Speaking of children speaking...

My boys. Even the power and beauty of the ocean cannot stop their talking.

I'm working on a theory derived via a major difference between my sons, one who is six years old and the other two.

Hey, if it was good enough for Piaget, it's good enough for me.

Here goes. Both of my boys are enamored with words...their own to be exact. From the time they wake up to the time they can no longer move their lips, this place is non-stop talking.

Non. Stop.

I am told (all the time) that this was how I was as a child. In fact, my siblings argue that I talked more than my boys combined. But they're older than me and prone to faulty memory, so I don't believe them.

Anyway, here's my theory: words are currency. More than money. More than precious metal. "More than even Legos!" as my older chatter box says.

What's interesting to me is how these two purveyors of mouth noise spend their words in completely opposite ways. (This way of looking at how one opens his or her word wallet has invaded my daily interactions. If you're talking to me, it's a safe bet I'm working like an accountant with your vocal ledger.)

Anyway, my older boy is an introvert with the sensitive clown gene. Precocious with his vocabulary, he likes to know and explain things to EVERYONE. This kid would give a go at explaining multiverse theory to Stephen Hawking, convinced the guy really just needs to see it from his perspective for it all to make sense.

But put him in the store and have the woman at the register ask him which superhero is on his shirt? Nothing.

Then there's the younger kid that keeps hanging around my house. At two, he's the guy at the party with everyone gathered around him, talking about the time he and Channing Tatum came up with the parody of Jean Claude Van Damme's Volvo commercial. He's the extrovert's extrovert with the performer's need to speak and act in such a way that you can't help but react to him.

He doesn't care whether you understand him or not, just that you love him and laugh at the appropriate times.

When I think about it, here's what my two pocket orators are teaching me: the value of words for both of them is in the forms of control they wield over what they are saying. In this is control; in this is the power to shape and direct meaning, and both of my boys understand this in very natural, unschooled ways.

In one, words manifest as a shield built of explanations and the ability to engage only those people he feels comfortable with. For the other, the same verbal skill set is a microphone and a stage that provide an audience for the things going on in his head. In essence, the way my boys speak is a better character inventory than any Myers-Briggs inventory I've ever seen.

In fact, that might be true for all of us when we think we're "just" talking.

Mary Karr on Wrestling with the Real

To begin this piece, let me be frank: after meeting her, I am an unabashed fan of Mary Karr as a person.

Being of a fan of her work is easy. Her first memoir, The Liar's Club, is credited by some with altering the rules of the genre. Her poetic line makes her nonfiction pop and her honesty drags that same poetry's toes through the mud so its arms can reach to the sky.

But what strikes me most about Karr is her pugnacious pursuit of real, carnal human representation. And this, I learned when she visited campus, begins and ends in her orientation toward life and grace as close-quarters combat. That is, if she's going to engage something - or someone - no punches are pulled, in writing or in conversation.

I think it's that drive toward real, personal experience that drives the authenticity in her work the most, at least from where I sit. When I read her third memoir, Lit, I suspected as much in passages like the following in which she describes her father’s final physical decline and her sense of culpability:

The day I moved Daddy to the hospital, he grabs my arm as we cross the lawn. I’m carrying his piss jug again. The checks I sent home never paid down the guilt I tote today for having disappeared from the pace he’s dying in, which is –in turn– a place dying in me….

Daddy’s last upright appearance was on the bar stool in the VFW, where one final shot of whiskey felled him the way German snipers had failed to. In an increasingly skeletal form, he kept breathing, though each week he’s sanded closer to the bone. But he’d been floating farther from me, starting when I’d left him–he’d left me? I never could decide–more than a decade before. 

The ambulance door seals me inside with him. Daddy’s good hand wipes his wet face then swats my hand away (117).

But it was in her remarks in a 2010 interview in Busted Halo where I found confirmation of my suspicion that Karr's confrontational honesty is the result of a deal with herself; it's the product of the same desire she found to get sober and turn toward faith.

"I think for me, my faith has been about realizing not that the suffering doesn’t exist, not that there isn’t evil….but now I accept mystery. There was no mystery for me before; I really thought I had it all figured out. And now I at least know I don’t know. I do believe that there is a loving and benevolent God who is omnipotent and all-powerful, and yet I believe Haiti happened. And I also believe at the nexus of suffering is where love is."

That's one of the best writing tips I took away from Karr's visit. Dogged honesty can't merely be the stuff of a writer's characters, but of a writer’s character as well. And for that to be the case, the writer must be willing to wrestle with their own dishonesty first before they attempt to bring truth to the page.

This is the fourth in a series of posts with reflections on writing from past participants in the Writer's Symposium by the Sea, an annual event at Point Loma Nazarene University where I work. You can find the first two posts here, here, and here. This year's guests include Siddhartha Mukherjee, Jeannette Walls, and Anne Lamott. For more information, visit here. 

Others, significant

As a writer, I find myself growing more and more concerned with significance. Not merely my own, but within the worlds and actions of my characters. The notion of meaningful action and influence is like an itch I can't scratch away.

Please note here my distinction between significance and prominence, professionally and fictionally. Our culture has an unhealthy habit of assuming the former in the latter, to our personal and general detriment. Prominence is given and taken away externally. Significance is ours to create.

Here is an unfiltered shot of our campus amphitheater, The Greek. Like most
first drafts, it has promise but needs some work to reproduce what I saw.

What is most interesting me, then, in relation to significance is the way in which I'm searching for it in the small moments of "small" lives. When I think about my characters, I want all of them - even the most static and instrumental - to operate in the paradigm that every moment carries the possibility of significance and that true tragedy is to live otherwise.

Finding the significance in the lives of main character is easy. But what about the guy cleaning the taco shop's drink machines? The woman selling phony skincare products to friends? The motorist who drives on rather than offer assistance?  

And here's an altered version of the original that went through several
digital drafts to finally approximate the colors and the contrast my limited
human eyes saw as I walked to my car at the end of the day.

This is why we revise and revise and revise. We work like the photo editing program I used to work on the picture above. On the left is the first draft, if you will. On the right, the "same" photo with layer upon layer of filters and contrast shifts and tint correction until what I wanted to hold the eye is better designed to do so. 

In essence, this is how I want to treat the small characters who do not, in their own right, seem significant. But, and maybe most significantly, these are the characters most like us. They live, they breathe, and they have the chance to do more for the world than the most "significant" among us.  

And that is the beauty of story. Unlike life, in which moments and people are gone long before we see what we could have done to make them matter or what they have done to impact our narrative, fiction allows me a space where I am forced to see that every moment and person is of consequence. I have limited time and my readers have limited attention. As a result, the real estate of the page is precious and not to be squandered.

And increasingly, this is the way I'm trying to live off the page. I find myself increasingly agitated by wasted time (and I've always been one to feel guilty for not making the most of my decreasing store of minutes in this place). I've always been a pilgrim in search of significance.

But now, I want to redefine my terms and stop substituting perception for human response, in my stories and my daily life.

Labor Pains

This is another entry regarding the student-driven hybrid fiction course I’m piloting at the moment that is testing both my notions of teaching and my students’ understanding of how the classroom is supposed to look. From time to time, I’ll reflect here on what I’m learning along the way.

I spent a large chunk of last year designing the hybrid fiction class I’m piloting this term. 

How much? Well, taking into account the 15 month May to August gestation period. I calculate that I spent more than 350 hours on the process from inception to the beginning of the current semester. That time includes researching network theory, collaborative learning design, LMS and technology experimentation, meetings with training staff and colleagues, reading, shooting video lectures for YouTube, and of course writing all of the components of the class into a set of digital storehouses.

But more on that writing process. I totaled the word count from all of the files I created for the class to work: all the explanations, assignments, modules, syllabus, and transcripts. The grand total? 65,428 words.

And that doesn’t take into account the scores of emails I wrote to anyone involved in the process from the provost to the people outside of education I used as sounding boards for some of the crazier ideas I had. There were also conversations about the class I haven’t included in the hour count above as they were informally connected to the work I was doing.

So, what’s the net-net out of this situation?

There's a good reason I haven't gotten much done on my current novel project. I used up all the words and time and creativity I had for it on this class.

The Great Ones Punch in Combinations

In his writing and his clothes, Talese is all about the details. 

As a journalist and essayist, Gay Talese is famous for his exhaustive research. When he takes on a profile, he is relentless in talking to anyone who has any connection with the subject, down to (literally) the guy who shines his shoes.

His most well-known piece, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," is a remarkably personal portrait of Sinatra at what seems to be the moment where he is teetering at the apex of his career. Never will The Chairman be more influential or vulnerable in the same moment, and Talese manages to hold these two disparate conditions in the center of the frame throughout the entire piece with a simultaneity that is beyond impressive.

What's more impressive - he never spoke with Sinatra. You'd never know it from the essay, though, as Talese's penchant for deep research is on full display in a clinic on how open the lives of celebrities can really be, despite their efforts for control the public perception of their image.

 

But for my money, some of the best writing "advice" that can be derived from Talese's body of work comes from the 39 articles and profiles he wrote about Floyd Patterson over the course of his boxing career and beyond, culminating in his classic Esquire essay "The Loser." During their relationship, he saw the champ in triumph and defeat, in the ring and the training facility, in public and private, in general and specific detail.

In short, this is a different type of research, one we don't pay enough attention to - the four seasons approach. That is, see a place in all four seasons before you decide to move there. As Talese puts it in the foreword to his book Fame and Obscurity:

"And so it goes. The obsessions of a writer surface and reemerge in an unpredictable spiral; the techniques evolve, but the fantasies linger." 

The same mentality is absolutely critical when it comes to writing, despite what general culture tells us.The exigencies Web culture and increasingly short news cycles privilege the immediate response. But the long view cannot get lost in our rush to publish. Twitter does not provide the platform for introspection any more than a bumper sticker. And while there are times when immediacy is the necessary medium, it is also important that writers choose to move a little slower when the situation is complex and research a subject over time.

Take a page out of Talese's book and write in combinations.

Here's the video of his conversation with us at the Writer's Symposium in 2008.

This is the third in a series of posts with reflections on writing from past participants in the Writer's Symposium by the Sea, an annual event at Point Loma Nazarene University where I work. You can find the first two posts here and here. This year's guests include Siddhartha Mukherjee, Jeannette Walls, and Anne Lamott. For more information, visit here. 

A Note On...Writing That Is Personal

Dean Nelson, in his familiar position interviewing guests
at the annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea.

Another in the "A Note On..." series in which I ask writers I know or hope to know to blog about lessons they've learned about writing, the creative life, or just general topics they have an interesting insight into. Today's comes from my prolific friend and colleague Dean Nelson. The question at hand: are our lives interesting enough to write about? 

In the first few sessions of the Creative Nonfiction class I teach, I generally hear observations from students that they haven’t lived very interesting lives yet, so they don’t really have much to say.  I don’t try to dissuade them from that idea overtly. They might even be right. But my guess is that that their lives are plenty interesting, and others would love to read a well-crafted story from them. Wasn’t it Flannery O’Connor who said that anyone who had survived childhood has plenty to write about?

So I don’t force it. We just read things I hope will connect with them deeply. There is the story from the LA Times where the college girl describes the most difficult and easiest food items to throw up when she needs to play her meal in reverse (cinnamon-raisin bagels are toughest, in her experience; mint chip ice cream the most gentle). And we read about a boy whose very conservative mom takes him to a jazz club for his 13^th birthday, setting aside her view of those places in an effort to make him happy. And there is the story about the subway ride where a man fell and was as afraid as a wounded animal, and the others rallied around him. And there’s that one about the priest who assures the little boy dying of AIDS that “it will be all right,” when the priest knows it won’t be. 

Those stories usually focus on something that happened over a period of maybe an hour at the most, yet they are so well told, and they point to a bigger story, and they draw similar kinds of stories out of the students.

In recent years I have read student accounts that include: wishing for Skinny Girl respect while standing in front of one’s closet; charting her growth as a female by the kinds of hair styles she’s worn; attending the funeral of her boyfriend, and then trying to take her own life; trying to tell the girl he’s scheduled to marry that he is gay; describing a sexual assault; seeing one’s favorite band; worrying that one’s parents are getting a divorce; going to chemo treatments with one’s mom; finding out one has the breast cancer gene, and, well, you get the picture. These stories are interesting. They really happened. And they’re told in such a way that others want to read them.

I think that kind of raw, true writing comes from reading other raw, true writing, and from an atmosphere where there are no taboos, no judgment on content, but plenty of feedback on craft and storytelling. Most good nonfiction stories are true, in that the account and the facts are accurate, and are True, in that the story points to something bigger than itself, like fear, love, grace, forgiveness, guilt.

And so it matters greatly where one starts when one writes. Instead of writing about eating disorders, write about one time when you struggled with this issue. Instead of writing about racism, write about that time you were a racist. Instead of writing about God, or the American People, write about – well, you get the picture. This is all just a riff, of course on E.B. White’s advice, “Don’t write about Man. Write about a man.”

My last couple of blog posts at www.deannelson.net try to do this. They have also appeared on Donald Miller’s Storyline blog. The bigger the issue, the smaller the focus. I don’t know who said that. But I’ve repeated it often enough to make it mine.

I get a lot of examples in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, on the last page, called “Lives.” Check them out. You’ll see specific stories about people you don’t know, and they will make you start looking at incidents in your own life where you’ll say, “I should write about that.”

Yes, you should. They’ll be interesting. 

Dean Nelson directs the annual Writer’s Symposium By The Sea, writes occasionally for the New York Times, and teaches at Point Loma Nazarene University. 

Of books, and lives, uncovered.

You know what they say about books and covers, but in the ways life unfolds as a story it’s often hard to reserve that judgment.

Last week I was standing in front of the unmanned lifeguard station at dog beach watching my two-year-old up on the tower enjoying his independence and making sure he didn’t jump off. Suddenly, the people watching the beach from behind him all stiffened as people do when they’re witnessing something socially unacceptable. I turned to see a man, at least 70 with his pants gaping and round belly flopped over the open zipper, squatting down over the jetty rocks with a grunt.

Ocean Beach has a large homeless population, so I’m sure I wasn’t the only one wondering if he was about to use the rocks as his toilet. Happily, that wasn’t the case, but proceeding to take off his pants and socks continued the moment’s awkward trajectory.

Sometimes, though, there are storylines we still feel drawn to even when the cover is disconcerting.

At this point, the man simply waded in the water. And when the first wave hit his bare shins, he turned around with the widest Cheshire grin on his face. Another older gentleman, still fully dressed, stepped closer to take pictures as the first waded deeper into the water.

Content that nothing inappropriate was happening, I turned most of my attention back to protecting Judah, but something about this scene in the water kept drawing my eyes back to the scene in the ocean. The partially-undressed man had tucked the legs of his boxers up into his waistband to walk further out into the water, and he paused to flash his large belly to his friend for a picture as he took off his shirt.

The man on the shore gestured for the man in the water to go out deeper. He did. And when the wave hit his belly for the first time, a whoop of excitement from deep inside him sprang from his mouth. This playfulness continued as he wrapped seaweed around his neck and did a muscle-pose for his friend. The grin that lit up his face the moment he’d stepped into the water hadn’t left, and he was clearly and fully enjoying every aspect of the moment.

His vulnerability reminded me that the best stories are those that catch us by surprise when we uncover how invested we’ve become in the characters, because their stories give us insight into our own.

Within minutes, my perspective had shifted from wariness to being choked up with emotion. I have no idea what the man’s story was. I can imagine a few possibilities, but it doesn’t really matter. What I saw was a person so intent on being completely present and enjoying his moment so fully that he didn’t care what anyone else on the beach thought. I envied him and found myself worried that someone might stop him before his mission was complete.

I have spent far too much of my own life story worrying about how my audience perceives every situation. And as this tale unfolded before me, I felt God talking to me, telling me it was my time. Don’t worry; I’m not going to get naked on the beach. But my story is about to take a turn. I will be brave and vulnerable and expose my desires. I will be more afraid of missing my moment than of how people might perceive me. And I will worry less about the outcome and focus more on experiencing the journey as the story unfolds.

I will live, uncovered.

For the latest piece of original work, I found a writer hiding if my own home. Heather Murphy Clark teaches composition and raises the three children we call ours. A big fan of YA, she usually prefers to be a reader of stories, so I'm thankful she was willing to share one of her own reflections here.

On being "a soul in transit"

A shot from last night's concert off of Switchfoot's Facebook
page. Pictured are Jon and Tim Foreman, pro surfer and guy
I grew up around, Rob Machado, and my old friend Drew Shirley.
Check out the band at https://www.facebook.com/switchfoot 

Last night, I got the chance to see my favorite songwriter, Jon Foreman, play a show with my favorite band Switchfoot. It was amazing.

Jon (I'll call him Jon, because we shook hands at the post-concert meet and greet, so we're friends now) is a great writer, and not merely of the poetry that makes his songs speak. In many ways, he is a thoughtful observer of the way time slips past us when we're waiting for meaning to find us. And in that, he lives in tension.

When he visited the Writer's Symposium by the Sea here at Point Loma in 2008, Jon described writing as the process of returning over and over to an irritant, a thought that even after several attempts to articulate it demands more attention. In essence, it's not repetition but living that drives us back to the topics we can't put down.

And so it is with doubt and belief in his work.

The "opening act" for last night's concert as a screening of the group's new surf and concert documentary, Fading West. I'll be writing more about it later, but there was a comment Jon made in it that matters here.

"I know what I believe, but I have my questions and my doubts. For me, that is the journey. I'm looking for the melody....I'm a soul in transit."

If I think about it, this is where writers live. The world is neither complete certainty or doubt, but the conviction that the space between the two is what matters most. And in that is meaning.

There's a notion in storytelling and poetry that is not linear. Writers don't have a plan so much as an intention. They make maps rather than follow them. Somewhere along the way, they make meaning - for themselves. And then, if the story they're telling makes it beyond the walls of their preferred writing device, others make their own meanings of the story. Those meanings are neither their nor the writer's, but a fault line between the two.

And that's what makes story necessary.

Back in 2008, Jon Foreman visited Point Loma as part of the 2008 Writers Symposium by the Sea. Watch the entire video here:

This is the second of a series of posts with reflections on writing from past participants in the Writer's Symposium by the Sea, an annual event at Point Loma Nazarene University where I work. You can find the first post here. This year's guests include Siddhartha Mukherjee, Jeanette Walls, and Anne Lamott. For more information, visit here. 

If You Build the House, You Should Get the Keys

As technology dependent as my new class is, some groups
still return to the classics - in this case, a chalk board - when
planning their next week's story lines and concerns. I love it.

If I’m honest with myself, I think my hybrid fiction class is built, at least in part, on a small amount of petulance on my part. It never fails that I have a few students each semester, generally those unhappy with their grades, who tell me they wish they had more control over the coursework and experience.

It usually sounds a bit like this:

“You know Dr. Clark, I think I struggle because I don’t get to choose anything about what we do.”

Snarky comments about overreaching word choice and hubris aside, I think my response is this class. You want some control (which, if they were paying attention, these students would realize they’ve had all along), well let me make you very, very aware that you’re in control.

Hence the 9-week, self-directed small group writing process in which my students, in collaboration with the other groups in the class, are writing a novel-in-stories that I will publish electronically after the semester ends. With their names on it.

As I expected, this was at once and exciting and sobering, “you-got-what-you-asked-for” moments. But it has also led to inventive solutions on the part of my students who feel the need to jailbreak even a system designed to give them almost all of the creative control. And I love what I’m seeing as they work outside the systems and platforms I provided or required.

Some groups have created their own SMS repeater groups so all their texts automatically go to every group member. Others have created their own Google circles for the class, enabling the use of Hang Outs for meetings if they want to work remotely or if a group member is unavailable in person. They’ve even tried gaming the story constraints I put on their work (if I have to kill one more zombie storyline…).

In total, I left some gaps in the process to see what they’d do, and it has paid off in a number of ways, some of which I’ll likely build into the next iteration of the class. I can’t wait to see how the next group looks to break the system productively.

This is another entry regarding the student-driven hybrid fiction course I’m piloting at the moment that is testing both my notions of teaching and my students’ understanding of how the classroom is supposed to look. From time to time, I’ll reflect here on what I’m learning along the way.

A Writer’s Prayer

Photo by Heather Clark

Maybe we can’t plot the moment when we were changed irrevocably; when we ricocheted off of greatness along a new course that would become our trajectory; when we saw, for a moment, what we wanted to reach for before we died.

Or maybe, if we look closely enough, we can.

I read a lot growing up. I don’t know a writer who didn’t. And, given my context, I read a broad swath of material. Hemingway when I was eight. Stephen King when I was nine. Catton and Hughes when I was ten. Austen when I was eleven. Didion when I was twelve. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Shakespeare by the time I was fourteen. Alice Walker almost got me kicked out of high school when I was a freshman.  

Somehow, though, I missed Walt Whitman until I was a senior. Or, more precisely, until I was almost done being a senior.

Uncle Walt was like one of those bands you knew that you needed to “know” but you didn’t know how to “know” so you just pretended you knew what people who actually “knew” them talked to you.

Random Dude in High School: “You like Bad Brains, right? I mean, those guys were like pioneers.” 

Me: “Totally. I mean, I’m kinda partial to Black Flag because, like, Henry Rollins is a poet or something, but…”

Random Dude: “Totally.”

So it was with Whitman, until that sappy moment when, at the end of the senior slide show at the end of prom, when the Walt truck hit me. Let me set the unlikely stage. Kids in tuxes and formal gowns. On a paddle boat. Almost to the after party. Video slide show with Whitney Houston as a soundtrack. And then – cue the synth orchestra – the words of “Oh Me! Oh Life!” roll up the screen.

And there I was, through the swirl and clatter of gossip and teenage nostalgia and plates being cleared, transfixed by a poem I should have already known.

Oh Me! Oh Life!
Walt Whitman

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
                                       

                                                        Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
Source: Leaves of Grass (1892)

This. This was my moment. I always loved to read. But this, this simple profundity, this small moment of stable clarity in a world that felt like it just wouldn’t stop shifting under my feet. This was it.

I’m fairly certain this is the beginning of my journey as a writer, not that I knew it at the time. There were other influential points on the plot line, but this was my genesis moment. My garden and my fall and my intention to journey toward making sense of it all for someone else.

Twenty years later, I’m still working. Still grinding. Still trying to be even a cut-rate Walt. But I’m still certain of these things:

I am here.

The actors are still on the stage.

And my verse may still yet get read.

What was your moment? Who authored it? Let me know.