Attention all Tulane creative writing students:

This year’s AWP (Associated Writers/Writing Programs) conference will take place in Denver from April 7–10, 2010. The conference is one of the biggest and liveliest literary gatherings in North America, featuring 300+ presentations, readings, lectures, panel discussions, and forums, plus hundreds of signings and receptions.

Each year, the Creative Writing Fund sends up to FOUR creative writing students to the AWP conference, accompanied by faculty members. The CWF covers airfare, shared hotel accommodation, and registration fees, as well as a per diem for food.

On their return to Tulane, students are expected to write a detailed report on the events they attend and on the conference experience overall.

Eligibility:

Anyone enrolled in a 400-level Creative Writing class at Tulane in Fall 09 or Spring 10.

To apply:

Write a letter to Professor Rothenberg, Chair of the Department of English, describing why you would like to attend this conference.

Deadline:

Monday, January 25 by 5 PM. Successful applicants will be notified during the first week of February.

Deliver your letter by hand to the Department of English office in Norman Mayer. For further information on AWP, please visit http://www.awpwriter.org/

Report by Nicola W.

C.D. Wright recently spent an hour with Professor Cooley’s Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop.  While her work can be mysterious and surreal, Ms. Wright is herself plainspoken and unassuming and was generously forthright in her answers to our many questions. She said she got into poetry “rather late” after a short-lived try at law school, confessing that as a young adult, she was afraid of not being good at anything and that she felt “a great longing to be part of something I liked and cared about.”  As a child, she cared very much about words, in part because she did not have access to any of the arts except for literature (her father was an enthusiastic reader), and that “books were my families … words were like real things to me.”

Her fascination with language remains; Ms. Wright described poetry as “a process of faith to the language … a truth of the word.” She loves all types of language, sacred, foul, archaic – “all the different layers of language” – and advised us to learn another language, because “when you learn another language, you can see the skeleton of your own.”

When asked about her writing methods, Ms. Wright said she likes to work with phrasing, adding “I never felt I had that much control over line,” that she couldn’t “artificially exact line” on her work, and often prefers to work with internal line breaks. The nature of what she is working on determines how she goes about writing: she is “always waiting for the poem to teach me something.”

Physical location and geography exert a strong influence on the work.  (“One Big Self,” her collaborative work with photographer Deborah Luster about Louisiana prisoners was the example she gave.) Her poems often start with just fragments “of things that are giving of a resonance.”  As the work progresses, she is always looking for ways to add texture.  When writing “Deepstep Come Shining,” Ms. Wright had been very concerned about how it looked on the page, posting pieces of the poems on walls and rearranging them to heighten certain patterns and threads.  She was drawn to writing book-length work as she was attracted to “the possibilities of including everything instead of distilling,” but noted that after writing a book-length poem, one must relearn how to write a lone poem!

She addressed the issue of personal courage.  When asked about how she had been able to write her more explicit poems, Ms. Wright described herself as “afraid of everything – except on the page,” a point she reiterated at her public reading a few hours later.   She shared that the hard part is always “breaking the silence. Even though I find the prospect of breaking into the page terrifying, I have the love for the adventure.” This leads her to keep learning new things and working with different forms.  She is not “one of the poets who find their form early on and stick with it.”  She likes to turn the page – “to see what’s on the other side.”

On practical matters, she called herself “not much of a planner,” but added that she does keep good notebooks.  For us less organized beings, it was inspiring to hear such an accomplished poet call herself scattered, that she felt like “a cat who can talk,” that she “can’t reproduce yesterday, can never find her car keys, and never drives the same way twice.”

Our class readings this semester have focused on work by non-American poets, so it was also interesting to hear Ms. Wright observe that in America, poetry was still “an invisible practice,” that our poets were the “unacknowledged legislators.”

Our time with Ms. Wright went far too quickly but, for me, continues to resonate.

C.D. Wright was the 11^th Florie Gale Arons Poet. This annual program is sponsored by NCCROW (Newcomb College Center for Research on Women.)

Report by Jenny Douglass:

Until this past Wednesday, when I thought of Deborah Eisenberg I pictured the photo on the back of Twilight of the Superheroes: a woman with rigid facial features looking at something unseen by the camera, her expression calm, her demeanor austere, and her thoughts transfixed in the wrinkles of a new story– a person whose intellect and presence would be nothing short of intimidating.

Eisenberg has written four collections of short stories since 1986 and has been the recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (otherwise known as a “genius grant”).

On Wednesday, Eisenberg read from “Some Other, Better Otto”, which appears in Twilight of the Superheroes (2006), to an audience crowded into the common room of Cudd Hall. Since that evening, when I think of her I think of the richness of her expressions.

As she read from her story, she raised eyebrows into deep, sympathetic angles. The words she spoke were deliberate and full, as though they had taken shape deep within her rather than simply in her mouth. When different characters spoke, her voice took on nuances with such fluidity that it was clear she had become entirely intimate with the complexities of each character. At times, her whole body would be compelled by a character’s mood and tendons would push from her neck in frustration or her shoulders would slouch in disappointment. At the end of her reading, while the audience applauded, she bobbed her head gently up and down and a smile of genuine gratitude spread across her face.

These rich and genuine expressions should come as no surprise from someone who, in the words of the MacArthur Foundation, “continues to produce elegant explorations of the human psyche in tales of increasing complexity, fluency, and moral depth.”

Following her reading, Eisenberg opened the floor to questions, adding,  “I’m willing to answer anything at all.” Many of the questions she was asked centered on her writing process and all of her answers invariably commented on the subconscious, organic nature of writing. When developing characters, she explained that uses no methods. Instead, she said, “I use my eyes and ears, let them say what they have to say, and try not to block them.” And when asked why she writes stories a certain way, Eisenberg smiles, looks up at the ceiling with her hands in the air and says, “I honestly have no idea. It just seemed right.”

In a recent interview, Eisenberg responded to being a genius with “Uh, I’m not”. But what emerged from the questions and answers was the feeling that she in fact has an exceptional ability to acutely perceive and represent the human condition. Yet rather than estrange or intimidate, Eisenberg left the audience full of creative writing students with inspiration from her own life. When asked where she was when she was our [college-student] age, she said bluntly, “Well, I was sort of in the gutter.”

Having not started writing until she was thirty, she remembered feeling “utterly useless” and that “everyone was miles ahead of [her]”. She continued, “If you find [writing fiction] hard going, don’t be frustrated and don’t think necessarily you’re unequipped to do it. It is unbelievably painstaking and takes a lot of patience.” She said she would have given up if she hadn’t been living with a fellow writer, Wallace Shawn, who explained to her, “Everyone writes like a five-legged pig at first.”

This was the first event in our new Writer’s Writer Series. The next is a reading by Edmund White on Monday, February 1^st.

Report by Elizabeth Furey:

The students of Paula Morris’ Intro to Screenwriting class made sacrifices to make it to a dinner on Thursday, October 29th.  Rehearsals had to wait; club meetings were pushed aside.  Professor Morris lifted her boycott of Whole Foods for the occasion.  The reason: Eric Overmyer was kind enough to join the class for a question-and-answer session in Professor Morris’ living room.

The experienced television writer and producer talked openly to the class (as long as what they asked did not violate any terms of the confidentiality contract he has signed with HBO) about the business of writing for the camera as well as for the stage, and on the writing process in general.  Eric Overmyer mentioned the difficulty of joining the writing staff of an already established show.  He says his strategy is to stay quiet and get a feel of the writers’ room before pitching ideas and stories.  Mr. Overmyer talked about the necessity in writing to arrive at a point organically, and not to force something on to a story.  However, in television a certain point must come up in a scene, so it’s up to the writer to make that happen believably.  He also brought up the point that some background in acting could be helpful when writing for either the stage or the screen.

Eric Overmyer began writing because, he claims, he had “no other skills.” After majoring in theater and going to grad school “for five minutes” he began his life as a playwright in New York City, “barely squeaking by” for some time.  A friend who got into television was his point of entry to the business. He admits that, at the time, some part of him felt he was selling out – like Holden Caulfield’s brother, D.B.  But any fears that he had become a sell-out quickly vanished when he realized what hard work and creativity went into being a writer/producer for a television series.

Mr. Overmyer was asked about the day-to-day life of an executive producer, and he assured the students that there is little down time in his average day.  There’s location scouting, story meetings, casting, conversations with directors on changing the location of a scene and the cost implications of doing so, to name a few.

For both teaching and writing for television (and much else in life, one would imagine) “it depends on who’s in the room,” Mr. Overmyer said.  He has taught at Yale’s Drama School and NYU, and has experienced writers’ rooms on several shows, so he has had both positive and negative experiences. Mr. Overmyer is confident about the writing on his latest project, Treme. And is he excited about teaching at Tulane?  Of course.

Eric Overmyer co-created the upcoming HBO show (due sometime at the end of April, beginning of May) Treme with David Simon, creator of The Wire.  Although the show is named after Faubourg Treme, the historical African American neighborhood in New Orleans, it actually takes place all over the city a few months after Hurricane Katrina tore through – set from Thanksgiving 2005 through the first Mardi Gras after the storm.  Treme will be filming around the city for the next six months.  Mr. Overmyer said he would like to take his Advanced Screenwriting class to the set of Treme next semester for an invaluable and unique experience.

The classes Eric Overmyer will be teaching next semester (Spring 2010) are Advanced Screenwriting and Playwriting II.  Both promise to involve a great deal of writing, Mr. Overmyer said.  Placement in either class will be undoubtedly competitive.  (It should be noted that Professor Morris is the proud “gatekeeper” of the Advanced Screenwriting class. You can read course descriptions and requirements for this class here.)

Thanks to the Duren professorship for funding this event.

Report by Betsy Porritt:

Dan Baum cuts an interesting figure in a straw boater, sleeveless shirt and baggy, fuchsia pink trousers.  When he talks, it is with the confidence of a New Yorker reporter with hand gestures to match. He speaks with a warm eloquence and easy precision directly reflected in the clean lines of his prose. It’s easy to see how he gained the trust of the diverse cross section of characters that are presented in his book Nine Lives.  And characters they are, although this is a work of non-fiction. Baum has creatively re-constructed nine narrated lives of pre-Katrina New Orleanians as a way to explore the deeper issues within the heart of a city that is so much more than one awful hurricane.  While the whole world of journalism and storytelling was looking one way and “disappeared down the rabbit-hole” that was Katrina, Baum looked the other and found a wealth of stories itching to be told and begging for representation.  “New Orleans”, he said, discussing the secret to his success in gaining access to so many people’s personal narratives, “is a story-telling place.”

Baum discussed the way he applies fictional narrative techniques – character, structure, dialogue, point of view – to the stories of real people, obtained through interview and observation. He also uses his writers’ skill to adopt the tone and language of his interviewees, bringing us close to their experiences. The book may not always be completely factual – it may even contain a few outright lies – but the truth of the matter remains. This is a book about trauma and recovery: the depiction of Katrina as just another pot hole in the warped and bumpy lives of our protagonists makes this not tale of re-construction but an historical account of a city, filled with more heart than any fictionalized account of heroism could be.

A self-confessed “old journalist”, Baum has found his own way to get to the bones of a character and a story.  Experience has taught him about people and given him the skill of listening to them.  Somewhere along his career (as well as The New Yorker, he has written for Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, and Playboy), any outright ego was knocked out of his writing and he learned how to present the world without infusing it with an overpowering sense of himself.

Maybe this is why he makes such a good journalist and why Nine Lives is such a compelling read.  His characters reflect his interviewing style and are all the more real and rounded for that.  We learn more about Joyce Montana through the way she sees her husband and son than we ever would if she were simply talking about herself.  In his talk last Thursday in Cudd Hall, Baum discussed some tricks of the trade – including fast typing; re-reading Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style; asking off-topic/unexpected questions; and approaching an interview as though it’s a “shrink appointment” to help the interviewee go truly “deep.” But it’s clear that an understanding of people is the real secret ingredient to journalistic success.  Well, maybe that and a flamboyant choice of leg-wear.

Reportage by Chris D.

Courtesy of Professor Morris and the generous donors of the Tulane Creative Writing Fund, the Advanced Fiction Workshop (and myself–recent grad/willing driver) had the opportunity to attend the morally ambiguous and spectacularly muddy forty-fifth annual Angola Prison Rodeo.  If you are lucky enough to attend this event, you will, as one should on field trips, learn a few things.

1) You will learn that Angola (or “The Farm”–Wikipedia article here) is the largest maximum security prison in the United States, with 5,000 inmates.

2) You will discover that around thirty of these inmates are insane.  The “Yes, though I have no experience and nothing to gain or lose, I will volunteer to ride a 2,000 lb bull that may or may not stomp on my head like an overripe cantaloupe”-type of insane.

3) If you read Tim Gautreaux’s short story “Rodeo Parole” (from Welding with Children), you will find it to have a more somber atmosphere (and drier setting) than the Inmate Poker event at Angola, though the details will be the same–four convicts sitting at a poker table and trying not to fidget when a wild bull is released into the arena.  The winner is the last man seated at the table.  The losers are the people who get a hide-covered battering ram to the ribs. (There will be many losers).

4) You will learn that monkeys with tiny saddles can ride dogs that herd sheep.  For some reason, this will be the most disturbing thing you see.

5) You will discover that there is only so much punishment your delicate, aesthetically advanced sensibilities can take.  You may scoff at prisoners trying to milk wild cows, gasp at convicts scrambling away from bucking Brahmas, and shake your head in indulgent disapproval at inmates trying to wrestle the smaller bulls.  But during “Guts & Glory,” the final event, during which thirty or so current-cons attempt to retrieve a poker chip tied to the nose of a bull that probably gets tasered for a warm up, all ideas of “taste” and ”exploitation” go out the barred window.  By the time the eighth guy gets charged into and flipped eight feet in the air, you really won’t be capable of much more than a benign and slightly stupefied grin (or grimace, depending).

6)  When you go to the crafts fair, you will learn that prison business-savvy includes knowledge of what cartoon characters will inspire children to harass their parents into buying handmade leather goods and woodwork from people behind chain-link and barb wire.  (Actually, though Dora is spot-on, Spiderman seems a little 2007.)

7) You will learn, again, how smart your girlfriend is, when she asks, “Do you really need a snakeskin visor?”

8) You will learn that having already graduated from Tulane Creative Writing doesn’t necessarily preclude you from drawing on the wonderful benefits of being a student in the program.

9) You will learn that having already graduated from Tulane Creative Writing doesn’t necessarily preclude you from having to do homework for Paula.

Report by Faine Greenwood:

I never thought I would see a man discussing, ahem, evacuating his bowels in the South of France at an officially Tulane sponsored event. Yet I have: I have seen Jonathan Ames.

Ames, a NYC-based personal essayist, novelist, and screenwriter (among other talents) is a bizarre and neurotic presence, the sort of gentleman who fades into the background until he says something entirely outrageous. His simple, casual-sounding writing has the sensibility of an off-kilter and sexually depraved P.G Wodehouse, Bertie Wooster with a scatological sensibility and a delicately concealed transsexual fetish. Yet Ames cedes to moments of haunting, almost delicious sweetness in his prose and in his stories. He has a surprising eye for important detail and for on-point and hilarious dialogue. He shows us things we would never think to look at (or might, in all honesty, want to look at).

His delivery is utterly deadpan and, on stage, Ames personifies the down-trodden “bald and impotent” figure that shambles through so many of his essays. Yet his calm is what kills the audience dead: there’s something about how matter-of-factly he relates his experiences with a Ugandan colonic doctor. He keeps a straight face even when discussing the aforementioned South of France episode, in which he’s totally humiliated. We’re still laughing with him. That’s a knack.

Jonathan Ames is, at the same time, totally depraved and totally charming, a gentleman who has merely lost his way. He was a pleasure to have at Tulane and did not engage in any socially unacceptable behaviors on campus: I think we should invite him back.

Report by Sarah Manthey:

Chris Rose, local newspaperman turned spokesperson for post-Katrina New Orleans, half-read half-performed works from his book 1 Dead in Attic as the third contributor in the symposium on the personal essay. His book is a compilation of articles he published in The Times Picayune.

Rose began as a social columnist for the paper, but after Hurricane Katrina his column turned into more poignant pieces.  He attributed this transition to the transformation everyone was going through at the time.  For him writing acted as therapy the way that post-Katrina New Orleanians used talking as therapy.  “All anyone wanted to do for the first year after the storm was have someone listen to their story,” said Rose.  “I was able to get up on a soapbox and yell.”

Rose began the reading with a piece entitled “My Introduction to New Orleans” which described how, ironically, a hurricane during Thanksgiving break his sophomore year of college initially pushed him toward the city.  He read other essays such as “The City that Hair Forgot” wherein he links amusing vignettes to a larger message that to experience “a New Orleans moment” is not simply to walk down Bourbon Street but to delve into something much deeper and harder to describe.  The end of his piece begs the question: “Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?”

In their discussion, Professor T.R. Johnson pointed out how similar his writing is to the way Rose talks.  Rose advised writers to read aloud their material, either to themselves or a friend. Much more than “regular newspaper fodder,” Rose’s column allowed him the opportunity to speak about extremely personal experiences in such a way that everyone could relate.  “I like to call it literature in a hurry,” said Rose.

Report by Faine Greenwood:

Phillip Lopate has been a particular delight for me to discover. I’ve got my reasons: I have often been critiqued in the past for providing too much background information in my essays: it is the fetish of a life-long information whore, the kind of person who enjoys being good at Trivial Pursuit. I admit it all. The advent of the Internet has made back-research entirely too tempting to me. I can Google up a library of Alexandria; every factoid is instantly accessible to me in purest format. And here we have Phillip Lopate, who did this kind of exhaustive research prior to the Internet, who provided back-story and context in a readable and elegant fashion, who nailed it. As Peter Cooley noted, in his introduction at the Symposium, Lopate could write an essay about shoelaces, an essay in which we were given the history and origin of shoelaces, an essay we might actually enjoy.

Lopate’s style is cool and intellectual. His is not the enveloping bear hug of the new-age personal essayist. He is not here to make us feel better about ourselves, or drag us along on his personal spirit-quest (and thank God he does not). Lopate remains at a bit of a scholarly distance, a role he is comfortable with. Mr. Lopate is the shusher in the back of the movie theater, he is the man who spoke out (finally!) against the horrifying rise of joie de vivre. He says what he wants to say, and he does it so smoothly that we do not immediately file him away as a simple rebel.

And there is emotional depth to Lopate, beyond his initial New York City (Brooklyn!) veneer. Lopate worked as a “poet in residence” and teacher at the District 9 middle school in New York City for years, teaching writing and art to a host of not always willing pre-teen kids. The observations and the material he gets out of those years is superb. Look at the brilliant Chekhov With Children from the Getting Personal compilation, in which Lopate audaciously produces and puts on an ennui-sodden Russian play with a bunch of middle schoolers. The miracle? He pulls off the play, and the children personify the characters, envelop themselves in the part. He does not talk down to the kids or assume that they are incapable of doing what they do: so too does he approach his readers. He assumes we will sit beside him for the duration, and listen to what he has to say, because he has invited us in.

That Phillip Lopate is fearsomely intelligent and eternally measured serves him well when he reverses things. The Tulane reading was a case in point. Lopate followed a rather dense essay about his experiences in poetry with an essay discussing (in great detail) the vagaries and insecurities of his sex life. It worked perfectly, in my mind: the fog of scholarly thought the audience had succumbed to subsided, and we were all laughing together over Lopate’s particularly clever turns of phrase. (“Sex is like parenting: someone, somewhere, is doing it better then you.”) Lopate proves that we can have the high and the low together in personal essay, and perhaps emphasizes that we do not even need to make the distinction. Every part of life can be examined and considered, and every bit of it can be made interesting.

Lopate is an impeccable stylist, the man who has defined the personal essay in America. It was very good to meet him: we discussed pierogis briefly, and I mentioned that I agreed entirely with the thesis of Against Joie De Vivre. I wrote him a brief thank-you email that weekend. He replied immediately and graciously: we can’t ask for much more from those who come to Tulane to talk to us. He said in the email that he hoped he’d be invited back. I hope so too.