First Person Plural

Poetry Competition

2012-02-01T12:16:00.003-05:00

We’re helping to spread the word about The Enoch Pratt Free Library’s free poetry competition.

The deadline for submission is February 21. The winning poem will be published in the Little Patuxent Review, dramatically enlarged and illustrated for display during National Poetry Month in a Central Library show window, and featured in a reading at the CityLit Festival.

For details, please visit the Enoch Pratt Free Library website.

And, mark your calendars for a special Little Patuxent Review event on Sunday, March 3, at 7:30 P.M. at The Writer's Center. We’ll feature a reading and discussion with poet Truth Thomas and Little Patuxent Review editor Laura Shovan. Thomas is guest editor for the winter 2012 Social Justice issue. He and Shovan will lead a discussion on the various ways literature can facilitate understanding and change. The program will include poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction readings by authors published in the journal.

The Writing Staycation: Participant Perspectives

2012-01-30T09:31:00.001-05:00

The Writing Staycation: Participant Perspectives

For me, one of the highlights of facilitating the Writing Staycation is getting to know a community of writers -- a young mom creating time to start a novel, a retired government worker writing a memoir, a lawyer taking a week’s vacation to focus on poetry, and an MFA short story writer polishing her submissions.

In preparation for the Fourth Writing Staycation, March 5-9, 2012, I asked some past participants to share their thoughts. Here’s what I heard back:

“The Writing Staycation at the Writer's Center in Bethesda was just what my writing partner and I needed to finish our novel, after almost six years of on-and-off work on it. Having the space, and a concentrated period of time to focus, was invaluable in terms of enabling us to work on our book, while the daily warm-up exercises and optional group discussions provided just the right amount of creative brainstorming and helpful advice we needed to keep us motivated.”
--Penelope B.

“The Staycation gave me the impetus to focus and write in a disciplined fashion. I was able to write the first two chapters of my novel, as well as benefit and learn from Zahara's knowledge, tips and exercises - the guest speakers (and snacks!) were also great!”
--Laura E.

“The Writing Staycation provided me with the time and space to focus entirely upon finishing a novel with my writing partner. It is worth investing in the time spent with other writers as the feeling of community and support is not easily captured elsewhere. Take the leap and you will be happy you did it!”
--Cherie S.

“The Staycation met my expectations for uninterrupted time to write in the company of other writers. I also met my goal to have my novelette ready for submission. I now have a clearer idea of the path ahead for this work. The supportive environment you provided at the Writer's Center was key.”
--Frank R.

Please consider joining us for the next Writing Staycation, and joining this rich community of writers.

-Zahara

Zahara Heckscher, M.A., is the co-author of the book How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas. She has also written numerous articles that have appeared in books and the online travel magazine www.TransitionsAbroad.com, where she serves as contributing editor. Heckscher teaches professional writing at University of Maryland at College Park. She is a breast cancer survivor who prefers to be known as a "cancer thriver." She blogs at www.cancerthriver.blogspot.com.

Poetry Inspired Dance at The Kennedy Center

2012-01-25T11:02:00.002-05:00

Poetry Inspired Dance at The Kennedy Center

This week at the Kennedy Center, the Mark Morris Dance Group will be performing the famous L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, which was inspired by a number of disciplines: Blake’s prints, Milton’s poetry, and Handel’s music.

In anticipation of these performances, the Kennedy Center is hosting a “tweet conversation” this Thursday, January 26, from 10-4 PM in which different artists can answer the question: “what great art has inspired you to create your own art?” Mark Morris Dance Group dancers will be “in the room,” as well as special guest artists from CUDC, Dance Exchange, and the Pinkline Project.

The hashtag to follow and join the conversation: #allINSPIREall

For more information on the event, please click here.

The Writer's Center and the National Intrepid Center of Excellence

2012-01-20T10:19:00.001-05:00

The Writer's Center Provides Program Support To National Endowment for the Arts' Operation Homecoming Writing Program at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center

Expressive writing will be part of healing protocol for returning troops

“Trauma comes through the senses, and art can heal through the senses,” said an audience member at the recent National Summit: Arts in Healing for Warriors at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

For the first time, the National Endowment for the Arts’ critically acclaimed Operation Homecoming writing program will take place in a clinical setting as part of a formal medical protocol to help heal service members at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE) at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The NICoE is a new facility that provides an interdisciplinary team assessment in a holistic, patient- and family-centered environment, and is dedicated to providing care to service members and their families dealing with the signature wounds from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Psychological Health (PH) conditions.

Over a year-long pilot phase, Operation Homecoming at the NICoE will consist of two elements: an expressive writing workshop for troops as part of their clinical rehabilitation, and a more informal four-week creative writing and storytelling series for service members and their families at the Fisher House, the residence for families and patients at Walter Reed. These creative writing sessions will be led by writers with military experience or previous experience working with the military community. After the pilot phase, Operation Homecoming at the NICoE will be evaluated for possible replication at other rehabilitation centers around the country.

Operation Homecoming is a landmark partnership between the NEA and the Department of Defense. The program is being conducted with programmatic support from The Writer’s Center. Operation Homecoming has been sponsored by a partnership with NEA and The Boeing Company since its inception in 2004. The Boeing Company will support Operation Homecoming programs at Fisher House.

“The National Endowment for the Arts is honored to partner with the Department of Defense to incorporate Operation Homecoming creative writing workshops into sessions with patients and families at this state-of-the-art healing center,” said NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman. “There are strong indications that expressive writing and other forms of arts engagement can play an important role in improving the health and well-being of service men and women. Now it’s our duty to test and advance those practices that prove to be most effective, and a world class treatment and research institute like the NICoE is exactly the place to do just that.”
“Art makes a difference in the quality of life for our wounded warriors and those around them,” said Rear Admiral Alton L. Stocks, Commander of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. “Operation Homecoming will be a welcome addition to NICoE’s innovative treatments for returning troops and a positive expressive outlet for their families.”

Operation Homecoming writing workshops will be integrated into the NICoE’s groundbreaking, interdisciplinary approach to working with patients and their families. This holistic approach ranges from physical and neurological exams, to family evaluation, nutrition, alternative medicine, and art therapy. The NICoE’s Healing Arts program uses art therapies such as visual arts, mask making, and other art forms to give troops a creative outlet for their experiences.

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience was created in 2004 by the NEA to help U.S. troops and their families write about their wartime experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, and stateside. Between 2004 and 2009, Operation Homecoming conducted more than 60 writing workshops for troops and veterans at military installations, writers centers, and military medical centers. A global call for submissions from troops and families resulted in an anthology and an archive housed at the Library of Congress. The program produced educational resources on creative writing, and inspired two award-winning documentaries.

For more information, visit www.operationhomecoming.gov

About the National Endowment for the Arts

The National Endowment for the Arts was established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. To date, the NEA has awarded more than $4 billion to support artistic excellence, creativity, and innovation for the benefit of individuals and communities. The NEA extends its work through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic sector. To join the discussion on how art works, visit the NEA at www.arts.org.

About The Writer’s Center

The Writer's Center cultivates the creation, publication, presentation, and dissemination of literary work. We are an independent literary organization with a global reach, rooted in a dynamic community of writers. As one of the premier centers of our kind in the country, we believe the craft of writing is open to people of all backgrounds and ages. Writing is interdisciplinary and unique among the arts for its ability to touch on all aspects of the human experience. It enriches our lives and opens doors to knowledge and understanding. Visit our Web site at www.writer.org. The Writer's Center is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cafritz Foundation, The Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, and by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Writer's Center gratefully acknowledges assistance received from the Cultural Alliance of Greater Washington's Business Volunteers for the Arts Program.

Food Writing 101

2012-01-17T14:52:00.003-05:00

Starting March 6, food writer Nevin Martell will lead Food Writing 101. Martel talks about the upcoming workshop on his blog, which also features some great pieces on food and culture.

I recommend that anyone interested in this workshop should visit his blog to read more about it, and then register early for the workshop.

BUP Announces Writing Contests

2012-01-12T09:43:00.001-05:00

BUP Announces Writing Contests

The Bethesda Urban Partnership & Bethesda Magazine have partnered to host the below contests. All winners will be published on the Bethesda Urban Partnership and Bethesda Magazine websites and honored at a special event during the Bethesda Literary Festival.

Essay Contest
Submit Your Essay Here.

Adult & Young Adult Essay Topic: Who or what has influenced, motivated or inspired you and how has it shaped your outlook on life?

Eligibility: Residents of Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia are eligible. The contest will take entries in two categories: Young Adult (grades 9-12) and Adult (ages 18+ and finished with high school).

Awards
Adult: Youth:
First Place: $500 and published in Bethesda Magazine First Place: $250
Second Place: $250 Second Place: $150
Third Place: $150 Third Place: $50
Honorable Mention: $75

Questions? Email essay@bethesda.org.

Short Story Contest

Adult & Young Adult Short Story: Open

More information: www.bethesdamagazine.com

Poetry Contest
Submit Your Poem Here.

Awards:
First place: $500, published on The Writer's Center's "First Person Plural" blog, and a free class and membership to The Writer's Center.
Second Place: $250
Third Place: $150

Requirements: Poems cannot be more than 21 lines of text. Do not double space your entry. Only one entry per
person. Your poem must be your original work. Any poems containing material that is obscene or
objectionable will be disqualified.

Eligibility: Open to residents of Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. who are 18 or older at the time of the entry deadline.

Questions? Email poetry@bethesda.org

Pushcart Prize Nominee Jacques Rancourt on "Shank"

2011-12-22T12:30:00.005-05:00

The most obvious influence and closest relative to my poem “Shank” is Phillip Levine’s “Animals Are Passing From Our Lives,” which is written from the perspective of a pig:

…………I can smell

the sour, grooved block, I can smell

the blade that opens the hole

and the pudgy white fingers

that shake out the intestines

like a hankie

and ends with the great final stand: “No. Not this pig.” This poem has many striking similarities with “Shank,” so you can imagine my surprise months after I finished revising “Shank” when I read Levine’s poem for the first time.

That might not be entirely true. I’m sure I read Levine’s well-anthologized poem years earlier during my undergraduate years, but I was not consciously thinking of Levine at the time I wrote “Shank.” The mind does this sometimes. It synthesizes, rearranges, spits an idea back out years later, and congratulates itself on its originality.

Looking back through my first drafts, the synthesis of Levine’s poem is less evident. I find the first line I wrote for the poem in a journal dated during the summer of 2010: “I am the cow who’s too stupid to know,” which is a line that was cut pretty early in the drafting process. At the time, I had been planning my food-themed freshman comp class, and I was reading a lot of articles and books about industrial farming and livestock conditions. In younger versions of the poem, the comparison between the cow and the speaker was a more self-conscious one, a more blatant metaphor, and the voice didn’t come from the animal itself.

The poem was titled “Shank” right from the start. This doesn’t happen to me often, as I usually don’t understand my own poems well enough in the beginning to give them their final titles, but in this case, the duality of the word’s formal definition (a cut of meat from the lower limb) and its street definition (to be cut by a makeshift blade) was a tension that initially set me writing this poem.

At the time, I was writing a lot of poems which examined the relationship between a queer identity and violence, and how coming out publicly opens oneself up to freedom but also a vulnerability (physical and otherwise). As I revised the poem over the next few months, I became more attracted to this cow in the slaughtering assembly as a character, and as a result, its role in the poem grew larger until it became the focal voice.

The queer and human voice still exists, but it’s been filtered through the cow and only comes out forthright once toward the end: “In the night I held hands / with a man, I licked his face. / Then I was fat enough, full even, / placed in line.” When friend and terrific poet Josh Kaslcheur pointed out the similarities between “Shank” and “Animals Are Passing From Our Lives,” I was drawn to the way these two poems were in conversation with each other and how the idea of an animal walking toward its butchering block can encompass such different metaphors.

Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of "Shank" (p.42) published in Poet Lore (Volume 106 3/4 Fall/Winter). You can purchase the issue here or procure a subscription to Poet Lore here.

Jacques J. Rancourt holds the 2011-2012 Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His poems have appeared or will appear in New England Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, and Columbia, among others. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he was a founding editor of the online literary journal Devil's Lake (www.devils-lake.org). He blogs at http://americanshrapnel.blogspot.com/.

Critique Groups: Helpful, Harmful, or a Big Waste of Time?

2011-12-14T11:36:00.000-05:00

Check out TWC workshop leader Ellen Herbert's blog article, entitled, "Critique Groups: Helpful, Harmful, or a Big Waste of Time?"

Also, check out Ellen's February workshop, Writing From Life.

C.M. Mayo's 10 Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Writing Workshop

2011-12-13T09:28:00.001-05:00

TWC workshop leader C.M. Mayo's new podcast is 10 Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Writing Workshop.

Take a listen here.

Or, read the blog post about this podcast.

And hey, if you liked this one, check out more podcasts for writers.

BUP Announces Writing Contests

2011-12-12T09:27:00.003-05:00

BUP Announces Writing Contests

Essay Contest
Submit Your Essay Here.

Adult & Young Adult Essay Topic: Who or what has influenced, motivated or inspired you and how has it shaped your outlook on life?

Questions? Email essay@bethesda.org.

Short Story Contest

Adult & Young Adult Short Story: Open

More information: www.bethesdamagazine.com

Poetry Contest
Submit Your Poem Here.

Eligibility: Open to residents of Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. who are 18 or older at the time of the entry deadline.

Questions? Email poetry@bethesda.org

Delmarva Review Pushcart Prize Nominations

2011-12-07T10:13:00.000-05:00

Delmarva Review Pushcart Prize Nominations

The Delmarva Review has nominated the writing of six authors for Pushcart Prizes in poetry, short fiction, and essay categories. The review is invited annually to honor original prose and poetry with nominations for the prestigious annual literary awards.

Poetry nominations include “After Phillis Wheatley Sailed to England,” by E. Ethelbert Miller, of Washington, D.C., “A Whaler’s Journal: Scrimshaw,” by Kyle Laws, of Pueblo, CO, and “The Photo Album,” by Wendy Elizabeth Ingersoll, of Newark, DE.

Short fiction nominations include “The Guildemeister,” by Iain S. Baird, of Annapolis, MD and New Orleans, LA, and “Mrs. Morrisette,” by Margaret Rosenberg, of Reston, VA.

In the essay category, “Nursing 101,” by Margaret Adams, was nominated. Ms. Adams is from Baltimore, MD.

All six selections were published in the 2011 issue of The Delmarva Review. Final selections in the national competition will be published in the late fall, in Pushcart Prize XXXVII, Best of the Small Presses.

The Pushcart Prize nomination process has honored the outstanding work of authors annually since 1976. The first edition featured a short story by a young Ray Carver. Since then, Pushcart has discovered many talented new voices in literature.

The Delmarva Review is published by the Eastern Shore Writers’ Association (ESWA), a nonprofit organization supporting writers and the literary arts. Its website is www.easternshorewriters.org.

The submission period for the 2012 edition of the Review is open now through February 28. Writers of fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry are encouraged to submit their best work. All writers are welcome, regardless of geographic residence. Submission guidelines are posted on the website www.delmarvareview.com.

Subscriptions and individual orders of The Delmarva Review are available on its website. A digital edition can be purchased from Kindle on Amazon.com for download to electronic reading devices.

The Review’s editorial board includes Wilson Wyatt, chairman, from Bozman, Mala Burt, managing editor, from St. Michaels, John Elsberg, from Henderson, George Merrill, of St. Michaels, Margot Miller, of Easton, Amanda Newell, of Henderson, and Harold Wilson, of Chester. The copy editor is Jeanne Pinault, of Cambridge. Laura Ambler , of Easton, is design editor.

By and By: The Copybook Songs of Isaac P. Anderson

2011-12-06T09:19:00.000-05:00

By and By: The Copybook Songs of Isaac P. Anderson

Part of a full length book and album project called "By the By: The Copybook Songs of Isaac P. Anderson," workshop leader David Keplinger has put a lyric written by his great great grandfather in 1869 to music. Below is the song they made together!

David Keplinger, vocals, guitar; Helen Hausmann, violin, Ira Gitlin, banjo.

Buy the EP on iTunes today!.

Also, check out David's upcoming workshop, Managing Imagination.

The Story Only You Can Tell: How to Use the Past

2011-12-05T09:05:00.002-05:00

The Story Only You Can Tell: How to Use the Past

TWC workshop leader Laura Oliver's new book, The Story Within, New Insights and Inspiration for Writers (Penguin, 2011) has only been out for four weeks and has already been named one of The Writer Magazine’s “Top Ten Terrific Writing Books of the Year,” with additional buzz from The Huffington Post and Gotham Writers' Workshop in New York City. Please reading below an except from The Story Within, New Insights and Inspiration for Writers:

I was on a flight from Dulles to LAX and my plane was delayed, all of us already onboard, waiting for the arrival of 13 pieces of baggage from a connecting flight. Our pilot updated our departure status every few minutes but he sounded increasingly annoyed as the delays dragged on. Maybe someone was waiting for him in LA: a friend, a wife, a lover. Finally he reported, “Uh folks, we’re not waiting anymore.”

The cabin lights dimmed and the plane rocked slightly then began the slow push back, the careful turn, the taxi toward the runway. As the aircraft lumbered toward take-off, gathering momentum, I closed my eyes anticipating the moment I’d feel the front wheels leave the earth. It is the best part of flying--a moment of subtle exhilaration not unlike knowing a story-start is going to take flight.

But instead of lift-off, the plane suddenly decelerated and powered down to a stop. The pilot came back on: “Folks, Air Traffic Control isn’t happy about us leaving without those bags. Looks like we’re going to sit in a penalty box for a while.”

That’s the thing about baggage--about the painful experiences you’ve stuffed, the unacknowledged feelings and memories you’ve stowed. That baggage is perhaps your most authentic material and leaving it behind may cost you the stories you were born to write.

The sibling who protected you, the friend who saved you from isolation, contributed to who you became. But so did the coach who humiliated you, the girlfriend who deceived you, the parent who abandoned you. We just don’t like to think about these influences. We tend to pack them away but their impact remains, and with it the potential to serve our writing.

The stuffed experience may be a relationship or a situation, a workaholic parent, a move to a place where you had no friends. And sometimes there is only a vague feeling without a specific memory attached to it, but the feeling is no less formative and no less worthy of your respect.

If the color purple inexplicably makes you sad, there’s a reason. Explore the feeling on the page until you figure it out and are free of it. Explore contradictions—like occasions where you “should” have been happy but were not. Examine influences from your past--your mother’s loneliness, your father’s courage, and ask yourself “What if?” Asking “What if?” allows you to push beyond the subliminal limits of what really happened to invent a more imaginative or compassionate story. Maybe you’ll stumble on an actual truth or at least a new empathy.

Try rewriting the facts of your life as you would like to have seen them played out. Make people more accountable, more self-aware than they actually were. Make something happen when nothing did. Expose secrets from your past in a way that benefits a whole town. These exercises are constructive, freeing, and set a whole new energy in motion. Recognize the fact that what you invent on the page you may be able to recreate in your life because in this world you can bestow miracles.

Neuroscientists now believe that the primal brain, that ancient, reptilian, “old” brain, cannot distinguish between self and other. It sees all action as inner-directed. So when we criticize others, bizarrely, we feel criticized. When we gossip about a co-worker, we feel diminished. And as writers, when we lead a character to an epiphany, laughter, insight, forgiveness, or compassion, we feel oddly as if those gifts have been bestowed upon us. What a life-altering combination of fiction and reality! Each informs and transforms the other.

Embrace the memories you would rather avoid and tell the whole story. It’s okay if you take off late, if waiting until you are ready to write about a particular subject, person, or experience, delays the writing of your essay, story, or novel. On the wings of truth, lost time is recovered in the air.

Laura Oliver is an award-winning writer and the author of The Story Within, New Insights and Inspiration for Writers (Alpha/Penguin.) Pulitzer Prize-winner Jon Franklin says, “This book will make you a better writer.” Cynthia Gorney, U.C. Berkeley, says The Story Within is “eloquent, no-nonsense, inspirational, funny and loaded with truly practical ideas.” Oliver teaches at St. John’s College. Her website is www.thestorywithin.com.

For upcoming TWC workshops being led by Laura Oliver, please click here.

Registration Open for Bay to Ocean Writers Conference

2011-12-02T09:25:00.000-05:00

Registration Open for Bay to Ocean writers Conference

Registration for the 15th Annual Bay to Ocean Writers Conference, February 25, 2012 is now open. Check the website www.baytoocean.com for details. Featured speakers include TWC workshop leaders Kathryn Johnson, Laura Oliver, Lynn Schwartz, Khris Baxter, Angela Render, and Sue Ellen Thompson. Registration must be received by February 15, 2012.

On the website you will find session descriptions and brief bios of the instructors. You can print out a schedule for the day to help you plan your day; however, it is not necessary to sign up for individual sessions.

At this conference we’ll have 28 excellent session leaders giving presentations on many topics relating to the art and business of writing. Whether you’re interested in learning the craft of writing, utilizing digital tools for writers, getting your work published and marketed, or any of the other writing related topics offered, the Bay to Ocean Writers Conference definitely has something for everyone.

Fees have stayed the same as we are aware of the impact of the economy on everyone: $89 for adults and $55 for students with ID. Your registration fee includes a deluxe continental breakfast, a networking lunch and five sessions chosen from 25 offerings.

Early registration is strongly encouraged as the conference has sold out in advance the last six years.

Writers Here & Now

2011-12-01T09:01:00.002-05:00

For all of you TWC fans of our good friend Rod Jellema, check out the reading he's featured in below, this month!

WRITERS HERE & NOW

THE PROGRAM IN CREATIVE WRITING at the UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND & JIMÉNEZ-PORTER WRITERS’ HOUSE PRESENT:

Rod Jellema,
Michael David Lukas,
Alison Stine

December 7th, 2011
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

RECEPTION, 6:15, at
DORCHESTER HALL

READING, 7:00, at
ULRICH RECITAL HALL
TAWES HALL

Rod Jellema is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, where he was the founding director of the Creative Writing Program. He produced five books of poems, the latest of which, Incarnality: The Collected Poems was published in October 2010. He was twice awarded poetry writing fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, and was many times a resident fellow at Yaddo. He edited and translated two books of poetry from the North Sea language of Frisian: County Fair: Poems from Friesland Since 1945 and The Sound that Remains: a Historical Collection of Frisian Poetry. For this work he was awarded Friesland's highest literary honor, the Pieter Jelles prize, and the Columbia University Translation Prize, 1986.

Michael David Lukas has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a night-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv, and a waiter at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Maryland, his writing has appeared in VQR, Slate, National Geographic Traveler, and Georgia Review. He has received scholarships from the National Endowment of the Arts, New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, Squaw Valler Community of Writers, Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and Elizabeth George Foundation. When he isn’t writing, he teaches creative writing to third-and forth-graders.

Alison Stine is the author of the books Wait, winner of the Brittingham Prize, Ohio Violence, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize, as well as a chapbook, Lot of My Sister, winner of the Wick Prize. Her poems and prose have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Huffington Post, New England Review, and many others. Her awards include the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. A former child actress, her musicals and plays have been performed at the Cleveland Playhouse, the International Thespian Festival, and Off-Broadway for Stephen Sondheim's Young Playwrights Inc. Urban Retreat.

TWC Open Door & The Delmarva Review Reading

2011-11-30T12:34:00.002-05:00

TWC Open Door & The Delmarva Review Reading

This Sunday, December 4, The Writer's Center will have a “double header,” with readings by poets Kathleen Ossip and W.M. Rivera at 2:00 p.m., followed by a 5:00 p.m. reading celebrating the publication of The Delmarva Review’s 4^th Volume. 'Tis the season for great writing. For more information, read on.

TWC Open Door Reading, 2:00 p.m.:

Kathleen Ossip is the author of two books of poems, The Search Engine and The Cold War, and one chapbook, Cinephrastics. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, the Washington Post, Fence, The Believer, and Poetry Review (London). She teaches at The New School in New York, where she was a founding editor of LIT, and she's the poetry editor of Women's Studies Quarterly. She has received a fellowship in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as grants from Bread Loaf, the Ragdale Foundation, and Yaddo.

W.M. Rivera’s most recent poetry collection, Buried in the Mind’s Backyard, was published in 2011. His poems have been published in the Nation, Prairie Schooner, the Kenyon Review, the New Laurel Review, the California Quarterly, Gargoyle, The Ghazal Page (online), The Curator Magazine (online), The Broome Review, and Innisfree. His first book of poetry was published in 1960 titled The End of Legend’s String, illustrated by Mexican artist, José Luis Cuevas—drawer, engraver, and sculptor. Rivera’s academic and professional activities in agricultural development have taken him to more than 30 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America.

The Delmarva Review Reading, 5:00 p.m:

The Delmarva Review, a journal of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, is published by the Eastern Shore Writers Association, a nonprofit organization of writers across the tri-state region of the Delmarva Peninsula. Join us in celebrating publication of Volume 4. Six authors published in the new issue will read at The Writer’s Center at 5 pm Sunday, December 4. They are among 33 authors from seven states, the District of Columbia and the Ukraine whose original work is included in the 2011 edition. Copies of the Review are available from The Writer’s Center, the publication’s website at www.delmarvareview.com, and in a digital edition from Kindle on www.amazon.com, for download to tablets, cell phones and other reading devices.

The readers are:

Margaret Adams is a Maine-born writer and former columnist for the Bangor Daily News. Her work has most recently appeared in Urbanite Magazine, Johns Hopkins Nursing Magazine, and Down East Magazine. A graduate of Vassar College, she is studying nursing and public health at Johns Hopkins University. She is from Baltimore, MD.

Iain S. Baird is an award-winning memoirist and writer of short fiction and creative nonfiction. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he has had stories published in the Seven Hills Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Timber Creek Review, and Oracle. A memoir, Two Storms, was published in 2010. Iain is from Annapolis, MD and New Orleans, LA.

Linda Blaskey, winner of the 2008 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize for her chapbook, Farm, was the recipient of a fellowship grant from the Delaware Division of Arts. Her short story, “The Haircut,” was dramatically produced by Philadelphia’s InterAct Theatre. She is from Lincoln, DE.

Anne Colwell, whose first book, Believing Their Shadows, was published by Word Press in 2010, has published work in numerous literary reviews. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she received an Established Artist Award in Poetry and an emerging Artist Award in Fiction from the Delaware State Arts Council. Anne is assistant professor of English at University of Delaware. She is from Milton, DE.

Nan Fry is the author of a book of poems, Relearning the Dark. Her work appears in literary magazines, textbooks, and anthologies, including The Beastly Bride, published by Viking. She teaches at The Writer’s Center. Nan is from Cabin John, Maryland.

Margaret Rodenberg is a former computer industry executive. Her writing has won awards from Writers Digest Magazine, the San Francisco Writers Conference, James Rivers Writers Group, and Carve Magazine. She is currently writing a novel from Napoleon Bonaparte's point of view and blogs at: FindingNapoleon.com. Margaret lives in Reston, VA.

We can't wait to see you on Sunday!

C.M. Mayo Interviews Solveig Eggerz

2011-11-29T11:15:00.000-05:00

C.M. Mayo Interviews Solveig Eggerz

As part of the series of occasional conversations with other writers, TWC workshop leader C.M. Mayo talks with Solveig Eggerz, TWC workshop leader and author of the fiercely poetic novel Seal Woman. Inspired by the Icelandic fairytale of the seal woman and the true story of some 300 German war widows brought to Iceland to marry and work on the remote farms, Seal Woman has been widely praised and translated into both Hebrew and Icelandic. The conversation ranges from the author's unusual background (from Iceland to England to Germany to Alexandria, Virginia), Iceland's book culture, fairytales, advice for writers, and more. Visit Solveig Eggerz at www.solveigeggerz.com.

The Hill Center Opening

2011-11-28T11:00:00.005-05:00

The Hill Center Opening

Here's a report on the Hill Center opening two weekends ago by Gimbiya Kettering, our 2011 Undiscovered Voices Scholar:

The Writer’s Center had a display table at the open house for the opening of the Hill Center at the Old Naval Hopsital at 921 Pennsylvania Ave SE. From the hundreds of people from Capitol Hill and around the city who attended the opening, it is obvious that many are excited about the opportunity for continuing education and classes for adults on Capitol Hill. The Writer’s Center is one of about 25 program partners who participated in the “Salute to Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital” on Saturday, November 19^th. For more information about the Hill Center, please visit their website.

Stewart Moss, the Executive Director of the Writer’s Center, is excited to at the opportunity to extend writing classes new a new part of the city. He talked with visitors about upcoming classes at the Hill center including classes about poetry, blogging, and fiction character development. For a complete list of upcoming classes, click here.

Stewart Moss (right), the Executive Director, and Gimbiya Kettering (left)the 2011 Undiscovered Voices Scholar met at the Writer’s Center display and talked about L. Peat O’Neil’s upcoming Writing a Family Food Memoir and their family’s Thanksgiving traditions.

Open House Celebration for The Hill Center

2011-11-17T14:13:00.002-05:00

Open House Celebration for The Hill Center

The Hill Center, a new arts venue in the heart of Capitol Hill, holds an open house celebration from 12 noon to 4 pm this Saturday, November 19. Come find out about several new writing workshops we’ll offer there later this year and in 2012 The Hill Center is located at 921 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE, very near the Eastern Market metro station on the blue/orange line.

For more information please visit their Web site, http://www.hillcenterdc.org/

Tim Mayo Reflects on Poet Lore and "Constant Replay"

2011-11-14T13:00:00.007-05:00

When I look back at the poems I’ve written which the editors of Poet Lore have accepted, I see they have all been highly charged anecdotes, sometimes allegorical, fabulous or loosely meditative, which often seem to carry heavy moral implications. In the first poem Poet Lore published of mine, “Retribution,” the poem’s image of a twisted body reflects the emotional and moral effort it took the subject of the poem to ask for forgiveness:

It’s as though you’ve grown a third hand.
Out of your elbow, it shoots straight back
pointing to where you’ve been; you start
to go through life backwards, shaking hands,
making peace with everyone you’ve left behind,

Another poem “The Frog and the Snake” dealt with the suicide of my biological mother where the suicide incident was told in counterpoint to a vivid description of a garter snake hunting and finally consuming its prey. These and the most recent poem Poet Lore has chosen of mine were not emotionally easy poems, either to read or to write, and many other editors had shied away from them. But not the editors at Poet Lore and I thank them very much for their courage and for validating my efforts. I have come away from my experiences with all of the Poet Lore editors that they deeply believe in the poems they publish.

In the most recent of my poems, which Poet Lore has just published, “Constant Replay,” I have tried to write about the incident of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center from a slightly different and unexpected vantage point.

I began to write the poem in February of 2011 almost ten years after the attack on the World Trade Center. I am not a poet who can witness or experience something and then immediately go home and write about it. It takes me a long period of time to internalize something before I can write about it or even decide I want to. One may well ask how long does it take to internalize an experience, and I guess the answer is as long as one’s brain or heart and soul take, and that there may be an inverse relationship between the separate internal turmoil of the heart and soul and the weight of the external turmoil which is trying to enter the poet’s consciousness and take center stage asking him to respond.

There are so many conflicting and contradicting statements about what poetry should be and what it should do. To some extent my writing “Constant Replay” tries to address that. It probably doesn’t succeed in the sense that the poem does not go down any of the normal avenues where we expect a poem about such a public and tragic event should go. Over the years before writing the poem I’d read a number of poems about the collapse of the Towers, and some of them were so strong and glorious in the manner of how they approached and described the event, as well as what they said about it, that the idea of writing something (even if one wanted to) became daunting, and I didn’t want to. Part of why I didn’t want to was that I felt the subject would be well covered by better writers than I who had a sharper sense of the event’s importance and how to put that into the appropriate cultural context.

One such poem that I remember was Galway Kinnell’s “When the Towers Fell.” How could I ever match the description and the detail of such a poem? It was often majestic in its descriptive scope and then would zero in on a detail of an office worker or an investment banker doing whatever daily insignificant thing that particular person was doing at the moment when their world so momentously changed. Kinnell’s poem was both sweeping and fragmented, and in its fragmentation, the poem reflected the fragmentation that such an experience has upon one’s consciousness. That is to say Kinnell’s poem seemed to, among other things, express how we, as witnesses or readers, cannot really take in the event as a whole unified experience. There is no one image which says it all. It is too immense for us to emotionally and individually take it all in. Each individual who died carried to his or her death a whole story with its own separate sadness and tragedy, and each deserves his or her own elegy. But something like that cannot be written. Not all in one poem. Then there are just the implications of the attack beyond the personal, its symbolism, if you wish, to both us and to the attackers, but no matter how we look at the event the size of it will only allow us to come up with a one-sided or a lopsided story. “Constant Replay” is my own lopsided take on that event which others must feel on one level or another but have not expressed.

When I began the poem, I knew from the first line I put down that it was going to be a poem about the Towers, but I had no idea how it would turn out. The ambivalence of the speaker in the poem becomes to a great extent what the poem is about. It’s so easy to take sides at the time of such an obviously powerful event especially in the moment when all emotions are running amok. Oddly everything seems so clear as to whom has been offended, who is right and who is wrong, but what can one glean and how does one finally feel after the knee-jerk of passion has subsided?

I think I have always written poems that are personal, and by that I do not necessarily mean that they are about me, but instead that the poem speaks out on an individual basis to an individual whom I don’t know. When I imagine someone reading one of my poems, and perhaps this one more than a lot of the others, I see a person with my book or a copy of the journal my poem is in open in front of him or her. It is always evening, actually well into night, and that person who I am trying to touch is doing this at a moment just before they finally turn out the light and go to sleep, and if there is a nightly habit or ritual to this, it is something akin to saying a prayer before you go to bed.

Tim Mayo is the author of "Constant Replay" (p.28) published in Poet Lore (Volume 106 3/4 Fall/Winter). You can purchase the issue here or procure a subscription to Poet Lore here.

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Tim Mayo’s poems and reviews have appeared in, 5 AM, Poetry International, Poet Lore, River Styx, Web Del Sol Review, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac, among many other places. His first full length collection The Kingdom of Possibilities was published by Mayapple Press in 2009. He has been twice nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology, twice for a Pushcart Prize and was chosen as a top finalist for the Paumanok Award. He is on the author committee of the Brattleboro Literary Festival.

Photo credit to Amelia X

Featured in TWC's Workshop & Event Guide Winter/Spring 2012

2011-11-11T12:00:00.003-05:00

This awesome feature and more are published in the TWC Workshop & Event Guide, you can pick up your copy in person or download it from our website here.

Soul of the People: A Profile of David Taylor

by Myra Sklarew

David Taylor’s first contact with The Writer’s Center (TWC) came in a fiction workshop he took in 1996 with Kate Blackwell. A short story he workshopped then later ended up in his collection, Success: Stories. For him, one of the great benefits of TWC is meeting and working with other writers; he still shares work with those from that early workshop. He then took a short fiction workshop with Richard Peabody, leading to his first published short story, “Strikers,” and another with Barbara Esstman, “an excellent forum for work on longer pieces, dealing with questions of process.”

Since then, David has received a number of awards. His nonfiction has appeared in Smithsonian, The Washington Post, WIRED, Environmental Health Perspectives, and in publications of the National Institutes of Health and the National Academy of Sciences, as well as in documentary scripts for PBS, National Geographic, and the Smithsonian Channel. His collection won the 2008 fiction award from Washington Writers’ Publishing House and was a Library of Virginia Literary Awards finalist.

David contacted TWC about instructing in 2005, and soon began teaching science writing. I have been one of the fortunate recipients of his teaching in two workshops. This fall he leads a workshop on “Writing Brilliantly about Science,” for both generalists and technical experts with a focus on narrative.

What strikes me about David’s work is its enormous range and daring. Travels have taken him from service in the Peace Corps in Mauritania, West Africa, where the drought was severe, to work as an editor in Southeast Asia, to a recent journey to a remote clinic in Mali where malaria is being treated and studied. He has interviewed Malian singers Amadou and Mariam about their lifelong blindness and plan for concerts in darkness, ziplined through coffee forests in Panama, and explored the great Brazilian novelist Machado De Assis, whose writings set the stage for many innovations by modern fiction writers. It seems that there is no journey that is off-limits as long as there is a narrative, a life-story.

David’s subjects include Ginseng, the Divine Root, an exploration of the science and subculture of a medicinal plant. His work on a 2003 documentary, Partners of the Heart, took me back to my own childhood. I recall the “blue babies,” born with congenital heart malformations, and the work of Alfred Blalock and Helen Taussig, and, most importantly, a man named Vivien Thomas who with no college or medical education became head of Hopkins’ Surgical Research Lab, teaching a generation of surgeons. Thomas’ contribution might have gone unnoticed had it not been for documentarians like David.

His work on the Works Progress Administration echoes powerfully in these hard times. In 2011, something like the W.P.A. Writers’ Project might lend a hand, for example, to the thousands who recently assembled at a job fair arranged by our Congressional Black Caucus at Atlanta Technical College, waiting all night in dress clothes for 2,000 jobs. David brought this project into the light once more with Soul of a People: The W.P.A. Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America.

^
Myra Sklarew writes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction essays on science and medicine. Book publications in 2010 include Harmless and The Journey of Child Development: Selected Papers of Joseph Noshpitz, co-edited with Bruce Sklarew.

Stanley Plumly Interview from Workshop & Event Guide

2011-11-10T13:00:00.005-05:00

This awesome feature and more are published in the TWC Workshop & Event Guide, you can pick up your copy in person or download it from our website here.

Joshua Weiner: You’ve been teaching courses at The Writer’s Center on and off for many years now. Why do you do it? You have a big time job directing the M.F.A. Program at University of Maryland, you’re busy working on new poems and essays, you’ve been travelling all over the place recently as Maryland State Poet Laureate…

Stanley Plumly: Well, I did it—taught at TWC—off and on for a while, years ago, but then stopped. But I came back to TWC for one reason, and that’s because Sunil Freeman [Assistant Director of TWC] was running it. But why teach on top of other teaching, there’s a slightly different answer to that. Teaching people at a place like TWC, that’s a very different situation than in a graduate workshop. In the graduate workshop, students have a strong need to talk, to critique each other’s work, to discuss the nuts and bolts of writing—they want to do it, and they have to do it, it’s the only way they learn. In a workshop of the kind I teach at TWC, that need is not driving the conversation. In the TWC workshop there’s a kind of freedom in how I talk about poems. We can range more widely, and other things can stream into what we’re talking about, and how we’re talking about it. They are not digressions, but tributaries that join the main course and current of poetry. It’s much more theoretical; it’s as if a certain obligation is taken away, it’s just a different kind of teaching situation. I can speculate and roam around in a way I’ve never been able to do in a graduate workshop.

I had a similar situation in New York, when I was teaching graduate workshops at Columbia, and then also at the Y.M.C.A. on 92ND Street. Louis Simpson said to me, ‘Stan, you know why you like teaching at the Y? Because you enjoy the company of grown-ups.’ And that’s true! Sometimes there’s also a younger person, someone who is preparing to go to graduate school, or someone who has recently finished, but still wants to be in that environment. What I do at the university is important to me, but there’s a richness of experience and point of view that I find in the TWC workshops that I don’t find elsewhere.

And we have so much work to do! I try to get through six to eight poems in a session, so it’s essentially a workshop-lecture; and frankly, I enjoy that so much more (laughs).

JW: Do you like to give exercises or assignments in these workshops?

SP: I don’t. But: I just had an experience this past summer at Kenyon College, where it’s a totally different situation for a summer workshop. Students write every day, and in response to a prompt, at the end of each class, for the next day. I hadn’t done that before, I’ve always resisted assignments. Perhaps out of a kind of arrogance, that if you needed the assignment, you shouldn’t be doing this. The real work is self-initiating, or should be. That’s the test. But there are many roads. And students there thrived. So, I might try that. What happens usually is that an individual will come up to you and say ‘I need help’ and then you can take something from their own work, a line, an image, an idea, and you can offer them that more isolated element as a self-prompting for the next poem—there’s something there to return to, to explore more. And I think that’s the most useful methodology.

JW: It sounds as if that’s something you do yourself in your own work…

SP: Oh, yes. I have a new book coming out in the spring, and I’d say there are two or three poems there that are poems I did not include in the Selected and have been completely rewritten. It turns out they were prompts. I thought they were poems (laughs). But it turns out they weren’t right. And I felt that I wanted to get them right, I didn’t want them to appear in that earlier incarnation.

JW: Well, this leads into my next question, which is about the role of reading—in the workshop and also in your own work as a poet.

SP: Well, in the workshop, I don’t use texts, necessarily, what I’ll do is add to the worksheet a poem or two from the pool out there, that’s appeared within the last year, often something that’s been in a magazine, just to see how students are going to look at that poem; and each of them takes that poem and talks about it, and that’s how we warm up, a kind of calisthenics, and we’ll talk about that poem in a kind of ‘new critical’ way, reading it very closely, and from there we’ll get into the worksheet with their poems. But at the same time, I’m always referring to what Eliot calls the ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ always appealing to the past, which for those purposes in the workshop usually goes only as far back as the Romantics. Sometimes I do reach further back (my academic training is in the 18TH C., juvenalian satire, Pope and Swift). But you try to create a context in which poetry is alive in a simultaneous way, so it’s not just tradition in a linear sense, but tradition in some kind of universal sense.

JW: Almost spatial.

SP: Yes, exactly, I imagine it’s like we’re inside a globe.

JW: A planetarium.

SP: A planetarium, very good! All these different stars with different magnitudes that we’re looking at. And you’re testing the students’ reading. And they’re intimidated by the past, I think; if you make it seem contemporaneous—that a Wordsworth sonnet, or Keats’ sonnet to his brothers, is a poem that could have been written recently, and it feels that way, then they have a richer sense of what the language is, what its possibilities are.

And there are some poets who do know that. John Berryman is a poet who collapsed time entirely, stylistically as well as in terms of the content: “Mistress Bradstreet” and of course the Dream Songs, move throughout time, and play with it, pun on it.

JW: Seems like Joyce is the master behind that, that kind of dream space, where language and identity are in a state of continual change.

SP: Right. In a poet like Berryman, he’s such a great poet, because he’s changing, he evolves through time, but he’s informing himself through established forms. His sonnets, for example, the best of them are amazing, that they’re sonnets!

The diction in them is incredible. What he was after in the Dream Songs is essentially a sonnet, in the structure of them, but it’s a variation, an exploded sonnet!

JW: I find that the problem of structure is one of the things about poems that I can actually teach.

SP: Yes, take Lowell’s Notebook poems, for example—he has a similar feel to Berryman for form. And that’s also what’s marvelous about Bishop. What is her formal sense? In her later work, it looks like she’s writing verse paragraphs; they have a spontaneity, as if they have no sense of themselves as made objects. But you look at the rewrites, it’s amazing, how crafted, and how in a way almost labored those poems are. “One Art” is clearly an example of form re-doubling itself; she breaks every rule about writing the villanelle.

So, yes, I read, I re-read: a few of my contemporaries; and I do pay attention to some younger poets I know about. But something has happened, and I don’t know when it happened, when poets stopped being concerned about posterity. That if you mention the word immortality, it’d be like a joke, a presumption.

JW: Is it the influence of the New York School (O’Hara, Ashbery, Koch, Schuyler)?

SP: Well, all of those poets are very much interested in lasting; they’re fine poets, with clear formal integrity. Maybe it’s something about the computer that makes a certain use of language almost too floaty, like if the computer lost electricity and everything disappeared, it wouldn’t matter: oh, I’ll just write another one!

JW: It’s like a willful shrugging off of the burden of the past.

SP: It’s as if, with some younger poets, this feeling applies to everything in their lives. There’s a lack of belief in the future.

My idea of someone who doesn’t seem to give a damn, and yet who gives the greatest damn is Philip Larkin, and it’s in the form.

JW: ‘Books are a load of crap.’ Only after you’ve spent a life shelving them, as a librarian!…

SP: (laughs) Yes, he came at it from many sides (laughs).

JW: Larkin’s one of the great lyric poets of the postwar period, isn’t he? I say that as a kind of segue. The lyric poem is often thought of as being a kind of very intense personal expression of interior experience. And you’ve been identified as belonging quite strongly to that tradition of the extended lyric. But in your poems you seem open to all kinds of influences—other poems, for example, and visual art, the movies, political history, and also other people…

SP: It’s the stuff that sticks, that you can’t ignore, and it’s more than a feeling, it usually has a manifestation, often in a fact—I love an irresistible fact—a poem should have at least one fact in it, one that’s rare. I firmly believe in real toads in imaginary gardens; but emotionally you attach yourself to the language at that level where you hear the experience, you see it, and to me that’s where the writing gets to take on a certain authority. And I can hear it, I really believe strongly in what you’d call the music of the poem. That’s essential.

JW: How do you know when you have a real poem hooked on the end of your line?

SP: Well, you write yourself to that feeling, that place. Almost invariably where you think you’re going and what you think you have is not what you end up with, and you end up with something better. And that takes time. And you think you have it, and then a month later, six months later, ah! You make a little adjustment; and I believe firmly in the small adjustment as a big deal. I hope that doesn’t sound precious. I guess it’s the French Symbolist in me. I place absolute emphasis on what Coleridge calls the best words in their best order; but that’s fairly dry, you need the musical equivalent too—that’s where Keats lifts the writing to a different level, even from his own contemporaries. Wordsworth in The Prelude: there are so many passages that you fall asleep over; but when he gets it right in that incredible blank verse of his, that’s just amazing. And the complexity of the diction he uses—no one had used diction like that before—that elevates into poetry what in another context sounds awkward, off-kilter.

JW: It’s a kind of discovery or invention for all the English poetry that follows. I think of the expressive awkwardness in Hardy.

SP: Yes, they both understand that narrative is an argument, and argument is a narrative; that you’re going somewhere; that the volition of the poem is its drive, to go forward, whatever its versified quality is.

JW: Olson also believed in that kind of velocity. But he had a different way of talking about it: one insight being immediately superseded by another insight: that’s what you’re projecting.

SP: And he uses the field, the whole page, all that silence as part of the vocabulary of sound. It’s almost visual, the vocal presence. He’s a very underrated poet, I believe, but incredibly influential. He and Marianne Moore are the most underrated influential poets of their generations.

JW: People tend to think of Olson as a kind of secondary Poundian, but I think of him alongside Coleridge, the way he was interested in all kinds of knowledge, that mind he had for anthropology, and how it informs his sense of language and poetic form.

SP: And he wrote a great book in prose, Call Me Ishmael. And to write good prose, oddly enough, is one of the ultimate tests for a poet.

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Stanley Plumly’s recent collection of poems, Old Heart, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and The Paterson Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography, was runner-up for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Distinguished Biography. Plumly is a distinguished University Professor at University of Maryland. In 2009, he was appointed Poet Laureate of Maryland, and in 2010, he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Plumly’s new book of poems, Orphan Hours, will appear in the spring of 2012.

Joshua Weiner is the author of two books of poetry, The World’s Room and From the Book of Giants; and he is the editor of a collection of critical essays, At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn. The recipient of a Whiting Foundation Writers Award and the Rome Prize, he teaches at University of Maryland, College Park, and lives in Washington, D.C.

Plumly and Weiner will read together at TWC on May 25, 2012 as part of our 35th Anniversary Reading Series. Mark your calendars!

The Memorial Day Writers Project Open Mic

2011-11-10T10:40:00.001-05:00

The Memorial Day Writers Project Open Mic

The Memorial Day Writers Project will hold its open mic venue on the Mall Nov 11, 11:30 AM to 5:30 PM, adjacent to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The event is open to the public. Bring your original poems, prose, song or a funny story. Come and listen to the songs of Jonathan Myer, an O-1E pilot who worked over the DMZ and the Ho Chi Minh Trail; Dick Richards, the award-winning author and song writer from the 1^st Cav who sings about his time at Khe Sanh and Bong Son; and excerpts from ‘Your Hero and Mine, Scott,” letters from a 19-year-old embedded reporter with the 101st Airborne unit; and many others. Come and listen to the poetry of grunts, medics, marines and airmen. Come to listen or come to participate at the “Writer’s Tent” on the Mall.

If you’d like to read please contact Dick Epstein at dick_epstein@hotmail.com and he’ll add your name on the sign-up list!

Meet Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Only Authorized Biographer

2011-11-09T13:00:00.006-05:00

Do you believe that everything is foma? Do you wish your epitaph would read "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" ?

This Saturday November 12, Charles J. Shields, the only authorized biographer of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., will read from And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life at TWC. The book was released yesterday November 8. You can buy your copy AND get it signed at TWC on Saturday evening.

Date

Saturday November 12 at 7:30 P.M.

Location

4508 Walsh St.
Bethesda, MD 20815

Attendance

S10 Members/Students, $15 Non-members

Visit our event listing and register for the event here. You can also visit Charles J. Shields' blog Writing Kurt Vonnegut.

The Surprise in Writing by Angie Kim

2011-11-08T12:30:00.002-05:00

I never wanted to be a writer.

Growing up, I didn’t keep a writing journal or create characters in my head. Writing was a means to an end: I wrote essays to get into college, then articles so I could list “Reporter” in my law school application, then law review pieces to include in my résumé, then briefs to persuade judges to give money to my clients.

Two years ago, I wrote my first “creative” personal essay. My goal this time: to write a how-to book for parents facing the same medical quandary with their kids that I’d gone through with mine. (The details of my son’s illness, I won’t go into here, but I’m happy to say that he’s fine now.) I’d read somewhere that it’s best to build a platform for a nonfiction book by publishing related articles. So I wrote an article summarizing my experience on what I called the “doctor-mom track.” Then I signed up for a personal essay class at The Writer’s Center, not because I wanted to improve my writing, but because I secretly thought the instructor would read my piece and immediately send it to his agent or his editor buddy at The New Yorker.

That didn’t happen.

The instructor said my essay was a good effort. An interesting topic. He pointed out some nice language. Then he crinkled his forehead into a How-do-I-say-this-tactfully frown, and said, “This piece reads like an argument, like you’re making a case. I think of personal essays more as writers discovering something new, about what they think, who they are. Does that make sense?”

It didn’t. I had no idea what he was talking about. I wrote knowing exactly what I wanted to say. I wrote to convince others that I was right. That, to me, was the point of writing.

I kept quiet and listened to the instructor discussing the importance of things I’d never before considered: voice, showing rather than telling, description, dialogue, avoiding clichés. Publication, he said, we’d get to at the end. I considered skipping all but the last class.

For homework, he handed us a list of phrases and told us to write a short essay on one. I saw “knuckle bones” on the list and knew what I should write: an essay about my genetic deformity. I was born with missing knuckle bones in my pinkies and fourth toes, making those digits half the length they should be. Pinkies are supposed to be short, so my pinkies aren’t too noticeable, but my toe-stumps look freaky. I would argue show how my too-short pinkies, which never bothered me as a kid, ended up derailing my dream of becoming a concert pianist, whereas my toes, which I obsessed over as a child, ended up not affecting my life at all.

When I started writing, though, I realized that my toes had never bothered me in Seoul, where I grew up. I remembered obsessing over socks and never wearing toe-baring sandals as an immigrant teenager in America, but not in Korea. Why?

I didn’t know the answer. I wrote anyway, trying to figure it out. I wrote about my first day of school in America, when the Korean-American boy in my grade was assigned to be my translator, despite not speaking Korean. I wrote about my parents leaving me with relatives so they could work 18-hour days in a grocery store behind bulletproof glass. I wrote about the anxiety of not knowing how to ask for the bathroom. I wrote about my new classmates, the girls who fawned over me, like I was their pet. I wrote about my dad being shot in the store lobby. I did not write about my pinkies or my career plans.

The next class, I read a section out loud. The instructor grinned. “That,” he said, “is a personal essay.”

I kept writing. I wrote more personal essays, and discovered that my mother and our tiny home in Korea and my grandfather’s grave permeate my thoughts, which surprised me. Last summer, I started taking fiction classes and writing short stories, and discovered that I love strange characters who do irrational things, which also surprised me.

As for my mommy-track article, I took my instructor’s advice, completely revamped it, and got it published. A few literary agents contacted me to gauge my interest in writing a book on my “doctor-mom track” experience. I was thrilled, and I said so. But then came the biggest surprise: I found myself saying that actually, I’m discovering that I want to write something different. I don’t know what, exactly. I’ll know after I write it.

Angie Kim is a member and workshop participant at TWC. You can read Angie’s essay, “Missing Bones,” here. Her “doctor-mom track” essay is available here.

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Angie Kim’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in New Letters, Gulf Stream, and Slate. Her work was awarded finalist for the 2011 Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Award and the 2011 Tobias Wolff Short Story Award. She lives in Great Falls, Virginia, with her husband and their three boys.

Writing Jams at TWC!

2011-11-08T12:24:00.001-05:00

Krista, Kristen, and Stacey at http://www.thisisourjamdc.com/ crafted a playlist just for The Writer's Center!

"As writers of a music blog, we have a pretty extensive array of favorites. But, these are the songs that we tend to turn to when in need of inspiration. They have also been key in helping us get into 'the zone' when studying and focusing on work. Enjoy!"--K, K, & S

The Playlist:
"Iscariot" - Walk the Moon
"The Wolves (Act I and II)" - Bon Iver
"Too Afraid to Love" - The Black Keys
"Do You Realize??" - The Flaming Lips
"One of Those Days" - Joshua Radin
"Detlef Schrempf" - Band of Horses
"The Garden You Planted" - Sea Wolf
"Die Die Die" - The Avett Brothers
"Ain't No Reason" - Brett Dennan
"Edge of a Dream" - Sarah Jarosz
"Tangle in this Trampled Wheat" - Tallest Man on Earth
"Ghost in this House" - Alison Krauss and Union Station
"Blackbird" - Glee Cast

A huge thank you to http://www.thisisourjamdc.com for this gift. If you're a music fan, this blog is definitely not one to miss!

--Zach

Support TWC on Give to the Max Day!

2011-11-07T14:43:00.001-05:00

Give to the Max Day: Greater Washington is a day for Washingtonians to come together to raise as much money as possible for area nonprofits in 24 hours, starting at midnight (12:00 AM) on November 9 through midnight (12:00 AM) on November 10. By engaging thousands of residents to support their favorite charities in one day, Give to the Max Day is trying to break the national record for the best online giving metropolitan region event, showcasing the Greater Washington region's strong community.

This week, support The Writer's Center by donating to our cause. With your help, we could also win additional prizes, which means additional programming and events to our members and fans. Thanks!

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Barbara Saunier on "Foreclosure"

2011-11-07T13:00:00.002-05:00

There is not much fiction in the poem “Foreclosure”—unfortunately. While I am not the woman who lost her husband to cancer, her business to a single industry’s leaving the area, and her home to fallout from the other two events, I was there.

For nineteen years my long-time friend Michele lived in the old farm house I loved to visit, an hour-plus south of my own home. I loved the drive down there with my dog in the back seat, loved the lunches Michele would lay on the oak table in her dining room, loved collecting chestnuts from her yard in the fall, loved the vista that swept down a long incline from her front porch across the road and down the cornfields to the woods, loved the wood stove in her family room, loved hanging heads with her over a jig-saw puzzle in near silence all afternoon. Loved it, loved it all. So while I can’t claim to have suffered the grim trifecta of loss that she did, what I did suffer from her very real losses has been real enough.

The day Michele held her everything-left-must-go sale, I was there. Most of the interior images in the poem originate with that day. But several months later, after she had relocated to another part of the country, I made the familiar drive again, knowing the farm house was still vacant and the raspberries in what had been her garden were now ripe. Most of the images from the yard originate with that final visit.

I had two other poems in mind as I tried to honor my friend’s experience with my own poem: Wallace Stevens' “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and a poem I have not been able to find again after I taught it years ago, I think by Etheridge Knight, made of a series of haiku that reflected a man’s experience in prison. But though I took a stab at a vision and an economy similar to theirs, I lacked the discipline reflected in those poems. I suppose all I really took from them ultimately was their cataloging approach and their use of roman numerals . . .

With this poem I did have one of those happy editorial experiences that come along now and again. The section showing the porch swing had given me fits for weeks, so when Poet Lore’s acceptance came with a request from editor Jody Bolz that I do something less “weak-kneed” with that section or lop off the precious part, I was pleased to find that in about half an hour I’d found a way both to salvage the Amish buggy and replace the unworthy bits. Sometimes it just takes a little distance—and a little nudge!

I am happy to report that the most fictionalized component in this poem is the dog. Against the odds, Michele was able to take her dog (and her four cats) with her when she moved. But as animal shelters know too well, there are dogs enough who are not so lucky. And I also felt that the dog as I wrote her into the poem — who, in spite of arrangements for her care, returns on her own to what she knows as her turf — reflects not only what happened to Michele but what is happening to so many families who lose their homes: that, in spite of one's best attempts all along to do the right thing, other forces intervene.

—Barbara Saunier

Barbara Saunier is the author of "Foreclosure" (p.47) published in Poet Lore (Volume 106 3/4 Fall/Winter). You can purchase the issue here or procure a subscription to Poet Lore here.

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Since Barbara Saunier’s poem “Foreclosure” was selected for publication in Poet Lore, her work has won first place in the 16th national MacGuffin Poet Hunt contest. She used her winnings to purchase a hay elevator. Her first book of poems is just about ready for submission.

Charles Jensen on "Moratoria" and "The Year of Living Dangerously"

2011-11-04T12:30:00.002-04:00

“Moratoria” and “The Year of Living Dangerously” are part of a larger manuscript of poems I wrote over several months in the fall of 2010. During that time, I was writing every day or almost every day, as much as I could for as long as I could. It was a unique moment; rarely in my life--working full time or going to school full time or both—have I had that level of productivity. For a long time, I let the poems sit, unsure of what to do with them, knowing many of them were, to put it kindly, awful.

Before my first collection, The First Risk, was published, I had written three other full manuscripts. One was my MFA thesis, which I promptly threw in the trash (except 2 poems that lived to see new life elsewhere). The next was an extended meditation on the rise of the AIDS crisis; it spawned my first chapbook Little Burning Edens and nothing else. My third manuscript was a complete sequence of poems; it gave rise to my second chapbook, Living Things. Then The First Risk came about, also made up of four discrete sequences.

In short, sequences were all I’d known for six years.

This writing jag wasn’t about sequence; it was just about writing poems. I wasn’t sure they would be a book or what the book would even be if they became one. In the past, the book, as a structure, served as a guide. I always knew what I was writing toward. Now I was in the dark.

After a few months went by, I dared to print the poems I’d written.

As I read them, I could feel the first tugs of the book. There were poems about money. There were poems about the ways our jobs define us.There were many voices, many perspectives, but they were creating a circle around a subject, a new experience for me. My other books chose their direction and plowed through. These poems had other plans.

It’s easier for me to edit poems when they are in a manuscript. I tend not to work the poems that don’t make it through this cut. Once the book takes shape, I work it and work it. I send the poems out. I read and reread. My most important task? Retyping the whole manuscript—at least twice—as though I were using a manual typewriter and not a sophisticated word processor. When faced with the daunting task of retyping any extra word, I am more than happy to cut out those not carrying their weight or to rephrase things more simply, more directly.

But these two poems have remained relatively unchanged since their writings. “Moratoria” is a litany poem using anaphora, possibly my most enjoyed and most frequently used tool in the poet’s bag of tricks. In some ways it responds to the limiting of our civil rights over the past ten years, but anyone who ever worked in a corporate or business environment knows that primary topic of communication is what you are not to do rather than what you are. This constant subtraction was the effect I was working toward here, and I think the litany of what is taken has a heavy cumulative effect I like.

“The Year of Living Dangerously” takes as its origin a small reality—making the difficult choice to go without health insurance in order to do other things, like pay rent and buy groceries—and tries to capture the sense of how even the mundane becomes burdened with risk and hazard in those circumstances. I remember when writing this piece, I worked very hard to keep a general word/syllable count for the lines and to focus my attention on starting and ending lines with hard or powerful words as much as possible. The mental work required to do that, to maintain the form, I think was beneficial. Rather than simply dump words on the page, I had to work against my instincts to phrase things in a way that would suit the poem.

The manuscript continues to evolve. It is now sitting with a few friends for advice—I always find this helps me view the work more objectively. I have a hard time doing this with single poems. But I believe the book must be alive, must have many moving parts, each one doing its share of the work. As with contestants on America’s Next Top Model, those poems unable to find the light are kindly asked to pack their things and leave the book. The others, little stars, shine on.

Charles Jensen is the author of "Moratoria" (p.101) and "The Year of Living Dangerously," (p.17) published in Poet Lore (Volume 106 3/4 Fall/Winter). You can purchase the issue here or procure a subscription to Poet Lore here.

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Charles Jensen is the author of The First Risk, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. He has also published three chapbooks and his poems have appeared in Bloom, Columbia Poetry Review, Field, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and Willow Springs. He serves as co-chair of the Emerging Leaders Council of Americans for the Arts, the nation's leading arts advocacy organization.

Marketing at the Speed of the Web with Angela Render

2011-11-03T13:00:00.004-04:00

It always amazes me how much I have to change my classes from quarter to quarter. Granted, much of the information I impart is “evergreen”—wisdom that remains valid through the ages—but then much of it can change on a moment’s notice.

For example, my last class on Social Networking for Writers, happened scarcely a week after a major change in Facebook. Not content with merely updating the screenshots, I used live images in the class instead. It was a case of the instructor being a half-step ahead of the student, as nobody in the marketing community had yet to see a clear path through all the changes, and the ramifications had yet to be even touched upon.

Nonetheless, evergreen wisdom should prevail no matter what technological changes rock the boat. When marketing anything to anyone, two things remain constant:
1) The consumer is a human being.
2) You want to sell them something.

In my upcoming classes on November 12th--Blogging Tips and Tricks and Advanced Marketing—I’m going to impart to you both the foundations of promoting yourself online as well as the latest tools available to you. More importantly, I’m going to teach you how to select the best tools to use for yourself.

We’re constantly bombarded with experts claiming that if you’re going to be successful, you’ve got to do X or you’ve got to do Y, as if jumping on the latest bandwagon was the key to success. There is no magic bullet to get where you want to be. There are thousands of paths to success and constantly chasing after the latest thing will do nothing other than exhaust you.

What I plan to teach is not only how to find your own path to success, but how to pace yourself so that you can win the marathon that is self-promotion. Be sure to bring your questions with you.

I hope to see you there.

Angela

Testimonials:

“Confident, well-organized, substantive presentations—and patient to boot! She fielded every question and led to think about approaches to marketing we had never considered before.”

“This was a very helpful introduction to an overwhelming topic—it does not seem as daunting now, to establish a platform and presence, as it did before I took the class.”

“The information shared has inspired me to go home and take action!!”

Angela Render is the workshop leader for Blogging Tips and Tricks from 12-2 P.M. and Advanced Marketing from 3-5 P.M. on 11/12 at TWC. Sign up for her workshops here and here.

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Angela Render designed and maintained Web sites since 1994 and is the founder and owner of Thunderpaw Internet Presence Management. Her published work includes: Forged By Lightning: A Novel of Hannibal and Scipio, Marketing for Writers: A Practical Workbook, a Writers' Journal column, and ghost blogging. In addition to her classes through The Writer's Center, she teaches at-risk middle-school girls and has been a guest speaker at numerous local conferences.

Creating Space and Time to Hear the Muse: The Writing Staycation with Zahara Heckscher

2011-11-02T13:30:00.002-04:00

Writing confession: I cannot write at home. Yes, I often knock off emails and short articles at my desk. But my real writing – my novel, my poetry, my creative nonfiction – seems to require a break in the space-time continuum.

My muse speaks to me more clearly the farther I am from the stacks of paper, the laundry, the kitchen. Hate to admit it, but she also demands distance from my family.

I’ve always wanted to go to one of those retreat centers where I could do nothing but write all day and stare at the mountains or ocean. But as a busy mom and educator, that ain’t happening. So I create mini writing retreats when I can. My most productive times are writing sessions with other writers around me. If someone else is in the room with me writing, I am less likely to read the paper or check my emails.

I created the Writing Staycation for like minded souls. I welcome anyone who prefers an out-of-home writing experience, and anyone who wants to have the time and space, outside the normal routine, to hear the muse clearly.

At the Writing Staycation, I nurture the body and spirit of the participants so they’ll have the stamina to focus on the writing. The event features healthy snacks, plenty of coffee and tea, inspiring speakers, and tons of time to write.

If you’d like a sacred time and space to listen to your own muse, I hope you’ll join us for the upcoming Writing Staycation, November 7-11.

Zahara Heckscher is the workshop leader for the Writing Staycation workshop, which starts Monday 11/7 and continues through Friday 11/11 at TWC. You can sign up for her workshop here. She has blogged previously about the Writing Staycation on First Person Plural here and here.

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Zahara Heckscher, M.A., is the co-author of the book How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas. She has also written numerous articles that have appeared in books and the online travel magazine www.TransitionsAbroad.com, where she serves as contributing editor. Heckscher teaches professional writing at University of Maryland at College Park. She is a breast cancer survivor who prefers to be known as a "cancer thriver." She blogs at cancerthriver.blogspot.com.