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Imagine a character whose job—such as a banker, thrift store cashier, babysitter, college president—typically implies certain traits about this person and a certain lifestyle. Write a story in which this character's life outside of his or her work is drastically different from what is typical. Explore in your writing why this is so, using it to inform the plot and to create tension in the story.
The National Book Foundation (NBF) announced the National Book Award finalists today from Portland on Oregon Public Broadcasting.
The finalists in poetry are:
Nikky Finney for Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press)
Yusef Komunyakaa for The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Carl Phillips for Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Adrienne Rich for Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007–2010 (Norton)
Bruce Smith for Devotions (University of Chicago Press)
The finalists in fiction are:
Andrew Krivak for his debut novel, The Sojourn (Bellevue Literary Press)
Téa Obreht, who was honored by the NBF last year as a 5 Under 35 author, for her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife (Random House)
Julie Otsuka for her novel The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf)
Edith Pearlman for her story collection Binocular Vision (Lookout Books)
Jesmyn Ward for her novel Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury)
This year saw the first graphic book finalist, in the nonfiction category: Lauren Redniss's Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout (It Books). The nonfiction shortlist also includes biographies of Malcolm X and Karl and Jenny Marx, as well as Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve (Norton), a look at Lucretius's philosophical poem, "On the Nature of Things."
The National Book Award winners will be announced on November 16 in New York City.
In the video below, Finney reads and discusses the story behind a poem from Head Off & Split.
"How does reading about love affect how we fall in love today?" Jeffrey Eugenides, who wrote his third novel, The Marriage Plot, around that very question, discusses his new book, the influence of Nabokov, and the pressure of following up his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex.
The Association of German Publishers and Booksellers Foundation (Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels Stiftung) awarded its 2011 German Book Prize on Monday evening just before the start of the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Fifty-seven-year-old author Eugen Ruge won the twenty-five-thousand-euro award (approximately thirty-four thousand dollars) for his first novel, In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts (In times of fading light).
The novel, which received the Alfred Döblin Prize in 2009 when still in manuscript form, was praised for its humor despite the gravity of its subject. "Ruge's family saga is a reflection of East German history," said the prize jury. "He manages to tame the experiences of four generations over fifty years into a dramatically refined composition. His book tells the story of the socialist utopia, the price demanded of the individual, and its gradual extinction."
An English translation of Ruge's novel is in the works, but a firm publication date has not been announced. In the meantime, English speakers can read a translated excerpt on the website Signandsight.
Adapted from Hunter S. Thompson's early novel, written in the early sixties but not published until 1998, Bruce Robinson's The Rum Diary, starring Johnny Depp, opens in theaters on October 28. In the meantime, check out Terry Gilliam's adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, also starring Depp.
Instructor of applied theater at Cornish College of the Arts, Caroline Brown has facilitated workshops for diverse groups, including veterans, AIDS widows in Kenya, and incarcerated women, as well as P&W-supported writing/performance workshops with BABES Network-YWCA and Compass Housing Alliance in Seattle, Washington. Caroline shared some reflections on her work with us.
What makes your writing workshops unique?
For the most part, my focus has been on the use of theater and performance as a means of helping marginalized communities share their stories with a wider audience. Writing has inevitably been an integral part of this process.
What techniques do you employ to help writers open up?
I conducted a five-week writing workshop with Seattle-based BABES Network-YWCA, an organization that supports women living with HIV/AIDS. I asked the women to help me create group guidelines for the duration of the process. One woman shouted “spelling doesn’t count!” I was so pleased to hear her say this, as I know were the rest of the women. This simple guideline gave the women permission to avoid self-editing, trust their instincts, and find their voices.
I offer exercises that reveal commonality and reduce feelings of isolation amongst the group. I do this by asking participants to create collective poems or short stories that reflect both the diversity and similarities of the group. While conducting the workshop with Compass Housing Alliance, an organization that provides services and housing to homeless and low-income people, we created a composite character that reflected each individual’s respective experience. The group chose a key turning point for the character and took turns answering questions as that character. They were able to collectively narrate the story of how he met his goals. I feel strongly that the participants would not have been as engaged had the same subject matter been discussed outside the context of a fictional story.
What are the benefits of writing workshops for underserved groups?
The work can be tiring and there are times when I yearn for a more conventional career. It is during moments of doubt that I remind myself of experiences such as the one I had working with incarcerated women in the Rhode Island state prison system. Upon completing a writing exercise one of the women asked me through tears if “we did these exercises on the outside.” She was being released from prison the next day and was scared of “going back to her old ways.” The workshops helped her to recognize herself as a good person, something she had never felt before. Her fear was that without such an outlet, she might forget this feeling and start making unhealthy decisions again. What stopped me in my tracks was the fact that such workshops are not so readily available to those who need them the most.
What effect has this work had on your life and/or your art?
I am inspired by the risks individuals take within the creative process and the freedom they gain from doing so. My greatest challenge in this work is to remember how important that journey is to everyone, including myself. After seven years of encouraging others to endure the challenges that come with the creative journey, it is important to remind myself to embark on the same. I owe it to myself as well as to those who have shown so much courage in the face of their own hesitations toward the creative process.
Photo: Caroline Brown. Credit: Sven McNichols.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Seattle is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.
Directed by Alan Govenar, the new film The Beat Hotel explores the legacy of Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, and other American Beats who took refuge in a cheap no-name hotel in Paris during the late fifties and early sixties.
Write a scene for a story with two characters involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Use news stories about the movement in order to gather details to create a realistic setting.
The visionary cofounder of Apple died of complications from pancreatic cancer yesterday at the age of fifty-six. Here are some choice cuts from his commencement address at Stanford University in 2005, presented in the form of a poem.
In Lee Goldberg's short film Remaindered, which is based on one of Goldberg's short stories and was shot on a budget of fifteen hundred dollars, a once-famous author desperate to regain his lost glory travels the back-roads of middle America selling remaindered fifth-editions of his first book out of the trunk of his car.
