On the final day of the Writers Guild's "Writing for Radio" residency, Nick Meyer, Andy Patrie, Scott Morfitt, Jason Spraitz and B.J. Hollars sat down to reflect on their time together. Click above to have a listen to their informal thoughts on what it means to write for the ear.
(Thanks to Lobo Loco for the music!)
As we come to the close of the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild’s inaugural season, it’s time to hear from you! How can we make this Guild YOUR Guild? How can we better provide you the resources needed to support your own writing?
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Sarah Lou Richards
By BJ Hollars
Concertgoers pack up all around me, squeezing the water from their drenched blankets as they head back toward their cars. But since my family and I are already soaked beyond saving, we take our time, and in our casualness, eventually make our way toward Sarah Lou.
I introduce myself, tell her how much I enjoyed her music, and mention how great it would be to have her drop by one of my creative writing classes some time if it ever fit her schedule.
“Of course!” she says.
“Really?” I say.
And then, a few months later, she makes good on it.
The following April I meet Sarah Lou for the second time. She’s riding out more miserable weather, this time in the visitor’s parking lot hut on the UW-Eau Claire campus.
She is unmistakable in her red-rimmed glasses, her leather boots, her guitar case slung over her shoulder.
“Hey there,” I say, nodding to the hut. “I see you’ve found our green room.”
“I’ll take it,” she laughs.
We thread through the swarms of students until making our way to my office.
“So you’re on tour?” I ask.
“I am,” she agrees. “But I’m also helping my dad. He just bought a new house in Menomonie, so today I’ve spent most of the day sanding boards and painting bathrooms, that sort of thing.”
“The glamorous rock star life,” I joke.
Sarah Lou offers a warm, Midwestern smile, one that reminds me that when she’s not busy being a rock star she’s busy being a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a fiancé, a friend, and today, my visiting lecturer.
“So you graduated from here a few years ago?” I ask as we settle into my office.
“Yup, exactly. I can’t really remember the year,” she says wryly. “We won’t talk about that.”
What we do know—minus her exact graduation year—is that she studied to become a music teacher. Though after a fortuitous visit to Nashville, she decided to try a new path: packing her bags and moving to Music City in August of 2007.
“I was totally taken by it,” she says of Nashville. “I didn’t play guitar and I hadn’t written any songs yet, [but] I learned very quickly that Nashville is definitely a songwriting city, so I just kind of scrambled and started to make it happen.”
“So you were kind of just ‘driven by the dream’ so to speak?”
“Yup.”
“And never looked back?”
“Nope, definitely not.”
Admittedly, I’m more than a little inspired. So many dream big, and yet putting oneself in a position to achieve those dreams is often easier said than done. But not for Sarah Lou. Rather than put her dream on hold she made it her priority, and after eight years of doing odd jobs in addition to her music, at last, music’s her job.
“Most months I can pay my electric bill,” she jokes.
“It’s a lot of storytelling,” she says of her lyrics, “pretty relatable stuff. And I definitely take a lot from my own life and the lives of those around me.”
Which means many of her songs are deeply personal, which can be complicated, she explains, when collaborating with others.
“It took me a really long time to find a collaborating partner,” she tells me. “Nashville is really big on co-writing, which is awesome, but a lot of times its totally a cold call. You just walk into a room with somebody you’ve never met and sit down and write a song. And in that aspect, that’s how songwriting is just like any other job: you go and you do your job. But for me,” she continues, “that’s been kind of tricky because it’s so personal. Sometimes its scary because things come out that are really honest, and you know that listeners, even if you’re writing about something that’s not about your own life, that’s how it’s heard. That can be intimidating—to be that brave, that honest.”
But it’s that honesty, I reason, that allows for relatability as well.
Later that afternoon, she’ll encourage my students to interpret a few of her songs.
What do the lyrics mean to you? she’ll ask.
The students will offer their interpretations, Sarah Lou will nod, and then, she’ll provide insight into her true intentions. Not that she necessarily has a preferred interpretation of her music.
“If [a song’s] received exactly as you intended, there’s something rewarding about being that clear,” she tells me. “But it’s also really special if something totally different is taken from it.”
Connecting with listeners, Sarah Lou explains, is what matters most.
As we wrap up our conversation, I ask her to tell me about the highs and lows of being a musician in Nashville. “Do you get a little of both?”
“Well I don’t think we have time for all the low moments,” she grins and then proceeds to tell me her high moment.
It occurred on her second day in Nashville. After a full afternoon of unpacking in the sweltering August heat, Sarah Lou, her father, and her friend, took a break to visit some of the better-known music hot spots the city has to offer.
“Let’s just pop into the Ryman,” Sarah Lou suggested—the home to the Grand Ole Opry from 1943 to 1974. Hailed as the “Mother Church of Country Music”, one look at the expansive auditorium explains why: it indeed resembles a church, complete with stained glass windows filtering colored beams upon the 2600 seats below.
“They had a recording booth in there where you could do, for 15.00, basically a glorified karaoke track,” Sarah Lou explains. “So I did two Patsy Cline songs, and as we were leaving some guy came up to me, and he was holding a guitar, and he said, ‘I just heard you recording. Why don’t you get on stage?’ And so I sang ‘Walking After Midnight’ on the Grand Ole Opry stage on the second day I lived in Nashville.”
I shake my head.
“Sometimes life just conspires on your behalf.”
“Right. And to have my dad there, you know? It was a really good sign,” she smiles, “that I had made the right move.”
Michael Perry at the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library (May 7, 2016)
By Ken Szymanski
Mike Perry’s level of success can’t be reached by listening to a speech. Still, the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library basement was packed with aspiring writers for his May 7 keynote address for the Chippewa Valley Writer's Guild, all us hoping to catch some tips that might provide the elusive secret.
Anyone who’s reading this knows the Mike Perry story. His success has been a blend of natural born talent and farm boy work ethic, combined with the ability to work a crowd on a book tour stops. Plus, his books often cover the right topics at the right times. Simple, right? Hardly. But he did reveal a simple word important to aspiring writers.
Perry said that being a successful freelance writer starts with saying yes. When agent called and asked if he’d be willing to climb up Mount Rainier for a story, he faked a confident “Yes.” And saying yes over and over has led to opportunities that provide a more exciting angle to writing than simply sitting at the keyboard. “Writing is a means to adventure,” he said, showing slides of mountain top views.
Once on assignments, he stressed the importance of observation (“You have to be the five senses for the reader”) and veracity (it wouldn’t be a Perry if he didn’t send some of us to the dictionary at least once). Nonfiction writers depend on the reader’s trust. It cannot be broken.
One audience member asked how to deal with having so many job-related writing obligations, that she had little time left to do the writing she really wants to do.
While writers dream of having months to devote to a project, Perry said that can be actually be counter-productive. Put in that situation, writers can auger down rather than gain traction. Conversely, the brain can spark a lot of ideas while doing other things. Tasks such as chores, mundane writing assignments, firefighting calls, etc. can give the brain a needed break or stimulus for the creative project. Sounds like part of the trick, for busy people, is to learn how to work on your writing when you’re not working on your writing.
But for those who like to talk about how writing is such tough work, Perry offered some relief. His brother is a logger up north. If writing is so hard, Perry said, try logging with him. “I’m sure we could arrange a sabbatical for ya,” he said, drawing a good laugh from the crowd.
That’s classic Perry. He loves talking about the craft of writing, but he never gets mystical. He mentioned that his muse is the guy at the bank who holds his mortgage. He writes to put food on the table for his family. It’s simply about observing, writing down observations, typing them up, printing them, cutting up those observations and laying scraps all over giant tables, and finding connections. Simple, right?
Sometimes it’s what Perry called “word jazz” and other times, he said, “It’s like a desperate game of literary solitaire.”
Literary solitaire: that sums it up the writing process as well as anything. It can be frustrating, success can be elusive, but if you stay up late enough and play long enough, eventually you’ll win one.
By Katie Allan
And plenty of other things. It takes roughly one radio song to drive the length of my Wisconsin hometown. If you were passing through town during the 90s, and happened to glance up through a smudgy school bus window, you might’ve glimpsed a day-dreamy kid with grass-hopper legs, a kitten shirt, and bangs long enough to tickle her eyelids. She’d have been reading a library book.
There was something special about that 45-minute commute to school twice a day, where my imagination sucked up stories like superfood. Because cute as snow globe towns are, sooner or later you start flicking pine cones at the glass out of curiosity. You learn about earth on the other side of rural Dairyland. I blame books, mostly. A few teachers. And definitely my parents.
But just knowing about faraway places isn’t enough. You have to see something out there that’s worth leaving home for. Some folks see mountains calling, others see cities, careers, Beyoncé, the ocean, education, real Chinese food, kinder climates…I don’t know what I first saw.
But a different window comes to mind, marginally less-smudgy, and 35,000 above the ground. I was nineteen and watching the rivers and village-speckled mountains shrink out of sight as I left Guatemala behind. I had a pile of hand-drawn pictures and cards in my lap; parting tokens from the girls of a Mayan village school. I was wondering how a foreign country could feel so much like home after fourteen days, and if that was normal.
Since that initial glimpse, I’ve returned four times to Guatemala. I’ve lived with a Guatemalan family and worked with a nonprofit called Mission Impact for nearly two years. I worked from the communication office, the Mayan girl’s school in a mountain town, and translated in the field for teams. I also spent five months in a training program called GoInternational.tv in Ecuador. There are a lot of stories I now carry around, wedged in my mind.
But since returning to the U.S. a few months ago, I still haven’t figured out how to translate them all into writing; I’m lacking words. But a miraculous thing about learning a new language is you acquire new words. So I’ve come across a couple in Spanish (*Spain-Spanish, not Guatemalan-Spanish), and one in Greek that echo things I encountered while living in Central and South America.
*Querencia – (n.) a place from which one’s strength is drawn, where one feels at home, the place where you are your most authentic self (Spanish). [kɛˈrɛnsɪə].
*Sobremesa – (n.) The time spent around the table after lunch or dinner, talking to the people you shared the meal with; time to digest and savor both food and friendship (Spanish) [sO-bRe-‘mA-sa].
*Convivencia – (n.) lit. “living together”, in the sense of living or working closely with other people with whom you share feelings, desires, or common purpose (Spanish) [con-vi-‘ven-sE-a].
*Meraki (μεράκι) – (n.) The soul, creativity, or love put into something; the essence of yourself that is put into your work (Greek) [mA-‘rak-E].
****All words and definitions come from the blog Other Wordly compiled by an awesome gal named Yee-Lum. Check it out at http://other-wordly.tumblr.com/
These aren’t words I’d use in a sentence. But just knowing they exist and that someone else has felt them before is somehow amazing.
I’m no longer in my small Wisconsin town, but in Seattle. It’s funny how in a way each city seems like a snow globe (size and snow variable); they’re unique, condensed collections of people, landscape, history and evolving culture. Sometimes the real challenge is to seek out adventure right where we are – to find wonder and humor and purpose in the places we live and work.
But if you’ve never left the place you were born, and you’re still captivated by what could be on the other side of the glass, it could be time to seek new worlds elsewhere. To stand from a different vantage point and look back at the glass sphere of home. Like the first men on the moon looking back at the blue globe of earth, maybe you’ll find it all the more beautiful from afar. Or maybe you’ll choose to make your home somewhere new.
Certain goldfish grow in accordance to how big their bowl is. I imagine it would be uncomfortable otherwise; they wouldn’t fit. We have to grow, learn and adapt in order to dive into a new environment where we don’t know the culture, language, systems, and rules of the kingdom.
But there are also new flavors and scents and sights and wonders. Blurry, nameless faces sharpen into friends, and there’s a lot of joking around, but also moments when you see someone, really see them, and realize they see you too. And one day, all that background noise and gibberish around you begins to sound like words.
Jeff Vahlbusch and Audrey Fessler
By B.J. Hollars
Admittedly, it’s a task easier said than done, especially when so much of students’ educational lives now involves synthesis, analysis and deconstructing a thing into its simplest parts. By poem’s end, the resigned narrator laments that despite his pleas, readers will likely still tend to beat poems “with a hose / to find out what it really means.”
Yet what happens when we allow meaning to take a back seat to musicality?
For a decade now, Drs. Audrey Fessler and Jeff Vahlbusch have been doing just that, organizing the International Poetry Reading—a one evening event each spring dedicated to encouraging community members to recite poems in languages from across the world. And that’s the beauty of the event: a chance to appreciate the sound of diverse languages, as well as to honor the cultures of the people who speak them.
The impetus for the International Poetry Reading began long ago, during Jeff and Audrey’s time as junior faculty members at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.
“It was a small college, it was a small event, and it lasted for an hour, maybe an hour and a half, “Jeff remembers. “Perhaps 20 people read in five or six or seven languages. We loved it, we thought it was magical.”
“And then we arrived here at UW-Eau Claire,” Audrey continues, “and thought, ‘This would be a wonderful kind of gift and tradition perhaps we could institute here.”
In 2006, Jeff and Audrey organized the very first International Poetry Reading here in Eau Claire. They kept expectations low, hoping for five or six languages to be represented. They were shocked to find the reality far exceeded their expectation: no fewer than 30 languages were represented.
“We were blown away,” Audrey says. “We just barely made it into our little two hour allocation of time."
They not only exceeded their expectation in terms of participants, but in terms of audience members as well, so much so that folding doors were soon spread wide to make room for overflow rooms.
“Our startlement and joy at the initial community response has kept us motivated for a long time to continue,” Audrey notes.
“Have there been any moments that really stand out in your mind?” I ask. “After all the poems you’ve heard and all the languages, what really resonates with you two?”
“The ones that have hit home for me, often, are when you expect someone to read and they sing,” Jeff says. “Where you expect someone to read and they chant.”
He goes on to describe an instance in which a woman from Cambodia leaned into the microphone, informing the audience that in her country they don’t read poems, they sing them.
“And she stepped back from the microphone and in a crystal clear, little but incredibly impressive voice she sang for four minutes,” Jeff says, his eyes glossing over in memory, “and it was evocative, amazing, and wonderful. And it brought down the house.”
Audrey adds that for her, the most memorable moment involved being “plunged into silence.”
“At this event people listen with all their might because they’re hearing languages they’ve never had the opportunity to hear before,” she explains. “They’re hearing sounds that they might not have known the human voice was capable of making.”
After 45 minutes or so of intense listening, all sounds were momentarily silenced as a reader shared a poem in American Sign Language.
“Suddenly there was nothing there for most audience members’ ears,” Audrey explains, “but there was this beautiful body in motion of poetry that had so much eloquence and grace and perfect intelligibility to audience members…”
Of course, moments such as these don’t just happen; they require lots of work. And for the past decade, Jeff and Audrey have dedicated hundreds of hours each year to their effort. There are a range of duties to be fulfilled, though perhaps most complicated of all is creating a booklet which allows audience members to read each poem both in its original language as well as translated into English.
“There’s an awful lot of work to do in just putting together the book,” Vahlbusch says, “…formatting all of these different scripts and languages—some of which our computers can’t handle—is a very, very exciting kind of work.”
“So how has the International Poetry Reading contributed to the Chippewa Valley?” I ask.
“One thing we have thought for years,” Jeff explains, “is that this is an event in which we in the Chippewa Valley get to see what an amazingly diverse place we actually are, and how many different people’s languages and traditions, ethnicities and races, come together in this small spot in Wisconsin to live together.”
He’s right, and were it not for events such as this, perhaps we’d never stop to notice the depth and range of our community.
Art often finds a way to bring people together, I think, and in this instance, the collision of poetry and culture seems to do just that, as well as instilling a deeper affection and appreciation for the place that we call home.
I’d hate to lose such an event, and when I ask Audrey and Jeff if it’s really over, Audrey says, “We would like it not to be the end. It has certainly been a great labor of love for us both.”
She goes on to say she’s hopeful that someone else might be willing to carry it on for a while.
“Free training,” Jeff says with a smile.
“And a ton of gratitude,” Audrey adds.
This year, the tenth International Poetry Festival will be from 7:00-9:00p.m. on Wednesday, May 4 in the Ojibwe Grand Ballroom in the Davies Center on the UW-Eau Claire campus.
If it is, indeed, the last chance we have to come together in this way, be sure to clean out your ears, listen carefully, and savor as much as you can.
***
Music courtesy of Lulzacruza
Debbie Campbell
By Debbie Campbell
Last week, I’m having coffee with an old friend. We’re splitting a blueberry muffin and she’s telling me what it’s like to be a mom. We’re mid-laugh in conversation when she stops abruptly and says, “I just thought I’d have it figured out by now.” For her, figured out means the marriage thing. But whether it’s the marriage thing or the career thing or any other thing, somehow the people I care about most all seem to think they should be someplace else by now. Writing can feel this way, too. Maybe it’s the novel you said you would write by fifteen—I had lofty childhood goals—or the poem that, no matter how many times you go to write it, refuses to assemble into something meaningful.
When I was a little girl, I kept quotes in sloppy handwriting in notebooks with moons on the front. I caught caterpillars in my parents’ little garden while they planted tomatoes and green beans. I would stand on the wooden garden gate and silently recite my favorite quotes, eyes closed, soft caterpillar feet almost indistinguishable from the small hairs on my arms. My absolute favorite was from Helen Keller: “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.”
In 2010, I graduated from a midsized Midwestern university, our very own UWEC. If you had asked me then, I would have told you adventure was Japan—the green grassy hill flooded with unfamiliarly large dragonflies, the young students I taught English phrases to through silly songs and program-approved drills. I would have said adventure was teaching yoga at local churches, or applying to MFA programs. If you had asked me then, I wouldn’t have, in the faintest, imagined adventure could soon mean teaching at my alma mater.
There’s an image I keep seeing recycled on social media. It says “Success” across the top. On the left of the picture, an arrow, a straight line. Below that straight-lined arrow, it reads, “what people think it looks like.” On the right, another arrow, this one a twisty turny mess. This one reads, “what it really looks like.”
Maybe this image keeps grabbing my attention because it speaks to my experiences both with writing and with teaching. Like I said, as short a time ago as 2010, the idea of teaching at UWEC would have been like a fever dream, something unattainable or unthinkable. I’m not sure anything has ever felt as strange or as exhilarating as having teachers I admired as a student become my colleagues. And it wasn’t a straight line from childhood to here, or even student to teacher at UWEC. It was a messy road I grew to love that led me here.
Writing is like that, too. That poem I’ve been struggling to assemble…well, it might not have come to fruition, but each time I sit down to write it, something messy and wonderful happens. I start with what I think will help me figure it out, take me on a straight line to my destination. Each time, every time, by the end of a mad hours-long writing session, I’ll have begun several other poems or maybe a novel. It won’t be the elusive poem I set out to write, but it might just be better, all of this surprising idea material that arises from the mess. And any writer knows, half the fun is being surprised.
There’s another favorite quote from my little girl days. It’s from an Emily Dickinson poem: “Not knowing when the Dawn will come, I open every Door…” To me, it reminds me to embrace the mess, the adventure. It reminds me that, while some days I feel like I should be someplace else by now, life, like most good writing, does not happen in a straight line.
In theory, starting a writing group should be pretty straightforward: find some writers, put them in a room, brew some coffee, and let the magic begin. But even within this simplified model, there are complications, such as: What people? What room? Decaf or caffeinated?
Below are five tips to make your fledgling writers group a great success.
It’s not easy to find writers. Sure, we’re everywhere, but it can feel a little awkward to walk up to a stranger in a bookstore and ask if they want to form a group. The CVWG’s “Directory” is an attempt to avoid that awkwardness, and it’s one place to begin your search. Keep in mind that the Guild does not have the resources to personally vet each individual group, but the assumption is that each “open” group is willing to meet prospective members with a potential to welcome them into the group. Admittedly, this, too, can feel a little awkward. Which is why sometimes rallying a group of friends (3-5 is a fine starting place!) and starting a new group that fits your needs is another way to get things going.
The success of a writers group hinges on finding people who share your goals. Begin your early meetings by discussing just what your goals might be. Do you want your group to serve as a place to workshop new work? If so, what’s an appropriate number of pages to share, and how do you play to distribute the work? More than anything, the sharing of work should always be equitable. Group members loose steam when one person turns in a poem to be workshopped while another person turns in a book. By settling on a few basic goals (What do we want to achieve? How will our meetings run? How many pages do we plan to share? How will we distribute the work) can go a long way to ensure that the expectations are clear for all involved.
We all live busy lives, and it can be tough to squeeze in even an hour or two a month for a writers group to meet. Perhaps the best way to find a schedule that works is to set upon a specific time each month (the second Tuesday, for instance) and then stick to that schedule as best as you can. Things always come up, of course, but if you can make your writers group adhere to a routine, then your group will benefit as a result of the stability. Schedule early, block out the time on your calendar, and reserve a brief moment in your life for your art and the art of others.
Not all writers group will follow the “workshop” model of sharing work and offering feedback. Some groups, for instance, might simply benefit by the social engagement or support provided by the group setting. However, for those who do want to provide substantive feedback on work, take some time to decide the group’s comfort level. You can develop your group’s “tone” or “vibe” by having a candid conversation about the depth of feedback you’re comfortable giving and receiving. Being mindful of the tenor of the room is crucial, and striking a balance between providing feedback that is simultaneously supportive, substantive, and specific, and can often go a long way.
The most successful writers groups don’t subscribe to the same rules as any other. Rather, each group should feel comfortable forming its own culture for the benefit of the group. Do what you want! Have fun! And if it starts to feel like a slog, it’s time to take stock of your current structure and adjust as necessary. Keep in mind, however, that building a community takes time, and building a writing group, in particular, takes time and trust. Be generous, be kind, be present, be helpful, and most of all, be inspired and be inspiring.
