How Daniel Bowman Jr. Became a Writer

Here was some sense and some beauty in the midst of a life where everyone argued about money because no one had any, where the house and the car were always falling apart, where I was dropped off to chain-smoking babysitters who seemed to fulfill their obligations solely by ensuring that I did not die on their watches.

Daniel Bowman Jr.’s first book is A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country (VAC Press, 2012). His work has appeared in journals such as The Adirondack Review, American Poetry Journal, Art House America, Books and Culture, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (Hong Kong), Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey), The Midwest Quarterly, The Other Journal, Pyrta (India), Rio Grande Review, and Seneca Review. He lives in central Indiana where he teaches at Taylor University.

He can be found on the web at http://danielbowmanjr.com.

Read more by and about Dan:

Book: A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country
5 Poems: Art House America
More Poems: Pyrta

How Daniel Bowman Jr. Became a Writer

This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday (er, or so) until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to Dan for saying yes!

1. Why did you want to become a writer?

I’m one of those people who feels like I didn’t so much choose to be a writer as writing—as literature and the arts—chose me. I read a lot as a kid. Something about the worlds inside books seemed more real, more true to me than anything else. Here was some sense and some beauty in the midst of a life where everyone argued about money because no one had any, where the house and the car were always falling apart, where I was dropped off to chain-smoking babysitters who seemed to fulfill their obligations solely by ensuring that I did not die on their watches. I was a sensitive kid, and it was to me a hardscrabble childhood much of the time, and the best consolation came in the form of nature and books—being outside in every season, and reading. Years later, my impulse would be not just to read, but to write. At college, I took the Intro to Literature course and it seemed perfectly inevitable to me that I would live with books for the rest of my days.

I remember seeing an interview with Barbra Streisand once where she was asked if she had doubts that she would “make it” when she was young and trying to get her first break. And she said, essentially, “No, never. I knew I was born to do it, and that it would only be a matter of time. There was nothing else for me.” And I understood that there was not a bit of arrogance in her answer, only that sense of inevitability. I feel like that about writing. It’s nearly absurd for anyone to think that he or she will “make it” as a writer, however you define that, or if you bother with such notions at all (many of us do, I suspect, but pretend we don’t). I always just knew I had to do it or die trying. If I couldn’t write books, I couldn’t do anything.

2. How did you go about becoming a writer?

I read and read and read. When I got to college, with the upbringing I’d had and the choices I’d made, I saw that I was far behind. I wasn’t even the best poet on my own campus, a tiny liberal arts school. So I overcompensated, became obsessed. I read everything I could get my hands on. At Roberts Wesleyan, it was a very traditional program, so I studied Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, the Romantic poets and the Victorian novelists, and then one single course offered to seniors called “Contemporary Literature,” a thing you, for the most part, had to discover on your own if you were going to discover it at all.

The courses drawing on the canon were what I needed, but I also knew that I could not write like that, that people didn’t say things like, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.” I needed to find poems that I could emulate. I spent my time in the library and in the dusty little used books stores of Rochester, NY: Rick’s Recycled Books, Brownbag Bookshop, Greenwood Books…. I read and bought books more or less indiscriminately.

Rick's Recycled Books / Photo by Doug Manchee

Mary Oliver, when talking about learning to write, privileges reading above all. She says something like (in A Poetry Handbook, which I don’t have here in front of me), “If given the choice between reading and taking a poetry writing workshop, the young poet should almost always choose to read.” That was the path I took. Of course, I surrounded myself with people who were like-minded and could help.

3. Who helped you along the way, and how?

I remain close to several of my undergraduate professors. William Judson Decker taught literature and had an expertise in the Romantic poets. He also loved Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher and Anne Tyler and Frederick Buechner…he was a great reader and one of the most thoughtful teachers, and men, I’ve ever met. Though he was not a writer himself, his influence on me has been profound.

After an MA program, I was employed in the business world for five years, during which time I was publishing a lot of poetry and had become friends with Jack Leax, who was teaching at nearby Houghton College. Jack’s friendship and mentoring helped me to persist even when it seemed I wasn’t making any progress toward my goals.

I did the low-residency MFA program at Seattle Pacific University. Gregory Wolfe, our program director, is the editor of Image, a journal of “art, faith, and mystery.” The faculty included poets Jeanine Hathaway and Jeanne Murray Walker, and like every low-res program, they brought in many terrific guests. It was just the perfect place for me, the perfect opportunity to improve my craft and finally piece together the manuscript that would become my first book. Greg and the faculty of the SPU MFA gave me a place where, for the first time in my writing life, I felt at home. The friends I made in the program help me every day of my life; even just seeing a quick line from them lets me know I’m not alone.

4. Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?

As a poet, I’ve always been inspired by García Lorca—both his life and his work. He endured suffering in many forms, and also was very playful and wildly creative. Coming from an “old world” culture, Lorca valued what he ultimately would call “duende,” a kind of dark and powerful force he saw at work in authentic art. As he refined his thinking about duende, Lorca concluded that great art depends on a “vivid awareness of death,” a “connection with a nation’s soil,” and “an acknowledgment of the limitations of reason.” This paradigm has been extremely helpful to me. Lorca first saw the power in the place he came from, the people and traditions and art. I think I do the same thing.

Simone Weil urged us to “love the country of here below,” as “God saw fit that it should be difficult yet possible to love.” I am crazy about that idea, and I gravitate toward writers who have chosen to love places, writers who maintain a “connection with…soil,” with places that are difficult yet possible to love. To me, Lorca epitomizes that tradition; to grossly oversimplify, it became the lens through which he saw the world. His place informs his poetics. Wendell Berry is another example, though he is a writer who has stayed in his native place.

I come from a little Mohawk River town at the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, a beat up and forgotten piece of ground that is easy to dismiss. No one has written more eloquently about the Mohawk Valley than Richard Russo. The people in his upstate New York novels, those are my people, that’s my place, those are our stories. My family came to New York from the Palatinate region of Germany in the spring of 1710. That is three hundred years! So of course, like Lorca, like Russo, I’m haunted by that soil and those people, and I often write from and about that place, though I do not live there anymore.

5.     What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?

Ora et labora.

How Cila Warncke Became a Writer

It never occurred to me that I could be a writer.
Books were magic, after all.

Cila Warncke is an award-winning essayist and is currently writing her first non-fiction book. She worked as a journalist in London and Spain for 10 years, covering music, politics, travel, media, and culture. Her essays, criticism and reviews have been published in journals including Beatdom, Word Play, The Kelvingrove Review, Denali, and The Nervous Breakdown. A graduate of the University of Glasgow creative writing programme, she was shortlisted for the Harper-Wood Studentship and was published in the literary magazine From Glasgow To Saturn.

Visit her website: http://cilawarncke.com

Read more by and about Cila:

Essay: Word Play
Essays “Soul Work” and “Fighting Fear”: The Nervous Breakdown
Blog – Irresponsibility: http://irresponsibility.wordpress.com

How Cila Warncke Became a Writer

This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday (or so) until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to Cila for saying yes!

1.     Why did you want to become a writer?

I grew up in a former holiday cottage on the Oregon coast, with no TV, a handful of septuagenarian neighbours, and my kid brother for company. Home-schooled until age 12, books were my main source of information about the world. I don’t remember wanting to write stories, so much as wanting to live them. I wanted to be a cowboy (Wyatt Earp: U.S. Marshall), be a detective (Nancy Drew), or a veterinarian (All Creatures Great and Small), but the one character that bled into real life was a nosy little girl with a notebook – Harriet. I read Harriet the Spy when I was nine and promptly bought myself a notebook, its cover embossed with a western saddle. It was the first of dozens of spiral notebooks, cloth-bound journals and legal pads I filled over the next few years.

Shy to the point of paralysis, I substituted scribbling for social interaction and was secretly thrilled at writing’s power to discomfit. I fell afoul of teachers for writing during class, irritated my basketball coach for writing on the bench, angered my parents for writing instead of doing chores, and generally unnerved my classmates. Years later, I recognised myself in George Orwell’s self-portrait in Why I Write: “I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays…. I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued.”

There was a positive element to my impulse as well. Being immersed in words made me happy. Books were magical, and what kid doesn’t want to touch magic?

2.     How did you go about becoming a writer?

It never occurred to me that I could be a writer. Books were magic, after all. Most of my friends’ parents were doctors and being a doctor meant money, respect, and a nice house, so that was what I wanted to do. I started college as a chemistry major but drifted into English basically out of laziness. If I had more self-discipline I would probably be an unhappy MD. I started by writing columns and music reviews for the student paper, which alerted me to the possibility that writing could get me close to things that fascinated me. After graduating I moved to London to work for Q magazine. I did every kind of writing – editorial, features, news, blogs, essays, publicity, criticism, analysis, copywriting, reviews, travel guides, FAQs, but in my mind only books and poetry were “real” writing. I went freelance and moved from London to Ibiza. By some trick of the mind I convinced myself that even though I was making a living exclusively from writing I still wasn’t a writer. Intellectual dissatisfaction and a desire for validation finally drove me to a Master’s programme in creative writing at the University of Glasgow.

It was a catastrophic decision. I realise now the problem wasn’t lack of credentials but lack of confidence. The literature elements of the course were brilliant but I dreaded and hated workshops. I left vowing to never betray myself like that again. As soon as I got Glasgow out of my lungs several loose threads of ideas came together and I started my current book, working titled Satisfaction – How to Get What you Really, Really Want. It is the true stories of ten ordinary people who, without fanfare, have created extraordinary lives. After muddling around with fiction this is different, urgent; I’m writing because it’s something that needs to be said. Before, I was just pushing words around on paper.

3.  Who helped you along the way, and how?

My first influence was my sister, who read to me constantly when I was very young and planted in my head the idea that books are delightful treasures. At university a number of professors whose names I’ve forgotten urged me to quit chemistry and study English, for which I am grateful. It was Paul Hendrickson, though, who put my feet firmly on the path towards becoming a writer. Generous, humane, kind, and curious, he taught non-fiction writing with an abundance of love and enthusiasm. Our class met on the top floor of the Kelly Writer’s House at Penn, an adorable little Anne of Green Gables-esque cottage in the midst of the high-rise, super-functional campus, and we could bring music – that was the first place I heard Kind of Blue. Professor Hendrickson taught us that essays and long-form journalism are important, meaningful and showed us how to make them beautiful. The other professor who I greatly admire is Michael Schmidt, head of Glasgow’s creative writing department. He’s the perfect mentor: ferociously erudite, urbane, acid-tongued, and an unapologetic defender writing standards.

I am also indebted to my writer-publisher friend Helen Donlon, for being the first person to suggest I can, and should, write books. And to all the friends who have fed, sheltered, and encouraged me during my years of itinerant freelancing.

4.  Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?

George Orwell. He endured a brutal education, vile jobs, un-picturesque poverty, war, illness and more poverty and never lost his nerve. I love his essays: they gleam with honesty and moral courage. Shooting an Elephant, Why I Write, Bookshop Memories, and Politics and the English Language are particularly fine examples. Orwell fought for what he believed in and held himself to the highest standards of thought and clarity – both as a writer and as a human being. For me, he exemplifies a writer to whom the craft is precious, but who is never precious about his craft. I am also profoundly influenced by Henry David Thoreau. Like Orwell, his writing is driven by ideas, not aesthetics, and it is all the more beautiful for not being decorative.

George Orwell

5.  What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?

Try a few things: study, travel, get a job or a few. If any of it satisfies you be grateful. Write professionally only if you must. Throw away your preconceptions about writing and the ‘writer’s life’. There are as many writers’ lives as there are writers, and there is no point in wearing someone else’s shoes. Be gently skeptical of criticism, but never defensive. As F Scott Fitzgerald said, in the end you have to rely on your own judgement, so trust yourself and do what you love.

How Andrew Porter Became a Writer

It seemed like this type of storytelling was within my reach; it seemed like something I might be able to do myself—with a lot of hard work, of course, but it seemed possible in a way that, say, writing the type of literature I had read in other classes, big Victorian novels and Russian epics, had never seemed possible.

Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and a novel forthcoming from Knopf in Fall 2012. His short fiction has appeared in One Story, The Threepenny Review, Epoch, and The Pushcart Prize anthology and on NPR’s Selected Shorts.  A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received a James Michener/ Copernicus Fellowship, the W.K. Rose Fellowship, and the Drake Emerging Writer Award. Currently, he’s an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Trinity University in San Antonio.

Web site: http://andrewporter.com

Read more by and about Andrew:

Book: The Theory of Light and Matter
Short Story excerpt: “Hole”
Interview at Fiction Writers Review

How Andrew Porter Became a Writer

This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday (or so) until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to Andrew for saying yes! (And thanks to new blog subscriber Denise Richter for recommending him!)

1.  Why did you want to become a writer?

Well, from an early age, I think I’d always known that I wanted to do something creative with my life. As a young child, I was drawn to visual art; and later, in high school, it was music, writing songs and so forth, and then, in college, I was pretty consumed with the idea of becoming a filmmaker, at least at first. I’d even begun to take some courses toward a film major at that point. Then, at the end of my sophomore year, I took an introductory fiction writing workshop, and everything changed. I remember sitting in that class and feeling very intimidated by the other students in the group, but also very inspired by the stories we were reading, contemporary short stories by writers I had never heard of before, people like Lorrie Moore, and Richard Ford and Raymond Carver. These writers seemed to be speaking to my own experiences in a very direct way, and I remember thinking how amazing that was, that you could write about such seemingly small conflicts and such ordinary people and yet make these character’s lives and experiences so compelling.

Raymond Carver

To put it another way, it seemed like this type of storytelling was within my reach; it seemed like something I might be able to do myself—with a lot of hard work, of course, but it seemed possible in a way that, say, writing the type of literature I had read in other classes, big Victorian novels and Russian epics, had never seemed possible. On top of that, for the first time in my life, I was actually getting some positive feedback on the work I was doing. My professor in that class was a very kind and generous man, and though I’m sure that the work I was producing wasn’t very good, it meant a lot to me at the time to know that it wasn’t horrible, that there might actually be something there.

Shortly after that, I think I simply caught the writing bug. It became hard to imagine a life in which I wasn’t writing or in which writing wasn’t at the center of my world. I didn’t really know why I was doing it, and perhaps I still don’t. I just  knew that it was more fun than almost anything else I’d ever done.

2.  How did you go about becoming a writer?

I think I began to seriously entertain the idea of becoming a writer around my senior year in college. That’s when I started talking to some of my professors about it and also when I began to do a little research on what other writers I admired had done. Not people like Philip Roth, but young, emerging writers, people who were maybe eight or nine years older than me. I think, in retrospect, what I had hoped to find was some sort of logical path, a series of simple and easy steps that would lead me to where I wanted to go. What I found instead, of course, was that the writers I admired had all taken vastly different routes and most had come to the profession somewhat indirectly. Still, I did notice that a good number of them had eventually gone on to get MFA degrees, something I had heard some of my professors talk about in class. I didn’t really understand what an MFA was at the time, but it seemed that there was some sort of correlation between getting an MFA and becoming a writer, or at least that’s what I thought at the time.

So I ended up applying to programs, and three years later, after earning a degree from the University of Iowa, I discovered that I was in exactly the same place I was before.  I had a few more stories under my belt, a little more experience and knowledge, and of course some wonderful new friends, but I didn’t feel any closer to actually publishing a book.

What followed after that was basically a decade or so of struggling along, trying to keep my head above water financially, trying to find a free moment here or there to work on my stories, enduring a lot of rejections, jumping between agents, being told again and again that nobody wanted to publish short story collections anymore, and so on. I came very close to throwing in the towel on several occasions, but I think what helped me out, what kept me going, was the fact that I’d always found a way to surround myself with other writers, people who were struggling along just like me, fellow adjuncts at the colleges where I taught or people in the community who had found a way to support their writing habit without going into too much debt.

3.  Who helped you along the way, and how?

Early on, it was the professors I had as an undergraduate and grad student—writers like David Wong Louie, Frank Bergon, Marilynne Robinson, and Barry Hannah—but later, it was really the friends I’d made in grad school who helped me the most.  These were the people who I could call at any time of the day or night to talk about writing, the people who  I shared my early drafts with, the people who kept me going during  those frequent moments of self-doubt. To be honest, if I hadn’t had those friends,  it’s hard to imagine where I’d be now.

Charles Baxter

4.  Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?

Charles Baxter has a great epistolary essay called “Full of it” (excerpt here), which appears in Frederick Busch’s anthology Letters to a Fiction Writer. It’s a wonderful essay—very funny and smart, like all of Baxter’s writing—and for a long time it served as a source of inspiration for me. Not because it painted a romanticized picture of the writing life, but because it painted just the opposite: a realistic one. Basically, Baxter catalogues all of the many setbacks and early discouragements he faced—all of the novels he wrote that didn’t get published, all of the stories we wrote that got rejected, all of the agents who abused him, his descent into despondency and hopelessness, the many years that he spent knocking on a door that simply wouldn’t open.

If anything, one might interpret this essay as a kind of cautionary tale, an argument for why one shouldn’t pursue this particular path. But for me, it never read that way. For me, as a longtime admirer of Baxter’s work, it always read like a testament to hard work and perseverance. I remember thinking, if someone as talented as Charles Baxter had to endure these types of setbacks, then why should I expect anything less? So, for a long time after that, as the rejection slips were piling up in my drawer, it was this essay, and Baxter’s story, that saw me through.

5.  What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?

I would say what Baxter says indirectly in the letter I referenced above: it’s not going to be easy, by any means—it might even take you to some very low moments in your life—but in the end, it’s the writers who persevere and push through these periods that ultimately succeed. I honestly believe that. Talent is obviously important, but it’s only a very small part of the equation. The rest has to do with whether or not you can endure the sacrifices you’ll have to make, the discouraging comments, the setbacks, the self-doubt. If you have the fortitude to keep writing in the face of all of these things, then I’d say your chances of publishing a book are pretty good.

Beyond that, I’d say it’s important to surround yourself with other writers, as I mentioned above. No one can write in a vaccuum, and it’s important to have a support system of some sort, a group of people who you can trust and who you can rely on for encouragement. In a world where most people aren’t going to really understand what you’re doing or why you’re doing it, it’s really important, I think, to have at least a few people who do.

My job is the “best”!

It’s syllabus time. School starts Monday, so I’m working on crafting the perfect balance of readings and assignments, with time for grading in between.

Of course I’m lamenting that break is almost over while assuring myself that Break. Is. Not. Over.

But I’m also experiencing the little inner delight I get over designing a new syllabus and anticipating the cool things I’ll get to read and talk about with students this semester. I’m enjoying the industrious feeling of sending and receiving emails, writing and crossing off items on the to-do list, working on a couple of new manuscripts, and cleaning up the holiday mess.

In other words, I’m looking forward to the new semester. Perhaps this is because my job is THE BEST!

In a recent Forbes Magazine study of BEST JOBS FOR WOMEN IN 2012, my job was rated #1. Here’s what it says:

At No. 1, post-secondary teachers top the list. Not only do women report very high satisfaction rates in the job, median annual earnings range from $59,000 (for foreign language and literature teachers) to $94,000 (for law teachers), well above the average household income in the U.S. Furthermore, the field is expected to grow by 15% and features an average of 55,000 openings each year.

Shatkin believes women likely value post-secondary teaching for its high earnings, prestige and stimulating environments. The National Survey of College Graduates found that women appreciate a job’s location and environment more than men, and Shatkin points out that college students are generally excited to learn, colleagues are of high caliber and college campuses provide comfortable amenities. At the same time, post-secondary teachers have a high degree of independence and autonomy, which Shatkin says almost all workers prize.

[The bold is my doing. Source link to Yahoo overview. Source link to Forbes Magazine article.]

I have to agree. My students ARE generally excited to learn. My colleagues ARE of high caliber (not just in academics, but in food, fashion, music, and fun). And the amenities are comfortable indeed. I like my office with its window view of rooftops and treetops. I love working at a place with a library overlooking the campus on one side and a river on the other – and with more books I can order from other campuses. And did I mention: I got to take students to Prague and Berlin this summer!

Sometimes, when I’m drowning in the middle of a semester, I think that I would quit teaching if I could, and just write. But I’d drown in different ways without the semester’s structure or the students’ energy.

Yes, I get annoyed when our budget well runs dry or when the bureaucracy runs thick, but, in the spirit of living lovely, I thought I should take a moment to appreciate where I am and what I’ve got. Here’s to a new semester.

My Non-New-Year’s-Resolution for 2012: Live Lovely

Happy New Year! I just returned today from an awesome family holiday in Colorado, filled with skating, hiking, skiing, hugging, crying, laughing, eating, and drinking. Here’s a view from the gondola up the mountain at Keystone (which was way out of my league skiing-wise):

It’s resolution time, but I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions. Here’s what I said about them in a post a year ago:

A resolution is something we should do, don’t do, resolve to do in the future, do a few times, and then fail to continue doing. Which makes us feel bad.

I respond much better to commands. So I’ve started choosing one meaningful command that repeats in my mind as if yelled by a drill sergeant at top volume, or, better, as if sung by an awesome singer who repeats it as a refrain I can’t escape.

Last year – 2011 – my command was: Put Yourself Out There  (See full post here.)

And I did! Against my own shy nature, I gave lots of readings for my book, developed my blog, made a new web site, won awards, applied for a competitive Fulbright post in Belfast (survived preliminary round!), submitted a tenure dossier, gave more readings, and just generally Put Myself Out There.

Before that, in summer 2010, my first blogging summer, my command was: Finish What You Started

I’d started all these manuscripts that I hadn’t finished, and this command, repeated over and over, helped me get focused and finish lots of projects.

Which brings us to 2012. My theme for this year is: Live Lovely

This basically means I’m tired of putting myself out there and I want to turn my focus toward living well, slowing down, making art – literary, visual, decorative, culinary – and toward my loved ones.

It’s a weird phrase – Live Lovely – so I’ve been trying it out for a few weeks in my head. And it’s already working! For Christmas I made a few gifts, which combined art-making with loved ones. Here are some vellum votive candles I sent to my mother and grandparents, and I made some for dad and sister too:

[Update: I got the idea from this cool book: PHOTOCRAFT Cool Things to Do with the Pictures You Love]

A friend and fellow writer keeps a terrific blog – I Will Not Diet – where she posted lots of Non-Resolutions by contributors (like me!) HERE.

What did YOU accomplish this year? What’s your command/theme/non-resolution for 2012?

Merry Christmas

I’m a crier by nature, and here is something that brings me to tears and makes me feel probably exactly how one should feel on Christmas evening: grateful, appreciative, sad, alive, alove (which should be a word).

The New York Times invited readers to submit photos of loved ones they’d lost this year. Here’s a screen shot. Click to go to NYTimes, where you can click on each photo and read a bit about the person who was lost this year:

Click the image to go to NYTimes

Here’s who I lost this year:

Thebes (left)

Obviously our other cat lost his best friend too. Thebes had been with us longer than our daughter, and even today my husband said, “You know what I miss this Christmas? – Thebes.”

Today on the phone, my mom gave me news of my grandfather’s worsened condition. He was taken to the hospital today and they’re not sure he’ll return. Here he is with me and my sister in his arms:

How Deborah Fries Became a Writer

I believe that in our multi-media, internet content-saturated lives, it’s in many ways harder now to pull the signal out of the noise and to hear your own voice, let alone develop it. It’s important to keep the chatter at bay.

Deborah Fries is a poet, essayist and editor whose first book of poetry, Various Modes of Departure, was published by Kore Press in 2004.  Her second book, A Field Guide to Temporal Habitat, will be published by Kore in 2012.  She is an editorial board member and columnist at Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments, and in 2011 began an online journal, The New Purlieu Review.  She is a recipient of a Kore Press First Book Award, a James Hearst Poetry Prize, a Leeway Foundation grant, and in 2006 was selected by Galway Kinnell as the Montgomery County (PA) Poet Laureate.

Read more by and about Deborah:

Book: Various Modes of Departure
Poem, “Leaving Whitefish Bay” at Terrain
Poem, “Like Field Mice” at Poet Laureate
Literary Journal, New Purlieu Review

How Deborah Fries Became a Writer

This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday (or so) until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to Deborah for saying yes!

1. Why did you want to become a writer?

As a kid, I loved the musicality of words, and they’d get stuck in my head like pop tunes. I think I must have walked around for years with “runcible spoon” just below the surface of conscious thought. Ultimately, I chose writing because it was the expressive medium that allowed me multiple chances to get it right. I always enjoyed writing, but growing up, I thought I’d be an artist. I headed off to college as an art major. But I could never make my hands create what my mind anticipated. At some point, I gave up on a process that seemed unforgiving and switched to writing, which offers endless possibilities for revision. It’s still important to me to maintain precision in writing, but I’ve learned to have fun through the medium of printmaking by not being so invested in the outcome. Printmaking offers me the option of impressionistically visualizing a final product, but leaves room for the happy accident – the unexpected neat thing that you see when you pull a print. Now I’d like to find a way to introduce those random elements of external agency into my writing!

The Dolomphious Duck, who caught Spotted Frogs for her dinner with a Runcible Spoon

2. How did you go about becoming a writer?

Once I’d settled on the idea of becoming a writer, I ploughed through all the poetry and fiction writing classes I could take as an undergrad and graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where I studied writing with Jim Hazard, James Liddy, John Goulet and Tom Bontly. My thesis was a collection of short fiction.  The workings of narrative turned out to be immediately useful, when my plans for an academic life were derailed by divorce and I began writing for a monthly business magazine.  I was living in the Rust Belt at a time when Wisconsin was losing manufacturing jobs to Mexico and businesses were making risky moves into new product lines or corporate structures to survive.  They let me tell their turnaround stories, which often seemed as rich as fiction, with language as musical as poetry.  Who doesn’t love the sound of Snap-on de México?

From business writing, I went on to government public affairs. Each new position relied upon the written word, but took me farther away from what felt was my authentic voice.  I would not have predicted that I’d find my voice in Philadelphia.

3. Who helped you along the way, and how?

In the spring of 1994, I moved to Philadelphia, where I continued to work in public affairs but began to explore my new city as a literary tourist.  I found myself in this wonderfully fluid Northeast corridor where writers seemed to treat the cities along I-95 as a single reading circuit.  Being in Philadelphia made it possible for me to attend free readings by visiting writers, including Mark Doty, Sharon Olds, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gerald Stern, Stanley Plumley, Kay Ryan, Joyce Carol Oates, Louise Gluck, Tobias Wolf, Jonathan Franzen, Stewart O’Nan, Sherman Alexie, and Anne Lamott, and to learn more about Philadelphia’s vibrant poetry community.  I started writing and sending out poetry and by the summer of 1999, had a book-length manuscript that was a first book contest finalist at New Issues Press.

Dave Smith

But three more years went by without publication of that manuscript and I had begun to think that New Issues’ interest had been a fluke.  In the summer of 2002, I attended the Catskills Poetry Workshop in the hopes of working with Stephen Dunn.  Everyone wanted to do a tutorial with Dunn, the 2001 Pulitzer Prize poet, so instead of Steve, I serendipitously ended up studying with Dave Smith.  He believed in my writing.  And although my sense of possibility as a poet would later be substantiated by other judges of my work — Carolyn Forché, Gallway Kinnel, Denise Duhamel, Yusef Komunyakaa and Molly Peacock – if it had not been for Dave’s sincere interest in my manuscript at that moment in my life, I might have given up.  The sea of writers is so large, and when you’re adrift, writing in isolation, — well, you see where this metaphor is going.  Dave Smith gave me what I needed at that point in my life to stay alive as a writer.

The next summer, at the West Chester Poetry Conference, I took Jeffrey Skinner’s advice on how to organize a manuscript, and a few months later, my manuscript, Various Modes of Departure, was selected by Carolyn Forché for the Kore Press First Book Award.

With the publication of Modes, my relationship with Kore Press has provided me with a sense of community that is much like that wonderful feeling of belonging you experience in graduate school.  They’ve included my work in Powder: Writing from Women in the Ranks, Vietnam to Iraq, and adapted it for the one-woman play, “Coming in Hot.”  As the Kore family of writers has grown, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know many of these women, who like me, were welcomed into the world of publishing by Kore and for whom that will always be hugely significant.

Amy Clampitt

4. Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?

Because I published my first book decades after I had left graduate school, I am always inspired by late bloomers like Amy Clampitt.  I am inspired by Annie Proulx, who rolls up her sleeves and embraces occupational language and untamed landscapes with the gutsy precision and aim of a cowgirl.  I am inspired by women writers like Maxine Kumin who grow old with their craft as if it were the currency of the essential.

And I am inspired by all writers and artists who lose themselves in what they do; that is, they become unselfconscious in relationship to their work.  When I was in graduate school, I had the pleasurable assignment of taking Grace Paley to lunch before she gave a reading at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  I don’t remember much about the lunch, except that she seemed familiar and easy to be around.  But that night in the middle of her reading, a tooth – a removable one – came out, and she looked at it, put it aside on the podium and continued reading.

5. What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?

Given that my daughter recently began writing short fiction, this is something I think about often.  I believe that in our multi-media, internet content-saturated lives, it’s in many ways harder now to pull the signal out of the noise and to hear your own voice, let alone develop it. It’s important to keep the chatter at bay.  I’d tell any aspiring writer to sharpen her observational skills, to collect real experiences, to invest in understanding human nature.  I’d tell her to read, write, read, write – to engage in a kind of literary interval training.  It’s important to study craft but it’s equally important to increase your seeing power.  I’d tell her rejection is meaningless, and that if you write something you wouldn’t want your mother to read, it will probably get published.

Deus Ex Machina: Freshly Pressed!

My last post was an interview with the poet Carrie Oeding that ends with this advice: “Write and read, and things will happen.” I’ve been writing this blog for almost two years now, and something definitely happened.

I got Freshly Pressed! I got hundreds of comments and likes and new subscribers.

I can’t help but think of it in literary terms: like a Deus Ex Machina. The WordPress gods intervened – apparently out of nowhere – and changed the story.

But the point of my How to Become a Writer interview series is not to perpetuate the idea that things happen out of nowhere, that we should just sit around and wait for a god to get lowered into our life stories to solve everything. Just the opposite: that things happen because we’re working to make things happen. One of the comments on the Carrie Oeding interview post said something like, “Don’t forget the importance of luck.”

Which makes me think of the quote by Seneca: “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.”

I was hugely lucky (and grateful) to get Freshly Pressed, but I’ve been preparing for the opportunity for years. I remember reading a Wordpess post about “How to Get Freshly Pressed,” and there was advice like have good content and give credit to your images and links. I made sure to follow the advice. I’ve been writing this blog for almost two years, and I created a series that I hoped would be of interest to others, and I tried to make it look nice.

It’s the same thing I’ve done in my journey as a writer: I keep writing and submitting my work and rewriting and resubmitting. Yesterday I got a rejection letter. Today I’ll send something new out.

Anyway, what I mean to say is: Hi! I’m excited to meet all of you who subscribed to my blog and left comments. I’m still going through your comments and visiting your blogs – which are from all around the world. I’ve subscribed to some of your blogs and left comments on others, and I’ve even got a couple new writers for my interview series that came from your comments and suggestions. Thank you!

Stay tuned for a new interview to post this weekend…

How Carrie Oeding Became a Writer

[A] mysterious poet visitor was sitting in an undergraduate workshop at the U of MN. Someone said he was a famous poet from China, and honestly I don’t remember what his name was. I wouldn’t have known who was famous then. Why was he there? He came up after class once and said, “You’re going to be a good poet one day.” It kind of shook me.

Carrie Oeding’s first book, Our List of Solutions, won the Lester M. Wolfson prize in 2010, selected by David Dodd Lee. The book was released in 2011 by 42 Miles Press, a new poetry series from Indiana University South Bend Press. Carrie’s work has appeared in such places as Colorado Review, Third Coast, Greensboro Review, Mid-American Review, Best New Poets 2005 and elsewhere. She is currently working on a second book of poems and a book of creative nonfiction essays. A native of Minnesota, Carrie has lived in Washington, Ohio, Texas and now resides in West  Virginia with her husband, poet Kent Shaw.

Visit Carrie’s website: http://www.carrieoeding.com/

Read more by and about Carrie:

Book: Our List of Solutions
“I Have Been In More Uncomfortable Situations Than This” at Diagram
Audio at The Poet’s Corner
“Work Harder” at Verse Daily

How Carrie Oeding Became a Writer

This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday (er, or so) until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to Carrie for saying yes!

1.  Why did you want to become a writer?

I was really in my head as a kid. Books excited me, but they excite a lot of young people, so who knows. When I grew older, I knew I wanted to make art, and I was closest with language as an outlet. When I was a junior in high school, I started telling people I was going to major in creative writing at the University of Minnesota, and then I did.

I was born on a small Minnesota farm, a small working farm where my dad grows corn and soybeans and sometimes raised sheep. I never write poems about where I grew up. There’s no negative or traumatic reason for this. I have, however, one piece in Brevity: A Journal of Concise Creative Nonfiction that is about my relationship with growing up on a farm. I want to say “in isolation on a farm,” but I think of my husband laughing when I said we lived 5 miles from town, which was hardly isolation. But it might as well have been 50 miles, as I spent most of my life on the farm. And, anyway, the “town” was Luverne, MN–population: less than 5,000. My husband also likes to chuckle at the image of me stretched across my bed, literally waiting for something to happen, anything. People like to look back and find meaning after the fact about how they got here, some of this is true and some is storytelling. Storytelling is meaning-making, I understand, but I don’t always trust it. This distrust works well in essays as it creates a constant need for questioning and rethinking.

Louise Bourgeois Installation view, Tate Modern, London, 2007 Image © Nathan Strange/AP

2.  How did you go about becoming a writer?

In a pretty conventional way. B.A. in English with creative writing emphasis. Attending an MFA program immediately after at the age of 22. Ph.D. in creative writing right after that. But this doesn’t necessarily explain how I became a writer. I became a writer by writing. I remember almost all of my undergraduate creative writing teachers saying, “Just write, and things will happen,” and when I began to see it was true, I never doubted this. I still don’t. Even when I’m anxious about what’s next.

Was I too young to leave Minneapolis after undergrad and pursue an MFA at 22? Probably. But I was right to make the decision, and I immediately had a real writing life because if it. If I hadn’t left Minnesota to get an MFA at that time, I likely would be a very unhappy person today who doesn’t write. Maybe I wouldn’t, but I wouldn’t want to go back in time and find out.

I heard someone on NPR a number of years ago, a fiction writer, who said he taught himself how to write stories by retyping Grace Paley’s short stories. It was an “I had no idea what I was doing” confession, but I loved the idea of it. And Grace Paley should be retyped by all of us. I can’t remember who it was, but then I think he went on to somehow fall into some famous novelist’s lap who schooled him.

Joseph Cornell

 3. Who helped you along the way, and how?

This is another interesting question, because I again want to answer it in different ways. Some of the people who helped me in the beginning of my writing life were practically strangers whom I had brief encounters with. For instance, a mysterious poet visitor was sitting in an undergraduate workshop at the U of MN. Someone said he was a famous poet from China, and honestly I don’t remember what his name was. I wouldn’t have known who was famous then. Why was he there? He came up after class once and said, “You’re going to be a good poet one day.” It kind of shook me. It didn’t stay with me, though. I just remembered this recently.

Stevie Smith

The writers I read whom initially helped open up the idea of what writing could do—Stevie Smith, Amy Hempel, Mary Ruefle, Frank O’Hara, Barry Hannah, Larry Levis, Claire Bateman, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis. I feel incredibly unsatisfied stopping here, but I’m just making lists.

My editor, David Dodd Lee, for being such a smart reader of my first book (and of poems, period), seeing that it is doing something new, understanding its humor and seriousness, and publishing it. Publishing it in a gorgeous book that completely lives up to my in-print dreams!  Also, my husband, Kent Shaw, who is a poet, who has read more contemporary poetry than anyone I’ve met and sees the book in the same vein. His writing keeps me excited about poetry, which is funny because when we first started dating we didn’t read each other’s work. We are both very critical, and we secretly worried we wouldn’t like each other’s poems. Our writing was a huge surprise to each other. Then we got hitched.

Some who currently help me are the writers and artists who keep me excited about making things: Alice Notley, Eula Biss, Maggie Nelson, Mattea Harvey, Werner Herzog, Miranda July. I am absolutely on fire about artist Sarah Sze, but you should see the installations in person.

Something that has helped me from stopping writing after I completed my first book, is taking art classes during my two years in Houston. I saw a Martin Puryear show at the SFMOMA in 2009. I had finished my first book, and it was unpublished. I was alone and at god-awful MLA, and it was one of the best art experiences of my life. Something about walking closely around his sculptures made me feel like I was breathing for the first time in two years. I moved to Houston nine months later and took art classes at the Museum of Fine Art’s Glassell School. I remember the first night of just intro to drawing and how it felt electric to be sketching terribly in the humid Houston August. I think there were times I slept with my art supplies. It’s stupid, I hate these kinds of narratives, but I am going to own this one. Two years of classes weren’t enough, but having that kind of excitement about making anything recharged my writing.

4.  Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?

Henry Darger

Joseph Cornell and Henry Darger were easy to get obsessed with. There is no line between their artistic and personal biographies. Going back to the writer who copied lines of Grace Paley, I like the idea of trying to figure things out on your own–having a hunch of what you want to do, and like Darger, finding ways on his own to get his collages “right” for him.

Also Ana Mendieta, I’m fascinated with, her performance pieces, during which uses her body in ways I’m usually very cynical about.

Louise Bourgeois is one of my favorite artists. Her wit, side view, darkness, and play are right up my alley. And she just works in so many mediums. Never stopped exploring.

I’d like to be around Marianne Moore. Have her as a neighbor, but I don’t want to read her biography.

5.  What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?
Write and read, and things will happen.

If you’re a poet, consider making something in addition to poetry. You need to be making something all of the time, whatever it is. Poems, collages, pancakes.

Be humble. Don’t romanticize being humble. Don’t be so easily impressed.

Images of Indiana

What I do between my daughter’s volleyball games…

These pics are taken at Concord High School, Indiana.

Or the view from the road. This is Gary, Indiana, en route to Chicago:

Bremen, Indiana – on my way to a reading in Ohio.

On the way home from the reading in Ohio. The black figure mowing the lawn is either a nun, an Amish woman, or the Grim Reaper, reaping:

But since I was on Highway 20 in Shipshawana, Indiana – Amish Country – I’m going to have to go with Amish woman. (The shoulders of the roads are full of horse droppings):