, “All of the people writing about women who overcome obstacles are writing about healing through adversity, which is a fundamental belief of The Women’s Initiative. In light of our current world when some people are feeling less secure and less hopeful, this offers the opportunity to come together and heal together.”

This writing contest holds several distinctions especially resonant at this moment in time. Entries do not have to be in English and can be either poetry or prose. Judges will focus on the story being told, rather than on grammar and spelling. All entries will be published in a book, as they have been every year since 2012, and each writer will receive a copy.

Bugg says, “We don’t measure one person’s experience against another.” It’s not about who has experienced the most trauma or who has endured the longest, she explains. “That’s one of the reasons that all stories get published,” she says.

They are in the process of finalizing the judges panel, which is made up of members of the community who represent their client population, individuals associated with The Women’s Initiative and experts in the field of writing. As Bugg explains, judges are instructed to read for “emotional resonance, a movement from challenge to change and whether the story might be a beacon to other people.” Amanda Korman, communications and outreach coordinator, says, “By writing your story you are giving as much light and hope and inspiration to others as you are getting by putting your own words on that page. We’re always giving and receiving at the same time. That is so much what this agency is about.”

Winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on March 22 as part of the Virginia Festival of the Book. “It’s our most anticipated event of the year,” Bugg says. And the fact that it is public allows them “to celebrate out in the open what is really transformative in the office. …It’s an opportunity to celebrate participants, legitimize the contest and provide a larger public forum. It sends the message that issues related to storytelling and therapy and mental health are not to be relegated to far corners. They give voices to many things considered taboo.”

Some of these subjects include sexual assault, domestic violence, divorce, illness, the experience of being a refugee or immigrant and the loss of a loved one. And while Bugg says The Women’s Initiative would like to reach as many people as possible, “If we only had one volume of Challenge Into Change, or only one person submitted, it would be worth it to us. We’re providing a platform and safe place for people to share their innermost secrets, something that we hold sacred.”

Korman says there is a Maya Angelou quote they touch on again and again: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Bugg adds, “That is the rallying cry of Challenge Into Change.”

Martha Trujillo, who entered the contest in 2011, says that writing her story made her “happy that I was able to communicate something that changed my life.” She wrote about immigrating from Mexico and learning to navigate the health system with English as her second language when her daughter became sick. “It was important for me to tell everyone you can do things if you want,” she says. “It doesn’t matter how much you know. Be proactive and find resources.” For those afraid to enter the contest, she says to ask yourself, “What was important to you, how did it help define who you are and what you want in life?”

And for those experiencing anxiety over the potential loss of much-needed services, Korman and Irvin emphasize that The Women’s Initiative is standing strong, and they credit stability to local donors. Irvin says, “We’re here and we’re committed to serving women now and in the future. We are only able to do that because of local support from individual people who recognize the importance of the services provided, such as safety, healing and access to mental health treatment.”