Keeping in touch through quarantine

Thank you Joe. Ironic the poem evokes Neruda. A couple of weeks ago I submitted some poems to Rattle magazine and in my bio I say, ““I don’t consider myself a poet. Why, then, do I write poems? The short answer is I don’t. I believe I’m simply a conduit through which poems write themselves. Regardless of the poem, however, my goal is accessibility because I feel as Pablo Neruda that if one can’t read their poem to a fruit vendor, a construction worker, or a crossing guard, the poem has little value.” I’m trusting poet Willie Perdomo who wrote that it is how Neruda felt. I found it reassuring that I share an opinion about poetry with such a heavyweight; I feel my work is less tangential to accepted norms and feel encouraged to continue exploring the genre. Maybe someday I’ll be able to channel the subtlety of that first couplet:
“Why did the grove undress itself
only to wait for the snow?”
What a lovely way to describe the period during fall when trees lose their leaves while contemplating paradoxes in the way nature works.

Thank you for the kind words, Sally. Sometimes words just flow and in those moments I am reminded of Colum McCann who says that his writing process is often just “opening up the windows and letting it come in.” Of course, once you let “it” come in, the hard work begins, which McCann acknowledges.

You and I are on the same page regarding the viator; I thought it would be a fun form to play with but don’t plan on submitting it to the contest.

Hi Nikita,

I love your assessment of Le Guin’s fiction because I think “concise and revolutionary” apply to her non-fiction work as well. To clarify, however, Words Are My Matter isn’t a how to book like William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, or Stephen King’s On Writing; it is instead a book in which close reading reveals to writers, whether emerging or established, literary gems that speak to what makes some writing good and some writing not. For example, in the essay, “Learning to Write Science Fiction from Virginia Woolf,” she says of Woolf, “she imagined a society vastly different from our own, an exotic world, and brought it dramatically alive. I’m thinking of the Elizabethan scenes, the winter when the Thames froze over. Reading, I was there, saw the bonfires blazing in the ice, felt the marvelous strangeness of that moment five hundred years ago—the authentic thrill of being taken absolutely elsewhere [emphasis Le Guin’s].” She then explains how Woolf accomplished that feat: “By precise, specific descriptive details, not heaped up and not explained: a vivid, telling imagery, highly selected, encouraging the reader’s imagination to fill out the picture and see it luminous and complete.” Yes, we learned about setting, detail, and imagery, so Le Guin isn’t really telling us anything new, but I found it quite helpful to think of precise, specific, and descriptive details as a sort of invitation for a reader to engage with one’s work on a deeper level—like inviting a reader to join you, the author, in an analog interactive session, so to speak. Moreover, her comments were helpful since I tend to heap up and explain details because I’m still working on trusting the reader to fill in the blanks. I was advised by a couple of professors to trust the reader, but the notion was and still is, to a degree, an abstraction to me. Indeed, up until now, I could only imagine The Reader as a concept: A nebulous formless composite of speculation and assumption. However, a totally unexpected benefit of reflecting on Le Guin’s words was visualizing the reader as an actual live human being holding and reading my book or story. Believe it or not, this is a huge development for me because not only is visualization a powerful tool, but giving “the reader” shape and solidity enables me to further remove me from the narrative and, thus, think in terms of how the reader (perhaps someone I know) would react to this word, this sentence, this story instead of how clever/profound/cool it sounds to me.

The working title of my book is Quantum Wave Surfer. The story takes place at the intersection of science and spirituality, and I have you and Kazuo Ishiguro to thank for where I’m at with it. Back in September, you asked if anyone would like to join you in NaNoWriMo. The first I heard of NaNoWriMo was in one of my first classes and I remember thinking that the idea of writing a novel in a month was as absurd as the idea that humans built pyramids by rolling 100-ton blocks of granite on logs. My opinion, however, was based on the erroneous assumption that the goal was a finished product. Ignorance is not strength. But, as I wrote in my lengthy “…Troubled Times and Insecurities” post, I was floundering and your invitation planted a seed, a seed I confess I ignored until the last minute. And I mean the absolute last minute. On November first, I finally decided to research exactly what NaNoWriMo was all about. As I read the details, the sub-title of an article about Ishiguro in The Atlantic sprang to mind. The article was titled “Writing Advice From a (Newly Minted) Nobel Winner,” and the sub-title read: “Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the bulk of The Remains of the Day in four weeks. All it took was extreme dedication—and a willingness to be terrible.” So, I thought, hey, I can do that! At the end of November, I had a little over 45,000 words (though I cheated a bit and started with the 7,500 words I’d written in Novella class). I’ve since added approximately 5,000 words to the Word file version and another 15,000 or so handwritten words in my Writer’s Notebook. But the story locked up on me and now I’m stuck. I keep writing ideas, passages, and dialogue in my Writer’s Notebook as they occur, but the overall narrative arc remains elusive.

Nikita,
I’m not sure why I haven’t been getting notices of replies, but there you go. As far as Leguin, Tales from Earthsea, Gifts, and The Telling. I haven’t read anything of hers that I didn’t love and that didn’t make me think.
Nineteen Minutes was striking as far as the perspective of the shooter and the families. Troublesome Creek I am loving for the regionalism and the lore-being a librarian by horseback is something I could see myself doing. 🙂 The Starless Sea I’ve set aside because of Creek, but I can’t wait to get back to it.
How’s that for a non-answer?