Halfway Through

I can hardly believe I’ve finished my third master’s degree residency. I’m halfway through! If all goes well, I will have my master of fine arts in creative writing degree next December – and a completed memoir.

This past semester I have focused instead, though, on poetry, and one of the things that surprised me is how much writing poems has affected how I think about and approach the writing of my memoir.

Writing poetry – at least for me – requires a deepening of time and space. A pause, a respite, a lengthening of presence, so that the words that arrive come from a deep place, a place of unseen possibility and unknown potential. They allow for an unlocking of dark places, places that have been embedded in emotion and experience.

So when I began to write poetry in response to exercises over the past semester, verses emerged that evoked ideas and experiences I had not been able to access while writing my memoir. Places and people came forth after decades of burial. And I began to consider the possibility of incorporating my poetry into my memoir, exploring a hybrid work, an experimental form.

One of the guest authors at our residency was the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Tretheway. She read some of the poetry from her forthcoming book (to be published in fall 2012), and also conducted a 90-minute question-and-answer session about her three books of poetry and her nonfiction exploration of the Mississippi Gulf Coast (where she was born) after Hurricane Katrina. That book, Beyond Katrina, incorporates her poetry into a nonfiction narrative about how Katrina affected her family. I’ve been toying with the idea of blending my own poetry into my memoir, which is my master’s thesis (read this blog to learn more about my master’s degree journey). One of the gifts of doing this program is the realization that a memoir can be an experimental work. It might incorporate poetry or artwork or photography. I want to explore all of those options, (keeping in mind the practical fact that it likely would make it harder to sell to a publisher).

I’m going back to writing my memoir in the coming semester, and hope to have a completed draft by June. Then I’ll spend my final semester polishing it and getting it ready to go out to agents. (Also this semester I have to write a 25-page critical paper. It will examine mother-daughter relationships in memoirs about childhood trauma. I’m looking at three memoirs in particular: Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, Emily Rapp’s Poster Child, and Road Song, by Natalie Kusz.)

If you write both poetry and nonfiction (or even fiction) I would love to hear how one has affected the other in your experience. Does your prose become more lyrical and poetic?

Writers Conferences to Jazz You

I've put together a list (not exhaustive) of nationally recognized writers conferences for those of you who are considering attending a conference between now and early next year. Here's the list:

June 2011

Bear River Writers’ Conference, Petoskey, MI – June 2-6, 2011 www.lsa.umich.edu/bearriver

Writers’ League of Texas Agents Conference, Austin, TX – June 10-12, 2011 www.writersleague.org

Nebraska Summer Writers Conference, Lincoln, NB – June 11-17, 2011 www.nebraskawriters.unl.edu

Wesleyan Writers Conference, Middletown, CT – June 16-20, 2011 www.wesleyan.edu/writers

Santa Barbara Writers Conference, Santa Barbara, CA – June 18-23, 2011 www.sbwriters.com

Jackson Hole Writers Conference, Jackson, WY – June 23-26, 2011 www.jacksonholewritersconference.com

July 2011

Antioch Writers’ Workshop, Yellow Springs, OH – July 9-15, 2011 www.antiochwritersworkshop.com

Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, Portland, OR – July 10-17, 2011 www.tinhouse.com

Taos Summer Writers Conference, Taos, NM – July 10-17, 2011 www.unm.edu/~taosconf

Writers Retreat Workshop, Hindman, KY – June 17-26, 2011 www.writersretreatworkshop.com

Stonecoast Writers’ Conference, Freeport, Maine – July 17-23, 2011 www.usm.maine.edu/stonecoast_wc

Napa Valley Writers' Conference, St. Helena, CA – July 24-29, 2011 www.napawritersconf.org

Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, Fort Bragg, CA – July 28-30, 2011 www.mcwc.org

August 2011

Pacific Northwest Writers Association Summer Conference, Bellevue, WA – Aug. 4-7, 2011 www.pnwa.org

Willamette Writers Conference, Portland, OR – Aug. 5-7, 2011 www.williamettewriters.com

Write by the Sea, Star Island, NH – Aug. 6-13, 2011 www.joycemaynard.com

Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Middlebury, VT – Aug. 10-20, 2011 www.middlebury.edu/blwc

Book Passage Travel Writers Conference, Corte Madera, CA – Aug. 11-14, 2011 http://bookpassage.com/travel-food-photography-conference

Cape Cod Writers Center Conference, Cape Cod, MA – Aug. 14-19, 2011 www.capecodwriterscenter.com

Sun Valley Writers Conference, Sun Valley, ID – Aug. 19-22, 2011 www.svwc.com

September 2011

Southern California Writers Conference, Los Angeles – Sept. 23-25, 2011 www.writersconference.com

October 2011

Women Writing the West, Lynnwood, WA – Oct. 14-19, 2011 www.womenwritingthewest.org

Surrey International Writers Conference, Surrey/Vancouver, BC, Canada – Oct. 21-23, 2011 www.siwc.ca

2012 

San Diego State University Writers Conference, San Diego, CA – January 2012 www.ces.sdsu.edu/writers

Southern California Writers’ Conference, San Diego – Feb. 17-20, 2012 www.writersconference.com

Association of Writers and Writing Programs, Chicago, IL – Feb. 29-March 2, 2012 www.awpwriter.org/conference/2012awpconf.php

Desert Nights/Rising Stars Writers Conference, Arizona State University Piper Center, Phoeniz, AZ – March 12 http://www.asu.edu/piper/conference/

Las Vegas Writers Conference, Las Vegas – April 2012 www.lasvegaswritersconference.com

Lessons Learned

I’ve discovered some surprising things about doing a master’s degree at this point in my life, which is to say, mid-life. First, I have had to slow down – way down – to focus on it, and that has been a blessing. Second, as I’ve slowed down, it’s opened up space for considering questions like, What is life? and, Why am I here?, and, What lessons should I learn from events that happened to me as a child?, and, How can I apply them to my life today?, and, finally, How can I make my life be more about service to others?

This is the third month of my first six-month “project period.” I am in a low-residency program through Antioch University, Los Angeles, and each project period follows a 10-day residency. So, every June and December I go to L.A. for 10 days, during which all the MFA in creative writing faculty and students gather for lectures, seminars, readings and workshops. At the end of the residency, you are assigned a faculty mentor (you get to submit a first, second and third choice), whom you work with for the subsequent five months.

My mentor is Donald Morrill, associate dean of graduate and continuing studies and the Dana Professor of English at the University of Tampa in Florida. He’s the author of four nonfiction books and two collections of poetry. While there are three core faculty on the L.A. campus, the faculty mentors for this program come from all over the country, as do the students. The five other students in my mentee group are from Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Nebraska and Illinois.

Each week we all check into an online forum to encourage each other and to discuss books we are reading as a group. Each month I send 20 pages of new writing and two book annotations to my professor and he responds with suggestions and comments. I am getting so much out of this already, including the realization that, as daunting as it seems, writing 20 pages of new material each month is doable. (I say that now, but it’s only the third month.) When I go back to Los Angeles in June for my residency, I’ll have completed 100 pages of my memoir. Also, I love reading the books I am about the craft of writing, and I’ll share some of my thoughts about them here as well.

One other aspect of this program that I really like is the opportunity to “genre jump.” As a creative writing student, you are asked to declare an emphasis. So, since I am writing a memoir, I am a creative nonfiction student. But one can choose to do one of the four project periods in another genre (the other two are fiction and poetry). So, in June I will genre jump into poetry for six months. My goal is to perfect enough of my poems (I’ve been writing poetry steadily for the past five years or so), to put together a collection to submit to a literary publisher. Then I will return to the memoir for the remaining year of the program.

There are other requirements of the MFA, which I’ll blog about next week. Meanwhile, you keep writing, and I’ll do the same.