Category: Writing

Summer Writing

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This summer I’m spending several hours a week in my imaginary worlds. More specifically, I’m reworking my dissertation (which is a collection of linked short stories). I’ve cut a few stories out, added four newer ones (of the dozen or so I’ve written in the last three years), and begun the process of revision. My university even graciously awarded me a generous grant to work on the project, and in late August, I’ll be sharing some of my work with the entire faculty (all 160+ of them).

I’m a big fan of short-story cycles, works in which the individual pieces can stand on their own, but when arranged with other stories become almost novelesque. Some of my favorite cycles are The Things They Carried, The Joy Luck Club, Love Medicine, The House on Mango Street, and Winesburg, Ohio. The older I get, the harder I find it to read long novels, and I’ve become much more of a short-story aficionado. The short-story cycle gives readers a complete narrative of, say, 15-20 pages (approximately). And then when you add up all of those smaller narratives, with their various threads, you have a book that might be 200+ pages, but has the depth of something seemingly longer. (That, at least, has been my experience.)

In my collection, recurring elements include characters, settings, themes, and chronology. With characters, for example, in one story an individual might be the protagonist, but in another story serve as a minor character. I’ve fleshed out three specific settings around which the stories revolve: my fictional town of Ellis, Minnesota, set in the southwest part of the state; a small college town in eastern South Dakota; and the area around Big Stone Lake (which is on the border between Minnesota and South Dakota, right where there’s a triangular bump). Google Maps has been my friend, helping me to imagine these communities. For the most part, the action in the stories takes place over the course of a year, with a good portion of the stories set in the fall (my favorite time of the year).

So far, I’ve made substantial revisions on two of the newer stories, and I’ve established a writing rhythm and routine (which can be difficult in a professor’s otherwise unstructured summer). I’ll share some more thoughts on this project as it progresses, perhaps even sharing an opening line or two.

Why I Write Poetry

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Note: this piece originally began 5 years ago, and I reworked it over the last summer.  Enjoy.

Poetry on the Northern Prairie

Bill Holm stood tall, probably six-foot-six. With a bulging stomach, white hair, and a white beard, he looked the part of Santa Claus. And his voice—deep and resonant to the point that any poem he read sounded great—made it impossible for me to fall asleep in his “Poetry” class. It was strictly a “literature” course, so there were daily readings from Donald Hall’s To Read a Poem (a textbook I still own), two exams, two explication papers, and two poem recitations given in front of the class.

All of this happened the fall of my junior year at Southwest Minnesota State University. On Monday and Wednesday afternoons from 3:30 to 4:45, I sat expectantly as Bill read aloud poems by poets I’d never heard of before: Wallace Stevens, Robert Bly, James Wright, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Frost (beyond “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “The Road Not Taken”), among many I could name.

I write these two statements unashamedly: he made poetry come alive; he made me into a poet.

*          *          *

The reading assignment for one class in early October had been Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” along with some other poems, none of which I remember. I followed the opening lines of the poem as Bill recited in his rich baritone, “Let us go, then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” He continued reading, but those opening lines knocked the wind out of me. Eliot’s simile seemed against the “rules” (due to my limited knowledge of and exposure to poetry). My awe left me only one thought: “Maybe I could try writing poetry again.”

At that point in time, I was searching. I was halfway through my program as a vocal music major with a recently added music education track. For the latter I possessed zero enthusiasm—the decision had been one encouraged by parents and my-then girlfriend.

Yet I had always enjoyed poetry—what little I’d read in my small high school English program. I had received A’s on my creative writing assignments in high school. And so during Bill’s class and after it was over, I scribbled lines, attempted to write poems, inspired as much by him and his readings as by the poems and poets themselves.

*          *          *

Four years later when I was enrolled in the MFA program at Minnesota State University Moorhead, Bill gave a reading at Zandbroz Variety in Fargo. I arrived early to the downtown storefront bookstore on a chilly mid-December night, hoping to talk to him. I was able to catch him before the reading, and I thanked him for his influence and his instruction. I told him about my pursuit of being a poet, a writer. Bill smiled and then laughed. “Well, now you’ve ruined your life,” he said.

After the reading he signed my copy of The Heart Can be Filled Anywhere, still my favorite book of his. In blue ink he wrote, “May this make you a little homesick for the southwest.” That was the last time I saw him.

*          *          *

Bill collapsed at the airport in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on February 24, 2009, and died the next day from complications due to pneumonia. He was 65. As a man who owned no computer or TV, he left behind a house full of books and music, including a dozen of his own, half of which I’ve read. More significant to me is my personal connection with him, and the way both he and the content of the class altered my career trajectory.

I wouldn’t have dropped the music education track that semester and added a second major: Literature/Creative Writing. I wouldn’t have completed an MFA. And I wouldn’t have gone on for a PhD with a specialization in Creative Writing if it hadn’t been for Bill’s instruction, his encouragement, and his own books that I read with great joy.

*          *          *

In the bottom drawer of my office’s filing cabinet, in the very back slot, is a blue hanging folder labelled “Pre-Workshop Poetry,” the phrase referring to poems I wrote before I took any undergraduate creative writing classes. In there are poems I drafted that fall. Here are a few lines from one of the attempts: “The sun has just gone down / and the western sky is orangish-red. / To the east it is already getting dark.”

Strangely, 16 years later, I can look in that small stack of poems I wrote while I was absorbing the work of so many great poets, and I see the motifs and subjects that many of my published poems contain: travel, the landscape, the rural areas, evening.

Bill taught me not to be ashamed of where I came from. He taught me that there was poetry in the prairies of Southwestern Minnesota. He taught me to love the region and the people themselves. And now, I can confidently draft, revise, and publish poems set and inspired by this region, offering no apologies, and desiring to give none.

I am, at heart, a prairie poet.

Writer Appreciation #2

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I suppose it was only a matter of time before I wrote something about this author; after all, he was the focus on one of my PhD written exams (where we examined the work of one author, as well as criticism and secondary readings on the author).

TIM O’BRIEN

My first encounter with O’Brien’s work occurred during a undergraduate summer course entitled, “The Short Story.” Our text was John Updike’s (at that point), newly released anthology, The Best American Short Stories of the 20th Century, a book I still own.  O’Brien’s story “The Things They Carried” was included, and I remember thinking as I read it that I’d never encountered a story such as that before.

Fast forward three years to a fiction workshop in my MFA program wherein we read his story “On the Rainy River.”  For those unfamiliar with his work, this story, and the previous one, are part of his short-story cycle The Things They Carried.  Later that semester I read that entire collection, but I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

I used these two stories in subsequent courses, but I’m not sure what prompted me to include the full cycle/book as the last text in a freshman composition course in which the main text was A World of Ideas, a book filled with classics of western civilization.  Nonetheless, I included O’Brien’s book in four successive quarters, and each time, I came to appreciate it more and more.  And the students responded in an overwhelmingly positive manner.  (I still remember the student who told me that he’d only read a couple books in his life but that he was going to read more work by O’Brien.)

Prior to starting my PhD, I read the rest of O’Brien’s books (there are 8 total), and so for me it wasn’t too difficult to decide to focus on him for the major author portion of my PhD exams.  My favorites (besides TTTC) are Going After Cacciato (which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1979), In the Lake of the Woods (1994), and If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973).

So what is it about his writing that I’m captured by?  Well, for one, his precision of detail.  To use the cliché, I’d state that he can paint a picture in words.  And since much of his subject matter touches on the Vietnam War in some capacity (with some scenes of actual fighting), this precision is key.  I’ve never been in armed conflict. I have no clue what it’s like to be fired at, what it’s like to know that someone (unseen) is trying to kill you.  But having read O’Brien, I have at least a glimpse of that reality.

His writing is also very rhythmic, and by that, I mean that his work reads well aloud, and that there is a masterful control of cadence, of sentence variety, that is pleasing to the ear.  I suppose that for me, my appreciation of his skill in this area stems from my own reading and writing of poetry.

His use of fantasy, of metafiction, of blurring lines—these things too draw me to his writing.

The way in which he makes you feel the emotions of his characters is masterfully done.  Case in point, I have read and taught “On the Rainy River” probably 3 dozen times.  That story, more than anything else of his I’ve read, speaks to me on so many levels.  The imagery, the urgency of the narrator, the dramatic stakes, those haunting closing lines: “I was coward. I went to the war.”

I’m excited to be teaching The Things They Carried again this semester, after having not assigned it in any class for several years.  I’m curious to see how the text has changed, how I’ve changed, and how my students will respond to this wonderful writer.