Workshop Schedule & Sign-Up

Sign up for a slot you’d like to take and plan to submit work at least one week in advance of that date, if not two weeks in advance. You may exchange slots, if you change your mind or something comes up, but this must happen at about three weeks before the workshop date—otherwise, it may go to waste. If you miss your own workshop date without prior arrangements, you will lose your right to workshop in the future. Forever! Or at least until we forgive you. Choose wisely. This list will also be distributed on the yahoo group, where you can always find it by searching through the archives.

Jan 4 - Sujata

Jan 18 - Tom

Feb 1 - Jason

Feb 15 - Pierre

March 1 - Tom

March 15 - Elisa

March 29 - Kalman

April 12 - Sujata

April 26 - Lynda

May 24 - Marie

June 7 - Kalman

June 21 - Roger

July 5 - Sujata

July 19 - Alan

August 1 - Howard

Seeing and Believing and Acting

Exercise Your InkTank

Last night's craftshop exercise was one of those had-to-be-there things. (There was some acting involved, a foam bear claw, a dead plant, and a box of kleenex.) But for those of you (and you know who you are) who might be curious about what you missed, you'll find the gist of it below.


Because our talk about formatting and submitting manuscripts is (let’s face it) never very exciting, I thought we’d do something with a little zip in it tonight. Experiments in perspective—and by that I mean the writer’s way of seeing, not the character’s or speaker's—are always interesting because they remind us of ourselves as unique seers. As artists we have a responsibility to see—and record—the news of the world. Sometimes we forget this because we’re worried about POV shifts and space breaks and all of those criminally irritating mechanical concerns. It’s time to be reminded.

I’ll need a few randy volunteers for this experiment—let’s say three—who are willing to sacrifice a little on-the-spot writing time. We’ll concoct a moment, which we’ll then present to the group. The group’s task will be to record the scene as though witnessing it in the “real” world and to imagine the world around the scene. Write a poem, a story, follow the event where you like. We’ll share our work and see a little more clearly (perhaps) how we see. Use the space below to record as many details as you can as the action is taking place or directly thereafter. We’ll share these notes too.

InkTank Writers’ Salon Guidelines

Workshop Guidelines
Manuscripts must be submitted at least one week in advance of the assigned workshop slot. Otherwise, we’re all in trouble. Use our yahoo group and/or distribute copies by hand. Submit work that has been edited to the best of your abilities. Unedited work embarrasses everybody. We’re adopting (almost) professional formatting standards because it makes sense to learn them and work with them. We understand that e-mailing your work may disrupt your formatting—do the best that you can.

Titles: Pick one. Don’t italicize it, underline it, enlarge it, or type it in a wacky font. (It’s tempting, we know, but resist.)

For Prose: Submit no more than 25 double-spaced pages. Use 1-inch-or-so margins and a 12pt-or-so inoffensive font. (Most folks agree that Times and Courier are the standard.) Include your name and the date in a header and page numbers in the upper right corner. Your unadorned title should be centered above your first paragraph of text.

For Poetry: Submit no more than 10 pages. If the size or look of the font are somehow involved in your meaning making, they may vary to your little heart’s desire. Otherwise, keep it simple. Include your name and the date in a header and page numbers in the upper right corner. Your unadorned title should appear directly above your first lines of text.

For Everything Else: Use common sense.

Response Guidelines
Comment directly on the manuscripts up for workshop. Be nice, but don’t be so nice as to render your comments useless. Don’t ever be mean. Be critical, yet sensitive to the writer. If talking isn’t your style, make sure you offer more written commentary. If writing on the manuscript isn’t your style, make sure you give good verbal commentary. We’ll roll around the room and give everyone a chance to talk. Don’t use this as an opportunity to soapbox—keep it brief. It isn’t a bad idea to start with a positive. If you haven’t read the work, don’t comment—we won’t be offended if you leave at the break, but we will be offended if you huff off mid-workshop, or snooze.

Craftshop Guidelines
Craftshop topics are generated by group members. Speak up if you have an idea. The exercises give us a basis for a little technical or philosophical discussion and a chance to do some writing on the spot. If you’d like to share your craftshop results during the Salon, speak up. A little conversation about your work may transpire—nothing too serious. If you’d like to share your craftshop results later, send them to the yahoo group and they’ll be published on the blog. Anyone (even those who miss the meetings) is welcome to submit craftshop exercises for publication. Exercise sheets will appear on the blog after the Salon meets.

Salon Ethics
It’s simple: You’ve got to give at least as much as you receive. If everyone abides by this simple notion, the life of the Salon will be a dream. But if you don’t offer good commentary, don’t expect it in return. If you can’t abide by our guidelines, don’t expect us to be happy about it. Expect us to be sad. Expect us to think things about you. Remember that the Salon is free—it costs you nothing to be a member—but that does not mean it’s yours for the taking. It belongs to all of us and none of us; it is what it is. Please don’t try to make it something else and please don’t abuse it.

Salon Writers Write "Bad"

Untitled by Jason Gallagher

George. His name was George. With a name like George how could he have such a throbbing piece of man meat? It was juicy, huge in its girth but with the right amount of length. Not too much, just enough. It would fit comfortably inside my tight box. Try not to think about your own pussy while it is taking in that glorious member. I remember the pinch as it entered but I didn’t turn my head, I didn’t grimace. It was differently not something to cry over. I knew it would be over soon. There was no reason to not let him go through the motions. The thrusting would be deep; there was no better word for it then penetration. Teeth grinding with the intensity of each pound. Yet gentle. Each movement was forceful and gentle. That is how the whole thing can be deceiving. You think that it will be more then it is.


MOANS IN THE NEIGHBORS' SHED by Kalman Kivkovich

I hear the groans coming from the neighbors' shed.
The heavy breathing sounds like something out of my dreams.
I'm fifteen and dreams I have---flood of wet dreams . . .
I glue my eye to a crack in the wooden wall.
My gaze pierces the soft skin that blocks my view.
The moans fill the enclosed space beyond.
What the hell is it? My mind gears in full speed.
I close my eyes.
Something is bulging inside my trousers,
Thrusting against the already dilapidated partition.


WET DREAM by Kalman Kivkovich

I submit to a deep sleep,
Or do I?
Millions of thoughts, fragments of unidentified reflections,
Rushing through my resting head,
Thumping inside my skull,
Like giant waves on shore, beating against the boulders.
My mind struggles to focus into the hazy twister,
To grasp the indistinguishable.
And there she is,
Slowly advancing, floating toward me,
Like a mirror image out of the Greek mythology.
A spark in my brain turns my body over---once, twice.
I feel warm throughout,
My tongue searches for moisture off my lips,
I utter from within.
The lids of my closed-eyes tighten evermore.
My breath turns heavy,
My blood pulsates in an unrestrained rhythm.
My body stretches and again turns over.
I am being transferred away.
Where am I?
Now I feel my bare feet, resting on smooth pebbles,
I am standing on a still, dry riverbed.
I hear something,
A faint but rising sound.
It's coming closer,
Now it is roaring,
Oh God . . . the water!
I am going to drown,
I am on top---I am under.
I am wet,
My eyes open.



SEX WRITING WORKSHOP by Marie O'nan

We always had to kick the dog out of our bedroom before being intimate.
We always had to call it being intimate because Sylvia didn't want to say
fuck and she didn't want to sound like an easy listening song. All she
could say was weiner. "Oh Richard," she'd say, "I love your weiner." Or,
"Oh, your beautiful weiner."
"Sylvia," I'd say, "It's your weiner too. We share it like how siamese
twins share whatever it is that connects them."
Last night, we started to get intimate. The windows were open a little
because it was warm outside. You could smell the rain. Virgil howled
outside our door. He must've heard thunder. "Richard," she said, "Give me
your weiner."
"Sylvia," I said, "Fuck me hard." I don't know why I said it. I was
scared she would slap me, but she didn't. She just kept going the same as
before. I heard the rain and the dog crying and Sylvia's breathing and I
felt lucky.

Dirty Bird

Exercise Your Inktank
Bad Sex

I will confess I was dreading the prospect of writing bad literary sex scenes as examples for discussion. Thankfully, the Literary Review’s 2006 Bad Sex Award winner was announced yesterday. The judges say the award’s mandate is “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.” Here are their criteria for bad sexiness: “unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant sex scene in an otherwise sound literary novel.” Pretty vague, if you ask me, but otherwise maybe fairly sound. If you already know the winner, hold your tongue. Otherwise, read through these selections and see if you can pick it. A disclaimer: the following excerpts contain seriously graphic sexual content that may not be appropriate for some readers and may completely ruin our chances of ever having a grown-up conversation about the topic.

David Mitchell from Black Swan Green
“Now she made a noise like a tortured Moomintroll.”
Irvine Walsh from Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs:
“Skinner took his thick green slime and spread it like a chef might glaze some pastry…A ludicrously distended clitoris popped out from nowhere like a jack-in-the-box.”

Thomas Pynchon from Against the Day
“Ruperta had trained her toy spaniel to provide intimate ‘French’ caresses of the tongue for the pleasure of its mistress. …Reef followed, taking out his penis, breathing heavily through his mouth. 'Here Mouffie, nice big dog bone for you right here.’”

Julia Glass from The Whole World Over:
“And then before her inner eye, a tide of words leaped high and free, a chaotic joy like frothing rapids: truncate, adjudicate, fornicate, frivolous, rivulet, violet, oriole, orifice, conifer, aquifer, allegiance, alacrity…all the words this time not a crowding but a heavenly chain, an ostrich fan, a vision as much as an orgasm, a release of something deep in the core of her altered brain, words she thought she'd lost for good.”

Mark Haddon from A Spot of Bother:
“And it swept over her like surf sweeping over sand then falling back and sweeping up over the sand again and falling back. Images went off in her head like little fireworks. The smell of coconut. Brass firedogs.”

Will Self from The Book of Dave
“The confusion of their bodies—his hairy shanks, her sweaty thighs, his bow-taut cock, her engorged basketry of cowl and lip.”

Tim Willocks from The Religion
“He bent her across the cold steel face of the anvil...she called out to God and convulsed with each slow stroke, her head thrown back and her eyelids aflutter, and her cries filled the forge…until she squeezed him from inside and he exploded to a prayer of his own within her body.”

Iain Hollingshead from Twentysomething
“And then I’m inside her, and everything is pure white as we're lost in a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles…I can feel her breasts against her chest. I cup my hands round her face and start to kiss her properly. She slides one of her slender legs in between mine. ‘Oh Jack,’ she was moaning now, her curves pushed up against me, her crotch taut against my bulging trousers, her hands gripping fistfuls of my hair. She reaches for my belt. I groan too, in expectation. And then I'm inside her, and everything is pure white as we’re lost in a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles.”

The Challenge:
Write some bad literary sex. Attempting the worst can be as instructive as attempting the best. Use any of the above passages as a model, or create your own scenario.

Writing Violence

Exercise Your InkTank
Extreme Violence

The conversation about violence in storytelling is often one about the writer’s intent. If the writer’s intent is to shock the audience with extreme violence for the purpose of mere entertainment, we tend to categorize the violence differently than we might other kinds of violence in writing—we call it gratuitous. But violence that is sneakily used for the purpose of teaching readers a lesson might also be accurately called gratuitous. In both cases, readers have cause to resist and cause to dismiss; in both cases the reader’s sensitivity to violence is subject to the writer’s designs.

That said, I do think there is a place in literature for crazy gonzo blood splat gratuitous violence, as well as preachy politico tearjerk baby bye-bye violence. But what I’m more interested in talking about tonight is storytelling. The fact is that violence happens in the world. And the fact that it isn’t pretty or pleasant shouldn’t keep us from writing about it, though it may make the task more challenging.

If you slow down the pacing of the story around the violence, embellishing it with lots of details, the word gratuitous may stick to you—you may even be accused of glorifying violence. But if you speed it up and race right past it, you may be justly deemed a scardey cat. If the violence in your stories always happens off screen, it may be that you are mistaking your own fear, for the desires and needs of the story.

Here’s some advice from Chris Offutt, a writer who knows a good deal about it. I’ve summarized things he has said on the subject in workshop and out: write violence if you must, because you must, but write about it with the same care you’d take with anything. Your prose should be energized, not hyper. If you decide to take a clinical distance, don’t make it so cold you disappear. Be there.

A writer who does this well, I think, is Denis Johnson. This is an excerpt from “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” from the short story collection Jesus’s Son:
And later, as I’ve said, I slept in the back seat while the Oldsmobile—the family from Marshalltown—splashed along through the rain. And yet I dreamt that I was looking right through my eyelids, and my pulse marked off the seconds of time. The Interstate through western Missouri was, in that era, nothing more than a two-way road, most of it. When a semi truck came toward us and passed going the other way, we were lost in a blinding spray and a warfare of noises such as you get being towed through an automatic car wash. The wipers stood up and lay down across the windshield without much effect. I was exhausted, and after an hour I slept more deeply. I’d known all along exactly what was going to happen. But the man and his wife woke me up later, denying it viciously.
“Oh-no!”
“NO!” In a minute the driver, who’d been slumped over the wheel, sat up and peered at us. His face was smashed and dark with blood. It made my teeth hurt to look at him—but when he spoke, it didn’t sound as if any of his teeth were broken.
“What happened?”
“We had a wreck,” he said.

A literary writer who is known for his extreme violence is Cormac McCarthy. No conversation about violence in the literary world would be complete without him. Here’s an excerpt from the novel Blood Meridian:
And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.

And now a little challenge:

In order that there be some correspondences between our work tonight, I’ll ask that we all write about the same scenario and that’s the scenario presented in the excerpt from “Car Crash.” In other words, let’s write about a car crash. Why didn’t I just say that? Write against the impulse to glorify violence and against the impulse to hide from it.

Salon Writers Write

The following submissions are the happy results of our various craftshop exercises. We thank our Salon members for sharing their work with us and welcome others to do the same. Submit work for publication on the Salon blog by sending it violettuce@juno.com or via the Salon's yahoo group.

VIOLENCE, WORKSHOP
By Sujata Naik

There she was. weaving, for the past twenty minutes, ahead of me. Then gone. Tumbling down the left curb. I found myself speeding up to the spot. Then scrambling down. Where the steering wheel had met the driver, blood and some innards splattered man and machine. His neck seemed to have cracked. The head lay limp, hanging lose to one side. A toy. No groans, no moans. No moans, no groans. Looking back, it makes me sick. Then, then I only took what was given.
My thought was more to immediate myself than the driver. It could have been me. Thank God he's dead, I don't have to make the effort to extricate the mess. I remember being angry with the dead man. Angry that he had been weaving. Angry, like some religious fanatic, that he had been drinking. No, I had no time to feel sick. Or grieve for the stupid. Then, only then, did I call 911


THE CITY
by Sujata Naik

The city
is alive and kicking well , thank you.
Just discharged,
minor stitches.
Thankful that
its innards are not derelict,
desolate
crime-sneaking
(unlike Buffalo).
Here, it's
the very propah
who sneak in,
on the Washingtonparkers.
A glass of beer
camouflaged in a
coffee mug.
Everything
has a chamillion quality.
Even corruption.
Not cops shaking
you down for a fiver
But schools and providers
Kids is education
Kids is big bucks
Tomorrow sneaks in on the city
Tomorrow, robbed
even of its shadow.


FOUND POEM
by Sujata Naik

This world...

Mythical walk
down
The syntax street.
This world,
an instruction
in
my own devices.
Fractured, found
fractured.

(suddenly industrious Sujata
Suddenly
industrious
I)


HELL ON I-71
by Kalman Kivkovich

"Papa," I said, "I'll miss you." My throat was burning. Will I see you again? I thought. This thought had hit me many times lately. He was not doing so well since mother's departure---something to do with his heart.
"You'll see me again," he said with a soft smile, as if he read my mind. "Israel is just a flight away . . ."
"Sure," I said. I kissed his cheek just before he boarded the plane to New York. Would it be for the last time? The thought kept gnawing my mind as I was driving back to Cincinnati.
It was early afternoon, a pleasant spring day. I was sad to see Dad leave, but I was happy that at least he managed to visit me in Cincinnati. My parents always had promised to do that. At least he did.
My eyes darted from the road ahead to the empty seat beside me. He was just there . . .

I-71. North bound. Traffic is light. I am trailing on the slow lane. I guess thinking has something to do with my pressing on the gas peddle. The seat beside me is still empty.

BOOOM*** I was startled to my core. "What the . . ." BOOOM*** The explosive sounds came from my left side. A FORTY-FIVE footer obstructed my view. My hands were on the steering wheel, but my Monte Carlo was flying on an autopilot controlled by the fucking truck driver. My white vehicle was dancing on the highway. Don't ask me how, but after several zig zags, and I mean ZIG ZAGS, I found my car positioned perpendicular to the freeway. My hands at that point were off the steering wheel. I was helpless and hopeless for the ride. The front passenger seat was still empty, except all the glittering glass fragments that littered the maroon velvet upholstery. There was no window left intact. The GIANT was still obstructing my left view. This time it was the front of the MONSTER. I could have reached and grabbed the grill. The fucker-trucker was pressing on, pushing me forward . . . I grabbed the shiny chrome grill . . . "STOP!!!!"
For a freaking short second it seemed as if my adversary driver or God had listened to my plea. Somehow a gap of a few feet opened between us. I am still alive . . . maybe---
BOOOM*** The gap was gone. He was coming for the kill. I closed my eyes . . . I must have been praying. I could hear the screeching of the tires below; they were turning fast but taking me nowhere. Burned-rubber smell seared my nostrils. Is it over? Is it Heaven . . . it feels more like Hell . . .
BOOOM*** No, it wasn't over. My deformed car and I were airborne. My eyes were still closed, but I could feel the flight. It must be my last---
TAHHH*** It was a short ride that ended with a thunderous blast of metal-concrete collision. We hit the median. One tire exploded. We bounced off back to the center lane.
SILENCE. Am I alive? I got out of the wreckage. It wasn't a car. I don't remember opening any door or climbing though a window opening. All I remember was staggering away from a smoking thing and dropping to the asphalt.
"Are you okay? The ambulance is on its way. I'm a nurse . . ."
"What?"
"Don't move . . . you'll be fine," she said, gently wiping the blood off my face. "What's your name?"
"What?"
"Your name?"
"Papa . . . Papa, are you okay? Papa . . ."
"You were alone in your car," she said. "Your Papa must be okay. Relax. Oh, I can here the sirens."
"What happened?" I asked, trying to focus on her face.
"You were hit by a semi. You were so lucky."
"Where is he?"
"There," she said, pointing. The Devil was parking about one hundred yards ahead.
Traffic was lined up for who knows how far. The paramedics had arrived, trailed by the police and fire trucks.
I was on my way to Bethesda North. They wanted to clean me up and make sure that there was no trace of concussion. By that time I felt more alive, far more than I had felt a little while ago. I quivered at the thought that my father could have been sitting in that seat beside me. Oh God, thank you . . .

"I'm sorry, but I have to write you a ticket," the officer said, standing by my hospital bed.
"What?"
"There were witnesses."
"What witnesses? He just hit me . . ."
"I'm sorry," he said, handing me the orange paper. "You can fight it in court if you wish. Sign here please."
"Okay . . ."
"By the way, were you wearing a seatbelt?"
"I . . ."
"Never mind . . . you must have been."

"I-71 has reopened after Thursday afternoon crashes near Hyde Park.
A police dispatcher with the Ohio State Highway Patrol told 9News that two separate collisions involving semi-trailers occurred almost simultaneously on both North and South bound. Emergency crews took two people to the hospital. No names or conditions have been released. 9News, Hagit Limor reporting."
"More news after this . . ."


VIOLENCE
by Dick Mashburn

Basic facts: Loaded cement truck approaching intersection at bottom of steep hill. The traffic light for traffic coming down the hill is red. The truck driver apparently disregards the signal and crashes into the mid-section of the auto, killing driver and passenger in the car.

Our job is to figure out why truck ran red light.

The accident investigator later said that the truck could have stopped. Testing showed that the brakes were fully functional. That left intent as the only plausible reason for the wreck, but there was no motive, unless the truck driver had a reason or no reason at all, if worthiness of motive counts, for running the red light and vaporizing the sedan that was filled with a young man and young woman just a moment ago and is now filled with bloody body parts.

Wasn't the truck driver Rodney Smerling?, thought Officer Albertson

Didn't he graduate from high school in the same class as Bart and Molly, who only seconds ago were probably on their way to a class picnic? If I weren't working, I'd be on the way myself.

But I have no clue as to any motive involving the three of them.

Rodney and Bart and I played on the same high school football team, did't we? wondered Officer Albertson. Was there ever tension between him and me?

And what about Molly? Could Bart have intended to put her in the path of the truck? What if she was pregnant? What if she was carrying Rodney's child?

At Long Last

Electric Queen City Boogalou
an InkTank Collaboration

Sitting in the Westin on the corner of Fifth and Vine, I am thinking about the old Sheraton Gibson that used to be in the same area. The Tyler Davidson Fountain, our famous piece of public art from the 1880s, has just returned from its brief trip to the Art Museum. While sitting here I realize all the things we only know about because we’re from Cincinnati. First off don’t tell a guest to go to Jack Ruby’s when they want to go to The Maisonette. Jeff not Jack, you’re acting like a tourist. All this talk of restaurants is making me hungry; my recommendations to a P&G exec would be Tucker’s anyway. Take them to Over-the-Rhine, show them how we survive, when most Cincinnatians are living meal to meal in the nation’s eighth poorest city. Then take them to an empty Great American Ball Park (GABP) and see how fair weather the suburban fans of the world’s oldest professional baseball team can be. So they haven’t won a championship since 1990; Wrigley packs them in with a team that hasn’t won since 1908. How about some flying pigs? What, you say pigs don’t fly? You have a better chance of seeing an avian heifer then a Democrat being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from around here. But then, it isn’t that people don’t try. They do. And it isn’t that people don’t care. They do. But when the Fountain returns to a square and there isn’t a damn thing different than the location, you have to wonder who picked her up and moved her. Was it us? Was it you? Is it that we don’t try? Is it that we don’t care? They’re putting an ice skating rink in soon, filling it with young professionals. But there is something that Cincinnati can be good for: chili, ribs, ice cream, unbelievable views of hills, hills and more hills. Come with me my honored guest and we’ll pass the Embassy, lavish in exterior and cold as a January Cincinnati midnight, bright day though it is. So much life on these city streets, electric energy aplenty to light this square and more like it. Because we are more than a square or a fountain we are every Margaret Garner, Pete Rose, Jerry Springer, Charles Mason, Carson Palmer and Andy Traves. We are the good and the bad of America. We are, have been, and still will be THE QUEEN CITY!

Paula Rego

These are some of the Dog Woman paintings done by artist Paula Rego. I mentioned them and mentioned I'd post them. Learn about Rego here:

Paula's Playground

Against Reportage

Exercise Your InkTank
Politic Politics Political Poetry

We’re living in a city that is (reportedly) one of the most violent in the country. So far this year there have (reportedly) been 68 murders; 273 rapes; 1,761 robberies; 879 aggravated assaults; 4, 475 burglaries; and 2, 248 auto thefts. We’re living in a state that is (reportedly) one of the most important in the upcoming elections. Over $170 million has (reportedly) been spent on campaign ads, the large majority of them negative. We’re a people who are (reportedly) fed up with politics. When we cast our votes, many of them will (reportedly) fail to be counted.

Reportage has its place in the world. As does political propaganda. But what place does poetry have in our politics? How do we contribute to the conversation without becoming lost in the white noise of political punditry? I asked Melissa Tuckey, a friend deeply involved in both political and writing communities in D.C., to help us to approach these kinds of questions and she very graciously agreed. Here’s what she said:

One problem with political poetry is when the writers are not open to the complexity of the problem they are writing about—or the complexity of language. It's easy with politics to reduce everything to sound bites and partisan thinking, but this is not poetry.

The poet should be open to discovering something new about whatever subject they are writing about. Sometimes it helps to come at it from a completely illogical point of view, or angle, to see something new again.

I also think its important not to fall into false dichotomies, “us versus them, self versus other” thinking. To recognize your own complicity in whatever evil you most abhor. To write from your conscience—to wrestle with it. CK Williams does this well.

Ultimately I think all poetry is political in that it causes the reader to recognize and appreciate the complexity of the world. It frees us from the world of slogans and invites us to think for ourselves. That’s political.

Many of the political poems I write end up in the trash, but it makes me feel better to write them.

I think poets should write about things that matter.

It’s helpful to look at poetry by poets who write successfully about such matters: some of my favorites are Whitman, CK Williams, Adrienne Rich.


Against Reportage:
For all that is said about us, we’re a very informed and aware people. And our knowing extends well beyond what the reports about us say. Whatever your politics, you’re a person with a voice. Like Melissa says, It's easy with politics to reduce everything to sound bites and partisan thinking, but this is not poetry. Let’s do the hard thing. Together, we’ll compile the reports about us. Individually, we’ll struggle to remain open to the complexity of the problem we are writing about—or the complexity of language. We’ll make an effort to see something new about the subject, or see it from a different angle. Even if it ends up in the trash, it might make us feel better to write it.

INFORMATION

Exercise Your InkTank
INFORMATION Glut

The trouble with INFORMATION is that its transmission often raises issues of credibility, believability, and trust. INFORMATION is heavy, angular, and conspicuous. It can be very difficult to manage as INFORMATION. Here’s what can happen when INFORMATION does not rise out the story organically:

“What’s going on here Susan? It seems like there are millions of Americans here on the shores of Lake Michigan,” said Mike. He folded his blue hat in his hands.
“It’s the World’s Fair, silly, an incredibly popular and immensely influential social and cultural event,” said Susan. She straightened her old-looking dress at the waist.
“We’re lucky to be here,” he said. He touched her arm—a little forward for the times.
“We sure are. The year of 1893 is turning out to be a good one.”

Here are some concerns I’ve often heard from group members, students, teachers, mentors, and colleagues alike:

I want to deliver the kind of INFORMATION that convinces my readers of my credibility as a writer and/or convinces my readers of my character’s credibility without seeming like that’s what I’m doing; there’s nothing less convincing than a writer who’s obviously trying to convince you.

I want to get technical INFORMATION into my story without turning away readers who may not be familiar with the terminology or seeming opaque.

I want to get INFORMATION about technology, geography, politics, history, into my story that my readers will need to understand in order to follow my story, but I don’t want that INFORMATION to bog down my storytelling.

I want to get INFORMATION into my story in order to entertain and hold the interest of my readers.

I want to get INFORMATION into my story seamlessly—I don’t want it to seem like INFORMATION.

Behind these concerns are very particular larger issues—issues we should talk about as writers. Right now. But the problem with INFORMATION is that it isn’t STORYTELLING. It’s INFORMATION. Working INFORMATION into a story is always going to be a challenge for that reason.

Here goes:
I’m going to distribute little piles of INFORMATION around the room. Choose any pile you like and investigate it. Next, write a segment (of a poem, a story, an essay, a scene or something in-between) that engages some of the ideas present in your pile. If your experiment is successful, your readers should not be able to sense the presence of the INFORMATION in your segment—they’ll be engaged in your storytelling, engaged in the continuous dream that is the world of your story. Even if INFORMATION isn’t a problem for you, this exercise will give you a chance to come into your writing at a different angle.

Political Poems Now

FORSYTHIA WINTER
by Melissa Tuckey

First snap and daffodils nod off
they always look
so surprised

while here in D.C.
everything wants to bloom
at once a profusion
of highway exits
and war

I want off this crazy
interchange forward and back
illegal turns and still
the land refuses

Go ahead open your hand
what emptiness
will you offer

that wild impulse the rain



THE GENESIS OF TORTURE
by E. Ethelbert Miller

In the beginning
we will all wear black hoods

Our faces will be hidden from history and
someone will tie a cruel footnote to our genitals

It might be a neighbor disguised as God



TAR
by C. K. Williams

The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain, mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof off our building,
and all morning, trying to distract myself, I've been wandering out to watch them
as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a hundred miles downwind
if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake at seven
when the roofers we've been waiting for since winter sent their ladders shrieking up our wall,
we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making little of the accident,
the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance of order.
Surely we suspect now we're being lied to, but in the meantime, there are the roofers,
setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on the curb across, gawking.
I never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrowingly dangerous.
The ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are bulky and recalcitrant.
When the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the underroofing crumbles.
Even the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey, chokes and clogs,
a dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a cock, then hammer it,
before the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth wearily subside.
In its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it, though, on your boots or coveralls,
it sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with burst and half-burst bubbles,
the men themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost from another realm, like trolls.
When they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention in the asphalt pails,
work gloves clinging like Br'er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch along the precipitous lip,
the enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shimmers and mirages.
Sometime in the afternoon I had to go inside: the advent of our vigil was upon us.
However much we didn't want to, however little we would do about it, we'd understood:
we were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon, then someday.
Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an atmosphere as unrelenting as rock,
would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits and submissions.
I think I know, though I might rather not, why my roofers stay so clear to me and why the rest,
the terror of that time, the reflexive disbelief and distancing, all we should hold on to, dims so.
I remember the president in his absurd protective booties, looking absolutely unafraid, the fool.
I remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Susquehanna at those looming stacks.
But, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, clinging like starlings beneath the eaves.
Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air.
By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts.

It's Politic

"The Colonel" by Carolyn Forche

What you have heard is true. I was in his house.
His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His
daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the
night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol
on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on
its black cord over the house. On the television
was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles
were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his
hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings
like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of
lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes,
salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed
the country. There was a brief commercial in
Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk of how difficult it had become to govern.
The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel
told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the
table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to
bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on
the table. They were like dried peach halves. There
is no other way to say this. He took one of them in
his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a
water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of
fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone,
tell your people they can go f--- themselves. He
swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held
the last of his wine in the air. Something for your
poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor
caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on
the floor were pressed to the ground.

False Start Re-Starts by Salon Members

The Writing Group Speaks
by Dick Mashburn

What follows is original but not spontaneous or unprovoked. It’s a
response to one of the interventions of our moderator/chief instigator.
The idea for this game is that she gave us a bunch of scraps of writing
she found on or in the vicinity of her desk. There’s no telling if it
was part of a significant work or just words that somehow came to rest
on that shred of paper.

What’s not in doubt, however, is that being dutiful writing groupers,
we vied for the privilege of putting these would-be gems into a
context, that like a jewelers finest setting can unlock the complete
and true beauty that now lies passively as in a humble …

The President, for Christ sake, is up there in a helicopter, surveying.
“Our worst fears,” he says, “are heading South.”

“It was those bastard Democrats,” he continued (alteration from
original). “They roiled around making such a stink that that jerk
Señior Fox got the Mexican legislature to create a whole package of
benefits for Mexican workers. Now, instead of flooding into this
country to take jobs nobody else wants, and behave like angels because
they know that if they FU, we’ll send ‘em home in a heartbeat, they
shoot down the tubes back to good old Mexico.

“Of course somebody’s got to pay for this, and that bastard Fox got the
legislators to put huge taxes, it’s like Nucular War on all American
companies. By the time Ford adjusts for the new taxes, they have to
jack the price of a “nicely equipped” Focus to $32,000. That puts their
workers in this country out of work and they go scurrying off to North
Carolina to work in the textile mills. Raleigh-Durham is beginning to
look a third world country, and those S.O.B.s over there in Tsunami
Land don’t even appreciate us sending them shirts. Said they need
machines to make shirts, like they used to, not shirts, or worse yet,
us exporting shirts all over the world.

“Thanks a lot World. Thanks for the gratitude.”


Cicadas On Us
by Kalman Kivkovich

2004 was the most recent emerging time of Cincinnati-17-year cicadas. I was here, waiting in anticipation. I remember my father talking to me about those fascinating insects, more than fifty years ago. I recall him claiming to have captured fifty cicadas in some glass jars, just to free them later unharmed. "I can't kill anything," he had said.
Since my early childhood, those goldish-looking bugs had visited at least three times. But in 2004, they came in-force, never seen before. My heavenly-kingdom grounds were not spared. They came a little late, but they came-trillions and trillions of them. And their symphonic non-stop opus, MAN! They say it is exclusively-male stuff. They must know their stuff! The intense, high-pitched humming can harm your eardrums; it can be as loud as a 747 Delta Jet flying over Clifton; it surely fends off birds, sometimes.
I was brave, my wife wouldn't dare to come within a foot and even then I had to hold her hand. I collected a few specimens, housing them in an empty glass pickle jar. Yes, I did pierce the tin cover for breathing air---like my dad, I didn't want to kill them. I waited for them to sing, but they were not in the mood, I guess. All they did was crawl on top of each other. After a few days, there were fewer that still crawled . . . and then came the stench . . . and then came the second empty glass jar---this time it was from mayonnaise, just in case the new cicadas liked it better.
I observed my prisoners closely; my nose was touching the glass. I didn't bother to feed them; they say that cicadas don't eat anything, and that they have already stuffed themselves of tree sap underground. So I just looked at them carefully, I looked at their huge red eyes, one on each side of the head and at the other three little shiny eyes on top of their head. With their wings, they resembled common giant houseflies. The wings were fascinating---glassy and transparent wax-paper-like held by an elaborate vein structure---reflecting sunlight in shimmering rays. My eye traveled to their legs, And legs they have---three pairs of them.
After a two-day clinic, I decided to let my jailbirds go free. Only two were still moving, the rest were stock-still; a few sparkly wings littered the bottom of the jar. I had read that cicadas don't bite; they didn't harm me thus far, although they were everywhere: covering my trees, shrubs, grass, walls and even the windshield of my car. In most cases they simply took off and flew when approached.
I stepped out to the porch. "Okay, little fellows," I said, "your days are numbered anyway. Go find yourself a mate, have fun and die." I took the lid off and shook the jar. No takers. I tapped on the glass. "Go, go you . . ."
And off they went. I wouldn't know if it was a hop or a natural take off. The two creatures flew straight into my thick curly hair. I was startled; I jumped backward, my hands reached up, searching to grab the unforeseen attackers. "Sons of bitches!" I yelled, "Get off me, you bastards!" I ran back into the house and jigged my way to the dinning room.
Locks of hair dropped to the floor. The cicadas kept clinging to my scalp, burying their claws in my now rapidly disappearing hair. The place looked a lot like a barbershop, not a dining room. My screaming and jumping were in vain. By the time I managed to rid myself of those Devils, I was petrified to glance at a mirror; the floor spoke volumes. The two cicadas were still alive, still clenching to some strands of my past glory. In my anger I raised my foot to crush them . . . and then again I remembered my father. "Damn it, I can't!" I scooped the mess into a paper beg and emptied its contents in the woods behind my deck. When I returned, I barely gathered the nerve to peek at my image in the bathroom mirror. "My God, what will Sandi say?" I said to myself. I looked so much different. Heartbroken, I left the bathroom. I took off my sandals and headed to the bedroom. My right foot hit the doorjamb. "Fuck! Oh God . . ." In an instant, all my grief of loosing my hair had vanished---I was dancing, kicking my legs up and high. . . .

It has been a couple of years since my encounter with those terrestrial flying vermin. I still have some hair left, but not much to brag about. The important thing is that my wife likes it as it is, so she says. And one more thing: I have been told by many that my Jive has improved. . . .


CICADAS AND OTHER FANTASIES KEPT IN GLASS JARS
by Sandi Kivkovich

My father claims to have captured fifty cicadas in glass jars.
He also claims to have freed them.
"I can't kill anything," he said.
My father claims he can tell when it is going to rain.
His sisters tell how as a child he pretended to be the wind and the storm cloud.
"I can't hide my feelings," he said.
My father claims he can tell a story about anything.
He captivated my youth and beyond.
"Life is a story," he said.
My father claims that he understands feelings.
All are important.
"A child's problems seem as large to them as those of adults," he said.
My father claims he is fine.
He slaps his knee and laughs and sings songs in gibberish to me.
"What's your name little girl?" he said.

New Wheels

Exercise Your InkTank

The story goes that false starts can be useful failures—at least you’re writing, right?—but as useful as they are, they can also be demoralizing, frustrating, intimidating, exasperating, and annoying. Over time you may develop a sense for what has wheels and what doesn’t, but even the most experienced of writers have false starts. I know several novelists who have written several (one of them five) novels, before they’ve found the story they wanted to tell. They regard their novels-never-to-be in this way: it’s precious trash. Some writers cannibalize old failed projects, pulling a few lines, an image, or even a chapter into their current work. Some simply take what they’ve learned and translate it. But what do you do with those pages-that-go-nowhere sitting on your hard drive after you’ve scrapped them for the metal?

Here’s one idea: you give them away. My gift to you this evening is a collection of little fits and starts, all of Salon-workable length, all culled from my fail-files. See what you can do with them. Pick any one or two you like and revise it in any way you please. It’s yours now. I won’t need it back when you’re done.

1. Again it happens that I am terrible. It isn’t often that every face looks petulant. Even the ones I don’t know. And the meaning the world has to offer is ground down, a smart kick, or there’s merely the birds in their sheer numbers winding the cycle of the rooftops and me. You can look and there they are. And then that’s all there is.

2. I rent a cottage on a two-mile spread with another rental set up ten feet across a gravel drive from mine. The other place is a three bedroom house. Probably a hundred years old. I live in its converted shed. Probably once the site of an outhouse. It’s nice though, remodeled. The stove almost works, carpet’s stained, but you can work around these things, or over. The neighbors are boys, maybe eighteen, maybe still in high school. I did not know that this would happen when I moved in.

3. My father claims to have captured fifty cicadas in glass jars.
He claims also to have freed them. “I can’t kill anything,” he said.

4. I never wanted a good explanation for heat lightening.

5. I was little when my mother first told me not to get my hopes up. She said it would hurt more in the end if you went in thinking positive. And, if you went in expecting failure, think how good you’d feel about it if you had luck. I was an awkward girl and it struck me she was probably right. I went into womanhood expecting it would turn out poorly. My hopes were so low, good weather excited me. When I hit high school, I couldn’t get a date. Then it came out I was easy because who’d date a girl with a sack of bricks for an ass? I played that game and I wasn’t stupid about it. I knew about taking what you can get and what it can get you. I kept my eye off the prize. Once I’d had it done to me every way by most everybody, I figured life would get measly and lonely again. I figured at best I’d marry somebody cheaper than me and bury his complaints in my thighs. But then Walter showed up with his hands stroking my back like I was a little bird. Walter showed up and it was love, love, love.

6. The last thing the widow says to her keeper is, do not try to know how to say love. Many times we fail disbelieving. Is it you? Is it you? Are you the one? I don’t want you to tell me. It’s something we’ve already done. And so we must sleep. We must decide now that our living here is enough.

7. There is only as much tension in the finest disguises.
Otherwise, we would always be thieves.

8. All kids believe in God and sugar.

9. The President, for Christ sake,
is up there in a helicopter, surveying.
Our worst fears, he says,
are heading South.

As Promised: Three Prose Poems by Russell Edson

Grass

The living room is overgrown with grass. It has
come up around the furniture. It stretches through
the dining room, past the swinging door into the
kitchen. It extends for miles and miles into the
walls . . .

There's treasure in grass, things dropped or put
there; a stick of rust that was once a penknife, a
grave marker. . . All hidden in the grass at the
scalp of the window . . .

In a cellar under the grass an old man sits in a
rocking chair, rocking to and fro. In his arms he
holds an infant, the infant body of himself. And
he rocks to and fro under the grass in the
dark . . .



Accidents

The barber has accidentally taken off an ear. It lies like
something newborn on the floor in a nest of hair.
Oops, says the barber, but it musn't've been a very good
ear, it came off with very little complaint.
It wasn't, says the customer, it was always overly waxed.
I tried putting a wick in it to burn out the wax, thus to find my
way to music. But lighting it I put my whole head on fire. It
even spread to my groin and underarms and to a nearby
forest. I felt like a saint. Someone thought I was a genius.
That's comforting, says the barber, still, I can't send you
home with only one ear. I'll have to remove the other one. But
don't worry, it'll be an accident.
Symmetry demands it. But make sure it's an accident, I
don't want you cutting me up on purpose.
Maybe I'll just slit your throat.



Antimatter

On the other side of a mirror there's an inverse world,
where the insane go sane; where bones climb out of the
earth and recede to the first slime of love.

And in the evening the sun is just rising.

Lovers cry because they are a day younger, and soon
childhood robs them of their pleasure.

In such a world there is much sadness which, of course,
is joy.
But it has to be an accident . . .

Found Poems by Salon Members

Please note: selections have been published in order of their submission. If you'd like to publish your found poem on the blog, please submit it via the Writers Salon yahoo group.


AN ANCIENT IMMOVABLE ARM

An ancient immovable arm,
Invisible, balanced.
An ancient immovable arm,
With prolong sound, merged people with pain, grief,
Energy, fierce pride and pleasure.

The words were borrowed from Webster, page 797 (Ms).

Kalman Kivkovich

A CONSTELLATION OF GROWTH

A constellation of days designated
for planting trees,
for flowing water, not restrained or limited,
style flavored with caraway seeds,
people growing, trembling or quivering with excitement.

Words taken from Webster's Dictionary Page 63 (A's)

Sandi Kivkovich


POPEYE'S "SMOKING GUN"

This new food fear
becomes inconvenient again.
71 percent were women,
after discovering
an opened bag of spinach.
Nine California farms
zero in on three
health authorities.
The "smoking gun"
has died.
Watch how the leafy green,
the tainted greens,
could be a crucial clue.

from the CNN article "Health chiefs find 'smoking gun' spinach" dated 9/21/06
Jason Gallagher

Find Found Poetry

Exercise Your InkTank
Writing without Composing

If you’ve never heard of found poetry, you’re about to because:
1. It’s everywhere
2. Everybody’s doing it, whether they intent to or not (see Donald Rumsfeld)
3. It’s a good way to see language as language
4. Its critique of the way we use language is implicit (built-in)
5. Its critique of the culture in which the original text was created is implicit
6. You’ve decided to attend the Salon and there’s no escaping it now

The rules are very simple: using ordinary texts from the world around you, create a poem. Do not write. Compose. You may subtract lines of text and re-arrange them, but you may not add any words or phrases of your own. Your poem need not follow any formal structure (although it can, if you like) but pay close attention to what line breaks can do to the meaning and rhythm of your lines. A line as simple as the one I am writing now, can begin to look like a poem quite easily:

A line as simple
As the one I am
Writing now can
Begin to look like a poem
Quite easily.

Below you’ll find a few examples of famous (notorious) found poems. A simple Google search will provide you with a few thousand or million more. We’ll draw our original texts from a hat. Should no hats prove present or available to us, original texts will be drawn in some other equally exciting and totally random fashion. Feel free to write on your original text (maybe crossing out or highlighting words or phrases) and then transfer your found poem to the back of this sheet. Try to compose (not write) at least five lines. We’ll share them and then the best (to be determined by wild hooting and hollering) will be published on the blog.

THE UNKNOWN
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002,
Department of Defense news briefing


A CHALLENGE TO YOUR SPIRIT
Girls and boys of America
Are the hope of the world!
You can’t evade it, young America.
And are you going to go on dancing
And spinning on your ear?
What are you thinking about, sitting
There staring into the dark?
Haven’t you been lying around long
Enough?
Shouldn’t you go to work?
Find as interesting a subject as possible.
Write as vivid a sketch as you can
Of a person who attracts you or an animal.

Annie Dillard from “Junior High English” from Mornings Like This: Found Poems

Take-Out Sestina

The Take-Out Assignment for the week is to write a sestina with these six (Salon-generated) end-words: metrosexual, obtuse, crystal, equivocate, time bomb, terrorist. Take a look at the craftshop post for the formal structure the sestina follows. Consider shifting the words for variety and telling a story with a cohesive narrative. We'll take a look at these on Thursday -- we've already seen a few remarkable entries.

Orange saccharine Narcotics Orgasm Frosty Cascade

A Partial Sestina by the Salon Collective on the Spot

Her eyes caught my gaze like fresh narcotics
An unattented hookah burned shisha so saccharine
Silvery water that roared nature's orgasm
Evaporating condensing perspiration turned frosty
Removing all memory of a world with colors rippling red ostentatious orange.

Better than narcotics are oranges
What the hell am I doing with these narcotics
They only make the rings in my nost frosty
It lingers on the lips of my love like an orgasm
Goose bumps down my back cascade

Down Main Street we cascade
To a room painted bright orange
Many colors in your mind like a mental orgasm
Stawberry fields forever these are great narcotics
Ripped out mouth smiles saccharine
Frosty

Formal Attire

Exercise Your InkTank

Today we’re going to try on some formal constraints. That’s right. We’re getting conventional up in here. Maybe you’ve written some formal poetry before, a few pantoums or a villanelle, perhaps. Maybe you’ve written poems before but nothing formal because formal poetry is stale and frusty and/or absolutely terrifying. Or maybe you’ve never written a poem before at all. No matter your disposition or level of experience, the truth (and it’s not one I’m making up this time) is that formal constraints are a good way to free yourself from habit and to invite real invention into your writing space. You may find a new turn of phrase or a new image, a new story or a new voice, or you may simply find that a new form reminds you of what you valued in more familiar forms. At a minimun, you’ll leave today having written a sestina with your fellow Salonists.

The Suit
A sestina. Let’s talk about what that is first: It’s a poem consisting of six six-line stanzas and one three-line envoy. The end-words (we’ll generate these together) in each stanza are the same, but they follow different sequences. Here’s the pattern the sestina follows:

1 2 3 4 5 6 - End words of lines in first sestet.
6 1 5 2 4 3 - End words of lines in second sestet.
3 6 4 1 2 5 - End words of lines in third sestet.
5 3 2 6 1 4 - End words of lines in fourth sestet.
4 5 1 3 6 2 - End words of lines in fifth sestet.
2 4 6 5 3 1 - End words of lines in sixth sestet.
(6 2) (1 4) (5 3) - Middle and end words of lines in tercet.

The Tailors
Who comes up with this stuff? In this case, the French. The sestina appeared in France in the twelfth century, initially in the work of a troubadour. Why are we here at InkTank writing a sestina? Because the sestina is one of the best poetic forms for storytelling. Its repetition and long line-length make it an ideal form for our purposes. What are our purposes? We’re all about storytelling here, no matter the genre. Why do we keep using forms the French developed? It is merely a coincidence, I assure you.

See Me/You/He, She, It Again

Although we’ve worked with perspective before, it’s an issue that often re-appears in our conversations, and the sticking point is generally the idea of POV shifts in the third person. Why, you might ask, can’t I enter the minds of more than one character in the third person?

Here’s a response:

1. RULES: There is no rule against the use of an omniscient narrator – of course there isn’t – but it is true today that many stories written in the third-person perspective, are written in the third-person limited perspective. This means that the story resides near one character, though it may shift to another between chapters or sections. You’ll find that stories that are written from an omniscient perspective generally have something in common: a very strong narrative voice that is the controlling force of the story. Think of One Hundred Years of Solitude. We follow that story from character to character because the narrator leads us there carefully. Each move that the narrator makes in that novel, is made for a reason that is clear to the reader. The voice is thick and big and easily identifiable.

2. READERS: Frequent shifts between characters in the third person that take place without an apparent system of logic irritate readers. They can become lost, they can feel violated, and worst of all, they can lose faith in the writer. Frequent shifts between characters in the third person can also prevent readers from fully entering the world of the story. Readers would rather understand the story from one character’s perspective, than know what everyone in the book is thinking about everything that happens, if it means that they can spend a little quality time getting to know that one character. In other words, rather than opening the story, frequent POV shifts often close the story to readers, restricting them to a surface level.

3. TRAPS: Many writers fall into the POV shift trap early on because they simply don’t know the stakes. But others fall in because (in truth) it is easier to tell readers what characters are thinking or hiding than finding ways to show it. For many readers and editors alike, shifts in the third-person are signs of laziness or sloppiness. Even if you’re making a deliberate choice, that choice may be interpreted in that way. You should know that before you decide to take the risk.

4. PREROGATIVE: It’s yours. But a little time spent deciding exactly why you’ve made the choice you’ve made in terms of perspective is a gift you should give yourself. You deserve it.

In The News:

BEDFORD, New Hampshire (AP) -- A woman turned herself in to police Wednesday after a store surveillance video captured footage of two children sneaking behind display cases to steal thousands of dollars worth of jewelry, allegedly on instructions from their mother and grandmother.

Find a way to enter this story – it’s a real one, pulled from the headlines today. Your first choice should be narrative perspective. Think about why you’ve chosen to write from 1st, 2nd, or some variety of 3rd and be ready to talk about it. Then write a short short.

Styling A Style

Some writers are known for their style. You know their writing as theirs when you read or hear it because the choices they make in terms of language are distinctive and unique to them. On one end of the style spectrum, you’ve got voicey writers. Think of Barry Hannah who, in describing a dream he once had (of a bar and after giving up liquor), writes, “pickled eggs in a massive jar at the end of a dark-wooded gold-wrapped bar, immense.” A writer with a more transparent style of writing might have described this dream differently, “there was a jar of eggs at the end of the bar,” for example. But Hannah is a writer who is interested in the way the sounds of words in combination can effect their meaning. Lots of folks cite writers like Hemingway and Hempel as standing firmly at the transparent end of the style spectrum. (You’ll see an excerpt from Hempel at the bottom.)

Both voicey and transparent styles have their merits, as do styles that land somewhere in the middle. And different styles serve different purposes. But how do most writers come upon their styles? Is it a choice? Something you’re born with? If you asked Barry Hannah how he found his style, I think he’d tell you it had something to do with learning to pay attention to the story he wanted to tell and then locating the right voice to tell it in. Read about it in his essay “Mr. Brain, He Want A Song.” It’s in a book of essays about writing called The Eleventh Draft, one which I highly recommend to you.

Finding your style might have a good deal to do with finding your voice, which is often regarded as a sort of essence of self, communicated through the writing. But it’s probably important to note that your style might shift considerably between projects and change over time. Writers make many stylistic changes, but the truth is likely that we can never quite escape ourselves. Even if we make serious changes in our approaches to stories, signs of our selves will remain.

What’s your style?

Maybe you feel you’ve already found your style, or maybe you’re still hunting it down. Either way, trying on different styles is a good way of sussing out some margins for yourself. Let’s do a little of that today, shall we? Spend a few minutes re-writing the following passage from Amy Hempel’s story “In A Tub,” using a very very voicey voice. Then, using your re-write as the template, re-write the passage using a different voice. You may add any details or ruminations that you like, but let’s keep it in first-person POV and stick with the basic scenario of a character standing on a deck.

At the back of my house I can stand in the light from the sliding glass door and look out onto the deck. The deck is planted with marguerites and succulents in red clay pots. One of the pots is empty. It is shallow and broad, and filled with water like a birdbath.

And You Say: What Is An Exquisite Corpse?

One happy consequence of our last meeting was the composition of three Exquisite Corpses, all of them about Ohio. We each wrote a small paragraph on a sheet of paper and then folded the paper over so that only the last few words were in view. The next writer in line had only that last bit to work with and was challenged with the task of carrying the story along.

The idea behind the Exquisite Corpse (or the cadavre exuis, as the French surrealists who developed the technique would call it) is to allow the personality of the group to create a collective work of art. You'll see who we are in Ohio #1, #2, and #3 below. What do you think?

Interested in learning/doing more?


Visit a gallery of corpse paintings created by the famous French surrealists who created the exquisite Corpse technique here: Gallery
Visit a journal that fancies itself a literary corpse hotspot here: Journal
Visit a contemporary gallery of corpses here: Contemporary Gallery
And help people you don't know create a giant corpse poem here: Dada Poem

InkTank Exquisite Corpses

Ohio #2
It's dark down here in the subway beneath Central Parkway. The only light that filters down here is from the holes in the sidewalk above. But that's okay. Being homeless, you can't choose where you live.

You can choose to live on the Banks of the Ohio River, except then you look at Kentucky, whose skyline is not as spectacular as Cincinnati's. Or camp out at the corner of Hopple and I-75 and tell people for three straight months that you are stranded.

I don't think they care. So why do you ask the people or tell them?

Let me tell you why. To make an effort. And even beyond that, to find out why they have these tired ideas about Ohio. That all we are is the big pawn in presidential elections. That Columbus is named after a guy who discovered a place where a whole culture already lived. That Cleveland is only good for a ball game and the Rock and Roll Museum. And Cincinnati is sooooo conservative. God. I fucking hate all of that. All those boxes. And especially that last one.

It's the last one that says the most about Ohio. It's the one that explains why Ohioans say "Huh?" so much.

"Huh?" I didn't get it.


Ohio#1
Ohio is the place of the Cincinnati Reds, the Cleveland Indians, and the Cincinnati Bengals. In Ohio we love our football, basketball, and baseball. Ohio is the home of P&G products. Cincinnati is the home of General Electric.

General Electric is but one of the many industrial companies that makes Cincinnati a marketable economic power spot. Cincinnati is a metropolis, just like Columbus and several other Ohio cities.

It's always hot, sticky, and cloudy in July along the muddy Ohio. Unlike Columbus, whose river gently cools the downtown streets, the mighty Ohio applies its charm across the region in sweat that drops but does not cool those it kisses.

Ohio is home of a diverse climate. Some regions are hot, others cool. Some so hot that people's faces precipitate with the perspirations of sweat.

The winters in Ohio can be very harsh. I remember back in 1977, it seemed that we had two feet of snow or more. If you come to Ohio just make sure you have winter gear. If you don't, you will be in for a rude awakening of frosty freeze. We eat ice cream in the winter-time in Ohio.

We eat Skyline all year long too. Depending on how you look at it, there's no particularly good or bad time to eat a chilli cheese Coney with mustard and onions.


Ohio #3
Ohio is never as simple as it sounds. Look at it there - Ohio - simple as grass. But when you start to listen, it turns in your ear. The river expands inside it and makes everything dark, as after a flood.

There was a flood, you know, in Cincinnati in the 30s and a smaller one in the late 90s that still landed a Cincinnati suburb on CNN and a flood kitty in my mom's house. I watched from NC which, with its hurricanes and days-long deluges, is nothing, or not a whole lot, like Ohio.

Just like Ohio...Round on the outside and high in the middle. Ohio meaning "Hello" in Japanese and some forgotten phrase in the forgotten language of a forgotten race who once knew this place only as "Home."

Ohio, the heart of it all. Where red and blue clash every four years and the scarlet and grey play marching fighting songs.

It all starts at the Findlay Market Parade. Opening day is a big event. You should come out sometime to opening day. There is no certain dress attire. Just come out and have fun. It's opening day with the Cincinnati Reds. You have to love those Reds. They were the world champs in 1990 from start to finish.

People talk about the big red machine. I don't know what that is. Or was. And I couldn't tell you what a met is, exactly, I just know that it has meat in it and they sell it at the ball games.

But it's not as good as what they serve at Izzy's. But then, nothing is.

Dialogue on Dialogue

When I think about dialogue these days, I’m usually deciding how economical I want a scene to be. I want to give my readers a chance to hear my characters speak and to know their voices, but I don’t want to go so far as to flatten out the scene. The more fat I can cut away, the more potently the exchanges between characters will translate. That often means losing filler words like okay and alright and well, and I don’t know how many I don’t know’s. By the same token, though, I’m making an effort to push scenes through to their natural ends. I’ve been guilty in the past of mistaking my discomfort for the discomfort of my characters. That is, my investment in the moment becomes too great to discern the larger needs of the story, and I allow my characters to escape confrontation. Here’s something I’ve learned the hard way: the psychology of avoidance and denial is only as interesting as the psychology of avoidance and denial – collisions and connections between “real” people are what bring us back to stories again and again. The best bit of philosophical advice I can offer you about dialogue is to be brave, both about cutting and extending scenes.
“But what about some practical advice?” you say. “What about the nuts and the bolts?”
“I have some thoughts about that too,” I say. “Jesus. Get off my back already. As you can see, I don’t go in for complicated dialogue tags. I stick with say and leave it at that.”
“Do most writers make that choice?” you say.
“Yes,” I say. “I’d say so. It’s a matter of trusting the reader to correctly interpret the tone of the exchanges between characters.”
“What about quotation marks? Does everybody use them?”
“Not everybody. But I’d say that most folks do. It’s just a good way of keeping things clear.”
“What else have you got? Be brave, don’t use fancy tags. Is that it?”
“I’d also say that it’s a good idea not to use dialogue for exposition.”
“Care to explain?”
“Don’t use dialogue to deliver lots of information. It looks and feels funny. If I asked you how you were, you wouldn’t respond by telling me that you’ve been okay but it just hasn’t been the same since that back surgery in ’82 and even though when you became the town mayor and married my cousin Suzy you started feeling better about the world, you still have some pretty hefty misgivings. In others words, when writers cram background information into dialogue, readers sense the machinery at work. It isn’t real.”
“Okay, okay,” you say. “But how do I know when to summarize a scene and when to use dialogue.”
“That’s a good one,” I say. “I’d say when the dialogue can offer your readers more, when the way the characters talk can show them something about who they are. Or, when the scene is really important. People don’t want to hear that the big argument happened. They want to see it. They want to be there too.”
“I’d rather be anyplace than right here,” you say. “So I can relate to that.”
“Those sound like fighting words,” I say.
“They are,” you say. “They are fighting words. What are you going to do about it?”

Let’s Have Us A Fight
The exercise for this evening will be to stage a fight. A war of words, so to speak. Render this fight as completely in dialogue as you can, using only a few words here or there outside of the quotation marks. Just to make things a little more needlessly complicated, we’ll generate a few key words and expressions to work into our scenes. Include as many characters as you like, but two will probably do.

Where The Heart Is

Exercise Your InkTank

“The truth is, fiction depends for its life on place. Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of ‘What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?’ – and that is the heart's field.”
- Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” Collected Essays, New York, 1994.

It seems like all we writers ever talk about is character. Character, character, character. As though there’s nothing more to stories than the people who occupy them. But characters have to have places to be, right? In fact, in order to be, they must be somewhere, unless (of course) they’re disembodied voices. Even if we don’t invest a great deal of attention to place as storytellers, there always is place in our stories. It’s inevitable. And it’s more important than folks might think. As Eudora Welty phrases it, “fiction depends for its life on place.” Without place, there is no story, and without the story, there is no storyteller. Our lives too depend on place.

When conversations about place happen, they’re often about regional classifications. Writers who write with a strong sense of place in their stories are often categorized by that place. Their work is often said to be in some sense about place, or the place is said to be a character in the story in the sense that it plays a significant role. Many people read regional writing in order to get a sense of that place – this places a good deal of responsibility on the writers. They have the power to determine the character of their homes in the minds of all their readers.

You’ve heard of that wily band of Southern writers and you know how those East Coast writers can be. Sometimes you hear about Midwestern writers and sometimes the talk telescopes in on a particular Midwestern city like Chicago. In the work of Stuart Dybek, for example, we find Chicago rendered in intricate detail. But have you ever heard anything about those Cincinnati, Ohio writers? Who are they? What are they doing? Let’s find out.

Who is Cincinnati?
Rather than beginning with an idea of character, we’re going to begin today with an idea of place. We all live in or around the same place and yet I’d wager that none of us see it in quite the same way. Just as our ways of seeing and experiencing are informed by our distinct senses of place, so will our characters be informed by the world surrounding them. Our rendering of our place and the people who occupy it will determine Cincinnati’s character in the minds of our readers. Think about it. You have the power to make Cincinnati who it is. You might begin by considering the ways in which Cincinnati has made you who you are. Begin with a specific location. Describe it. What details make that place who it is? Write a paragraph in which your sense of who Cincinnati is, is evoked.

Guys & Dolls

Exercise Your InkTank

When we talk about character description, we aren’t simply talking about what our characters look like. After all, the color of their hair isn’t often terribly important to our understanding of who they are, unless of course it defines or describes their experiences in the world somehow. An albino’s corn-silk sheen might be meaningful beyond the color itself, for example, and even a bald head can mean a certain attitude about age. But a straight list of physical details (eye color, hairstyle, figure) doesn’t really give us much in that regard. It may lead our readers to the water, but we’ve still got to coax them to drink, to believe that the water is real.

When we talk about character details, we’re talking about the details that give our readers (and perhaps even ourselves) a sense of who characters are in the world of the story. For that reason, physical details should do more than just fill in the blanks. Think of it this way: a story can conjure a vivid and effective sense of characters without ever once mentioning their physical appearances. If readers’ imaginations are actively engaged in the story, they will supply those details themselves, using their own lives and stories as templates. Some readers may even chose to supplant the physical details you’ve supplied with their own, if theirs prove more useful to their believing and imagining. It all boils down to a matter of trust and/or control. How much control do you wish to have over your readers’ imagining and how much do you trust them to see what you’re hoping they’ll see? A bit of advice: give your readers the benefit of the doubt and give them character details that do more than describe physical appearance. Let those details do two jobs at once.

So, here’s our girl. She’s a vintage cut-out doll. Let’s put a new dress on her and let’s make it one that means. It’s our job to bring Edith to life. I’ve given her a name. Now let’s give her a life. And finally, let’s generate some physical details that express that life most accurately. Write an introduction to Edith that would fall early in a story, establishing who she is for our imagined readers.

Return To This Place

A blog-world reminder that our next Salon meeting is this Thursday (the 15th). All manner of exciting and informative and hilarious discussion will take place. Writers of all levels, backgrounds, and areas of expertise are welcome. And all signs point to an important Cincinnati literary event to remember.

Framed

Exercise Your InkTank
Framed

One of the oldest forms of the story is the frame story, which makes sense given the story’s roots in oral tradition. Often the frame of the story involves the act of telling of a story. The teller narrates a story to a fictional audience, whether actual or implied. Eventually, the larger frame seems to fall away and the true story becomes the story that is told within the frame story, the story within the story.

In the best frame stories, we are always aware of the frame, though we may not focus on it. In the worst frame stories, the frame is a clunky device that merely bookends a story.

The telling of the story (or the frame) need not have primary or equal interest but it should certainly have an impact on the shape and character of the story within. The frame can determine the bent with which the story within is told, it can provide an occasion for the story within, it can even give the audience a glimpse of the world beyond the story within.

In establishing a good frame, we have to think about how we want the story within to be told; we have to think about audience. For our craftshop exercise today, I’m going to provide you with some criteria which should help you to establish a sound frame.

Here goes: Your storyteller is a character in the story within the story. Though not the most important character, she does have a story to tell. As a teenager, she knew a man who was later to become a highly respected and well known public figure. At one time, though, he was an ordinary high school student. They weren’t friends. They shared an evening together, both of them stranded (awkwardly) at a party in the woods gone haywire. There were others there and he wouldn’t have noticed her there, but she saw him do something extraordinary. Something that would make the story worth telling now, especially in light of who he has become. And perhaps also in light of who it is that she has become.

Your task is to find a way to let this character tell her story. Give her an audience within the story. Give her a voice. Ease us into the story within a story.

Sweet Emotion

Exercise Your InkTank
Insides and Outsides: Telling A Good Joke

We’ve all heard the advice that showing is a better choice than telling, but if we always show what a character is feeling, our stories will likely collapse under the weight of a thousand meaningful hand and facial gestures. In other words, sometimes it’s necessary simply to say, he was mad, especially if showing him pocketing his hands or biting his lip until it bleeds disrupts the timing or rhythm or efficiency of the storytelling. Imagine a world in which characters can never say what they feel, but instead must find ways of otherwise revealing themselves. How cumbersome and how comical.

(A few provisos and sidebars: Of course, he was mad, can be written more interestingly. Word choice alone often seals the deal, brings the reader in like showing can. And of course some telling is always a terrible tire. Inflated dialogue tags, for example, or telling that is appended to showing, which is a sign that the writer does not trust the reader to make the proper assessment.)

How do we know when to say he was mad and when to send him stomping down some lonely corridor? Many writers will tell you that it’s a matter of instinct. We learn how to tell a good story when we’re children and we learn it by listening to the stories of others. We carry those same lessons with us as adult readers. We can remind ourselves of what good storytelling is by looking to what children want from a good story. According to Margaret Atwood, in “Reading Blind” children want these things: “They want their attention held … They want to feel they are in safe hands, that they can trust the teller … They will not put up with your lassitude or boredom: If you want their full attention, you must give them yours.”

Atwood also likens timing in stories to the logic of joke telling: “If we guess the riddle at once, or if we can’t guess it because the answer makes no sense – if we see the joke coming, or if the point is lost because the teller gets it muddled – there is failure. Stories can fail in the same way.”

Bringing it all together: If the writer’s desire to demonstrate/show what the character is feeling inside overwhelms the reader’s basic investment in the story by losing her attention, by betraying her trust, by seeming to lack urgency, or by muddling the story, the story will fail.

Let’s work on this by telling some really bad jokes and turning them into good ones. You’ve all probably got one joke, an old standby you’ve told a dozen times. First try inflating it to the extreme, omitting nothing and showing as much as possible. Next try paring it back. Keep some of your showing, but only enough to perfect the timing of the joke.

Time After Time

Exercise Your InkTank
Time Management

When we talk about back-story in storytelling, we’re often talking about the revelation of information and it’s sometimes a tricky chemistry. The introduction of other stories to the larger story can create an evocative sense of depth or even a sense of verisimilitude. And when you think about it, it’s hard to imagine a story that only moves directly forward in time. Even if a story does not invest a substantial formal movement to back-story, it may often recall moments (here and there) in a character’s life that work to explain things like motivation. When we understand why a character behaves the way he or she behaves, we’re more likely to believe and to invest; we’re more likely to allow ourselves to be moved. Back-story is a tool with great power, but if we’re not careful how we reveal information, we risk disrupting our readers. They can feel manipulated, or betrayed, or they might just sense the machinery behind the story and lose faith in it.

There is (of course) no one right way to reveal information, but there are some less than respectful ways that tend to irritate the hell out of readers. Token irritating revelation: “And then she realized she’d been dreaming.” Token infuriating revelation: “And then she realized she was dead.”

Here’s a smattering of good advice I’ve heard over the years: By revealing necessary information too late, we up-end the reader’s investment in the story. A good reveal is one that feels earned and organic, not theatrical. Real suspense is not created by withholding. Always connect. A good narrator is one who wants to tell you everything. A good hint is undetectable. It falls out like any other bit of information. The pleasure the reader derives from piecing things together will be greater if the piecing isn’t the focus of the narrative’s energy, but a consequence of it. The reader must always know where the story is. Always set the scene first – don’t ask your readers to re-imagine it later. Don’t make the story explain the difficulties away – break the bone to re-set it if you have to. If the story hinges on a central revelation, reveal without a hint of smarminess. Nobody really likes to know the writer is there behind the writing. There are unreliable narrators and there are unreliable narrators.

Many stories devote large formal movements to shifts in time. Here’s some advice I’ve heard about that: Set and maintain a pattern. Hang the back-story on a strong enough line. Reliance on juxtaposition alone for the activity of meaning-making between segments or sections creates exhaustion rather than interest. Again, always connect. Formal shifts can be denoted in many fashions ( * * * or white space or italics or chapter breaks, for example). Size is often an issue when deciding between them, but also taste.

Here’s my big craft-shop idea for the night. I’m going to give you some back-story on a character. You find a savvy way of revealing it in your own little story:

Once, when George was a child, he confused his father’s lessons. During a fire he was to evacuate with everyone else to the yard. During a storm he was to take cover beneath the large wooden table in the basement. But while everyone else stood in the yard and watched the house burn, he sat beneath the table and wondered at the smell. He was unharmed, but shamed greatly. His father trusted him to do nothing alone thereafter.