by Amanda Snyder
Story Week Assistant Artist Director
Fiction Department MFA Grad 2006
I used to have this blue Post-It stuck to my computer monitor that said "Just write." All caps. Period. Written with a black Sharpie. I wrote it when I was at an artists’ colony in Virginia. Having 16 hours a day to write sometimes seemed daunting; I didn’t know what to do with myself. The colony was on a farm and my studio was in a corn crib and sometimes I’d spend several minutes staring out the window and into the painters and sculptors studios across a field, wishing I had something so tangible to grasp onto and mold. Something more than a pen and paper.
Then I decided to get the f***over it.
I scribbled down "Just write." on the Post-It and stuck it to the window to dissuade myself from further pointless navel-gazing.
I took it home with me and the Post-It got obscured on my computer monitor over the following two years. My day job (or one of them, anyway) is as a journalist, or something I guess you could call a journalist – keeping an entertainment website up-to-date – and the blue Post-It disappeared under HTML coding cheat sheets and invoice instructions and (perhaps ironically) a clipping from a magazine about how to relax at your computer and it eventually disappeared.
I don’t even wanna admit this, but my creative writing life has almost disappeared with it. It’s not that I don’t write – I do. But mostly, they are words for other people, words to be counted and economized, words that need to be precise and punctuated perfectly. They are not mine, not really. My words are scribbled haphazzardly in a tiny journal in phrases and chunks, in a script only I can read. My words are squeezed out in last few minutes before bedtime, or in the hazy morning. Sometimes they’re not squeezed out at all. Sometimes sentences just marinate in my head until the wording, the cadence, everything is perfect and I wait to see if another one follows.
Which is why I love Story Week. This is my third year working as assistant artistic director and it never fails – Story Week reminds me to simply put the pen to the f***ng paper. I found myself talking to countless people on Sunday night at Martyrs’ and so many of them said, "I’ve been meaning to write more." or "I haven’t had much of chance to work on what I want." And I’ll bet each and every one of them (including me), so blown over by the four stories that night (Megan Stielstra, Jeff Adams Oaks, Bobby Biedrzycki and Sheree Greer’s freaking amazing stories!), renewed that age-old resolution to write just a little more than we have been. I know I wasn’t the only one on Sunday night to think, "Well shit, I’m gonna write something that’s gonna blow the audience to pieces. too."
And just tonight, I was talking with Colin Channer (Thursday! I can’t wait until Thursday! The Metro!) before Chitra Divakaruni’s reading and conversation and when I mentioned that I’d love to someday have my creative writing outweigh my journalistic writing when it comes to all that pesky bill-paying and life-living, his response was simply, "Just do it."
Like it’s that easy, I thought to myself.
But you see, it is.
That sentiment was echoed by Chitra in her amazing conversation with Donna Seaman when she said she tells her students that in order to be a great writer, you have to make room for it. You have to give up something else in your life that isn’t so important.
You have to make room for it. That phrase stuck with me the whole El ride home. Because, you see, that little blue Post-It said the same thing.
Just write.
by Nicolette Kittinger
Last night, I learned:
Cutter (kŭt'ər) n. — Any boat used by the coast guard over 65 feet in length (and about as big as four medium-sized neighborhood bars) often filled with two hundred men in their 20s who are so horny a girl can be unsexy even if she’s wrapped double in Gor-Tex.
Doored (dôr'd, dōr'd) v. — The door of an automobile opening directly into the path of a bicycle, affording the bicycle rider no time to react, resulting in the injury and/or death of the bicycle riding party.
Sniffers’ Row (snĭf'rs rō) n. — The row of seats closest to the stage at a strip club.
And of course that emotional cheating is just as bad as, if not worse than, physical cheating, and this is especially true because Oprah says so.
I don’t think readings have ever been both so informative and so entertaining.
Story Week has officially begun — and is off to a wildly successful start, if I may say so.
Sunday night at Martyrs’ kicked off the festival’s twelfth year with mingling, wining, light dining, and of some of Chicago’s finest storytelling, brought to us by the amazing performers of 2nd Story (which, for those of you who don’t know, is a monthly "hybrid performance event combining storytelling, wine, and music that is produced by the Serendipity Theater Collective").
The performers — Megan Stielstra, J. Adams Oaks, Bobby Biedrzycki and Sheree Greer — are all current or former students of our very own Fiction Writing department, making them a fitting chaser for the Alumni Reception that preceded their standing-room-only performances.
If this event is indicative of what’s in store for us during this incarnation of Story Week — and I’m sure it is — be prepared to show up early to stake your claim on a seat, laugh until you cry, and learn a thing or two from time to time.
Nicolette Kittinger is the vice president of the Fiction Writing Student Board and the undergraduate recipient of the John Schultz and Betty Shiflett Story Workshop Scholarship. She received that award at Martyrs' last night, but was too humble to mention it in this blog post.
by Dan Prazer
In just a little over half a day, the first of Story Week 2008's events kicks off.
If you could see my apartment right now, you'd be able to tell something huge is coming. There are slices of foamcore scattered on the floor where my wife Ann helped me make signs with our sponsors' logos. Crumpled wads of paper overflowing from the wastebasket under my desk like some sorry excuse for a science fair volcano. Dishes piling up in the kitchen next to a pile of takeout containers — pizza boxes, Chinese cartons, something plastic that I think held garlic bread — that haven't yet made it to the dumpster behind our building. Something in the fridge smells funky. With all the last-minute wrinkles to iron out, I just haven't had time to tend to our living space.
And with fourteen hours to go, I've got what I think is a healthy mix of eagerness ("Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Come onnnnn, when are we gonna be there?") and a restless terror, the kind you see when you finally get your cat into the vet and his eyes bug out of his head trying to figure out what the hell is going to happen next.
So after a (very short) night's sleep tonight, we'll be ready to roll tomorrow, and at the risk of jinxing us, I'm going to predict that this year's Story Week is going to go smoothly enough for me to actually sit down and enjoy the panels and readings. And that's a prospect that, in the chaos of my apartment, is only now beginning to sink in. After all the work comes all the fun.
Hope to see you all there.
Dan Prazer is assistant artistic director for Story Week 2008.
by Steve Tartaglione
The transition from second person to first at the beginning of "Wildwood" in Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao still gets to me. I’ve never been able to write in second person effectively. I can coast for a paragraph, maybe two, but then I struggle with a big question: how specific should I be when developing a scene? I worry that, when writing in second person, there needs to be an overwhelming level of universality to what I’m saying — there must be a strong enough force or emotion tying a reader to a specific scene. Without it, I feel like I’m forcing the reader into a situation he or she may not want to partake in.
To do so, to delve into a scene using the second person, takes a great deal of skill in order to manipulate characters, dialogue, and action without widening the gap between narrator and reader. If the reader, being directly addressed, were to disagree with one sentence or action, one line of dialogue, the writer runs the risk of losing the reader completely. There’s a really fine line between well-written second person and poorly-written second person.
To write in this manner without a reader really noticing at first that the point of view shifts from "you" to "I" like Diaz has been able to do (I didn’t immediately pick up on it) is extremely difficult. The shift from "you" to "I" must be seamless if there’s going to be trust with the first person narration from that point forward. If the reader feels a certain distance when being directly addressed, if the actions and dialogue don’t ring true, once the point of view shifts to first person, the reader might not feel that necessary connection, that sense of intimacy you need to go along with the narrator.
To do all of this seemingly organically is one of the reasons I enjoy Diaz. His manipulation of voice feels so casual and yet, after a second glance, you can see that there’s a great deal of calculation within the text (What will work here? What might work here? Do I need to fill in gaps? Is this switch too raw? Etc).
It's a testament to Diaz's talent that he takes so many risks for the sake of storytelling and manages to make them look not only easy, but essential to the telling of the story.
Steve Tartaglione is a student in the Critical Reading & Writing II: Fiction Writers class that is reading the works of our Story Week authors.
By Jessica Young
I recently kept company with a sweet, squishy, deliciously chubby four-month-old baby girl. She has wide, interested eyes that haven’t yet lost their newborn blue, soft skin the creamy color of the inside of a hazelnut, and a righteous light brown baby Mohawk. We spent an afternoon together, she sleeping and screaming in 15- to 20-minute increments, me trying to eat a rushed lunch, changing her diaper, trying to feed her, singing her lullabies, and making my arms wickedly sore from rocking her and bobbing her and whispering sweet things to help her sleep. About a half hour before her daddy came home, I managed to coax her into the sandman’s arms, and she crouched in my arms, folded around her bum and legs, her little baby face buried in my breast, and slept. When her father discovered us on her sofa, he smiled at his daughter. “Poor little thing,” he said, “She’s still trying to learn how to be a person.”
That's exactly what's happening. She’s learning about hungry, and sleepy, and uncomfortable, and frightened, and crazy in love. She’ll learn what it feels like to be embarrassed, to be angry, to be excited and joyful. She’ll learn about pride, about pain, about hard work and kindness and forgiveness; because none of us is born knowing any of the things we need to know to be a person. I realize no matter how old I get, no matter how much I know, there are still moments when I’m learning how to be a person.
I am reminded of these moments when I read Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. I was given her book of short stories, Arranged Marriage, by a dear girlfriend when she learned I was starting grad school at Columbia College. It was an amazing gift for me. My love affair with the short story is deep and satisfying, and Chitra Divakaruni came to me this way first. I read the whole book cover to cover, the colors of India soaking through her words into my brain, the taste of chapatis and mangoes and pomegranate juice familiar on my tongue. I thought of the plight of Indian women, in their homeland and here in America, and felt a heart-plucking empathy for the complexities of their existence.
The next time I encountered Divakaruni’s work was in my first Advanced Fiction class, taught by Eric May. Eric gave us a copy of “The Maid Servant’s Tale,” a short story from Arranged Marriage, and as I read, I realized I was familiar with the story. It is a long, poetic, and mythical story-within-a-story—part cautionary tale, part family history—told by an auntie to her niece upon the young woman’s visit to India. The young woman is shacking up with an Indian man back in the States, and when she hears the story, it sets in motion inside her thoughts of her complicated relationship with her mother, of the snares of classism and injustice, of the difficulties that exist between men and women and the inexorable, gravitational pull of fate. The story still carries massive weight in my heart, as a woman navigating her own challenging relationship with her mother, as a woman claiming her own independence in the face of societal challenges, as a woman daily discovering more of who she is.
I met Ms. Divakaruni at an AWP conference in Austin, Texas a few years ago. I carried with me my dog-eared, deeply loved copy of Arranged Marriage. She was gracious and carried a tremendous presence, both in front of the mike and during our brief conversation after her reading. I’ve recently read an excerpt from The Palace of Illusions, Divakaruni’s latest novel, published this year by Doubleday. The bit I’ve read is steeped in her voice, saturated with wit, color, and emotion, and promises to be a powerful story told with arresting clarity and passion. I’m excited to buy a copy when she visits for Story Week, and look forward to meeting her again.
I first read Divakaruni a few weeks before I started here at Columbia. Now, a few months before I graduate, she returns, and I get a chance to hear her speak. This opportunity is one of the finest bookmarks to my graduate-student experience. Ask me about symbolism in her story collection, and I can tell you she knows how to use perfectly placed, perfectly worded metaphor in order to make a point without beating her reader over the head. Ask me about her use of point of view, and I can tell you she draws readers into characters’ worlds, regardless of how she’s telling story. Ask me about her craft, and we can discuss what I have learned from her about being a writer. But I’d rather meditate on how she has taught me about being a person. Her stories reveal to me emotional and specific challenges of being an Indian woman, and through them I learn about the tension of expectations, the difficulty of growing up, of pleasing your family and satisfying yourself, of bad things that happen to good people, and how to approach being a person with wisdom and grace.
Jessica Young is adjunct faculty and an MFA candidate in the Fiction writing department.
by Sam Weller
With Story Week less than a week off, this blog is about to heat up. Students in professor Lott Hill's Critical Reading & Writing II class are reading and journaling on a good number of books written by Story Week 2008 featured guests. In the coming days, keep an eye on this blog for their insights.
Rock.
Sam Weller is the Story Week faculty artistic director
by Vanessa Pegram
In the beginning of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz depicts Oscar as a pudgy, sci-fi loving little kid. Oscar knows what he likes but is forced to question that as it corresponds with his culture. The women in his life always seem to enforce the idea of him having many ladies or girlfriends, especially his mother. She is the one that compares him to the "debonair pretty boy" Porfirio Rubirosa and expects him to go outside and play with the girls instead of staying inside all day. The narrator even emphasizes the importance of having many girlfriends by saying that Oscar’s lack thereof is "very Un-Dominican." As Oscar’s waistline grows, so does his crisis to identify himself as a true Dominican. His identity crisis is universal to the issues of poverty and privilege, but gives the reader insight into the deeper issues of the Dominican Republic, which I think is what Diaz wants us to see.
All of the central characters in the novel are acting as vessels to inform the reader about the DR. Diaz uses details such as the introduction about the fuku and the women’s concern about Oscar’s machismo as little insights to the culture of the Dominican Republic. He uses Oscar’s self-identity crisis as a parallel for the self-identity crisis facing the DR. So then how can the characters be fully developed and lead their lives if they come from a country that is still struggling with it’s identity? I think this question is one of the whole underlying forces of the novel (granted I really have only read the first forty pages). I was going to add that I’m not suggesting the whole book is really about the culture struggles of the DR, but maybe it is. It’s obviously a story bigger than Oscar’s or Lola’s — we can infer that from the information about the fuku. Diaz wouldn’t have started the story like that if the reader were not supposed to know that fuku is going to come back and bite the characters in the ass in some way. I can see that I’ve been rambling, but I do actually have a point. The footnotes were brought up in class briefly, and I wondered why Diaz would use such extensive or lengthy footnotes instead of just finding a way to add them to the story. I noticed though that so far they are all about the Dominican Republic. If they were embedded, then the reader would not have to go outside of the story to get them. So far, Oscar seems to be a bridge between Santo Domingo and Washington Heights (or in this case, one could expand that to being a bridge between "Third" and "First World" countries) if the foot notes were actually story, then that bridge would crumble. So then how does a person identify themselves with their culture when their country is having the same crisis? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Vanessa Pegram is a student in the Critical Reading & Writing II: Fiction Writers class that's reading the works of our Story Week authors.
by Dan Prazer
One of this year's Story Week guests, Junot Diaz, snagged the National Book Critics Circle Award yesterday for his debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Thing is, according to the Washington Post, he wasn't there to accept it in person. He was on a plane to Venezuela. Sean McDonald from Riverhead Books, Junot's publisher, picked up the award for him, joking that if you listened closely, you could hear "some distinct shouting" all the way from Caracas, or at least "the vestigial part of his brain being blown."
He's teaching in Rome, flying to Venezuela, winning the NBCCA, and then, in a little over a week, we're lucky enough to have him on a flight to Chicago.
Congrats, Junot! We're all looking forward to helping you celebrate.
(P.S. If you haven't read his debut collection of stories, Drown, get moving, will you? I read it in one sitting, only later realizing I hadn't eaten all day. Just shows how nourishing an amazing book can be.)
Dan Prazer is assistant artistic director for Story Week 2008.
by Randy Albers
So one of the things that I told the faculty when I took over the job as chair is that the mark of a good organization is its ability not to avoid all problems, but to find ways of solving them when they do come, as quickly, efficiently, and painlessly as possible. The past 24 hours has tested that theory.
Yesterday afternoon, we got word that Joyce Carol Oates would not be able to appear at Story Week this year. We had been worried that she might cancel since we heard that her husband had died a couple of weeks ago, but we only heard yesterday that she finally had decided that she couldn't do it. Of course, our hearts go out to her. In addition to being a terrific writer, she is also a wonderful person, and we should all send good energy her way in order to help her get through this sad time.
Meanwhile, of course, we had to figure out what to do with Story Week, which is due to open in ten days. Sheryl Johnston and I had an emergency consultation session during which we brainstormed possibilities for who might be an excellent writer to invite, who might give an answer quickly, and who might fit in with our present excellent mix of writers, as well as our theme. After some back and forth, consulting with Sam, Bill Young, and Donna Seaman, among others, on the fly, we settled on a couple of names. With the help of the Lavin Agency in Boston, which has been incredibly accommodating, and with the excellent support of Eric Winston, Columbia's V.P. of Institutional Advancement, and his very able Event Coordinator, Diana Cazares, we managed to secure Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni by this afternoon.
Problem solved—quickly, efficiently, not entirely painlessly.
Chitra was here a few years back and did a great reading, as well as one of the best Conversation With the Author sessions ever, with the lively and vivacious Elizabeth Berg. She is an award-winning author of 14 books, including Arranged Marriage, The Mistress of Spices, Vine of Desire, The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming, and the soon-to-be-published Palace of Illusions. Her work has been published in over 50 magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and translated into 16 languages. Born in Calcutta, she holds a Ph.D. from Berkeley and now teaches in the excellent writing program at the University of Houston. She is also one of the most approachable, wonderful people you could want to meet, and I am very glad, for reasons beyond filling the Oates "slot" at Story Week, that she will be with us.
When you see Sheryl and Sam, give them pats on the back—though, in Sheryl's case, not too hard, OK? She's been going around the clock on the festival; with this problem, even though solved, she may be too exhausted to withstand more than a slight tap on the shoulder.
Take a breath, everyone. We're getting close. And it's still going to be a great show.
Off to a committee meeting and then I'm heading home to listen to some Texas music (in Chitra and Sam's honor) from Jon Dee Graham, something appropriate like "Tie a Knot," whose refrain is "Tie a knot/ Tie a knot/ Tie a knot so it don't come loose."
Just what we're trying to do with Story Week in the next 10 days.
FLASH 2: RANDY ALBERS ENTERS THE 21ST CENTURY!
by Randy Albers
With the nearly incessant (though very well-meaning, I'm sure) prodding of Sam Weller, I am, with this opening, officially entering the blogging world. I am, by the way, not wild about that term, "blog." Sounds a bit too much like "slog," which is what I spend all too many hours doing in committees. But I am willing to be educated, and Sam is the man to do it—along, of course, with my students, who do it daily.
As we stand on the verge of what looks to be another Story Week garden of earthly delights (a term not chosen lightly, as you Joyce Carol Oates fans will know), I am feeling the usual mix of anticipation, frenzy, and outright excitement that I have felt each year for the previous 11. But this year, more than ever, I have been intent upon sliding into the background and enjoying the way in which others—Sheryl Johnston, Sam, Mandy Snyder, Dan Prazer, the staff and students—are leaping into the fray, taking ownership of this festival, and striving to create the best ever. When Ann Hemenway and I were working on the first couple of Story Weeks, we never would have guessed that it would become what it has become: a central part of the city's literary calendar, third most-attended festival after the Humanities Festival and Printer's Row, and a source of pride, as well as inspiration and creative stimulation, for so many people each year. It's as gratifying as it is humbling, and even in a blog, I can't let all of this be noted without expressing my thanks to everyone who feels part of Story Week.
And feeling a part of it is, of course, the goal. Audience participation has always been the main goal, trying to give a variety of formats that maximize contact between experienced and developing writers, as well as promote conversations among all interested parties. Along with that, we have tried to find ways of making sure that people in the fiction writing department itself could take roles, take part, and take pride. This year is no different, and with that in mind, I welcome everyone to the first Story Week blog. Sam's vision of the blog was very appealing to me, even if I have very limited exposure to them. So this year, Sam, Lott Hill's Critical Reading and Writing class focusing on Story Week writers, and other interested parties will be posting entries all the way up to and through the festival. I invite you to post your own [comments may be posted here or on the Story Week MySpace page; see sidebar links]—because Story Week is nothing if not a festival of the people, free and promoting the exchange of ideas among all ages and backgrounds and interests.
We've had great moments over the years—the first Metro show, "Bad Boys Night Out," with Don De Grazia, Richard Price, and the incredibly influential Hubert Selby, Jr.: Sherman Alexie and Dorothy Allison engaged in a conversation about the salutary effects of writing and oral sex; Elizabeth Berg and Chitra Divakaruni letting us inside their friendship and writing processes; Junot Diaz turning to the two ring girls leading him out to his reading and saying, "Are you girls UNDERGRADUATES?"; Irvine Welsh lining them up out the door at Metro and then joining in a DJ set with Joe Shanahan; Studs Terkel regaling us with stories of meter men and open heart surgery; Salman Rushdie and Jonathon Lethem trading ideas and stories about writing; student readings; faculty readings; alumni readings; panels on publishing, censorship, writing after 9/11, and so many others—and I know that there will be many others to come this year. So this is a great extension of Story Week, and I thank Sam for his gentle prodding to get me into the 21st century.
Welcome to everyone—to the week and to this blog. Have a great time!
And thanks, Sam, for the gentle prodding. I feel almost electronic.
Randy Albers, Chair
Fiction Writing Department, Columbia College Chicago
Founding Producer, Story Week Festival of Writers
