Blog hop, bog hlop for Richelle Hawkes

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Richelle Hawks of Shipwreck Dandy asked me to participate in her blog hop, and so here goes--

What am I working on?

Right now I have finished up a week at the Antioch Writing Workshops in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where I ran a poetry workshop and also met one-on-one with various people to discuss both poetry and fiction manuscripts. It was great fun, and I met lots of wonderful people, and stayed with writers Robert Wexler and Rebecca Kuder. Now I’m staying with friends-in-the-arts Lynn and Paul Digby, and Paul is taping and filming me reading poems and some fiction. Later on he’ll make some videos (and there will be podcasts) with his own music.

When I go home, I need to finish up some manuscripts that have been lying around, waiting for attention.  I have a poetry manuscript and a novel for children that are in need of some final polish or tweaks here and there. I have a novel forthcoming next year that I mean to revise one more time—occurred to me that I really ought to change the order of a few things, long after it arrived at the publisher's office.

More here

I won’t start a large, new project until those things are done, though I’ll be writing poems and small stories. I’ll be doing some traveling on behalf of my  novel, Glimmerglass, beginning with SIBA in Norfolk in September. I really need to arrange more events at the moment. And I’m still doing some work to help out recent poetry and fiction books—The Throne of Psyche, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad, and The Foliate Head. (See tabs above for information.)

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

I write lyric poetry, long narrative poetry, short stories, novels of various sorts, and even a few Southern fantasies for young adults, so I find that one a daunting question. Think I’ll leave it for readers to answer!

Ferrol Sams Award,
Silver Award, ForeWord BOTYA
More here

Why do I create what I do?

One of the most beautiful, good, and true acts human beings can perform on planet Earth is to rejoice in the greater Creation by making things. To create art is to live a larger life, one with greater energy and joy and scope.  

I make things in order to speak to and give back to the created world—to make shapeliness and to seek power and truth in words that, once pushed into the right order, may become an experience for another human being. I love the thought that somewhere, someone may be reading one of my books and feel something of what I felt when I was making it.

How does my creative process work?

More here

I might as well say that it falls as a golden waterfall from a distant star. The more I go on, the less I know and the more I feel about the mystery of art. If my writing is moving in its most natural and most potent way (as opposed to my simply doodling with words because, say, I haven't written a poem in a while and want to do so), it simply pours through me like a wave of energy that becomes embodied in words. Words and stories and poems swoop in, and later on I polish them and play with them until they are right. 

All work falls short of the fire that burns in the mind, but approaching that original fever is a constant lure. I love that fay call from within (or perhaps from without?) and the attempt to answer back.

More here.

And who to tag for the Gob Holp, Ogh Bolp, Blog Hop?

Scott G. F. Bailey
Scott's blog hop response here

More to come...

Writing the past

WRITING THE TIME-PLACE

Writer Robert Freeman Wexler asked me for any tips on research, as he is planning a novel set in the past.  Though I imagine he has quite as much common sense as I do, nevertheless I sent him a few thoughts and now post them here for any other interested parties:

Research/writing tips for stories with historical settings:
 1. Think of time as a place you can enter. Don't notice any more of it that you would of: a. any new place your observer might see, if seeing for the first time; or, rather differently, b. any usual place your observer might see.
2. Keeping 1 in mind, don't overdo the research, or you may feel compelled to use it.
3. Use primary sources when possible.
4. Use secondary sources when you need to know a general tendency--as, what the typical house structure was for a particular time and place and class, naming ways through generations in a certain region, etc.
5. When moving from research to writing, resist like mad any "namedropping" tendency. That is, do not attempt to prove that you are in a particular place and time by stuffing in references to Mae West or how to make yak butter or the seeds commonly found in the belly of a bog body or any other fascinating tidbits unless they make sense to mention in the context.

Update:  I completely forgot this! Park any P. C. sensibility at the door. Don't pay any attention to -isms, or you will write a novel that has modern people running about in supposedly past times. Many a big literary seller has done just that, even books beloved of many critics. I once caught some flak from a sf/f reviewer about a children's novel, The Curse of the Raven Mocker, because the people of Adantis aren't so keen on girls wearing dresses. But the culture ways of the Adantans are specifically drawn from a mixture of nineteenth-century Scots-Irish settler and Cherokee culture ways. Time has not treated them quite the same way as the rest of us, and so many elements are unchanged or changed in a different way from the way ours have changed. So stick to your time and don't pay a whit of attention to fashionable contemporary sensibilities.

WRITING THE DEPRESSION

My steaming-into-the-station book, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, is set in a time not all that far away and so rather different from Catherwood and The Wolf Pit. It's about the same kind of distance that Thackeray had to stretch in writing Vanity Fair, I suppose. While I did not live in the Depression, my elder relatives certainly did, and I grew up hearing stories that often involved hardship. I spent part of my summers in a house that was etched with deprivation, and which I used in great detail in the book. But there were a lot of other details to look up--bits about trains and signals, hobo signs, eucalyptus trees, con men, and more.

JUST PLAIN WRITING

Of course, after twenty minutes staring at Pinterest, I have a cheap revelation that everyone does now have 15 minutes of fame, that reading is dead, that Melvillean "deep diving" is absurd, that time is frittered and wisdom extinct, etcetera! An hour afterward I recover and think that perhaps I had better put on my diving gear and go write a poem.

'Night.