by Jim Heynen

My favorite definition of the word “loft” is  “a room or space over a stable or barn, used especially for storing hay or straw.” I do much of my work in a writing studio at the Loft. Maybe the space aligns with my farm boy roots because the unadorned room reminds me of the quiet privacy of a haymow. It’s a physical space that puts me in a good headspace to write. I also like knowing that people in adjacent studios are quietly at work too. I don’t feel that I’m competing with them; it’s more like parallel play, parallel ruminating.

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.

by Ellen Baker

Quiet. I’m lying in the October sun on the deck of my just-rented cottage in storybook Castine, Maine, a coastal village of white clapboard houses and a glistening harbor surrounded by elms and maples dressed in their fall colors.

So quiet. Every writer’s dream?

I’m clenching my teeth.

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 Ben Obler

In poker, when I call half the pot with a straight draw and middle pair, against one other player, in late table position, I know where I stand. I know it’s the right decision. However it shakes out, I will regret nothing. But in writing, when I put my protagonist, Gus, in the aisle of a home improvement store for the scene when he gets the call from Priscilla, how can I gauge this choice? As he eyes the mole/vole repellent package midconversation, finding the cruelty unexpectedly tantalizing, can I be assured there’s not a better symbol in the lumber aisle? Or lighting, or plumbing? Maybe Gus should be kinder. Maybe he shouldn’t be talking to Priscilla at all! Uncertainties stack up in a hurry, as numerous as cards in a deck.

Writers’ Journeys to Cuba

by Anya Achtenberg

Es la poesía la única patria real del hombre.

(Poetry is the only real country of human beings.) ~Derbys Dominguez, poet, arts instructor, in Matanzas, Cuba

I first traveled to Cuba from Boston when I was a barely published poet, at a time when those who worked against the US blockade of Cuba faced threats and sometimes murderous retaliation. I made a second trip a year later. After our translator Lilia Berta learned that I loved poetry and was trying to write it, she began to call me “Poeta.”

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.

by Athena Kildegaard

I first loved my husband in the fall of 1979, and I’ve been loving him again and again ever since. All that time I’ve written poetry, but until January first this year I’d written only a handful of love poems.

That curious pair of facts began to needle me in early December last year. Driving from here to there I thought about a love poem by Dorianne Laux I’d read that morning, how true and necessary it was and how unwrought it seemed. That thinking led me to wonder why I’d written so few love poems over the years. I realized that I was just plain afraid of writing them.