Sundress Publications Seeking Outstanding Non-Featured AWP Panels

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Sundress Publications is excited to announce that we will continue our tradition of hosting roundtables on our official blog, featuring some of the amazing AWP panels that will not be appearing at AWP 2019. If your panel did not make the final cut this year, you’ll still be able to bring your topic to the web!

Now more than ever, your voices are necessary. We know that many important discussions won’t make it to Portland next year. That’s why we want to make them accessible and build an archive of diverse, engaging voices. We’re looking for topics that are driven by passion, inclusivity, forward-thinking, collaboration, and hybridity; all things fresh and unexpected. Let’s have more conversations – the world needs them.

Past panels posted to our blog include a wide variety of topics including using a reporter’s techniques for fiction writing, a fresh look at the cultural conversations started by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and women at war. You can see some of our previous conversations at https://sundressblog.com/tag/awp/.

Do you have an excellent submission that didn’t make the final cut for 2019? Please send us your proposal for consideration at submit@sundresspublications.com. Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis. Multiple submissions and simultaneous submissions are acceptable. Please include the names of all of your contributors within your submission.

Sundress Publications Seeks Outstanding Non-Featured 2018 AWP Panels

 

Sundress Publications is excited to continue the tradition of celebrating non-featured AWP panels on our blog in 2018. We know that there are dozens of worthy and important panel proposals that weren’t accepted for AWP in Florida next spring, so let us be your platform instead!

Do you have an excellent AWP panel that didn’t make the final cut for 2018? Please send your proposal to us for consideration at sundresspublications@gmail.com. Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis. Multiple submissions and simultaneous submissions are acceptable. Please include the names of all of your contributors within your submission.

We want to host your panel as an online roundtable in order to present them to an expansive audience and create an archive for your necessary voices. We’re looking for topics that are driven by passion, inclusivity, forward-thinking, collaboration, and hybridity. (In fact, you tell us what we’re looking for; bring us something completely fresh and unexpected!) We look forward to hearing from you and your colleagues.

Feel free to check out our wonderful 2017 AWP roundtables here.

2016 AWP Roundtable 6: Manuscript Masseuses and Book Midwives – Shop Talk for Coaches, Aspiring Coaches, and the Writers Who Need Them

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Welcome to our first Sundress Roundtable, a celebration of exceptional, not-so-lost AWP panels which did not make the AWP final cut for 2016.

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2016 AWP Roundtable #6: Manuscript Masseuses and Book Midwives – Shop Talk for Coaches, Aspiring Coaches, and the Writers Who Need Them

When a crit group just isn’t enough and you need a professional eye, how do you get expert help without breaking the bank? If you love the idea of working directly with writers, how can you set yourself up as a coach?

In this roundtable, experienced writer-coaches Kristy Lin Billuni, Linda González, and Minal Hajratwala share tips and tricks for building a thriving business, choosing the best coach for yourself, and guiding writers past their blocks and on a path to success.

 

What do writing coaches do? Do you call yourself a coach, teacher, tutor, or what?

Linda González: Coaches assist writers to expand their mental and emotional capacity to live a writer’s life. I help writers understand how their writing fits into their overall lives and then find achievable, heart-driven goals that include both the actual writing and the marketing aspect. Since I coach mostly women and people of color, I connect their platform building to a bigger vision of equity and paying it forward – they easily see that and move to a place of seeing their writing as empowering themselves and others.

Kristy Lin Billuni: I like the word “teacher,” and use it, but I never correct writers or clients when they use other, similar words for me: coach, collaborator, tutor, book-therapist, and many more. I am all these things at different moments in the work, and part of my skill, I think, is being able to understand what the writer and the project need and then filling in that role.

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What does your coaching practice have to do with your own writing?

Minal Hajratwala: Coaching pushes me to be in touch deeply with what I’ve learned over twenty-five years of writing. And I also get to learn continuously, which is fantastic for someone like me working outside the academy. My clients “teach” me things all the time, from new software they’re using to books they recommend to the latest publishing trends they’ve heard about in their genres. Often, in giving a client a suggestion or a writing prompt, I realize that I should try it myself, too. I love being in constant conversation with other writers about process, strategies, structure, narrative issues, sources — all the many complex aspects of creative work.

I have so much compassion for “my” writers as they engage in the valiant struggle — which reminds me to turn that same compassion toward myself, when I might otherwise be tempted to beat myself up about my own work, pace, or process. I only work with people when I feel there’s a good fit, so my clients also come from or become part of my wider writing community. We’re all in it together, ultimately.

Kristy Lin Billuni
Kristy Lin Billuni

What were you doing before you started coaching? How did it prepare you? What made you decide to start coaching writers?

Linda González: I was and still work at times as a facilitative consultant and trainer with organizations seeking to increase their capacity to work collaboratively with a focus on equity. It prepared me because I bring a systems approach to my coaching – seeing a writer in the midst of their own systems (work, family, etc.) – and assisting them to integrate writing as a non-negotiable practice that is their gift to the world.

Kristy Lin Billuni: I started out editing novels for a larger editing company. Some of my editing clients needed bigger-picture support, so, with my boss’s permission, I started freelancing with coaching services for those few clients. Before I knew it, I was doing a lot more coaching than editing, and I was able to launch something on my own. I took a business class for women entrepreneurs, which really helped me take myself and my business more seriously.

When I moved to a new home, a loft in the SoMa district of San Francisco, my clients responded positively to the new space. It’s really true what they say about location being a key to business success. There’s something that feels good to my writer clients about coming to work with me in my “artist loft” in a city and neighborhood associated with creativity.

That’s when I began blogging as the Sexy Grammarian. At first, it was just an experiment to see if I could bring more of my own identity to the work and to see if social media might be a good way to market. Very quickly, I found it was an ideal brand for me in many ways. It drew more of the types of writers I loved closer to me, and it repelled writers who were not a good fit. My client stream shifted dramatically from 100% referral to 50% referral and 50% social media.

I came to teaching through the sexual health education world. So, teaching sex is really what qualifies me to be a teacher. Being a writer myself is probably my greatest qualification for teaching writing specifically. I do have a good, natural editor’s eye, but I really see myself as being an equal to my clients in terms of writing skill, not an authority, necessarily. I think being a writer who sometimes succeeds and sometimes struggles makes me a very good collaborator and teacher for other writers.

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What’s the best thing about being a writing coach? What’s the hardest thing about being a writing coach?

Linda González: The best thing is seeing people shift from a scarcity mentality to one of abundance – seeing their writing life as a long-term process with small steps each day to achieve their goals. I also love to see writers embrace their authenticity and stop – or at least minimize – comparing themselves to others.

When I look out into the writing world and see my writers being published and following their unique paths, that reminds me our work changes individual lives that make a greater impact in the world. The hardest thing is to see how deep some of our limiting beliefs are about our ability to speak out truth in a world that still does not value the arts and even less values women and people of color.

It is also hard to see people decide to spend money on items or experiences that will not support them as much as coaching. It is a powerful choice to be coached and requires a solid belief that you can make your goals a reality.

Minal Hajratwala
Minal Hajratwala

What kinds of questions should a writer ask when considering a coach?

Linda González: Having been a coach for over 15 years and having had 4 coaches myself (3 focused on moving my writing forward), I suggest a writer get clear on pricing, working agreements (e.g. payment, session options in terms of time and spacing, cancellations, expectations), and coaching philosophy. My own philosophy, for example, is based on client-driven goals, multiculturalism, spiritual principles, and life experiences.

More than asking questions, I would suggest a writer ask for a sample coaching consultation to get a feel for how that coach works and if their style will help them resolve the issues they have been unable to solve with their other resources. These sessions are typically offered by coaches and range from 15 minutes to an hour.

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Do you offer any freebies for writers to get to know you?

Minal Hajratwala: Yes, I offer a free 30-minute initial consultation, and I have a free PDF of writing prompts to help people get started.

Kristy Lin Billuni: I offer every writer I meet a free 1-hour session. This has turned out to be an amazing marketing tool. I find I get close to 100% of writers who show up for the free session to agree to more paid sessions with me. It feels good to know that if I can get a writer to see and experience what I do, I can get that writer’s business.

I also just launched a free ebook on my site. And really, my site is full of free content for writers too.

It’s important to have good boundaries as an entrepreneur starting out, to not give away too much of your value for free. By having a few things that I clearly give away for free, I always have an answer to requests for discounts or freebies, and that makes it easier to draw a boundary. I’m currently using the free ebook to teach myself some best practices for selling ebooks, and I am learning a lot with that process.

Linda González
Linda González

What is your pricing structure? Has it changed? What works/ doesn’t work about it?

Kristy Lin Billuni: I charge $150 for a 1-hour session, and I’ll read up to 10 pages of content to prepare for that session if the client wants that. I mostly work in series packages of 4-12 sessions, with the price-per-session getting lower the more sessions the writer commits to. At the 12-session level, the cost goes as low at $108/session. All you have to do to get the package discounts is sign a contract, make a deposit of any size, and pay the balance by the last session. I have no requirements on time lapse, so some clients will race through 12 sessions in a quarter, and others will savor a 4-session package for an entire year. I have no cancellation or rescheduling fees.

My clients love this structure. It feels flexible and generous to them. It does make it difficult for me to predict cash flow.

I’ve recently received feedback from a trusted business coach that I should totally upend this structure and create something more strict, more like a gym model. I’m putting a lot of thought into this idea.

Minal Hajratwala: Pricing is always a work in progress, I think. My structure is similar for 1:1 coaching, partly because Kristy was my role model! I do try to give myself a $5 an hour raise every year or two on my birthday.

I also have “Manuscript Massage” (developmental editing) rates as well as several online courses for writers that I offer at different price points, from $66 to $615. I started teaching my own courses online several years ago, when I moved out of the U.S. The classes have been a fantastic way to work with writers at a lot of different financial access levels and across geographies.

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What advice would you give to a writer who’s ready to start coaching other writers?

Minal Hajratwala: If you want to be a coach, take the plunge! What do you have to lose?

But first, a caution: Make sure you’re doing it because you love working with writers on their writing. Maybe you’re adjuncting and your favorite part is the one-on-one conferences that you’re spending too much time on for too little money? Maybe you’ve been frustrated by peer groups and workshops because you’re always the one with the best advice? Maybe you’re getting requests to “pick your brain,” and you’d love to help, but not for free? Or maybe you feel passionate about the need to help a certain kind of writer or story get out in the world?

Those are all good reasons to try your hand at coaching.

The one bad reason: “I need to make money fast.”

Coaching is not the fast track to money. There is money in it, but money must not be the only reason you’re in it — or you’ll be a terrible coach, do more harm to writers than good, and burn out fast.

Ok, here’s what I’d suggest if you want to dip your toe in:

1. Write up a simple sales page on your website (if you don’t have one, set up an easy free one) that really sells your approach, background, credentials, testimonials if you have them, etc. If you have a particular expertise or niche, mention that; it’s not mandatory, though.

2. Do your research, look at what coaches with comparable experience are charging, and come up with an hourly rate that seems competitive. I personally am a fan of posting rates on my website, because it saves me time in answering queries and recalculating estimates every time, but people vary on that.

3. Set a launch date and create a launch offer. Make the intro deal really juicy and irresistible, like 2- sessions-for-the-price-of-1. (This, by the way, is better than 50% off. You want to work with folks who CAN afford your rate but need a chance to get to know you.)

4. Then turn your sales page into a short email that goes to every! single! person! you know. It doesn’t need to be fancy; you’re a word person, not a graphic designer. Tell them you’re starting up as a coach and they get a discount if they book their editing time by X date, and they can use those hours anytime in the next X months. Include your Paypal info and (sweetly) make it clear that booking a session = paying in advance. In this email, also encourage them to forward / gift / share the deal.

5. During your launch period, spend time in relevant groups being genuinely helpful to writers, without being salesy. Post links to your sales page all over your social media profiles. Bonus if you figure out how to add a cute kitten, cartoon, or meme that will make people share your info.

6. Then see what happens. If you get even one or two clients from this process, you’re in business. Study your success, learn from your failures, take a small business class to learn as much as you can about the path you’re on, and keep going!


Linda González is on the roster of coaches used by LeaderSpring’s Executive Coaching Project and Windcall Residency Program. She has been a featured writer at literary events and fundraisers, has published essays in numerous journals and in three anthologies, and is an active member of Las Comadres para las Americas and Toastmasters. She received her MFA from Goddard College, her BA from Stanford University, and her MSW from the University of Southern California. Her purpose is to work with multicultural wisdom and inspire people of color to embark on a creative journey of balance and healing for this and future generations. www.lindagonzalez.net

Minal Hajratwala is a writing coach, author of the award-winning nonfiction epic Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (2009), and editor of the groundbreaking anthology Out! Stories from the New Queer India (2013). Her latest book is Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment (2014), published by the (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship model press of which she is a co-founder. She graduated from Stanford University, was a fellow at Columbia University, and was a 2011 Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar. She is passionate about helping writers unpack internalized oppression and give voice to untold stories. minalhajratwala.com

Kristy Lin Billuni, AKA The Sexy Grammarian is a teacher and a writer. Since 2003, she has coached, tutored, supported, and collaborated with hundreds of writers. Before she edited her first novel, she hustled several very sexy jobs. As her editing business grew, she sensed parallels in her teaching work and her sexy roots. She embraced the idea and called it Sexy Grammar. Cleis Press just published a chapter of her novel, Turning Out, as a short in the collection Bondage Bites. Cosmo recently profiled her story in their “Sex Work” column.

2016 AWP Roundtable 4: Little Lies/Little Truths: At the Intersection of Lyric and Narrative

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Welcome to our first Sundress Roundtable, a celebration of exceptional, not-so-lost AWP panels which did not make the AWP final cut for 2016.

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Three practitioners of the brief lyric narrative share insights about keeping their work short AND fully realized. A lively discussion moderated by Ilyse Kusnetz will take place about how the panelist authors identify primarily with a single genre (fiction or poetry), yet also choose to write and edit short work that straddles forms. Panelists will explore how current publishing embraces not-so-easily-categorized pieces. The session concludes with attendees writing postcard stories.

Alright, fellow poets, fiction, and non-fiction writers (or combo of all three!), we’re going to treat this panel as if we’re sitting around a table, sharing our lively thoughts and reading our work to each other in short snippets.

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Can you please tell me what you think constitutes “a brief lyric narrative” as we called it in our panel proposal? Some writers use the term “short-short” or state their work is prose poetry. Nowadays, the term “flash” is pretty flashy.

Sarah Freligh: I recently reviewed the new anthology Flash Fiction International for Brevity and found it interesting that aside from a few mentions of “fiction” in their Introduction, the editors refer to the selected pieces as “flash,” a reluctance on their part perhaps to corral these works into the small pen of a specific genre. The suggestion then is that “flash” transcends genre, that the best works are hybrids combining craft aspects of both prose and poetry, i.e. the narrative urge of prose with the lyric economy of poetry.

A prose poem, however, is not tied to conflict, time, and consequence the way a story is; the prose poem instead owes its allegiance to aspects of poetic craft, most especially sonic devices. While some prose poems ARE stories (I’m thinking here of Carolyn Forche’s “The Colonel”), most are not bound by the cause/effect of narrative and its insistence on conflict as both ignition and fuel.

Cate McGowan: A brief lyric narrative tells me a story with such lovely imagery and compressed metric language that I can divide it into lines and sell it as a poem. That’s when I know I have something.

Yes, Sarah! Note my short answer above versus your lovely explanation? I think both are relevant, but which answer do I prefer? Well, of course, yours. But note that many times I can’t take a poem and make it into a story. The way you describe poetry versus flash fiction captures the struggle I am currently having. Last week, I sent in two stories to a flash fiction journal. One was a poem on which I’d removed the line breaks. The other began its life as a story. Which one do you think was accepted? The story. Of course, I promptly changed the converted poem back to a “real” poem with line breaks and stanzas. The darn thing had no conflict, but aurally it has substance and the cause and effect to which you refer.

Sarah Freligh: Yes, an ear for the cadence and sound of language, definitely. Perhaps the shorter the piece, the more important language becomes?

Karen Craigo: I absolutely agree—with brevity, every morpheme or phoneme becomes essential. There is no room to mess around.

Sarah
Sarah Freligh

Please share a very short piece of your own. This might be a few paragraphs or a stanza (or a complete story or poem) that you think exemplifies a fully realized world or concept. It might be a work-in-progress or a published piece, whatever speaks to our theme of crossing genres in fewer words.

Karen Craigo: “Working the Retriever”

This machine we called the Retriever operated on belts. It was always moving, brought metal bins from the sub-basement, a giant room, though I never once saw it, but sent maintenance there ten times a night: a bin offline or upended, gumming up the works, patient charts scattered among the gears. I was a clerk then, six bucks an hour, good money for a summer gig that was mainly easy, if dull. When all went well, I stuck lab reports or X-rays in the record, one folder, one bin at a time. I was alone at my machine, plenty of downtime to view platelet counts or photos of kidney stones, or to note the penned-in tumor on the diagram of a breast. But sometimes, a crisis: a patient in the ER, unresponsive on the table, unspecified cause of morbidity. I had to act fast, find the chart with the allergy, the condition, the med that contradicts, and haste meant everything. Once or twice a doctor shadowed my chair, both of us rigid and listening to the old motor strain. But the Retriever kept its own time, and somewhere deep below it made a grab, haphazard, and lurched the data skyward. Finally, there on the conveyor, the bin, its fifty records, among them the one with the answer or with none, filed, one hoped, correctly, all the info laid out with care, anchored in place by a little piece of tape.

Sarah Freligh: “We Smoke” was the winner of the 2015 Sycamore Review Flash Contest, but it’s also included in my book of poetry. Like any story should, it introduces a conflict up front: the mysterious “we” (and we read on to learn their identities) are smoking in defiance of the nuns’ edict that they not do so. The act of smoking, too—I hope—becomes more significant when we learn that “we” are pregnant, unmarried young women and are carrying children that they will give up for adoption at birth. Smoking, then, is both defiant AND a denial as well as a way to cement their community. They smoke as a way to ignore Ruby the Waitress who in effect sides with the nuns that giving up their children is a good thing. They smoke in the bathroom at night at the Mercy Home for Unwed Mothers, the only place where they take ownership of—however temporarily—the children they’re carrying. In the end, they smoke as a way to avoid the inevitable. So the repetend of “We smoke” provides unity in the manner of a prose poem, but also moves the narrative forward in a (I hope) story-like way, an arc if you will. “We Smoke”:

We smoke because the nuns say we shouldn’t—he-man Marlboros or Salems, slender and meadow fresh, over cups of thin coffee at the Bridge Diner. We fill an ashtray in an hour easy while Ruby the waitress marries ketchups and tells us horror stories about how her first labor went on for fifty-two hours until her boy was yanked out of her butt first and now she has this theory that kids who come out like that got their brains in their asses from Day One. She says we’re smart to give our babies away to some Barbie and Ken couple with a house and a yard with real grass and a swing set, and we nod like we agree with her and smoke some more.

Nights we huddle up under the bathroom window in the Mercy Home for Unwed Mothers and blow smoke at the stained sky while we swap stories about our babies doing handstands on our bladders, playing volleyball with our hearts, how our sons will be presidents or astronauts, and our daughters will be beautiful and chaste, and because we know our babies are not ours at all, we talk about everything and nothing while we watch a moth bang up against the light and smoke some more.

Cate McGowan: Here’s a recent short piece: “Waiting for the Northbound Trolley”

Wearing silt-stained slacks and smelling like a Saturday of swabbing decks, I stand on the sidewalk sipping my Colt. I roll up my sleeves, hair on my arms prickling in the ocean breeze, and gaze at the asphalt pinkened by a neon marquee. Venus, blue and fecund, winks and flirts high on the horizon.

At 11:42, the trolley hisses to a stop, late as always, and Miss Emmie Travis hops off, carrying a knapsack bulging with sodas and romance novels; she shuffles by me, head down, slow to begin her weekend cleaning. She staggers toward the hotel, then disappears into the parking lot. And like a lonely bugle reveille, her arrival sends me bumbling back to the ABC to buy another 40 just so I can hear the cashier girl say, “Wait. Don’t you want your change?”

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Does your piece include little lies or little truths? A combination? (Remember, that was our panel title!)

Karen Craigo: Mine is very truthful, actually, or tries to be. Maybe I’m overstating the heroism of the medical records clerk a little—my job was seldom truly vital, almost never life-or-death, and my dealings with doctors were infrequent, to say the least. Looking it over, though, I’m struck by the almost journalistic accuracy of the thing. This was a weird, hard-to-describe piece of equipment, but by damn, I did my best.

Sarah Freligh: I like how “The Retriever” becomes a realized character through action and description.

Both little lies and little truths. I’m not saying what’s what and where!

Cate McGowan: There is no truth here, except forbidden love has driven me to drink! Really, though, in my own life, I would reckon that longing is the most painful experience a person can have. It comes in many guises: longing for lost love; longing for dead or dying relatives, spouses; longing and regret for lost opportunities. The possibility that I could have been different, could have chosen a different path at every junction haunts me. So I guess that piece is indeed a little truth, a little lie. The speaker feels such love for Miss Emmie, and yet… yet… he/she is invisible to all but the cashier. I have been in that place, for sure.

Wow. I don’t care if Karen’s or Sarah’s pieces are truth or lies. They are beautiful. One thing I note was their repetends and phrases (and Sarah points hers out, too—thanks!). And I think someone who wants to write flash needs to know those are mighty weapons in the arsenal. Karen and Sarah do that and more.

And Karen, I don’t think you are overstating the heroism of the clerk. This heroism takes the guise of patience. More than anything you are showing us that everything matters, even the (note the proper noun) Retriever, whose godlike mechanized slow-motion reminds us of how life and the world continues to move one second at a time, no faster, no slower, no matter how much we want it to operate differently. And life ends in death. I felt like I was watching a methodical angel of death.

Sarah, what can I say? That first-person plural narrator is indeed rebellious in revealing its truths. But also, the anaphora is brilliant, relying on aural effects just as poetry does. But the repetition does something else, too. By repeating over and over that they smoke, they are just pregnant girls who are trying to justify their actions and loss, make sense of how they are stuck in this awful place. The more they tell me the reasons they smoke, the less I am inclined to believe their brazen flippancy.

Sarah Freligh: Yeah, that’s the arc I was hoping for, that with each repetition “We smoke” and the revelations that follow, the reader is closer to the “truth” of these girls, closer to understanding their motivation. So maybe that’s another aspect of flash fiction, that because these pieces are just that – pieces of a longer narrative — the narrative is filled in by the reader who, by seeing the larger picture, understands more than the character can. Or will.

Karen Craigo: Geesh, I’m with the right people! Love these pieces and your explanations of them. My own understanding of flash is expanding as we write this!

Karen
Karen Craigo

Can you explain how or why when you wrote this work that you felt the need to compress it?

Karen Craigo: This is actually part of a series of poems on the topic of work and money, and just as “The Retriever” refused to do its job faithfully in real life, it also refused to fall in place as a poem. In a practical sense, a prose piece breaks up the lineated poems nicely—but I don’t consider this a poem at all. I think it feels very much like a short essay. I will say that avoiding line breaks seemed like a concrete poetry move to me—this was a conveyor belt that was constantly moving (until it broke), and thus one line or one sentence dissolves into the next without any indication—just like that belt went by me for so many summer midnight shifts, the only thing in the room for me to look at.

Sarah Freligh: Work and money, so topical. And yet few poets seem to address this anymore, the gigantic elephant in the room that unites all of us, regardless to color, ethnicity, age or gender.

Would enjambed lines create a similar forward motion, conveyor belt sensation?

“We Smoke” started as a poem. There was a stanzaic arrangement and lineation that felt as if it was working against the voice of the speaker/narrator. The form essentially was throttling possibility. Once I freed it from the imposition of form, the voice began to move into the driver’s seat and a multitude of voices emerged. There’s the nuns who appear as hearsay, “say we shouldn’t” smoke. There’s Ruby the waitress with her own two-cents worth of indirect dialogue and there is the “we” and what they’re telling each other in the bathroom at night when they smoke. In the end, what they don’t say is loudest of all, lingering in the air like the smoke must have. That voice thing, I don’t think that would have happened if I’d been occupied with line breaks and sound rather than voice.

Cate McGowan: Well honestly, the more I write, the shorter and more dense my work has become. I find my published work, including most of the stories in my recently published collection, bloated. My instinct is to cut it all down to the bare minimum, to the essence of emotion. As Chekhov once wrote to Gorky, “[S]hun all descriptions of the characters’ spiritual state. You must try to have that state emerge clearly from their actions. Don’t try for too many characters. The center of gravity should reside in two: he and she.”

Mine started out as poem, and it’s been in my discard pile for years, but it has conflict or a complication, something a story needs, something we have all said here. “Waiting” is not nearly as finished as Sarah’s and Karen’s pieces, so who knows what will happen to it? I may expand it. Or I might revert it back to a poem.

Karen’s piece does feel concrete. Her use of phrase after phrase, those long sentences that make me breathless by the time I get to the end, the slow, methodical trail of words, really all mimic the Retriever. Wow, yes, I get that!

Sarah, it’s the voices that get me every time. They usually control my own work. My narrators and characters speak to me and keep me up at night.

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Do you have any tips for those who are interested in trying this concentrating and combining in their work?

Karen Craigo: I don’t think you can choose just any topic for the brief lyric narrative form. So many topics call for details and development. A short piece needs to be contained, pretty much, in a small space, and thus the form invites one to present an image, more or less, instead of a conventional story. I do best when something in the story is mimicked by brief prose, like this one which is an unbroken chunk of text. It is suggestive of the ever-rolling conveyor belt, and of the dense information found in a charge.

Sarah Freligh: Start with a first line that contains a conflict and a bit of mystery. There’s your flame. Now throw some dry wood on your small fire, i.e., complications. Compress time (a year in five sentences, say) or expand time (a minute’s worth of “real time” told in 250 words).
Once you’ve got your structure, what seems to you like a story, go back and examine each word. Your nouns should be vivid and specific, rather than vague and general, while your verbs should convey to the reader both the “what” of the action as well as the “how.” Why say “Sarah walked slowly into work” when you could say “Sarah trudged into work.” We get the slow walk, but we also understand Sarah’s attitude toward work. “Trudge” sounds exactly like what it is. I trudged into work too many days to count.

Finally, read it out loud for the sound of individual words as well as your syntax. Does it speed up where it should slow down, punch where it should soothe? Words do that. Phrases and sentences do that. Listen.

Cate McGowan: Yes, I cut unnecessary adverbs, adjectives, endings, and beginnings—these are all methods I learned from my buddy, Chekhov. I really obsess over each word, making sure it needs to be in a piece. As a way to improve or manipulate meaning, I creatively employ stanza or paragraph breaks, interesting punctuation, and half-scenes.

Sarah Freligh: Yes, Chekhov—one of Raymond Carver’s “instructors” and Carver was, like Hemingway, a master at omission. I recently re-read “The Lady and the Dog” and was amazed at the ending, the protagonist’s epiphany and how redemptive it was, in only 18 pages of text. Yet not a fall note in the story. That’s concision.

Cate McGowan: What Sarah and Karen say! Wow, you ladies are amazing. I also love using in medias res—starting in the middle and ending there. I avoid too much exposition. Ambiguity is necessary for any work to intrigue a reader, but it shouldn’t obfuscate meaning; it should expand it.

Cate
Cate McGowan

Have you ever felt limited by your primary genre? Does writing a shorter piece free you to explore other forms? Is there value in this? Can you explain?

Karen Craigo: My primary genre is poetry, although I’m very invested in nonfiction, too. For me, poetry is a rather honest genre, but it includes more artifice than prose does, at least when I wield it. The essay lets me get personal—lets me get honest. When you see “me” in a poem, it’s poem-me. The “I” that inhabits my essays, though—well, that’s I—me. Karen. K-Dawg, as my students call me. I go to the prose form when I’m at my most raw and honest. I almost can’t believe the personal details I’ve revealed in my prose—things that would be suggested by symbol or metaphor within the bounds of a poem, but that are full-on confessions in prose. This is not a function of length for me (although I seem to be incapable of writing long essays—far too taxing, I think).

I was a journalist for about a decade in one of my earlier incarnations. Maybe I’m constitutionally unable to be less than truthful in prose.

Sarah Freligh: I think writing short-short fiction has made me a better poet. Writing poetry has made me a better writer of fiction, short and long. I think War and Peace could be 1,000-plus pages, but also three paragraphs (Try it. I dare you).

Cate McGowan: Yes, yes, yes! I am now considering eschewing fiction and pursuing poetry. In fact, I’ve applied to a few programs. I started in poetry and always thought I stunk. Now that I have had my adventure in fiction, I am brave. I can finally pursue my heart’s desire. Writing poetry to me is more difficult than fiction. It may not be as time consuming, as I revise, revise, revise everything. And revising two stanzas is a little more freeing than revising a twenty-page story. However, the problem with poetry is that the poet has to turn the combination lock just the right way. A few turns to the right, then hit the spot, a few turns to the left, then the sweet spot again. If a poet misses the mark, the lock will not open. I have to get it right from the start. That’s terrifying. But also, yes, rewarding if I do find the right formula.

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In your experience, is the publishing industry open to this type of hybridization or the spanning of forms? Do you think it’s relevant to classify work as a specific type of genre or sub-genre? Or is it limiting? Can you provide examples of any experiences you’ve had publishing a short-short, crossover, or not-so-easily categorized work? Are there any publishing outlets you like that are taking chances with more experimental forms?

Karen Craigo: The publishing industry seems to like hybrid forms when it comes to short work. It can be a little trickier to publish a book of short prose, I think—no one is really asking to see those manuscripts, which may be even less marketable than poetry, if that’s possible.
If I can speak candidly beyond the publishing sphere, I could tell you about a major grant I won from a state arts council several years back. I was pushing up to the deadline, nothing was coming together, and then I remembered a friend who won a larger grant by submitting her fiction as nonfiction. (The state offered a major and a minor grant, $10,000 or $5,000, and she won the major grant.) Well, guess what? I took a bunch of poems, knocked out the line breaks in about ten minutes on Microsoft Word, put one to a page, and submitted the whole mess as creative nonfiction. Bang! Major award. Ten-thousand dollars for referring to de-lineated poems as essays. Very innovative, the judges said. It was nothing I hadn’t been doing for years, though, and consistently not winning anything with those pesky line breaks in place.

Sarah Freligh: I’ll pass on this one. I think those who are more published can answer this more succinctly.

Cate McGowan: No, the publishing industry wants what it wants. I have no clue what is acceptable any more. Readers should drive the market, but unfortunately, like everything else, the corporate heads make the decisions. The public is dumbed down as a result. Heck, change a setting and some names, and you have every mainstream novel out there. I tried to read Beckett the other day and could not believe how amazing it was. And I realized that few people would read him. Why use a fork and chew when someone spoon feeds you? There are indie publishers out there trying to get the public’s attention. Flash fiction has potential because, as everyone says, in this information age with the glut of images, ideas, and stories out there, we have to catch a reader’s attention quickly AND hold that attention. A 150-word story is better at capturing the average person’s gaze than maybe a Beckett novel. Though, I do love my Beckett!

I like the online flash fiction publishers and those that take chances. I’m thinking of the New Flash Fiction Review (disclaimer, I was just asked to edit for them). University publishers, such as mine, Moon City Press (Missouri State University), are looking for innovation. Thank goodness Moon City took a chance on me!

Sarah Freligh: The short prose form is immensely challenging for the reader, but if the writer is not experimenting for the sake of experimenting—“no tricks,” as Raymond Carver once said—then the short-short can contain the world of a novel with the gut punch of a poem. But so much is left to the silence and the white space, and that can be daunting for many readers who don’t pay close attention to the text. The short form commands attention, and sadly, reading attention has become fragmented and shortened.

Ilyse
Ilyse Kusnetz

For our grand finale, let’s do three things. First, provide a short prompt to help a writer produce a postcard story or poem. The final product should be no more than 75 words, let’s say. Then, and this is a dare, write your own responds to your prompt in thirty minutes or less. If you’re willing to get a little naked, include your rough draft here—try not to tweak it too much. Let’s keep these as close to first drafts as we can so that readers might see our own messy beginnings. Last, please comment a little about your process as you wrote and produced your postcard piece. (Please note that I am not the best at explaining my processes, and I’m not expecting a how-to). I think readers will be thrilled to read about our creation steps!

OPTION A: Sarah Freligh’s Prompt

I have a bunch of picture postcards featuring people doing people things. Postcards of Edward Hopper paintings (the people ones, not the landscapes) are good for this exercise as there’s a sense of mystery to them; we write to find out what that woman, wearing only her brown shoes, is doing sitting on a chair in front of an open window.
So the prompt is, draw a postcard from the pile, study it for a minute and then write a story in its entirety on the back of the card.

OPTION B: Generate your own prompt and write to it! Sky’s the limit!

Karen Craigo: I chose Option B, just because I don’t have a handy stack of postcards (although I love that prompt!). My thinking is this: short is good for the hard-to-say, like confessions or apologies or things you don’t dare to wish. Lyrical is good for hiding in plain sight—for obfuscating the life-truth while telling the absolute lyrical gospel. So here’s my prompt: Confess the worst thing in you, but restrict yourself to metaphor for the telling. (As an aside, I’d like to note that seventy-five words is only slightly more than no words.) “A Week Before Jack”

The toddler wants in the pumpkin, which he carries from room to room. Sometimes he’ll sit on the carpet, pull the stem, bite it, then turn to me and say, Open, Mom, open. But it’s not time to open the pumpkin. Give us eyes and we lose something—reason, will. We empty through the eyes, the mouth, the top of the head. It’s better this way, I tell him, but still he cries and pulls.

I have a habit of jumping the gun, not biding my time, and maybe I’ve passed it down in my genes. The pumpkin is my confession. This poem is dedicated to every soggy-centered cake I’ve ever eaten.

Sarah Freligh: I have a bunch of picture postcards featuring people doing people things. Postcards of Edward Hopper paintings (the people ones, not the landscapes) are good for this exercise as there’s a sense of mystery to them; we write to find out what that woman, wearing only her brown shoes, is doing sitting on a chair in front of an open window.
So the prompt is, draw a postcard from the pile, study it for a minute and then write a story in its entirety on the back of the card.

Here’s my attempt in 100 words, prompted by the picture postcard of a woman happily eating an ice cream cone: “Hot Out”

Aunt Fran sounded happier in Tucson than when she lived upstate. The sun was out often. AND NO SNOW! she wrote in loopy letters that cartwheeled across the page. The temperature was 98, but that was dry heat, no humidity.

Months went by and we didn’t hear anything. Then she wrote to say she was suffocating. God must be punishing her.

My father flew out and took care of it. All the burials and the questions: Had she been troubled? What kind of mother would drown her three kids?
The water was cold, my father said. It was hot out.

Cate McGowan: I went with Option A, Sarah Freligh’s prompt. I was inspired by the Edward Hopper painting, Automat. It took me about 15 minutes, not sure if it works, but here goes (funny, our titles are similar): “Look Out”

Pedestrians purled by in clumps. Over the snowy thoroughfare, the streetlights perched like long-necked shorebirds.

She worried. Yes, she’d given him the best blowjob he’d ever received. He’d said that. They sat in his car outside the mini-mart, and then she pushed him inside her.

“Need anything else?” The waitress dropped the check on the table and didn’t wait for an answer. Evie reached into her pocket, picked at the corner of his letter nestled in there; she knew what it said—no need to read it.

She slurped her tea, studied homeward bound commuters maelstromming outside on the sidewalk. She watched them the same way one might peer into a wildlife-filled aquarium.

I like this piece better now than the one I included in question 2, “Waiting on the Northbound Trolley.” As I said earlier, I like writing to a female/male tension and conflict (thank you, Anton!). OK, I went over a little, darn it. But isn’t writing flash about breaking some rules? Imagery is important to me, as is the richness of language, so I looked at the painting, and it is like the subject’s in a fishbowl, so I tried to use water descriptions or allusions. And Evie is the perfect name for a female, after all, Eve was the first female. In a later draft, I want to include that the woman is only wearing ONE glove, but that’s for a subsequent effort. I might play with the order of things here, too. It’s non-linear, but I like it!


Karen Craigo is the author of No More Milk, forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2016. She teaches writing in Springfield, Missouri.

Sarah Freligh is the author of Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Poetry Prize, and Sort of Gone, a book of poems that follows the rise and fall of a fictional pitcher named Al Stepansky, Her poems and short stories have appeared in many literary journals, including Sun Magazine, Sycamore Review, Rattle, Brevity, Cimarron Review, Third Coast, and have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac.” Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a poetry grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2006, and a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts in 1997.

Poet and journalist Ilyse Kusnetz (panel moderator) is the author of Small Hours (2014), winner of the T.S. Eliot prize from Truman State University Press and The Gravity of Falling (2006). She earned her MA in creative writing from Syracuse University and her PhD in contemporary feminist and post-colonial British literature from the University of Edinburgh. Her poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard ReviewThe Cincinnati ReviewCrazyhorseStone CanoeRattle, and other journals and anthologies. She teaches at Valencia College and is married to the poet Brian Turner.

Cate McGowan is the author of the story collection, True Places Never Are (Moon City Press, 2015), which won the 2014 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. A Georgia native whose flash been anthologized in W. W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International, she’s contributed fiction and poetry to many literary publications, including Glimmer TrainCrab Orchard Review, and the English fashion magazine, Tank. Cate’s been an editor for the Louisville Review and SFWP and an arts writer and essayist for national outlets. She’s currently the Senior Editor for New Flash Fiction Review. Named a top college professor on Rate My Professors.com, McGowan teaches writing in Florida.

Sundress AWP Roundtable 1: The MFA Years

sundress

Welcome to our first Sundress Roundtable, a celebration of exceptional, not-so-lost AWP panels which did not make the AWP final cut for 2016.

Our first roundtable is comprised of J.R. Dawson, Minda Honey, contributors, and Caitlin Neely, founder and editor, of The MFA Years, a blog which follows first and second year MFA candidates and explores their experiences.

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How has blogging for The MFA Years affected the way you perceive and experience the MFA?

J.R. Dawson: I guess that when I’m going through my program, I’m not just thinking about me. I feel like I’m thinking about the whole culture, my other friends in other programs, and those who may be interested in the program I’m in. It makes you see the whole picture instead of just going through school for your own benefit. The MFA culture is its own little world, and being able to blog about it for an audience means that I’m a part of that world. It also comes as a responsibility. I have to represent my program well and I have to be honest about uncomfortable things in my own life in order to do my job and give the reader a real tool to use. For example, I wrote about something really personal back in May, and it was so very uncomfortable, but it helped people who were in the same situation. It was good to see that by “walking through the fire” and being honest, I connected with readers.

Minda Honey: I would not say that blogging has affected my perception or overall experience. I used my blogging as a way to give potential MFAs an idea of what the experience is like rather than as a tool for me to explore the experience in real-time. Any writing to gain further understanding of my experience would likely occur in the months or years following my graduation from the program. So, I believe my experience to be fairly on par with what it would be like had I chosen not to blog about it.

Caitlin Neely: Before this, I was not an avid blogger. But I was also never good at keeping a diary as a kid. Blogging about my MFA has been great. It helps me process what I’ve done, accomplished, and how I’ve changed. It’s also helped me connect more to my program. They’ve shared a few of my posts on the UVA Facebook page and I’m glad they enjoy reading them!

What tips do you have for students who are interested in blogging about their own experiences?

JD: Don’t just write about you. People read blogs in order to connect and learn. Write about the larger scope of what is going on with you in your life. Thinking about your audience is what separates a blog from a diary.

Also, don’t try to be someone you aren’t. All of us wish we were as witty as Allie Brosh, few of us are. Just be you.

Finally, proofread. You are in a writing program. If you have a typo or a grammatical error, that looks bad for your program.

MH: Do it. The MFA Years recruits every year in the spring and you always have the option of blogging independently from your own corner of the Internet. Be honest about your experience and your feelings, but also be mindful of any limitations your department might have concerning this practice.

CN: Go for it! Blogging is a great way to think about your MFA in a new way and to chronicle your experiences. Plus, it keeps you writing even if you’re experiencing writer’s block in other aspects of your life (we all know that feel).

My big tip is to always remember the internet is forever. Even if you take a post down later on or edit something out, there still might be ways for others to access it. That’s why I give my blog drafts 24 hours to sink in. I don’t hit publish immediately after I’ve written something. And proofreading is just as important!

Are modern MFA programs doing an effective job of communicating to potential applicants via the internet (social media, program websites, etc)? In what ways can they use the internet as a way to advertise themselves?

JD: I think some are and some aren’t. I think people are still learning that this generation that is now entering college and graduate school thrive and survive on the internet. I think that program websites need to be spotless, and I know that when I was applying for MFA programs, sometimes I ran into schools where instructions were a little hard to follow and not specific enough. Having a professional, informative, clear website is really important to us. And using twitter to communicate is also really great.

But I also feel like perhaps there’s a gauche way to use the internet. If I saw a pop-up ad for a program or a Facebook ad, I’d probably give it a side-eye. Maybe getting creative with webinars, videos, that sort of thing? I would have loved to see more of that when I was applying.

MH: I believe that there is opportunity for programs to enhance their web and social media presence. I recall that during the application process that some websites were difficult to navigate or just felt light on overall content. This is actually a role or roles that could be turned over to their MFA candidates and become a chance to gain social media experience much in the same way that a program’s literary magazine gives candidates the opportunity to develop literary mag experience.

CN: Some programs are doing a great job and others are not. When I was applying to programs, I couldn’t believe the number of times I came across a program site that provided next to no information. I’m talking funding numbers weren’t even mentioned and some of them were programs I knew fully funded everyone. I’m not sure why these places aren’t shouting from the rooftops how awesome they are and how much money they provide.

Twitter, Facebook, and websites are all great ways for programs to advertise themselves. I agree with Minda. Social media is something that could be handed over to interested graduate candidates. And (self-promotion alert) The MFA Years is always happy to interview alumni and current MFA students about their program.


Minda HoneyMinda Honey was raised in the land of bourbon, basketball and horse racing—Louisville, Kentucky. She is a candidate in the MFA program at the University of California, Riverside, where she is working on her memoir, An Anthology of Assholes. Her writing can be found on Gawker and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She tends to her own little plot of the internet at www.mindahoney.com.

11655340_10101465223647081_1133941834_n (1)J.R. Dawson  is an MFA Popular Fiction candidate at Stonecoast. She holds an MS in Education and a BFA in Playwriting and English Literature. She is the founder of her alma mater’s Writer’s Guild and is past editor-in-chief of their literary journal. She has published plays, a short stories collection, and one really weird new age music demo that her parents made her release when she was fourteen. Dawson now keeps a blog, Ramblings of a Mad Woman, where she is currently attempting her Year of Writing Challenge. Follow her @j_r_dawson.

Caitlin NeelyCaitlin Neely is an MFA poetry candidate at the University of Virginia. Her work has been published in Sixth Finch, DIAGRAM, Thrush Poetry Journal, Devil’s Lake, and others. She is the founder of The MFA Years and the editor for Reservoir Journal.