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Help and Support Along the Way
by Lynn O'Neill
Our theme this month is social architecture and we thought the publication of San Diegan Amy Wallen's first novel, MoonPies and Movie Stars, would be a great backdrop to talk about writer communities. Wallen has written her novel, not only with plenty of solitary nose-to-the-grindstone work, but also with support from several read/critique, prompt groups and workshops.
Lynn O'Neill: First things first: the description of your book and a great blurb:
Amy Wallen: When Ruby Kincaid, the owner of a six-lane bowling alley in Devine, Texas, spots her runaway daughter on a ButterMaid commercial, she sets off for Hollywood to find her and make her own up to her responsibility of being a mother to the two little kids she left behind. In a madcap road trip from the dusty flats of Texas to the glittering aisles of The Price Is Right, Ruby survives with a little pluck and some Texas spunk.
"To read MoonPies and Movie Stars is … like being on a tour bus guided by Eudora Welty on speed…”
-Mary Gordon, author of The Stories of Mary Gordon and Pearl
LO: I love “…Eudora Welty on speed.” Sounds like my kind of book. I think people always want to know where writers get their characters.
AW: My characters appeared during a Judy Reeves writing marathon, back in 1997. For one of our writing prompts, she tossed out some magazine pictures and I chose one of an older woman talking on the phone. My character, Ruby, was born from that––I wrote from my grandmother's voice whose world centered around the Brackettville, Texas honky tonk she owned. Ruby evolved to become less like my grandmother and more her own self. In the novel the honky tonk became a bowling alley, the heart of the county. I borrowed the name of the town from a few counties over: Devine Texas, but the book is structured after Brackettville.
LO: You mention Judy Reeves, who is now Program Director of San Diego Writers, Ink. She has been one of the prime movers in the San Diego writing community. Part of your early writing community was with the (now defunct) Writing Center she founded.
AW: Yes, when I met Judy I was writing personal memoir––just babbling about my childhood. At this time I submitted something to an anthology at the Writing Center and it got accepted––indeed, about my childhood in Africa, but I had also written in Judy's workshop “Wild Women Hot Nights,” about having sex with Jesus Christ––it was blasphemous and present tense––thinking about him as a really lousy lover. It went over well. That was the first time I felt part of a group, even though I get antsy in groups. I don't “play well with others” but I learned that writers don't expect you to conform or follow preconceived rules. In fact, writing usually turns out better when you break the rules.
LO: You majored in journalism and advertising at the University of Oklahoma but left it all behind. I guess if you were destined to write about having sex with Jesus Christ, Oklahoma probably wasn't the place for you.
AW: I did have to leave Oklahoma, so I made a list of what I wanted in a place. I wanted a Spanish-speaking community because I had lived in Latin America as a kid. I wanted a beach. The plan was to live in San Diego five years, then move to San Francisco, a city I thought more literary, but I came out in 1988 and I haven't left. I found my home in the people and community; I have no desire to leave.
LO: One aspect of your writing community is that you continue to take classes and write with prompt groups.
AW: Yes. I learn a lot from assignments and I like deadlines. Ever since I got here I've traveled to L.A. for groups or classes. I took a fiction class at UCSD and enjoyed it and then someone told me about the Writing Center, in downtown San Diego. I started “Brown Bags” and classes there.
LO: By the way, “Brown Bags” are drop-in writing prompt groups held at the Grove Bookstore in South Park (San Diego)––12 to 1 on Tuesdays and 5:10 pm on Thursdays at Lestat's in Normal Heights––everyone is welcome. Writing prompt groups were how I found you. I will never forget sitting in that moldy office on Park Blvd., many times just the two of us, writing our hearts out. That's when I switched from rather flat personal narrative to fiction––sometimes in the third person, which was new for me. With you, I was able to witness the process of someone crafting fiction; I had to be part of that dynamism. Community can be that small: one-on-one. Then I joined your read and critique group, which helped me to actually complete those short stories. Judy Reeves says it best: “…for all the ideas of [the] writer as [a] solitary, tortured soul alone in her cramped garret or shambled studio working into the night, in reality writers, like the rest of humanity, are basically communal creatures.”
AW: Yes, we get our fodder from the world; we have to interact. I can stand up and make jokes when I'm emceeing open mic night in front of dozens of people, then there are times where I want to stay home and unplug the phone. I just want to write, alone. But alone is when we weave together what we gather when we are with others.
LO: You've written most of your novel freehand, during Brown Bags. Why not do the free writing on a laptop?
AW: Because the noise is irritating and the way you type on computers you're editing as you go. You're losing some of that “first thought” stuff. We say in our Brown Bag rules, “first thoughts hold the truth.” Free writes are when I let it go. The entire first book and the rewrites were written by hand. Part of the Brown Bag experience is hearing your work aloud (you can choose to read to the group) and you often hear things you didn't know you'd written.
LO: You then started taking the polished pages to read/critique groups. How did they help you?
AW: Again, I like deadlines, but groups aren't for everyone. It can be heart wrenching to hear critique (a polite word for criticism). If your work is published then people will be thinking this stuff anyway. It's also inspiring to hear other people's work. I learned a lot about detail, word and verb choices. I'd look at my writing and see where I could up the ante. Another “rule” in Brown Bag is to be specific. Say “geranium” instead of “red.” That stuck with me. I couldn't have written this book and come away with 400 pages without that community.
LO: We were both in Janet Fitch's (White Oleander) L.A. group at different times. I was in a few months before it disbanded, but you were in for five years. Did you ever feel like you were writing by “committee” in groups, that your voice was compromised?
AW: I'm a people pleaser so I would try to please everyone. That didn't work very well for very long. You have to find “your people” in the group who your work registers with––and then there are those who surprise you occasionally with a new perspective. There's something about having lots of minds working on something and having lots of feedback. You lose perspective when you're working by yourself. At some point, however, I realized I wasn't listening to me; I was only listening to them. When I started going with my gut that's when my writing got better, fuller. That's when people started responding better to my work.
LO: Does this writing structure help you alleviate some of the dread writer's block?
AW: I don't believe in writer's block! You must show up every day for writing. It's like practicing the piano. Just because you didn't write well one day doesn't mean you don't show up the next day. If you do that you gradually get more out of practice. You don't have to be inspired to write; you write to be inspired. It's like a religion. I'm an atheist but writing can have a divine purpose.
LO: Another component of communal writing is the sharing.
AW: We just celebrated the second anniversary of “First Fridays,” San Diego Writers, Ink Open Mic where writers bring three minutes of prose to read aloud, the first Friday of every month. It's like showing your art in a gallery. Storytelling was an oral tradition to begin with. You're putting life into the piece when you read. Some people come to the open mic nights just to listen. It's entertainment.
LO: What other groups have you been in?
AW: Last summer was my fifth year attending NY State Summer Writer's Institute at Skidmore. Writing conferences can be good intensive workshops with folks who have no preconceived notions about you. I'm now in a monthly L.A. read and critique group. It's a peer group––people I knew from Skidmore.
LO: You had also applied to grad school.
AW: Yes, and I was rejected by them all. I was discouraged, but then realized I had a strong writing community and a life here in San Diego. It wasn't long after that that I got the books deal. When I was a kid and we had to move all the time, my mom would say, “it's not the place but the people.”
LO: Getting the book(s) deal, (you're working on your second novel now). How did community help?
AW: Finding an agent is about having connections. Agents only take people by referral. Someone at one of the workshops I attended had mentioned the Publisher's Lunch Web site. It lists the books sold that week, to which publishing houses and what agents were repping them. What got the agent psyched was that I had mentioned in the query letter that one of their books, Waltzing at the Piggly Wiggly, was similar to mine and that's what got me “in the door.”
LO: Speaking of the second novel, you've had some help with your own “one-on-one community”––your boyfriend and fellow writer, Eber, whom you met through your read and critique group.
AW: He's been so helpful. I call him “Mr. Engineer” and the “Plot Psychiatrist.” He's good with the science of things; he knows if something does this then another thing has to do that … and this triggers great plot ideas.
LO: How has your writing improved over the years?
AW: It's easier. On the first novel I spent so much time trying to learn to write. I craft a good sentence now yet I rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. On the last round of edits for the novel I sat on my couch for a week and read it aloud to myself and I liked it.
LO: What's in store for the second novel?
AW: The second novel takes place in the same Texas community. The community is the series, not the main character. Stay tuned.
LO: I would encourage people to look in their communities for prompt groups and read and critiques. I've lived in a few big cities over the years and you can find them (or start them!), and because of the hard work of some dedicated San Diegans who love writing, we have a lot to feel good about right here.
AW: I think San Diego has one of the best writing communities in the country––even better than New York City. Maybe only the Loft in Minneapolis/St. Paul can compare. San Diego will one day be written about. It should be watched.
MoonPies and Movie Stars was released December 28, 2006 by the Viking Adult/Penguin Group. Please visit www.amywallen.com for more information. Lynn O'Neill is a San Diego essayist and fiction writer. E-Mail: jasminatree@yahoo.com. For information on Judy Reeves and San Diego Writers, Ink, visit www.judyreeveswriter.com and www.sandiegowriters.org. Also try www.themuseisin.com for additional writing resources.
Found in Translation Words Without Borders Smuggles in Contraband Lit
by Ana Yoerg
I'm going to raise my children bilingual. Which languages, I have yet to choose; though by default I suppose English will be one of them. The other could be Italian, Spanish, or maybe Thai. French? Dutch? Swahili? (If it's one of these, I'll have to get cracking on them myself first, and be quick about it.)
Why would I do this? Parents say it's hard enough to communicate clearly with their children, from the “Don't put that in your mouth” stage all the way through the peer pressure rebuttals, heartbreak condolences, and career advice that is subject to selective hearing. How many times have you heard a frustrated parent remark, “I feel as if I am speaking another language. They just don't understand what I'm saying!” So why complicate matters with another spoken language? Aren't things hard enough?
The answer is quite simple: parents want to give their children as many opportunities as possible, and raising a child to be bilingual widens their scope of potential learning. Forget for one moment the studies that show the accelerated development of the brain among those who are exposed to multiple languages at a young age. Have you ever been witness to a child or newborn as they first discover their senses? It is a moment of real empowerment: Hmm. I can see it. I can touch it, smell it, and yes, I will put it in my mouth to see what it tastes like. Curiosities are temporarily satisfied, and the self in its entirety is awake and alert in observation––a state that for many will only return during adulthood through strict meditative training. Exposure to different ways of speaking and listening, therefore, actually extends one's powers of expression and understanding.
But there is more. If my children learn from the very beginning that there is more than one way of saying something, then they'll assume there is more than one way of looking at the world. A friend's six-year-old daughter once asked him solemnly if a 'bird' can also be the 'grass.' Whether or not this testifies to a premature awareness of the arbitrariness of any one particular language toolbox (to use Steven Pinker's expression from The Language Instinct) I cannot say, and certainly wouldn't claim as he does that children seem to obey a common grammar instinct, while at the same time being acutely sensitive to the syntactical mistakes of their uneducated parents, but it does seem to follow that children have this open attitude toward language that many an adult seems to have foregone, as in Corinthians: “As a child I spoke as a child, I thought and understood as a child. But when I became a wo/man, I put away childish things, and began to see through a glass darkly.”
If liberty of language and open expression is a thing of childhood, by all means don't stash it away too soon. To this end, I'll have to keep on telling stories, too, in an attempt to cultivate an appreciation and perhaps even a love for narrative, descriptive detail, character, and faraway places. Books. Reading. Literature.
But again––why? Of course, to develop the imagination, and at least attempt to keep television and mass media at bay, as they tend to narrow rather than widen one's perspectives. At the beginning of 2006, a study concluded that Americans spend more time immersed in media than they do sleeping, and the latest statistic is that it now consumes 50 percent of our day. This means half of our waking life is dedicated to an impersonal companionship, which makes me wonder how long it will be before Tivo trounces Tammy and Netflix replaces Nick. Customized video services like these give us too much control over the type of contact we have with the world. The other major source of information, network television news, sadly completes our view of the “Other,” and it ends up being quite limited. The passive, solitary viewer, when inundated with short TV spots and flashes of images of things foreign, is left with a shallow but lasting impression of what another culture is like. Thus a stereotype is born.
There is another way to approach the subject of knowing the Other, and that is through the academic world, or non-fiction reading. Of course, I'd be happy if my kids grew up reading encyclopedia entries on the Masai tribes of Africa or bombarding my astrophysicist brother-in-law with questions about the skies in the Southern Hemisphere. I'd also be happy if they went far in the formal education system, learning to think critically and form their own ideas, create and deliver arguments, and the like. As young adults, I'd like them to read well-written and balanced commentary on current events, looking for information from a variety of sources and being aware of potential biases. But actually, I'd be happiest if they simply opted out of the Extra Value Meal.
McDonalds being too easy of a target, I'll use Subway as an example. On my last visit to this fine fast-food alternative, I found myself gazing up at the board in amazement at the choices that lay above me in florescent yellow and red glory. Turkey breast; turkey breast & ham; smoked or regular. Five different breads; toasted; not. Special sandwich of the day? Combo meal? Chips or cookies? My god, I thought. Overwhelmed, and kind of embarrassed at my indecisiveness (everyone else seemed to know what they wanted), I picked a number: 1. Meatball Marinara. Combo, with Baked Lays, and a Diet Pepsi. As the decisions rolled off my tongue, I felt an immediate lightness––yes, that must have been what I wanted. The truth is, it wasn't. But the responsibility of choosing for myself was put on someone else, someone I trusted––the experts of market research, the folks whose job it was to study lunchtime needs of the general public and create neatly packaged combinations that will be sure to satisfy, and most of all, take away some of the stress of having to listen to our body's cravings and use our senses. We go for the Extra Value Combo Meal because we don't have the time or energy to create the whole from its parts, to start on an individual level with one thing we might want and build from there. And, we think, it's cheaper.
We tend to deal with other cultures in a similar way: pre-packaged and economical. As I see it, almost everything, when approached theoretically, is a thesis. We can study a culture from a sociological perspective and apply all kinds of theories to the circumstances of a conflict or event. All the bits and pieces––rather like the evidence of a good essay––can somehow be fit in such a way that serves to prove a hypothesis. There are people whose entire lives revolve around their Edward T. Hall abilities to put the pieces in order; they can construct an entire jigsaw puzzle of blank cardboard and convince you that it is a picture of the Grand Canyon. But you are left with just that, a two-dimensional faux photograph, and probably a lot of pieces that don't fit. What do you do with them? Toss them aside, maybe into the recycling bin if they're lucky.
The pieces that don't fit, however, contain some of the key elements in understanding a culture. The minor details in the way a father treats his first-born son, the way in which bedroom furniture is arranged, the slight nuances in romantic behavior among two lovers from different sides of the tracks. These are things you will never find in an Associated Press article, CNN news report, or even a 700-page anthropological study on a select group of people. Poetry, prose, music, and art, on the other hand, will provide these; in fact, these are what they thrive on. They beg for active involvement in the material, both rational and emotional, and give a depth of characterization that serves to deconstruct stereotypes and allow us to be sensitive to the plights of individuals. As a collection of observations, with a blurred line between subject and object, the Other is thus accessed through its parts and not as a whole, and the reader is given the freedom to make their own decisions and conclusions.
The problem now lies in the access to such literature. My kids may one day read original texts, but that is just one––if we don't have the time or energy to make lunch, how can we possibly learn all the languages of the globe? This is where translators step in, and an organization called Words Without Borders comes to the rescue. Doctors and engineers have long used the catchphrase 'without borders' to describe the exportation of Western medicine and technology to developing countries. English, too, has long been a Western export, as well as literature, as books are translated from English into a variety of languages and widely distributed. But what about the cultural and literary 'trade deficit' that we experience, contrary to economic laws, when we import too few? A 2005 Bowker study revealed the shameful fact that only 3 percent of books available for sale in the English-speaking world were works in translation. (Not taking into account the fact that many are new translations of known classics, rather than contemporary authors, which makes the actual percentage even more sparse.) Rather than focus on what we can bring to or, on the negative side, impose upon other cultures, we could turn our attentions inward to our own peoples and introduce them to the world of the Other directly, through the authentic voices of their writers. Bring the mountain to Mohammed, so to speak. Or rather, give him a nice book to read about how people live on the mountain.
Words Without Borders, in collaboration with The New Press, brought such a book to the American public this year, and it has thankfully been well received. The title, Literature From the 'Axis of Evil', met with some controversy, of course, as “Writings from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and other Enemy Nations” contains a sarcasm and shock value that, despite its obvious marketing appeal, risked insulting authors by mere use of the harmful rhetoric that supports the abstract thinking of 'evil nations' after 9/11. Overall, however, the goal of Words Without Borders, which is to stimulate international conversation through literature, to “widen, not diminish, our circles of reference, thus waging the eternal battle against ignorance and fear of the 'enemy,'” is largely realized by this publication, which represents a pool of talent that would otherwise never be accessible to the American public.
Starting with the obvious 'enemy,' we find in the anthology an ode to Baghdad by Salah Al-Hamdani, a war oppositionist living in exile in France. As many of the countries included in the anthology are closed societies that banish dissenters, there are some voices from expatriated communities; yet they are still significant members of that society. Here, the exiled laments his distance: Baghdad, my Beloved / I was squatting in a corner of the page / Sheltered from barren days / far from bloody rivers / that swept away the names of the dead / and people's silence. Many Americans might empathize with the poet, who, like us, is far from the barren days and bloody rivers that mark the Iraqi conflict, removed from the daily violence and instead buried in the paperwork and theoretical framework that surrounds it. But he, unlike us, carries the memory of its people, the victims, but in a very real, unglorified way. “They fed on lies, they practiced Ramadan during the day and got drunk at night,” as he writes in “The Beginning of Words,” “...Everything they said about the sacred book was very refined. So was the food.” Al-Hamdani writes about the people as only one from the culture could, exposing the hypocrisies and intimate details, which then help us to see the inhabitants of his homeland as people, faults included; this is more powerful than the usual view of war victims as a hapless collective that can only be generally pitied, and always from a distance.
Turning from victims of war to soldiers, Kamel Al-Maghur (1935-2002), Libyan writer and government official under Qaddafi, recalls the images of the variety of soldiers that occupied his country: Italian, British, German. “The soldiers' green plumes intermingle; they resemble the feathers of the birds they come from. It is difficult to separate them. Times mingle, eras intertwine.” The people of a nation, similarly, are difficult to separate:
The Jews of the neighborhood are as poor as the Jews of the other neighborhoods. They are like us, or so they appeared. The Maltese speak something that sounds like Arabic, herd goats, and sell palm wine. The women clean and mop their own houses. I doubt they were cleaner than us.
These are descriptions one would never find in a newspaper, or even a feature story in a periodical, for there is not enough room to accompany all of the pluralities that exist in a society. We struggle to understand foreign events and attitudes because you cannot simplify the situation; understanding lies in the complexity of the situation itself. Ethnic and regional groupings are our attempt to inflict some sense of order so that we might understand it, but without the individual pieces, we are lost.
Such is the case in “A Tale of Music” by Kang Kwi-Mi, of whom we know nothing except her gender. She recounts a childhood life of abject poverty in post-WWII Japan and her family's subsequent return to Korea, where her musically talented older brothers were to follow their dreams. The threat of American military planes in Korean airspace, and the 1968-9 incident of the U.S.S. Pueblo, the “imperialists' spy ship,” created a sense of urgent patriotism that sent the youngest in another direction. He joins the People's Army and later completely abandons the world of music for the stone production sector, voluntarily traveling the country to erect monuments to the Great Leader, Kim Jong II. Disappointed, his younger sister cannot understand how he could become “even more silent, as if he himself had turned to stone,” and sacrifice so much for a person that was not kin and a country he hadn't even been raised in. The assumptions that she makes about the motivation behind his decisions––that he'd been brainwashed or otherwise coerced into deserting his art––reflect many Westerner's perspectives on the lives of North Koreans. As we have a fundamental distrust for dictators and view communist nations as forcefully stifling artists and intellectuals, of course we would tend to agree with his sister.
Then, she comes across his soldier's notebook, where he expresses frustration at composing a suitable song to show the Fatherly Leader's love of his people:
It doesn't work. Until now, I've thought that music is the most powerful thing, an emotional language that can express everything. But it's not the case. There's no melody that can express this great, passionate love. Like no artist can draw the sun…
She concludes that her brother “still lived in the dignified world of music, played by the monuments for the cause…” only now he uses a different medium of expression. But it is all towards a larger purpose that we as Americans still may not be able to grasp, coming as we are from an outsider's perspective.
Are we destined, though, to always be outsiders? To always have the sense that we are merely stealing glimpses, fragments, peering into other cultures through ambiguities and shades of meaning? Yes, we are. We will not be handed a complete picture of the Other on a silver platter. That is the very challenge of literature: to take a world that is not your own and work to make the connection. From Cuba, Anna Lidía Vega Serova tries to come to terms with her own bicultural existence, as she writes, “The howls of rats heard beneath the windows of your building might recall songs in a foreign language, words with ambiguous meanings, the sounds of other times and places, possibly extraterrestrial.” Of this planet or not, I'd want my children, and their children, to at least have the possibility of understanding those songs.
Words Without Borders publishes an online magazine of international literature at www.wordswithoutborders.org. Be sure to check out their blog of Literary Notes from Around the World. Recommended: The Mail Bag: Arnon Grunberg and Matteo Bianchi to One Another.