Writing Workshop Notes and Prompts

NSP Meditations, Writing , , , ,

Today I will teach a writing workshop in Astoria on the theme of “Veracity in Fact and Fiction.” I’ve never taught this workshop before and that newness always produces something wonderfully unexpected with participants and myself. The timeliness of the theme is obvious and I expect some of the discussion activities I have planned will elicit serious reflection. Below is the survey/questionnaire of my design that I will give the participants. They will choose their top three questions/prompts and discuss them with one another. Then they will take them somewhere with writing, either in essay, memoir, commentary, fiction, wherever.

It will be good to teach again. We have assembled a truly extraordinary group of writers and thinkers in these Astoria workshops. People come from all over the region to share and build a vital creative community. I have found my time with this group to be some of the most creatively and spiritually nourishing experiences of my life. I am thankful for these people and their embrace of me and my teaching.

Does a poem have to remain true to the facts of an experience?

Is invented truth the same as real truth in a story?

What’s the better story to tell/ The lie or the truth?

Do writers have a higher responsibility in a culture to be truthtellers?

Respond to this quote by Bob Dylan: “All the truths in the world add up to one big lie.”

Respond to this quote by E.L. Doctrow: “There is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.”

Can there be multiple versions of the truth of an experience?

Why is the Flat Earth Society gaining so many new members?

Dragons or the Laws of the Universe? Which would you prefer to explore as a writer?

Can a male writer reveal the truth of a female experience?

Can a white writer reveal the truth of a person of color’s experience?

What’s the lie you keep telling yourself to keep going?

Is a myth a lie?

Do people/cultures need myths to survive?

Is omission an act of lying in a piece of writing?

Is social media responsible for more truth or more lies in our culture?

If I told you I had communicated with a coyote, would you believe me?

What is authenticity in writing?

Does the truth change under duress?

What is the art of telling the truth to a person or reader?

Why are so many eyewitness accounts of an event later found to be completely bogus?

What’s the biggest lie in America?

Why were so many people ready to embrace the the concept of fake news in America?

Do facts change over time?

True or false? A sentence composed as a lie requires more imagination and greater ability of a writer than a sentence composed as fact.

Do you traffic in rumor or act upon rumor?

What’s your personal relationship with the truth?

What kind of writer are you primarily? Fact based or liberated from factual constraints?

Can a novel be true? Can a novel lie?

Is recreating dialogue in non-fiction fake?

What’s something irrefutable in our culture?

Are weather reports a form of lying? Why do people believe weather reports?

Why did the climate change issue become a war over fact versus fiction?

What’s the greatest ongoing battle for truth in American culture?

Are dreams fact or fiction?

In ancient times, facts/truth in a story didn’t matter: telling it was the story. And if it was told well, it got passed down.

The greatest book mixing fact and fiction is the Bible.

Is telling the truth in a piece of writing more challenging an exercise than exposing a lie?

Is journalism relevant anymore?

How has the advent of the Internet changed the concepts of fact and fiction?

Who is the biggest bullshitter you have ever met?

What’s the definition of bullshit when it comes to storytelling?

Can music offer truth in a way writing cannot?

What’s the color of the truth? Color of the lie?

Fort Hope

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations , , ,

I built a corral-style fort and dubbed it “Fort Hope” because various notions of hope meandered through my mind as I worked. Perhaps “worked” is the wrong word. “Played” is better. I sat inside the fort and thought about hope:

There is hope for me in people, books, dogs, rivers, trees, birds, and occasionally, music. There is hope for my country because I’ve read American history and know that Henry Kissinger once was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and George Wallace was Governor of Alabama. I have hope that people will give me a first or second chance. Some already have. Fresh hope has emerged from the most unlikeliest of places: dead unpublished writers, dead dogs, poetry, a poet, a boat refurbisher, tennis. People who are angry forestall any opportunity for hope. There is no hope for improved engagement on social media. I have hope that many people will soon abandon it, like many people abandoned pet rocks decades ago. I’ve never met someone named Hope. White breakers out to sea offer glimpses of antediluvian hope that something new will materialize from the ocean and show us the way.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Dog Conversation

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I met an elderly woman along a river trail on a fine sunny morning. She was catapulting a Chuck-It with her feisty black dog. A fighter jet zoomed overhead. I heard birds everywhere. The river ran green. White seed heads of black cottonwoods floated by like clouds. I asked the woman about her dog as I ask everyone about their dogs. I enjoy hearing dog ownership origin stories because they tend to reveal essentials of a person—good and bad.

The woman told me she’d recently adopted the two-year old dog from a local animal rescue organization, which entailed driving to a kill shelter in California and bringing the dog back to Oregon. The dog was highly protective of its owner and she told me not to try and pet it, although I dearly wanted to.

We talked for ten minutes or so about the joy of adopting shelter dogs and what it’s like to lose old dogs. I told her I was dogless at the moment, but sharing my time with senior dogs and friends’ dogs. I wasn’t sure if I would have a dog of my own in the near future because the future is so uncertain for me. But dogs have a way of finding a person exactly when that person needs to find a dog. That has happened to me multiple times in my 21 years on the Oregon Coast.

After we parted, I heard her talking to the dog and not about matters related to Chuck-It. I remember doing that as well. It occurred to me that one of the reasons I like having dogs is how encounters with other dog owners in the remotest of places, at the oddest of times, is such a wonderful thing. The talk often begins about dogs, but then, for me at least, it always transcends into something else, something about the world we live in or the one we are experiencing outdoors at this precise moment when the rest of the world is at work, usually inside.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Pie Breakfast at the Fort (For EU)

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations , , , , , ,

I feel certain that at this very moment, I am the only person in the world eating pumpkin pie for breakfast inside a driftwood fort constructed by the pie-eater. Now, if only I had made the pie myself!

Another corral fort. I’ve got corrals on the mind. I decorated this fort with colored rope, shells, a wine cork and a penny. There can be beauty in detritus.

I’m writing this in longhand with a Keno pencil. I am channeling the prose style of WG Sebald who would often plunge a reader into a vortex of fact and fiction.

The tide is coming in and breaking up at the jetty. I taught a writing workshop here once and the writing was languid. All the participants seemed drugged by the ocean that morning. I am thinking of someone the skirted color of green and yellow I would like to show this fort and jetty to. We would sit inside the corral and talk of our long history together and perhaps, our future together. We would compare our mistakes and take new risks. We would dive into Sebald’s vortex and emerge as poetry.

I know the bald eagle will appear soon. She’s the nicked-up old warrior I’ve seen around here for years. We once stood almost face to face, ten feet away. I’ll never forget that.

Summer approaches and with it, the hordes. What will the hordes write in my ongoing driftwood fort writing project? Will they write at all? I don’t begrudge their presence on the beach. They are there and not indoors. They might even get to see the eagle.

The pie tastes good. It was made by a real baker, a baker who gigs his baked goods.

I notice a lone gull ripping apart a crab at the wrack line. No one is around me for a mile in either direction. I relish that more than I can say.

A nap sounds like a good idea. A morning nap at the ocean inside a driftwood fort. I will dream in green and yellow.

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Reading Richard Brautigan in the Toyota Service Center

NSP Meditations , ,

My God Richard! You simply don’t hold up very well anymore, except for a few extraordinary lines that excite like something unearthed by an archaeologist’s trowel and dusted off with a fine brush.

My high school creative writing teacher recommended you to me. I took him up 30 years later.

Those extraordinary lines report on blackberries, rain and lint. You wrote a one-paragraph short story about lint! The lint read rock solid, heavy duty. You also memorably used the words “laid” and “unlaid” and “unlaid” isn’t even a word! Are we better off now that writers, male or female (or somewhere in between,) don’t employ the word “laid” like you did, like so much lint dryer lint floating above the dandelions of an unmowed, revenge-seeking lawn? Who knows? But dammit, I wish Rolling Stone magazine was publishing short fiction addressing that question.

To think that in the late 60s Rolling Stone magazine used to pay you $2500 for a short story! Those were the ridiculous radiant days of macrame and typewriters and floppy fashions and jug wine. You could live in SF for six months on $2500 back then…and you did! Your biggest expense was red wine and you cadged most of your drinks in the North Beach bars anyway because you were a SF literary celebrity. Is there one literary celebrity living in SF today? I mean, the kind still writing and cadging drinks?

Your writing about women has gone the way of the television Western (Gunsmoke!), perhaps both good and bad developments. Miss Kitty is dead. Marshal Dillon is dead. So is a writer like you.

I won’t mention your ignominious end, perhaps the most ignominious end to a major, semi-major, minor, obscure or totally unknown writer in American literary history. If only you could have gone the way of Hart Crane, slipping out that porthole of a ship at sea and all. Or was that Martin Eden?

There was a shot gun and a lot of maggots at your end. Sorry, I wasn’t going to mention that.

You would truly despise what your country has become: the landscapes, the literature, the President, the cars, the clothes, computers, the infiltration of corporate commerce into every microbe of our lives.

Still, take heart Richard and smile when I tell you: I’m probably the only person in America reading you in an automobile service center the size of an airport terminal in a decent sized Midwestern city from your heyday. And consider this Richard: there is an indoor pond in this center and trout (goldfish) are swimming around. No one is trout fishing of course, but this pond might inspire a short story on the banality of indoor ponds inside automobile service centers. You would have known what to do with that subject.

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Notes for the Coffee Shop Novel

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , , , ,

More electronic devices in use than people using them.

A hip priest takes a quasi-confession from gender-conflicted parishioner. They fist bump.

Dissipated writer tries to reanimate.

It’s sunny outside but a few customers carry umbrellas; Oregon is dead.

Shop only plays Patti Page or Patti LaBelle.

Lots of posters for animal rescue events.

Everyone is incredibly tall.

A regular always wears yellow or orange denim skinny jeans.

Two women daily occupy the corner window and write computer code for health care conglomerates.

The shop introduced square coffee cups and the customers revolted.

One man always walks in eating a cucumber.

The shop has a certain beloved transient who serves as a mascot and alleviates everyone’s conscience about doing nothing about homelessness.

One older man’s flatulence is the shop’s inside joke. Luckily, it doesn’t stink; it only toots like a horn you might hear during a logging operation.

There is no plot, only milieu.

Not a single customer knows how to change a flat tire.

The female barista wears vintage tennis skirts all the time and wants to meet a modern-day Bukowski or become one herself.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

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