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“Story Water”
Getting to know your characters is the most important aspect of plot for me. A good story develops from the decisions, the reactions and responses a character makes in relation to given circumstances. The economy collapses! But who your character is will determine what she does in response: marry a millionaire, start her own business,…
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John Berger
The great John Berger passed away just a few days ago on the 2nd of January. He was a wonderfully prolific writer who made art history, the way we see the lives of artists and their productions, come alive. He was a playwright and a novelist. On a personal level, though, three of his “poetic…
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Inspiration
Yolanda Lopez’s image of the seamstress as Virgin Mother is especially inspiring to me because my mom was a seamstress from the age of 16 to her retirement, and she held our family together with a strong work ethic and a great deal of faith. The word “inspire” is especially important to writers–whether poetry or…
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In Memoriam: Mavis Gallant
“No, I had no idea what was in store for me [when I arrived in Paris]. None whatsoever. But I had a typewriter, so I started writing.” Mavis Gallant I am ashamed to admit that I learned of Mavis Gallant’s work rather late—in 2007, after coming across an interview conducted by Stéphan Bureau and translated by Wyley…
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Borders/Embargoes, II and III
“…behavior could be judged by moral criteria as right or wrong, but action is judged for neither its motivation nor its aim, only for its performance.” Hannah Arendt, qtd in Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun, Wafaa Bilal and Kari Lydersen II. To anyone looking through night goggles, the eight figures…
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Borders/Embargoes, I
“When you tell a story no one else tells anymore , you say: ‘I invented this, it’s mine.’ But what you’re really doing is remembering…what the memory of your forefathers left in your blood….” Ariel Dorfman, “Myth as Time and Language [in Miguel Angel Asturias’ Men of Maize]” I. In the moonlight what appeared…
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Lanham and Orwell
I learned a great deal about voice from Richard Lanham, especially two of his books: Style: An Anti-Textbook and Revising Prose. In the latter, Lanham outlines a multi-step technique he refers to as the “Paramedic Method” or “PM.” Once I learned the technique, I never let go, reading my papers out loud, marking each stumble…
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Boal and Freire
In Theatre of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal takes on the task of stripping theatre to its roots, insisting that “all theater is necessarily political, because all the activities of man are political and theater is one of them.” Theatre at its most elemental was the “dithyrambic song”—free, “created by and for the people.” The history…
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Repeat or Tell a Different Story?
Reading Hilde Lindemann Nelson’s Damaged Identity, Narrative Repair has been a transformative experience. This philosopher has given me a way of thinking and talking about how it feels to mediate between two cultures. She argues that our identity is formed in relation to two narratives: the story we tell ourselves about who we are and…
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Writer’s Block: Habit
Students who suffer from writer’s block often describe writing as an abstraction or a mystical trance that occurs unwittingly and without explanation. Understandably, it’s that sense of writing being outside of one’s direct control that seems to provoke the greatest anxiety and frustration for them. Will the trance come mercifully before deadline and keep them…