Year of Plenty: A Family’s Season of Grief

In his latest memoir, Year of Plenty: A Family’s Season of Grief, B.J. Hollars chronicles a year that brought the cancer diagnosis of his father-in-law, the intense uncertainty of covid, and the struggles he and his wife Meredith faced raising three young children in the midst of all this. Hollars writes in diary style, but with sharply rendered scenes, and accompanies the narrative with photographs and family interviews. Author Tessa Fontaine describes this small gem of a book as “one of the most tender, big-hearted accounts of grief and love I’ve ever read.”

Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore interviewed Hollars recently about the book, the choices he made in structure, and the importance of awareness.
—

DINTY: Structuring a memoir as a diary, or series of journal entries, is a narrative choice I regularly warn my writing students against. The structure is restrictive, on one hand, and on the other hand requires regularly sequenced entries, some of which may actually be superfluous to the story. Yet you pull it off, rather brilliantly, in Year of Plenty. Any advice on how you did that? Was it the structure you intended all along?

B.J.: Well, thanks for the kind words! I’m so close to the material, I’ve had a terribly difficult time determining if I’ve pulled off anything or not. That’s been one of the greater challenges throughout. But certainly, I agree with your advice, and I offer the same warning to my own students. The danger, I often share, is that the diary/journal form can sometimes “excuse” the writer from having to craft anything. And if it’s an actual diary, it can become too “precious.”

I think Beth Kephart said that memoir is a “made thing” and that it requires “shaping.” I’ve been thinking about that a lot while writing this book. I’ve also been thinking of some advice from a friend who remarked that the more emotional the subject matter, the less dramatic the language ought to be. Both pieces of advice have served me well throughout the book.

As to the last part of your question on whether this was the structure I intended, I think it was. In the beginning, it wasn’t a book, just a series of voice memos, emails to me, photographs, and notes on the backs of receipts. But when I gathered all these up, I was able to piece back the days. And while the scenes are accompanied by dates, that’s mostly a technique to create some immediacy. I wanted readers to sort of relive the experience alongside me in “real-time.”

DINTY: The other unexpected choice you make is to include family interviews. The interview chapters are very brief, and often not directly focused on your father-in-law Steve’s cancer or death, but instead just revisiting memories. You even interview your very youngest children. I wouldn’t have thought to do that, but it creates a lovely intimacy.

B.J.: The interviews were a way for the rest of my family to speak directly without my “shaping” the prose. There were limits to my experiences, but by providing them some “unshaped” space, I was trying to make room for the myriad of experiences we shared but also lived independently. I will never fully understand what they felt, though I was there for most of it. These interviews were a way for me to see what I missed and to honor their own place in the story.

I also included some photographs. This was a way to give it a “family scrapbook” vibe without too much purposeful curation. The photos are nothing special on their own, but when I paired them with the vignettes, I noticed some strange juxtapositions emerging.

“Intimacy” is exactly the word for it. I suppose I was always looking for ways to invite readers into these moments in the hopes that they might reflect on their own experiences. The interviews and photographs were two ways in.

DINTY: Part of what fascinates me so much about your book is that it serves as a remarkable eulogy of your father-in-law, but it is much about you and your family, the joys of course, but also an honest examination of the challenges of parenting, of marriage, and an inquiry into how we spend our days and weeks and months. How can we make the most of our time, when time feels so short?

B.J. Just yesterday, I read an article in The Washington Post that noted how when we lose someone close to us, we have a neurological drive to “go out and look” for them. Writing this book was my attempt to go out and look for my father-in-law after his death. But it also prompted some introspection, of course. 

I haven’t reached any definitive conclusions. I’m the same person I was before I wrote this book and before my father-in-law died, but I am a little more aware of the minutes, the hours, and the days. I suppose our awareness is about the only factor within our full control. We can’t necessarily “extend” our time on this earth, but we can choose to live in the present and hold tight to the seconds as they tick past. It’s easy to “kill” time; it’s harder to savor it.

DINTY: Of course, what you describe just above is the definition of a writer. The poet Mary Oliver writes,

Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

What is astonishing you now? Do you have a new project already underway?

B.J.: Last summer, my daughter and I completed the Montana Dinosaur Trail, a 14-stop road trip of all things dinosaurs. We talked with paleontologists, commercial fossil hunters, and any number of strangers in small Montana towns who quickly became friends. We camped in state parks and KOAs and literally dug up a hadrosaur bone. It was one of the most astonishing adventures of my lifetime. I’ve been writing about it ever since.
___

B.J. Hollars is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Year of Plenty. (You can view the book trailer here.)The founder and executive director of the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild, he is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire.

The Joys of Writing to Wordcount

By Olga Mecking

“On the test, you will have to write an essay of around 200 words,” my English teacher said.

I first encountered the idea of wordcount in EFL classes and was taken aback. Where I come from, long essays written in flowery style are the norm, especially in school. Teachers said, “Write for as long as you need to include all the necessary information,” but their preference was clearly on the longer side. Lacking any other guidelines, I submitted one-page assignments and was shocked when I got low grades. “But I already said everything I wanted to say,” I argued.

With time, I challenged myself to puff up my essays. Could I add more description here? Expand on this argument? Write at least three pages instead of one? I did everything I could to make my work grow in bulk and my grades improved immediately. But along the way, so did my writing, and I discovered the joy of expressing myself in the written form.

So when my English teacher set wordcount limits, I believed it would stifle the creativity I had just discovered in myself. Writing longer pieces allowed me to consider points of view I may have otherwise ignored, and find a more nuanced way to present my arguments. Now I became the devil’s advocate: how could I write a full essay in just 200 words?

But during the exam, I would stop for a moment and count what I’d already written, then look at the time. Knowing how many words I had left allowed me to plan my essay better. Did I have space to add another argument or should I move towards the finish line? Having so much control over my writing was incredibly powerful—and turned me into a wordcount convert.

When I started writing professionally, I was happy to find wordcounts are also used in journalism. Wordcount is one of the first things I check when preparing to write a story or even before that, during the querying stage. When I write, “I’m thinking between 1000 and 1200 words for this story, I’m letting the editor know that I am familiar with their publication. Shorter doesn’t necessarily mean less work, of course. At times, I’ve done a lot of reporting for 1000-word stories. But wordcounts provide important information. Not just how long the story should be, but also how much detail I can go into, how many sources can I interview, or where I should put the tension points. Since these usually happen at one-quarter, midway and at three-quarters of the story, I knew how many words I could spend on each part and how quickly I should get there. The longer the article, the deeper I can go, but when writing shorter pieces, I have to be very focused on only the most necessary bits. Knowing how long a story will be allows me to gauge the time a piece takes to write and how much I’ll get paid with a per-word rate.

Wordcount was one of the first things I worried about when writing my nonfiction book, Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing. Coming up with enough content for a full-length book was daunting, but dividing it into chapters and sub-chapters made it seem doable. Nothing felt as good as having a calculable goal: knowing the book would be finished at some point, and knowing where that point would be. I approached fiction with the same mindset: I wasn’t writing a novel. I was writing 52 scenes of 1200-1500 words each.

Often, shortening my pieces only made them better.

I once wrote an essay of about 3000 words about the disorienting experience of being a mother abroad. Various literary magazines rejected it. In a moment of brilliance, I cut it down to 1000 words and sent it to the New York Times where it was accepted almost immediately.

Now, when I sit down to write, I get the necessary amount of words out and then edit them, adding scenes, arguments or quotes (depending on the kind of writing), and cutting unnecessary information until I reach that wordcount again. Along the way, I make sure that the whole piece is well-written and properly structured. Quotes from sources and experts fill the wordcount quickly, which is why I rarely write memoir, preferring reported essays and features instead. Sometimes, I treat writing like a game: how close can I come to the desired length?

But the best thing about wordcount is the sense of accomplishment I get when I’m done. It’s like being given a sturdy wooden box to fill with my story. It makes me feel safe.

Constraints don’t kill creativity. They give it space.

(NB from the Brevity Blog editors: this essay came in at 889 words. Now it’s 782.)

_______

Olga Mecking is a Polish writer living in the Netherlands. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The BBC, The Guardian and many others. She is also the author of Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing, out in the US with HarperCollins.

My Poetry Background Helped Save My Memoir—But Not Before It Nearly Did It In

By Ona Gritz

“Things take the time they take,” Mary Oliver says in a poem kindly titled, “Don’t Worry.” My memoir took ten years to complete. No one who knows my painful, complicated story is surprised by this. The book centers on my sister Angie who, twenty-five and pregnant, was brutally murdered with her husband and infant son.

As the youngest in an insular, secretive family, there was a lot I didn’t know about my beloved sister’s life. When I finally began to write about her thirty years after her death, I knew little more than I had as a child. I had to acquire school and court records, track down estranged relatives, scroll through microfilm in the city where she’d last lived.

Sometimes I had to step away from this work because nearly every detail I discovered broke my heart. But the main reason my son grew from a middle-schooler to a college graduate by the time I finished my manuscript is that I wrote it like the poet I am, pausing to perfect every sentence before moving on to the next.

Open almost any craft book and it will tell you that polishing as you go is a bad idea. Don’t judge that first draft. Just get it down. But playing with words and prettying sentences is my favorite part of the job. And in attempting to write a layered, complex family memoir, fussing with the language was the only part of the process I actually knew how to do.

I tend to write short poems, so my bad habit of burnishing while drafting never cost me all that much time. But my talent at concision flew out the window with this project. I understood that, unlike autobiography, memoir’s lens should focus on one small aspect of a life. Yet I had so few memories of my brief life with Angie, I assumed every one belonged in the book.

My manuscript ended up nearly 400 pages long. When I asked for feedback on this tome from my trusted cohort of literary-minded friends, including an editor and an agent, they read my many labored-over sentences and believed along with me that the whole was better than it was.

The book went out and the rejections came in, the first so generous with its praise, I could have used it as a blurb. Instead, it became a life preserver as I began to receive brusque replies, generic ones, and often no reply at all.

Finally, one editor told me the harsh, unadorned truth. While my writing was lovely, the story was too disjointed. Actually, there were too many stories, making it unclear what the book was about.

After a few sleepless nights and more than a few tears, I took a deep breath and sat at my desk, recalling Barack Obama’s phrase about using a scalpel rather than a hatchet. It was hatchet-time for my memoir, though, and I went at it ruthlessly, hacking off every inessential detail and scene. It felt awful to recognize myself as a living cautionary tale against spending years perfecting what was ultimately an early draft. It also felt good as hints of an actual story began to emerge.

I brought the outline of this scaled-down version to an online course, Creating a Narrative Arc Out of a Messy Life. There, under Lilly Dancyger’s brilliant guidance, I began to find my story’s structure: a weaving of timelines that allowed my adult self, the impassioned investigator of our troubled family, to drive the through-line of the book.

Afterwards, I asked Lilly for a developmental edit. I sent her my manuscript and awaited her notes, sure they’d contain a few insightful tweaks to my structure and then I’d be done.

Lilly did offer good advice on the structure, but she also said this: “My biggest note is that I wanted WAY more reflection, on pretty much every page. I wanted to hear what you think and feel about every new piece of information that’s presented.”

I read that note several times before I understood. I’d left myself out of my own memoir! How had I done that? Or rather, how had I done that without noticing?

Again, the answer could be found in my training as a poet. In poetry, restraint is an asset. Don’t tell the reader what you think and feel. Not overtly. Let the moments and images speak. Trust the reader to make meaning from them.

This, I finally learned, is among the greatest differences between the two genres. The job of the memoirist is to show herself erring, thinking, feeling, learning, and evolving. Right there, out loud, on the page.

In truth, I found this prospect terrifying. I didn’t want to look at my role in Angie’s story. I’d been our parents’ favorite. The one who could do no wrong while she could do no right. And I’d hurt her. Less severely than they had, but enough that it pained me to go there. I didn’t even know where to begin.

Then poetry gave me the answer. During a weekend workshop, I wrote a poem where I spoke to Angie directly. The direct address is common in poetry, and I’d used it often. Only this time, I thought, Of course!

In my final revision, I switched the narrative from first to second person, so the book now read like a letter to my sister. I told her how it felt to be me in our family, confiding my misgivings, reflecting on my discoveries, and uncovering my grief. This allowed me to feel close to her again. It also proved to be a path to self-discovery and to writing that wasn’t just pretty, but probing, intimate, and true.

___

Ona Gritz‘s new memoir, Everywhere I Look, is about sisterhood, longing, true crime, and family secrets. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Utne Reader, Brevity, The Rumpus, and River Teeth, and been named Notable in The Best American Essays and best of the year in Salon.

The Magic Question: Getting Real Feedback You Can Actually Use

Show your pretty necklace.

Just look at those beautifully dropped shoulders!

By Allison K Williams

A writer asked,

I wrote a short story recently, which wasn’t very good, and some people left comments complimenting it, but they were being nice, instead of telling me how they really felt. How do I politely ask them not to spare my feelings? While I appreciate the kindness, I wrote the thing as practice and would appreciate criticism, since I want to become a better writer.

There’s a two-part challenge here. First, most of our readers do want to be kind. If they’re writers, they understand how much a negative comment can interrupt or even squash the creative process. Second, if the commentariat are primarily readers, or early-career writers, they may honestly not know how to identify what’s not working, much less how to phrase that constructively, so they put away the unease and say something nice—or, as our mothers taught, they don’t say anything at all.

Direct, specific critique is a kindness in itself. When I started as an editor, I read ads in the back of writing magazines promoting “gentle, nurturing feedback” from “kind, supportive” editors. But my writer friends were asking, “Just tell me what’s wrong so I can fix it!” Yet, not everyone is ready for full-on directness. Even in my twenty-year relationship with the (wonderful! insightful!) editor of my plays, a brusque rejection of a new manuscript turned me off writing another script for nearly three years. Pathetic? Silly? Overdramatic? Yes—but feelings are facts.  

How can we get the feedback we need from readers who don’t want to hurt us? How can we help our writer friends improve without damping their creative joy?

Coaching circus in schools developed the foundation of my teaching style and pedagogy. When I started, I worried about “moving too slowly” and boring the students, but breaking skills into smaller steps at that grueling residency in Alaska (70 elementary kids! Total darkness!) actually led to faster learning, and starting with components before sweeping ideas serves my teaching still. One of my fellow coaches in Utah discovered the power of a positive focus instead of a negative correction. For a particular aerial position, where students were shrugging up to their ears, we all stopped saying “Put your shoulders down!” and started calling out, “Show your pretty necklace!” The imaginary jewelry, and lifting the sternum to “show it” helped students from preschool to adulthood correct their form.

Part of our coaching process was having students show work-in-progress, anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes of a group acrobatic or aerial routine, at the end of each rehearsal. With mixed age levels K-12, the feedback needed careful guidance to stay helpful and encouraging, yet offering critical insights to their peers helped the students improve their own work—just as identifying the challenges in someone else’s writing helps us see those same issues in our own. We started with “What do you see that’s working? What should they make sure they keep doing?”

Then came the magic question: “As they keep working, what should they keep working on?”

Try to stay in unison more—Jenny’s calling the moves at the right time, so can she be louder?

Point their toes harder, it looked really good when they did.

Even more of the funny moments, we liked the characters!

Not “you guys were out of sync” or “sloppy feet” or “undeveloped characters.” Positive focus, instead of negative correction.

The Magic Question is a very simplified version of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, a more elaborate method that also controls what feedback is received and how it’s given. By identifying what the artists are doing well, we set our critical eyes to what we’re actually seeing/reading/hearing, rather than what we wish we had experienced. By focusing the feedback on what to do more or better rather than instead, we affirm the creators’ goals and respond within the framework of their creation.

As I keep working, what should I keep working on? enlists our readers as collaborative partners and colleagues, rather than elevating them to be our critics. The answers are a lot easier to receive, and the feedback becomes part of our own work plan. We’re not being told, “do this” or “don’t do that.” We’re being affirmed for the work we’re doing, and encouraged to develop our own next steps to make the best parts better.

It’s entirely possible that in the pursuit of improvement, we’ll discover we were working towards the wrong thing to begin with. Maybe the key isn’t pointed feet at all, but making sure the flexed feet look intentional. But making that discovery ourselves is more powerful than being told. And helping another writer find their own path is less fraught than informing them they’ve got the wrong map.

As we develop relationships with writing friends and within peer groups, our feedback style can and will evolve. I have plenty of friends who can tell me “That’s not working the way you want it to,” and to whom I can respond in kind. But for early-draft feedback, for stranger/acquaintance critique, and for assessing our own work, the Magic Question is a powerful way to give direct and kind feedback that’s also immediately useful.

______

Allison K Williams is Brevity‘s Social Media Editor and the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book.

For the Edification of My Soul—And the Enhancement of My Writing Craft

By Laura Johnsrude

I go to art galleries for the edification of my soul.

I go to art galleries to gasp and moan and wonder and pause.

Pause, as I do at a good line on the page. Captivated, I read the good line again, to savor the craft and the way the prose makes me feel.

At an art gallery, I want to see through someone else’s viewfinder, see inside someone else’s mind, yes. And visual art—I find—can nourish a writer’s imagination, generating ideas for new work.

Reason enough for me to wander a room surrounded by paintings, collages, and mixed media installations.  

As a creative nonfiction writer, I believe there’s more to glean in these experiences than seeds and fertilizer.

In an art gallery, I relish the unexpected, the artist’s novel choices. I lean close to see the threads or buttons or bugs stuck to the canvas. To see the tiny dots of color or the swirls of the paint. To see the contrasting dark and light in a photograph. The recurring elements. What’s implied or echoed or blown up into hyperbole. I laugh when I realize the artist repurposed lightbulbs or dominos or pencil erasers, turning the stuff of drawers and boxes and trashcans into art.

Whoever thought of doing that? Making a quilt out of ticket stubs. Making a portrait out of aquarium rocks. Making a sculpture out of thimbles and bottlecaps. Painting the young girl’s eyes that piercing shade of green. Using paper towels color-dyed by wiping wet vegetables. Placing the pitchfork so close to me that I feel stabbed.

Oh, yes, there’s inspiration inside an art gallery for us—the writers—to craft our prose in unexpected ways, to make our own novel choices.

We can think about ways to do that. Juxtaposing concepts for contrast and comparison. Evoking mood with sensory details. Pulling a thread through a segmented essay. Lifting lyrical prose with rhythm. Portraying motifs by intentional repetition and list-making.

Oh, lean close to see the delight of a scene so round and crisp it is alive. To see the imagery created by language, like smoke, suddenly just . . . there. To see all those words arranged with dots and commas to slow the pace, then strung together in a rushing, stomping, revving, peddle-down, cascade of consonants clacking together, into a full-stop crash at a pitchfork period.

Yes, I go to art galleries for the edification of my soul.

And I go to art galleries for the enhancement of my writing craft.

We can visit art galleries to pay attention—to notice— and then can carry the insights and feelings back home with us, to write and revise, building and shaping our prose. Maybe our readers will gasp and moan, or even laugh. Maybe they’ll pause and wonder—how, pray tell, did they do that?

__________

Laura Johnsrude is a retired healthcare provider and creative nonfiction writer, recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her essays have been published in Fourth Genre, Bellevue Literary Review, River Teeth, Hippocampus, and Under the Gum Tree among others. She is Assistant Book Review Editor for Good River Review. Connect with Laura on Instagram.

Does It Have to Be Memoir?

By Beth Kephart

In the end, we make it. We craft the poem, we THE END the novel, we choose the cover art that will announce our work. No matter which pronouns we’ve used, no matter how many autobiographical facts we’ve either deployed or disguised, no matter how we defend or announce ourselves in our gussied-up flap copy, the books by us begin with us; they are personal. There is always the glimmer of an I standing in plain sight.

Having written and taught memoir for more than thirty years, I understand the impulse—better than I sometimes wish—to uphold the I as a verifiable I, to go to market with a memoir. The true story can, after all, be nearly anything at all—splinters, streamers, details, arcs—so long as it is true. But sometimes, even after years of work, the memoir we think we have been writing simply wants to buck the truth. It wants to suppose. It wants to bend. It needs a dose of artifice. It’s just not interesting anymore. It’s stuck inside its cage.

If that’s the case—if your memoir has become not an odyssey but a job, not a fervent search but a grinding duty—why not set it free? Why not liberate your best true stories by exploring other forms?

Think Ocean Vuong. Think Francisco Goldman. Think Vaddey Ratner. The first made, of his personal history and his great love for his mother, the art of the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The second transformed the harrowing sudden death of his new wife into Say Her Name, a book he sold as fiction. The third recreated the trauma of her experience with the Khmer Rouge into the transporting In the Shadow of the Banyan, also a novel. These three authors are among the many authors (Claire-Louise Bennett, Sheila Heti, Lisa Halliday, to name a few) who gave themselves the freedom to write toward emotional truths without lashing themselves to the absolutes of mindful autobiography.

Throughout my nearly forty-book career I’ve swerved from personal memoir to a river’s memoir that felt more true than anything that had preceded it. I wrote a wild corporate fable (with a chief executive officer friend) that encapsulated so many of my years spent writing annual reports and vision statements and executive talks without betraying a single confidence or company policy. I wrote a middle-grade novel called Undercover which is, in all the most important ways, the story of my teenaged years that I would never write as memoir, and I once wrote a young-adult novel called The Great Upending that features two young people I loved, on a landscape I loved, with a message that, had it been written into a memoir, might well have come off as a screech.

Finally, in November, my newest book, My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera, was released—a book in which memoir sits alongside deeply researched history, and in which the narrative adhesive is a series of letters written to a man I never met, a paper adventurer named Dard Hunter who died in 1966.

Every book I’ve written, in other words, began as something true—a memory I had, a problem I faced, a regret I couldn’t neglect, some kind of beauty I wanted to hold onto, some question that needed to be answered, or at least heeded. Writing beyond the truth hasn’t just given me room to go deeper and farther than the facts sometimes allowed. It has also returned me to memoir, and to memoir teaching, with a greater respect for the possibilities of form, and tense, and attitude.

In the end, the words we’ve written are the words we’ve written. We claim them. They claim us. If memoir has become, for you, too small a space within to dream, consider the novel, the watercolor, or the poem.

__________

Beth Kephart is an award-winning writer and teacher and a paper artist. More at bethkephartbooks.com and bind-arts.com. Please join her for her upcoming Craft Talks presentation, Does It Have to Be Memoir? Reimagining Your True Story, April 3rd at 2PM Eastern time (yes, there’s a recording!)

Hit Play: Tapping the Power of Song

By Gretchen Cion

“Just listen,” my friend said, handing me her headphones. 

At thirteen years old, I sat on the steps of my junior high school while Martin Gore of Depeche Mode spoke directly to my soul. Martin had me at that first word of his tragic yet electrifying lyric— “fragile!” With puberty and unrequited crushes and pimples strewn across my face, I too knew what it meant to be fragile daily. Tears brimming from having been seen, I promptly went out to Bill’s Records and bought “Black Celebration” on cassette.

With time, the intensity of music and my love for it lured me into writing. By then, I had graduated to The Smiths. I would crack my journal open and rant away mostly in the form of really bad poetry. I certainly wasn’t alone as a teenager in this practice, waxing poetic on my disdain for the world or a less-than-loyal boyfriend. Morrissey pierced my melodramatic heart. It wasn’t until I started writing essays as an adult, though, that I realized how vital music could be to kickstarting my creativity.

I’ve found songs from my life to be the container in which my stories are kept. Turn up some Janet Jackson, and I’m breaking and popping at a house party in New York City circa 1999. Pop in some “Wagon Wheel” by Old Crow Medicine Show, and I’m feet-out-of-the-window road-tripping, singing along with my husband and kids across West Texas in the summertime. When writing about these memories, I put the music on and let myself go into a deep, full body remembering that’s transportive.

While working on my essay collection, For Shame and Other Fun Feelings, I was struggling to find the emotional resonance of a specific memory at the crux of my piece. “Bambeléo” by Gispy Kings opened the floodgates, dropping me right back into my twenty-two-year-old, self-conscious self and the basement apartment in San Francisco where I betrayed my truth for group acceptance. Sure, the song left me a little raw from the pain it contained, but its time-machine quality, delivering me into details of the moment, was worth it. 

Songs, no doubt, are portals to the past, but it’s not all about the memories. Dig into some new tracks and be ready for the ideas they deliver. I teach a class called Poetic Playlist to girls and gender-expansive youth through The Intuitive Writing Project. Each week, I introduce lyrics by beloved songwriters. We discuss both craft elements and the lines that resonate with us. Then I present a prompt connected to an idea, the song’s theme, or a direct quote from the music before we go off and write together.

Years into leading this class, I’m still amazed by how readily a song presents a prompt after one read-through. Inspiration abounds, usually tethered to an explicit truth worth exploring. While listening to, say, Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” one might consider who or what in the writer’s life is worth an uphill battle. Part of what I love about using songs as prompts is how the music can make us feel and how it can affect and inspire each of us in completely different ways.

I’ve come to depend on the warmth and serenity music can provide when I write. My fingers freeze on the keyboard without it. I become one of Pavlov’s dogs. Cue the music, cue my creativity. It’s as if the music moves to the forefront, while my writing becomes a secondary, less precious, out-of-the-spotlight kind of thing. Nothing to see here, just some words coming together. With the daunting silence filled, my fingers fly. 

Lofi Girl is instrumental to my practice, literally. No lyrics, just a steady string of beats that sets a layer of calm in my space. As an educator, I routinely use chill tunes to welcome my students into the classroom, to accompany group discussions, and as a backbeat setting for in-class writing time. Everybody seems to like a little backbeat. 

Could I write without music?

Possibly, but why would I deprive myself of the richness of reflection, the imaginative sparks, or the cocooned tranquility song can offer? We all have our writing practices. Some thrive in a closet of silence while others need community to stir their creative flow. For me, I’ll lean into the power of a playlist every time. 

____________

Gretchen Cion is a multi-genre writer, filmmaker, aspiring DJ, and educator currently teaching with The Intuitive Writing Project and Berkeley City College. She holds an M.Ed. from Hunter College and has nearly completed an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Her essays have appeared in Transfer Magazine, Sky Island Journal and her first short film, “Full Crow,” was a semi-finalist at the Boden International Film Festival. You can learn more about Gretchen at www.gretchencion.com.

How Do You Know When Your Work Is Done?

By Suzanne Roberts

One of the questions I often get about writing is this: How do I know when a piece is finished? The first answer I give is that it’s done when it says what it needed to say, which is usually something different or deeper than what I had set out to do from the beginning, so there are both surprise and recognition. I’m the sort of writer who often has no idea where I’m going until I get there. Writing is an act of discovery, and I only figure out what I’m trying to say by saying it.

Another answer I give is that I know I’m done when I’m putting commas in and taking them back out; fiddling with the minutiae is a sign that it’s time to let it go.

Both these answers are true, but they are also not true. The truth is that nothing is ever finished. This isn’t the answer most writers want to hear, but I’m offering it here as good news. If we accept that we will never be done with a piece of writing, we can stop worrying so much about it.  

We change and grow as writers, so when we return to our work, we can always improve it. When I give a reading, there are often words or phrases I read differently from the printed page, which is why I wince when someone in the audience opens my book “to read along.” Many writers I know do this, editing their already-published words when they read. And if we’re lucky, we might be given the opportunity to make those changes in subsequent press runs. I was able to do just this with my first memoir Almost Somewhere.

Two summers ago, I set out again to hike California’s John Muir Trail, the trip I wrote about in my 2012 memoir. I brought my Kindle along, so every night in the tent, I consulted my own book to compare the trail I was hiking to the one in my memory; I was interested in the ways backpacking had evolved but also how I had changed. Drought and wildfire, along with more signage and safer bridges, had transformed the landscape but more than that, my understanding of myself and my place in the world have changed.

Reading my earlier work, I found so many cringey phrases, and I also saw just how naive I had been about so many things. As a young woman, I had read mostly male nature writers and never quite saw the landscape they offered me in their books—one of rugged individualism and of conquest, so in Almost Somewhere, I had been seeking a uniquely feminine view of nature, one based on connection and community. What I hadn’t thought about, though, was that early American nature writers were not just coming from a masculine place, but a stance of colonization. I had been taught that our national park system was a wholly positive American endeavor, and it wasn’t until years later that I learned the creation of the park system was predicated on a dark past—one of displacement, murder, and erasure of Native Americans. Both my experience and the memoir I wrote represent an imagination limited by a lack of knowledge.

This is not to say that my first memoir—a record of who I was at that moment in time—isn’t of value. Yet when I revisited the book, I realized I wanted to write an afterword, noting the ways my perception, consciousness, and capacity for empathy have changed. When my husband and I took a rest day at the Vermillion Valley Resort, a popular stopover for both JMT and PCT thru hikers, I paid the expensive internet fee and wrote to my editor, pitching the idea of a new edition of Almost Somewhere. He wrote back immediately, saying he loved the idea.

When I returned home, I went through my memoir again, making small changes. I had to stop myself from making more significant revisions, because I knew I had to honor my earlier effort and the writer who made the best book she could at the time. Our work is a snapshot of our earlier selves, and if we aren’t sometimes embarrassed when we look back, that probably means we haven’t learned a damn thing.

Many people don’t get to go back and revise earlier publications, though I’m certainly not the first to do it. Walt Whitman famously revised his first edition of Leaves of Grass over the last four decades of his life. What started as 12 poems became a 400-poem “deathbed version” tome. The French painter Pierre Bonnard often retouched paintings he had made many years earlier and was even rumored to have persuaded a friend to distract the guards while he touched up a painting hanging in a museum.

Going back in and making changes and additions later enables us to see where we’ve been and maybe even where we’re going. It also makes clear that we’re never really done with a piece of writing or work of art—that is, not until we’re dead, and if we can keep this in mind as we go, maybe we’ll be able to more easily let things go.

__________

Suzanne Roberts is the author of three award-winning memoirs: Animal Bodies, Bad Tourist, and Almost Somewhere, as well as four collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, CNN, National Geographic Traveler, Brevity, and elsewhere. She teaches for the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing at UNR-Tahoe, and is currently at work on a craft book, based on her Substack newsletter 52 Writing Prompts.

“Live Writing” & Nurturing the Freedom to Make Abstract Connections

By Alexandra O’Sullivan

When people ask me what I do and I tell them I’m a teacher, their faces often brighten for follow up question, ‘What do you teach?’ then quickly twist into humorous disgust to exclaim, ‘Oh, I hated English!’

Some days just walking into my classroom to face the ever-present hatred, not of me, but of the subject I happen to love, is uniquely discouraging.

In my first year of teaching, I handed out reader’s notebooks filled with lined paper for the students to fill with their reflections on different texts. The books had shiny covers, pages for brainstorming ideas and for recording reading goals, and were held together by spiral binding. Within the first week several students had ripped out the binding and were walking around the classroom using it as a whip to whack other students. One student tore up everything I gave him, including the worksheets I printed, along with every short story, poem, and essay. When asked by a school village leader why he was misbehaving in my class, he screwed up his face in pure disgust and spat, ‘It’s English!’

In my naïve moments, as a hopeful writer pursuing my teaching degree to pay the bills, I’d imagined introducing great literature to utterly absorbed and wide-eyed youths, believing that my passion would translate to theirs. If I couldn’t cut it as a full-time writer, then at least I could share my love for literature with the next generation, but I was failing at that too. Those that can’t do, teach. What do those that can’t teach do?

I went to class each day, fresh worksheets sitting in the folders tucked in my teacher’s bag. I presented my PowerPoints, and pin-pointed the few students who did enjoy reading and writing, who emailed me their novels and short stories for feedback and who read impressively sophisticated books during silent reading. I watched these students sit in a small cluster, their faces veiled with a waning patience as I yelled and begged and pleaded with the rest of the class to sit down, to stop throwing paper, to be quiet and let me get through the explanations and instructions before the independent task. It was those quiet students, the ones who did share my love of English, that I felt like I was failing the most.

I couldn’t blame the other students though. Beneath their bravado I sensed a terrible fear. During my first teaching placement I’d been told I had to ‘live write’ on the board in front of the students while discussing my creative choices. These ‘think alouds’ were an integral part of a pedagogical methodology that focused on the teacher explicitly modelling every skill before asking students to do it themselves.

The first time I tried ‘live writing,’ I stood in front of the class, gripping my whiteboard marker, and felt the glare of the classroom lights on me. Writing is often done alone, in the dark, where those early drafts can be as ugly as they need to be. Writing, exposed, in front of a classroom of children who were just waiting to cut me down, was truly daunting. I stumbled through it and came out with a deeper empathy for the students who, as I stood over them demanding that they do their work, turned pale and insisted, ‘but I don’t know what to write.’

They were telling the truth. The fear of exposing those ugly first sentences can block the best of us, let alone the troubled youths I was teaching. Even writing in the dark, as I’m doing now, is often hard work. Sometimes there is a struggle in accessing the necessary abstract thought, those magical connections that snap together like magnets to create coherence in a piece of writing. Usually, if I wait patiently enough, they come zipping in and snapping together all on their own. Usually.

Many students, I have noticed, don’t like to think in the abstract. When I ask them to seek such connections in a text, they roll their eyes and moan, “I don’t get it.”

If I never ‘got it,’ if I never experienced those moments of zipping and snapping that make the wait well worth it, then I’d want to rip it all up too. Sometimes, I still do. But I always return to the struggle, because pushing beyond it brings such joy. If only my students understood this. It’s not always easy. To face great art is to face yourself. To find connections in literature, to create your own, are ways to enter a lifelong conversation with the world, and with what it means to be a human in it.

In desperation, I designed a stream of consciousness writing lesson. I created a PowerPoint that explained the technique of non-stop writing where you just get down all the thoughts in your head without worrying about how they sound. I asked the students to set a timer for me to demonstrate the technique on the board. We bantered back and forth about how long I would write in front of them, then decided on one minute. I admitted to them that I was feeling intimidated before I turned to the board and began. Behind me, I could hear students giggling and accusing me of ‘stopping,’ every time my marker paused for a millisecond.  

When it was their turn, I set the timer on my phone for three minutes. “So, we can write anything?” A student asked again. “Anything!” I confirmed. “Fill the page with swear words, tear them up afterwards if you want! Just write nonstop, and silently!” I pressed the timer. Ten seconds in someone yelled ‘shit!’ and, as agreed, I reset the timer. They knew I meant business. They tested it again. On the third reset, twenty-two heads bowed down over pages, twenty-two pens scurried back and forth, the only sound in the room.

I walked between desks, breathing in the focussed writing that was happening all around me. When it was over, students erupted into a babble of excited chatter, many clamouring to come forward and share their work with massive smiles on their faces, their pages filled with words. I had given them the darkness the writer craves. The freedom the writer needs. For a moment, at least, they got it.
___

Alexandra O’Sullivan lives in regional Victoria, Australia, and writes fiction, creative nonfiction, reviews, and feature articles. Her work has appeared in publications such as Meanjin, The Victorian Writer and The Guardian. She works as a high school English teacher and was recently included in the anthology Teacher, teacher published by Affirm Press.

Not Telling It All

By Bev Stevens

I was in my sixties before I turned my hand to creative nonfiction. I was, and still am, writing web copy and how-to guides for online accounting software: dry stuff, but that’s okay; it pays well, I have an analytical mind and a good deal of persistence. For a long time, I had no pretensions to be a real writer. I had been mightily discouraged by a primary school teacher. She read my poem and said I’d never be a writer, too many lists. Actually the poem was okay for a seven-year-old; it used concrete sensory detail and went something like, Blue sky, green grass, autumn leaves, falling down. I told anyone who asked that I could never write a novel; I lacked imagination. That, too, was something a teacher had said, but it was the sewing teacher, irritated with my constant requests for help to make a sundress.

In my mental hierarchy of writers and writing, literary fiction was at the top. I read and reread Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen. I devoured their biographies, and those of other women writers, fascinated by the links between their lives and what they wrote. I read contemporary novels by award-winning or well-reviewed writers including acclaimed New Zealand writer Barbara Anderson who was in her sixties when her first novel was published. That fact stuck with me. Years later, I was at the university graduation ceremony where Barbara, now aged 83, was awarded an honorary doctorate. But by then, dementia meant a helper had to lead her on stage. My mother’s mental state started to decline at about the same age, and I found myself counting the number of good years I reckoned I had left in which to do all the things I wanted to do. It turns out, creative writing is one of them.

I began with a story I’d uncovered in an internet archive of old New Zealand newspapers of how, in 1912, my eminently respectable grandfather, then aged 19, was charged with riding a motorcycle furiously and negligently, knocking over a small boy who was running across the road. I wanted it to make the story inviting enough that my daughters, nieces and nephews would want to read it. But I failed; it was lengthy and dry. That spurred me to enroll for a memoir course, the first of many creative writing workshops and webinars over the past six years.

Now, I’m building a collection of essays that tell the story of my life. What drives me has altered. There’s a sense, despite—or perhaps because of—my reserved nature, of wanting to be known; of, after three score years and ten, having something to say. I grew up, the eldest of six children, in a family where little warmth or affection was shown, where emotions were kept in check except for the occasional flare of my father’s temper. Dinner table conversation was restricted to Pass the salt please, and May I have a second helping. We heard no details of my aunt’s divorce or my father’s rift with his parents. We kept up the appearance of a well-adjusted family even into adulthood; the cracks that appeared as the six of us moved towards middle age, whether it was alcoholism, affairs, domestic violence, embezzlement, sexual abuse, or gambling, were whispered about, covered over and sealed up. 

So to open up in my writing is a challenge. How much can I say without breaking the family compact to hold things in and keep them close? What can I tell without upsetting someone, hurting their feelings, or damaging relationships? I can write about my breast cancer, but not my marriage breakup. I can write about my parents openly now that they are gone. But my brothers and sisters are a different matter; so are my friends, my daughters, and my ex-husband. Even if I was a great writer, I couldn’t convince myself that I’m entitled to tell all in the service of art. The defense that it’s my story to tell from my perspective doesn’t sit well with me.

It means there’s a lot I can’t tell unless I can frame it with compassion; unless I’m willing to show it to anyone who is portrayed in a less than flattering light; and unless I have their permission to publish. I toy with the idea of changing names, submitting to US journals the people I write about won’t ever come across, and not sharing those pieces on social media. But that still gives me an uncomfortable sense of betrayal. And what’s the point if I can’t trumpet my success?

I’ve realized I do want to be known, but selectively. I’m happy to stay clear of scandal and trauma except for passing hints, instead portraying pivotal moments from ordinary life. I’m keen to have essays accepted by literary journals in recognition of having reached a certain level of proficiency in the craft. The story of my grandfather’s reckless driving and brush with the law, however, still awaits, and deserves, a rewrite.

__________

Beverley Stevens is a writer of creative nonfiction by night and a web writer by day. Her work has been published in leading New Zealand literary journals Landfall and Headland, as well as in the Longridge Review and Dorothy Parkers’s Ashes. She lives in Wellington, New Zealand. Visit her website at designit.co.nz

---