We’re all in this together: writers, artists and community

The first thing the speaker at this month’s meeting of the Writers Guild of Texas did was move his chair from behind the desk at the front of the room. There he was, sitting little more than a foot away from the rest of us, with no protective piece of furniture in between. Was there a sigh of contentment in the room? A frisson of fear? After all, we’d once had a speaker who tried – with limited success – to make us sing along during a presentation. We were wary of change.

We were wary of getting close.

Which, it turned out, was the point Dallas writer/poet/teacher Joe Milazzo wanted to make. “I think if there’s an occupational hazard to writing – it’s not writers’ cramp or writers’ block. It’s isolation.”

image: pixabay

Although as writers we’re told, necessarily, to just sit down and write, “the seclusion you need can easily grade into isolation. The material we work with as artists – and I call writers artists – is language. Language is inherently social. One way to remind ourselves of the inherent social nature of language is to join communities. Like this one.”

“The action arts – theater, visual, musical – they are really good at social connections.”

Social connections. Those things extroverts do. If there’s a standard personality type for writers, it’s not extrovert. Yes, some of them do exist, rarer than unicorns or the fabled 1 percent of the fabulously wealthy. Most writers, the other 99 percent, so to speak, are introverted. Make that, very introverted.

Milazzo sympathized, admitting, “I find it draining. I think this is a challenge we face as writers. It can be hard to think of socializing as networking when it takes so much out of you.”

But “writing requires readers. It’s a way to communicate. . . To find an audience – I hesitate to use the word ‘compete,” – but we should take notice of the way other arts groups socialize.”

Yes, we’ve watched from safe distances as musicians gather together with each other and their audiences. As do theater and acting ensembles. The thought of an orchestra, a dance group or troupe of actors performing to an empty hall is unimaginable.

But how can dedicated introverts like writers find – form – communities?

First, we need to banish the idea of networking, socializing and community as things that require us to push ourselves in ways that aren’t authentic. Real networking isn’t about how many business cards we distribute, or collect. “It’s showing a genuine interest in others. (And) the amount to which you’re willing to reach out to someone is totally within your control.”

“One way to have readers is to serve as readers ourselves,” he said. Community members can be the first readers and supporters of writers. “You never know when the good you do will come back to you.”

And that other fear of writers – that if we share our ideas, someone will steal them? 

Milazzo cited the MFA program he participated in at California Institute of the Arts, in which people from multiple artistic fields study together. “We really believed that a success for one of us was a success for all of us,” the antithesis of an attitude all too common among writers, “a jealous protecting of one’s own ideas. I get it, but that’s still an attitude I think has to be protected against. Writing, indeed, any artistic endeavor is a hard road to walk. The more people that can walk it with you, the better.”

What other potential members are there for a literary community? “Libraries and independent bookstores are part of that community that deserve patronage.” Also among the components of literary communities are “reviewers, visiting authors, independent publishers. Literary citizenship (even) extends to anyone who can benefit, whether writers or not.”

How about online communities, an audience member asked?

Milazzo admitted, “It’s fraught. It is hard to be genuine sometimes. (But) if there’s a publisher out there or a publication, or an author you admire, connect with them and see what they’re doing on social media. The thing that builds community is still basically correspondence. It may be email, it may be direct messaging on Twitter. . . A good review is not necessarily the same as having a reader write and say, ‘this book mattered to me.'”

Wordcraft – Poetry’s spoken words live in Big D!

As a writer I admit, I’m wedded to fiction. And although I try to keep an open mind about other forms of wordplay, it’s been years since a post about what is probably the oldest form of word art – poetry -- appeared in these pages. So last Saturday, I went to The Crown and Harp, 1914 Greenville Avenue in Dallas, for a free reading from Pandora’s Box Poetry Showcase Dallas. The intimate pub on the lowest end of Greenville was the perfect setting for an evening of readings by seven North Texas poets.

Guest poets Joe Milazzo (The Habiliments) and Logen Cure  (Letters to Petrarch) read from their recently-published works. Pandora’s Box regulars Dan Collins, Paul Koniecki, Mark Noble, Gayle Reaves and Christopher Soden, read individually from their own works, then joined with guests Milazzo and Cure for “Breadcrumbs,” a round robin of thematically-linked poems.

Even for non-poets (maybe especially for non-poets), hearing pieces such as Milazzo’s “The Dream in Which We Purchase Catapults in Bulk” (“East of inside, where the coats/ groom their cowlick obsessions/over stoic luggage, that must be/ the land where your grudges /crouch. . .”) opens a mind as much to new ways of thinking.

As does Cure’s take on Italian Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarch, “the person who formed love poetry as we know it today,” writing 366 sonnets to a woman he addressed on as “Laura” (and who may, Cure suggests, have been only a figment of his imagination).

As befits “a queer 21^st century woman”, in Cure’s description of herself, her poems are not sonnets. Instead, they consist of meditations and letters as brief as Petrarch’s form, addressed to the poet whose muse “. . . was nothing more than the angle of the L /and the curves of her vowels, /her voice a replication of the way the r/reechoed in your dreams.”

The schedule and venue for Pandora’s Box Poetry Showcase has varied, but the group hopes to start appearing regularly from 7-9 p.m. on the third Saturday of the month at The Crown and Harp (next reading: May 21). Check Pandora’s Facebook page for details.

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Want more poetry? Try the Dallas Poets Community, where Cure and Pandora’s members discovered each other, with free open mic readings at 7 p.m. the first Friday of each month at Half Price Books Flagship store, 5803 E. Northwest Highway in Dallas.

For help in exploring the Dallas poetry community, Dallas Poets offers free workshops on the second and fourth Wednesdays of each month, also at Half Price Books. The next workshop is scheduled for tomorrow, April 13.

More free or almost free help for area poets comes from The Writer’s Garret in East Dallas whose peer workshops meet in Lucky Dog Books, 10801 Garland Road in Dallas. The Garret is home ground for several Pandora’s Box members. Mixed prose and poetry workshops meet on first and third Tuesdays from 7-9 p.m. and second and fourth Saturdays from 10 a.m. – noon. First visits are free, with a $3 charge for subsequent visits.

Later this month, Half Price Books hosts poet/actress Amber Tamblyn (Joan of Arcadia, etc.) at 6 p.m. April 23 for a discussion of her latest book, Dark Sparkler. See the Half Price site  for details.

Wordcraft -- Got Lit? SMU hosts new & coming writers

Southern Methodist University’s creative writing director David Haynes is known for bringing a variety of writers to the university’s annual Litfest. His choices for this year’s festival, Thursday through Saturday, are no exceptions, showcasing writers as diverse as an award-winning mystery writer with poets, literary novelists with writers of nonfiction.

Novelist/short story writer Liam Callanan won mystery writing’s Edgar Award for his first novel, followed since then by All Saints and short story collection Listen. He and McKinney, Texas, poet R. Flowers Rivera (Troubling Accents and Heathen), and poet/novelist/short story writer Jeffrey Renard Allen (Song of the Shark) will open the fest with readings at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, March 19, in the Stanley Marcus Reading Room of the university’s DeGolyer Library.

Want to know what it takes to build a life as a writer? The festival’s schedule for Friday, March 20, opens with a 3 p.m. panel discussion by all writers of their journeys to the writing life, in McCord Auditorium, on the third floor of SMU’s Dallas Hall. Readings follow at 6:30 p.m. in McCord Auditorium by fiction/nonfiction writer Peter Turchi (A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery and Magic) and poet Jericho Brown.

The festival concludes Saturday, March 21, with readings at 2 p.m. by Dallas poet/editor/novelist Joe Milazzo (Crepuscule W/Nellie) and a pair of poets, Alan Shapiro (Night of the Republic) and Elizabeth Gray Jr., whose works include translations of classical and contemporary Persian poetry.

All events are free and open to the public. Speaking from experience, parking is easier to find around the SMU campus for weekend events, but there are several parking garages and street side meters available.

For a complete schedule, author information, campus map, and parking information, see http://smulitfest2015.wordpress.com/.

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Also this weekend, the Writers’ Guild of Texas hosts its spring writing workshop Saturday, 9 a.m. - 1 p.m. at the Richardson Civic Center, 411 West Arapaho Road, in Richardson, Texas. Novelist Brian W. Smith (Nina’s Got a Secret) went from self-publishing to sales to commercial publishing houses. He shares his insights on writing, publishing and selling. Workshop fee is $25 for WGT members, $35 for nonmembers. Workshop registration and WGT memberships are available online at
www.writersguildoftexas.org/.

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 -- Our imaginary friends talk back

Last week, I let Dallas writer and editor Joe Milazzo walk us through a recent class on developing fictional characters sponsored by the Dallas Writer’s Garret. But of course, characters are no dummies, no matter what their IQ. Whether based on people we know or dredged from the deepest recesses of our own minds, they don’t just stand around waiting for us as writers to put words into their mouths. In fact, they seldom stand around at all.

“There’s a concept in theater called blocking -- where you’re aware of the actions taking place around the actual dialogue,” Milazzo said.

With that in mind, he led class members through exercises designed to build character development through dialogue.

But first, we had to make our characters move. Why put movement first? Because, “even in a purely auditory work, like radio, there’s a sense of blocking.


So he asked each of us to write a list of gestures or facial expressions we felt were particularly communicative. With other people in the class, jotting ten or a dozen gestures was simple. If, like me, you often write in public places, take a minute now to glance around the park, the café, the bookstore. How about making notes of the people you see while waiting to be called for jury duty, during class, in a doctor’s or hospital waiting room? Waiting for the bus, in shops, at the gym? Just don’t be intrusive -- you want to notice how people look and move when they don’t feel on stage.

Once we had a list of gestures to refer to, Milazzo provided a scene written entirely in dialogue, the speakers unseen but overheard by the principal character, and asked to imagine seeing the speakers and inserting their gestures, expressions and movements. This exercise would also work using plays, especially classics available online.

For now, I’ll use a few lines from Milazzo’s example, the scene on pages 336-337 of Degrees by Michel Butor, in the English translation by Richard Howard. This is available in the Dallas Public Library system.

“Say, isn’t tomorrow Uncle Pierre’s birthday: Mother want to know if we’ve done anything.”
“Done anything?”
“Jacques and I haven’t, but you’re his pet. . .”
“Are we celebrating tomorrow night?”
“No, he’s coming to lunch?”
“Lunch? Why didn’t he tell me?”
“Does he tell you everything?”

“By adding blocking and gesturing, you are remaking things about that character that readers can use to get to know your characters,” Milazzo said.

Some of these actions can be used instead of speech tags -- “he said, she said” -- to indicate the speaker as well as the action occurring. The emotional content of gestures lets readers discover facets of a character’s life without exposition on the writer’s part. Use of movement and gesture also slows the pace of dialogue, if needed for the story. Although it’s often advisable to keep action and speech tags to a minimum, even to the point of eliminating them completely from portions of dialogue, knowing where they underlie the speech will keep our characters grounded.

For more about Milazzo and his work, see www.slowstudies.net/.

For more about the Dallas Writer’s Garret and its programs, visit www.writersgarret.org/.

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Today, August 12, is the last day to reserve a seat for Dallas author Ben Fountain discussion of his National Book Award finalist, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. To sign up, go to www.dallasnews.com/benfountain/. I’ll follow up on Fountain’s appearance next Monday. My biggest what if -- if Fountain could satirize the poor old imploded Texas Stadium, what couldn’t he have done with the Cowboys’ new billion dollar digs in Arlington?

Wordcraft -- Asking your imaginary friends out to play

This is the post where I ask you to hide your screen from your co-workers’ view. The post where we talk about those voices you hear in your head, the conversations you try not to carry on in the hearing of the other people on your commuter train. It’s time to get serious about character development in your writing. Make that, specifically, in your fiction. Because Aunt Betty is also serious about cutting you out of her will if you report any more about her kitten hoardings in your memoirs.

With Aunt Betty’s threat in mind, and because I like the slight degree of objectivity I get from writing fiction instead of purported real life, I went to this past week’s class, “Getting Your Characters from Thought to Action,” taught by author-editor-lecturer Joe Milazzo at the Dallas Writer’s Garret.

What makes a memorable character -- one that readers, we hope, will remember long after they finished our story, our book? Do we base them on other people or on versions of ourselves? Milazzo leant toward considering them versions of our own existence -- “as though you’re in touch with parts of your mind you don’t use in your everyday life.“

“One of the novelists I studied with when I was an MFA,” Milazzo said, “thought that a certain character was for that novel, and when the novel was over, that character would go away.” The writer ended, instead, by writing another novel for that relatively minor character, “because he didn’t believe she had told everything she had to tell.”

But how do we introduce yourself to the people who’ve been living, rent free, for who knows how many years, inside our heads? How do we give them permission to tell their stories?

One of my first assignments in the first creative writing class I ever took, asked for a character sketch. Listing my character’s height, weight, age, gender, and hair color seemed pointless, so I gave the instructor a scene of her in action. Still not sure that’s what he wanted. But he seemed grateful somebody at least turned in an assignment.

By the time I start writing a character, I’ve already talked to her enough to know her name and how bad a reputation she has back wherever she came from. Or why he’s hiding out, ready to do anything in the world except go back to the people who knew him before. Doodling through a few scenes where the characters can kick butt or get their kicked helps.

You can write your character’s back story -- and yes, I’ve don’t pages and pages of those. Or you can be, just the facts, ma’am, with your character and corner her into giving you an interview, like the one outlined on the character questionnaire Milazzo handed us.

First the name, of course, as much an indicator as “Honey Boo Boo” of where your character comes from. Milazzo’s questionnaire added such tidbits as “what would you like to be remembered for after your death?” and “if your features were to be destroyed beyond recognition, is there any other way of identifying your body?” (Hope that means something less obvious than DNA and dental work!)

Less morbidly (or not), how about this item from the questionnaire -- “on what occasions do you lie?” and “what kind of threat do you present to the public?” And my favorite -- “you are awake at 3 a.m. How? Why?” (I’m thinking about characters -- what did you expect!)

One of the questions on the list was “What do you save or collect?” For myself, I could have answered, I collect ways to build a character -- I’ve probably got dozens from writing classes and favorite books. Google “character questionnaires” and find some to suit your needs. Or try the Gotham Writers’ Workshop,  www.writingclasses.com/InformationPages/index.php/PageID/106/.

Next Monday -- How does your character speak? And where?

Paging Dr. Seuss

Joe from the Writers Garret asked for readers, as in people willing to read their own writing OUT LOUD in front of the crowd of Saturday window shoppers at a local upscale mall.  No, don't let me go all weaselly about this -- it wasn't any old shopping mall.  It was NorthPark Center in Dallas, Texas.  True confession:  I love NorthPark.  It may be the only shopping mall that houses a collection of stupendous art, right there by the food court, the escalators, everywhere.  It has an indoor duck pond and a children's library.  My family hangs out there when the weather won't let the kids play outside.  It's way, way cooler than your usual shopping venue.  So of course I told Joe I'd read.  I begged him to let me read.  He said yes.  Then I remembered that reading my own words in public makes me want to throw up.

The Garret, a gathering place in East Dallas that offers writing classes and workshops, was one of dozens of  organizations invited to an arts fair at NorthPark that day.  Our booth was next to those for book reviewers and oral storytellers.  Costumed actors from the local Shakespearean theater strolled the halls, with more actors dressed as characters from the books of beloved children's author Dr. Seuss.  You know him, the cat  from Whoville who stole Christmas.  The stage area where those of us who accepted the challenge of Garret writer in residence Joe Milazzo would read was between a Starbucks and the restrooms at that end of the mall.  It was busy with a capital biz.

Fellow writer Gigi asked me to videotape her reading.  Maybe she just took pity on me looking greenish, hoping to distract me from the awful moment when I would look at the paper in my trembling hand and realize the words printed on it made no sense whatsoever.  I concentrated on keeping her in the viewfinder, forgetting that photography rule about keeping track of the background so your subject doesn't end up with telephone poles appearing to sprout from her head or any such nonsense.  She read, I read, others read.  At least our lips moved.  The noise of the crowd overwhelmed the PA system, the shoppers not even slowing to gawk.  Joe said it was good experience, we'd be better for it the next time.

I asked Gigi later whether the video helped her critique her performance.  She said yes.  Except that when she viewed it she couldn't take her eyes off the guy with the Cat in the Hat costume posing behind her.  Dr. Seuss would have had a moral for that.