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I never thought when I registered for a photography workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown, MA, this year, forgoing my usual fiction workshop, that it would so seamlessly and wonderfully weave writing into our week of shooting pictures. My first clue that it would be interesting, though, was the pre-workshop assignment, which called for presenting a photograph or a piece of writing (essay/poem) depicting an everyday object or scene in an intriguing way. Little did I know that our Instructor, Joanne Dugan, was not just open to writing but fully invested in it.
Click on photos for full-size images
"On Seeing What's in Front of You: Photographing Your Own Life with New Eyes," August 5-10, 2012, was meant to show us that projects full of potential were present not just in exotic locales but in our everyday lives, and that transforming ordinary pictures into extraordinary images was accomplished through changing the way we think about and thus see what's right in front of us. Writing was a tool to both chronicle and discover just how we thought about what we were shooting and to uncover what held the most meaning for us. (I am only just now fully understanding that purpose!)
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. (G.K. Chesterton)
Most of our daily assignments incorporated writing into the experience, either recording our thoughts or feelings while shooting or writing something to accompany the pictures. Patti, a fellow student, was already well-versed in marrying text and image, something fully realized in most of her presentations. This gave me the freedom to do the same, liberating me to write at FAWC again - and in a visual arts workshop!
I was amazed when Joanne used a simple questionnaire to show us how just words (our answers) could inspire new projects. (Likewise, painting, dance, or even music could unleash ideas to explore.)
You have to milk the cow a lot to get a little cheese. - Henri Cartier-Bresson
And once a day Joanne offered us her popcorn box, into which we reached and pulled out a strip of folded paper with a quotation on it. What was quirky on Monday had by midweek become an anticipated little gem of a daily gift; she suggested that the one we pulled out was perhaps meant for us at this specific time.
Reflecting on the week after it ended, I had the idea that it could be promoted to writers as "Pen and Shutter: Photography for Writers." As my classmate Andrea noted, writing and photography are stronger together. And I can see how not only the end products, but also the processes can influence and benefit each other.
Life is once, forever. - Henri Cartier-Bresson
Joanne Dugan has completely changed the way I photograph in giving me both new techniques and a totally different way of thinking. The ultimate challenge, one we only had time to touch on over the course of four days of shooting, is to take not the documentary "I was there" postcard shot but instead the descriptive picture of how we felt, one that shows the viewer what holds meaning for us. This is the entire key to understanding why some of my pictures make me go "Yes!" (as Henri Cartier-Bresson would say) and why others seem technically high in quality but lacking in soul. It is the key to becoming a better photographer.
www.joannedugan.com - little movies, photographs, projects, books, etc.
JOANNE DUGAN Fine Art - photo galleries, information
Joanne Dugan's Photography and Writing Blog - with an entry about this workshop and a photo with yours truly in it :)
Photo credits: Mark Abe
"Building Great Sentences" is an audio course offered by Great Courses, a "lifelong learning" catalog company which sells CD/DVD recorded lectures on a wide variety of topics by esteemed professors. Even though I am a writer, when I've seen it in the catalog, I've had a hard time thinking of a more boring subject. I couldn't believe their pitch that it was one of their most popular courses. All I could see in my mind's eye was diagramming sentences in tenth grade English class and trying to learn all those tenses.
In college I hated English Comp. I had a TA named Gordon who was boring, and the class was boring. (Gordon himself was probably not boring - maybe just bored; he may actually have just been another MFA student gutting out a Teaching Assistantship required for tuition remission.) The writing we did in that class was not what I called creative, and I just saw it as getting my card punched.
Then I happened to remember my writer friend Dianne telling me that revision was her favorite part of writing. And what is revision but taking sentences apart and putting them back together? It's rearranging ideas, finding just the right words, and building great sentences to create exactly the meaning you want to impart to the reader. As we writers already know, and as it is explained in the first lesson of the course, sentences are more than just their content; the way they are constructed carries their meaning.
The idea of listening to twenty-four lectures about it might not have excited me initially, but since I was already constantly striving to build great sentences, how dull could the course actually be? (It also helped that it was on sale at five percent of the regular price. That was the sale price, not the discount!)
I'm finally reading Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert*. Just today I read this great sentence, in which Emma Bovary and Monsieur Leon find themselves discovering an intimacy they each privately acknowledge yet cannot discuss:
Future joys, like tropical shores, project over the immensity that lies before them their native softness, a fragrant breeze, and one grows drowsy in that intoxication without even worrying about the horizon one cannot see.
Could I ever HOPE to write such a gorgeous, evocative sentence that so wonderfully captures the emotion of the characters using so rich and relatable a metaphor?
Or consider this sentence from The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich (the context of which is not needed to appreciate the beauty of its language):
Then he stilled his heart, his breath, his thoughts, and leaned into her until his heart knocked hard and his breath tore through his lungs and thoughts turned into shifting colors that ripped softly into many pieces and rained down all around them as ordinary light.
Sometimes the writer in me gets in the way of the flow of a story, as I am compelled when coming to a sentence like this to stop and read it over and over, marveling at its beauty, deconstructing it to demystify its creation, and wondering if I could attain the vision necessary to emulate this level of writing.
Clearly, this course is just right for me, and if the first lesson is any indication, it will most definitely not be boring.
* From a new translation by Lydia Davis, 2010
Last month I went to the Kennedy Center to see the Broadway musical "Come Fly Away," a dance revue choreographed by Twila Tharp and set to the accompaniment of Frank Sinatra's recorded voice and a live big band on stage. I went with my good friend Phil (reason enough to enjoy the evening), and while it was a good show, we were both somewhat underwhelmed. The rest of the audience felt the same, as evidenced by the rather reluctant, slow and gradual standing ovation - the kind in which the applause is sustained and everyone looks at everyone else for a cue to stand. As we walked out into the night, neither one of us had much to say.
I wondered why; it was a brilliantly performed, perfectly executed show, packed with nonstop, amazing dancing and a whole company that made it look effortless. The dancers were good-looking, the costumes were attractive, and the set was wonderful. The music was - well, Frank - come on! The band played flawlessly, as if Sinatra were live and on stage with them. So why was the audience so restrained in its enthusiasm?
Today it finally hit me, after my workout, in the shower (where I have thought of short story plot lines, solved Lotus Notes application development coding problems, and composed music). Yes, there is strength, power, and flexibility in dance. Yes, dancers' feet do leave the floor. Yes, people want to see excitement and come away wowed. But for this dance lover, anyway, the dancing in the show was too - athletic.
Just like in figure skating, dancing has been becoming more and more athletic over many years. Tuxes and floor-length gowns are out, and now dancers leap, throw each other, spin both vertically and horizontally, flip in the air, whip each other around violently, and do things that make you go "ouch" and feel imaginary back pain. But whereas figure skating is actually an Olympic sport (which Scott Hamilton tried to emphasize by wearing only athletic stretch wear), dancing is arguably not. Which is not to say it is not athletic - because it certainly can be - just that it is not a sport in the sense of competing and winning against an opposing player(s), reality/competition shows notwithstanding. Why, then, does it have to continually increase in technical difficulty, at the expense of artistic expression?
Of course the same debate rages on in the figure skating world and probably always will. Triple this and triple that are ho-hum, and now at least one quad jump is required to win. Those on the sport side argue that scoring for artistic impression should count less; after all, no other Olympic sport has musical accompaniment (except the floor exercise in gymnastics) or has an artistic component at all. Those on the artistic side recall the classical roots of figure skating and lament the fading of Tchaikovsky and sequins on the ice.
So it goes.
Fast forward to the 21st century and the glut of competition shows on TV, such as "So You Think You Can Dance." The more outrageous the physicality, the greater the displays of strength and speed, the more violent the movement - the more excited the judges get, screaming their approval louder the more the sweat flies under the lights and the more revealing the lycra.
Maybe it's just that appetite thing: the more you get of something, the less satisfying it becomes and the more you need it to be more. Everything has to be increasingly extreme, because anything less is ordinary.
I guess I've always been old school. Give me Fred and Ginger any day over anyone else you can see today. Now there was style. There was grace. There was humanity. With dancers today, you get excited at their physical prowess and feats of strength. With Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly you were stirred emotionally.
Maybe I'm a slow adopter. Maybe I don't like change. Maybe I'm too nostalgic. Or maybe I just like dancing the way I saw it on "The Carol Burnett Show," back when I wanted to grow up to be the next Fred Astaire.
Photo Credit: Broadway.com
"Hi, I'm Ben." His kind, gentle face seems to belie the deep bass voice he used in the PEN/Faulkner reading he has just finished at the Folger Shakespeare Library on Capitol Hill. He smiles and shakes my hand, which is cold from nerves. Benjamin Percy is one of the "it" writers of today, appearing in ads for workshops and conferences, interviews in lit journals, and magazine articles, and I enjoy keeping current with emerging, promising talent.
I had not wasted any time getting to the book signing table when the reading ended and had even bought my book before the event started. Now, waiting for the writers to get there, those of us who had formed an indistinct line wondered which seat Percy would take and which his co-reader, Dagoberto Gilb, would take. Most PEN/Faulkner readings feature one well-established writer and one lesser known but promising writer, and the book signing lines are often embarrassingly lopsided. Having never heard of Gilb, I wasn't sure which writer was which, but watching people's restlessness, I felt I was about to find out.
When they arrived at the table and chose their seats, the line almost immediately shifted over to Gilb. I found myself the first in Percy's line - which made me glad - but also the only one, which made me uncomfortable. Didn't people know he was one of today's literary darlings?
He had read from his latest book, The Wilding, in a shockingly deep voice that recalled James Earl Jones as Darth Vader. The discordance between his young, sweet features and this dump truck rumbling sound reminded me of singer Josh Turner. It was well-suited to his material, which is dark, mysterious, and creepy.
(In fact, there is so much blood and unexplained death in the three stories I read yesterday from his collection Refresh, Refresh that I had to stop because I had started feeling ill. I should have gotten a clue from the fact that Peter Straub wrote one of his jacket blurbs.)
My jury is out until I've read enough of his work to form an opinion, but I noted a few things from the evening:
1) Storytelling as art
There's reading words off a page or news items off a teleprompter, and then there's infusing life into every spoken word of a story so that you are sucked in and experiencing what the characters are going through. Garrison Keillor, of course, is the penultimate storyteller, expert at holding the attention of an audience. Of all the readings I've attended, Percy's came the closest to hitting that mark. The booming of his voice, shaded with latent menace, combined with the dark nature of his writing, reminded me of the "Radio Mystery Theater" I couldn't help listening to on WCCO after turning the lights out (against my better judgment). I would lie in the dark, the covers pulled up to my chin, telling myself "Turn the radio off! Turn it off now!" but unable to stop holding my breath waiting to hear what happened next.
I'm not saying writers should do sound effects when they read their stuff or have musical interludes to play when they reach space breaks. But reading can be performance art if one spends the time practicing a piece and thinking about how the way one reads will affect the audience. Whether one chooses to take this approach is a personal decision, but I think if you can increase your hold on the audience and make it more memorable and - dare i say - entertaining*, that can only be good not only for your story and you as a writer, but literature in general.
*(Entertainment may sound lowbrow relative to what writers want to achieve, but maybe it is a necessary prelude to enrichment.)
2) A new form
Percy referred to a 120-page story as "my..." , paused for the perfect length of time, and said "shnovel." It was funny and cute, and Percy is disarming in his way of putting the cute right after the macabre, so everyone laughed. It's nice to have a new term for something that's too long to be a short story (or even a long short story) and too short to be a novel; the term novella is so freighted with negativity and awkwardness that I've become hesitant to use it. Injecting a little humor into a new term for this form might just get people to relax and let it be!
3) What Lies Beneath
I was struck by how easily and quickly Percy moved from the disturbing to the comic, how he could set you on edge one moment and in the next make you laugh and want to share a cup of coffee and ask about his kids. It made me wonder whether he was a dark person with surprising moments of levity or an easygoing guy with disturbing issues lurking underneath.
Of course, this is a continuum, not a simple dichotomy, and we probably all move along it one way or the other at various times in our lives. It isn't important as a reader to know where the author is, but this spectrum is what keeps me reading and certainly what keeps me writing.
Photo credit: Esquire
What happened to the word an? It feels like an old friend gone missing. One day I woke up and no one was using it anymore.
"I think there's a apple in the fridge."
"That's a old version."
I even heard someone say - no kidding - "I was a English major!"
Really?
Can a word fade into obscurity from disuse? When did someone first decide it was okay to say a before a word beginning with a vowel? Or did so many people lack an understanding of the rule that a critical mass was eventually reached, rendering the word an helpless to stop its being relegated to a dusty drawer as the newest companion to forsooth, verily, and yoicks?
People butcher grammar all the time in conversation, but standards are higher for written English; "proper" English is what distinguishes civilization from - well, whatever you have without it (Terra Nova?). Yet I have been more than dismayed to find that using a for an is now seen even in newspapers and magazines. (Does this mean editing is more lax, or there is less editing?)
I accept that usage of words changes over time, and with it, meaning. I use the word hopefully a lot. Technically, it's an adverb, like angrily, quickly, or gracefully - a descriptive word modifying a verb. At some point, however, it became accepted as an introductory word describing the attitude about whatever follows in the sentence: Hopefully, I would win both the Veg-o-Matic and the Thighmaster. I didn't even realize until today that I'd been misusing the word.
Is this bad? Should I be as inflamed about my own grammatical error as I am about an's disappearance? They are both wrong, but they both appear to be acceptable.
The same goes for the word broke. Who said we could lose the n? Every time I hear it misused, I cringe and want to say, "Fie! Whencesover didst that come?" Broke is the past tense of the verb to break: break, broke, broken.
I know he will break my heart, but I'm going to ask him out, anyway.
He broke my heart even though I waited until the third date to propose.
He has broken my heart, but soon I will join Match.com.
Broken is also the state of disrepair: My heart is broken, but it's nothing my friend Johnny Walker can't fix!
Broke as past tense is only fitting as dialect: Dang nabbit! Pappy's hooch machine in the holler down yonder's still broke!
Otherwise, as far as I'm aware, broken is still the correct word: Damn - the nozzle that foams the milk for morning espresso is still broken!
From where I sit, using language as my art, it's hard not to feel sad about the decline of proper English, the gradual, apathetic casting off of grammatical rules. Is it stuffy to want to construct sentences following long-accepted guidelines? Should one relax and follow the masses in resignation to the tides of popular practice?
I'd hoped to draw some pithy conclusion warning against degenerating into a Lord of the Flies existence in which we only use the grade school communication exercise vocabulary of fa, pa, and ba, - but, faced with my own participation in changing the rules, I am left with only my belief in what I learned in school.
Comments welcome.
