I’ve been working away on the novel this weekend, writing, but also organizing all the stuff I’ve accumulated over the past few years while I’ve been working on the manuscript off and on. There’s a good reason to work every day on a book until it’s done. Reacquainting yourself with the pieces of a big story, the lists and notes you’ve made, the hearts of those people you call characters, all that is time you could have been writing if you’d just stayed with it, stayed in your chair as Ron Carlson says. Do as I say—and Ron Carlson says—not as I do, if you can. Continue Reading »

You may have  heard me quote my friend, novelist and memoirist Judy Goldman, when she talks about the most important question a writer can ask him or herself.  It’s simple. “Did I write today?” Not how many pages, or how many words, Judy goes on to say, but just ask if you did it.

Well, I’m asking that questions every day. And just like eating whole foods and reading what’s going to make my writing better, I  have to wake up with that goal firmly planted in my psyche, and I have to do my best to achieve it each day, even if some days I fail. Otherwise my muse will go find somebody else who doesn’t mind sitting at her keyboard typing or scribbling on her legal pad toward inspiration and eloquence. Continue Reading »

This series is a little out of order, but this is about small changes that equal big impact. 

January is often the month we draw the line in the sand. In years past it’s been about looking better in a bathing suit, but now, at 56, that line is more about avoiding diabetes, getting rid of high blood pressure and HBP meds, and sidestepping disability.  I want to feel good and keep on feeling good. Of course, I’d still like to look nice in pretty clothes, see my neck again, and go sleeveless, but that will be the metaphorical gravy.  Right now it’s about giving up gravy, getting off medicines, and showing my gratitude that I still get around pretty well,  still breath pretty well, still see pretty well with my glasses on, and hear well enough to participate in a conversation, although the TV volume is loud and sometimes my husband and I have two conversations at once. Of cousre we don’t know it’s two different converasations at the time. Continue Reading »

Reading. My friend Joyce McDonald, a fine writer, said something that inspired this year’s thread of activity on Dancing with the Gorilla. She said, “I read 200 books last year.” I about fell out of my seat.

I’ve let reading good literature (and bad literature with a good cover on it) fall to the wayside. Teaching writing classes means you read manuscripts. Lots of them.  Often too many of them for your own good as a writer.  Now, some of them are very fine, but many of them need a lot of editing. And you’re reading with editing in mind, even when they are good, and that’s not the same mindset that absorbs good storytelling in the most luscious way.

My ex once said he wouldn’t play tennis with me anymore because I was ruining his game. Don’t boo him. He was right. Have you seen my hand-eye coordination? Continue Reading »

Hello everybody. If you weren’t in Harrogate, TN this weekend, at the Lincoln Memorial University Mountain Heritage Literary Festival, you missed a fine gathering.  Listen to keynote musician Scott Miller sing “Appalachian Refugee,” which he sang for us on Friday night:

Appalachian Refugee

Here’s a scene storm word list from “Appalachian Refugee.”

head

drive

ridges

reach

body

ground

voice

fog

refugee

sleep

Thank you to everyone who attended the festival this weekend and for making it such a success!

Well, the Gorilla is back and we’re dancing!  My two weeks off turned into a much longer break. But the urge to blog is back, and just in time to talk about summer homeschooling for the fiction writer. Someone once said that a writer has homework every day of his (or her) life. So, how do you study? Who do you study?

This summer I’m going to study the short story.  Even though I’m working on a novel, I believe the short story, like poetry, has a lot to teach the novelist about attention and compression as a formula for tension at the local level, the level of sentence and paragraph,the level of the very words you choose or don’t choose.

To explore this relationship of language and pressure, I’m going to reread and reread several story collections published not so very long ago and a couple that have been around a bit longer. I’ll read straight through some and dip down into others. The key is a regular diet of short intense stories I wish I’d written:

Continue Reading »

Heads up people in Knoxville and Nashville. Poet, essayist, and now memoirist, Jim Minick, author of THE BLUEBERRY YEARS: A MEMOIR OF FARM AND FAMILY, is coming your way. Jim will be reading at Davis Kidd in Nashville’s Green Hills on Friday at 3:00 PM and at Carpe Librum in Knoxville on Saturday at 2:00 PM. Ron Rash eloquently states on the cover, “There is so much to praise in this beautifully written memoir, but what I admire most is Jim Minick’s utter lack of self-righteousness. In these pages we are given a wisdom that has, at its center, a quiet and abiding humility. What a fine, fine book THE BLUEBERRY YEARS is.” I second Ron Rash. Don’t miss a good reading from a great book! Mark your calendars. That’s:

Davis Kidd, Nashville, Friday, September 17 at 3:00 PM.

Carpe Librum, Knoxville, Saturday, September 18 at 2:00 PM.

Time to get back into the swing of things for fall. And time to get back to Five and Ten. I’ll be teaching creative nonfiction at Lincoln Memorial University this coming spring. My good buddy Jim Minick, who teaches at Radford University, sent me a list of fine books on writing creative nonfiction. I’ll share with you.

Writing Life Stories by Bill Roorbach, Story Press, 1998.

Creating Nonfiction by Becky Bradway and Doug Hesse, Bedford/St. Martins, 2009.

In Fact: Best of Creative Nonfiction by Lee Gukinds, WW Norton & Co., 2004.

Writing True by Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwartz, Wadsworth Publishing, 2006.

Tell it Slant by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, McGraw-Hill, 2004.

Keep it Real: Everything You Need to Know about Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction, by Lee Gutkind, reprint edition, WW Norton & Co., 2009.

Best American Essays, edited by Robert Atwan, Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000.

 Thanks, Jim. Don’t eat too much on book tour!!!

Hope to see you at Dancing with the Gorilla! Check out Tuesday’s first all time on DWTG guest blog by Jim Minick!

This week I’m teaching at the Tennessee Young Writers Workshop at Austin Peay State University. TYWW is a program of Humanities Tennessee, the same organization that offers us the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on the second weekend of October and Chapter 16–Tennessee’s excellent virtual center for the book. For more information on these programs, visit Humanities Tennessee’s website: www.humantiestennessee.org

This is a terrific workshop because all the young people who attend want to write. We don’t have the make them write. They are writing on their own volition, and not just in class. They write in the their free time. They write in groups with someone offering a prompt. They gather in clusters of like-mindedness and share their work for critique. They are thick-skinned (sometimes after a rite of passage for first-year participants) and they understand that their goal is to become a better writer every day, every time they pick up the pen, and that becoming a better write may require them to lower their standards and write badly before the good stuff can come. These young writers understand what it means to write toward their stories, to feel around in the dark for the things they need, the objects and gestures and lines of dialogue and the surprises their characters give them. The elements they find in the dark illuminate the story they are searching for or illuminate how a story they already know can be best told.

What struck me early this week is that these young writers wrestle with the same issues all writers wrestle with. Growing up or growing older doesn’t cure you of insecurity, a vocabulary curve, an unhealthy obsession with adverbs. Writing well is always work on some level, and it is work writers should embrace will all the enthusiasm of this crowd of young writers. They can learn a lot from writers who have achieved some success. But we can also learn a lot from them.

Go be enthusiastic about writing. Don’t fall victim to that stereotype of the tortured writer. Accept the joy of your obsession and go take joy in it, even if it sometimes brings you to tears.

One of my favorite exercises is to ask students to list as many one syllable words beginning with a particular letter of the alphabet as they can. Each of us has an active vocabulary (words that come easily to us in speech and in writing) and a passive vocabulary (words we know the meaning of but don’t use readily). As a writer you need as many words at your disposal as you can muster. This exercise helps remind the writer of words he or she knows but might not think of when writing a first draft. And many one-syllable words are good solid specific nouns and verbs. They work like bricks to build a strong image or sentence.

The next part of the exercise is to write a story with only one syllable words. Only proper nouns can be multi-syllabic. Try it. You’ll be surprised at what you can accomplish with only one-syllable words.

This week’s Scene Storm Word List comes from the letter C and all are one-syllable words:

course

coast

carve

cool

crease

core

crisp

cord

cone

curl

A woman who has been like a mother to me since I was sixteen years old recently had a series of heart attacks and mistook them for indegestion.  If you are a woman or if you love or live with a woman, please read the following description of a woman’s heart attack taken from an email forward.  I’ve read a great deal about heart disease because a close family member has cardiovascular disease and arithmia. This description and the events described are grounded in facts about women and heart disease, not matter how authentic the forward may or  may not be. Women do often have different symptoms from men when they have an MI. Know your body. Don’t be fooled. Be safe.

The email forward:

Women and heart attacks (Myocardial infarction). Did you know that women rarely have the same dramatic
symptoms that men have when experiencing heart attack … you know, the sudden stabbing pain in the chest, the cold sweat, grabbing the chest & dropping to the floor that we see in the movies. Here is the story of one woman’s  experience with a heart attack.

“‘I had a heart attack at about 10 :30 PM with NO prior exertion, NO prior emotional trauma that one would suspect  ight’ve brought it on. I was sitting all snugly & warm on a cold evening, with my purring cat in my lap, reading an
interesting story my friend had sent me, and actually thinking, ‘A-A-h, this is the life, all cozy and warm in my soft, cushy Lazy Boy with my feet propped up.

“A moment later, I felt that awful sensation of indigestion, when you’ve been in a hurry and grabbed a bite of sandwich and washed it down with a dash of water, and that hurried bite seems to feel like you’ve swallowed a golf ball going
down the esophagus in slow motion and it is most uncomfortable. You realize you shouldn’t have gulped it down so fast and needed to chew it more thoroughly and this time drink a glass of water to hasten its progress down to the stomach. This was my initial sensation—the only trouble was that I hadn’t taken a bite of anything since about 5:00 p.m.

“After it seemed to subside, the next sensation was like little squeezing motions that seemed to be racing up my SPINE (hind-sight, it was probably my aorta spasming), gaining speed as they continued racing up and under my sternum breast bone, where one presses rhythmically when administering CPR).                                 

This fascinating process continued on into my throat and branched out into both jaws. ‘AHA!! NOW I stopped puzzling about what was happening — we all have read and/or heard about pain in the jaws being one of the signals of an MI
happening, haven’t we? I said aloud to myself and the cat, Dear God,I think I’m having a heart attack!

I lowered the footrest dumping the cat from my lap, started to take a step and fell on the floor instead. I thought to myself, If this is a heart attack, I shouldn’t be walking into the next room where the phone is or anywhere else ..
but, on the other hand, if I don’t, nobody will know that I need help, and if I wait any longer I may not be able to get up in moment.

I pulled myself up with the arms of the chair, walked slowly into the next room and dialed the Paramedics .. I told her I thought I was having a heart attack due to the pressure building under the sternum and radiating into my jaws. I
didn’t feel hysterical or afraid, just stating the facts. She said she was sending the Paramedics over immediately, asked if the front door was near to me, and if so, to unbolt the door and then lie down on the floor where they could see me when they came in.

I unlocked the door and then laid down on the floor as instructed and lost consciousness, as I don’t remember the medics coming in, their examination, lifting me onto a gurney or getting me into their ambulance, or hearing the call they made to St. Jude ER on the way, but I did briefly awaken when wearrived and saw that the Cardiologist was already there in his surgical blues and cap, helping the medics pull my stretcher out of the ambulance. He was bending over me asking questions (probably something like ‘Have you taken any medications?’) but I couldn’t make my mind interpret what he was saying, or form an answer, and nodded off again, not waking up until the Cardiologist and artner had already threaded the teeny angiogram balloon up my femoral artery into the aorta and into my heart where they installed 2 side by side stents to hold open my right coronary artery.

“Iknow it sounds like all my thinking and actions at home must have taken at least 20-30 minutes before calling the Paramedics, but actually it took perhaps 4-5 minutes before the call, and both the fire station and St. Jude are only minutes away from my home, and my Cardiologist was already told to go to the OR in his scrubs and get going on  estarting my heart (which had stopped somewhere between my arrival and the procedure) and installing the stents.

“Why have I written all of this to you with so much detail? Because I want all of you who are so important in my life to know what I learned first hand.”

1. Be aware that something very different is happening in your body not the usual men’s symptoms but inexplicable things happening (until my sternum and jaws got into the act).  It is said that many more women than men die of their first (and last) MI because they didn’t know they were having one and commonly mistake it as indigestion, take some Maalox or other anti-heartburn preparation and go to bed, hoping they’ll feel better in the morning when they wake up … which doesn’t happen. My female friends, your symptoms might not be exactly like mine, so I advise you to call the Paramedics if ANYTHING is unpleasantly happening that you’ve not felt before. It is better to have a ‘false alarm’
visitation than to risk your life guessing what it might be!

 2. Note that I said ‘Call the Paramedics.’ And if you can take an asprin. Ladies, TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE! Do NOT try to drive yourself to the ER – you are a hazard to others on the road. Do NOT have your panicked husband who will be
speeding and looking anxiously at what’s happening with you instead of the road.

Do NOT call your doctor — he doesn’t know where you live and if it’s at night you won’t reach him anyway, and if it’s daytime, his assistants (or answering service) will tell you to call the Paramedics. He doesn’t carry the equipment
in his car that you need to be saved! The Paramedics do, principally OXYGEN that you need ASAP. Your Dr. will be notified later.

3. Don’t assume it couldn’t be a heart attack because you have a normal cholesterol count. Research has discovered that a cholesterol elevated reading is rarely the cause of an MI (unless it’s unbelievably high and/or accompanied by
high blood pressure). MIs are usually caused by long-term stress and inflammation in the body, which dumps all sorts of deadly hormones into your system to sludge things up in there Pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep. Let’s be careful and be aware. The more we know, the better chance we could survive.

I don’t know how to make a small pot of soup; my husband doesn’t know how to plant a small garden. While three 400-foot rows of beans means a lot of picking, and people are starting to run from us when they see us coming with sacks of yellow crooked-neck squash, all those beautiful vegetables will make for some good soup this winter.

What excess do you see in your life? What excesses do your characters have, either self-imposed or thrust upon them?

Assignment: Write a scene where a character’s excess comes into play.

Assignment: Write a poem about your excesses or the excess of someone you know.

Scene Storm Word List: Here are 10 verbs associated with gardening. Use the in a scene or poem that has absolutely nothing to do with gardening.

rake

dig

cut

pick

plow

weed

hoe

dust

shell

seed