How To Get a Writing Gig

Easy, show up with some beer.

People who know me know my fondness for beer, preferably lager, chilled, and straight from the bottle.  I’ve written about the story of beer for this blog, and about its relationship to the invention of writing.   And so I was pleased to learn recently of yet another connection between beer and writing.

From the November 9 issue of The Writer’s Almanac:

The first issue of Rolling Stone was published on November 9, 1967. It was started by 21-year-old Jann Wenner, who dropped out of Berkeley and borrowed $7,500 from family members and from people on a mailing list that he stole from a local radio station, and with that money he managed to put together a magazine. The cover of the first issue featured John Lennon, and in it, Wenner wrote, "Rolling Stone is not just about music, but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces." He printed 40,000 copies, and 34,000 were returned unsold. But soon Rolling Stone had a devoted group of readers, partly because there were some great writers there. Probably the most famous of these journalists was Hunter S. Thompson, who showed up at Jann Wenner's office in 1970 with a case of beer and an offer to write for Rolling Stone. [emphasis mine] The next year, he serialized Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the magazine's pages. Today Rolling Stone has a circulation of about 1.4 million.

 

 

It's All in the Art

From a recent NYT review of Mary Karr's latest memoir Lit:

"Lit is a story of addiction and recovery, by now familiar in outline from the many A.A.-like autobiographies produced during the memoir craze of the late ’90s. Whereas many of these lesser efforts were propelled by the belief that confession is therapeutic and therapy is redemptive and redemption somehow equals art, Ms. Karr’s own work demonstrates that candor and self-revelation only become literature when they are delivered with hard-earned craft, that the exposed life is not the same as the examined one."

Or as British writer V.S. Pritchett said about the memoir form:  "It's all in the art.  You get no credit for living."

WORD DRUNK

The other day, while making lunch and listening to the radio—a program on Middle East politics—the guest, whose name I never got, used the adjective “pusillanimous” when describing John Kerry’s position on the topic under discussion.

I was startled—even if this was NPR—that this word fell so easily and naturally out of the guest’s mouth.  I stopped what I was doing and went straight to the first of my three reference books, The Oxford Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus (2^nd edition) to look up the word’s meaning, though I’d guessed at it from the context within which it was used.

In the Oxford, there were only two listings for pusillanimous: lacking courage and timid.   Oops, but then just three words down, I saw the word “pustule,” whose sound has always intrigued me.  It also puts me in mind of the Black Death, with which I am slightly obsessed.  (Really, just last night I watched a DVD about it.)        

I'm also obsessed—and more than slightly—with words, which was why doing dictionary work as a college freshman kept me up most of the night.  For on the way to looking up, say, pusillanimous, I'd get waylaid in the D's (diffident) or F's (flotsam) or surely the L's (lobelia).

But I’ve made progress since then, I think, so I didn’t tarry long on pustule, but went straight to my second reference book, the large and unwieldy Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Second Edition) which sits on a built-in dresser in my walk-in closet.  It’s pretty heavy, but at chest-height it’s easy to flip open, which I did—and paused but a second at “piddle”—the meaning of which seemed momentarily apt :“to spend time in a wasteful, trifling, or ineffective way; dawdle (often fol. by around).”

Indeed.

But I quickly quit piddling around and pushed on through the “P’s”—pusillanimous being quite toward the end.  Once there I was rewarded with a more extended definition of the word, and hence a more nuanced one.  In addition to lacking courage and timid, pusillanimous means lacking resolution; cowardly; faint-hearted.  And there were synonyms: timorous; fearful; frightened.

Next stop was my third reference book, The Oxford Pocket American Thesaurus of Current English, and even more pusillanimous synonyms, including “lily-livered, chickenhearted, spineless, and craven (and it took just a second for me to spy two pustule synonyms I rather liked: boil and blister).

Finally, I felt sated.

Well, not quite.  I went on the internet, to my latest discovery,  dictionary.com.  This site searches several on-line dictionaries, including The Etymology Dictionary, which I refuse to bookmark, for reasons that should be obvious by now.

At any rate, dictionary.com didn’t have anything new to add, though it did suggest “related words”: poor-spirited and unmanly, both of which sound less like timid and faint-hearted and more like something else.

Now, though, I was sated.  Exhausted, actually.

P.S.  (Before leaving dictionary.com, I just had to check on pustule.  A find!  Here it is used as a metaphor: "a cool glimpse of green between hot pustules of sooty sprawl" (Nicholas Proffitt).

And who exactly is Nicolas Proffitt?  And whence the quote?  Sorry, you’ll have to discover that on your own.

 

 

This Wondrous Thing from Our New Poet Laureate

(NOTE:  Best read aloud, at least four times daily.)

Turtle

by Kay Ryan

Who would be a turtle who could help it?

A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,

She can ill afford the chances she must take

In rowing toward the grasses that she eats.

Her track is graceless, like dragging

A packing-case places, and almost any slope

Defeats her modest hopes.  Even being practical,

She's often stuck up to the axle on her way

To something edible.  With everything optimal,

She skirts the ditch which would convert

Her shell into a serving dish.  She lives

Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery

Will change her load of pottery to wings.

Her only levity is patience,

The sport of truly chastened things.

Every Writer Needs a Friendly Critic

In Howard Gardner’s book Creating Minds, the author examines the idea of creativity through the lives of seven major artists and thinkers of the 20^th century, including Freud, Picasso, Gandhi, and T.S. Eliot.  As a writer myself, I went immediately to the chapter on Eliot, which opens with a discussion of a draft of The Waste Land discovered in 1968, in a collection at the New York Public Library.

Eliot had originally given the draft of the poem to his wife Vivien and to his friend and fellow writer, Ezra Pound, also an ex-pat poet living in Europe.  Pound, it turns out, suggested changes to the original “that reduced the poem to approximately half its length.”

Later in the chapter, Gardner becomes more specific: ”While highly suggestive and full of sections with undeniable power, the original manuscript was bloated….There was much indecisiveness, repetitiveness, and monotony: too many voices and too little sense of overall direction, control, and locale.  Pound’s feat was in carving away the overstated sections that pulled the poem in diffuse directions and in both sharpening the remaining verses by crossing out unnecessary or misleading words or phrases and eliminating many hedges and ambivalent tones.”

Vivien, Eliot’s wife, also made changes that Gardner says “nicely complemented Pound’s,” changes that were the result of her “excellent ear for specific lines.”  Gardner refers to both Pound and Vivien as Eliot’s “friendly critics,” helping him to create this masterwork of early 20^th century literature.

It gave me great comfort to learn this.  Those of us who write and teach writing know that though done in solitude our stories, poems, and essays are really collaborative efforts, dependent on our own “friendly critics” to help make them tighter, more focused, more engaging.  And while it’s not always easy to hear that we haven’t created a masterpiece on our first, or fifth, or even twelfth try, we recognize the value of the input we receive from our first readers. 

And as I tell my students, we may not make all the changes suggested by others—we are, after all, the final authority on our own writing—but we are grateful for what these comments teach us.   Which is why I open every writing workshop with the LaChapelle maxim:  "When one of us learns something about writing, we all do."

And so may we all, as Eliot did, use our "friendly critics" to help us find the great work lurking within our own literary efforts.

 

Stein on Writing

At a literary event I attended in August, one of the panel presenters highly recommended Sol Stein’s book, Stein on Writing.  Always in search of new ways to think and talk about writing, I’ve been making my slow way through it.  (Full Disclosure: My totem animal is the turtle; “slow” is how I do most things.)

Though most of the chapters are dedicated to fiction writing, Stein has many good things to say—or re-emphasize—to those of us writing nonfiction, including that writers learn their craft by reading and analyzing other people’s writing.  This is why writers benefit from workshops, classes, and writing groups; they not only have their drafts read and responded to, but also read and comment on the work of their fellow writers.  Both activities help us become better practitioners of the craft.

In the book’s final chapter, Stein lists his Ten Commandments for Writers.  My favorite is the last, “10.  Above all, thou shalt not vent thy emotions onto the reader, for thy duty is to evoke the reader’s emotions, and in that most of all lies the art of the writer.”

Amen, I say to that, Brother Stein.

The Dangers of Listening to the Radio

One of my favorite NPR programs is the Bob Edwards show, which is broadcast on Sunday mornings here in Chicago.  

A couple of weeks ago he interviewed Denis Dutton, author of The Art Instinct (Bloomsbury Press), who mentioned a website he edited called Arts & Letters Daily, www.aldaily.com.  I made the mistake of writing it down, and now I'm hooked.

Updated six days each week, Arts & Letters Daily contains links to articles, essays, and book reviews on literature, language, ideas, and the arts compiled by the Chronicle of Higher Education.  The pieces are originally published in magazines, newspapers, and book reviews from all over the world, making them a must-read for writers.

And if you start to feel guilty about all the time you spend in idle reading, remember what the great Dr. Johnson said, "I never desire to converse with a man [or woman] who has written more than he has read."

P.S.  Happy 300th Birthday, Dr. J!