Dallas Writer’s Garret back and better than ever

Thea Temple

Dallas literary institution, the Writer’s Garret, welcomed a standing-room crowd to its new quarters at Metropolitan Press, 1250 Majesty Dr., with an open house, readings, and discounts on new classes Saturday. A change in ownership of the building in the Lochwood neighborhood that the Garret had shared with the Lucky Dog bookstore last December, a move I announced in a December 8, 2016, post at this site, “The end is nigh – make way for the beginnings.”

John and Marquetta Tilton, owners of Lucky Dog and its sister store, Paperbacks Plus, had given the Garret a home since its inception in the mid-1990’s by Thea Temple and her late husband, former Texas poet laureate Jack Myers. The Tiltons were on hand Saturday to wish the Garret well in its new home. (Lucky Dog remains in business at the Lochwood address, as well as in Oak Cliff and – under the Paperbacks Plus name – in Mesquite.)

The Garret’s new space at Metropolitan Press includes office, reception, and supply space, as well as a common room where the open house was help, and other spaces shared with Metropolitan Press’s other tenants. In addition to printing services, Metropolitan Press provides office space for a number of nonprofit organizations, and a rotating gallery of work by local artists.

Thea Temple, now the Garret’s executive director, introduced a panel of writers – some fostered by the Garret – several of whom will be conducting classes this spring – beginning February 11 with a workshop on partner zines led by poet/zine maker Lisa Huffaker. (Registration for Huffaker’s workshop closes tomorrow, February 8. Cost is $45 for Garret members, $60 for nonmembers. See the Garret’s site for membership and registration.)

Although the Garret has a special place for poets (Although the Garret has a special place for poets (“Jack won my heart by reading poetry to me over the phone,” Temple said) its classes cover a number of other genres.

l-r, Randel, McCullagh, Young, Kent

Additional February classes/workshops for writers are “Poetic Imitation & Innovation,” February 13, led by poet/creative writing instructor Logen Cure; Storytelling for Nonprofits and Grant Writers, February 18, with Robin Myrick; and “The Elements of Creative Writing,” February 21, with Darcy Young.

Later this spring, editor/blogger/memoirist Melissa T. Schultz, teaches “Finding Your Voice,” March 4 and historical novelist Weina Dai Randel, (author of The Empress of Bright Moon and The Moon in the Palace) teaches “Strategies in Writing the First Ten Pages” April 30.

Other authors on the panel – fostered by the Garret and past or possible future instructors --- were book artist Kendra Greene, essayist/novelist Julianne McCullagh (The Narrow Gate), actor/playwright Erin Burdette, and New York Times bestselling novelist Kathleen Kent (The Heretic’s Daughter and others), reading from her latest novel, The Dime.

“I wrote three books of historical fiction that did very well,” Kent told the crowd, “so it made sense that I would jump off the tracks and write crime (in The Dime, based on a character she invented for a short story anthology.)”

Randel lauded Kent’s instruction in a previous class at the Garret, leading Temple to speculate that the group could lure her back for a repeat.

In addition to classes for writers, the Garret also offers programs for readers, adult learners, children and schools, and the community. See the site for complete information.

Wordcraft -- Hot off the presses -- live & local in Texas

The 2014 SMU LitFest opened last week to a full room in the DeGolyer Library as five local editors discussed the state of literary publishing in North Texas. The participants were Matthew Limpede, editor of Carve magazine; Will Evans of Deep Vellum, a press publishing English translations of foreign authors; Ronald E. Moore, a poet and composer whose Baskerville Publishers is expanding its repertoire from biographies of opera stars to poetry; Mark Allen Jenkins, editor of the newly renamed Reunion: The Dallas Review, arts and literature magazine of the University of Texas-Dallas; and Joe Milazzo, co-editor of the experimental literary journal (out of nothing).

Dallas Writer’s Garret co-founder Thea Temple opened the discussion with a question to the panel about the role of technology in the future of publishing. The revolutions spawned by the Internet, print on demand technology and electronic publishing, all agreed, have made a wider variety of literature available. But in themselves, these won’t keep small presses running unless they can provide the quality of writing communities of readers expect.

“We started (out of nothing) as an ezine because there was no overhead,” Milazzo said. “But that was not a good enough aesthetic reason.”

“When I took over Carve in 2007,” Limpede said, “I decided to go to a quarterly format,” seeking quality of writing over quantity. And although still publishing online, Carve has taken the retro-seeming step of publishing a paid subscription premium print edition with added content, in the hope of nurturing an emerging literary community. Make that, a twenty-first century print edition also available on iPad.

For Evans, whose Deep Vellum press is sponsored by the Writer’s Garret, being able to communicate with translators over the Internet has been key to his dream of establishing a Dallas-based literary press. “Previously, I would have had to make contacts at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Now, Frankfurt is a place to get together, after signing rights to texts. Independent publishers have much more power than they used to have.”

And what about the logistics of getting volumes printed and in customer’s hands, Temple asked?

Goodbye to the worries of not only publishing thousands of copies, but of finding warehouses to store them and locating distributors to get them into readers’ hands, Moore said, the worries that previously forced his Baskerville Publishers out of the literary fiction market. Now with print on demand publishing, he only needs to order copies he already has distribution orders for, enabling him to broaden his press’s niche.

So what does the future look like, Temple asked. How do small presses, which by definition don’t have larger readerships, expect to grow? And not only grow but engage in the larger issue of restoring reading as a respectable activity?

“We have to think about things like branding, aesthetics as much as text,” Limpede said. “Social media has turned out to be more powerful than I expected. Every press has to make their own definition of what’s okay for them.”

“What’s your definition?” Temple asked.

“For me, doing okay is getting my first book out,” Evans said.

“For us,” Limpede said, “okay (may) mean having a part time job, even a full time job, but it’s about finding your own community. For literature there’s no easy formula.”

“What ‘okay’ means,” Milazzo said, “has everything to do with readership. The reader completes the artistic endeavor.”

For more about reading--and writing--for these publishers, see http://carvezine.com/, www.baskervillepublishers.com/, www.outofnothing.org/, http://deepvellum.org/, and www.utdallas.edu/ah/reunion/.

Will Evans (l) & Matthew Limpede

(Next Monday, Dallas does readership, reaching every high school student--and more--during April’s Dallas Big Reads. But don’t wait until April 1--stay tuned for guerrilla early bird book distributions at local transit stations.)

Wordcraft -- New critique technique, part II

Blame my lateness this morning on the Superbowl -- and I didn’t even watch it. But after writing late at night while keeping an ear open for the grandkids I was babysitting, the computer ate my post. Really.  Stay tuned anyway, for the conclusion to last Monday’s discussion of a recent Dallas Writer’s Garret workshop with University of Alabama professor Michael Martone.

His portion of the two-part workshop introduced us participants to a method of critiquing writing new to most of us -- the cross-section approach. While the classic American (actually University of Iowa) writing critique looks at writing samples, one after another. The cross-section looks at a small portion of the whole array of writing brought to the group, for instance, all the titles, then all first lines, all first paragraphs, and so on.

Because this method was so unfamiliar to what we’d used previously, Writer’s Garret co-founder Thea Temple held a followup session last Saturday to explore its implications further. I’ll insert comments from that session as I finish this post about Martone’s method.

After looking at the layout of our pages, Martone launched a discussion of titles and their importance, urging us prose writers to think of titles as short poems rather than prose in themselves. The prose, whether essay, memoir or fiction, then becomes, he said, “a commentary on the piece of poetry that is the title.”

In Temple’s session, we looked at our array of titles, searching for those that invited further reading. The hardest part, as at each step of the cross-section critique, was to prevent ourselves from launching into discussion of the rest of the piece. What intrigued us most? Titles that worked against our expectations, that implied a reversal of expectations, as in the title of memoir, “Raising My Father.” We found ourselves wanting titles capable of tying a story together, without being heavy handed. Perhaps Martone would have said, we wanted poetic titles.

Martone next discussed first sentences. “Another thing that the title does is pivot to the first line,“ he said. “It’s almost like a virus. You want it to infect the readers.”

But how fast should the infection spread? In Temple’s session, we found ourselves facing the difference in pace between first sentences of short stories and those of book length works, whether novels or narrative nonfiction such as memoirs. The opening sentence of a long work may need to develop enough sympathy for a character to propel readers through the level of conflict involved in a novel-length plot. The first sentence of a short story, in contrast, often must be an immediate conflict.

Because several of the participants were writing memoirs, Martone concluded his
workshop with a discussion of plot structure, particularly its effect on nonfiction works. To be a story in most senses, the main character’s initial state of being -- her ground state -- must change through the course of the work, ending on a significantly different ground.

A fiction writer can isolate a train of events that will produce this change. But how can a memoir writer, still immersed in her own evolving life, determine when she has achieved a different state of being?

“In memoir, one of the strategies is to draw a kind of ‘fake’ parentheses around the life,” Martone said. This is often done by limiting the memoir to a particular period or event in the writer’s life, such as a memoir of childhood. His parting caution -- “You start a story with a coincidence, but you can’t end a story with a coincidence.” Memoirists beware -- the conclusion you draw must be your own.

(Robin Hemley asked us to bring a family photograph and a series of small objects to his half of the workshop. Next Monday, I’ll tell you what we did with them.)

Wordcraft -- Resolution number 2: Join other writers

It’s still December and you’re already making your second writing resolution for 2012. Feel proud of yourself as you join a writers’ workshop. And then faint from terror.

I’ve been a fairly regular member of a workshop, at the Dallas Writer’s Garret, since 2007 and can honestly say that by the last couple of meetings I’ve been able to resist the urge to lock myself in the restroom before my turn came to read. Because putting your work out there is scary. It’s amazing that we writers hope for publication, when our work may be seen by thousands of people, but fear putting it before a dozen.

But those dozen, of course, are the ones you see face to face. The ones who say things about your writing that ring in your ears. That’s the terrifying part, but it’s also the helpful part. I’ve heard unpublished writing at conventions, and the stories from writers who attended writers’ groups were better than those who hadn’t. It’s hard to be objective about our own work. We need to enlist the eyes and ears of others as well.

(There are online groups as well, but nothing quite beats the physical presence of other group members.)

After I had tried writing fiction for about a year and family members started to avoid me for fear I’d ask them to read my stuff, I realized I needed to find other writers. But how? An internet search turned up some possibilities, but for those of you in North Texas, I’ll list some I can vouch for from personal experience.

-- The Dallas Writer’s Garret. Moving from its current East Dallas location in January, but check www.writersgarret.org/ for the new place and times. 
The late Texas Poet Laureate Jack Myers and his wife Thea Temple founded the Garret, which has its own education program as well as sponsoring writing workshops. Attendance at the workshops (called Stone Soups) is free for first-timers, $3 thereafter. Garret members also enjoy unlimited free attendance.

-- DFW Writers’ Workshop. Meets every Wednesday evening at 508 Simmons Street in Euless, Texas. Non-members may visit twice a year to observe but reading and critiquing is limited to members. Dues are $100 annually, prorated quarterly. DFWWW also sponsors a convention I’ll say more about in a later post. See www.dfwwritersworksho.org/ or call 817-714-6573.

-- North Texas Speculative Fiction Workshop. Meets the second Saturday of each month except December at the Hurst Barnes & Noble Bookstore, 861 NE Mall Blvd., in Hurst, Texas. DFWWW member Pat Hauldren (Alley) is the founder and moderator. It was free when I attended a few years ago and I that’s still the case. See www.ntsfw.com/   This group (and several others) are also on
www.meetup.com/

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Contest deadlines -- December 15 (tomorrow!) is the deadline for the first short story competition from Short-Story.me. Contest fee is $5. See the site, www.short-story.me/ for details. (And check out my fantasy story “Shaman” from 2010 while you’re there.)

Also due December 15 -- Entries for SheWrites Young Adult Novel contest, whose proceeds benefit Girls Write Now. See www.shewrites.com/ for details (even if you’re a guy).



(Next Wednesday: Resolution number 3 -- find homes for your stories.)

Wordcraft -- Write on: The Garret's alive and kicking

On the front of its Sunday Arts & Life section, the Dallas Morning News proclaimed the Dallas Writer’s Garret to be an institution “at the heart of Dallas’ literary community.” Like many nonprofit organizations, the Garret feels the pain of the current economic situation. But it’s operated under an the additional burden of grief since 2008 when Jack Myers -- poet, SMU professor and husband of the Garret’s founder Thea Temple -- learned he had cancer.

Although Myers died in late 2009, his latest book of poetry, The Memory of Water, was published this spring by New Issues Press. And the Garret continues its work as well, with the help of staff members Joe Milazzo, director of community and education outreach, and program and operations administrator Grace Kenney. They plan an open house Saturday, September 10, from 3-5 p.m. at the Garret’s location above Paperbacks Plus, 6115 La Vista Dr. in Dallas.

In addition to training writers, organizing youth programs and bringing world-renowned authors to the city, the Garret gives writers a place to hang out with other writers. Its several critique groups give us a chance to receive feedback on our work and listen to the work of other writers, as well as just talking about writing.

At this past Saturday’s meeting, participant Paul shared a quotation from Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk on the value of such groups -- a chance to make friends not because we share the proximity of working in adjacent cubicles or living in adjacent houses, but because we share a passion. The passion for writing.

Currently the Garret hosts regular writing critique groups in mixed genres on the first and third Tuesdays of each month from 7-9 p.m. and on the second and fourth Tuesdays, 7-9 p.m. solely on poetry; and on the second and fourth Saturdays from 10 a.m. until noon for prose and poetry. First visits to each group are free, and $3 thereafter.

It also hosts a reading for performance workshop on third Sundays from 4-6 p.m. (August 21) and a poetry discussion group on second Thursdays from 7-9 p.m. Participation in these groups is free.

For more information, see www.writersgarret.org or contact the Garret at 214-828-1715 or gen@writersgarrett.org

Imagination and the path to reality

What does 9/11 have in common with lagging business innovation?  What does it have in common with murder and suicide rates (and not just by the bombers)?  That was way more than I expected to hear from poet and memoirist Allison Hedge Coke at the mentorship training session this week hosted by the Dallas Writers Garret and Dallas Central Ministries.  Allison, an award-winning writer of Native American ancestry and a former prisoner and homeless runaway, began mentoring at-risk teenagers while still a teen herself.  She visited Dallas during the fall break from her work as an associate professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

Under Allison's direction, Writers Garret members, along with Garret founder Thea Temple, employees of DCM, and students and mentors from Paul Quinn College searched for connections between those being mentored and themselves as potential mentors.  So why writing as a path to mentorship?  Doesn't mentoring usually focus on life skills?  As DMC worker Michael asked, is there a path between imagination and reality?

Allison's answer:  Often, yes, because of the transformative nature of imagination.  The highest reason for suicide, she said, and possibly a reason for murder as well, is the lack of an ability to see the temporary nature of circumstances -- that is, of a failure of imagination.  And it's failure of imagination which, according to CFOs at a recent AT&T Center think tank Thea attended, is the number one issue for the future of American business.  And the connection with 9/11?  Also, according to those same leaders, a tragedy stemming ultimately and horribly from a failure to imagine possibilities and consequences.