Mountain Words Literary Festival: Premise in writing process

If one concept stands out as a thread to connect so many of the brilliant writers and presenters I've experienced this past long weekend at the Mountain Words Literary Festival in Crested Butte, Co, it is the guiding idea of a "premise" for the writing project, the essay, the book.

1. Friday morning I started off the festival weekend with a workshop on writing a play in two hours led by Steven Cole Hughes, a Visiting Professor of Theatre at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, CO. A dynamic and authentic teacher, he brought us back to Aristotle's three elements of a story: beginning, middle, and end. To which Steve added possibly the most important 4th element: premise. According to Steve, "You mean something and you are trying to affect your reader in some way. Be aware of why you said something." 

Aristotle names 6 elements of theater:

• plot
• character
• theme (premise)
• music
• diction
• spectacle

A premise is "a statement that is provable by the events of the story." I am a lover of sentences, and so Steven spoke to my own process of writing when he focused his teaching on "the way the story is told, word for word, the drama of the sentence." What is the story you are setting out to tell? Keep this statement in mind as you write in any genre that involves storytelling.

2. My next spectacular workshop, titled "Poems for which we are grateful," was led by Aaron A Abeyta. I fell in love with his writing two years ago in the first Mountain Words festival. In this workshop, Aaron drew from the teachings of W.H. Auden for certain essential questions he asks himself of the poem and the subject as he is writing. Aaron spoke about how he finds the poems he is most grateful for seem to ask some essential questions, personal as well as philosophical:

• why am i writing this? 
• whose poem is this?
• what is the universal question I am asking here that has been asked a thousand times already?
• what parts of me are emerging here? 
• What place is emerging? 

For Aaron, poems ask questions that perform as the guiding premise for the writing of that poem. If you are getting stuck in a certain draft, go back to these questions and see what question must be asked next. Szymborska wrote, "Whatever inspiration is, it is born from the continuous question, "I don't know." I thought that Abeyta, as a teacher, bravely and with humility held high standards for us writers in the room, and asked for everything of his students. He asked us to ask  ourselves, what is our guiding question in our life? 

3. Laura Pritchet PhD directs the MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University. Her workshop approached storytelling through flash and fragments, experimental forms that provide fresh methods to write about challenging subject matter. Climate change, racism, society division, despair, can be illuminated through lists that subvert the standard "10 Rules of..." offerings online. Snippets unrelated through causality with large leaps between the fragments. The epistolary form can bring in voices and perspectives of others. And her favorite, the hermit crab essay/poem/piece of writing finds just the right container to crawl into and take over as its form. You must find just the right form for what you want to write about. 

For all of these experiments, the writer must also be aware of the theme or underlying meaning. Laura told us to say something that matters to you so that your writing can become an act of connection between you and the reader. She read a beautiful example of using these short fragmented forms from her latest book, Playing with (wild)Fire, that consisted of four paragraphs, each one a different character's third person description of that moment in time. Her characters were human as well as mammal and bird.

 

 

New Special Focus on Fiction: short story, novel, screenwriting workshop series begins April 29th

“What another would have done as well, do not do it. What another would have said as well or written as well, do not say or write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself.” — André Gide

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor” – Anne Lamott

 “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”   - Elmore Leonard

What if you could combine into your writing process through some beautiful technique the wisdom shared in the three quotes above? How can you pinpoint the perspective on your subject matter and the voice that exists nowhere but in yourself, and then translate that onto the page? At the same time, striving for perfection is the best way to never complete your manuscript. But how to figure out which are the parts that people skip reading? 

Beginning April 29th, I'll be offering a 6 wk writing series that will explore writing techniques that you can use to dig into your short story, novel, or screenplay. We will write stories, develop ideas, and expand novels in process. We'll also write in a supportive community, sharing tips about how to submit and publish your work along the way. Each week we'll cover new ideas and methods, focusing on a different key area of writing fiction each week: structure, plot, character, time, setting, and voice. Sign up for all 6 sessions or drop in depending on your schedule. In person and online.

2024 Monday Night Creative Writing Workshop Fiction Special Focus 

 6 workshops in this series: structure, plot, character, time, setting, and voice.

A fun and generative workshop especially for writers of fiction, short story, novel, and screen writing. Do you wish you wrote more? Want to feel a sense of community when you write? Want to start a book or finish a book? 

In-person and on zoom - sign up for the 6 wk series or drop in when your schedule works 

April 29 - June 10, 2024 (no workshop May 27) 6:30-8 pm 

Monday nights $160 or $30 drop in

This creative series is the most popular and longest-running workshop I offer. Craft, technique, and prompts for fiction of all forms. A kick in the butt for your writing life! Waiting for inspiration is also called procrastination. So don't wait - connect with a community and improve your fiction project and writing practice. Mondays from 6:30 to 8 pm. This series will fill up fast as I keep the size of the group intimate. Sign up by email to tangledrootswriting@gmail.com or call 530-386-3901.

Inspiration found in "Words from a Bear"– a documentary film about Scott Momaday

 

“I think that we're constantly redefining the human condition. And that is, as far as I can see, the writer's subject. What is it to be human? What is it to be human here and now?”– N Scott Momaday

For this post, I wanted to share some inspirations from Scott Momaday. I'm returning to a film I watched that was presented by the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in early February in Elko, NV. This documentary film is about the life and art of Scott Momaday, titled Words from a Bear.

You can watch it here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyOJIrQvkZY

This film made me cry with its adept handling of beauty and the long obstacles in the life path of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet N. Scott Momaday. He is best known for “House Made of Dawn” and a formative voice of the Native American Renaissance in art and literature.

I've been creating pairs of books that when read together shine new light on each other. For the book House Made of Dawn, I would pair the novel Home by Toni Morrison. Try reading these two books back to back and ask yourself what you understand differently in each book because of what the other book tells in story. 

Excerpted from an article in The Guardian 1/29/2024

·       “Scott was an extraordinary person and an extraordinary poet and writer. He was a singular voice in American literature, and it was an honor and a privilege to work with him,” Momaday’s editor, Jennifer Civiletto, said in a statement. “His Kiowa heritage was deeply meaningful to him and he devoted much of his life to celebrating and preserving Native American culture, especially the oral tradition.”

·       House Made of Dawn, published in 1968, tells of a second world war soldier who returns home and struggles to fit back in, a story as old as war itself: in this case, home is a Native community in rural New Mexico. Much of the book was based on Momaday’s childhood in Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, and on his conflicts between the ways of his ancestors and the risks and possibilities of the outside world.

·       “I grew up in both worlds and straddle those worlds even now,” Momaday said in a 2019 PBS documentary. “It has made for confusion and a richness in my life.”

·       Like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Momaday’s novel was a second world war story that resonated with a generation protesting the Vietnam war. In 1969, Momaday became the first Native American to win the fiction Pulitzer, and his novel helped launch a generation of authors, including Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch and Louise Erdrich. His other admirers would range from the poet Joy Harjo, the country’s first Native American to be named poet laureate, to the film stars Robert Redford and Jeff Bridges.

·       “He was a kind of literary father for a lot of us,” Harjo told the Associated Press during a telephone interview on Monday. “He showed how potent and powerful language and words were in shaping our very existence.”

Imag[In]ing America: a exhibit of photography by Jennifer Garza-Cuen at Melhop Gallery in Zephyr Cove

 

After wandering alone from photograph to photograph, taking in the staged details, trying to observe with a level of specificity worthy of this photographer’s eye, at last I’m overwhelmed. The images make me uncomfortable. I cannot passively observe. I must feel and respond. The subjects stare at me as if saying, judge me if you will but don’t look away from me.

I sit in a pale wooden chair in the front room before nine square photographs on the wall ahead of me. Behind me the windows are paned in rectangles and the sun is projecting the shadows of clouds onto the floor, as if they float on the surface of water.

To my right, a large photograph captures the black-green rippled water of a pond and the white body of a young woman floating naked, eyes closed, mouth open, auburn hair wrapping around her tricep. On my left, a girl stands alone in a wide rural empty road that curves behind her, like her curling hair, like the curving boa wrapped in her wrists and draping down to tip under the hem of her dress. The girl stares straight at me. 

I’m a poet, and I felt intimidated when Jennifer asked me to write a response essay for her solo show at the Melhop gallery. I’ve known Jennifer Garza-Cuen for many years while we participated together in the Reno Art Salon with a vibrant group of artists of diverse mediums. "I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing," wrote John Cage in his book Silence. As a literary artist I love collaborating with visual artists, seeing through fresh interdisciplinary lenses each other’s work.  I think what poets and photographers share with their viewers is the question, what does it mean? In my own experience as a poet and teacher, people read a poem or listen to a poem and then look up wide-eyed and anxious that they must now be able to answer that question. I don’t know what Jennifer’s photographs mean. 

I’ve always been guided by this idea that a poem is not complete without its reader. The poet, the speaker, and the reader collaborate in a created social space. In these photographs, I feel the presence of the photographer, the subject, and myself. Maybe in photographs of people, we always experience the illicitness of the voyeur. In these photographs, most of the subjects look brazenly at me. Not back at me. They are looking at me first, hand and fingers poised arrogantly with a cigarette. I imagine they have already considered why they are being photographed, and why they want to be in this photograph.

If I look closely, I see my own reflection in these photos I've taken, within the social space of the scene. The poet Myung Mi Kim in Commons wrote, "The poem may be said...to mobilize the notion of our responsibility to one another in a social space." These photographs loudly protest any attempt to step away from my complicity.