Marin Poetry Center Online Retreat

from “Soap,” by Francis Ponge

There is so much to say about soap. Precisely everything that it tells about itself until the complete disappearance, the exhaustion of the subject. This is just the object suited to me.

*

Soap has much to say. May it say it with volubility, enthusiasm. When it has finished saying it, it no longer is.

*

Soap was made by man for his body’s use, yet it does not willingly attend him. This inert stone is nearly as hard to hold as a fish. See it slip from me and like a frog dive into the basin again … emitting also at its own expense a blue cloud of evanescence, of confusion.

*

For a piece of soap the principal virtues are enthusiasm and volubility. At any rate ease of elocution. This, which is excessively simple, has nonetheless never been said. Even by the specialist in commercial publicity. And what do the soap-manufacturers offer me—not a penny! They have never even thought of it! Yet soap and I will show them what we can do …

*

There is nothing in nature comparable to soap. No stone is so modest nor, at the same time, so magnificent.

To be frank, there is something adorable about its personality. Its behavior is inimitable.

It begins with perfect reserve.

Soap displays at first perfect self-control, though more or less discreetly scented. Then, as soon as one occupies oneself with it, I won’t say fire, of course, but what magnificent élan! What utter enthusiasm in the gift of itself! What generosity! What volubility, almost inexhaustible, unimaginable!

One may, besides, soon be done with it, yet this adventure, this brief encounter leaves you—this is what it is sublime—with hands as clean as you’ve ever had.

*

Because of this object’s qualities I must expatiate a little, make it froth before your eyes.

*

Violent desire to wash one’s hands.

Dear reader, I suppose that you sometimes want to wash your hands?

For your intellectual toilet, reader, here is a text on soap.

*

This egg, this flat
dab—this little
almond, which
grows so quickly
(almost instantly)
into a Chinese fish
With its veils and kimonos
And wide sleeves
Thus it celebrates its marriage
with water. Such is the gown of its marriage with water.

*

One would never be through,
with soap!

… Yet it is necessary to return it to its saucer, to its strict appearance, its austere oval, its dry patience, and its power to serve again.

trans. by Lane Dunlop in the Paris Review 

Craft Musing & Prompt:

We’ve been thinking a lot about soap lately! I remembered the Francis Ponge poem and started reading Ponge in an attempt to revive the simple objects in our homes that we’ve been staring at for a bit too long here on Day 956, 623, 444 of the pandemic.

Robert Bly calls prose poems “the natural speech of a democratic language.”  Robert Hass calls his prose poems a long escape.  He’s said he wanted to write prose poems which didn’t sound like prose poems. And remember what Frank O’Hara writes: “ It is even in prose/ I am a real poet.” I have a friend who dumps his poems into paragraphs, then looks for the line breaks in the language of the paragraph.  Other poets settle on vision of line breaks and build their poems around that.

Whatever you’ve been doing, however you’ve been building your poems, your assignment for today is to build a poem the other way. Throw the lines of a poem into a paragraph and break them in a different place. Or, challenge yourself to write a prose poem. Here are some more Francis Ponge poems on the very excellent Pen America website. (That’s your journal of the day. My kids are running wildly through the house and I’ve got to finish this entry!)

Here’s a PDF of an entire Ponge translation. Download and scroll to page 40 for his “Methods” manuscript where Ponge outlines the thinking behind his poems. I think you’ll find his prose style as engaging as I do.

We’re in intimate connection with our domestic worlds these days. It’s a good artistic practice to “take the side of things” and look at our forks and salt shakers and chairs in new ways.

My friend at Reveal was finalist for the Pulizter Prize this month! I made her a cocktail called “The Journalist,” poured it into a Mason jar, and took it to her front porch yesterday evening.

The Journalist Cocktail

Finally, a plug for a tiny company making bars of soap & shampoo. A 6th grader and a high school student are making it in their kitchen. Gorgeous, package-free eco bars made in Albany, CA. Sustainabar.

This is my last blog entry. Special thanks to my brother in law Patrick Kelly and friend Lane Greene for the great photos! And to Francis Kelly for helping me get the hang of Squarespace. Looking forward to seeing you on the other side, beautiful poets!

Marin Poetry Center Online Retreat

The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me by Eavan Boland

It was the first gift he ever gave her,
buying it for five francs in the Galeries
in pre-war Paris. It was stifling.
A starless drought made the nights stormy.

They stayed in the city for the summer.
They met in cafés. She was always early.
He was late. That evening he was later.
They wrapped the fan. He looked at his watch.

She looked down the Boulevard des Capucines.
She ordered more coffee. She stood up.
The streets were emptying. The heat was killing.
She thought the distance smelled of rain and lightning.

These are wild roses, appliquéd on silk by hand,
darkly picked, stitched boldly, quickly.
The rest is tortoiseshell and has the reticent,
clear patience of its element. It is

a worn-out, underwater bullion and it keeps,
even now, an inference of its violation.
The lace is overcast as if the weather
it opened for and offset had entered it.

The past is an empty café terrace.
An airless dusk before thunder. A man running.
And no way to know what happened then —
none at all — unless, of course, you improvise:

The blackbird on this first sultry morning,
in summer, finding buds, worms, fruit,
feels the heat. Suddenly she puts out her wing —
the whole, full, flirtatious span of it.

Eavan Boland’s death took us by surprise. She was so vital, so in charge, and only 75. We had a Zoom memorial for her two weeks ago. Hearing her poems read aloud by so many of her former students was a moving experience—the poems that she fashioned now have a new life in our voices. Although she died from a stroke at her home in Dublin, her death during this pandemic shook us. I’m grateful that I got to see Eavan last year at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Here’s the introduction that I gave to her reading there:

“Do you remember when you first read a poem by Eavan Boland? What year was it, where were you, who were you then? I ask this question because if you can remember a time before Eavan’s poems, you realize how badly we all needed her books. I first read Eavan’s work in high school, call it 1991. I special-ordered a copy of Outside History, right when the Norton edition came out. My steady diet of Dickinson, Lowell, Plath and Sexton, supplemented with Walcott and Heaney, was deficient. I got the hardback copy with the purple-black cover, a vase of lilacs on the cover.

To read those poems was to feel comfort—yes, this is what I’d been looking for—but it was also to feel terror—Boland’s poems were difficult, unflinching. They did not give you what you wanted.

In one of her most popular, break-out poems, this one first published in the New Yorker back in 1987, “The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me,” a daughter is handed a gift which dates from her father’s courtship of her mother. After a detailed, curatorial, ekphrastic description, Boland decides to liberate the fan from its status as nostalgic object. It is alive, a blackbird’s wing in flight. Boland’s poems begin with what is there in front of us—the ordinary ancestor, some domestic archaeology of children’s toys, teacups and saucers—and after extending a respectful and somewhat deceptive homage to the object or ancestor, her poems systematically, painstakingly, and without any trace of sentimental, completely transform what we thought we knew in the world.

We have our fore-mothers, their mistakes and their coups, and to be female was to have time embedded into you. Boland’s poems made that all ok for me. The presence of Boland’s work is so foundational, I can’t imagine a time without it. It’s hard to imagine Mark Doty, Natasha Trethewey, or Maeve McGuckian without Boland’s example.

Reading Boland before I knew her, I began to realize there was place for girls in the canon, that with her work Boland was ripping open a seam where we could slip in. Girl-poets need not be troubled or overly dramatic to purchase a place for ourselves. In her aesthetic, as we read her now, understatement is a value; it’s the not-said, some mystery that will not be wrapped up in neat politicks. How important it is now to look at the syntax of her work, the re-ordering of the world.

To see how the sentimental is transformed into the numinous.

When I ended up at Stanford in 2001, grateful beyond belief to be her student, one of her great aims was to warn us young poets off of the precious. I realize now, in her exhortations to steel ourselves against sentimentality, she was trying to inoculate us against smallness. This was a way out she’d found, and she offered it to us.

Prompt: Take an object from your parents’ past and fashion something from it. Remember that Yusef Komuynakaa poem, “My Father’s Love Letters?” Or, take a few minutes and write a few paragraphs about a poet who has influenced you. Why did they mean something to you? We grow as poets not just from writing poems but from considering our own sensibilities and how we’ve developed them, as I’ve said before.

Journal: The Irish Pages, a Belfast literary journal edited by Chris Agee. When I was a Fulbright professor at Queen’s University back in 2010, I got to meet Chris and learn about his amazing advocacy for Northern Irish poets.

Recipe: Gingery Fried Rice with Bok Choy. This is another great brunch/lunch recipe that is even better cold on Day 2 or 3.

Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend, everyone!

Marin Poetry Center Online Retreat

BOY WITH HIS HAIR CUT SHORT Muriel Ruykeser

Sunday shuts down on this twentieth-century evening.
The L passes. Twilight and bulb define
the brown room, the overstuffed plum sofa,
the boy, and the girl's thin hands above his head.
A neighbor radio sings stocks, news, serenade.

He sits at the table, head down, the young clear neck exposed,
watching the drugstore sign from the tail of his eye;
tattoo, neon, until the eye blears, while his
solicitous tall sister, simple in blue, bending
behind him, cuts his hair with her cheap shears.

The arrow's electric red always reaches its mark,
successful neon! He coughs, impressed by that precision.
His child's forehead, forever protected by his cap,
is bleached against the lamplight as he turns head
and steadies to let the snippets drop.

Erasing the failure of weeks with level fingers,
she sleeks the fine hair, combing: 'You'll look fine tomorrow!
You'll surely find something, they can't keep turning you down;
the finest gentleman's not so trim as you!' Smiling, he raises
the adolescent forehead wrinkling ironic now.

He sees his decent suit laid out, new-pressed,
his carfare on the shelf. He lets his head fall, meeting
her earnest hopeless look, seeing the sharp blades splitting,
the darkened room, the impersonal sign, her motion,
the blue vein, bright on her temple, pitifully beating.

Ruykeser’s poem has been on my mind because we are all cutting hair at home now. You might know this poem and her work. Precursor to Adrienne Rich, overshadowed by Plath, it seems like Muriel Ruykeser never gets enough attention. But I’ll argue the Ruykeser is the poet of our moment. Committed to social change yet completely attentive to poetic growth, Ruykeser’s poems do not bore with platitude or preach to the choir. Do you have her Collected Poems on your shelf? I’m ordering a used copy from BetterWorldBooks. In the poem above, she’s wins the award for the best use ever of an adverb in a poem. The “pitifully” beating vein in the last line is unforgettable. Somehow, we feel like the vein is beating still at this very moment in time. The adverb makes the girl immortal.

Prompt:

You get some fun choices today! Write a poem involving cutting hair, or scissors. Or, write a poem about siblings doing something together. I love this photo of my friend Lane’s mom and her brother.

I might write about my boys building a fort this week.

Journal: The Adroit Journal. Continuing our theme of siblings and children, the current issue features two new poems by David Roderick about being a dad.

Recipe: Negroni. After our whiskey cocktail detour, back to gin, Campari, and vermouth. Simple things are the best right now.

See you tomorrow!

Marin Poetry Center Online Writing Retreat

Poem: Doing Poetry by Jack Gilbert

Poem, you sonofabitch, it’s bad enough

that I embarrass myself working so hard

to get it right even a little,

and that little grudging and awkward.

But it’s afterwards I resent, when

the sweet sure should hold me like

a trout in the bright summer stream.

There should be at least briefly

access to your glamour and tenderness.

But there’s always this same old

dissatisfaction instead.

Let’s warm up today with some bad jokes provided to us by my friend Sean Singer:

How does a poet sneeze? Haiku.

What’s a Grecian Urn? About 20,000 drachmas a year after taxes.

How can you make a million dollars in poetry? Start with 3 million.

Prompt: Humor implies perspective. We need that to keep going here on Day 345,428,999.  Let’s try and write a funny poem today. Have you ever done it?  It’s hard. You suspect it might be pointless. It’s not en vogue. No one will want to publish it. But it might get you some place new.  If you can’t get to funny, aim for witty. That’s easier and still in the spirit of this prompt. Quippy, epigrammatic. Classical.  A short assignment because you might still be writing your series of poems.

Speaking of perspective, I’m researching a book about the man who wrote the lyrics to Jingle Bell Rock, a cousin of my grandfather’s. He was also a poet who published work in Poetry, the first issue of the Beloit Poetry Journal, etc.  A lot of poetry journals are digitizing and publishing their entire run now.  It’s such fun to look through old issues of Poetry. Or, take this New Orleans Review from 1976 with its Everette Maddox, Billy Collins, and Miller Williams poems.  Perspective, it gives you the thick skin you need to keep going as a writer.

Cocktail: I’m going to try this one tonight because I have some dry vermouth and demerara sugar for the syrup.

 The Blackthorn

 2.5 oz Irish Whiskey

.5 oz Noilly Prat Dry Vermouth

.25 oz. Demerara Syrup

3 dashes Angostura Bitters

Stir and strain into rocks glass with ice, add a lemon.

That’s all for today! See you tomorrow.

Marin Poetry Center Writing Retreat Post Wednesday May 20th

What do you want to read, or watch, or listen to these days? Friends are reporting strange twists to their usual choices: a chill mom I know suddenly wants to watch horror movies, a music critic can’t abide “serious” music these days, my husband and I are watching “The West Wing” for the first time and retreating into its aw shucks earnestness.  I bet you might also be retreating into history as a tonic and salve.

Did you catch that great podcast from the New Yorker Radio Hour last week, with Jill Lepore talking to David Remnick about her research into previous polio outbreaks in the 1950s? It reminded me of Ellen Bryant Voigt’s book, “Kyrie,” from back in 1995.   Blackbird magazine, led by the brilliant Mary Flinn, re-printed a suite of poems from the book in Spring 2019.  Blackbird writes: “Ellen Bryant Voigt’s book-length sonnet sequence Kyrie remains the dominant contemporary treatment of the 1918 influenza pandemic. She published the book in 1995, mindful, as well, of the epidemic of her historical moment. (The book appeared the same year that the CDC reported 500,000 cases of AIDS in the United States.)” 

Here is one of Voigt’s sonnets, untitled and set during the 1918 influenza pandemic

How we survived: we locked the doors
and let nobody in. Each night we sang.
Ate only bread in a bowl of buttermilk.
Boiled the drinking water from the well,
clipped our hair to the scalp, slept in steam.
Rubbed our chests with camphor, backs
with mustard, legs and thighs with fatback
and buried the rind. Since we had no lambs
I cut the cat’s throat, Xed the door
and put the carcass out to draw the flies.
I raised an upstairs window and watched them go—
swollen, shiny, black, green-backed, green-eyed—
fleeing the house, taking the sickness with them.

Read the rest of the stunning suite of 8 poems. Listen to Kyrie set to music in “Voices of 1918.”

Your assignment is simple: take some character or moment from prior history (personal or public) and start a series of poems. You can steal Voigt’s first phrase, “how we survived,” to get started. Have you written a series before? If not, just start with one poem and try to get three in the next few days. Writing a series gets you thinking about the space between poems and what it can do for you.

Our cocktail today, the Bee’s Knees, pays homage to yesterday’s poem, “Bee 3,” by Nan Cohen. It’s a Prohibition-era old cocktail with orange and lemon juice. Like yesterday’s rosemary gimlet, it requires a simple syrup—this time it’s just honey and water. It’s a great way to elevate that crusty old honey in your cupboard. See you tomorrow!

Marin Poetry Center Writing Retreat Post Tuesday May 19, 2020

Here’s Nan Cohen’s poem, “Bee 3,”from her 2017 book, “Unfinished City,” from Gunpowder Press in Santa Barbara. 

Bee 3

To look at a dead creature, however small,

A kind of prayer. You can look and look,

No one will stop you.

The way there is no end to prayers.

The way they travel out.

Going silent for a while,

Then taken up again.

A honeybee, dusted with pollen.

The stillness of its legs.

 Craft and Prompt:

I just spent the morning helping my nine-year old research a five paragraph report about Albert Einstein. My son got stuck at several junctures.  We pulled up the five-paragraph formula for third graders, and then we researched Einstein’s famous physics formula. I’m generally not a fan of formulas for poems, but I guarantee (say it with a faux Cajun accent) if you sit down and use these formulas for revision, you’ll come out ahead.

1)

First, find a poem that you love and determine why you love it. (I chose the Nan Cohen poem above.)

Then, find a poem that you hate and determine why you hate it.

 What have you learned about your sensibility as a poet?

2)

Then, pull out a poem of your own, one that you’re not quite happy with. Pick up the poem and hold it in your hand like an apple or a rock, turning it around to view it from all angles. Think about the poem as a physical object, a plastic entity like a painting or a sculpture, or even a musical composition. Basically, think of the poem as something other than a poem. And, then, think about what it needs. What does this strange art object require that it doesn’t yet have? Remember drawing lessons? Can you see the poem’s negative space as well as its positive space?

3)

For example, look and see what's going on in the far left corner of the poem.  Does it have a little dirt underneath leftover from the earth from where it was pried? How was the poem, my little apple, attached to its tree--what about that crevasse or bellybutton in the apple where the stem reaches down to attach to the core?

Does the poem have everything it needs to survive?  What is it lacking? How can you give it that?

4)

There are no set rules about revision except to continue going about it however you can. You learn by doing it; it’s a physical endeavor like  reaching for the next hold in on a rock climbing wall or catching a softball. You get better as you practice it; likewise, if you don't practice it, your revision muscles atrophy.  It is a dogged practice. 

5)

Things can always be tweaked, or changed, even just the shifting of a pronoun can give us a little more space to live.  It’s like asking yourself—“What am I feeling? What’s wrong?” Ask that of the poem as you would examine your little suffering houseplant with the sadly curling leaves.  What is it feeling? What’s going wrong for it?  Once you have identified that, half the battle is won! Don’t be afraid to state what the poem is lacking, this is the only way it can get what it needs to flourish.

Revision is detachment combined with empathy, and a love and respect for the reader--always imagining how the poem will be heard or felt by its reader.

6)

I like to record myself reading a poem and listen to it--where does it falter, where does it work? I use the “Voice Memos” app on my iPhone. It’s awesome. Play your poem in the car or on your earbuds when you are walking into the grocery store.  How does it strike you then?

Then, record someone else reading your poem!  Just ask them; be brave. Where does their reading falter?  Is that a place where the poem falters? Listen to the recording alone.

At a higher level, revision is all about sensibility, which is where this craft and prompt started:  I am designing a poem, I am composing a poem. Then I am composing an entire book--a big big poem, by arranging and fixing lots of little poems. But that's a topic for another blog! 

If you went through these organic processes, I am sure you learned something that will lead to better writing. I’m sure you also might be exhausted, so here’s a simple cocktail recipe that we’ve been having around my house. Making the rosemary syrup is pretty darn fun.

Finally, do you know the online journal At Length? It’s fabulous. Jonathan Farmer started it quite a few years ago in North Carolina, and they publish poems in series.

Rosemary Gimlet

Monday, May 18 Blog Post

Hi Everyone,

Let’s keep going, writing and revising, for days 65-71 of this pandemic! We need fresh air; we need fresh ideas. We need to stay focused and at the same time get out of our own heads. I have a solution, at least for your week in writing. I’ll start with a poem by Paisley Rekdal, a poet who often amuses and surprises me. Then I’ll explain why I chose it in the prompt that follows: Head of a Dog, Body of an Elephant.

POEM: Dear Lacuna, Dear Lard by Paisley Rekdal

CRAFT & PROMPT: Head of a Dog, Body of an Elephant by Rebecca Black

Our early work as poets involves finding our own material, figuring out what exactly our obsessive subjects will be.

In my experience, this material has not changed a great deal (ideas about art and aesthetics, geography, place, the self in the family and in culture) but my approach to this material certainly has broadened. I'm more confident; I can let more into my poems now than I could 15 years ago.

I'm sure by now you have some idea about what your material is, what you are really interested in exploring as a writer. Now might be a good time to force yourself to experiment by adding some disparate subject matter into your poems!

We've all got recipes we return to in our poems--the work of becoming a good self-editor involves realizing what we are usually cooking. "My god, I'm making another chicken pie in this poem." Or, "By gum, if I haven't mixed up another soup of self-loathing with a side salad of nature imagery."

So, here's your assignment.  Go buy or get a friend to give you some material that you don't think of as "poetic," some material that you would NEVER let into your poems.  Found text from a newspaper, scientific language, dialogue, political rhetoric—what would you never permit to muss up your beautiful poem? 

Couple this new material with a snippet of your best, most beloved language.  Practice feeling unsure. Tell yourself this is part of artistic growth. Remember the feeling of growing pains as a kid, when you could actually sense your bones groaning as they lengthened and thickened?

Your poem might feel like those children's flip books where one makes weird hybrid animals: a lower body of a hamster or cat with the head of a giraffe or a parrot.

This exercise has worked if you feel very uncomfortable and don't want to show the poem to anyone.  Just kidding, but truly, try and surprise your own [bored, worried, tired, and/or sad] self!

JOURNAL: Newsflash: The Northwest Review is coming back! New editor Mike McGriff will relaunch this historic magazine in the fall.

RECIPE: From Serious Eats, Easy Kale Quiche Recipe

If you’re like me, pie crust eludes you. I have to cook quickly; I’m certainly not taking the time for a homemade crust for a quiche that only 2 people in my household are going to eat. This quiche recipe solves the lunch/breakfast/brunch problem for the adults in our house as well as the too-much kale or chard and too many onions this time of year from the CSA problem. I like the pre-made crusts they sell at Colusa Market in Kensington.

I use the filling instructions from this recipe and simply pour into a pre-made, par-baked crust. And why not make two at a time. Freezers are our friends. Like poems in a series (stay tuned for more of that this week) multiples of quiche are timesavers!

Written Memoir vs. TV/Film (Or, "Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude)

Just as painting had to break new ground after the camera was invented, memoir has to do work that a movie or a TV show can't do. Painting moved from figuration, trying to represent a person or a place, for instance, into explorations of the abstract, the gestural; freed from showing us the actual world, painting could delve into abstraction. Of course this is an oversimplification (representational, figurative art is often imbued with ineffabilities and emotion), but I started to wonder what memoir/narrative/nonfiction writing can do that a documentary film or a TV show can't do that well. What are the strengths of memoir as a genre; what can writing do that other media can't do that well? A narrative can give us nuanced explorations of the mind at work. I can't think of a lot of films that do this well. Memoir might give us the sense of one single mind at work, as it roves through memory. That one single mind made evident can give us a sense that we all share the same feelings and most of the same flavors of experience. So, memoir could be an exploration that creates deep empathy. Moving way beyond reality tv. There is just something compelling about a real life written out on the page, composed by the person who lived it. But, that life and its evocation had better be significant, singular in its knowledge, to be interesting!

Researching Grants and Awards to Support Your Memoir

Just this morning, I was looking at similar books, doing a little market research, and discovered a possible grant from the Carter Center for writing about mental illness--the Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism.  Now, I'm a professional writer, and have received grants totalling over $100,000. I regularly trawl AWP directories of grants and awards.  But I'd never seen this grant, probably because I am not usually a journalist. Maybe it will prove beneficial to me.  The lesson is, I guess, be resourceful--look for random possible sources of funding...

Emotional Hiccups in Writing Memoir

The month of May almost killed me.  I didn't get any real writing done.  My family had a crisis--my dad, a stroke patient, half paralyzed with big cognitive deficits, checked himself out of his personal care home with no notice, and decamped back to my 90 year old grandmother's house.  A suspicious new money-grubbing, mentally unstable "girlfriend" was behind it all. Who knows how it's going to play out, but this new crisis, heralding a "new normal" in the family, completely stopped me from writing my memoir.  It wasn't jus the new time constraints--the constant phone calls around the family trying to untangle my dad's new unpaid bills, the time it took for me to learn to run a federal background check on the new girlfriend, the sleepless nights when I worried about my dad's unsupervised medicine-taking, the Sunday he called and said he hadn't eaten for 9 hours.  (He is one-handed; he can't open a jar of peanut butter by himself...) 

The big metaphysical problem was that this new crisis caused my interpretation of the past to change. Paragraphs that I'd written no longer seemed to contain the emotional truth I was aiming for. 

I bet this happens to other folks--life never stops, and current happenings in our lives color the past events that we are interpreting in our memoirs. Without going into a lot of details, this new crisis in my family made me see my parents in a new light, and what seemed "true" in March 2013 no longer seems absolutely true here in June 2013. 

What helped me start writing again?  Giving myself a short break, regaining the strength and equilibrium to open up my word file ("official narrative") again.  The realization that life would probably never just stop and the story would probably never be "over." That the act of writing a book required honoring some arbitrary constraints.

What emotional hiccups have you experienced in writing your life stories? Do you have any advice about how to write memoir as life's rich pageant continues before our eyes?

W.G. Sebald as Memoirist? Sure.

Since I started this blog last summer, I've had a new baby, taught several classes, and made some progress on research and writing. My new son will be three months old this week, and I'm working as hard as I can on my writing during my maternity leave from teaching. Something about having another, beautiful new baby makes me want to write even more--I feel the pressure to fulfill my own goals as I start to raise my boys to create their own rich lives. And the days when I am well-rested enough to think clearly about memoir-writing are few and golden... I've always loved the German fiction writer W.G. Sebald. He taught at the University of East Anglia, where I was a writing student in 1995-1996. I didn't read Sebald until my first year at Stanford in 2001, the year he died in car accident.

In 2011, when I was at Queen's University, Belfast, I went to a talk on Sebald. (Where are my notes on that talk--that March when my first son was three months old?)

Anyway, in moments of inattention to my own writing (the doc file is called "Official Narrative and has reached 3000 words), I'm reading my favorite memorists: Howard Norman, Mary McCarthy, Geoffrey and Toby Wolff. And strangely, Sebald. His narrators often seem like himself; his concerns are always the concerns of the serious memoirist--memory and history. So why not classify Sebald as a memoirist for our own purposes in this blog. Maybe if I turn him into a member of the tribe he'll reach out and help us from beyond.

Here's a list of writing tips from Sebald compiled by one of his last students:

http://richardskinner.weebly.com/2/post/2013/01/max-sebalds-writing-tips.html

And his obit. I've been reading a lot of obits lately in my research.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/15/books/w-g-sebald-elegiac-german-novelist-is-dead-at-57.html

Some "Best Of" Memoir Book Lists

Some of these titles got mega media; some you've probably not heard of either. (I got a minivan too this year, but I haven't written a book about it yet!)

http://www.bookpage.com/the-book-case/2012/07/03/must-read-memoirs-of-2012-so-far/

Three Great Books on Writing Nonfiction

My friend Zach Shore came over for a little dinner party the other night.  I'd made four different types of meatballs (lamb, beef, turkey, and veggie sausage) for us to try, in honor of the "pasta bars" that I remember from 1990s eating establishments and country club buffet lines.  Curiously, no one at the table recalled these "pasta bars," but they enjoyed the meatballs anyway.  And, more importantly, Zach turned me on to a great book: Thinking Like Your Editor by Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato.  Then I discovered The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner, and Writing and Selling Your Memoir by Paula Balzer.

Writing a memoir under 40

In a cursory web-sweep, it looks like a lot of memoir sites are for older folks in their twilight years who intend to self-publish their work.  That's great, but I didn't see sites for "younger" writers who are telling tales--cartoonists like Alison Bechel,  or early Joan Didion of the "Goodbye to All That" years, or Megan Daum, or Robin Romm, or, you know, writers that I like to read, and whom I'd like to write like.  So this blog will skew younger...