First Cascadia Writers-in-Conversation Evening a Huge Success

The inaugural Cascadia Writers-in-Conversation evening took place last night, with the delightful and eminently charming Sharma Shields as our first featured author. In a beautiful museum setting, with Z. Vanessa Helder’s magnificent watercolors of Eastern Washington on the walls, 60+ people had the great fortune to listen to a terrifically talented writer talk in depth about her life and her work.

Among the topics Sharma discussed were: how she became a writer, how fairy tales can help us find a different path to a deeper reality, the source of her ability to write funny, a writer’s relationship to the serious issues of our times, and the importance in her life of the stories of Hans Christian Anderson (the subject of her next novel).

Sharma listens and smiles with Z. Vanessa Helder’s watercolors behind her.

She also talked at length about the development and “weirdness” of her three books–Favorite Monster, The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac, and The Cassandra. One of the evening’s many treats was Sharma’s reading of three short stories about witches that showcased her humor and love for tales as well as the unique blend of edginess and tenderness that characterizes much of her work.

The audience waits for the conversation to begin, surrounded by Helder’s watercolors.

Next month–on Thursday, September 12–I’ll be interviewing the amazing Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajawea. Check back later for details.

Writers-in-Conversation events take place at 6 p.m. on the second Thursday of each month at the Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds, WA, and are sponsored by the Edmonds Bookshop and the Holman Company.

Kicking things off with thank yous and the story of how the Writers-in-Conversation series came to be.

Photos by Gene Openshaw and Rod Ralston.

Note: I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, where your purchases support local bookstores. If you buy a book through a click on this website, I’ll earn a small commission that helps defray the costs of maintaining this website.

Coming This August: The Cascadia Writers-In-Conversation Series

I’m excited to announce that starting this August, I’ll be partnering with the Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds, Washington (just north of Seattle), to host a new monthly series called Writers in Conversation.

On the second Thursday of each month, we’ll bring one Northwest writer in front of an enthusiastic audience for a brief reading, a lengthy discussion of his or her work, and a question-and-answer session with engaged literature lovers.

The main idea of the new series is to showcase the wealth of writing talent in the Pacific Northwest. To that end, we’ll feature writers from different genres at different stages of their careers who may have been overlooked rather than those readers already know.

Writers who appear in the series will also be featured, along with their work, on an updated and expanded version of the website WritingtheNorthwest.com.

This will be a unique chance to hear talented writers speak in-depth about what it means to be an author in the Northwest and why and how they create their works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The conversations will all take place in one of Cascadia’s beautiful galleries, with Northwest art lining the walls.

Cascadia Art Museum is the only museum dedicated to artists and their works from the Pacific Northwest. Focused on visual art and design from 1860 to 1970, it is committed to the belief that recognizing previously neglected artists who made significant contributions to the region’s cultural identity gives us a fuller and more comprehensive understanding of Northwest art history. The Writers in Conversation series signals the museum’s desire to highlight underappreciated NW artists in literature as well.

The first conversation starts at 6 p.m. on Thursday, August 8. Check back later this summer for more details and to learn who our first featured writer will be.

Here’s a peek at the space we’ll fill with good conversation and an enthusiastic audience just a few months from now:

New on WNW: Three Questions and a Quote with Pulitzer Prize Winner Mitchell S. Jackson

I’m thrilled to feature novelist and Pulitzer-Prize-winning nonfiction writer Mitchell S. Jackson in the newest WritingtheNorthwest.com post. Mitchell is one of the most exciting writers to come out of the NW in recent years.

Read his answers to “Three Questions and a Quote” here.

New WNW Post: An Illuminating Book of Poetry about E. Washington Migrant Workers

I just posted a review on WritingtheNorthwest.com of a unique book by a promising young poet named Ricardo Ruiz. The poems in it come out of interviews with migrant workers in Eastern Washington.

Together with brief bios of the interviewees, the poems present a full and sympathetic look at this hopeful but struggling and tragically neglected community.

Here’s how the post begins:

I never know where or how I’m going to come across good writing about the Pacific Northwest. A couple of weeks ago, for example, I was walking through the book fair at the Associated Writers and Writing Programs conference in Seattle when I found myself in conversation with a young man who had just published his first book of poetry, titled We Had Our Reasons. I asked him to tell me about it and liked both his subject–the lives of migrant workers–and his demeanor, so I bought a copy.

It was only when the writer, Ricardo Ruiz, had signed the book that I noticed the workers he wrote about lived in Eastern Washington. He had already told me his book was really a collaborative effort. He had interviewed workers of Mexican descent and fashioned poetry in different forms and voices from what they told him. Some were legal immigrants, some were undocumented, some had been born in the United States, and one was an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

It wasn’t until I was on the bus home and read the first few pages that I realized what a treasure his book is. In verse that has the accessibility of a Billy Collins or Mary Oliver but channels a very different world, Ruiz presents the struggles, hopes, and sometimes dangerous experiences of a group of people for whom the United States is both tentative home and too-often-tarnished dream.

To read the rest of the post, click here.

Note: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, where your purchases support local bookstores. If you buy a book through a click on this website, I will earn a small commission that helps defray the costs of maintaining this website.

New WNW Post Features NW Novelist & Screenwriter Jon Raymond

After a brief break over the holidays, WritingtheNorthwest.com is back, and I’m pleased to start the new year with a new feature, Three Questions and a Quote, and one of my favorite Northwest writers, Jon Raymond.

Raymond is the author of an award-winning story collection, an essay collection, and four novels, including Denial (2022), a finalist for this year’s Oregon Book Award in Fiction. He has also coauthored several films, including the HBO mini-series “Mildred Pierce” and the remarkable “First Cow.” Most of his work is set in the Northwest.

Three Questions and a Quote is a new, occasional feature focused on the thoughts and work of prominent Northwest writers.

You can access the entry on Raymond here, including his thoughts on Northwest writing and links to his writings and films (plus other goodies).

Feeling Wild and Lyrical: Jack Kerouac Spends a Night in Seattle

Jack Kerouac by Tom Palumbo circa 1956 
(image from Wikipedia)

There’s a new post on my WritingtheNorthwest.com site: “Feeling Wild and Lyrical: Jack Kerouac Spends a Night in Seattle.” It’s focused on Kerouac’s still-fresh description of Seattle in the summer of 1956, when he passed through on his way to working as a lookout on Desolation Peak in the N. Cascades.

Kerouac, of course, was a friend of Robert Lax, the subject of my book Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax. You’ll find a post here about a letter from him to Lax in which he laid out his thoughts about Christianity and Buddhism.

There are many pages about Kerouac and his friendship with Lax in Pure Act.

What Happens When a Writer Spends Years Writing One Book?

I found this article while going through some old papers recently. Poets & Writers Magazine commissioned me to write it ten years ago but never ran it. So it’s appearing here for the first time. I hope you enjoy it.

The Patient Novelist

There are dozens of books about it but none reveal how crippling it can be or the worst of its many symptoms, the most secret one: the shame. Evasion and deflection become part of your personality. You begin to answer questions with a single syllable or a vacant stare, until the questions stop.

I’m talking, of course, about the itch to write a novel and the sad results of scratching it for those who don’t find early publication: the seemingly stillborn body hidden in a lower drawer.

“I didn’t ever tell anybody about it,” says Selden Edwards, who felt the itch while earning a master’s degree at Stanford; for the next 30 years he stayed in his hotel room whenever his family went to a museum or the beach. “My children knew I had it but they’d never read it. My wife is an avid reader and she’d never read it. Two years ago if I’d invited everyone I ever cared about to a huge party and stood up and mentioned the name Wheeler Burden, nobody in the room would have known what I was talking about.”

Wheeler Burden is the time-traveling, baseball-whizzing, guitar-playing hero of The Little Book, Edwards’ first novel, a project he worked on surreptitiously for most of his adult life, discarding it and picking it up again half a dozen times before Dutton bought it for a high six-figure sum in 2007.

When that happened, “a big hole opened in the heavens,” Edwards says. “I was going to have a novel published. It was the dream of a lifetime.”

The dream of a lifetime might seem a bit clichéd but for Edwards it was literally true. Although he served as a prep school headmaster for 25 years and raised three healthy and successful children, he refers to The Little Book as his life’s work.

“I must admit it didn’t feel like that when I was working on it,” he says. “It was just this frustrating thing I had. I didn’t think of it as very meaningful.”

Even so, over the years he put everything he knew or learned into it, adding complications and connections, thickening the characterizations and plot.

“When you work on a story that long,” he says, “you come up with little details and you say, ‘I can work that in,’ or someone tells you a good story and you think, ‘Oooh, I could put that in.’ I could do a footnoted version of my novel that would be four times as long. Almost every detail comes from some part of my life.”

The list of authors who’ve suffered the vicissitudes and felt the significance of prolonged labor on a single novel is longer and more distinguished than you might think: Malcolm Lowry spent a decade writing and revising his most famous work, Under the Volcano; Katherine Anne Porter took two decades to write her single novel, Ship of Fools; Jean Rhys produced parts of her post-colonialist classic, Wide Sargasso Sea, over almost thirty years; and Ralph Ellison struggled so long to write a second novel after the phenomenal success of Invisible Man—forty years!—he never finished it.

Unlike Edwards, these authors all had agents and advocates, readers and reputations. So why did they work on a single book for so long? What did they gain by sticking with it rather than moving on?

Nothing in our culture encourages anyone to write a novel, let alone work on it for decades. Talented fiction writers whose first novels don’t sell right away are like those old Olympic hopefuls who had to fend for themselves while their foreign competitors received government support. More often than not, agents (if you can get one) will send your novel to no more than a handful of publishers before giving up. If the rejections point to a clearly fixable problem, they might risk a second round; if not, you’re on your own to wonder whether your book is fatally flawed or just not salable in its current condition—whether you should burn it or stick with it, filling it with all you know.

Lowry chose the second course with Under the Volcano, a novel so packed with meanings and allusions some critics have called it unreadable while others have proclaimed it one of the best books of all time. (In 1998 the Modern Library editorial board put it at #11 on their list of the 20^th century’s 100 Best Novels in English. James Joyce’s 18-year-effort Finnegans Wake was #77 and Ulysses, which took him seven years, was #1.)

Lowery wrote three full drafts between 1936 and December of 1940 when his agent sent his manuscript to four publishers who all rejected it. Nine more would turn it down in the months ahead. By then, however, Lowry was already working on a fourth draft in which he revised each of the book’s twelve chapters at least four more times.

“This is not to say that Under the Volcano became longer,” writes Lowry biographer Douglas Day, “it did not. It became denser, as [Lowry] applied quick, small pieces of information and insight here and there, in masterfully controlled profusion.”

The result? British publisher Jonathan Cape published the book in 1946 but only after Lowry wrote an impassioned response to a reader’s report that “with surprising consistency…condemned exactly what supporters of Under the Volcano have found great in it.”

Rejection and lack of understanding aren’t the only reasons for an author to spend decades on a single book. Porter’s delay in finishing her one novel—a wide-ranging yet intimate look at the lives of several dozen people sailing from Mexico to Germany on the eve of Hitler’s rise—had less to do with others’ opinions than with scope. Porter was already well known as a short story writer; any number of publishers would have been happy to bring out her longer work. But she was trying, as biographer Joan Givner writes, “to work on a huge panoramic canvas and solve the riddle of what had gone wrong with the whole Western world in the twentieth century.” Not an easy task for someone used to writing short—or someone working in today’s less-patient publishing environment.

According to another biographer, Darlene Harbour Unrue, Ship of Fools “represents the final stage of Porter’s thematic and stylistic evolution. On the ship are versions of earlier characters she created or planned to create: in the narrative are scenes that mirror scenes from her other stories, short novels, and essays; themes treated in the shorter work are treated again in the long novel; and the prose medium of the long novel is a combination of stylistic techniques that served her well in the other pieces.”

In other words, the novel Porter labored over for so long became her life’s work.

Like Porter, Jean Rhys had a strong publishing history (four novels, a book of short stories and several autobiographical pieces) when she began working on what eventually became Wide Sargasso Sea (#94 on the Modern Library list) sometime in the late 1930s. In a fit of anger in the mid-1940s she burned her half-finished manuscript. She wouldn’t work on it again until 1958 or finish it until 1966 but she never stopped thinking about the Caribbean childhood on which it was based. Finally, in 1964, after a quarter century of brooding, the book came together when she wrote a poem.

“Even when I knew I had to write the book,” she wrote to her publisher, Francis Wyndham, “still it did not click into place—that is one reason (though only one) why I was so long. It didn’t click. It wasn’t there. However I tried.

“Only when I wrote this poem—then it clicked—and all was there and always had been.”

That clicking never came for Ellison who published two books of essays and miscellaneous works but never completed his long-anticipated second novel. His literary executor, John. F. Callahan, suggests that the scope of Ellison’s vision—his attempt to write his own ‘life’s work’ (as if Invisible Man, #19 on the Modern Library list, weren’t enough)—may have been the reason. In his introduction to Juneteenth, the novel he assembled from manuscripts Ellison left behind, Callahan writes: “Sometimes revising, sometimes reconceiving, sometimes writing entirely new passages into an oft-reworked scene, he accumulated some two thousand pages of typescripts and printouts by the time of his death.”

As early as 1968 Ellison’s struggle to write his follow-up novel (he had written 1,000 pages already) was causing him frustration, anxiety and, yes, shame. “He has become so embarrassed about his inability to finish the book,” wrote critic Richard Kostelanetz, “that he gets visibly upset when acquaintances ask about it.”

(If you’re wondering what Ellison wrote in all those pages Callahan mentions, Modern Library published over a thousand of them under the title Three Days Before the Shooting in 2010.)

So what do you do if you’ve written a novel, sent it out and either failed to find an agent or found one who wasn’t able to sell your book? Most writers move on to other projects. Some quit writing altogether, either permanently or temporarily, by choice or from necessity. A very few love their project enough, are confident (or maybe crazy) enough, and have patience and vision enough to start again with the same book, putting more of themselves and their time into it, risking making it their life’s work.

“It’s a manic-depressive practice,” Edwards says, “because when you’re in the heat of revising you start thinking, ‘Oh, boy, this is getting good,’ but then you get those cold hard rejection slips. I had a paycheck so I wasn’t desperate, but each time I got rejected I felt ready to give up.”

The darkest days came near the end when he’d retired and had the time to do one more complete revision in a relatively short amount of time. He sent the results to nine agents. “The unbelievable thing,” he says, “is that it was maybe 80% of what became the final book and every agent rejected it unceremoniously, with just a printed rejection slip.”

Once again, however, Edwards started over, this time hiring a freelance editor who helped fix his ending and several smaller problems. They worked together for a year. One week after they stopped, Edwards had an agent. Two weeks later, he had a contract. One year after that, he had a bestseller.

“When the agent called, he said, ‘You haven’t given this to anybody else, have you?’” Edwards remembers with a laugh. “‘I have to represent this book!’

“One of the things you try to do as a mature person is not evaluate yourself based on the opinion of others. You try to have your own integrity. But when you’re a writer it’s almost impossible to do that. The key thing in working with the editor was that he said right away, ‘This thing has promise.’ He was the first person to read it from cover to cover. That was the whole difference.”

Edwards is about to publish his second novel—a book he sold in two days with just a proposal: “They said, ‘Can you do this thing in a year?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I can.’”

What advice does he have for others willing to stick with one book over time?

“Number one, don’t give up. But be realistic about it. Maybe you’re going to write a lot and it’s never going to be published. Just because it happened for me doesn’t mean it’s more likely. The other thing is always finish a draft. Every draft I wrote was about twice as good as the one before. I kept finishing and that made a huge difference.”

“You know,” he adds, “I’ve had a lot of good stuff in my life, but I wanted to have a novel from the time I was a young man. All that’s going on now—having a bestseller and all—it’s like being drafted by the Celtics. It’s just an unbelievable dream and I live it every day.”

* To learn more about Selden Edwards, including the response to his follow-up novel, The Lost Prince, visit his Wikipedia page.

My Former Student, Mitchell S. Jackson, Wins Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing

My former student, Mitchell S. Jackson, was just announced as the winner of a 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for his incredible piece on Ahmaud Arbery for Runner’s World.

And last night he received a National Magazine Award in Feature Writing for the same piece!

I gotta brag here: Mitchell’s first published piece of journalism was written in one of my classes back in the early 2000’s. I’m so very proud of all he has done since then.

You can read the Pulitzer citation here.

And you can read the incredible article Mitchell won the awards for here.

“Love in the Time of Cholera,” in the Time of Coronavirus

I started reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera yesterday, as every writer should at some point during a pandemic. It is so beautifully rich in language and poignant and, what I didn’t expect, funny. Here are two lines from early in the book I thought especially evocative:

“In summer an invisible dust as harsh as red-hot chalk was blown into even the best-protected corners of the imagination by mad winds that took the roofs off the houses and carried away children through the air.”

and

“At nightfall, at the oppressive moment of transition, a storm of carnivorous mosquitoes rose out of the swamps, and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad, stirred the certainty of death in the depths of one’s soul.”

Wow.

Novelist Kent Haruf (1943-2014) On Teaching and Learning Writing

Monday, November 30, was the first anniversary of the death of Kent Haruf, the bestselling author of Plainsong and other novels of unusual simplicity and beauty. I met Kent when we taught together at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and we became good friends. In his gentle way, he taught me many things about writing and being a writer, teaching and mentoring writers. In January 2000, I did two in-depth interviews with Kent, a portion of which was published in the March/April 2001 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. Here are some excerpts in which he talks about teaching writing, including what aspects of writing can and cannot be taught:

McGregor: What do you find most difficult to teach students or for students to learn about writing? Can you teach them, for example, to have an intrinsic sense of life or human values?

Haruf: I think you can teach them how to observe life. That can be learned. For example, you can teach somebody how to listen to natural speech sounds. One of the most difficult things for students is to understand what a story is or to see their own experience as story. Most of their notions of story are so distorted by bad movies and lousy TV that what they end up writing is pretty shallow, pretty implausible, and derivative. One thing I do is encourage them to read things that aren’t derivative—aren’t lousy TV. Presumably if they can learn what a bad story is and think it’s a story, they can learn what a good story is and know it’s a story. Another thing I do is encourage them to think about what has hurt them, because they will remember that better than good times or joyful times. I don’t want them necessarily to write autobiography but to use that pain as a springboard to a story. That leads to a lot of stories about pain but to me fiction is about problems and pain. Something has to happen, and it seems to me action most often comes out of yearning or pain.

McGregor: Are there things you can’t teach students?

Haruf: You cannot teach students talent.

McGregor: How would you define talent?

Haruf: I’m not sure. It has to do with an ability to write musical language. It’s a sensitivity to language, I think, before story. A person can learn how to see stories. I feel I have, and if I can, other people can. But while you can show a person why these words in this order might be musical or these words in this order are vivid and wonderful, you cannot affect the reception of that language in somebody’s ear in some innate way. You have to read a lot to find out whether you have that sensitivity to language or not, but reading alone won’t develop it.

McGregor: In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner wrote that anybody can learn to write a story they can publish. Do you agree with that?

Haruf: In most ways, yes. If you have at least some ability with language, you can be taught to write a story. If you work at it, it will be published, yes. But most people don’t have the talent for work required. The persistence that takes you past defeats and helps you stay in this process for the long haul. In my experience it’s a very long haul. And you have to be doing it for its own sake rather than any external reward because those are few and far between.

I sometimes say to students that writing is like religion. That doesn’t mean I’m solemn about it but I am very serious. I want to enter into it, devote the best I can to it, be the best I can to it. There’s no point in doing it in some mediocre or less than totally concentrated way. I’m irritated when students don’t take it seriously. I can’t see why they would be taking a writing class. There are so many other things that are easier to do. Writing calls out the best in you. It is difficult and the rewards are few, but if you actually succeed in creating something that seems like art, the satisfaction is greater than almost any other satisfaction available to human beings.