Writers' Roundtable
- Welcome
- First, I’ll talk a little about the framework we’re working in. Five or six meetings until the Center closes
- I will post my meeting notes to a blog located at http://bigelowwriters.blogspot.com/. There are no posts yet but I will post today’s notes today or tomorrow. You are invited to post your comments and, in fact, continue discussions there if you want to.
- I will encourage that sort of exchange since we have so few meetings.
- What will we do here?
- We will bring our work and read selections either to share or to invite comment or to invite critique. I will suggest exercises while not being mandatory will hopefully be useful. Reading time will be limited depending upon the number of participants and their endurance. Do not expect to read your entire novel. You may expect to read continuing pages from one meeting to the next.
- We will look at the craft of writing including how to write regularly, how to track our work. This will lead into such things as the mechanics of the software we use to write, storyboards, outlines, etc.
- We will also consider publishing, especially self-publishing, something particularly useful to the memoirists and those who are interested in creating a creative legacy by writing prose that focuses on life experiences.
- The agenda will ultimately be determined by the group
- Beyond the time we share this spring, if things are going well we’ll try to schedule something at another time so to continue our work through the summer and then again in the fall.
- REgarding critiquing and discussion: We critique writing not writers. Don Sheehan, former Director of The Frost Place for the Performing Arts in Franconia, NH used to remind us: “When the choice is between intelligence and compassion, choose compassion. The result will be a higher intelligence.” We will observe that here. This will be a safe place for you to bring your work, a safe place to take the risks that may have kept you from pushing your writing to a fuller realization.
- News and Jabber
“With the depth and resonance of her novels, Marilynne Robinson captures the American soul," Mao said in a news release. "We are proud to confer this prize on her and her extraordinary work.”
The Library of Congress' annual prize honors an American literary writer "whose body of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but also for its originality of thought and imagination," according to the release. The award seeks to commend strong, unique, enduring voices that tell readers "something new about the American experience."
In Robinson's case, it's not so much that she tells us something "new" as she reminds us of something "age-old," said Robert Casper, head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress.
“(She reminds us) that our stories have spiritual and moral dimensions,” Casper said, "that the stories that define us — that define our country — have a grounding in the spiritual and moral intellect.”
Casper described Robinson as “a writers’ writer” — “someone who tells these stories of people thinking deeply and powerfully while going about their daily lives, and in prose that is, simply put, virtuosic.”
- Regarding writing:
I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,
and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience and shat
Literature.
It’s not like that. It requires work, lots of work. If you are not writing daily, start. In order to write you must write. How many of you know pianists? How long do they practice? Your art is worth as much as theirs so give it that respect. Learn to write anywhere and everywhere. Sit and write out the conversations you hear in the doctors’ offices. Consider this one: Dr. Sobin’s office. Write even when you don’t have anything to say because you will find that you do. If you want to write, read. REad what you like. Read what you want to write. Don’t read the stuff that knocks you off your pins so you cannot read. I can’t write after reading Blood Meridian by Cormack McCarthy.
so it begins: blood meridian by cormac mccarthy
“See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.
“Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.
“The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.”
–Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985)
“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
- The Current Assignment
- What did you bring today?
- The Next Assignment
- Write a letter to yourself telling what you want to accomplish here in the next 100 days.
- Next Meeting
- April 16, 2016 @ 9:30AM-11AM
- Other Notes
Thanks. A good class. It can't grow too much. We might not have enough time to go around. Do you want us to post that which we write for the assignment? G
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