Workshop: Writing the Story

 

Writing the Story in Poetry, Fiction, Or Memoir

Writers' Workshop

Got a story? Of course you do!  There is a variety of narrative techniques used by writers in poetry, fiction, and memoir to draw in the reader.  Come join in this Zoom workshop, four Tuesday evenings (7:00 to 8:30 pm) February 17-March 11, 2025. The workshop is sponsored by Lake Superior Writers.  Participants will develop their own stories and, using guided prompts, experiment with various narrative techniques. It's going to be fun!  

Register Here https://lakesuperiorwriters.org/writing-the-story/

Sheila Packa is a fiscal year 2024 recipient of a Creative Support for Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. 

The Rose Warner Series at the College of St. Scholastica 2025

Every year the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth hosts the Rose Warner Reading Series. This year is on January 31, 2025 and the featured poet is Kimiko Hahn. She was also hold a reading in the evening for the general public.  In conjunction with this is a half-day conference for high school students. I'll be leading two break-out sessions for student writers along with two other Writers of Distinction, Marie Zhuikov and Nick Trelstad. 

Students register here: https://sites.google.com/css.edu/2025rosewarnerreadingserieskim/register

Kimiko Hahn is author of ten collections of poetry, including The Ghost Forest: New & Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2024) which plays with given forms while creating new ones, and, in doing so, honors past writers. Her last collection, Foreign Bodies, revisits the personal as political while exploring the immigrant body, the endangered animal’s body, objects removed from children’s bodies, and hoarded things. Previous books Toxic Flora and Brain Fever were prompted by fields of science; The Narrow Road to the Interior takes title and forms from Basho’s famous journals. Reflecting her interest in Japanese poetics, her essay on the zuihitsu was published in the American Poetry Review.

In 2023, Kimiko was named a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and received The Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award. Additional honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, American Book Award, and NEA Fellowships. In her service to the field, she enjoys promoting chapbooks and has created a chapbook archive at the Queens College Library. Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.

The Blank Page?

Fear of a Blank Page

In the New Yorker magazine, once I'd come across a hilarious cartoon of Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, sitting at a writing desk with a mass of crumpled sheets of paper on the floor around him.  Each of those sheets had sentences that just weren't working out. "Call me Jim" "Call me John"  "Call me Alexander"  etc.  How long did it take Melville to get to that remarkable first sentence?  "Call me Ishmael." From that first line, the novel has us in its grasp.  

Beginnings are sometimes difficult. Often a writer might not know where to begin a story. Maybe you begin with a description of a person, a place or a thing.  It is hard to tell if it is terrible or just all right or even if it's good. It's easy to crumple up that page with those early words and toss it in the trash. Start over.  Start over again. And again.  

The best advice I had ever received was this:  "When you are telling the story to your friends, listen to how you begin.  Start writing there."  This helps. Start with oral storytelling. A writer might start a story way too early on paper, long before the actual events in the story. In other words, start with action.  Start with a phrase that catches the listeners' attention.  

The other piece of advice is: keep writing. Keep writing even if the writing is not that great. You might have to get something down on paper before you realize where the story is heading.  In other words, the beginning words might simply be priming the pump. It's only after you get flowing will you have good writing.  Then you can go back and cut the preliminary work.  

Another piece of sage advice:  It's much easier to revise than to write.  So don't worry about your poor writing, faltering plot, inconsistencies, shifts in verb tense, etc. etc.  Once you have the bulk of the work done, then you can go back and fix it.   

This is well illustrated by this excerpt from the short story, "Bushes," China Miéville writes:

He took out a notebook and charcoal to make marks and every time he had to strive against the blankness of a page. He would be still and tell himself that he had already ruined the book so that was that, now, and it being too late to save it, he could continue.

I like this approach. The blank page is pristine as new fallen snow. It is an inviting possibility of perfection.  Reassure yourself that anything you put on that page is like you stumbling and dragging your feet, wandering about wildly and crookedly, and falling down face first. Miéville assures us that any mark made on that page will not be perfect.  It was never going to be perfect anyway.  Just carry on. Accept the facts. Keep going.  Maybe the story won't be perfect, but it might be good.  

Maybe it's best to start working on scratch paper, on the back of envelopes, on grocery lists, or scribbled recipe cards, or on the back of your children's drawings! Does that help? I'm curious about what helps you. Feel free to comment.  

___

For more information about this speculative writer who Ursula LeGuin called "brilliant," check out the author interview published in the Boston Review
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/literature-culture-china-mieville-strategy-ruination/

Artist Conversations: Sarah Ruhl

"Certain words, when you put them together, create a kind of melody...."  says Sarah Ruhl, playwright, writer, and writer. 

Playwrights' Center's Director of Fellowships Lynde Rosario sits down with multiple-award-winning playwright and MacArthur-certified genius Sarah Ruhl for a conversation that is as electrifying as it is wide-ranging. Topics include: collaborations, caregiving, perseverance, pandemics, politics, poetics, the epic and the domestic, finding a home in the arts, and the beautiful present of the theater as the key to its future. If you’ve ever wished for a seat at the table with incredible artists in passionate discussion, this series is your seat. 

 SARAH RUHL is an award-winning American playwright, author, essayist, and professor. Her plays include Eurydice; In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2010); The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist 2005, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize 2004); Passion Play (PEN American Award); Orlando; and Letters from Max (based on her book with poet Max Ritvo). Her plays have been produced on Broadway and across the country as well as internationally, and translated into fourteen languages. Her books include Smile: The Story of a Face, and 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a PEN Center Award for mid-career playwrights, a Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, and a MacArthur “genius award” Fellowship. She teaches at the Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

https://www.sarahruhlplaywright.com/a...

Some Poems in a Different Genre

I'm always interested in fiction writers who do interesting things with the form of a story. One such writer is Icelandic, Jón Kalman Stefánsson.  I loved his newly translated book, Your Absence Is Darkness. The form of the novel has taken on a pattern, musical and certainly poetic. The pattern isn't exactly repetition, but resonance.  It's sort of like the difference between a metaphor becoming a transforming metaphor.  Music is a part of the stories in this generational saga, since some of the characters are literary and some are musicians.  Also, we do get to know what's on this author's Spotify channel, Death's Playlist.   

I look forward to more of his works becoming available in English. His book The Fish Have No Feet was nominated for an International Book Prize 2016.  Here's a quote from Heaven and Earth, due out in English translation in February 2025.  I've borrow the quote from a book review of this upcoming novel.  

“Some poems take us to places where no words reach, no thought, they take you up to the core itself, life stops for one moment and becomes beautiful, it becomes clear with regret and happiness. Some poems change the day, the night, your life. Some poems make you forget, forget the sadness, the hopelessness, you forget your waterproof, the frost comes to you, says, got you, and you’re dead.” (p.85). 

  --https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/heaven-and-hell-by-jon-kalman-stefansson-review/

NYTimes Review of Your Absence is Darkness by Daniel Mason:https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/03/books/review/jon-kalman-stefansson-your-absence-is-darkness.html

Shortlist for the Booker Prize: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/fish-have-no-feet

Get the book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/your-absence-is-darkness/19657447?ean=9781771965811

Why do art or writing?

Is it useless, the time you spend writing things that you realize are likely not to be published or read by many or any?  The feeling is common to most writers and artists.  

What art does is to coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous. The so-called uselessness of art is a clue to its transforming power. Art is not part of the machine. Art asks us to think differently, see differently, hear differently, and ultimately to act differently, which is why art has moral force. Ruskin was right, though for the wrong reasons, when he talked about art as a moral force. Art is not about good behaviour, when did you last see a miracle behave well? Art makes us better people because it asks for our full humanity, and humanity is, or should be, the polar opposite of the merely mechanical. We are not part of the machine either, but we have forgotten that. Art is memory — which is quite different [from] history. Art asks that we remember who we are, and usually that asking has to come as provocation — which is why art breaks the rules and the taboos, and at the same time is a moral force.

—Jeanette Winterson, author of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

quote from her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Photograph of Winterson by Michel Delsol

Exhibition: Mine - What Is Ours in the Wake of Extraction

Exhibition of Art & Video

(this exhibition includes my poetry video, My Geology, a poem from Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range)

September 3-December 13, 2024

February 4- May 15, 2025

University of Delaware, Mechanical Hall Gallery

https://exhibitions.lib.udel.edu/mine/

Image & Poetry

 

Images are a crucial component of poems. 

“Images are not concepts. They do not withdraw into their meaning. Indeed, they tend to go beyond their meaning….If the image that is present does not make us think of one that is absent, if an image does not determine an abundance—an explosion of unusual images, then there is no imagination.”

Gaston Bachelard, French philosopher, 1884-1962l 

Moving Words: Writers Across Minnesota

Join Us for Moving Words

Thursday, April 25, from 6:00-7:30 p.m. 

Aitkin Public Library 

110 1st Ave NE

Aitkin, MN 56431

Sheila Packa and Kao Kalia Yang 

https://thefriends.org/event/moving-words-writers-across-minnesota-aitkin/

The program will last approximately an hour and a half, with a conversation and/or reading followed by
a question-and-answer session.

Listen to the writers on these radio conversations: 

https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2023/04/17/duluth-poet-sheila-packa-shares-her-favorite-poetry

https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2024/03/29/kao-kalia-yang-channels-her-mother-in-the-memoir-where-rivers-part