Over the past two weeks, I’ve begun my first season as a member of the Gypsy Sa’har troupe at the Orlando Bellydance Performance Company. Troupe practices take place at night, following the regular classes, and dancers learn choreographies at a much faster pace. Thus far it’s a fun challenge, but I would be lying if I didn’t admit that the jump up from Master-level class to professional isn’t an adjustment. The artist in me is excited and a little bit nervous for the challenges ahead—and likely the dramatic question of this year’s “Shimmying Writer” column will remain, is it possible to dedicate oneself fully to two art forms? What will that look like? And to a lesser extent, will I remain sane?

Regarding the latter, I am only half-joking.

No matter the lurking doubts, I wouldn’t have gone for it if I didn’t love to dance and believe I could dedicate myself to the rigorous practice and artistic growth. I’m happy and proud that I took this next step in my dance journey—and suspect the importance of doing so won’t become evident for months down the road.

But why? one might ask. Wasn’t it enough to perform with the Masters’ classes several times a year? Couldn’t you have “grown” on your own terms, without joining a troupe?

These questions unearthed a discussion pertinent to anyone who believes in excellence and desires to join the ranks of history’s greats. Since my audition two months ago, I’ve pondered what it would be like if artists of other disciplines had to “audition” and be accepted by the masters (dead included) to be deemed worthy, a professional? What might that look like for writers? Scary, perhaps, to think of Flannery O’Connor, Tolstoy, and Alice Munro facing you i.e. some kind of literary Flashdance, but what if that’s how advancing to the next level worked? Now, I’m well aware that there are plenty of ways emerging writers “audition” to join the ranks of the established—defending a creative thesis, publishing in literary journals, winning awards and fellowships, and the like—but I’m talking about a bona fide audition, where one of your mentors says, as my dance instructor, Suspira, asked immediately following my audition piece, “So, why do you want to join the dance company?”

There are no definite answers here—only that your response must be true to you. Mine was to push myself and to gain confidence as a performer, because often it’s not until you venture into uncomfortable, challenging territory that you realize what you’re capable of. And that’s when you may truly astound yourself.

So, why do you want to join the greatest writers in literature?

Several crucial points are embedded in such a question as well as the asking of it—namely, who is doing the asking, and why. The question itself is a test of the artist’s self-awareness about her practice. Recently I attended the Key West Literary Seminar, and after one of the panel discussions, someone in the audience asked the authors on stage, one of whom was Margaret Atwood, a question akin to why writers write, and is it to express themselves? The panelists exchanged looks and I believe it may have been Atwood who answered quite glibly that no, the aim of the literary writer was not to express oneself—if one wanted to do that, he or she could run outside and scream—but rather, the literary writer serves the story as it develops on the page. I couldn’t have agreed more. Expressing oneself is perfectly fine when journaling or putting on music and dancing at home, and it may remain part of what the artist does, albeit in a more sophisticated aspect—but “expression” ceases to be the overarching aim if that artist aspires to the highest standards of the discipline, and serving his or her craft.

But why ask this question in the first place? What’s behind it? Again, place yourself on the stool in front of O’Connor, Tolstoy, and Munro (or feel free to imagine other, scarier great authors you admire). They’re staring down at you from the lofty panel because they’ve climbed there, and climbing requires struggle, pain, and sacrifice of ego if not actual physical sacrifice. Their work didn’t attain greatness without perseverance through hardship, rejection, dedication to craft—and now, what’s that you say? You’d like to join them? Well, are you willing to do the same? Hold on, now. Think about it. Are you really willing to take up what they are asking of you?

For when you play out the scenario this way, you realize what they are asking you to commit to—achieving a professional level of artistry—is as serious as marriage vows. Can you answer yes to in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for better or for worse? For art may take you there. It’s no coincidence Lady Gaga’s song “Marry the Night” is an analogy of the pivotal point in which she decided to “marry her art” as she would a spouse.

Lastly, but just as important, the question is asked by a person or persons representative of the community the artist wants to join. An artist may create in solitude, but as soon as that piece of writing or dance solo is sent out into the world, he or she becomes a representative of those who practice that same craft. The audition question of why do you want to join the dance company? or why do you want to join the greatest writers in literature? is a vital one for fellow serious artists to ask of you, to hear your intentions and commitment to create at a level of excellence. Amateurs, hobbyists, and dabblers need not apply.

I encourage you to write down your fantasy audition and discover what your response is to the question of joining your art form’s top ranks—the answer may take you by as much surprise as the exchange I had several years back, midway through my MFA in Writing at Vermont College. I was studying under Douglas Glover when he stated that a writer should aim to make every piece of writing the best it could be—whether it was an essay, a letter, or an email. That’s the standard to which a master artist aspires. After I swallowed my shock (every piece of writing?) and absorbed his wisdom, I vowed never to take my words for granted again. My craft—blog posts, status updates, and tweets included—has never been the same since.

It is once again that time to highlight an author who appears in the upcoming Burrow book, 15 Views of Orlando. This time, we’ve got an author who used to live in Orlando, moved to Seattle to resurrect the dream of the 90s, and now lives in an undisclosed liberal elitist haven in the Northeast. Amid all this ping-ponging, we hope he will visit Orlando again soon, and perhaps, grace us with a reading…

Too quick across the face of this earth, Tom DeBeauchamp has never watched a puppy grow up to a dog and die. His stories and reviews have appeared here and there, online and in print. He waits for mail that never comes. He attracts sometimes the inverse of moths and jars them and stores them in cool, damp, dark places where they batter the glass with their bodies, desperate to touch the unity for which inverse moths despair. He reminds you we are all closer always to the molten central fire than we’ll ever be to the distant radiations of space.

Tom’s 15 Views of Orlando story culminates in Lake Keogh, a man-made lake near the Red Lobster in Waterford. Tom also appears in the 15 Views bonus features, where he has this to say, among other things, about Orlando:

It’s been years since I moved away, and most of what I remember is vague and hazy, the feel of driving in the heat with the air off, the sprawl west of Alafaya and the forgotten scrublands between Bithlo and the beach. I remember it being an unformed place, or a place with a sudden form, like everyone there was confused about how they’d ended up there, uncertain about how they’d leave. It had a transitory skin. But there were others, other transients who’d been there longer. I remember it as one of the strangest places I’ve ever lived…

Tom has reviewed books for HTML Giant, The Collagist, and others. His fiction has appeared (mysteriously and sometimes ordinarily) in Hobart, Smalldoggies, in Burrow’s first anthology, and elsewhere. Click, read, enjoy.

]]> http://burrowpress.com/better-know-an-author-tom-debeauchamp/feed/ 0 http://burrowpress.com/are-danes-into-sea-monkeys-a-book-review-of-the-field-by-martin-glaz-serup/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=are-danes-into-sea-monkeys-a-book-review-of-the-field-by-martin-glaz-serup http://burrowpress.com/are-danes-into-sea-monkeys-a-book-review-of-the-field-by-martin-glaz-serup/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:00:45 +0000 Rachel Leona Kapitan http://burrowpress.com/?p=3142 READ MORE]]>

THE FIELD
by Martin Glaz Serup
94 pp/ Les Figues Press
$15

I consider myself an experimental writer, but admit: I am cautious of experimental writing.  By definition it draws attention to writing rather than the story, form above content, style over substance, the onus on daring instead of endurance.  My prejudice, fair or unfortunate.  The bigger risk a writer takes with experimental and hybrid works, the harder to buy into the concept, the more skeptical my eye. I have a voice, always, challenging, go ahead, make me want to turn the page. Can you? The answer is often no.  But when a writer succeeds with a daring form the reward dazzles; a circus trapeze act so thrilling the trapeze disappears and you simply see the swingers flipping and soaring overhead. The Field made me forget the trapeze.

Described by the author as “everybody’s autobiography” Martin Glaz Serup’s text originally existed as installations in Finish and American art galleries.  I sorely wish I’d seen them. This lonely little book was a perfect January read. I respect the themes Serup explores, or more so, avoids.

This is squarely a text of avoidance.  The first stylistic constraint is the absence of pronouns, at least those gender specific. Initially this was noticeable, and then less, as the reader is absorbed into the voice. The  Field communicates, sentence by sentence, chopped and assembled, the anxiety of times and irrational concerns. Spare paragraphs, many a single sentence on a page, establish a lurching cadence that reinforces the anxiety. The field, for example “suffers from a fear of lifts,” “feels ashamed for taking pictures,” “tries to pretend nothing is happening.” Or this particularly interesting passage:

The field sometimes thinks it’s unhappy in a mild and ordinary way that makes it happy because it thinks things could be much worse, which makes it afraid because it thinks things could still get much worse, so it tries to think of something else.

Me too!  I do the same exact same thing.  And that is the heart of this brief tract, that Serup has created a blank field (not a pun) the reader inserts him or herself into seamlessly.  As open as the content is to self-imposition, Serup’s work is pointed, too, and that is through poetic diligence and a command of craft.

Serup lures readers along with details, on first read mundane, but with consideration, salient.  That  “the field enjoys looking at snow-covered fields” or that “the field likes caves and mussel shells; the field likes secretive things in general.” There are so many small details peppered through the spare text that each one takes on importance, and makes the reader pause to consider it. And reconsider.

I liked the book so much I read it a second time. I wondered if The Field was a breakup book.  It reads perfectly like an impersonal memoir of despair and breakdown.  At the beginning of the book, “On a trip to Paris without the kids the field asks, do you think we’re having a crisis. Yes, comes the immediate reply.” A few pages later, “According to the field’s nearest and dearest the field spends far too much time on the toilet in the mornings. The field just sits there, waking up. The field is a slow waker.”  It sounds like the ringing criticism of domestic partners, god, just wake up.  Later in the book, “Stepfamiles, what to think of them, the field doesn’t have any particular opinion… it doesn’t feel like… developing the thought further.” There is another romantic trip without this kids where, in nocturnal loneliness, the field listens to combines in a nearby field. It nails loneliness, as does a passage where the field speaks of enjoying talking on the phone until “its ear gets warm and dark red and throbbing.” That is very much the enjoyment of a person without another person nearby to physically relate to, and it is moving. The field’s desolation builds, and then later still it “speculates about whether it perhaps should seek professional help.” The sense of confusion, anxiety, and loss imbued in the text reminds me of my own past breakups.  It’s possible that is a slight of hand, and me inserting my own experience into the text. Which Serup has so deftly allowed. He has positioned himself as a writer at the forefront of his field, (again, not a pun!) relational aesthetics.  The art done across disciplines in this movement fascinates.

It takes less than an hour to read, and is worth the time. Buy the book and enjoy it, enjoy your personal response to the blankness, and the balls of a storyteller who meanders and is indirect and amorphous and knows the voice is strong enough that even with the lack of clear direction, the reader is going to follow.  Kudos to Les Figues Press for having the vision to publish a translation of a writer at the beginning of an important career.

I like books that read as meditations, and The Field does.  Close your eyes and repeat, what in the hell is all this living, anyway?  And to combat winter’s loneliness, I recommend Sea-Monkeys, Mr. Serup.  I don’t know if they have them in Copenhagen.  But if they do…

With the upcoming release of 15 Views of Orlando, Burrow Press is highlighting a handful of the book’s contributors. Here’s one now!

John King, an aficionado of college degrees, recently acquired his fourth, an MFA in creative writing from NYU.  While his doppelganger proudly teaches composition and creative writing at the University of Central Florida, John currently resides at an undisclosed location and toils on his epic novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.  He also reviews books for The Literary Review and theater for Shakespeare Bulletin.  His work has appeared in Turnrow, Gargoyle, and Pearl, and is forthcoming from Palooka.

John’s 15 Views of Orlando story is set in Crocodile World, which, for non-locals, is a caricature of a real place called Gatorland. He also wrote a Florida literature manifesto, which appears in the book’s bonus features. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Florida—this peninsula stretching from the American south to the subtropics, fragmenting into the archipelago of the Keys—is intrinsically dramatic, an epic provocation to the imagination. The state is wild, from ancient kudzu-choked forests of the north to the expanse of the Everglades where prehistoric reptiles still roam in their almost unimaginable realness. And the sky: almost unbearably blue and infinite over flat horizons, with cathedrals of wispy clouds hovering like heavenly thoughts, so meticulously idyllic that they look painted on by Renaissance masters.

And of course John’s work has appeared elsewhere. Here’s a poem called “Spinning” and a short story called “Guy Psycho: The Savior of Pop?” for you to enjoy until the book release party on Jan. 31st at Urban ReThink, 6-9pm, where John is a featured reader

As a young reader I had a bookmark which read, Dare to dream the impossible against a glittery backdrop of Pegasus in flight. When the bookmark wasn’t wedged between the pages of a worn Judy Blume paperback or illustrated classic like A Little Princess, it was jammed among the rest of my bookmarks, a bouquet which sprouted from the small jar in my room. The bookmarks shared similar dreamy backdrops, unicorns, fairies, and sayings. I’d never paid much attention to the peripheral instruments of my reading, or so I thought, until this afternoon. Dare to dream the impossible. I couldn’t shake the phrase from my mind. Why?

“The things we do before the age of five are built into the package,” author Margaret Atwood said last week, at the 2012 Key West Literary Seminar. She was leading a lively panel discussion with Michael Cunningham, Gary Shteyngart, and Dexter Palmer. She added, “All kids do it, but writers don’t stop.” Substitute any type of artist for writer and who she’s referring to remains the same—those of us who refuse to believe we must grow up to be accountants, bankers, and lawyers, or at least we refuse to only be those things, to deny ourselves the multi-faceted nature of what it means to be human.

I’m not going to attempt to answer why some of us, and not others, refuse to stop twirling or play-acting when the rest of the kids have heeded the whistle and left the schoolyard—the reasons are simply too mysterious, and I’m not a psychologist. What interests me is the dare to dream saying, how the messages that surround our inventing as children may have as much to do, later on, with how we invent our paths as artists and the opportunities we carve out for ourselves to fully realize our visions.

In the past several months, I was wracked with doubt over two pursuits—my first novel manuscript as it made the rounds with agents, accumulating rejections, and whether or not to audition for a spot as a troupe member with the Orlando Bellydance Performance Company. To top it off, I was sending out stories but none were getting picked up. For months. What was going on? Was this some kind of test from the universe, a “dark night of the soul” period in which my faith in myself, as an artist, was being tested?

If what the universe was telling me was that I was a giant failure, there was only one thing left to do. Keep going, because what did I have to lose? The worst case scenario was that I would have to write the book over again. Or write a different, better book. And if I auditioned and didn’t make the dance troupe, I would have to try again next year. Nobody would be dead; only my ego would be at stake.

So I kept sending out queries, I came up with my first choreography. And one chilly night in December, I auditioned.

My theory is this: sometimes you’ve got to venture into the thicket of doubt so deep, there’s no way you can miss the bright shining doorway when you stumble upon it, thrown open for you. By daring to dream the impossible, you’re forging ahead toward that castle in the clouds while you’re getting snagged by nothing but thorns in the thicket. The reason the saying is dare to dream the impossible is because the flip side is be careful what you wish for. It may surpass your wildest dreams.

How to call forth such wild dreams into your reality? To dare suggests doubt, as a dare is a taunt, a challenge, something against the odds. (“Consider the actual meaning of every word you use,” Margaret Atwood said in workshop. “Visualize what it is you’re actually conveying to the reader.”) A dare is planted in each step toward making the seemingly impossible a plausible reality. To take up a dare means you might lose, but you sure won’t get there if you pass up your chance.

For me, the chance to meet Margaret Atwood, one of the contemporary writers I most admire, let alone study with her, was about as far-fetched a dream as you could get. She’s the literary equivalent of Lady Gaga; at her signings and talks the line snakes down the block; she doesn’t teach on a regular basis, anywhere. So last summer, when I saw that she would be offering a workshop on first chapters of futuristic novels at the Key West Literary Seminar (aptly dubbed, “The Time Machine Doorway”) I was ecstatic; my new project was indeed a dystopic novel. The program was costly; I didn’t know how to afford it even if I was accepted. But I applied anyway.

And I got in. Much to my amazement, when I asked about financial aide, the director wrote back with an excellent offer, making the workshop and seminar a reasonable rate.

I had a spot in Margaret Atwood’s workshop. The impossible was suddenly made real.

Fast forward several months. Twelve of us are gathered around the backyard table in Key West; occasionally a rooster crows from next door. Margaret is leading us methodically through one another’s first pages, showing us how to line-edit like pros. “Sometimes we get caught up in lyricism when we really need to be focused on character and action, and what is being said,” she says. This is how she edits her novel drafts, she tells us—six to ten times.

We cut and condense. We toss around synonyms, always on the hunt for the better-fitting word. We consider premises, and what questions must be answered. “You’ve written an arresting first chapter,” she tells me. “We just need to know what’s going on in this future world.”

One often pictures doorways as leading to one place, or revealing one thing, when this isn’t entirely accurate. A doorway, when it opens, may reveal a number of different truths. I left the workshop with a clear path on how to move forward on this new novel, in a genre which is largely uncharted territory for me: speculative fiction. I also realized that the line-editing I’d done on my first novel manuscript wasn’t nearly as ruthless as what Atwood showed us, and I decided to re-edit the manuscript as soon as I got home before submitting it to any more agents.

Beyond her instruction, Atwood demonstrated that when a writer has reached what most would consider the pinnacle of success, respect, wisdom, humor, and kindness prevail. I’d entered the workshop with no expectations whatsoever for how she might conduct the class. I wouldn’t have been surprised in the least if she had shoved our manuscripts aside, peered down her nose, and informed us, diva-style, she was going to lecture for the next three hours. What a relief that she didn’t. I’m not only grateful for the time she spent with us and our work, but for the way that time was spent, for I left feeling more optimistic about my writing future than I have in months.

To top it all off, on the eve of our final workshop, my dance teacher Suspira posted the roster of who had made the dance troupes. My name was listed under Gypsy Sa’har. It was the troupe I was hoping to make. I shared the news with my new writing conference friends, unable to erase the smile from my face, while at the same time new questions surfaced: how am I going to balance two professional artistic disciplines? Will I be able to? But I’m learning to welcome the doubt.

Now that a few days have passed since my trip to Key West, I wonder how much of these magical moments depend on the long-ago messages springing from sparkly bookmarks I used without thought as a girl? Had my reading life not been peppered with those markers, would I have ended up a different kind of artist—unsure, less of a risk-taker?

That the daring and dreaming pays off is perhaps not terribly surprising. We’re all too familiar with sayings like “no risk, no reward.” But more astounding is that the doubt pays off too. Without doubt, there’d be no amazing moment of surprise as a literary great affirms the work you’ve done and instills her faith in you. There’d be no holding of breath while waiting for the webpage to refresh, and reveal your name as a new member of the dance company. There’d be no tears of joy as you receive a story acceptance as you leave the Hemingway house, alone among the last tourists as they exit the gate in the setting sun. Without doubt, the other face of dare, there’d be no awe and gratitude when you get home and open the message from the literary agent you’d spoken with a month before. If the manuscript is still available after you complete another edit, she’d like to have an exclusive. She can’t seem to get your novel off her mind, after all.

It was an eventful 2011, but the world keeps spinning and we’re looking forward to a hell of a 2012. Here are a few things we’ve got in store:

Jan. 31st - 15 Views of Orlando book release party. 6pm at Urban ReThink. You can currently pre-order the book from our online store. Get it delivered to your home, or pick it up at the event. If you pre-order for event pick up, or buy a copy at the event, we’re gonna let you buy a copy of Fragmentation + other stories for only $5. If you live outside of FL, you will be sorely missed, but don’t fret, you can order Fragmentation and get free shipping until the end of January. As for the event, expect authors to read, booze to be consumed, good times to be had by all.

Jan. 10 – There Will Be Words 2.1 (that’s year two, episode one). Featured readers are Brian Crimmins, Lindsay Fraser, Matt Peters and Eden Wetherell. The event will resume as usual, at Urban ReThink, on 2nd Tuesdays, with your host J. Bradley, and with chapbooks. Meet the authors at 6pm, watch them read at 7, take them home at 8. For those of you who have not been, it’s a very social, unpretentious, fun and literary time.

Jan. 13 – Maitland Poets & Writers Reading.  This reading series is generally a great time, in a beautiful venue, and, just to add extra incentive, I’ll be going all out for my reading of “South Beach.” I also have the honor of reading alongside Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Martha Marinara and Jesse Ross.

FEBRUARY: The return of 15 Views.  This Feburary will begin a new weekly “15 Views of Orlando” series on the Burrow Press blog. This time around we’ve got a couple graphic narratives too! Some of the contributing authors include Laura van den Berg, Susan Hubbard, Robert Venditti… oh man it’s going to be good.

MARCH 2nd: There Will Be Quickies! at AWP Chicago. Burrow Press is hitting the road in March, heading to AWP and joining forces with Chicago’s favorite reading series, Quickies!, hosted by Lindsay Hunter. Ten readers, 5 Orlandoans and 5 Chicagoans, will read for about 5 minutes each. The Orlando crew includes: Jonathan Kosik, David James Poissant, Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Kirsten Holt and Joseph Rippi.

MARCH 13th: There Will Be Madness. There will be brackets!

MAY 8th: There Will Be Words Anniversary Edition. The month of May will mark the one-year anniversary of TWBW, but we need your input now. For our anniversary event, we are bringing back your favorite readers from 2011. Click here to vote for your top 3. If you need some help remembering, watch them all read here. The four readers with the most votes will read in May. The next 8 readers will be invited to read two months prior, in March, where we will combine two things I love: reading and basketball. These 8 readers will compete in a single-elimination tournament. You’ll pick your winner on a bracket sheet. Winning brackets will get a little something. It’s gonna be awesome baby!

That’s a whole lot of goodness, and there will surely be more to come. If you want to stay in the loop, sign up for our monthly email and you’ll get just what you need to know, when you need to know it. Here’s to a happy, healthy, and productive 2012.

Jeanne Leiby was one of my greatest mentors, yet I never had a single class with her. While I studied writing and later taught at the University of Florida for nearly six years, I was never a member of her staff at The Florida Review, nor a student in her fiction workshop. But I got to know Jeanne through classmates who worked at the journal, and she always seemed to be around, eager to talk about teaching and literature. I remember she stopped me in the hallway to congratulate me on my MA thesis defense, and I mentioned I still wanted to pursue an MFA somewhere but wasn’t sure about moving. “You should check out the top low-res programs, Warren Wilson, Vermont College, and a few others,” she answered. I was barely even aware of such programs and not even close to considering them. But I took her advice. Six months later, I arrived at my Vermont College residency and began one of the greatest adventures in my literary career.

That August I returned to Orlando and stopped by UCF to return a book to a friend on The Florida Review staff. Jeanne was in the office and told me my former creative writing teacher had just suffered a heart attack; he was stable but the English Department was reeling. We talked for a few minutes, she asked where I was working—I had a few tutoring gigs, but that was all, enough to barely scrape by. A sky-cracking thunderstorm broke out as I headed for home. Pulling out of the parking garage, my phone rang. It was the Chair of the UCF English Department. How on earth had he gotten my number, and why would he be calling me? “Jeanne Leiby stopped me in the hallway and said you might be available to take over some of Pat’s classes,” he said, “two sections of creative writing, starting next week. Can you do it?”

I agreed, set down the phone and began a blurry drive home in the drumming rain. I think I sang along to the radio and shed tears of joy the entire way. Because of that phone call, I quit the tutoring job and taught creative writing until the final semester of my MFA.

During those two years, I often sat outside the English department on Colbourn Hall’s third floor deck, grading student portfolios and drafting lesson plans. Nearly every day, Jeanne would burst out, lean against the balcony, light up a smoke, and start talking. Sometimes she spoke about The Florida Review, other times we talked about teaching or writing, or grad school. She was the first person who impressed upon me, in unspoken terms, how we’ve got to fight for literature, if we love it and want it to stick around. Eventually, we’d talk so long she’d pull up a chair, my stack of undergrad fiction abandoned, Jeanne waving her second cigarette as we jointly stumbled upon a writing epiphany. On the occasional afternoon when she didn’t appear, I found myself lingering on the deck, reluctantly packing up my work, and missing her.

So we became colleagues. And friends.

This isn’t to say I didn’t have my difficulties with Jeannie. She had the complex, at times contradictory and dare I say, maddening, personality of a creative. I know people who steered clear of her because she rubbed them the wrong way, and I’ll admit, at times I considered this when she was talking a blue streak about such-and-such-literary-device, or unreasonable person, perhaps an intern, etc. There were times when I wondered if she really gave a shit about me, my writing, and my friendship. But what won me over was her uncanny ability, just as I was beginning to doubt if she really gave a damn about what I’d had to say, to pinpoint exactly what I was wondering about, or needing to do. She was nearly always right.

She couldn’t have been more right, for instance, on one of our last talks outside the English Department at UCF. It was fall 2007. She had just accepted the editorship at The Southern Review. My boyfriend at the time was working in Costa Rica and wanted me to forgo teaching that spring and join him, and I was agonizing aloud over what to do. “Go to Costa Rica,” Jeanne told me. “It will be good for your writing.” Her words matched my mood. It seemed a natural time to part with UCF, especially since she’d be leaving too.

I spent eight months in Central America. I returned with the strongest story material I’d ever written, plus the first fifty pages of what would become my first novel. One of the stories I felt would be a good fit for The Southern Review, although Jeanne had forewarned me that, for her friends, the bar of getting into the journal was exceptionally high. But wasn’t it Jeanne herself who had taught me, at one of her famous publishing panels, that getting published was about patience, persistence and confidence in one’s work, coupled with humility? I sent the story, “Welcome, Lost Dogs,” to The Southern Review.

Two months later, I received a detailed email back from Jeanne with a breakdown of comments from TSR staff. The story was compelling but needed more “flesh on its bones.” At the end of the letter, she invited me to send a revision. She added, “I’ve asked this of writers, oh, I don’t know, Vanessa, maybe five times in my editorial career?” I was ecstatic, spent a month revising the story, and resubmitted.

Looking back, it’s lucky “Welcome, Lost Dogs” ever found a home at The Southern Review at all. I didn’t hear back from TSR and when I saw Jeanne in Orlando nine months later, she said they’d never received it. The envelope had likely got lost in the mail. Meanwhile, since I hadn’t heard back, I’d started sending the story elsewhere. I hurried home and resent the revision the next day. I saw Jeanne again a few weeks later at the Grub Street conference, but she mentioned nothing about my resubmission. I began to get nervous, thinking maybe I had overstepped my bounds—that no matter how great the story turned out, she wouldn’t go near publishing it because of our friendship.

Then two months later, I got the call. I had just sat down in a café with a sandwich. She began, “Vanessa, today I’m not calling you as a friend, but as an editor, because The Southern Review would like to publish ‘Welcome, Lost Dogs.’” She then dragged Jen McClanaghan, the Resident Scholar, to the phone to tell me how the staff insisted they publish the story, so I could be assured my work had succeeded by its own merit, aside from our friendship. Jeanne and I caught up for about thirty minutes. The sandwich went untouched. When I climbed in my car, U2’s “With or Without You” came on, and I burst into tears. “Remember this day,” she’d said. “You get so few of them as a writer. That’s why I call.”

How true her words turned out to be. For over the next six months as I worked with TSR on the final edits, I imagined “Welcome, Lost Dogs” as the first of many years of such exchanges between us, that writer/editor would be the next magical incarnation of our friendship, my first personal connection with an editor at a major American literary journal. I can guess Jeanne may have thought something similar—“I’m working on your contributor’s note. How cool is that?” she wrote in a Facebook message last fall. When I lacked the funds to attend AWP and celebrate the Winter 2011 Issue in which my story appeared, she told me how much I was missed. The story had received much praise. I couldn’t have been happier.

There is a passage in “Welcome, Lost Dogs” that kept floating to my mind the night I received the news of Jeanne’s death: “There are three kinds of grief: the grief of the definite, for what once was and is now gone, the grief of the indefinite, where there are no answers and so the worst is suspected, and the grief of inevitability, for what must be lost and whose future must be abandoned.” That someone as remarkable as Jeanne could be gone, flung from this life in a car accident on a Baton Rouge highway on April 19^th, 2011, was as incomprehensible as it was shocking. I found myself comforted and haunted, for the first time, by my own words in literature—a story whose conception and birth had nothing to do with Jeanne, and yet everything to do with her. In perfect literary irony I believe that story could only have been published in The Southern Review, was destined to be. What has made her loss so difficult, for so many of us, is the abandonment of that future with Jeanne Leiby—the Facebook messages she’d pass along for emerging writer opportunities and conferences, her support of the reading series I ran in Orlando, stopping by to visit her booth at AWP. It seems impossible to imagine a future without Jeannie.

And yet.

Guest Post by Cynthia Hawkins

Funny Farm

In Funny Farm, Chevy Chase plays a writer who moves to the middle of nowhere in order to jumpstart work on his manuscript in solitude.  When he’s finally done, he rents a hotel room, chills champagne, hands his wife his manuscript, and sits with his hands folded together in anticipation—watching intently, reading her facial expressions as the pages turn, leaning to check whether or not her laughter erupts in just the right places.  Lesson?  Don’t do that.

Henry Fool

In Henry Fool, Simon the garbage collector and accidental poet finds a writing mentor in Henry, who teaches him that you “can’t put a fence around a man’s soul” and there are three kinds of there/their/they’re.  The bigger lesson here, however, might be that the same poem that prompts a publisher to issue a rejection “as violent as the effect your words have had upon us” can also make a mute clerk sing.

The Croupier

Mike Hodges’ film The Croupier features Clive Owen as Jack, a struggling writer by day and (eventually) croupier by night who finally makes it big … as an anonymous author of a tell-all book about (what else?) being a croupier by night.  Lesson: fame isn’t half as important as a cool hat.

Romancing the Stone

In the opening scenes of Romancing the Stone, Kathleen Turner’s Joan Wilder sobs as she yanks the last page of her manuscript out of the typewriter.  She should be crying because she’s just written three-hundred-or-so pages of overwrought genre drivel, but she’s not.  She’s crying because she’s moved by the story.  She feels for the characters.  It’s a good lesson:  if your work doesn’t move you, it’s not even worth the airline-variety teeny tiny bottle of booze Wilder favors for her post-novel celebration.

The Shining

In The Shining, Jack Nicholson plays a writer who moves to the middle of nowhere in order to jumpstart work on his manuscript in solitude.  Lesson?  Don’t do that.

Betty Blue

So many lessons to be gleaned from Betty Blue.  Write naked.  Read your rejection letters in French.  (It makes things like “your style is unbearable – you deliberately wrote a non-book” sound like sweet, sweet music.)  Compose your manuscript in a set of (at least) twenty black-bound sketchbooks kept in random order.  Suffocate your muse.  With a pillow.  Because your manuscript will be accepted by a major publisher the second said muse is no longer around to see it all come together for you.   But there will be a cat that kind of reminds you of her as you begin novel number two, so it’s all good.

Bridget Jones’s Diary

If you write a book about a woman with a crush on Colin Firth, a woman who happens to be writing a journal and pining after a character who is based on a character played by Colin Firth, Colin Firth will play that character in the movie adaptation of that book.  Better yet, here’s a flowchart illustrating the lesson inherent in Bridget Jones’ Diary:

Colin Firth –> Colin Firth –> Colin Firth

 
How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog

Now and then a movie about writing comes along that isn’t in any way about writer’s block.  How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog isn’t one of them.  And though there may be a subtle lesson or two about how to scale the wall you’ve hit (like, hang out with a child so you can write a convincing child character), Kenneth Branagh’s Peter McGowan offers an even greater lesson in how to handle an interview (like, steal the interviewers note cards and mock the questions scribbled on them).

Martian Child

John Cusack plays a sci-fi writer in the process of adopting a troubled boy, and the big lesson here comes from the kid: whatever you’re working on, there’s always time for a Martian dance to Guster’s “Satellite.”

The Outsiders

Probably no book or film had meant as much to me as a little kid aspiring to be a writer than The Outsiders.  Ponyboy writes, I’d once reasoned.  I write!  Ponyboy has hair.  I have hair!  Ponyboy gets beat up by rich kids, witnesses a murder, and hides out in an abandoned church.  I have hair!  I am Ponyboy!  I connected, you see.  I paid attention.  And before I ever heard anyone advise me to “write what you know,” I knew Ponyboy’s lesson:  Write about your crappy life.  That’s what it’s there for.

*     *     *

Cynthia Hawkins is an Associate Editor of Arts and Culture at The Nervous Breakdown, Managing Fiction Editor of Prick of the Spindle, and editor of the e-book anthology Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema.

Today I wrote a new poem. Only not with words, but with my body.

This poem is set to music, a slow, snake-like song called “The Sensual Chifti” which I fell in love with a few weeks ago upon stumbling across it on iTunes. My complete rendition comprises two minutes, thirty-eight seconds—not an epic by any means, but an average length, with enough rhythm, repetition, and surprise to sink your teeth into. The “writing” has taken place over several days in the clear but cramped space between my dining and living areas, close to where I’ve written the bulk of my novel, plenty of stories, and this column, to mention a few. Like any poem worth writing, the initial phrases flowed rather easily until I eventually hit a sticky spot or two where I wasn’t sure how to move forward. So I stepped away for a few days and when I returned, was able to push through and figure out the rest. There’s plenty of revising and polishing left to do, but all works of art, if they’re going to amount to anything, have to at least get off the ground. Or so said Billy Collins a few years back, at one of the Rollins College Winter with the Writers’ sessions.

I’m pleased to report that the aforementioned “poem,” my first choreographed Bellydance solo, accomplishes that.

What criteria warrants such a correlation between a poem, a literary work composed of words, and dance, an art form which relies solely upon the body, confined to space and form, and the movements capable of being articulated in that space? On the surface, one can conjure a couple of comparisons between the two readily enough—a dance choreography is set to music, for example, and what else is poetry but lyricism, a capturing of a certain emotional state and expression of that experience through rhythm, rhyme, and meter, not to mention other devices such as alliteration, assonance, etc. The restrictions of space and form apply to the page and poetry, albeit in a different way. Poetry and dance tend to be shorter forms (singular pieces may of course be collected or performed as part of larger works, but they are not by nature “long” in the way novels or symphonies are); and both contain a performance aspect. After all, one of poetry’s main distinctions from prose lies within its demand to be read out loud.

But there’s more to the metaphor, I think. I owe credit to my teacher, Suspira, who quoted a former dance instructor of hers who said, “Think of your choreography as a poem. A good choreography doesn’t mean cramming in every move you know just to show off what you can do.” In other words, like poetry, good choreography includes a careful selection of moves that capture the music’s mood, subsequently evoking varieties of mood in the dancer. And as with poetry, wonderful solos likely achieve their captivating quality by means of elegant simplicity and balance. In other words, what you choose to leave out is often just as important as what you choose to put in.

(It wouldn’t be unwarranted to use the comparison “a good choreography tells a story” either, but I’ll tackle that one in a future post. For now we’ll just stick to the poetry angle).

As a literary writer and occasional poet, the “choreography as poem” adage stuck in the back of my mind long after Suspira’s mention of it in class. When I decided to audition for a spot in one of Orlando Bellydance’s four dance companies, I called forth the analogy, for in order to audition a dancer must create and perform her own solo. So here’s how I applied my knowledge of poetry to composing my first solo dance. I think I might have panicked and ended up with one of those “overloaded” dances had I not kept recalling the metaphor—it’s an easy temptation to succumb to, especially when you hit creative walls and frustrations as you inevitably will in orchestrating your own piece. When you’re stuck, the mind is notorious for seizing hold and getting bossy, urging you to try cramming in this-or-that move.

1) “A poem has got to get off the ground.” –Billy Collins

I began by playing the song a few times to just see what moves my body responded with naturally to the music—much as a poet would do in writing a first draft. Focus, relax, and just observe what spills out on the page. In the case of “The Sensual Chifti,” I set a challenge for myself in that I find undulations, body rolls, and other slow movements requiring control most difficult to execute, and this is one of those snakey songs. But I forced myself to wait for the music, to take the entire count to render the movement without rushing; once I settled in, the moves seemed to naturally evolve from one to the next—just like how one image in poetry will lead to another, all the way through to the end.

2) Be mindful of transitions, and the need to create interest and surprise.

Transitions can be tricky. They can also be among the most wonderful opportunities whether you’re going from verse to verse in writing a poem, or the music you’re dancing to calls for a change in movements by the introduction of a new instrument, measure, etc. I included the requirement of “interest and surprise” in that as with writing, you don’t want to cram in too much but you don’t want to plod along using the same old moves over and over again, or the audience will get bored. Art contains repetition with variation—the variation being the key. Just as in writing, where you want to spot overused words, images or clichés, while you’re choreographing, ask yourself: am I leaving out the chest too often? The arms? And so forth. For me, it’s easy to rely on the hips too much and forget the upper body; hips and faster movements are my strong suit. In terms of surprise, you want to keep in mind that if you’ve been facing your audience for awhile, you ought to flip to the back a few times during your solo, in order to create a few “A-ha!” moments when you—surprise!—are suddenly facing them again.

3) What you leave out is as important as what you include. Jam-packed doesn’t equal complicated and artful. A simple dance, unified, resonating, and capturing the mood of the music, will often be more engaging to watch than a harried, overloaded one. Remember, once you’ve got your core choreography down, your “first draft,” if you will, with subsequent practices, you can revise. So don’t worry about figuring every look and hand flip from the get-go—that’s fine if they show up on their own, but you can add those layers later, bit by bit.

4) The creative process should be fun. Most of the time, anyway. If it ceases to be fun, stop. Walk away and come back later, because you won’t achieve the results you’re after by banging your head against the desk or hitting repeat for the hundredth time and swearing at the iPod docking station. In fact, you’re more likely to damage the work you’ve already done (not to mention the iPod) if you proceed under those conditions. Take a break, a yoga class, or make a sandwich; all that matters is you step away for an hour, maybe even a day or two, and a path to what should come next after the chorus or how to end that villanelle will likely have opened up.

This first choreography of mine is destined for improvement over the next two weeks, I know. But I’m confident that with practice and revision, it’ll get there; once the foundation is in place, you have something to work from. It’s the first choreography I’ve undertaken and therefore probably won’t be the best of my Bellydance career; I doubt it will be the last. But I’m hoping that like my first poems written in undergrad writing workshops a dozen years ago, I’ve created a solid work that will hold up on its own, one that reveals a glimpse of what I’m capable of in the future.

At first, I wasn’t sure that I liked seeing billboards for the local funeral parlor’s cremation services.  They are near some of my favorite restaurants, and feature creepily tasteful urns. They have advertising slogans on them like “contact us for more information.” Cremation never seemed like the sort of thing you might need to see a billboard for.  It seemed like the sort of thing you would research on an “as-needed” basis.  Like “oh, my loved one has died, and also they specified that they would like to be cremated.  Let me get the phone book out and find out how one goes about doing that.”  A billboard suggests that cremation is something you might have had at the back of your mind, or worse, something you might not have considered at all. “Oh, you know what?  I have that loved one just laying around, all dead and whatnot, and seeing that billboard about cremation was a huge help!  I had no idea what to do up until I saw that helpful, informative, colorful billboard.” It just so happens that this is precisely the situation I was in recently.

As I have mentioned before, my beloved barber, Ted, recently passed away, which was really a sad thing for me since he had been cutting my hair since I was but a boy, and more recently had been cutting my hair just then.  He died while rounding out the back, before he could go for the mirror to show me.  Coincidentally, I have yet to see the back of my hair, so if anyone notices a problem with it, could you please let me know?  Anyway, there we were, chatting, smoking cigarettes, smoking cigars, chewing tobacco, smoking pipes, thinking about smoking cigarillos, and eating Andy Capp hot fries.  Andy Capp hot fries are produced by the good people at ConAgra foods, who also have cheerful, helpful billboards with products like “SnackPack” and “Wolf Brand Chili,” my favorite.  Those billboards make perfect sense, always.

So there we were, smoking, eating, and drinking our favorite things.  Did I mention that we were drinking Applejack from a plastic bottle?  We always drink inexpensive Applejack from a plastic bottle while Ted cuts my hair.  Ted was working the scissors, I was shrieking to high hell at the very top of my lungs (you know, as a joke), splashing Applejack everywhere.  So then, Ted goes “Hey, stop shrieking for a second, I’m dying,” at least that’s what one of the other customers told me he said.  I couldn’t hear him on account of my shrieking.  Then, he just went ahead and died, tobacco juice all on his beard.  He didn’t even finish his Applejack.  It was a terrible experience for me.Ted had no family any more ever since I pressed his wife into divorcing him, married her, then had her deported back to Sweden with their children.  She was out of her mind, always asking about why I would get so many hair cuts, and why I cried when I heard bells ringing, why I took pictures of my toenails every morning.  Like I need to explain ANY of those things to anyone, let alone a Swedish woman who had only been able to stay in the United States on account of her brilliance as an anesthesiologist.  As if I needed to explain myself.  She only understood things phrased as Ikea-style iconographic instructions, anyway.  It was very perplexing.

Ted had no more family, and left no will, since he probably wasn’t expecting to die, so we told the police to stash him at the morgue until we figured out what would be the best thing to do.

That was a few months ago.  Come to think of it, I had forgotten about it until I saw that billboard.

Anyway, I’m going to miss old Ted, and not just because he always cut my hair so damned well.  He didn’t.  He was a terrible barber if I’m being honest, and since he’s dead now, I feel like I can be.  No, I’m going to miss Ted because he had one of those friendly smiles that just made you feel so very welcomed every time you jangled the bell of his shop door.  Jangled and cried, in my case.  He was warm, and made you feel like you belonged.  His beard reminded you of a favorite uncle or grand father (or grand mother, in some cases).  His Bay Rum scent recalled the corner Five and Dime.  His teeth recalled the American petroleum industry.

Thinking about Ted makes me miss the good old days when I was a younger man.  Days when you could drink six or seven cocktails at three on a Tuesday without anyone whining about “alcoholism.”  Days when people believed in ghosts, and paid good money to talk with them through highly skilled mediums, and booked expensive spirit-hunting trips with ghost-poachers.  Days when you could smoke in a nursery, and blow smoke right in an infant’s face, and its mother would laugh, and would THANK you because everyone appreciated a good Tiparillo.  Even babies.

Those were the best times, and I like to think that Ted would have supported me on that.    Seriously, though, Ted was a terrible barber.