As promised below, I'm posting here the notes from the inaugural Solstice Summer Writers Workshop in June, 2005, which, IMHO, offer fine advice to writers of all stripes, online, offline, even those antiquarians who still write by hand.
From the original Endless Knots, posted June 21, 2005:
Two more morning sessions worth reporting, the one here from the opening day. I was apprehensive about the mornings. Generally, panel sessions at conferences, not only ones for writers, tend to be deadly. I’ve been on my share of bad ones, the worst of which was with the founder of one of the handheld device companies. With only three of us there to entertain the crowd, his behavior was rather distracting, seeing how he spent the whole session with his head down, thumbing away on this little “CrackBerry,” raising his eyes occasionally to make a comment, then bending his head back down to return to his finger work.
Not so with my friends at Solstice. The day’s line-up comprised the teachers for the first half of the workshop—two poets (Terrance Haynes and Dzvinia Orlowsky), a non-fiction writer (Michael Steinberg), and four (principally) fiction writers (Manette Ansay, Dennis Lehane, Roland Merullo (see below), and Lee Hope, who also served as the moderator). This was our chance as students to get a feeling for who these people were and, appealing to me, they chose a topic that I’ve spent the better part of my life thinking about, albeit in a different domain: crossing boundaries. In this case, the borders were the genres of these adepts—fiction, non-fiction, and poetry; in my world, the barriers are “space, time, and organizations.”
I didn’t take verbatim notes, thus no true reportage. Largely, the topic was about truth in writing, causing some debate. Here then are the panelists’ gems, as perceived by this ever-striving-toward-truth-scribe, preceded by the speaker’s initials.
DL: A paragraph can be a poem, a chapter a short story. “Fiction is not about truth; it’s about emotional truth. I have no respect for truth; that’s why I became a writer.”
MS: Personal essays came more easily; the genre chose me. In memoir, characters have to be fully rounded…”From plays, I learned how to do dialogue.”
MA: I like what Anne Sexton said: “It was all true when I wrote it.” “We all do write in multiple genres, which creates more doors inside our windowless rooms…I try to choose the right vehicle for that emotional truth. If you get so fixated on that one door, look behind you. There are many doors, many windows…be open to them.”
Many sighs in the room.
RM: “We as writers choose words” as our vehicles for expression…”Some people choose painting, some child rearing, others surgery…Truth is not an ambiguous word in non-fiction…that’s the only rule in writing.”
DO: “I’m a fiction writer trapped in a poet’s body…Poems erupt from pages of a short story…I spent five years translating the work of a Ukrainian filmmaker…I suggest getting seeped in another language as a spur to your own writing…there’s always a balance between the lyric and the narrative…What happens with a poem where less is less, or when it’s too discursive?”
MA: “I’m a hopeless OCD and a novel is the one vehicle large enough to hold all my neuroses…even the things that are not so great.”
Much laughter.
RM: When I couldn’t get anything published, my mentor reminded me that “some people are sprinters and some are long-distance runners.”
DL: I spent 10 years as a short-story writer. My friends who knew me then still can’t believe I’m a novelist. My gift is for the epic but I’m terrible writing about my own life, which I do best obliquely. “I’m a writer. I sit in a room. Someone says, ‘How’s it going?’ ‘Same as last year. Bought a new pen.’”
More laughter followed by a question about the challenges of translating.
DO: Indeed. Take the term “dark eyes” in Ukrainian. It’s similar to the Eskimo term for “snow” with its many nuances. These special usages are very difficult to render in English.
TH: I need to get the sound first, “the rhythm of your heart…My obsession is redundancy, repitition.”
DL: Has anyone read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell? I recommend it to everyone because of its reliance on the importance of intuition.
A question about how to guard against situations you write about in fiction from actually transpiring. (A touch of omnipotence, perhaps, in the question?)
RM: “I developed a character who was an arsonist in one of my books based on a guy my father hated. Years later, I went bird watching in Northern New Hampshire. An older woman from my hometown was on the trip; we got into conversation; the guy’s name came up; and she told me this person I’d written about in fiction was in fact a paid arsonist!”
Then ensued a lengthy back-and-forth after a question about the role of lying and the necessity to tell the truth in memoir, causing references to Lauren Slater’s book, Lying and to the poet Stephen Dunn’s piece (?), “Truth and Artifice.” The panellists didn’t agree, things got quite lively, and the time was up.
