Q & A: W. Nick Hill on “Sleight Work” and Mucho Más

This blog posts on Mondays. Fourth Mondays of the month I devote to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

I was delighted to get the announcement for Sleight Work from W. Nick Hill, a poet and translator I have long admired. Sleight Work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License. The author invites you to download the free PDF from his website and have a read right now!

Here is one of the poems from W. Nick Hill’s Sleight Work which seems to me the very spirit of the book:

NOTICE
by W. Nick Hill

I live in a desert at the mouth of a mine.

The rocks and geodes I leave out on the sand.

If something fits your hand

Go ahead with it.

Poet and translatior W. Nick Hill, author of Sleight Work

Here is his bio as it appears in Sleight Work:

Walter Nickerson Hill was born in Chicago, raised in São Paulo, Brazil, and has spent lots of time in Oaxaca, Mexico. He shared Latin American culture with U.S. college students for a long time. Author of numerous academic reviews and articles, he has also translated the work of noted Latin American novelists and poets including Alvaro Mutis, David Huerta, and Miguel Barnet: Biography of a Runaway Slave. His English versions of poems by Mexican Jorge Fernández Granados’ Principle of Uncertainty, appeared as Constructed on Coincidence (Mid-American Review 2010). He is currently translating Gary Lemons’ Día De Los Muertos into Spanish. Hill has one slim award for a chapbook and will have three collections of poetry after Sleight Work comes out in November 2018. He lives on the Olympic Peninsula with his wife. Visit http://wnickhill.net

Before we delve into the Q & A, another favorite from Sleight Work:

After Hyde’s The Gift
by W. Nick Hill

Breathe it in and with your panorama lit up just now to the scope
of the cherries’ effervescent blossoming into the ether,
their tiny china on a weather-beaten wrought iron pea-colored table with chair,
a scent of July in vague Lapins where the leaves would have been were it a Camellia sinensis whose tiny white flowers ain’t tea;

something you have to pass on, give away with an authentic gesture over palm fronds shadowed against the wall
in a mauve kind-of-awareness
that brings out Matisse in the Mediterranean,
probably at siesta like a breath you have to give away to make room for the next

and recognize that’s the way energy flows,
like the random steps of the Egyptian Walking onion,
its scallion agglomerations all over the garden in clumps the wandering Buddhist monk gave us an age ago
that continue on walking around us all this time.

Translate from the breath into an object of delight
like the scent of Japan in the white frills on a purple plum in the springtime when it should be
and make sure somebody else gets it.

C.M. MAYO: How might you describe the ideal reader for Sleight Work?

W. NICK HILL: My “cousin,” Quentin Deming, M. D., Chip, as he was known, and his wife, Vida Ginsberg, were role models. They treated Barbara and me like royalty, wined and dined us when we visited them in Manhattan and we knew from stories it was like that with any and all. Chip was gracious, cosmopolitan, much loved by his patients and colleagues, idiosyncratic, capable of skate boarding in his red suit on his 70th birthday, and always ready to explain how some part of your anatomy worked. His daughters called recently to tell us he had died peacefully at 99. And that a constant companion in the time up to his end was my book And We’d Understand Crows Laughing. Chip would have been the ideal reader of Sleight Work; Vida too, who was widely admired for her knowledge of theater and her sense of humor. Maybe their daughters, Maeve and Lilith, but I can’t say for sure.

C.M. MAYO: And that cover image!? 

W. NICK HILL: I write virtually every morning and those pages pile up fast! When I realized that I was working on something inchoate I began to shape the whole into a collection. Well that’s one of my principal ways of working. But in this case, I began then to look around for an image for the cover, all the while I was also investigating what would happen if I set off on my own, that is to “publish” it on my website.  The image on the cover was a cell phone picture I’d taken of a busker on the Andador, the pedestrian walkway in Oaxaca, the city center on Day of the Dead, November 2017. When I’d worked out how the pose was accomplished, I was ready for the fact that the trick was after the fact, your money already in his cup. There’s an easy congress between busking and begging that goes back certainly to the picaresque tradition, and probably from time immemorial. And busking in Mexico, as you know is a worthy art. I’ve seen a Statue of Liberty across the street from an Uncle Sam, Roman Centurions, and so on. Taking money for little work is also sleight work, it’s true, though not a comely used phrase. But there’s a kind of trust the busker maintains in day long poses that she will be supported with contributions, that their bowl will not often be robbed, a presumption not so easily believed perhaps today. And then I don’t mind at all that the cover image invites the reader to consider the relation between a gift economy and the industry of book publishing in which the value of words has become more perhaps than at any other time in history the value of commerce.

C.M. MAYO: Can you also talk a little about your previous book, Blue Nocturne, and the hexagram poems?

W. NICK HILL: At some point in 2011 I began to compose what I called hexagrams out of a need for a simple meditative practice of writing.  With the I Ching in mind, I tried to write those two three line terse stanzas called hexagrams like those I had thrown using coins in the 60s and 70s to find guidance in the words of that venerable book of ancient wisdom. At least I fancied it told me appreciable things. The hexagram’s inner dynamism could change very quickly depending on the lines that moved, so there was always the possibility of surprises, changes. It was known as the Book of Changes, after all. I have also kept up with reading Tang and Sung dynasty poets, though I claim no expertise. I’m just a serial reader of Li Bo, Wang Wei, and many others. That discipline of composition continued for more than 64 days in a row and though I have all of them, only 18 or 19, depending, appear in BN.

Those little poems themselves began to very lightly sketch a consciousness that was connected to mine but wasn’t exactly. I sensed that this individual wanted to take himself, or herself, away for extended quiet, as in a remote cabin in the mountains around here in the Pacific Northwest. The speaker’s gender seemed to be male but I don’t think that it’s so clear.  In the course of this quiet time alone, the speaker awaits changes for the better that may arise out of paying close attention to the surroundings, especially nighttime and dreaming, and to the writing every morning.

Another set of incidents became entangled with these six line practice pieces. During what has become my almost yearly visit to Oaxaca, specifically in 2000, a chance encounter with Una constelación de noches / A Constellation of Nights, a glossy illustrated book of an art exhibit that the Mexican poet Alberto Blanco put together in which he paired paintings and poems. That handsome coffee table book came into my hands in the quiet inner patio under a bougainvillea “roof” at the IAGO, the painter Francisco Toledo’s Institute for Graphic Arts. I have not since seen the book again, though I tried for several years to lay my hands on it. The theme of nocturnes, more easily found in music and painting of course, were still a small literary presence in my memory, particularly Alvaro Mutis’ atmospheric nocturnes that evoked his family’s coffee plantation in torrid lands. This all came together in a rush in 2013 as Blue Nocturne. The color blue, aside from the celestial, came from a personal myth. As a child in Sao Paulo, I found a book with a blue cover in a box in an unused room over the garage, the former carriage horse stable in the old house we occupied. I don’t think I read much of it then because my brother and our friends got our dad to make the space into a floor hockey rink. But the notion of that book surely underlies some part of my desire to make them.

C.M. MAYO: As a poet writing in English, which English language poets would you say have been the most influential for you? And as one who also reads Portuguese and Spanish, which poets in those languages would you say have influenced your own work?

W. NICK HILL: Allow me to answer both the above in one. In Sao Paulo, Brazil,  my school mates and I spoke a bilingual mix of English and Portuguese. I loved the way those sounds danced around together! I was very much at home in Brazil. Portuguese wasn’t taught in the high school I went to when I returned to the States, so Spanish became my other language. Consequently, when I read it wasn’t English writers alone that interested me. One of the defining moments in my early life with poetry came in a flash of understanding how García Lorca made a verbal image come alive in “Romance sonámbulo,” from the Gypsy Ballads.  So it’s somewhat of a twist to focus on English, but I did pay attention to Modernists, especially Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, because I considered it a kind of (very opinionated) handbook of poetry in English, “The Seafarer,” and the ancient Chinese, in translation, of course, a reading habit I continue with Su Tung P’o, Hsieh Ling Yun, P’o Chu-ie, and so on. I also had a lot fun reading e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and for a time I thought a lot of Delmore Schwartz. Over time I went backwards, to Whitman, Dickinson, and sideways to the Beattles, Bob Dylan, and that would now have to include Leonard Cohen. 

Much later, I was able to participate in a poetry workshop for a heady week with Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and Michael Harper. That experience invited me to be more serious about my own writing.  After that I did short-term workshops with Marie Howe, Cleopatra Mathis, and then, a chapbook workshop with Jason Shinder at the New School.

I had a career as an academic, Ph.D. in Latin American literature. I wrote a monograph, Tradición y modernidad en la poesía de Carlos Germán Belli that was published in Madrid. Belli is one of the fine poets Peru has produced. He writes about contemporary angst in Golden Age formalisms. I studied with Oscar Hahn, a powerful Chilean poet whose Mal de amor, Love’s Sickness, among many others, made a big impression.  Through Hahn, I met Chilean poets, Pedro Lastra, Enrique Lihn, Nicanor Parra, Lucía Guerra, Javier Campos, and others. Javier later became my colleague at Fairfield University. Lihn became a model for my writing for a long time. He and I had long loopy talks about modernity. I was fuzzy whereas he had a clear understanding, some of which rubbed off on me, of what people were calling the Post-modern. I also developed an interest in the Summa de Maqrol el Gaviero, by the Colombian writer Alvaro Mutis. My first serious attempt to translate from Spanish were poems spoken by the existential philosopher cum sailor, Maqrol, The Lookout.

I don’t know how it is for others who teach about literature, but for me, after a time, when you’ve dealt with so many accomplished, brilliant writers and poets, it wasn’t so much that I was influenced by anyone in particular. It was more that I admired specific characteristics, or that the history of genres of writing became clearer because of the way Vallejo, for instance, who did have a serious part to play in what I wanted to do with poetry, the way he broke down previous measures of value to challenge language itself served as a path. Similarly with parts of Neruda, whose Odes touched a thread with simple language anybody could understand, like that of the ancient Chinese in English though because their poems were formally complex and were sung. 

C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about writing your own poems in Spanish?

W. NICK HILL: I began writing poetry in my early 20s and those attempts were in English. After college where I studied sciences and social sciences, I went to Spain to teach English for a year and to try my hand at writing fiction. Literature of all kinds, in both English and Spanish, occupied my reading. Bilingualism was imprinted on me growing up in Brazil. Over the years I’ve drifted away from Portuguese. In any case, when I turned to my own poetry it came out mixed English-Spanish. I wrote a chapbook called Mundane Rites / Ritos mundanos that was third place in the 1997Sow’s Ear Poetry Review’s chapbook contest but they only published the winner. Some of the poems came out in the minnesota review, and others, and in the Américas Review under a pseudonym I quickly dropped, Nicolas Colina. Poems in my chapbook came directly from the Central American conflicts of the 80s and 90s, border issues, as well. One of them was an experiment in the subconscious dialogue between Cortés and La Malinche that interwove Spanish and English. I have difficulty separating my poetry from politics broadly speaking. Because bilingualism involving U.S. Latinxs is contested territory, I drifted away from “code switching,” though I continued to publish in Spanish in The Bilingual Review, Ventana Abierta from UC Santa Barbara, and in Chile. It became clear to me in my teaching that the up and coming programs of studies in the 3 principle groups of Spanish Americans in the U. S. –Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans– weren’t being represented culturally, in my university anyway, in their bona fide condition as USians who wrote as they lived, in English, Spanish, and mixed up all together. And that’s not even considering interesting writing by Central Americans, Dominicans, and others, nor much attention paid to American Indigenous languages. I got a fellowship to get caught up on Chicano Studies at Yale, and began to develop university courses that addressed those communities, in literary culture at least. After all, at Fairfield University I had a whole range of speakers in my classes: English only speaking Mexican Americans, fluent bilinguals from the Caribbean, and foreign students whose English was good. This was during a time in the 90s and early 00s that I intensified my trips to Mexico, pointedly to Oaxaca where a former student, Kurt Hackbarth, had gone to teach English. He subsequently became a Mexican citizen and writes in both English and Spanish, plays, fiction, and commentary.

I compose in Spanish, not in the same way as in English exactly, but directly, that is to say I don’t translate, though that too is inaccurate. There is a mental space, or a consciousness accompanied by intuition and emotion where languages intermingle. The closest analogy would be sexual. And it’s in that embrace of languages where I enjoy hanging out.

C.M. MAYO: What is the best, most important piece of advice you would give to a poet who would like to try translating another poet?

W. NICK HILL: After a career of teaching, I no longer want to tell anybody or teach anybody anything. But the practice dies slowly, so rather than begging off, I’ll offer thoughts based solely on my own experience.

I believe, with others, that bringing a poem into another language is a recreation and a service to readers. I have read that a translator of poetry should find work that fits their sensibilities. I’ve read the opposite too. I met someone awhile back who was translating Horace for fun. So that is probably a good start at advice. Do it because you’re wrapped up in the words, and the vision, and you like it. But this individual wasn’t going to try to publish.

“I believe, with others, that bringing a poem into another language is a recreation and a service to readers.”

If publishing is the aim, then get the rights!  There are a number of ways to do that, most of which mean convincing somebody, poet or publisher –whoever holds the rights– to let you do the work, or accepts the work you’ve done. To do that you have to become the ideal reader, critic, and boatwoman to cross the mighty river between languages. Understand where compromises are required in the target language and decide throughout how to compensate.  One way is to shift the untranslatable gerund over to another one that suggest a similar affect

C.M. MAYO: You have also done book length translations, for example, of Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave. Can you tell a little about this experience and how it affected your own work?

Biography of a Runaway Slave

W. NICK HILL: I had been tried out so to speak on Barnet’s lesser testimonial novel, Rachel’s Song, the story of a dance hall girl before Sandy Taylor at Curbstone Press asked me to do Biography. I’m not certain I’d done a very good job with Rachel who was as shallow and frivolous as cabaret life allowed in Cuba in the 20 and 30s when it was a playground for privilege. But apparently it was good enough to give me a crack at Esteban Monetejo’s story. It was a daunting challenge. Esteban was an old man when Barnet interviewed him about the saga of how he ran away from slavery, lived alone in the bush, fought in the War of Independence, and watched the Cuban Revolution triumph before he died at 105 years of age. Esteban was uneducated of course, but he was smart, wily, curious, resolute, was steeped in the lore and rituals of various Afro Cuban spiritual beliefs, and he had a sharp memory. How does such a man sound in English? Though I read U.S. slave narratives, Montejo wasn’t going to sound like them. The details of everyday life he narrated differed greatly from slaves in the U.S. in large degree because Cubans were able to hold on to parts of their heritage from Africa.

As I progressed I realized that in a very real sense as translator I was mimicking Barnet’s role in his relationship with Montejo more closely perhaps than in other translations projects. Hence the confusion of titles between my version and the previous one by Jocasta Innes who knew a lot about ethnography and didn’t want to recognize the newness of what Barnet was doing. She published her translation in England as Autobiography, thus making Montejo into the sole author. What Barnet was after was to present the runaway slave’s voice as clearly and as transparently as white man could convey. And that’s what I tried to convey in the English version of the testimony of a man who was a character, a man of contradictions, tics in his speech, and great humanity, who gave convincing details of what life as a slave and as a free man in Cuba was like before the Cuban Revolution.

I made as literal a version as I could get and then worked to shape it within all the prohibitions and permissions I was aware of as a person who bridges the gap between slave and free, Cuba and the United States. I didn’t try to round Esteban out, I left phrases in Spanish or Yoruba that had no equivalent because the original already had a Glossary that clarified details of ethnicity, history, and the like.  I judged it to be acceptable to simply add to it.  In all, I tried to fashion a voice of great humanity in an English that was understandable but particular.  A new edition came out from Northwestern University Press in 2016, with a fine introduction by Professor Wiliam Luis.

C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive writer for many years. How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share? And another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic? 

W. NICK HILL: I have been much aided and hindered both by digital media. Before I left teaching I was deeply involved in using the web and programs like WebCT  –programs like Chalkboard today– to help students manipulate at their own speed the conjunction of sight and sound that is central to learning another language.

After I left academics, I really dove into writing poetry. I had already withdrawn from some of those very distractions you mention  because I could feel how they drew me further into time on computers and into a popular culture that relies increasingly on violence and the propagation of stereotypes. I don’t mean to say that there aren’t meaty blogs, You Tubes, and the like to enrich one’s thought, but even so it can be overwhelming, as you suggest. Thus, to say that I’m distracted from writing by elements of Virtual Reality would be erroneous however, because I’ve guarded against it.  In fact, the digital has benefitted my writing in two ways.

As I said previously, I published Sleight Work on my website to take advantage of the movement to ensure access to materials remains as open and free as possible. In the world of publishing today, there are so many access points to creative work it boggles the mind. At the same time, so much of it has been infused with commercialism that I for one find it disturbing. I’m sure there are exceptions, but much of the discussion of writing on the web and in print revolves around volume of sales, numbers of prizes, and other markers of what?  Subject matter? Craft? Raw writing as a practice? Justice? Art?

The second way that the Digital Revolution has not distracted me resides in the fact that I have made it a focus of my work. Awhile back I became intrigued by the Mesoamerican ballgame that was played in ancient times and is still played in some few areas of Mexico today. The game, variously called ullamalitzli, Pok-Ta-Pok, Tachli, was played with a heavy latex rubber ball five hundred years before Europeans came to colonize. I’ve been writing poems about the continuity of games in these lands. I have come to see that a continuity worthy of further exploration exists between the contemporary world of video gaming, itself a world apart, and those age-old games. This is a body of work that I’m still actively pursuing.

As for tips, I’d say the policy of following a middle course between Luddite no contact and game players who rarely see natural light is called for. And a good healthy skepticism about how electronics will deliver the biosphere from the predations of capitalism. Anthropologist David Graeber has my ear when he writes about anarchism in a compelling way in his Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology.  

I have always written on paper first and then make hard copies of what seems interesting enough to work further. The most unsettling aspect of this practice is that the pages keep on piling up. Some small fraction of those words do get digitized. Apart from that who’s going to wade through all those pounds of paper if I don’t. Which would seem to be a good argument for going paperless though I can’t shake it.

C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a poet and translator?

W. NICK HILL: I’m preparing for another stay in my adopted city of Oaxaca, Mexico where I will finish translating Gary Lemons’ Día de los muertos that Red Hen brought out in 2016 as a coloring book. The chiste, the joke is that I’m translating it into Spanish. More realistically, I hope to polish enough of a sample to interest a poet in Mexico to sign on with me to make it ring true with the goal of seeing about a publisher.  I’ve already asked Jorge Fernández Granados, but it was a year ago and was put off-handedly so he’s probably not thinking about it now. I have published a handful of poems from his Principle of Uncertainty, so I’m hoping he is amenable. In any case, Lemons’ work dances with surreal abandon that juxtaposes eccentric, intuitive images of the splendor and suffering of creatures, from burros, to dusty young gringos, and sea tortoises, all creatures encountered in Oaxaca at various times between the late 60s and the 80s. A happy, hubristic effort of mine to render this whirling dervish of words into Spanish.

In addition, I’m going to double down on a bilingual collection of poems that builds on Mundane Rites / Ritos mundanos and will poke around in matters related to Americanismus, a tentative title, for new worldisms. What the adventure of website publishing has suggested to me is that no existing publisher I know of will chance it with a book for bilinguals not by a Latinx writer. I’m cognizant of the political nature of cultural work and don’t want to distract from worthy goals of U.S. Latin@s. At the moment only on the web could I present a book for bilingual readers who might understand what I’m celebrating. Perhaps this effort is akin to the recognition that jazz and blues are universal art forms that honor African American originators and share their creativity even in the midst of racism. And then there’s that ball game project at the end of a joystick. Thanks for giving  me the chance to share with you. Keep up the good work.

Q & A: Mary Mackey, Author of The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams,
on Bearing Witness and Women Writers’ Archives

Poetic Alliteration

Q & A: Sara Mansfield Taber on Chance Particulars: A Writer’s Field Notebook

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.

“Silence” and “Poem” on the 1967 Hermes 3000

My writing assistant wonders…. um, warum? (why?)

Truly, I am not intending to collect typewriters. All shelf space is spoken for by books!! Last week I brought home a 1967 Hermes 3000 because (long story zipped) my 1961 Hermes 3000 is temporarily inaccessible, and it was bugging me that my 1963 Hermes Baby types unevenly and sometimes muddily (which could be a problem with the ribbon, but anyway), and I had a deadline to type my short story “What Happened to the Dog?” for the anthology COLD HARD TYPE (about which more anon read it here).

Well, obviously I had to buy another typewriter!

I dare not buy anything but a Swiss Hermes. The one I could find in my local office supply shop was a refurbished 1967 Hermes 3000 with a Swiss-German QWERTZ keyboard. I’ve had to get used to the transposed Y and Z keys; otherwise, kein Problem, and es freut mich sehr to have the umlaut.

A QWERTZ Swiss German keyboard
(American keyboards are QWERTYs)

Of my three Hermes typewriters, this 1967 3000 is by far the smoothest, easiest to type on, and most consistent. I venture to use the word “buttery,” in fact.

Herewith, typed on the 1967 Hermes 3000, “Silence” and “Poem,” from my forthcoming collection, Meteor:

Typed today but originally published in Muse Apprentice Guild in, ayy, 2002. I think it was.
www.givalpress.com

If you’re going to the Great American Writerly Hajj, I mean the Associated Writing Programs Conference, come on by my reading– it’s a free event– I’m on the lineup with Thaddeus Rutkowski, Cecilia Martinez-Gil, Tyler McMahon, Seth Brady Tucker, John Domini, Teri Cross Davis, Elaine Ray, William Orem, Jeff Walt, and Joan G. Gurfield for the Gival Press 20th Anniversary Celebration Reading on Friday March 29, 2019 @ 7 – 10 PM, Hotel Rose, 50 SW Morrison St, Portland OR.

The following day, Saturday March 30, 2019, @ 10-11:30 AM, I’ll be signing copies of Meteor at the Gival Press table (Table #8063) in the AWP Conference book fair.

You can also find a copy of Meteor on amazon.com. And read more poems and whatnots apropos of Meteor on the book’s webpage here.

P.S. Tom Hanks on typing, in the NYT. And Richard Polt on typing in San Francisco. And David Rain on “Hermes of the Ways.”

P.P.S. Joe van Cleave recommends silk ribbons from Ribbons Unlimited.

P.P.P.S. Your Typewriter is Not a Bowling Ball.

P.P.P.P.S. Austin Typewriter Ink Podcast “Typewriter Justice For All.”

Typosphere, Ho! “Stay West” on My 1961 Hermes 3000

“Round N Round” on the 1963 Hermes Baby

Marfa Mondays Podcast #19: Pitmaster Israel Campos in Pecos

Visit my website for more about my books, articles, and podcasts.

A Slam-dunk (if Counterintuitive) Strategy to Simultaneously Accelerate, Limber Up, and Steady the Writing Process

This blog posts on Mondays. Second Mondays of the month I devote to my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing. Welcome!

> For the archive of workshop posts click here.

Those of you who follow me here know that I am fascinated by attentional management and the creative process. Of late I have posted here on my advances in email management; finding time for writing (gimungous swaths of it!); and most recently, my distraction-free smartphone (which post includes an app evaluation flowchart to tailor-make your own, should you feel so inclined).

That last post about the smartphone appeared on the eve of the publication of Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. Because I am a fan of Newport’s books, especially Deep Work, which I recommend as vital reading for writers, of any age and any level of experience, I expected Digital Minimalism to be good. As I noted in that post, if nothing else, in broadening our ability to think about the technology we use, Newport’s term “digital minimalism” is an important contribution in itself.

Reader, Digital Minimalism is beyond superb. It is a healing book, on many and profound levels, and I believe that it is not only vital reading for writers, but for anyone who finds themselves staring at a screen more often and for longer than they know is good for them– and, alas, these days, that would be just about everybody. (Including parents.)

In Digital Minimalism Newport says much of what I have said here at Madam Mayo (I found myself nodding, yes, yes, at almost every page), but he goes thirty miles higher and a loop-de-loop beyond.

And perhaps most importantly, for the general reader looking for something in the burgeoning self-help genre addressing the behavioral addictions of our Digital Age, as a tenured professor of Computer Science at an elite university, Cal Newport has authority rarer than an orchid in the Sahara.

My intention in this week’s post is not to provide a full review of Digital Minimalism, but rather to focus on one chapter, “Reclaim Lesiure,” and, more generally, the importance for writers of quality leisure.

QUALITY LEISURE

Writes Newport:

“The more I study this topic, the more it becomes clear to me that low-quality digital distractions play a more important role in people’s lives than they imagine. In recent years, as the boundary between work and life blends, jobs become more demanding, and community traditions degrade, more and more people are failing to cultivate the high-quality leisure lives …crucial for human happiness. This leaves a void that would be near unbearable if confronted, but that can be ignored wih the help of digital noise. It’s now easy to fill the gaps between work and caring for your family and sleep by pulling out a smartphone or tablet, and numbing yourself with mindless swiping and tapping. Erecting barriers against the existential is not new–before YouTube we had (and still have) mindless television and heavy drinking to help avoid deeper questions–but the advanced technologies of the twenty-first century attention economy are particularly effective at this task.” (p.168)

I think that bears repeating.

“Erecting barriers against the existential is not new–before YouTube we had (and still have) mindless television and heavy drinking to help avoid deeper questions–but the advanced technologies of the twenty-first century attention economy are particularly effective at this task.” — Cal Newport

Newports recounts the experience of a writer who tried to go cold turkey from digital distractions. As that writer summed it up, it was “Torture.” Writes Newport:

“[He] felt uncomfortable, in other words, not because he was craving a particular digital habit, but because he didn’t know what to do with himself once his general access to the world of connected screens was removed.” (p.168)

Then:

“If you want to succeed with digital minimalism, you cannot ignore this reality… The most successful digital minimalists, therefore, tend to start their conversion by renovating what they do with their free time–cultivating high-quality leisure before culling the worst of their digital habits… When the void is filled, you no longer need distractions to help you avoid it.” (pp.168-169)

NOT THE DREAMTIME OF A CHARTREUSE MOON
OR,
THE PERILS OF PROCRASTINATION

As anyone who has taken on writing a book or three knows, only in the dreamtime of a chartreuse moon do they “write themselves.” It happens. But the experience is more often one of initial enthusiasm soon weighted down by one frustration and then twenty-nine others, delays for good reasons, for stupid reasons, more frustrations, distractions galore… and so, slowly, or quickly, a slide into the warmly inviting moist sand of procrastination.

Some books escape this trap. Most do not because the writer soon feels bad about having procrastinated–oh, very bad– and on top of this, in march the clanking, hammering, pounding round-n-round of woulda-coulda-shouldas… which makes the mere thought of the book so disagreeable that… eventually… it sinks deeper into the quicksand… and deeper…. And there it dies.

So how did I manage to write so many books, including the epic historical novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire? A novel, moreover, that deals with Mexico’s most complex transnational episode and recounts it by means of a Jamesian roving omniscient point of view? Whatever you may think of my novel, were you to read it, I am sure you could agree that it was not a modest undertaking. I won’t tote up all my challenges and frustrations over the eight years I needed to research and write it. For purposes of this blog post, the answer to the question is that, apart from a perhaps unusual streak of tenaciousness in my personality, when the going got really funky with The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, I happened upon the lifesaver–I grabbed it!– of psychologist Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit.

And now here I am in the midst of another multi-year book project– multi-year by its nature–but also one that, alas, has been interrupted by two other books, a death in the family, and two household moves… I was starting to sense a bit of dampness there in the encroaching sand, as it were. But then, in one of the boxes I opened after my latest move, I found again my dog-eared copy of The Now Habit. I reread it, and I can report that Fiore’s advice is as consolingly golden as ever.

And then, after reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, in the light and freshness of that, I sat down and went through The Now Habit yet again.

It was eerie to be reading Fiore’s The Now Habit in 2019, for it appeared in 1989, before anyone, outside a coterie of high-tech scientists and miltary people, had more than a notion, if that, of the Internet.

When I first read The Now Habit in the early 2000s, email had become a thing, but only a few writers had one of those newfangled things called “websites.” I did not yet know of a single one with a blog (I don’t think I’d yet heard of blogs). Cell phones were just phones. To get to school, we walked a mile in the snow without shoes (just kidding). For mindless procrastination there were trashy fiction, newspapers, magazines, and TV on tap, ever and always. In short, writers have always had to battle procrastination, albeit relatively low-octane stuff compared to the engineered-to-be-addictive apps of today.

But back to the question of quality leisure.

Of immense value for me in Fiore’s The Now Habit was the chapter “Guilt-Free Play, Quality Work.” Speaking to us from a time essentially free from “digital distractions,” Fiore says much the same thing as does Newport: for health, happiness, and productivity, we need quality leisure– or, as Fiore calls it, “guilt-free play.”

Writes Fiore:

“Attempting to skimp on holidays, rest, and exercise leads to suppression of the spirit and motivation as life begins to look like all spinach and no dessert… we need guilt-free play to provide us with periods of physical and mental renewal.”

It’s counterintuitive: when we seriously, urgently want and need to get work done, why first schedule play?!

Writes Fiore:

“Enjoying guilt-free play is part of a cycle that will lead you to higher levels of quality, creative work. The cycle follows a pattern that usually begins with guilt-free play, or at least the scheduling of it. That gives you a sense of freedom about your life that enables you to more easily settle into a short period of quality work. Having completed some quality work on your project, your feeling of self-control increases, as does your confidence in your ability to concentrate and to creatively resolve problems. In turn your capacity to enjoy quality, guilt-free play grows.” (p.82)

Play and work enhance one another in this cycle:

“…You are now well-rested, inspired, and ready for greater quality work. Guilt-free, creative play excites you with motivation to return to work.” (p.82)

I would urge anyone who wants to overcome procrastination to carefully read Fiore’s The Now Habit; he has much to say about the ways over-work can lead to procrastination, and the precise way to schedule guilt-free play with what he calls an “unschedule,” and how to overcome blocks to action. (Much of this good old-fashioned, yet oft overlooked, common sense, for example, what he calls “Grandma’s Principle,” that your scheduled guilt-free play should come after a good, solid half hour of quality work– “your ice cream always comes after you eat your spinach”.) My purpose here is not to review Fiore’s book however, but to focus on the counterintuitive importance for writers of quality leisure.

“GUILT FREE PLAY” AND “QUALITY LEISURE”

First, it should be triple-underlined that the “quality” of leisure is not necessarily related to its cost. Golf resorts, wide-screen TV manufacturers, purveyors of recreational vehicles, time-shares, sports equipment, Princess Cruises, et al would like you to imagine that what they’re selling is “quality leisure,” and the more expensive the upgrades the better!

But “quality leisure” could be an activity as pennywise as sitting in a chair in your livingroom and knitting a scarf from a ball of yarn that had been stashed in your closet for the past 20 years. Or, say, baking peanutbutter cookies; playing with your dog; walking out to the park and tossing around a frisbee with a friend. Biking to your public library to read War & Peace. Or playing baseball, curling, taking a yoga class, doing yoga on your own in your backyard, or on the beach at dawn! Scottish country dancing, baking bread, watching Casablanca at your local film school’s movie festival. Learning to play the guitar or the kazoo. Baking lasagne. Casting bronze sculpture! Or squishing together a super weird alien head the size of your fist out of papier mache!

In sum, “quality leisure” can be pretty much any activity that you truly enjoy doing and that you find energizing. (Hint: TV watching and pecking at the smartphone don’t count. Neither does bar-hopping or sitting around toking weed.) Newport has more to say about identifying and pursuing quality leisure. Before I return to that, a brief note about the “artist date.”

THE ARTIST’S WAY

By this point I imagine that many of you writerly readers may be thinking, didn’t Julia Cameron say something like this in The Artist’s Way?

Indeed she did. Cameron’s concept, a potent one, is what she calls “the artist date.” The idea is that this is scheduled quality leisure (to use Newport’s term) / guilt-free play (to use Fiore’s) but you go alone— absolutely not with someone else–and do something that nurtures your artist self. For me it might be something like a visit to a museum, reading a Willa Cather novel for an hour in a favorite coffee shop, or attending an organ concert. (In one of my most challenging moments in writing The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, one “artist date” I made for myself was to attend a planetarium show. Of all things.) Some people might like to get out the crayons or the Play-Dough. Of course, there’s no formula; what nurtures one artist, or writer, might not another.

So, advises Cameron, if you want to get some good writing done, go forth, by yourself, at a scheduled time, and do some fun and possibly wacky-nerdy thing!

Cameron’s The Artist’s Way was originally published in 1991, before the tsunami of digital technologies swept over our world, and yet like Fiore’s The Now Habit, it offers wise and timeless advice for writers. Cameron has a New Age spiritual slant, however, and that isn’t every Atheist’s slug of coffee. With that caveat, I warmly recommend The Artist’s Way.

CAL NEWPORT’S LEISURE LESSONS

Back to our computer professor and attentional focus expert Cal Newport and his latest, Digital Minimalism. In the chapter “Reclaim Lesiure,” Newport offers specific insights into which types of leisure are most effective for filling the void otherwise taken by low-quality digital distractions, and for enhancing well-being and productivity. These are those endeavors that:

(1) “prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption”;

(2) “use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world”; and

(3) tend to be those “that require real world, structured social interactions.”

Newport is not talking about eliminating digital technology, and in fact he points out ways in which websites, email, social media and more digital technologies can assist us in engaging in more and higher quality leisure. There is, Newport concedes, “a complex relationship between high-quality leisure and digital technology.” In my own case, I recently found out about and registered for a university extension course (which I attended in person) on a website. Many similar examples of how texting, social media, and YouTube, can assist and enhance real world meetings and activities no doubt pop into your mind. Newport stresses: “The state I’m helping you escape is one in which passive interaction with your screens is your primary leisure.”

“The state I’m helping you escape is one in which passive interaction with your screens is your primary leisure.”
— Cal Newport

Newport concludes his chapter “Reclaim Leisure” with four practices, each amply explained, argued, and with illuminating examples:

  1. Fix or build something every week;
  2. Schedule your low-quality leisure;
  3. Join something;
  4. Follow leisure plans, both seasonal and weekly, stating both the objectives and the habits you aim to establish.

AND TO CONCLUDE WITH FRIEDRICH DÜRRENMATT

Here is an example of one writer’s quality leisure activity: Swiss writer, playwright and artist Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) painted the bathroom adjacent to his office. This is a partial view, of side wall, back wall, and ceiling. I decline to publish here the principal appurtenance.

Thanks to poet Joseph Hutchison, who recommended Dürrenmatt’s work to me, as I am temporarly living in the area, I made it, shall we say, one of my “quality leisure” activities to visit the house / museum, now the Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel. (I would also call this visit “guilt-free play,” to use Neil Fiore’s term, but not an “artist’s date,” as Julia Cameron defines it, because I did not go alone.)

In the museum:

In English: “I can play with this world: that is my freedom as an artist.”– Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Here is the writer at his desk, as shown on the cover of this book (which I would translate as Dürrenmatt: His Life in Pictures):

The view of Lake Neuchâtel from his terrace:

More anon.

Remembering Ann L. McLaughlin

Meteor, Influences, Ambiance

Marfa Mondays Podcast #8: A Spell at Chinati Hotsprings

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.


“Round N Round” on the 1963 Hermes Baby

Uh oh (I can begin to see how this gets out of hand!) I just brought home a second vintage Swiss-made typewriter, a 1963 Hermes Baby, which is a sight lighter at 3.6 kilos (just under 8 pounds) and more compact than my 1961 Hermes 3000. It is in excellent working order, klak, klak!

He has not expressed himself verbally on the matter, but it would seem that my writing assistant would prefer that I use the MacBook Pro. Also, geesh, it was ten minutes past suppertime.

From Meteor, my collection which will be out from Gival Press later this month:

>More about Meteor on my webpage.

>More about the Hermes Baby at the Australian blog ozTypewriter and at the Swiss Hermes Baby Page by Georg Sommeregger (in German, but Google translation available).

#

On the Hermes Baby I am also typing up my story (originally written on the laptop), “What Happened to the Dog?” for COLD HARD TYPE: Typewriter Tales from Post-Digtal Worlds. More about that anon.

Meanwhile, whilst strolling about the Rio Grande outside of Albuquerque, my fellow COLD HARD TYPE contributor Joe Van Cleave ponders the Typosphere, its relation to digital media, and the ultimately analog origins of the digital:

Typosphere, Ho! “Stay West” on My 1961 Hermes 3000

From the Typosphere: “Bank”

Marfa Mondays Podcast #3: Mary Bones on the Lost Art Colony

Visit my website for more about my books, articles, and podcasts.

Q & A: Ellen Cassedy, Translator of “On the Landing,” Stories by Yenta Mash, Master Chronicler of Exile

This blog posts on Mondays. This year the fourth Monday of the month is, except when not, dedicated to a Q & A with another writer.

On the Landing: Stories by Yenta Mash, translated by Ellen Cassedy (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018)

Yenta Mash and her stories will be remembered because they have rare and masterful elegance, uncanny insight into vast prairie-like swaths human nature, and unusual heart. They also tell stories entirely new for many English-speaking people, that of the Jewish exiles to Siberia under Stalin during World War II, and their later migration to Israel. Translator Ellen Cassedy’s is a transcendent achievement; with Mash’s On the Landing she has brought a landmark book into English.

Translator Ellen Cassedy’s is a transcendent achievement; with Mash’s On the Landing she has brought a landmark book into English.

Ellen Cassedy is the author of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust and co-translator (with Yermiyahu Ahron Taub) of Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel. She was a 2015 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow, and On the Landing is a result of her fellowship. Her website is www.ellencassedy.com.

C.M. MAYO: How might you describe the ideal reader for these stories?

ELLEN CASSEDY: Anyone interested in fine literature! Mash is a great read – clear, sometimes funny, and full of ground-level truths about what it was like to live through great cataclysms of the 20th Century.   

C.M. MAYO: When and why were you inspired to translate Yenta Mash?

Ellen Cassedy

ELLEN CASSEDY: I learned of Mash’s work through the Yiddish Book Center’s translation fellowship program.  Having died in 2013, she’s basically a contemporary writer. She was a down-to-earth and often witty observer of a changing world, who drew on her own life of multiple uprootings in telling the stories of people who are forever on the move.  

Even in the most harrowing settings, Mash is somehow inspiring. Young and old, her characters are solid, sturdy people with a sense of humor.  They’re survivors, people who land on their feet.

The collection begins in a vibrant Jewish town reminiscent of the one in “Fiddler on the Roof.”

We then join women prisoners being transported into the Siberian gulag, with its frozen steppes, snowy forests, and surging rivers. After the exile, we see the Jewish community rebuilding itself behind the postwar Iron Curtain. Finally, we join refugees in Israel in the 1970’s, struggling with the challenges of assimilation and the awkwardness of a land where young people instruct their elders, instead of the other way around. 

C.M. MAYO: You are also a translator of the Yiddish writer Blume Lempel. Both Lempel and Mash write of suffering, exile, and grief, and yet they are very different writers, with very different experiences during and after the war. In a writerly sense, what are some of the differences that especially strike you?

ELLEN CASSEDY: Mash (1922-2013) and Blume Lempel (1907-1999) grew up in tiny towns in Eastern Europe, not far apart from each other. Both suffered persecution, displacement, and appalling losses.    

Lempel left home for Paris as a young woman, fled to America in 1939, and spent the remainder of her life in New York. Her work feels shattered, fractured, unhinged. Her gemlike, poetic style and decidedly unconventional narrative strategies take readers into a realm of trauma and madness. The title story, “Oedipus in Brooklyn,” is Exhibit #1 of her taboo-defying oeuvre.

As a young woman, Mash was deported to Siberia by the Soviets in 1941.  She did seven years of hard labor there, then spent three decades in Soviet Moldova before immigrating to Israel in the 1970’s. Her work bears witness in an urgent, orderly, and exacting fashion to a life full of tumult. Her language is alive with regionalisms carried to new places, bits of multiple languages picked up along the way, and neologisms invented to describe new circumstances.  

C.M. MAYO: In our last interview, about your translation (with Yermiyahu Ahron Taub) of Lempel’s stories, Oedipus in Brooklyn, I was intrigued, if not surprised, to learn that she corresponded with the poet Menke Katz. Would Blume Lempel and Yenta Mash have corresponded, or have corresponded with anyone in common in Yiddish and other literary circles?

ELLEN CASSEDY:  The world of Yiddish writers after World War II was like a virtual café on a global scale. Yiddish newspapers, literary journals, and literary prizes flourished, as did intense epistolary friendships. I don’t have any evidence that Mash and Lempel corresponded, but they must have read each other’s work in Di goldene keyt, the flagship literary journal published in Tel Aviv. And they knew some of the same Yiddish literary figures, including the eminent poet and journal editor Abraham Sutzkever.  

“The world of Yiddish writers after World War II was like a virtual café on a global scale. “

C.M. MAYO: How did working on On the Landing compare to working on Lempel’s Oedipus in Brooklyn and to your other translation projects?

ELLEN CASSEDY: I was fortunate to have Yermiyahu Ahron Taub as a co-translator for the Lempel project. We had a rich collaboration, full of constant back and forth. For the Mash project, I drew on the resources of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA – a wonderful organization that provided me with mentors and a vibrant and an engaged community. 

I did the English translation for Yiddish Zoo, a collection of Yiddish poetry for children in three languages. That was a joyful romp with lions and tigers and bears – great fun.

Now I’m working with a gifted cartoonist who’s embarked on a graphic project involving handwritten Yiddish archives. Quite a decoding challenge!

C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about Yenta Mash’s literary influences? (And in which languages did she read?)

ELLEN CASSEDY:  Mash knew Russian, Rumanian, Hebrew, and Yiddish.  She was drawn to Yiddish literature from early childhood.  As a small child, she knew poems by Y.L. Peretz by heart and was familiar with the classical Yiddish writers Sholem Aleichem and Mendele Moykher Sforim. After her years in Siberia, she joined the vibrant Jewish literary circle in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau. But it wasn’t until she was in her fifties, when she immigrated to Israel, that she began to write. She joined the Yiddish literary scene in Israel and was a member of Leivick House, a Yiddish cultural center. 

The red marker in this screenshot from Google Maps shows Chisinau, in Moldova, where Yenta Mash lived after her exile to Siberia.

C.M. MAYO: Which writers, in any language, could you compare her to?

ELLEN CASSEDY: Yenta Mash is a master chronicler of exile. Her characters are always on their way to somewhere or from somewhere. That’s why I chose the name “On the Landing,” the name of one of her stories, for the title of my translated collection.

“Yenta Mash is a master chronicler of exile.”

I compare her to other voices of assimilation and resilience – Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake), André Aciman (Out of Egypt), and Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Refugees).  Her work is keenly relevant today as displaced people seek refuge across the globe. 

C.M. MAYO: I am astonished that writing of such quality is only appearing in English for the first time in 2018. Is there more?

ELLEN CASSEDY: Absolutely!  Only a fraction of Yiddish literature from the past 150 years has ever been translated into English. As we gain access to more and more of these buried treasures, I believe Yiddish literature will take its rightful place in the world, as what has been called “a major literature in a minor language.”

“As we gain access to more and more of these buried treasures, I believe Yiddish literature will take its rightful place in the world, as what has been called ‘a major literature in a minor language.'”

There’s an expression in Yiddish, “di goldene keyt,” the golden chain, which refers to how Yiddish literature has been passed down through the ages, with one writer after another adding links to the chain. Yiddish was the language that my Jewish forebears spoke in kitchens, marketplaces, and meeting halls on both sides of the Atlantic. I’m thrilled to be able to add my own link to the chain.  

Q & A with Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub on Translating Blume Lempel’s Oedipus in Brooklyn from the Yiddish

Q & A with David A. Taylor, Author of Cork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in World War II

Translating Across the Border

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.

From the Typosphere: “Right & Wrong”

Typed on the 1961 Hermes 3000, a pair of poems from Meteor:

At last, my book, Meteor, which won the Gival Press Poetry Award, is listed on amazon, et al. The official launch will be in March, at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Portland, Oregon. If you’re attending that conference, I welcome you to come by the Gival Press 20th Anniversary Celebration Reading and my book signing at the Gival Press table in the bookfair.

See also:
> Interview by Leslie Pietrzyk for “Work-in-Progress” blog
> Meteor, Influences, Ambiance
> Another poem from Meteor: “In the Garden of Lope de Vega”

Apropos of typing, I am honored to also announce that my short story “What Happened to the Dog?” has been accepted for Cold Hard Type: Typewriter Tales from Post-Digital Worlds, edited by novelist Frederic S. Durbin, writer and Professor of English Andrew McFeeters, and philosopher Richard Polt, the Dean of the Typoshere, and author of The Typewriter Revolution. My own vision of the post-digital world? A mashup of a Fortean echo of Aeschylus’ death, the Galapagos Islands, an Ivy League university quadrangle, and round-a-campfire singin’ with the Girl Scouts. (Like they say about the future, the imaginal can be a beyond-strange land.) What post-digital worlds did the other contributors come up with? I for one look forward to reading…

In case you missed it, I posted here a while ago about the return to typewriters. As Andrew McFeeters says on his blog, The Untimely Typewriter:

“There’s a small, international army of typewriter users and collectors on this planet called Earth. Many share some core beliefs: 1) The typewriter inspires creative, deliberate, and thoughtful writing through its singular purpose; 2) Typewriters have no distracting social media apps. Writing, after all, is a solitary act; 3) Typewriters do not require batteries; 4) New technology is not bad, but it is inferior to the mighty typewriter; 5) If you do not think typewriters are cool, then that leaves more typewriters for the rest of us. Still, don’t knock it until you try it; and 6) If you feel the clacking call of the typewriter beneath the full moon on a windy night, check out Richard Polt’s website”

Richard’s blog is named after his book, The Typewriter Revolution.

P.S. Visit again next Monday for a fascinating Q & A with Ellen Cassedy, who has translated a brilliant, moving, and genuinely landmark book of short fiction.

From the Typosphere: “Bank”

Typosphere, Ho! “Stay West” on my 1961 Hermes 3000

Poetic Repetition

Visit my website for more about my books, articles, and podcasts.

Using Imagery (The “Metaphor Stuff”)

This blog posts on Mondays. Second Mondays of the month I devote to my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing. Welcome!

> For the archive of workshop posts click here.

The study of English Literature has its pleasures and virtues, and much to do with learning the craft of creative writing; nonetheless, these are not one and the same endeavor. You can earn a PhD in race, class, gender, fill-in-the-blank in the novel, yet still not have the wherewithal to actually write one. That said, a novelist who has never read anything by Shakespeare or, say, Jane Austen, and learned to appreciate why such works are so celebrated, is working at a calamitous disadvantage.

Analogy: an art historian specializing in baroque cabinets is not the cabinet-maker who crafts them. While the art historian focuses on fact and figures and on what the baroque cabinet represents in all its broader context; the latter actually makes one. The former might yammer on for a book or two about the Hanseatic League or the Counter Reformation or the rise of the urban bourgeoisie, and so and and so forth; the latter, she’ll worry about the specifics of the grain of the wood; the type of joint; the choice of tool; a carved rose or a daisy for the keyhole?

Further analogy: any furniture maker who would manufacture a baroque-style cabinet would undoubtedly benefit from some familiarity with the finer examples that have survived.

DEFINITIONS

As a writer, I don’t noodle much about literary definitions of the sort a highschool English teacher would lay on a multiple choice exam, e.g., whether thus-and-such is a simile or a personificaction, metaphor, or allusion. I just think of “imagery” as my palette of “metaphor stuff.” I, the artist, can ignore it. Or I can make tiny dabs of this; squirts of that; wild oceanic splashes! In other words, as I write a novel or a story or a poem or an essay, I use imagery– I apply “metaphor stuff”–when and as I judge it apt.

(Of course, if we aim to find readers, then comes revision and editing, and further revision… More about that big bramble of a subject anon.)

For using imagery, there is no formula. Some marvelous writers relish using loads of it, others, equally marvelous, apply it sparingly.

In general, it serves to slow down, focus and brighten an idea, a character, act, place, thing– whatever it is you want the reader to more sharply “see.”

Yeah, but what about clutter?

In my experience, most people who come to a writing workshop for the first time do not have the easily fixable problem of cluttering up their writing with “metaphor stuff”; rather, for lack of it their writing is dull. And when they do use metaphor stuff, alas, it’s more often than not cliché– that is, somebody else’s metaphor stuff, warmed over 279 times. (More about cliché here.)

How to come up with your own original “metaphor stuff”?

1. Practice. The more often you practice, the easier it gets. Like riding a bike, it doesn’t require some otherwordly talent; most people find it challenging at first and then, quickly, something they can “just do.” For a trove of exercises, have a look at my workshop page’s “Giant Golden Buddha” & 364 More Five Minute Writing Exercises.

2. Learn to notice it as you read. You already have an immense treasure of metaphor stuff at-hand, right there in the books you have already read and loved. Go pluck one off your bookshelf, open it at random and chances are, you’ll find metaphor stuff aplenty. As you reread– and as you read any new book– keep your eyes sharp for the way the author uses it. (See my post on Reading as a Writer.) How well do they use it? If you love the book, chances are, the author uses it very well indeed.

For those feeling a little creaky with the creativity mojo, I’ve posted previously about emulation or permutation exercises. Basically, you jot down another writer’s line or two– anything you especially admire– and then vary the nouns and/or verbs, adjectives and/or adverbs (or however you want to do it). In short, in these exercises the idea is not to plagarize another writer; rather, you emulate; by means of play, you create your own lines.

Yes, sometimes, like a big fat cheesy enchilada, too much metaphor stuff in a manuscript can be too too… uhhff, pass the Alkaseltzer.

But again, there is no formula. Switching back to the furniture analogy, I mean, “metaphor stuff,” not everyone wants all the swirls and twirls and dainty dimpled cherubs and roses and whatnotty-whatnots of baroque furniture. But some people think baroque is the Dickens’ chickens.

For your reference, and the satisfaction of all English teachers, herewith some definitions:

ALLUSION
An expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicity; in indirect or passing reference.

“Where’s the Plantation?” John Wesley asked. “Gone With the Wind,” said the Grandmother. “Ha ha.”
—Flannery O’Connor “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

ANALOGY
A comparison between two things, typically on the basis of their structure and for the purpose of explanation or clarification; a correspondence or partial similarity.

A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it’s not open.
—Frank Zappa

Minds are like ovens— if you leave them open all the time, everything comes out half-baked.
—John Michael Greer

METAPHOR
A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable; alternatvely, a thing representive or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract.

She had heard any number of women talk of pregnancy as a slow ordeal to be endured, but now from month to month she felt only a peaceful ripening.
—Richard Yates, “A Natural Girl”

PERSONIFICATION
The attribution of a personal nature or personal characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form. (Throw animal forms in there, too, whydoncha.)

He watched the clouds: dark swift horses surging up the sky
—Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

SIMILE
A figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid.

…a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage
—Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

If you want to nerd-out on definitions, other bloggers can help you. Me, I am hereby definitioned-out.

SLOOOOOOOW
DOOOOOOOOOWN

When I teach this workshop I ask my students to each take a turn reading an example aloud. I would suggest that you do the same: Slow down, waaaaay down. Take a long, cool moment to read these examples aloud carefully, crisply, as if you were at the podium before a rapt audience.

We drove on, the morning growing in the sky to our left.
—Rupert Isaacson, The Healing Land: The Bushmen and the Kalahari Desert

I wandered the village of rounded earthen houses, golden and white, decorated with stark geometric designs. They had a peculiar organic quality, as if they had bubbled up from the earth and dried there. Flattened dung cakes stuck on walls to dry looked like giant polka dots.
—Naomi Shihab Nye, “Camel Like Only Camel,” in Never in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places

Inquisitiveness flutters this way and that, like a bird in a glass house.
—Aldous Huxley, “The Traveller’s-Eye View”

Given the single fossil bone, one fancifully builds up the whole diplodocus.
—Aldous Huxley, “The Traveller’s-Eye View”

A Hollywood millionaire is a strong, silent man, clean-shaven, with a face, either like a hatchet or an uncooked muffin. These, on the contrary, had tremendous beards, talked a great deal, were over-dressed and wore white gloves. They looked like a little party of Bluebeards.
—Aldous Huxley, “The Traveller’s-Eye View”

Most of the above examples are from a handout I’ve used over the years in my “Techniques of Fiction” and “Literary Travel Writing” workshops at the San Miguel Writers Conference and the Writer’s Center. In case you’ve already seen those, herewith, from recent reading, some fresh examples:

But his smile stung me like a nettle. So I barked, “Have you been to the post?”
—Arthur Japin, The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi

My playing is no more like hers, than a lamp is like sunshine.
—Jane Austen, Emma

I have come out to lie on the rocks where I have the black edge of the north island in front of me, Galway Bay, too blue almost to look at, on my right, the Atlantic on my left, a perpendicular cliff under my ankles, and over me innumerable gulls that chase each other in a white cirrus of wings.
—J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands

Again, a curagh with two light people in it floats on the water like a nutshell
—J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands

He stuck with the tried and true—adding figures in his head. You could hear his lips whispering quick-quick-quick, like nuts rolling down a hill, and before you knew it he had the balance.
—Yenta Mash, “The Irony of Fate,” in On the Landing (translated from the Yiddish by Ellen Cassedy)

#

WALLACE STEGNER’S
BEYOND THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN

In the past couple of weeks, apropos of my book in-progress on Far West Texas (trying to get my mind around the history of the American West in general and Reclamation in particular) I’ve had the rich pleasure of reading Wallace Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridan: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Stegner is a master of many things, including “the metaphor stuff.”

Some examples:

It is easy to skirt the region, hard to cross it, for from Bear Lake at its northern border to the Vermillion Cliffs along the south, Utah has a spine like a Stegasuarus.
—Stegner, BTHM, p. 161

Powell saw the boat hang for a breath at the head of the rapid and then sweep into it.
—Stegner, BTHM, p. 63

Suppose he and his family endured the sun and glare on their treeless prairie, and were not demolished by the cyclones that swept across the plains like great scythes.
—Stegner, BTHM, p. 220

The inflexible fact of aridity lay like a fence along the 100th meridian.
—Stegner, BTHM, p. 229

Characteristically, he took on more than he could finish. He was a Thor, always getting caught in an attempt to drink the ocean dry or uproot the Midgard serpent.
—Stegner, BTHM, p. 279

His handling of the Commission was like a skilled muleskinner’s handling of a twenty-mule team.
—Stegner, BTHM, p. 289

Three hundred and sixty degrees of horizon ringed them, the sky fitted the earth like a bell jar.
—Stegner, BTHM, p. 297

And in these last examples, in addition to “metaphor stuff,” Stegner also uses alliteration, listing, and repetition:

The great men of Zion are on the map in Brigham City and Heber City and Knightsville, and beween and among these are scattered those dense but hollow names, smooth outside with use, packed with associations like internal crystals, that come from the Bible or the Book of Mormon—names that are like Lehi and Manti and Hebron, Nephi and Moroni and Moab.
—Stegner, BTHM, p. 192

But here before him was the opportunity of his life, the massive and complex problem of planning for the West whose parts meshed in an intricate system. And here was he with twenty years of experience and knowledge, every bit of which could be applied to the problem as an engine’s power is applied to the axles. The action of Congress, stumilated by Stewart and Teller, had shifted him into gear, and he was not now going to be content with making a humming noise or moving pistons meaninglessly up and down. He was going to turn wheels.
—Stegner, BTHM, p. 305

It was the West itself that beat him, the Big Bill Stewarts and Gideon Moodys, the land and cattle and water barons, the plain homesteaders, the locally patriotic, the ambitious, the venal, the acquisitive, the myth-bound West which insisted on running into the future like a streetcar on a gravel road.
—Stegner, BTHM, p. 338

He was not merely an explorer, an opener, and an observer, he was a prophet. And yet by the law of motion (and hence of history) which he himself accepted, his motion as a particle in the jar and collision of American life was bound to be spiral. His reforms have taken effect, his plans have been adopted, but partially, belatedly, sidelong, as a yielding resultant of two nearly equal stresses.
—Stegner, BTHM, p. 350

>> Find more workshop posts in the archive here; and many more resources at my workshop page on www.cmmayo.com here.

From The Writer’s Carousel: Literary Travel Writing

It Can Be Done! This Writer’s Distraction Free Smartphone

C.M. Mayo’s Workshop Page: Resources for Writers

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.


Migrating this Blog to Self-Hosted WordPress

Finally, after more than a decade, I took my own advice to get Madam Mayo off the free Google blogger platform and onto self-hosted WordPress here at www.madam-mayo.com. It was one part 2019 new year’s resolution and another part yikes-my-book-Meteor-is-about-to-come-out-and-I-should-have-already-taken-care-of-this. For the past few weeks I’ve been huffing and puffing up a steeper learning curve, and one with quite a few more scenic (and not-so-scenic) detours, than I had anticipated.

Oops, I needed to have packed more trail mix and the glamping equipment! A few elephants to carry it all would have been fun, too. Well, dangit, I meant to spend the month of January writing about Texas. (Photo: Engraving by G.H. Cushman of a painting by G.P.A Healy, Library of Congress, in the public domain.)

I do not aim, by the way, to import the entire archive of Madam Mayo posts going back to 2006. Archaeologists of Ur-litblogdom are hereby invited to dig around in the archives right where they always were and shall remain, for as long as Googledom, for whatever reasons known only to itself, deems apt. What I am bringing over here to www.madam-mayo.com, with selected links updated, are those posts that I believe best hold up over time: some transcripts of my talks, and other items related to my books (including the one in-progress) and podcasts; book reviews and the richer notes on recommended reading; articles for my writing workshop; and the now substantial collection of Q & As with other writers.

If you’re new to this blog, a few of last year’s posts that I would consider representative of what you can expect here going into 2019 include:

Working with a Working Library: Kuddelmuddel
September 24, 2018

Diction Drops and Spikes
August 13, 2018
(In 2019 look for workshop posts on the second Monday of each month)

Top 10+ Books Read 2018
December 17, 2018

Q & A: Leslie Pietrzyk on Writers Groups,
the Siren Song of the Online World, and on Writing Silver Girl
February 26, 2018
(In 2019 Q & A’s will post on the fourth Monday of each month)

As of today, February 4, 2019, the top Madam Mayo posts for 2018–some thirty in all– plus a wee batch (mainly workshop posts) from a sprinkling of earlier years, are now live here at www.madam-mayo.com. So I have more to do.

I also need to figure out the signup-by-email thing…

In case you are also thinking of migrating a blog to WordPress, or starting a new blog on WordPress, herewith a few resources that I have found especially helpful:

“Building an Author Website on WordPress: How to Start Smart”
by Jane Friedman

Five WordPress Themes for Professional Authors
(a guestblog post by Nate Hoffelder for Jane Friedman’s blog)

WP Beginner

The Strangely Beautiful Sierra Madera Astrobleme

Q & A: Carolina Castillo Crimm,
Author of De León, A Tejano Family History

Marshall McLuhan: Some Notes

Visit my website for more about my books, articles, and podcasts.

Q & A: David A. Taylor on “Cork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in WWII”

This blog posts on Mondays. This year the fourth Monday of the month is dedicated to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

I was excited to see David A. Taylor’s Cork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in World War II, firstly because I know from his previous works that this promises to be a thoroughly researched and superbly written history; and secondly because I have some tangentially related family history with another strategic material during World War II. My grandfather, organic chemist Frank R. Mayo, was then a research chemist at U.S. Rubber Company working on the crucial task of creating a synthetic rubber that could be mass-produced in a dangerously narrowing window of time; sources of natural rubber –essential for making automobile and airplane tires as well as tank caterpillar tracks–had been cut off when the Japanese invaded southeast Asia. Moreover, these days I am not the only one nervously aware that as we become increasingly dependent on our computers, smartphones, and electric vehicles, we are becoming increasingly beholden to a supply of “rare earths,” many found nowhere near the United States, for the batteries (as David mentions in this interview).

Cork, a strategic material: Who’dathunkit?

Cork Wars by David Taylor

Taylor’s Cork Wars has been garnering rich praise. Meredith Hindley, author of Destination Casablanca, calls Cork Wars “fascinating;” Mary Otto, author of Teeth, says: “Cork Wars captures the drama of three families whose lives are bound up with a precious forest product—and the urgency of war;” and noted biographer Douglas Brinkley calls Cork Wars “a landmark achievement!”

David A. Taylor

C.M. MAYO: How might you describe the ideal reader for Cork Wars?

DAVID A. TAYLOR: The story is narrative nonfiction, so really the ideal reader is anyone who loves a good story. Because it involves espionage and World War II, that tends toward a male reader but the focus on families and how they respond to a crisis will make it interesting to a wider audience. I’ve been pleased that a wide range of readers have responded warmly to the book.

C.M. MAYO: An unsung commodity turns out to be crucial for national defense. It seems to me there are many parallels to this, both in the past and the present. Can you talk about this a bit?

DAVID A. TAYLOR: That’s long been an interest of mine, especially commodities that come from nature. We’ve come to know that water can be a flashpoint for conflict and security. And many of us grew up hearing “Blood for oil!” as a shorthand describing the motivation for wars fought over petroleum reserves.

But other parallels today are less well known. One is an obscure ingredient in electronics like our cellphones: minerals called “rare earths.” Your cellphone contains just a tiny amount of rare earths, but they’re irreplaceable – and China holds practically a monopoly on them. That’s why the Pentagon recently issued a report saying rare earths are a matter of U.S. national security.

That’s a factor in the current trade conflict. It helps to know these things as world citizens. And for writers, I think that holds dramatic possibilities as well. 

C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about which writers have been the most important influences for your writing in general and for Cork Wars in particular?

DAVID A. TAYLOR: My reading taste has been shaped by so many wonderful writers of both fiction and nonfiction. It’s hard to keep to just a few. In fiction I’ve loved the works of Alice Munro, Grace Paley, Amy Bloom, George Saunders, Kate Wheeler, Chekhov, Tagore (stories), Borges, and Machado de Assis, the Brazilian master who combines wit and poignancy. In nonfiction I’ve been influenced by John McPhee, Rebecca Skloot, Isabel Wilkerson and others.

For Cork Wars, I was very impressed by a novel by Alan Furst called Dark Voyage, set during World War II and in the Mediterranean, in which the crew of a freighter (hauling a cargo of cork for part of the voyage) figures prominently. Furst evoked a world that’s noir and world-wise with vital characters, a combination I wanted for my book.

The other novel that I admired recently – it didn’t influence me because of when it came out – was Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach, which has beautiful writing and characters in that wartime atmosphere of New York harbor.

C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive writer for many years. How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?

DAVID A. TAYLOR: Thanks, so have you! The digital revolution has had a huge affect on my process. Yes, the distractions – and even the requirements – of email and social media have cut a chunk out of my writing time. I still write in the mornings, right after I get up, and that helps. And at some point in the day I like to write on paper, for a different neural connection to work. But I wish I had more tricks for staying focused (apart from self-imposed deadlines).

C.M. MAYO: Another question apropos of the digital revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?

DAVID A. TAYLOR: Yes, I started writing on computers but printing out to review and revise. I’ve seen research findings that reading hardcopy can help foster focus on longform reading (and revising). So as much as I write and revise onscreen, I do also edit on paper. The visceral circling of passages to move around can be satisfying.

I also read my work aloud to get my ear involved in hearing points for improvement. 

C.M. MAYO: Organization… Keeping the research and working library all in order is a titantic task in writing a book of this nature. What were some of the things you did for this book that worked especially well for you? 

DAVID A. TAYLOR: It’s interesting – have you found your own process has changed with each book? Mine has. For my first book, I used index cards to map out scenes, chapter by chapter. Later books relied on folders on the computer.

This one was challenging in terms of structure – it took a while to find the braided structure woven in three strands, with three families. As the structure evolved, the way I sorted my text, interview transcripts and images shifted.

One strength in this story’s evolution was the rhythm of research and interviews, writing and revision. The research led me to people to talk with – including Frank DiCara at his home in Baltimore, and Gloria Marsa, the daughter of a man recruited for spying by the OSS. I spoke with her often by phone in Mexico City, where she lives. 

Those conversations in turn pointed me forward with search terms for more documentary research, which often yielded details that would be hard to recall, but that help the narrative.

C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a writer? 

David A. Taylor’s Soul of a People

DAVID A. TAYLOR: I’ve been encouraged by the response to Cork Wars and I think there are other formats in which the story and its characters can speak to us. In earlier work, I was fortunate to have partners for adapting my book about the WPA writers of the 1930s, Soul of a People, as a documentary and later as a feature screenplay (not yet produced, but it did get some nice WGA recognition). So I’d like to explore something like that with this story.

I also have several new projects. I’m in awe of the vision of August Wilson, whose Twentieth Century Cycle is so monumental. I love the idea of imagining a vast canvas, and carving it up by decade! On my own much smaller scale, I have my Thirties story with the WPA writers, and now Cork Wars in the 1940s. So I have a few more to go.

>>Visit David A. Taylor here, and check out this excellent trailer for Cork Wars:

Find more Q & As in the archive.

# # # # #

>Your comments are always welcome. Click here to send me an email.

Q & A: Mary Mackey, Author of The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams,
On Bearing Witness and Women Writers’ Archives

Q & A: Sara Mansfield Taber on
Chance Particulars: A Writer’s Field Notebook

Notes on Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s
The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space
in the Nineteenth Century

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.

Meteor (Gival Press Poetry Award) to Launch at AWP

My book Meteor, which won the Gival Press Award for Poetry, and was orginally scheduled to be published in late 2018, has been delayed slightly; it will be out in early 2019. I’m thrilled to see the cover, designed by Kenn Schellenberg, and to announce that Meteor will launch at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference in Portland, Oregon this March. If you’re going to the conference, come on by my reading which will be part of Gival Press’ 20th Anniversary Celebration, and also to my booksigning the following day in the AWP Bookfair (details below).

Check out Leslie Pietrzyk’s interview with me about Meteor for her excellent blog, Work-in-Progress.

Visit Meteor’s webpage here. All of the poems in Meteor have been published, but only a few are online, among them: “In the Garden of Lope de Vega,” “Stay West” and “Bank.”

I’d be the first to say many of these poems could be considered flash fictions, and in fact, a number of them were originally published in literary magazines (e.g., Exquisite Corpse, Gargoyle, Kenyon Review), as fiction. But as I like to say, it’s all poetry– or at least, it should aspire to be.

March 29, 2019 Portland, Oregon
Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference off-site event
Hotel Rose
7 – 10 PM
C.M. Mayo, author of Meteor, to participate in Gival Press 20th Anniversray Celebration Reading. More details to be announced.

March 30, 2019 Portland, Oregon
Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference
Oregon Convention Center
Book Fair, Gival Press, Table # 8063
10-11:30 AM
C.M. Mayo will be signing Meteor.

Yep, I am still at work on the book about Far West Texas. I aim to post a podcast apropos of that shortly, however next Monday’s post– the month’s fourth– is dedicated, as ever, to a Q & A with another writer: David A. Taylor, who will be talking about his intriguing Cork Wars.

Meteor, Ambiance, Influences

Typosphere, Ho! “Stay West” on My 1961 Hermes 3000

From the Typosphere: “Bank”

Visit my website for more about my books, articles, and podcasts.