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.