Writing Update: May 2024
This past month I’ve been getting back into the swing of things since returning from the MFA residency at the end of March. Here are some things I’ve discovered in my writing process.
Revision. I revise more effectively when I print out my text. I circle things, make notes, ask questions, offer suggestions, draw arrows, etc. Making edits on a computer screen just isn’t the same. With poems, I will actually rewrite the piece on the back of the paper. Sometimes a rewrite from scratch (or from relative scratch) can help uncover insight and beauty that seemed so elusive in the earlier draft.
Submission. I printed out about 50 poems and started reading through them, making preliminary revision notes. My goal is to have them all out for submission by the end of the year. My submission process in the past has been to revise a handful of poems right before a deadline, then wait several months before doing it again. My goal is to submit more often with a wider array of my work.
Multiple Creative Modes. I’ve also learned that I can engage in more than one creative activity at a time. In addition to writing, I also draw cartoons. For some reason, in the past, whenever I hit a cartooning groove, my writing would fall to the side. When I got into a writing mode, I stopped doing cartoons. This month, I’ve been able to produce a bevy of cartoons and keep writing at my “new normal” pace. It feels like a threshold crossed, a milestone reached, a mindset shifted.
Writing Projects
A Darker Travel
I wrote a few new chapters for this novel, which is about a bereaved father who visits heaven in his dreams. I’ve moved beyond the “preliminary” chapters, which introduce the narrator to some general concepts of heaven. I’m now entering the “purgatory” sections, which will describe remedies to sinful habits formed on earth. Should be fun to generate some of these, a la Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio.
The Lesser Light
This novel is about a boy who survives a robot invasion by following a sci-fi book that echoes/foretells his own experience. When the book finally fails him, he must learn who he is without the book to guide him. I started a new version (for the fourth or fifth time!), this one written as a memoir from the protagonist’s point of view (written several years after the events). I’m trying this method out because it may allow for some meta-narrative possibilities (i.e., explaining the point of an event, connecting experiences together, internal dialogue, etc.) that could be more tricky with a traditional third-person narrator. We’ll see how it goes.
What I’m Reading
April’s Reads
William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew and Anthony & Cleopatra. My goal this year is to read one Shakespeare play per month. Since I missed March, I read two in April. I enjoyed these two plays, though not as much as I did Hamlet and Macbeth. The Taming of the Shrew is a convoluted love story involving several love triangles—or really more like love spokes aiming toward a single hub: the younger sister Bianca. I understand that this is a comedy, but the sexism is quite alarming at times. For example, the “shrew” (the assertive older sister Katherine) is starved, sleep-deprived, and gaslit into submission by her new husband.
Antony & Cleopatra, an action-packed historical play, has its share of sexism as well, though the leading woman, Cleopatra, holds her own to the end. She is arguably one of the strongest female characters in Shakespeare’s plays.
Sim Kern, The Free People’s Village. A very timely novel about love, protest, tragedy, and hope. The novel is set in Houston in an alternative 2020, where Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election, and the “War on Climate Change” has been waged ever since. While environmental progress has been made, the greening of industry and economy has been co-opted by capitalism and the criminal justice system. The rich continue to pollute because they can afford to pay the “carbon fines” while the poor are incarcerated for minor “carbon crimes.” The U.S. sends troops to the Amazon to fight “climate terrorism.” The protagonist, Maddie, is a young, white, upper-middle-class teacher whose boyfriend, a wealthy app creator, has created a community hub in a poor neighborhood. One night, Maddie finds a notice that the city is going to demolish many homes and businesses in the neighborhood to make way for an eco-friendly maglev “hyperway.” The residents occupy a building in protest, and the movement explodes. Soon there are thousands of people from all over participating. The story follows Maddie as she learns about her privilege, her power, and her place in the movement. Along the way, we watch her learn about love and loyalty as well. What I like about this book is that at the end, when things fall apart and nothing changes, there is still a note of hope. At times the book felt preachy, though this may be forgiven because the story is told in first-person POV, so the protagonist is sharing her perspective. Also, this book touches on many (perhaps too many) current social issues: environmentalism, racism, mental health, capitalism, climate justice, protests, community organizing, gentrification, indigenous rights, incarceration, militarism, imperialism, consumerism, censorship, education, media coverage of protests. I tell ya, it’s a lot packed into this book.
Robert Cording, In the Unwalled City. Bob Cording was my first-year poetry mentor when I did the MFA program. When we met in 2018, we had both lost a son in the previous year. It was a God-ordained meeting. He wrote an essay about his grief, “In the Unwalled City, “which appeared in Image journal in 2021. The next year, Bob published his book of the same name, breaking the essay into several sections intercalated with poems. It’s an interesting cross-genre experience, about 4-5 pages of essay followed by 10-15 poems, repeated several times. Connections between the essay and the poem resonate throughout. Cording moves through the different feelings of grief: sadness, anger, depression, longing, but also joy, laughter, and acceptance. This is a powerful and wonderful read from a dear mentor and friend.
I groan: Lord, grant me this fatherhood of pain,
do not let grief be finished with me,if only because it gives birth to my dead son
who is both not here, and not not here.
from “At the Cemetery”
Currently Reading
Herman Melville, Moby Dick. I’m almost done with this leviathan book! I’ve been reading more than one chapter a day this month so I can catch up to where I planned to be. Just a few chapters left to go. Here are four quotes.
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method (361).
One of my favorite sentences in all literature is bolded below:
Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet [of whale blubber] itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. The spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan’s feet are shoeless; the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge. If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistant’s, would you be very much astonished? Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men (418).Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You’ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts (433).
One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? … Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme (456).
Mihkail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. I first encountered Bakhtin when I was working on my seminary thesis. My advisor recommended I read secondary sources first, so I could be introduced to the terminology and see his literary theories applied. Ever since, I’ve been wanting to read him. I got a copy of The Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics a few years ago, but have only read the first chapter or so. Rabelais and His World is about the carnivalesque, the grotesque, popular humor and its role in literature.
Let us say a few initial words about the complex nature of carnival laughter. It is, first of all, a festive laughter. Therefore it is not an individual reaction to some isolated “comic” event. Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants. The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay relativity. Third, this laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. Such is the laughter of carnival.
Let us enlarge upon the second important trait of the people’s festive laughter: that is also directed at those who laugh. The people do not exclude themselves from the wholeness of the world. They, too, are incomplete, they also die and are revived and renewed. This is one of the essential differences of the people’s festive laughter from the pure satire of modern times. The satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it. The wholeness of the world’s comic aspect is destroyed, and that which appears comic becomes a private reaction. The people’s ambivalent laughter, on the other hand, expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it.
Wahinke Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez, Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth. It’s hard to categorize the format of this book. Two authors engage in conversation (like an interview almost), responding to an excerpt from another author. Each chapter has its own excerpt, and each chapter focuses on a different “precept” of Indigenous life and culture. Aside from the introduction, I’ve read five chapters (each is about 10 pages). Every chapter is so engaging. The wisdom and perspectives the authors share is old and traditional, but for me—coming from a white, dominant culture background—so much in this book is new, refreshing, inspiring, and inviting. I’ve included two quotes below.
from the chapter “Conflict Resolution as Return to Community”
Perpetrators were considered to be an integral part of the community because of their important role in defining what was inappropriate behavior and pointing out weak spots in the community that influenced it. The ultimate goal of the process was not punishment, but rather to restore peace and harmony in the community.from the chapter “Humor as Essential”
Although all cultures appreciate and use humor, under the dominant worldview humor is too often merely for entertainment rather than for helping us understand the world better. Humor has always been fundamental to existence in Indigenous communities. It serves to bond people together. It encourages social harmony and complementarity work. It is vital for education in all forms. Joseph Bruchac, an Abenaki storyteller, says: “Humor can be used to remind people—who because of their achievements might be feeling a little too proud or important—that they are no more valuable than anyone else in the circle of life.”
Thank you for reading! If you read any of the books I’m reading, please let me know! Blessings on your weekend!
Love this, Nate. I feel the same about revision--physical always helps. I haven’t read Bob’s book but am eager to!