Book Fever
By Marcia Loy May 30, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

The Last of the Canadians

If a book cometh from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts.
?Thomas Carlyle

It’s been a great month discovering new writers and rereading old favorites. This week was no exception.

Deafening, Frances Itani, 2003. Someone said an artist shows you the world in a way you hadn’t seen it before. Itani is an artist for conveying words and language in a way most of us have never looked at them before. Deafening is the story of six-year-old Grania, whose bout with scarlet fever leaves her deaf. This debut novel is beautifully written and won a Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Excerpt: Grania watches her grandmother’s lips. She understands, pushes aside the heavy tapestry curtain that keeps the draught from blowing up the stairs, and runs up to the landing. She pauses long enough to glance through the only window in the house that is shaped like a porthole, even though it’s at the back of the house and looks over land, not water. She peers down into the backyard, sees the leaning fence, the paddock and, over to the right, the drive sheds behind Father’s hotel. Far to the left, over the top of the houses on Mill Street, she can see a rectangle of field that stretches in the opposite direction, toward the western edge of town. A forked tree casts a long double shadow that has begun its corner–to–corner afternoon slide across the field. Remembering her errand, Grania pulls back, runs to Mamo’s room, finds the package tied up in a square of blue cloth and carries it, wrapped, to the parlour. Mamo pulls a low chair over beside her rocker. Her rocker moves with her, out to the veranda, back to the parlour, out to the veranda again.

The Ash Garden, Dennis Bock, 2001. One day I picked up an innocuous-looking book called The Ash Garden by a Canadian author. The fact it was a short book appealed to me. I was running out of time to read three books for this week’s column. I can’t say enough about the story and the writing. It’s not an easy book to read. It’s the story of a young scientist working on the Manhattan Project and a six-year-old girl who survives the Hiroshima bomb. Fifty years later they meet.

The New York Times called The Ash Garden “Mysterious and compelling…An elegant, unnerving novel that illuminates the personal consequences of war.”

Excerpt: One morning toward the end of the summer they burned away my face, my little brother and I were playing on the bank of the river that flowed past the eastern edge of our old neighborhood, on the grassy floodplain that had been my people’s home and misery for centuries. It was there I used to draw mud pictures on Mitsuo’s back with a wide–edged cherry switch, which I hid in a nearby hickory bush when it was time to go home. I liked its shape and how it felt in my hand, like a fine pen or paintbrush. I scooped up mud from the bank and shaped it into pictures of all sorts: trees, fishes, animals. The day my parents were killed I’d decided to paint my grandfather’s face. I had turned six just a few weeks earlier. Mitsuo, my little brother, was only four years old and three months.

Homesick, Guy Vanderhaeghe, 1989. I try each month to feature lots of different writers. I could have chosen Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony, Adele Wiseman’s Crackpot, Nancy Richler’s Your Mouth is Lovely or Michael Crummy’s The River Thief for my third selection this week. But I liked The Englishman’s Boy so much I couldn’t resist reading another Guy Vanderhaeghe book.

Homesick is the story of Vera Monkman, who moves from Toronto to a small town in Saskatchewan in order to help her 12-year-old son. They move into her father’s house, where Vera grew up. The story involves the complex relationships between father, daughter and grandson.

Excerpt: I’m not like some people; I’m not good at swallowing my pride. It sticks in my throat. Funny how some people have no notion of pride. Pooch Gardiner…certainly doesn’t. When I let it slip Dad had got himself comfortable in his later years she couldn’t feature how I hadn’t got my snout in the trough. “Fool’s pride,” Pooch called it. But then Pooch isn’t one to look too closely where a dollar comes from. “If your old man has a little money,” she said, “why shouldn’t he help? You’re a widow, aren’t you? And Daniel’s his grandson, isn’t he?”

Coming in June: nonfiction and history. Happy reading. 

Marcia Loy is a member of the steering committee of the Authors’ Sala and a volunteer at the Biblioteca Pública. She can be contacted at marciabookfever@hotmail.com.

Writer’s Workshop brings coaches together
By Eva Hunter

What do you get when you put a poet, a screenwriter, a fiction and literary nonfiction writer, and a feature and romance writer together? If they’re all successful professional writers and experienced writing coaches, the answer is “a writing workshop.”

Actually, Writer’s Workshop: San Miguel has been around since 1995. At that time, several San Miguel writers and I founded the workshop to teach real writing skills to people who wanted to learn them. Our motto was, and still is, “You Want to Write. We’re Here to Teach You.” Over the years, the other members of the workshop drifted away—one to New York to try his hand at playwriting, another to an itinerant lifestyle in the States, which included—for a while, a short while—a gig as a long-haul truck driver. That left just me and I’ve been teaching my two eight-session courses, “Style Workshop for Prose” and “Beginnings, Endings, and Everything Between” since then, as well as various one-day workshops that take a quick look at the craft and art of writing.

But as of the beginning of June, Writer's Workshop: San Miguel is returning to its origins as a writing-coach cooperative. Three other well-known writers are joining me in the workshop.

They’re Michael Grais, prolific screenwriter and producer of films, including Poltergeist, Marked for Death and Death Hunt; Donna Meyer, who has a professional writing background that stretches from small-town newspaper to nationally circulated magazines to successful romance novels; and Bill Pearlman, the poet, philosopher and psychologist of the group. And, oh, in case you’re interested, it’s Donna Meyer who drove long-haul trucks.

I’ve asked my fellow writers to join me in answering some questions about writing.

What’s the most touching thing that’s happened to you while teaching writing?

Bill Pearlman: At the end of a creative writing poetry course I taught in New Mexico, the class took me to a brew pub and bought me beers and dinner. They told me they were pleased with the class and grateful for what light I could offer in terms of their own work and the work of writers we examined as part of the course.

Donna Meyer: For me it was working with someone who had a dream of writing, but thought she could never do it. Then seeing her open up and letting the words pour out—beautiful words, wonderful writing, from the heart.

Michael Grais: Having someone complete a first screenplay and it’s really good.

Eva Hunter: After I left Portland, Oregon, where I’d taught in various venues for many years, a group of writers who had studied with me formed a feedback group, which they called the “What Would Eva Say? Group.”

What’s the most aggravating aspect of teaching writing?

BP: Teaching beginning composition, which requires an endless quantity of papers to read and grade.

DM: People who think they know more than you do and try to lead the class. Why are they there?

EH: Many people assume that simply because they want to, they can write a book or a screenplay or whatever. After all, everyone can write, correct? It’s a lack of understanding that a successful writer is successful because of training and hard, hard work. People wouldn’t expect to perform brain surgery just because they think it would be fun, but they expect to be writers without going through an apprenticeship. Learning to be a good writer can be equally as complex and time consuming as learning to be a brain surgeon.

How did you learn your genre of writing?

BP: I studied poetry at UCLA with Jack Hirschman and Charles Gullans. I loved poetry’s breadth and these two teachers were miles apart—Jack, a sort of bohemian (recently poet laureate of San Francisco) and Charles, a formalist, much influenced by Yvor Winters at Stanford. In graduate school at the University of New Mexico, I was influenced by Robert Creeley. I loved the legacy of discovery in poetry, from Shakespeare to our time, as well as the rich and important meanings poetry can achieve.

DM: By reading in my genre. For one full year I read over 100 books of the specific kind I wanted to write. I studied them. I used colored markers to highlight different elements so I had a visual picture of the structure. I analyzed the bad ones to try to figure out why they bored me. Learning to write genre fiction is not a secret. It’s all right there on the page.

MG: I learned from a screenwriter who was working, making money and had been for many years. I wanted to earn a living writing for film and television, and by working with a writer who had accomplished that, I got real-world advice and guidance.

EH: I had formal university training, but I didn’t really learn to write professionally until I studied with someone who was doing what I wanted to do.

What should someone look for in choosing a writing coach?

BP: Someone who carries the possibility of transforming experience into written work might be the beginning. Also someone who believes one can grow through writing, and who has written for the sake of illumination and telling important stories.

DM: Hmm, hard to define, but I’d look for a basic compatibility. Try to read something he or she has written and see if it resonates with you.

MG: A writer and teacher who has succeeded in doing what you want to do.

When did you know you would be a writer?

BP: In college and in the late sixties. The world was falling apart and the fight against the Vietnam War inspired new ideas about authority and inner life as well as new ways of thinking and feeling. Allen Ginsberg was a decisive factor in this.

DM: Actually, when I started writing, I didn’t want to be a writer or even to write. I wanted the lifestyle of a writer and thought maybe I could do it. Then I fell in love with the craft itself.

MG: Very young.

EH: I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know I was a writer. Despite higher education later on, the most definitive moment for me in my entire school experience was in first grade when the teacher was standing at the blackboard, chalk in hand, about to write the first word we would learn to read. I thought, “Oh boy! Here it comes!” 

Is there a well-known sentence or line you wish you had written?

BP: Yes. “Your own emboldened feeling’s glowing fellow feeling…” which is Rilke in his Seventh Elegy, translated by Leishman, Spender.

MG: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” From Network by Paddy Chayefsky.

EH: There is so much beautiful language in contemporary writing it’s hard to choose. I’m cheating—it’s more than one line. From Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient: “With the uncorking of each tiny bottle the perfumes fell out. There was an odor of the sea. The smell of rust. Indigo. Ink. River-mud arrow-wood formaldehyde paraffin ether. The tide of airs chaotic.”

Eva Hunter is a writer specializing in literary nonfiction and fiction. Her most recent book is Lord of the Dolls: Voyage in Xochimilco. Her short story, “Iris Wanted to Be a Movie Star: The Kind that Sings and Dances, Too” is included in the anthology Solamente en San Miguel.

Writer’s Workshop: San Miguel

Breaking in: What It Takes to Write What You Want to Write
Michael Grais, Eva Hunter, Bill Pearlman
Fri, June 13, 4pm
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Publica
Insurgentes 25 
Free

Michael Grais, Eva Hunter and Bill Pearlman talk about the myths and realities of breaking in to writing and share their “breaking in” stories.

Writer’s Workshop: San Miguel offers a variety of writing classes throughout the year, including writing to discover the inner self, novel and memoir, literary nonfiction, screenwriting, and short fiction and nonfiction pieces. For information, contact Eva Hunter at 152-6378 (evamhunter@gmail.com ) or Michael Grais at 152-6062 (michaelgrais@yahoo.com ).