Writing Tip by Douglas Kearney

Photo by Los Jackson

Writing Your Ultimate Table of Contents

Imagine you have written the book of poetry you have always wanted to complete. Now, write its table of contents; the only rule is, this list contains no poems that you have already written.  Keep the table of contents in your journal or wherever you store writing ideas.  Then, whenever you are blocked, either:

(a) choose one of the titles and write a poem for it
OR
(b) write the first line (or two) of each poem

Biography of Douglas Kearney: Douglas Kearney is a poet/performer/librettist. He won a Whiting Writers’ Award and his second book, The Black Automaton, was a 2008 National Poetry Series selection.  He lives with his family in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California. To find out more about Mr. Kearney visit his website at www.douglaskearney.com.

Writing Tip by Cecilia Woloch

(I’m writing this at a truck stop in Nitro, West Virginia, so I may be under some kind of influence, and that may be my point, or part of it.)

Writing-wise, I’m a firm believer in doing whatever works for you – just figure out what works for you and do it.   There are no formulas, no rules.   But I also believe in the power of habit.   I think it was Faulkner who said he’d learned that, in writing, habit is a much stronger force than either inspiration or willpower.   So I write at least a little bit every day, so that I don’t lose track of myself.   Although sometimes it’s good to lose track of yourself … .Because I’ve also found that being in a strange and even uncomfortable environment sometimes has a better effect on the writing than I think it’s having at the time.   Helene Cixous said, “Exile is an uncomfortable situation.   It is also a magical situation.”   And because I can’t always dash off to the Carpathians or Nitro, W. Va., what I do to shake myself up in my writing is to immerse myself in some other writer’s work for a while.  I’ll pick up a collection of poems by a poet whose sensibilities and way of using language are really different from mine, kind of a foreign country, and I’ll just read for half an hour or an hour, steep myself in that, and then I’ll open my notebook and write and see what happens.  I sometimes do this with a collection of poems or the work of a particular poet for a week or two, or longer, and I just keep mining that vein for as long as it’s interesting to me.  My first ex-husband used to say that I had a pathological fear of boredom.   I don’t think that’s a bad trait for a creative person to have.   So I walk that line between being habitual, maintaining the discipline of working every day, even if only for an hour, and constantly trying to lose myself in unfamiliar territory.

Biography of Cecilia Woloch.  Cecilia Woloch is the author of five award-winning collections of poems, most recently, Carpathia, published by BOA Editions in 2009.  She is currently a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Southern California, as well as the founding director of The Paris Poetry Workshop.  She spends a part of each year traveling, and in recent years has divided her time between Los Angeles, California; Atlanta, Georgia; Shepherdsville, Kentucky; Paris, France; and a small village in the Carpathian mountains of southeastern Poland.  For more information on her work go to her website at www.ceciliawoloch.com

Writing Prompt by Alistair McCartney!

 

Writing Prompt: The Pitiless

In Volume One of his collected letters, Gustave Flaubert wrote that “the highest and most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, nor to arouse lust or rage, but to do what nature does—that is, to set us dreaming.”  He went on to say that writing that achieves this often has a pitiless aspect to it.  Its “somber depths turn us faint, yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.”

This prompt is based on this idea that writing from a point of severe detachment can set the reader dreaming. So choose a moment of heightened drama to write about.  I often suggest a death scene to my students, but it can be any moment that’s full of extreme tension—a scene of violence, of heartbreak.  Write about this moment focusing purely on the concrete details, avoiding any commentary, any statement of how the characters or narrator feel, erasing any hint of melodrama.  The idea is, through describing this moment without emotion, in an almost pitiless manner, great feeling will be evoked in the reader.  I do this exercise in fiction classes, but it can be done in any genre.

Biography of Alistair McCartney:  Alistair McCartney recently published The End of the World Book: a Novel (University of Wisconsin Press, April, 08), which was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Debut Fiction Award.  Currently at work on his second novel, The Death Book, he teaches creative writing in Antioch University’s MFA and BA Programs.  See what he’s up to at http://alistairmccartney.blogspot.com

Writing Tip by Marisela Norte!

I’ve chosen public transportation and my own two feet as my preferred means of navigating the city.  Every day I make it a point to venture out with my camera and a small notebook and just take in this landscape that is Los Angeles.  It can be a short tour around the neighborhood, a visit to the Shoe Repair man or a six mile walk. I take a personal object along with me to leave at a bus bench or atop a newspaper vending machine and try and imagine who may have come across it; might this be something they were looking for or had lost? Will they carry it home? Will it remain there for me to find again? Questions posed, and there begins the writing.  I have received many, many beautiful gifts on the sidewalks of the city; this is my thank you.

Biography of Marisela Norte: Considered one of the most important literary voices to come out of East Los Angeles, Marisela Norte has performed her work throughout California, the US and the UK.  Her words can also be found in the anthologies Microphone Fiends, Bordered Sexualities: Bodies on the Verge of a Nation, The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place, Bear Flag Republic, American Studies in a Moment of Danger, American Quarterly and Rolling Stone’s Women of Rock.  In 2008 she received the Ben Reitman award for Peeping Tom Tom Girl , her first collection of prose.  Norte is currently working on Sociedad Anonima a collection of photographs and short fiction.

Writing Tip by Brendan Constantine!

A good way to get started on a new piece is to put down your initial ideas in the form of a letter.   Address the letter to someone in your life who absolutely does not understand your work (your parents, workmates, landlord).   As you refine the letter, you may get a clearer picture of what you want.   You might also become so frustrated in the effort to make your work accessible that you strike out in new territory just do defy expectations.   All outcomes are good!

Biography of Brendan Constantine:   Brendan Constantine is a poet based in Hollywood.  His work has appeared in numerous journals, notably Directions, The L.A. Review, Ninth Letter and RUNES.  H is book, Letters To Guns, is just out from Red Hen Press.   New work is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Chaparral, Askew, Luvina, and the anthology Bright Wings.

Writing Prompt by Eloise Klein Healy

Eloise Klein Healy with Nikita

The Red List

Very quickly and without thinking, write a list of ten red things you have owned or come in contact with in some way in your lifetime.  When you read down the list, one or two items will “vibrate” a bit more than the others.  Choose one and start a free write about the object. For example, you might have had a red sweater in the fourth grade.  It’s OK if you find yourself taken away to another topic–just keep on going. The exercise works on associative powers of language and experience.  If you can time yourself, write for five to seven minutes.  Now you have some raw material and you can see if you can create something with it.  Any color can be chosen–a blue list, a green list, whatever.

Biography of Eloise Klein Healy: Eloise Klein Healy is the author of six books of poetry: Building Some Changes (Beyond Baroque Foundation); A Packet Beating Like a Heart (Books Of A Feather Press); Ordinary Wisdom (Paradise Press/re-released by Red Hen Press); Artemis In Echo Park (Firebrand Books), nominated for the Lambda Book Award and released as a spoken word recording by New Alliance Records; and her collections from Red Hen Press, Passing, and most recently, The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho. The Inevitable Press published her chapbook Women’s Studies Chronicles in the Laguna Poets Series.

Writing Tip by Noel Alumit

I think it’s useful to mix up my routine.  Don’t always write in the morning, try at night or the afternoon.  Don’t always write at your desk, switch to the kitchen table, the bedroom.  Even better, try a park.  My mind is constantly shifting depending on time and place.  Doing this allows me to find various shades in characters or scenes.

I’m a different person at night from when I wake.  I may be a little more tired and that mood colors how I write.  I think it layers my work, makes it more complex.  I think it prevents my work from getting stale.

Biography of Noel Alumit: Noel Alumit wrote the novels, Letters to Montgomery Clift, and Talking to the Moon.  He blogs at:  www.thelastnoel.blogspot.com.

Writing Tip by Suzanne Lummis

Here, the object is to enrich the language of your poetry and perhaps also trick yourself into writing a poem you wouldn’t have otherwise.   Sometimes it’s a poem your subconscious has been holding in its storage unit – you just needed the right key.   Open a dictionary at random, here and there, chose sensory, evocative words that you’ve never used in your poems, a selection of nouns, verbs and adjectives—words like puma, swagger and frothy, or gingerbread, captivate and fluorescent.   Add a mineral or precious stone, a celestial body, and a commercial brand name.   Now steal three words from a poet whose work you love (but make sure they’re not the poet’s signature words.   If it’s Plath don’t take “bald,” “hooks,” “moon”).   Put them on scraps of paper and choose a few blind.   Now, instead of starting with a topic or event then searching for the right words, you’ll let the words lead you to the poem’s subject.  Don’t be literal; don’t put everything in its logical context.  Go for the image, use the words in unpredictable ways, and mix them into areas where one wouldn’t expect to see such words.   Good luck.  Viva Poetry.

Biography of Suzanne Lummis: Suzanne Lummis, in a program funded by the NEA, is one of fifty writers selected to represent Los Angeles at the 2009 Guadalajara International Book Fair. Her poems appear in California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present (Heyday Books), Poems of the American West (Knopf), Place as Purpose: Poetry of the Western States (Autry/Sun & Moon), and in major literary publications in the U.S. and U.K. Work is forthcoming in The New Ohio Review.  She teaches several levels of poetry through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and has developed classes on the Poem Noir (“Poetry Goes to the Movies”), the persona poem and the socio-political poem.  “In Danger,” a collection of poetry, was published by Heyday Books as part of The California Poetry Series.

Writing Prompt by Majid Naficy

If you were a mother living in Gaza or Ashkelon…

Biography of Majid Naficy: Majid Naficy, the author of more than 20 books in Persian, fled Iran in 1983, a year and a half after the execution of his wife, Ezzat, in Evin prison.  He has published two collections of poetry Muddy Shoes (Beyond Baroque Books 1999) and Father and Son (Red Hen Press 2003) as well as his doctoral dissertation Modernism and Ideology in Persian Literature (University Press of America 1997) in English. You may read his poem “My Neighbor Goes to the Zoo” at http://www.iranian.com/main/2009/sep/my-neighbor-goes-zoo.

Writing Prompt by Lynne Thompson

One favorite prompt of mine frequently arrives unbidden when I am in a new or unfamiliar location.  The sights and smells of some place that is not “home” never fails to compel me to pick up a pen to write the words that will allow me to savor the extraordinary experience over and over again.  I wrote  Blur so that I could happily relive the week I spent in Italy’s Tuscany region; the first stanza of that poem is re-printed below:

Blur

—or so the sunflowers seemed
as we trekked mile after mile
in a Chevy tassí, from Sienna to
Montepulciano where everything
is humility and Mary, Mary and
genuflection; where air tastes olive
in our nostrils; mud’s improbably
silk on our hands and history is
the color of a cheap, true chianti—

I recommend that poets look—truly look—at their surroundings, be they familiar or new, in order to bring a fresh re-vision to their work.

Biography of Lynne Thompson: Lynne Thompson’s Beg No Pardon won the 2007 Perugia Press First Book Award (www.perugiapress.com) and the 2008 Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award.  Her work has appeared in the Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Margie . In 2009, her poem, Voice, was commissioned by Emory University.