by James Cihlar

Revising Individual Poems

The first steps in revision are the most basic. You must read a lot, and you must write a lot. Because cutting and reshaping are common revision tools, it helps to have plenty of material to work with. As you write first drafts, turn off your censor and generate poems. Keep it going every day, if you can. Your mind is an engine, your life is an enterprise, and your poems work from, elaborate, and develop your sense of how the world works, and how you work in it. Poems are a record of your attempts to mediate the world. Embrace that to begin with, and don’t give it up. Keep it separate from the revision process.

As writers who live and work in a community, we often give each other feedback. A funny thing about criticism: there’s something strangely hopeful about it. By pointing out what’s wrong, by naming the mistakes of the past, we unavoidably imply a world in balance, lay claim to our inherent rights. Writers do this in their subject matter, and in their process: we move from criticizing what is to imaging what could be. This visionary act requires faith. Writers seem to be more willing than most to take our chances in hopes of the big payoff, the personal achievement, the artistic success. We know the odds are against us, but we plunk down our money for the lottery ticket every time.

by Mary Carroll Moore

That first phone call came on a busy day at work. I was preparing 700 stuffed cherry tomatoes for a catering job that night and here was a publisher on the phone asking if I would consider authoring a book. It would be based on my cooking school, which had just been written up in USA Today. Of course I said yes—who wouldn’t? I didn’t tell the publisher I knew nothing about organizing a book manuscript.

by Idris Goodwin

Almost every weekend I pack a suitcase with my books, CDs and flyers, drive a few hours to a community college or bookstore, set up my little table and commence to running my mouth. I am the hip hop version of Willy Loman. People want to know: What you do, would you call it rap? Are they monologues? Is it slam? What is it?

Calling it “a hybrid of spoken word, hip hop poetics, and creative memoir” doesn’t make it much easier. To be honest, there isn’t a short but all encompassing answer, so I invented one. The following essay, “Break Beat Poetry,” from my debut collection These Are The Breaks (Write Bloody Publishing) prose and essays on hip hop culture and race in America, explains just what the heck I do.

an excerpt from These Are The Breaks

When Bronx DJs performed for neighborhood block parties in the early 70s, they discovered how to extend the instrumental “breakdown” section of a record. When looped, these free-flowing breakdowns – dubbed break beats – served as the audio stage on which dancers and MCs “got loose” or “styled.”10

Birthed from the intersection of Afro Latin, Latin jazz, be bop jazz, hard bop, hard rock, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, blue-eyed soul and German computer music, break beats are true poly-cultural relics. All electronic music, from rap to house to techno, drum and bass, utilize the cyclical flow of a break beat.

by Anika Fajardo

Memoir revolves around ourselves and our families. But writing about these subjects can be a difficult undertaking, both emotionally and technically. The things we enjoy about reading personal stories—the gritty, unvarnished truth of someone’s life—are also the things that can hold us back as writers of creative nonfiction. Our personal bias, self-censorship, and fear often interfere with telling the truth in our stories.

A Question-and-Answer Session with Rebecca Frost and Linda Shapiro

Linda and Rebecca are the founders of Dancers Who Write, a reading series showcasing the literary talents of writers who are also movers.

The View: How was the Dancers Who Write series born?

Rebecca Frost: Our project was conceived somewhere alongside the fall soccer games of our de facto godniece in common. Linda and I, who knew each other from myriad connections in the dance world, would show up to watch the games in chilly weather, intermittently, independently. In between cheering for preteens’ near scores, we’d talk, compare notes, stamp our feet. Turned out we were both writing a lot and had no idea the other was as well.

Linda Shapiro: As a published freelance writer on subjects ranging from dance to the research of University of Minnesota faculty, I had been thinking that I needed an outlet for my newly hatched fiction. As a choreographer, I always had plenty of opportunities to present my work in various stages of development. I wanted that for my writing.

I’d also been thinking about other dancers I know who write and have published or performed their text-driven work, and thought there might be more waiting in the wings. So we chatted a bit about the possibility of a modest series somewhere and started doing some investigating. Todd Boss graciously offered us three evenings in his Verse and Converse series at Nina’s Café in Saint Paul (January, March, and May 2010). They were successful enough that we wanted to continue into the summer at the Bryant-Lake Bowl—to see what would happen in a Minneapolis venue, and, as the Nina’s events were free, to see if anyone would actually pay to hear dancers read their stuff.

Bev Bachel

The great thing about the new year is the chance for a “do-over.” What you didn’t get right—or done—last year, you can try again this year. This is especially true for writers. It seems that every novelist, poet, playwright, and memoirist I know longs for the big T: time.

But no matter how much more we desire it, we’re each given just 1,440 minutes each day. As a college professor once said when I complained about having to read ten novels in ten weeks, “It’s not how much time you have, it’s what you do with it.”

Here are some tried-and-true tips that can help you make the most of your time.

Go for your goals. You won’t be able to complete anything if you commit to everything. Be willing to say no, even when it means disappointing others. That way, you’ll be able to say yes in a big way to the goals you consider most important and the tasks that will help you achieve them. No, I can’t go out to dinner. Yes, I will see meet you for the movie that’s set in the same era as my historical novel. No, I can’t write a lengthy response to that e-mail. Yes, I will spend 15 minutes making a list of my main character’s flaws.

Break them into bite-size pieces. Going for your goals all at once is like trying to swallow an apple in one bite. Instead, break them into chunks that you can easily accomplish. Take one Loft class. Make a list of three agents. Write seven paragraphs. Doing what you set out to do, even it it’s just getting out of bed when your alarm goes off, unleashes an adrenaline rush that can help fuel you through your next to-do.

Get started. One of my favorite writing tools is the kitchen timer. The next time you find yourself procrastinating, set the timer for 15 minutes and start doing. When the timer goes off, stop. Or continue. It’s your choice. And regardless of which you choose, you will have gotten an important start on whatever you’ve been putting off.

Make use of the margins. If you’re like most writers I know, it’s hard to find time to write. There are work, kids, household chores, and more, all screaming for attention. Rather than waiting for a day off or an evening when you’re home alone, start making use of the margins, those small pockets of unexpected found time—when you’re on hold, when your gal pal is late for coffee, or when your teenager refuses to get off the phone. Take advantage of the small, and you’ll be surprised at how much you’re able to scrawl.

Track your numbers. Tracking your numbers every 30 days will help you make better decisions. There are many different numbers you can measure: minutes spent writing, word count, queries sent, queries accepted, poems written, and freelance-article income are just a few examples of the types of numbers that should be guiding how you spend your time, energy, and creativity.

Good enough, move on. Rather than agonizing over whether the protagonist in your novel should be wearing an amaranthine sweater or one that’s aubergine, call it purple and move on. As my friend and fellow writer Carolyn says, “Done is better than perfect.”

So, whether you long to finish your novel, journal more consistently, or make more money as a writer, now’s the time . . . ready, set, restart. It’s the best way to make the most of the coming year.

Bev Bachel is a full-time writer and author who’s enjoying her 2011 restart.

by Jonathan Odell

In life, you can either live out of your imagination,

or you can live out of your history. ~Stephen Covey

That’s what we adults do with much of our lives. We live out of our history, doing the things that have worked once upon a time. We obey the rules. We avoid the things that didn’t work while stubbornly refusing to imagine a new story for ourselves.

One of my favorite quotes about childhood is from Graham Greene: “There is always one moment in a child’s life when the door opens and lets the future in.”

by Emily Brisse

Early on in my life, I knew what I wanted to be: worldly.

experienced; knowing; sophisticated: as in the benefits of her worldly wisdom

I was the child who read Jane Eyre at ten (or tried to, anyway), convinced it would open up some corner of the universe. I was the teenager who read Jane Eyre again (this time actually) while nested between two branches of a tree, feeling that this was what people in love with the world did. At 21—after many more books, many more secret trysts with vocabulary words and foreign-language dictionaries, many more far-off yearnings, after finally a study-abroad term in Paris—I went east, to Maryland, my desire for worldliness a warmed stone in my hand.

by Lawrence Perlman

pensiero

The following remarks were made prior to a reading by Lawrence Perlman at Open Book October 6, 2010, from his novel The Last Layer.

Thank you all so very much for coming. Before I read a few passages from The Last Layer, I thought I would address the question that is more or less on all of your minds: “How did this guy, who spent his life in the real world—as a lawyer, law professor, and CEO—come to write a novel?”

by Clem Nagel

aptmetaphor

It was Earth Day 2010 . . . and was I prepared. Typical of me, I brought everything except the office desk lamp. Extra pencils, blank paper (in case someone forgot), name tags, paper clips, Scotch tape, roll of paper towels, Band-Aids, easel pad, masking tape, markers (I used to work for the YMCA), books, and my detailed class outline for each of the coming four weeks. I had been invited to teach a series of poetry classes. I arrived at the residential senior center community room half an hour early to get acclimated.