christopher cocca

is, of course, a great song by The Smiths. It’s also a great cover by Noel Gallagher. There’s a pretty great clip on YouTube of NG talking about Morrissey and Johnny Marr (he loves them) capturing the quintessence of pop stardom (which is looking absolutely ridiculous and absolutely, effortlessly cool at the same time).

There Is a Light That Never Goes Out is also the name of short story I’m currently writing. My prose lit seminar has really helped me see material in places I’ve been ignoring and is helping me think in better dramatic fashion. That’s not to say, by the way, that my Light That Never Goes Out story is about the song. The song (really just the title) is a jumping-off point, and what I’m learning from close readings of Cheever, Munro, O’Connor, Bellow, etc in the context of the seminar is helping me think about story in general and about specific stories.

I’m workshopping the first parts of Milton County Power & Light this week.

Did you know that there’s a Willa Cather Memorial Prairie in Nebraska? I didn’t know they named prairies after anyone.

“As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.” – Willa Cather, My Antonia

Is your work tied to place? Mine is. Mountains, rust-belt ruins, green and yellow fields in alternating bands, small cities, little towns, Cold War suburbs. A valley. Some rivers. A beach and a sound.

One of my earliest literary memories is of my grandmother reading the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder to me when I was as young as 3. I remember one scene specifically about a lost doll partially frozen to the ground in a fallow cornfield puddle. I hadn’t connected these early experiences to my own vocation before, but this image, 27 years later, is vivid, and our own setting, the bi-level in Whitehall near the old cement plant.

What are your places?

I said in the Vocation post that it’s a small and large jump from MDiviness to MFAdom.  It’s small in the sense that, at our best, clergy and writers are both engaged in discussions of meaning, meaning-making, how this all ends, how to keep it from ending, etc.  It’s big, massive, really, in the sense that an MDiv means that if you really want to, you can find a job in a church.  You can be a religious professional (I make fun of that term in Milton County Power & Light, if you’re interested).  But the MFA isn’t really about getting a certain kind of job.  It seems like more of a license to proceed in this way that we’ve been going, and hopefully, to get better at the going.

I thought of ending that post by saying “If it turns out that I’m not really a Christian, I hope to God I am a writer.”  This made me think of a Karl Rahner quote I came across yesterday:  “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or nothing at all.”  I’d prefer mystic to nothing at all, and it seems to me that I’m headed in this direction.  I require frequent, direct access to the holy in ways that don’t come, for me, from the typical apologetic acrobatics and exegetical excursions we call sermons.  I haven’t figured out what that access is, precisely, but I have some ideas.

On a related but different note, Saul Bellow’s description of Woody’s beatific vision of love in “A Silver Dish” and what (still little) I really know about Bellow’s own transcendentalism got me thinking about what a Christian transcendentalism (I don’t mean to say that all Christian mysticisms need to be transcendental) would feel like for me.  Walking from E 11th Street to Union Square under an intense awareness of awe and connectedness, it sounded like this:  “Jesus saves me.  Jesus saves everyone.”

This is an interesting post.  Wickett, of the Emerging Writers Network, has only recently started to read Amy Hempel and asks if others have had similar experiences avoiding a writer’s work for one reason or another, finally read it, love it, “and kick yourself repeatedly for having wasted the years?”

I came to Amy Hempel via Chuck Palahniuk, but I’d never read any Alice Munro before starting the MFA.

Just wanted to thank everyone for their feedback on my piece.

Joe and Raquel’s comments on the last post are helpful, and I’m reminded about something I didn’t say in the post.  In addition to becoming a better writer (and here I mean with regards to some technical and structural things) and learning to become a better reader, they’re right:  something else you should learn in workshop is the difference between advice that works for your piece and advice that might make sense, generally, but isn’t right for your style, point of view, goals, preferences, or vision.  And then, of course, there’s advice that’s off base.   That’s all part of the balance, and I’d advise against considering a workshop as something akin to revision by committee.  That said, yes, seeing your work through new eyes (the eyes of people who don’t really know you) is extremely important (I think we all have blind spots).

Something I’ve been specifically thinking about is better storytelling.  I like what I do with words, and I like emoting.  I think I’m good at these things, and at leaving a certain feeling.  I’m good at description and I try very hard not to use dying words, metaphors, or images.  I try say things in ways I haven’t seen them said, and I try to do that well.  I’m not sure that I’m as a good story teller (not that every story needs story telling, if that makes sense) as I might be, though, and I do want to get better at that.  When it comes to what I might learn from conventions, that’s one of things I’m really interested in.   I’m  interested in hearing how other writers hear what I’m doing.

I have some really great things to share from tonight’s class with Benjamin Taylor, but they’ll have to wait for the morning.  One thing I loved, with reference to rules in art being made to be broken (this is a paraphrase): the rule, for instance, that a novel has to have action.  There are entire Samuel Beckett novels where nothing happens (except thinking).

We finish Alice Munro and being Saul Bellow next week.  If any of you have read Munro’s A Wilderness Station, I’d love to hear what you think really happened.

I’m at Villa Pizza in Port Authority.  Tonight was my orientation at The New School.  Some impressions follow.

Waiting for the session start and sitting with 70 or so other first-year students, I thought:

I wonder who else is scared.

I wonder who else assumes everyone else in the room has their shit more together.

I wonder who these new peers are, and which of them will be friends.  I wonder where the ones I know from blogging and facebook are sitting.

I wonder who else is a spouse or parent.

I wonder what we’ll do here.

A few minutes later, Bob Kerry greeted us with what I thought was a frank (in a good way) and encouraging welcome.  Among other things, he talked about his life as a reader and congratulated us on taking this step.

Linda Dunn spoke next and welcomed us as part of The New School’s long tradition of believing in the power of literature, words and education.  She talked about the kinds of things the program looks for in applicants, and stressed the importance of taking a broad view of literature and in finding writers who reflect that value in diverse ways.

Robert Polito shared a poem from Jason Shinder’s “Stupid Hope” and, later, “Lament For the Makers” by Frank Bidart:

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

Many creatures must
make, but only one must seek

within itself what to make

My father’s ring was a B with a dart
through it, in diamonds against polished black stone.

I have it. What parents leave you
is their lives.

Until my mother died she struggled to make
a house that she did not loathe; paintings; poems; me.

Many creatures must

make, but only one must seek
within itself what to make

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

*

Teach me, masters who by making were
remade, your art.

Fitting, and for me as a parent making sense of taking time for art (even making art in the first place), a bit of serendipity.  Writing well and making something worth having spent this time on is, in fact, a way of loving my son in a way that no one else can.

Robert stressed our program as community, and finished by thanking us, welcoming us, and telling us to enjoy.   As my first night in the city ends, I feel thankful for this opportunity and excited about what we will do here.

A visitor made his/her way here today by searching “MDiv MFA.” I was surprised to find that this blog is actually the top result for this query on Google.  Running that search also took me to The Grad Cafe forum and this post at  Travis Poling’s The Art Of Living blog about MDivs, MFAs, and MBAs in the conceptual age.  Poling’s post takes its frame from Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind.   Any of you terminal degree folks care to weigh in on the subject?  Are degrees like the MDiv or MFA replacing the MBA?  What does this discussion say about all of those service job searches?

I also think it’s funny that when you search “MDiv MFA”, Google thinks maybe you meant “MDiv MBA.”  Reminds me of the  “when I look at a monk I see a holy man, when I look at a pastor I see a businessman” adage from Dan Kimball’s old site.

I came across You Will Get Papercuts via my Google Alert for all things related to “MFA”.  YWGP is only about 11 days old, but I like its raison d’etre:

We at YouWillGetPapercuts are recognizing a sad trend. Is our creativity dying a little from our day jobs, or just getting really stifled? We are firm believers that writers, no matter how “successful,” will write through anything, even a nine-to-five.

We created this space for people like us: young and bright folk who are underpaid, overqualified, and bored.

Admit it. You should be making photocopies, listening in on that important conference call, or getting papercuts while mailing packages off to exotic countries. Instead you’re doing character sketches for your first novel, writing song lyrics on the back of a receipt, or making a life-size replica of Michael Jackson’s head out of chewing gum and white-out.

Whatever it is that you’re doing, show us what you’ve got. Send us what you’re writing, let us see what pictures you’re taking, clue us in to what we should be listening to, and tell us why you hate your boss and how much better of a job you could do.

We will read anything and everything you send us, but we will only publish what we like.

I know absolutely nothing else about this blog/venue, but I do know what it’s like to sit in a cube for 12-hour days and drive 155 miles round-trip for a job that, as likable as parts of it were (and especially the people), eats time you’d rather use for doing whatever that thing only you can do is.  I’m not suggesting that only you can write the great American novel or that only you can capture the Sitz Im Laben of small-town/suburban/inner-city/white-collar/blue-collar/angsty/ironincally detached/chronically hip/deliberately unhip etc reality, but only you can do it the way that only you would.  That’s reason enough to do.  Actually, it’s the only reason to do anything, isn’t it?

In my earliest draft of Milton County Power & Light from a few years ago, one of the narrators (at that time the titular personality when the book was called something else) articulates the day-job anxiety in the opening pages.  As I revised, I wanted something less zeitgeisty, less clever, and began to show these things instead of tell them.   (I think all first drafts probably tell).   So You Will Get Papercuts resonates with me as someone who quit the corporate life and is much, much happier with small successes at various venues, more (and better) work on MCP&L, and a more active platform for meeting people with similar interests and discussing the things we value, the books we like, the work we do, the bands we dig…the progress of our lives as writers.

The metric below isn’t meant as some kind of formula, but I thought it was worth sharing.  The point on the far right represents last month’s visits to this blog.  Other points are identified to show what I mean about how making room in your life for writing means, well, making room in your life for writing.  The influx of visitors came after I started writing more (and starting sharing better writing) here.  Now I write essays, self-publish short creative/literary pieces and poems, blog more consistently about other things I’m interested in (including other bloggers) and share excerpts from my novel.  Even though this blog started 2 years ago as a place to share news about my published work, it’s become a place where I’m happy to publish work and it’s a growing (not large, but nice) forum for discussion.

I’m not suggesting that everybody who already knows that the only way their writing will improve (read: the only way they’ll be happier, more fulfilled, and pursuing the gamble that writing ought to be their pursuit in the first place) is to make more time for it has the freedom to do so.  I still work in in the real world.  I certainly don’t get paid for most of my writing.  But I made a decision that I didn’t want to spend my 30’s the way I was starting to spend my late 20’s.  I don’t know what that looks like in your case.  For me it involved becoming more sustainable, working closer to home, being more balanced.  Soon it will involve an MFA at The New School in fiction.  Soon after that I hope it means more.  In the meantime, it has meant  successes that I’m proud of and the sharing of my work here and in other venues– the building of a framework, the putting of myself out there and the improving.  It’s a risk, but, for me, the bigger risk is not doing it.  Maybe you’re the same.

I’ve been especially active this month to the point of real pain in my carpal tunnels.  I’ll take that.

This is a great and helpful post.  One of the best parts:

For what it is worth to you, apart from pay scale, you take 20 years of wondering if your work reaches people and you turn it into two years of having people tell you to your face whether it reached them or not. Very talented people, in some cases, geniuses. Thus the ambivalence towards these programs, on the part of many writers. You may think you want to know but then when you do, it’s rough sometimes. But, sometimes not. As my sister says, you just don’t know until you know.

The ability to come and see…that’s priceless.