The daily icicle
From Goddard, where today Susan Kim, Kyle Bass and I will be talking about the writer in the world, then I will be moving on to a session on emotional structure.
Good morning from Goddard
Where we are talking about death and time and the body and trauma and love and witness and healing…and writing, always writing.
Why we write
Last week, at a conference on young adult literature, key note speaker Beth Kephart (multi-award winning writer of fourteen books and more on the way), argued for the “radical significance” of stories in our new, “Sandy-Irene-Katrina world…of fiscal cliffs and residual recessions.” She asked:
“We are a globe on the verge, I’m saying, and because we are, mere entertainment for mere entertainment’s sake — for mere (forgive me) profit — strikes me as an increasingly unviable platform. Literature as easy distraction, literature as untempered horror, literature as gossip, literature as desolation, literature as isolation, literature as sensationalism, literature that leaves us stooped, numb, incinerated, angry, distracted, glassy-eyed, New Jersey Shored (and I am referring the show), and emotionally paralyzed: Do we honestly have time for this now?”
What do we have time for, and how will we spend that time so we might find a better future, not yet written? This is an essential question, not just for young people but for all people whether we are writing stories or writing our lives.
For Beth’s entire speech, Lamp Lighters and Seed Sowers: Tomorrow’s YA, click on the link.
December 4th at Book Court
The Salon: Literary Women
Guest Curated by She Writes & Hedgebrook Writers Retreat
Talking women writers with some wonderful women writers with Hedgebrook, She Writes and Goddard connections. Come join us!
Moderated by Holly Morris
Lisa Dierbeck
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
Martha Southgate
Amy Wheeler
Lisa Dierbeck is the author of the novels The Autobiography of Jenny X and One Pill Makes You Smaller, a New York Times Notable Book. In 2010, she co-founded Mischief+Mayhem, an independent publisher run by established authors in association with OR Books. The New York Observer has dubbed it “the book industry’s new danger brigade.” Frequently anthologized and twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and in such publications as The Boston Globe, O, the Oprah Magazine, The New York Times Book Review and Time Out New York.
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, is a National Book Critics Circle Finalist, among other honors. She is the author of Why She Left Us, an American Book Award Winner, a U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellow, Hedgebrook alumna, and a faculty member at Goddard College. Rizzuto has appeared widely in the media, including The Today Show, The View, 20/20, The Joy Behar Show, MSNBC-TV and PBS-TV. Her articles have been published internationally.
Martha Southgate is the author of four novels. Her newest, The Taste of Salt, was published in September 2011 and was named one of the best novels of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Boston Globe. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her essay “Writers Like Me,” published in the New York Times Book Review, appears in the anthology Best African-American Essays 2009. Previous non-fiction articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, O, Entertainment Weekly, and Essence.
Amy Wheeler is a playwright and the Executive Director of Hedgebrook, a retreat and residency for women writers on Whidbey Island that supports women writers whose stories and ideas shape our culture now and for generations to come. Amy holds an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, and her work has been seen in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Atlanta.
Holly Morris, co-founder of PowderKeg, is a writer and editor, and a television documentary producer and correspondent. The former Editorial Director of the book publishing company Seal Press, Morris edited an eclectic list of titles on topics ranging from domestic violence and geo-politics, to award-winning poetry and international fiction and nonfiction. She also edited the Adventura imprint, which features outdoor, travel, and environmental literature. She is a longtime board member of Hedgebrook, a writer’s residency in Washington State. Her essays are widely anthologized, and she writes for numerous publications including The New York Times. Her book, Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine, based on her experiences as an international correspondent, was named an “Editors’ Choice” and a ‘Notable Book of the Year’ about exploration by the New York Times. Morris is the executive producer/writer/director of the award-winning prime-time PBS documentary series, “Adventure Divas”
September 8th – Tea and readings
“For a ceramic artist, form is a vessel for the spirit. Fire – volatile and sacred in many cultures – is the alchemy that brings it alive. The artist’s intentions, finger marks, and dreams all ignite in the kiln. When we invite hand-made art into our everyday lives – in our morning coffee, our afternoon tea with friends – we find the stillness and beauty of the present moment: meditative, ritualistic, reverential, and sacred.” – Ming Yuen-Schat
On September 8th, at 2 pm, we are reading and drinking from an art exhibit – Chalice – which includes 100 porcelain and celadon vessels of different shapes and sizes. Pick your favorite right off its velvet pad, turn it in your hands, have a cup of tea. Sit back and listen to readings from Ed Lin, Anelise Chen and me as we reflect on sacredness and spirituality in our society.
While you are there, visit 50 artists’ studios as part of the Brooklyn Museum’s Go Project. Preview the Asian American Arts Alliance’s Locating the Sacred Festival. For the full day’s program at the NARS studios in Brooklyn, check out this flyer.
The New York Art Residency & Studios (NARS)Foundation
88 35th Street, Brooklyn, NY, 3rd Floor
(Take the D, N, R to 36th St.)
For further information, please contact [email protected] or 718-768-2765.
To write or to have written?
In truth, I skim uplifting forwards in my email, and only if I have time. But today, one of the messages resonated and I want to share a piece of advice:
Give up the past. I know, I know. It’s hard. Especially when the past looks so much better than the present and the future looks so frightening, but you have to take into consideration the fact that the present moment is all you have and all you will ever have. The past you are now longing for – the past that you are now dreaming about – was ignored by you when it was present. Stop deluding yourself. Be present in everything you do and enjoy life. After all life is a journey not a destination. Have a clear vision for the future, prepare yourself, but always be present in the now.
I so love the idea that the past we are longing for was ignored when it was the present!
I am finishing up my semester with my Goddard students. As we look back on what we have written, and face a future of ripping that apart and rewriting, it can be exhausting and scary to think of the work ahead; how much easier it would be to be able to rest on what is already done! This takes the form of what I call page conservation, and editing (moving those blocks of text you like around with your handy computer!) instead of re-envisioning. I have a book now that needs re-envisioning, even though I have re-envisioned it several times. Yes, it would be lovely if my readers could just see it the way I would like it to be seen now. But since they cannot read my mind, only my pages, the reality is this: If I don’t rewrite, if I am not writing, then what am I? Not a writer. Just a woman who is putting her books in a box and taking them out again.