Tuesdays with Story

Writer’s Mail
Tuesdays With Story
August 6, 2013

“You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” – Jodi Picoult

Tuesday at Barnes & Noble…thanks Amber
Carol from 2nd and 4th visits with the group and shares her experience self-publishing her novel Asperger Sunset; overall, positive. Jerry and Amber bought their copies right then and there. Lisa has purchased it on Kindle (no signed copy for her.)

Lisa shares a chapter from Tebow Family Secret. Jerry wonders about there being wine in the library after Adam gives his speech. Alicia liked it and found one of the character in particular bold. Pat thought that three minutes of applause after the speech was too much and suggested that Lisa should go home and try clapping for three minutes because that’s a long time. She was disappointed when one of the characters offered another an internship after being so adamant about not starting a relationship with the person he is offering the job to. Judith got that the character was fighting his feelings, but Lisa thought she could beef that part up. Pat wondered if she could replace a reference to a real celebrity with the words, ‘movie star.’

Then Lisa shares her poem, Choir Practice at the Pool Hall with the group. Pat gives a shout out to Gwendolyn Brooks. Pat suggests leaving the last stanza off. Andy thought it jumped all over the place and found it hard to follow. Even Lisa thinks it’s a dark poem, and it is. Jerry agrees about dropping the last stanza. Ruth wonders if Lisa could switch the order of the last two stanzas instead of dropping the last one altogether.

Alicia shares the last chapter of Lincoln’s Other War. Lisa had a lot of questions, and she wondered if what was happening at one place and time was going on at the same time as something else. Pat enjoyed Alicia’s reading in a bittersweet kind of way, and wondered if she made Mary Todd a little more manic then maybe it would be even more believable. Good work on a job well done.

Andy reads from the prologue he added to his rewrite of the first chapter of Pilleum. Everyone agreed that the dialogue is better in this draft. Lisa was curious about some kind of back-story and Andy said that this should be uncertain and left up to the reader as to when it takes place. Alicia thinks that Lisa is looking for a historical grounding. People still didn’t like one certain character any better than they did the last time. Jerry was puzzled by why the main character doesn’t just take what she wants. Pat noted a lot of fire metaphors. Ruth wondered if shape-shifting might be a possibility since we are in a different world. Jerry had a problem with there being American slang in the dialogue given that we don’t know where or when the story is happening.

Pat shares four poems with the specific structure of the Japanese Tanka. Lisa liked them all. Jerry and Amber liked the last one a lot. Andy noted that the turn in one poem came later than where it should have been.

Amber reads a chapter from Noble. Andy liked it and wondered if, when Moira says that she has been studying, her mom could reply “studying what?” Moira could say “biology” and her mom could call her out on it. Lisa thought that it was a good chapter, but wondered why Ansel left the way he did. General agreement that it had to with teenage boy issues and self-preservation. Pat pointed out that oaks and pines cannot exist in the same forest system.

Jerry shares the first two chapters of Capitol Crimes. Pat really liked the doctor character and hopes he keeps popping up in the story. There is a short discussion about delirium tremens and one of the characters falling off the wagon. Alicia thinks the story should start with chapter two. Andy, too, thought the first chapter got a bit long. For a stronger, more immediate opening, Pat emphasized strong visuals and specific, trauma-based reactions.

Who’s up next . . .
August 20: Lisa McDougal (chapter, Tebow Family Secret), Andy Pfeiffer (novella/part 2, Pilleum), Bob Kralapp (poems), Millie Mader (chapter 46/part 2, Life on Hold), Judith McNeil (chapter 3, My Mother, Savior of Men), and Amber Boudreau (chapter 18, Noble).
August 27th: Carol Hornung (Ghost of Heffron College).
September 3: Lisa McDougal (chapter, Tebow Family Secret), Ruth Imhoff (chapter, Motto of the Hound), Millie Mader (chapter 47, Life on Hold), Pat Edwards (poems), Amber Boudreau (chapter 19, Noble), and Jerry Peterson (chapters 3-4, Capitol Crimes).

Fifth Tuesday, planning ahead . . .
Yes, our next Fifth Tuesday is October 29. You knew that.
Yes, second-and-fourth group hosts. You knew that, too.
But what you didn’t know is where we will be . . . at Mystery To Me Bookstore, Madison’s new independent mystery bookstore on Monroe Street. It’s across the street from Trader Joe’s. We talked about this at our last Fifth Tuesday, and the consensus was Mystery To Me is where we want to go in October. Store owner Joanne Berg says we are most welcome.

TWS’s newest published
Carol Hornung joined the ranks of those of us who have published books with her mystery, Asperger Sunset, now up on Amazon as both a print book and a Kindle book. Get a copy, read it, then post a mini-review on Amazon and Goodreads. That’s what we do in TWS, help one another succeed.

Reading events…
August 16: Eric Piostrowski at A Room of One’s Own, 6:00 pm. Eric will read stories from This Ain’t What You Rung For.
August 17: Eric Bledsoe at Mystery to Me, 2:00 pm. Eric reads from the second Tufa novel Wisp of a Thing.

Learning to write and read poetry . . .
Reporter Tom Vitale delved into that with former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky yesterday morning on NPR’s Morning Edition. A fascinating story. Here it is:
For Robert Pinsky, the pleasure in poetry comes from the music of the language, and not from the meaning of the words. So he put together an anthology of 80 poems that are models by master poets — from Sappho to Allen Ginsberg, Shakespeare to Emily Dickinson.
“For a lot of people, well-meaning teaching has made poetry seem arcane, difficult, kind of brown-knotting medicine that might be good for you but doesn’t taste so good,” Pinsky says. “So I tried to make a collection of poetry that would be fun. And that would bring out poetry as an art, rather than a challenge to say smart things.”
The book is called Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by studying with the Masters. It includes a 15-word meditation on time by 19th century British writer Walter Savage Landor:
On love, on grief, on every human thing
Time sprinkles Lethe’s water with his wing.
(Lethe is the river of forgetfulness, one of the five rivers of Hades in Greek mythology.)
Pinsky says that what charms him about this verse is the graceful choreography of the words: “Three times at the beginning of that poem, I put my upper teeth on my lower lip, to say, ‘On love, on grief, on every human thing.’ And three times at the end I purse my lips to say, ‘Time sprinkles Lethe’s water with his wing.’ If you want to write well, it helps you think about vowels and consonants, which are an important element in making what someone else would want to read or hear aloud.”
Pinsky says reading poetry aloud — language carried by the human voice — is a unique pleasure, one that Pinsky hammered home when he founded the Favorite Poem Project as U.S. Poet Laureate in the 1990s. The online project features 50 videos of ordinary Americans talking about their favorite poems.
“She spoke to me,” Jamaican immigrant and Long Beach, Calif., resident Seph Rodney says of Sylvia Plath in one of the videos. “She spoke it seems, directly to my life. It was powerful. It was bitter. It was caustic. It was at the same time really urgent about the need for love.”
John Freeman, former editor of GRANTA Literary magazine, and author of How to Read a Novelist, says with the Favorite Poem Project, Pinksy demonstrated the importance of poetry in American lives.
“I think he is the most important U.S. Poet Laureate since that position has been resurrected,” Freeman says. “He really took the job and ran with it.”
Pinsky teaches at Boston University and is author of more than a dozen collections of his own verse. For him, a poem begins with sound.
“Even just the cadence of pauses,” he explains. “I stop. I think. I wait. I wait a little longer. Then less. … Something like that generates the poem. And for me, if anything I do is any good, it’s carried by that kind of cadence or melody.”
As a teenager, Pinsky wanted to be a jazz saxophonist. Now, at the age of 72, he’s playing jazz again, this time syncopating his verse with the rhythms of a band. In March, he performed with a trio at a New Jersey writer’s conference.
“When we play together, you’re listening very intently to what the others are doing,” Pinksy says, “and responding to it as they’re responding to you. And that’s a joy like no other.”
Pinsky has taken his joy in language to a place no other American poet has ever been: In a 2002 episode of The Simpsons, Pinsky plays an animated version of himself giving a reading at a college. And that’s nothing to sneer at, says critic John Freeman. “When a poet can be that visible and that important that they can also be made fun of, that’s a good thing for poetry,” he says.
For his part, Pinsky says at least he knows someone’s listening, even if it’s a yellow, fictional, 8-year-old: “Hey listen, as I always like to put it, Lisa knows my work,” he says.
Pinsky says his hope for the future of poetry is that more people will know the work of more poets.
*Now that you’ve read the interview, you owe it to yourself to listen to it, compete with the excerpt from The Simpsons. Here’s the link: http://www.npr.org/2013/08/06/209256446/pinskys-singing-school-poetry-for-the-verse-averse

Great word . . .
Often it’s the word’s history that makes the word really interesting. Wordsmith Anu Garg illustrates with this great word:
paparazzi
PRONUNCIATION:
(pah-puh-RAT-see)

MEANING: noun
Photographers who follow famous people to take their pictures for publication.

ETYMOLOGY:
Plural of paparazzo, from the name of a photographer in Federico Fellini’s 1959 film La Dolce Vita. Fellini got the name via scriptwriter Ennio Flaiano who picked it from the 1901 travel book By the Ionian Sea. The book mentions a hotel owner named Coriolano Paparazzo. Fellini claimed at another time that the name Paparazzo suggested to him “a buzzing insect, hovering, darting, stinging”. Earliest documented use: 1961.

USAGE:
“I wasn’t even in the same ballpark as most of the fathers, who were tripping over each other to record their progenies’ squeaky, off-key performances. It was worse than a restaurant full of drunken paparazzi realizing they’d caught the president.”
– Tony Hicks; The Parent Paparazzi; Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, California); Jan 30, 2012.

What if you don’t like the book your friend wrote . . .
That put’s you in a bad situation, says YA author and blogger Nathan Bransford. Here’s how he started a recent blog:
It’s always a little nerve-wracking to read the books your friends have written because dear god what if you don’t like it and then you have to pretend that you do, but what if you’re not a good liar and they can tell you don’t really like it and then it becomes a Thing and so you try to insist, “No, I really do like it” and the other person says, “It’s okay, it’s totally cool if you don’t like it” and BOTH OF YOU ARE LYING*.
Been there? And now Bransford on reading on your smartphone:
Maybe it’s because we’re all living a hectic urban life, but I cannot count the number of friends who have sheepishly admitted that they haven’t read a book in a long time.
Read the full post at http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2013/07/publication-alert-all-our-pretty-songs.html

Food For Thought…
“Write about winter in the summer.”-Annie Dillard