I identify very strongly with place and often write about it, so I was interested in Kathryn’s post last week since I seem to have opposite feelings about place, and it got me thinking about some things. What does it mean to belong to a place, and what does it mean for a place to belong to you?

Ted Kooser, former U.S. Poet Laureate, writes often about theMidwest. He grew up in Iowa and lives in Nebraska now, and the stories of his grandmother, his mother, his father, and others that appear in his poems are set in the prairie farmland of his home. In general, his work exists in a very Midwestern landscape (as anyone who’s lived there can attest), but he says that he doesn’t consider himself a regional poet. I can understand the aversion to the label. Kooser wants to write things that transcend one specific place, that allow people to connect to the poems no matter where they’re from, and I think he succeeds at that. But I still consider him a Midwestern writer. At the very minimum, he’s a Midwestern poet because he understands that place, but it extends far beyond subject matter. Kooser is Midwestern in his whole approach to language, the way he eases you in and uses the landscape as a catalyst for what he really wants to say.

Plenty of well-known writers have been linked to a region or even a specific city—Faulkner, Joyce, etc.—but I’m interested in the idea of a regional writer as it exists today. Read more »

I used this to calculate how long it would take to pay off the loans from undergrad ($35,000) and from graduate school

This guy looks legit

($40,000). I then used a bottle of moscato that Ericka gave me to offset the utter despair. When I ran away from home to get a Master’s degree in Creative Writing, I wasn’t thinking of my future career plans, no, I was thinking, “Screw you, ex-boyfriend, who said more school was unnecessary, let’s run away together instead. And screw you, friends and family, who said I couldn’t get in with my business degree.” It was all fun and games, until last year when I decided not to take out more loans and then lost my job and had to call my family for financial help. Add another two to three thousand to the debt pile.

So while it was hilarious that President Obama is Slow Jamming the News with Jimmy Fallon, the truth is if my interest rate doubles, I might have to resort to hocking poems on the street like this guy (when I’m not working four jobs of course). And I’m just one of millions. All these money thoughts made me ask myself was it worth it? Read more »

If you live in Spokane and we hang out on a semi-regular basis, you’ve probably seen me wearing my leather jacket. It goes without saying that my cool factor increases by about 90% when wearing this jacket, but what you don’t know is I’ve had it for four years and only started wearing it this past fall. No, it wasn’t the Pacific Northwest climate or an identity crisis that prompted this decision. It was simply the “right time.”

I had that jacket all through undergrad. I’d carefully pack it in my suitcase and take it home on breaks thinking the day would inevitably present itself when my leather jacket was ready to be worn out in the world. The day didn’t present itself, and I’d dutifully take the jacket back to school where it would hang in the corner of my closet. I occasionally modeled it for myself in the mirror but it never looked quite right. I can’t really explain what was holding me back but I just kept waiting, refusing to give it away or even leave it at home when I moved to Washington. Somehow, after four years, the day finally came. It wasn’t momentous or especially exciting. Probably no one even commented on the fact that I was wearing such a cool jacket.

And my jacket is one of many items in my closet to suffer this fate. I have a pair of shorts that I’ve had for five years and worn maybe three times. I have a pair of jeans that I owned for two years and just started wearing this past winter. I have a pair of bright yellow flats that give me terrible blisters and that don’t match anything but that I refuse to get rid of.  I have a problem with letting go.

The same thing happens with my poems.  Read more »

A Timeline of Names

Catherine
Name at birth

Katie
Age 0-6

Kates
Nickname from parents

Cathy
1^st grade. Baby’s first identity crisis. Couldn’t handle being 1 of 3 Katies in class.
Made decision based on love of movie Singing in the Rain.

Cathie
Mid- high school. I wanted to be able to loop the E around to cross the T
and dot the I at the same time. Seriously. Read more »

Poet and human rights activist Marjorie Agosín will read tonight at Gonzaga University. While she might be more wildly known for her poetry and activism, I recently read and enjoyed Agosín’s nonfiction book Of Earth and Sea: A Chilean Memoir, which I bought from the University of Arizona Press.

I was quickly absorbed by Agosín’s lyrical imagery and her unique relationship with Chile’s stunning landscape. However, what most intrigued me about the book was its unusual structure. Agosín crafts a flowing series of intimate vignettes reminiscent of Sandra Cisnero’s House on Mango Street. Beginning in the south-central city of Osorno, she travels through the country’s narrow geography, using important dates, locations, people, and objects to tell the story of her double exile–daughter of Jewish immigrants and Allende supporter. She skillfully layers her personal history with the political climate of her family’s adopted country and her own search for identity and belonging.

Tonight’s reading will be diverse in content, and its language will be rich and memorable. For more information about the event visit http://news.gonzaga.edu/2012/celebrated-human-rights-activist-gonzaga-u.

We teach how not to write and we teach writers to teach themselves how not to write.
When we teach how to write, the student had best be on guard.

–Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town, p. 64

There’s an institution, which shall remain nameless, whose H.R. Dept. has asked for a philosophy of teaching.

I thought I’d offer the readers of Bark both the ‘Erasure’ version (followed by the thing that I submitted for the job)…

Thinking The Other

Commodities want
to know
shelter with flesh.

You ask the kind
of reward
virtually.  Through-

out we are known, feel
exposed, full of
weeds worth even more.

The what splintered

too and filth-strewn
glitz grammar

seek partners already
exhausted

and roll.

Why:

To Cultivate Critical Thinking and Imaginative Engagement with The Other

Not all questions are equal. In North America, for example, we often pursue answers like commodities, as if we’re constantly in the market for the idea or the semblance of thought that will make life easier or more convenient. Other answers are born into the marriage of curiosity and vulnerability. We want to know something that matters, that persists throughout generations, a thing that binds us to their pursuit of truth and makes it our pursuit too. Moreover, we feel exposed to the social vicissitudes of life and death without at least trying to find shelter with other flesh and blood participants. Where, you ask, do we find such shelter?

Read more »

The Pulitzer Prize winners were announced today, and while the various winners in letters, drama and music celebrated, the internet freaked out because the fiction prize was notably not awarded.

The finalists, which are not announced before the award itself (unlike the National Book award, which announces them months before the announcement of the winner), were Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia and DFW’s The Pale King.

Here’s how it works, as I learned just now: three judges read over 300 books in a nine-month span, and then they, as a united panel, make a recommendation to the Pulitzer Board about who the three finalists should be. Then the board, which includes NYT columnist Thomas Friedman and fiction writer Junot Diaz, makes the final decision. Except that they decided not to hand out the award in fiction. No one won.

On one hand, who cares? If you didn’t know until today that your book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and then you found out in the next sentence that you didn’t win, would you really care that much? It doesn’t seem that insulting that a board of 21 people couldn’t decide on whether your book was “better” or “more important” or whatever rationale they supposedly use for the Pulitzer. Plus it’s just one (admittedly prestigious) award out of what seems like 1.2 million of them, and you can still put “Pulitzer Prize finalist” on your CV or dust jacket.  *

On the other hand, even if we all agreed that prize committees are probably full of well-intentioned people who take the job seriously, which I hope is largely the case, doesn’t it seem, well, a little douchey that they couldn’t just pick a damn winner? Read more »

Get Lit! was an amazing experience, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t help this quiet ennui that’s crept up on me since it ended. I met and heard some spectacular authors, writers who who’ve inspired me, artists that I never dreamt could all inhabit the same 30-mile radius without imploding or summoning the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And it’ll take me at least a fortnight to absorb all of the wisdom I gained during the past few days. I learned so, so much.

It’s like seeing your favorite band for the first time live. Leading up to the event, you’re a manic wreck, sporadically blurting out the band’s name in daily conversation, listening to their records over and over again, making sure that you’ll know all of the words so you can sing along and not miss a beat or a word. You become what Steve Almond calls a Drooling Fanatic. You start to lose your grip on time. The closer the event comes, the faster time goes. And then it’s here. Your favorite authors, the people who inspire you, the books you owe something to, they’re all around you and it’s tough to take in. You don’t realize what’s just hit you. Read more »

The poetry world has a paranoid side. If you ask Anis Shivani or certain folks in the avant-garde crowd, American poetry is a shell game. It’s rigged. And in certain circles, it’s clear that there is an us, and there is a them.

For instance, after a recent controversy in poetry land, there was this comment:

The entire official world of poetry publishing is corrupt from the top down to the smallest little contest – and the NEA is a facilitator of that. It is a world of mutual back scratching MFA grads with middle names like “Lavender” who elevate the word “vanity” to heights never before seen. Geoffrey Gatza (yes, I published with BlazeVox and donate to them) is one of the handful of honest, innovative publishers who are trying to deal with the real issues facing real poets and their readers – hence the hatred heaped on him by the officials patrolling the boundaries of verse culture.

This made me think of something from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals:

The notion of resentment is central to the book. In it, he makes a distinction between “slave morality” and “noble morality.” He writes:

…Slave morality from the start says “No” to what is “outside,” “other,” to “a not itself.” … In order to arise, slave morality always requires first an opposing world, a world outside itself.

Or as the philosophy department at Lander University puts it,

For Nietzsche, vanity is the hallmark of the meek and powerless…Vanity is a consequence of inferiority.

So when certain crowds get riled up, you see comments like this:

Two of the best considerations on this matter…were published last fall by…one of the central figures on the Buffalo poetry scene.

There’s a profound sense of self-importance—and yes, vanity—in that statement. It almost sounds like a perverse version of John Winthrop’s famous “city on a hill,” as if Buffalo were a beacon, preventing wayward poets from entering perdition.

Needless to say, the very notion of a “scene” speaks to a dichotomous, us. vs. them approach; “scenes” are defined entirely by them, by the Hegelian “Other” (which Nietzsche was damn familiar with).

And does Buffalo’s “scene” merit that much importance to begin with? While I admire a number of Buffalo poets and presses, I have to say that Buffalo’s crowning achievement is its hot sauce. (Frank, of Frank’s hot sauce fame, is surely what Hegel would call a world-historical individual.)

That’s the thing: I’m far less interested in a scene—I’m far more interested in good writing wherever I can find it. Needless to say, there are numerous great poets scattered across the country, and many of them aren’t any part of a “scene.” Case in point: One of my favorite poets works at car service on the West Coast.

Moreover, the folks in favor of a “scene” always seem to attack the opposition, as Nietzsche puts it, “in effigy.” In other words, it’s one big straw man argument. Even though that’s a logical fallacy, it doesn’t mean it’s not convincing; folks use fallacies for a reason: they work.

Read more »

Pivoting off Mr. Leunig’s not-so-recent-at-this-point post, I decided to try my hand at NPR’s three-minute fiction contest.  The stories have to be under 600 words, and this round, must begin with the line: “She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door.”

Perhaps overly influenced by Mr. Ligon, I’m not a big fan of quick fiction.  They seem to rely to heavily on some cute turn or twist toward the end, and being so short, so much is often lacking when it comes to characters development and plot. But perhaps overly influenced by Mr. Leunig, I thought the contest would make for good practice.

As I pondered story possibilities, I couldn’t avoid thinking how little I liked the first sentence chosen by Luis Alberto Urrea, the judge of the contest. (She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door) Let’s free associate.  Wordy.  Melodramatic.  Lifetime movie.  I checked out the website and found an explanation:

“The key being, of course, that ‘finally,’” Urrea tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz. “There can be an infinity in what’s going on with that ‘finally.’”

“I’m a book person, and honestly, I wanted the sense of life change that comes from a good reading experience,” he says. “I can’t wait to see where people go with it.”

Urrea says his editors at Little, Brown and Co. inspired his challenge. “My editor is often telling me, ‘You know what? Stop clearing your throat. Stop clearing your throat, don’t hesitate — get in the story,’” he says.

I see what his editors are getting at. That line is throat-clearing. Whatever comes next, that could be the heart of the story, or it could be more throat-clearing. Either way, I couldn’t help feeling any good story produced from that line would be better off without that first line.

As Mr. Frey can attest, good writing prompts are few and far between.  So I don’t mean to be too hard on Mr. Urrea, who has won many awards for writing, as if I had to come up with an opening line for a short story contest I’m not sure I could do any better.  My favorite writing prompts don’t use a starting line, but rather some kind of free-association, low-pressure, brainstorming with a group, which often leads to an idea for a narrative.

It turns out I’m not the only person who had qualms with this opening line.  Kani Martin’s story “Action Verbs,” is a meta-narrative of a writer attempting to improve the quality of that line. Read more »