Tuesdays with Story

Writer’s Mail
Tuesdays with Story
February 20, 2015

He said it . . .
On writing and stories, whether print or television . . . “It’s the words. It’s all about the words.” – Bob Simon, television correspondent (1941-2015)

From Tuesday evening’s gathering of first-and-thirders . . .
Lisa McDougal read from chapter twenty-six of Tebow Family Secret. Alicia Connolly-Lohr thought the waiters would have fancy dress and wondered if one character would stab at another instead of impaling them and nick them so there would be blood, but the cops wouldn’t be called. Kashmira Sheth wanted to know why Lisa needed this scene. Jerry Peterson wondered why they would serve pasties at this particular restaurant, but Lisa let us know they’re supposed to be pastries. Amber Boudreau questioned a few lines of one character’s dialogue. Jerry pointed to a few lines he thought were overwritten, but it might have come from an earlier version.
Amber read some flash fiction. Kashmira suggested shortening the front end and getting into the story faster. Jerry thought the narrator should get nicked and be in a bit more peril before he is saved from his vision.

Alicia read from Chapter 11 of Coastie Girl. Lisa was interested in reading more after reading this chapter. Judith McNeil thought it was realistic. Pat Edwards thought the internal dialogue didn’t match some of the other narration in places and questioned the strength of the language. Jerry had trouble with the crew
“running around.” Kashmira was looking for some more impact on the main character in one scene in particular.

Amit Trivedi read from a revision of Chapter Thirteen. Pat likes it when they make her look things up and enjoyed the descriptions about the hut. Lisa thought the descriptions went a little long in the beginning. Lisa has a question about the next Chapter. It’s unclear who has read it or not, but Kashmira answered the question. Jerry wanted the main character of chapter thirteen to perform a specific action in the work. Pat wondered whether this is adult fiction or young adult. Kashmira suggested it could be new adult. Jerry thought Chapter fourteen really started on the second page.

Millie Mader read from Chapter sixty-one of Life On Hold. Lisa was looking for more at the end of this chapter. Alicia was looking for a little bit of conflict between the main character and another girl. Pat wondered how the girl could get on the military base. Jerry had a problem with the last paragraph. Pat was looking for some more consistency in the writing, too.

Jerry read from Chapter ten of Rooster’s Story. Alicia was glad to see more of one character who didn’t have much to say in previous chapters. Pat wanted to know where the main character got the booze and wondered why he might have drank in the first place.

*Special note. First-and-thirders will next meet on Wednesday evening, March 4. The group will move for that evening only because Jennifer Chiaverini launches her newest novel, Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule, at B&N on Tuesday evening, March 3. The crowd she pulls will take all the chairs in the store.

Who’s up next . . .
February 24: Carol Hornung (scenes, The Ghost of Heffron College) and Judah LoVato (chapter, The Bridge).

March 4: **Yes, this is a new night, a Wednesday night!
Alicia Connolly-Lohr (chapter 12, Coastie Girl), Pat Edwards (???), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Mike Rickey (poems), Millie Mader (chapter 61, Life on Hold), and Andy Brown (chapter, The Last Library).

March 17: Lisa McDougal (chapter, Tebow Family Secret), Amber Boudreau (???), Bob Kralapp (???), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Alicia Connolly-Lohr (chapter 13, Coastie Girl), Judith McNeil (???), and Jerry Peterson (chapters 11-13, Rooster’s Story).

Fifth Tuesday . . .
Now only six weeks away . . . Second-and-fourth group will host our March 31 Fifth Tuesday at Mystery To Me Bookstore. Yes, it’s a potluck event, so what are you going to bring for the feasting table?

TWS alumna Susan Gloss Parsons is our special guest for that evening. She will share her experiences in getting her first novel published by Morrow.

We lost a top poet . . .
Philip Levine, U.S. poet laureate (2011-2012), died Saturday at the age of 87.

Here’s a condensed version of The Fresno Bee’s story announcing his death – Levine lived in Fresno, CA: A native of Detroit and son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Levine was profoundly shaped by his working-class childhood and years spent in jobs ranging from driving a truck to assembling parts at a Chevrolet plant.

Although he taught in several colleges, he had little in common with the academic poets of his time. He was not abstract or insular or digressive. He consciously modeled himself after Walt Whitman as a poet of everyday experience and cosmic wonder, writing tactile, conversational poems about his childhood, living in Spain, marriage and parenting and poetry itself.

Levine captured the ways “ordinary people are extraordinary,” while writing poems that are accessible to readers, Edward Hirsch, a friend of Levine and president of the Guggenheim Foundation said Sunday. “They move between the most ordinary diction and high romantic heights.”

Levine loved the earth and sky as much as any poet of nature, but he came to be identified with poems about work and workers, like “Buying and Selling” or “Saturday Sweeping,” in which employees toil under a leaky roof and “blue hesitant light.” In “What Work Is,” the title piece of his celebrated 1991 collection, he offers a grim sketch of standing on line in the rain, hoping for a job:

This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.

He was among the country’s most decorated poets, winning the Pulitzer in 1995 for “The Simple Truth” and National Book Awards for the 1979 collection “Ashes” and for “What Work Is.”

The future poet was a scrawny kid – 5 feet 2 inches, 125 pounds – who imagined himself in peril on the streets of Detroit, “the most anti-Semitic city west of Munich.” He would imagine walking home from school with a rifle, shooting at Cadillacs, Lincolns and other cars owned by rich people.

By the end 1942, when he was just 14, he had worked at a soap factory and, like a first kiss, discovered poetry. He would walk the streets late at night, speaking to the “moon and stars about the emotional revolution that was raging” inside him. In college, Wayne State University, he read the verse of Stephen Crane and T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams and immersed himself in the history of poetry.

“I believed even then that, if I could transform my experience into poetry, I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own,” he later observed.

Exhausting factory hours made Levine so determined to write that he showed up in 1953 at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop even though a planned fellowship had fallen through. He was told he could sign up for one course, but he enrolled in three. One of his teachers, the poet John Berryman, became a mentor.

“He seemed to feel I had something genuine,” Levine told The Paris Review in 1988, “but that I wasn’t doing enough with it, wasn’t demanding enough from my work. He kept directing me to poetry that would raise my standards.”

Another poet, Yvor Winters, allowed Levine to stay with him at his home in California and picked him for a Stanford Writing Fellowship in 1958. Around the same time, Levine joined the faculty of California State in Fresno and remained there for more than 30 years. He also taught at Princeton University, Columbia University and several other colleges.

“I’m not a man of action,” once said. “I’m a contemplative person who goes in the corner and writes.”

For another retrospective on Levine that includes Levine reading several of his poems, call up Tom Vitale’s story for NPR Sunday Edition. Here’s the link: http://www.npr.org/2015/02/15/384096472/philip-levine-who-found-poetry-on-detroits-assembly-lines-dies-at-87

Great word . . .
From Wordsmith Anu Garg:
frankenfood

PRONUNCIATION:
(FRANG-kuhn-food)

MEANING:
noun: Genetically modified food.

ETYMOLOGY:
From franken- (genetically modified), alluding to the artificially created Frankenstein’s monster Earliest documented use: 1992.

USAGE:
“[David Bronner’s] real problem with GMOs has less to do with Frankenfood fears than with the documented effects of herbicide- and pest-resistant GM crops, which were sold as a way to reduce harmful spraying.”
– Josh Harkinson; The Audacity of Soap; Mother Jones (San Francisco); Jan/Feb 2014.