Dos Passos, Artistically Rendered

In my hands is the Dos Passos Review Volume #7, Issue #1. On its 46th page is the poem, “South China Sea” — my poem. I’m critical of it. I don’t like the spacing — I like my poems bunchy, contained. Some of my lines, now that they are memorialized on paper don’t spring so strongly toward me:

…against clapboard down,

I don’t know what the word “down” is doing there. It feels messy, either evidence of poor comma usage or poor editing.

…did within the border of forecast,

A line from somewhere I’m not sure where.

Sure the poem is very old, an antique in my collection, springing from experience in the summer of 2000. Perhaps the word “down” made sense then, or the “border of forecast” was more self-evident. Again, I’m not certain about some of the poems lines.

I do however like this poem. It brings me some joy to see it in print, in a review I think feels right in my current poetic career arc. The image of two bodies, cradled like the South China Sea, Kenny Rogers on the Alpine Tavern jukebox brings me back to a certain place I can never return to. This is why we write.

Screenwriting:

On Wednesday of this week I received word from the Nichol Fellowship. My feature length script, “The Ancient Gallery” did not advance with the other 326 other screenplays into the second round. My script fell in with the seven thousand odd others deemed not worthy of a second read. It was a bitter pill, although one I’ve swallowed annually since 2001. The letter is politely written. I knew the methodically paced thriller had little chance to receive recognition being a genre piece. The Fellowship wants more Todd Solondz than franchise style horror. It’s a contest that rewards existential thinking/writing more than a piece with blockbuster potential. Make a list of those scripts that win/place in the contest: they’re hardly household names. The writers may go on to work on recognizable work, but the Nichol is an entre to that world.

What’s particularly bitter about this revelation is that 2010 marks the last year I will be eligible for consideration in the contest. One of the primary stipulations for entry is that writers cannot have earned more than $5,000 in screenwriting. By next May when the scripts are due for the 2011 screening, I will likely have exceeded that threshold by three or four times. Having reached something like a financially profitable place with my screenwriting is the biggest breakthrough in the last year and I’m not shy about saying that. I’ve earned around $7,000 this year already and am looking at potentially more in the very near future. Money is a bi-product of good writing, I believe. One missing for me from the beginning. I’m pleased with being paid. Until now it’s been the one thing I’ve never done as a writer. If it wasn’t for that nasty annual goal of winning the Nichol Fellowship.

I’ve promised myself not to bemoan success . I do however reserve the right to comment on it like I did my experience seeking it out. The joys of amateurism vanish as one ceases to be amateur. In my social work career the “aw shucks” moments have gently ebbed with each state meeting and 4:00pm conference call about slashing state budgets. The same holds true creatively. I’m in that phase of my career development where I can no longer scheme about my first breakthrough. The first one has come already and I am cultivating its evolution. They may get bigger. They just cease to wear the costume of breaking new ground.

Better Views From Up On High

I’ve pined for a breakthrough. Something to re-invigorate. In the weeks prior to my anniversary in late May, I felt a strong pull to get away from the emotional dependence on writing. In spite of the strong flow of story (evidenced by the stacks of sketches on the desk) my sense was that the emotional acumen toward putting those works into the world in adequate costume was shaken. Perhaps the dog’s dying. Perhaps the mounting sense of “what for?” Something wasn’t right, or, nothing was.

Without the elaborating on the exact anatomy of success, I landed a contract to write a screenplay. The producer was someone on the east coast, an engineer for an aviation company brokered to me by a connection I made many, many years ago and which I had lost faith in. He had been harboring an idea that over the years he felt compelled to write. Trouble for him was, he wasn’t a writer and that’s where I came in. Negotiation. Contract. Story formation.

Today I can say that I’ve written 1/3rd of the first draft and am prepared to submit for my second paid installment.

Certainly an engineer at an aviation company isn’t the entree to the business I needed to make this professionally. That came a few days later. David Lyons of Lyon’s Entertainment hired me to write — on spec, meaning no money up front — a feature film to accompany their simultaneous release of a book and documentary. No money up front. A percentage of the WGA minimum when the screenplay sells. Different than the last job but in the long run, this is the connected break I’ve been pining for. A real company. Real connections with producers. Relationships in the business. Turns out the person who brokered the ghost writing job connected me to this job and I have a sense, could be a connection for so many more.

I have not reached that mountain top. I’ve made it to a switchback and I continue to climb.

I want to say, faith restored. If the mission is to continue writing then this chapter has been a terrific success. Around this switchback, Lisa and I talk about this part of my life much more freely. We share success. Plan for more.

There’s another switchback on the horizon. I can just feel it.

Click here for the poem.

To make appropriate note, this poem took on a radical change in publication. It was, as written, a landscape poem; it wasn’t meant to be written and viewed in portrait form. The editor, Coop Renner did a nice job though and the site’s layout definitely lent it a clean, up and down look. Enjoy.

Images of the South China Sea as Intimacy

It’s out and in the world now. These words will no longer be able to feel the challenge and changes from my pen.

Click here for the Dos Passos Review website.

An Old House, An Old Destination, An Old Idea

On the phone yesterday. A lot, it turned out although the morning didn’t promise such a thing. With a sick dog in my life who eventually passed in the early evening, it felt like I was always talking to someone. Always relaying messages and information. The vet and her advice. My wife who was in between massages, making decisions. My mother who noticed a Facebook post about my hope for his eventual well-being who on the eve of her birthday, met us at the hospital and watched us go through the decision to put him to sleep.

All in all, the house is empty today. My eyes still hurt. My mind still races with the subject of those phone calls though.

One of the conversations I managed to have was with David Beispeil, a Portland area poet/writer/organizer whose credits are too many to mention. One prominent role that David occupies is as the Director of the Attic Writers, a writer’s resource center here in town. They offer classes and consultations. I came across my contact with him as I randomly explored their site. From the name of one of their consultation services, I thought they might be a place for me to connect to.

Those who know me, know my poems are getting “out there”. Where “there” is, I don’t quite know with any certainty anymore. While I am pleased with the infrequent recognitions I receive from the at large literary world, I’m not quite sure when I look back/forward that I see my verse fitting into anything concrete. No tradition. No stream of the literary moment. My work ends up “anywhere” and that’s what I end up celebrating. Every few weeks a poem is received. Every few weeks I get the good word.

Every few weeks I wonder what kind of writer am I. What kind of writer am I?

David Beispiel had some things to say about what kind of writer. Not knowing me, he couldn’t speak to my specific work but he spoke to becoming what kind of writer you are and making that a matter of choice. Our conversation was about a specific poetry consultation class that the Attic offers. You can bring them a 20-25 page poetry manuscript and one of their poets will consult with you: coming up with a submission strategy, having an idea of what your poetry is made up of, looking at chapbooks.

What is a chapbook, exactly?

I’ve always known that chapbooks are small press poetry books, something between self-published (read: photocopied) broadsides with crude design and those perfect bound University Presses. My sense of myself is that I’m beyond needing a Xerox card and some coins while not quite ready to approach the University of Pittsburgh to bring out my initial offering. Where does that place me? Beispiel was very clear that while a chapbook isn’t a place to make money for a poet, it does allow you to transcend the first of the literary world’s misgivings: vanity presses, while advancing, are still the realm of the impatient. The unedited. Amateur. He said that although you’ll be paid in copies, a number of notable poets have parlayed that chapbook press success and turned it to one of the larger poetry presses. All this said, even Black Sparrow Press doesn’t “make” a poet a rich man or open every door, but it conveys something.

In ten years, if my book is out on Copper Canyon will I be happy? Of course. And I’ll clearly see the place where my work fits.

Here are some steps I’m taking over the next few months in order to position myself to begin a chapbook publishing effort.

1.) Read a lot of publisher’s guidelines. I’ve located a few databases that collect chapbook publishers. If I read a hundred sets of writer’s guidelines, I should get a good idea of what people are looking for.

2.) Peel back the veil on my own work and look for cohesion. This seems pretty self-explanatory but it’s difficult to see “into” your own catalog of work. Am I filling a niche I don’t quite see yet?

3.) Look at geography in the publisher. If the house seeks to promote it’s writer, where do I want to potentially travel? If it’s regional (Oregon, Washington, Montana or BC) I could more easily get to events where I’m “featured” and can make a face for myself. Of course, I’d love to be notable in New York or Montreal, but that’s not going to get me face time.

4.) Will the publisher promote me with any sort of on-line presence? Is it feasible to work on a print/on-line system where I have not only paper but a URL to hand out? This is something I should demand — I think.

5.) I’ll need a special query letter. Is this where I need eventual consultation from the Attic Writers?

6.) The question that keeps coming to me as one that needs answering: Is there an advantage to now seeking out publication of individual poems in magazines that also have chapbook publishers? It feels to me like that follows the same logic as querying the producers who judged your award winning screenplay.

7.) The on-going piece that’s been missing: finding someone who can serve as a sort of advisor/ad hoc editor of my poems as they’re forming into a manuscript. I’d love to have a voice that is critical and loving.

These are my ideas. In death, a conversation that takes on new life.

It’s a rare event that makes me hungry every time it happens. There’s a unique thrill in opening up a new magazine in advance of the public, read acknowledgements and contributor notes and know that’s you. I’ve got so much work out there in the world now I can hardly keep track. It’s good to get the yes and the pages, the latter seemingly a closing window of creative expression.

NOTE: I’m including a link to the Deronda website even though what they have on-line isn’t too exciting. I have posted the poem here though:

A SELF-INFLICTED FAMINE

The storm gave away all our things; the storm, rattling the

ground below.  I was a cup and saucer then.

Unfilled, I was a shaking cup and saucer merely, in the

storm without rain.  We fought in all our clothes; then

we fought the storm; then we fought each other.  Then

alone, because we could no longer identify the outlines of

our clothes.  As the lines of the storm without rain

were drawn and constantly redrawn, it was now that I fell

from the cup and saucer, spilled from its lip

errantly.

But I was also the saver of seed.  There were fruits

in the storm, in the cup and saucer, and we waited

to be

saved, for the storm to return all out things.  It did not.

We found that instead, it had taken all soils, leaving

nothing

except impenetrable clay at our feet.  We would be so

reminded, broken spade the results of subsequent digging.

Though the

storm gave away all our things, these soils, these

ancient soils, our hopes given; though we’ve been left

barren of these, so I have saved for the coming alluvium.

AUGUST 2005

Unlike what I detailed in previous posts, this year has so far been a fertile time.

The organizing principle recently has been a new embrace of genre. An honest look at the markets says that it might not be the worst idea to try and find the influence of something other than the dying Gaul “literary” magazine. Internally, I could stand to do something with my stories other than meandering. This year’s dawning has coincided with a profound step outside previously sacred presumptions: that I know my stories cold. I felt a need to force new perspective. My standard, “I don’t need guidance” had to be set on the sideline. At certain times in my creative life, the word genre was profane, and the idea an abomination. We’re taught that as young, ambitious writers I believe: genre is an acquiesce to mediocrity.

The cover of John Gardner's novel, Grendel which tells the story of Beowulf from the monster's point of view

The late author and critic John Gardner emphasized its importance thoroughly in The Art Of Fiction among other critical writings. A simple paraphrase of the controversial thinker’s ideas would be that genre organizes story. Simple. A common theme on my desk is, in fact, that of messy, unorganized stories. For some years I’ve been writing to the end, finding the story, having no prevailing structure, believing that just because the story is about marginalized persons and deals with emotions that it’s literature. As fiction becomes more influenced by cinema (an art form more directly related to and fed by a massive marketing machine) the idea opens in the storytelling class of creatives. Young writers once learning at the knee of Robert McKee, Syd Field and Joseph Campbell took to Blake Snyder in the decade before he passed, his book Save The Cat a revolution in teaching people the rules of genre. Almost self-help in its accessibility, Snyder’s thesis is much more concise and user-friendly: what you write fits into a genre, so you may as well use that to your advantage.

Inconspicuously, I picked up a book at the library in late December: Europe’s Best Science Fiction. It was an omnibus of fifteen great stories from across the pond (a great concentration from Russian and other Slavic nations) with the editors discussing how each particular fit into the canon — not only the country’s literary tradition but in the tradition of the richly upheld genre of science-fiction. I soaked up the book in a weekend, thrilled in some of the stories, much of the criticism and the what transferred from that experience pushed me a step ahead. I began organizing some of the loose, amorphous story pieces on my desk. The greater genre “science fiction” has rules but that isn’t a bad word. Those rules work in giving the writer (and reader, to some extent) valuable outline and guidance, it pre-establishes a set of expectations that are best trusted. Without embracing these rules, a few of these story bits would have already withered.

Below are two stories I’ve finished since the dawn of 2010 and how understanding genre took them from bits and pieces to fleshed out fiction.

The Beautiful Room Is Empty

Genesis:

I read W.G. Sebold’s neo-classical novel, Austerlitz because the cover was innocent and haunting. I fess to this first impression. The review in my local organ, The Oregonian was enough pushed me to buy it and a stack of Sebold’s other work on eBay which I read multiple times. Austerlitz possessed some of that beautifully, Germanic quality best written by Gunter Grass. The idea of one’s history being apt for metaphor, not being shy about feeling the weight of focus from the entire Western World. My favorite stylistic part of the book though was a scene utilizing simple security camera footage in a continuous loop. Stemming from that simple image, one I read four years ago, I wondered if a good story could be told entirely from the perspective of surveilance.

Of course, just saying a story is told through the eye of a surveilence camera isn’t enough in itself. It’s not a story actually. It’s a good jumping off place, a point of view, something even beginners are told to find. From that I had the unique challenge of cobbling together a decent story. Clearly my first decision had to be determining who exactly was looking out through that camera? Then to decide what or who were they looking at? Once I determined those entities I could finally write the story.

24/7/365

My inclination was to make a general statement on human behavior from the position of cold remove: whoever is watching is clearly in some culturally or socially superior position, however faulted or delusional. Whatever humanistic trait demonstrated by the intruders, they viewed themselves as comfortably rid of it. Or above it. Was the observer a police officer? An agent of the government? Could I hook into  an ironic turn and make my observer a simple bumpkin, taken for anything and everything without even knowing as much?

None of these were enticing enough to start writing the story. I made reams and reams of notes but wrote nothing. The first line was nowhere.

When I read the short story “A Birch Tree, A White Fox” by brilliant Russian science-fiction author Elena Arsenieva (whose English translations seem difficult to locate) my story fell together. It was a cool January morning a few weeks ago when I realized my fledgling story had to have a message. Not an overtly moral message so much as a quiet, lonesome missive launched into dark oblivion. The human intruders had to be obsessed with expressing something regarded as simple to an all-knowing and, importantly, inhuman captor but that would also captivate the reader. Instead of struggling to make that connection allegorical or metaphorical, I decided to make it literal. Thus a science fiction story was born where there was nothing. The inhuman captor wouldn’t be simply power hungry or evil. He or she would be extra-terrestrial and observing basic human movements like an other-worldly scientist over new bacterium.

Without unraveling too many details (or give away Aresenieva’s brilliantly poetic statement on humanity, for that matter) I learned that the story I was writing would work if it did two things:

• It needed to eschew the easy story line that the observed intruders I was writing about are breaking in to steal something of simple monetary value;
• And there also needed to be a gesture both symbolic and human.

To answer these questions I took The Beautiful Room Is Empty to another world. Another time when we as human beings were no longer the dominant species in the universe. When the concept of being a pack animal was our burden to bear on our backs.

What’s more human than the need to remind yourself of threatened individuality?

Here is an excerpt from the short story:

Where The Thing Is Native

Genesis:

I was watching OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting) late on a droll Saturday night. I was pulled into a few moments of a documentary about a crew of travel documentary filmmakers. Something in a simple cutaway shot of a B-Camera operator shooting footage in an Andes village made me feel something. From out of nowhere I was sympathetic. I wanted to tell his story, whatever that story was. When I posed the story idea of a story about such a person, Lisa was lukewarm.

In fact, she said, “that sounds pretty boring.”

Her dismissal presented a challenge: just saying that I’m interested in the story of a B-Camera operator isn’t anything more than character. I spent a few quiet work afternoons sketching notes about my explorer character: he’s ambitious, he’s new to the crew we find him on; most importantly I concluded that he needs to find something. What I felt forming at my desk was an adventure story: naive hero in over his head in a strange place who makes an astounding discovery and fights adversity to bring it home. All of the hallmarks of a different sort of pulp were there but I wasn’t quite turned on by it. Frankly there is no real market for “adventure tales.” I go to a gym each day and that basic market research says that none of those kids are cutting their teeth on Tarzan. Unless it’s a “first person shooter”.

I decided to amend the genre while keeping the elements consistent. As I formed a story, I decided to change the “astounding discovery” element. Instead of a thing, I made it a place, one familiar to the naive hero but a quarter turn off. To heighten the intrigue and skeptical nature of my story, I made an eerie connection between the strange place and the comforts of home. Simple changes around the same core story I began. Only now I could move a little more freely with the subject and had some leeway to create.

At The Mountains Of Madness

What I got were six thousand, very well written words. I’m hardly one to be pleased with a first draft but “Where We Are Not Native” reads like a Depression-era, weird fiction story. My hero is stranded due to the cruel fate of nature, escapes isolation in the cold, connects to a strange host and the rest is fueled by simple human characteristics: savage ambition and curiosity. I look at where this story could have failed (still wary that it’s not yet published) and it would be just that basic story place. In spite of genre, I learned that the character motivations driving the story need to remain human whether or not the antagonism is.

The story simply wrote itself in places.

Here is an audio excerpt from this story:

In the end, writing genre makes me feel like a much older writer. Not in age (although my birthday looms) but in my approach to story and the mechanics of writing it. I imagine those old pulp writers, those more hard boiled story-crafters to be much like I am now: hunched over the keys, hungry to exact some living, breathing story from their bones. I imagine them ever aware of the next one on the horizon and where to sell it.

Conversely, it makes me feel like a much younger writer too. Younger, in that each story’s flight is real. It’s a part once embedded coming loose from its original mooring. I’ve never felt that before.

Opened A Copy Of This Book In The Library & Found Her Name

her name

found

written in a book

of Noel Coward’s

letters:

Andrea Drinard

Chinaski: Hero

“Love Is A Dog From Hell” rejected for it’s unmarketable title.

Bar fighters (especially the loud ones, the mad ones) don’t improve their pugilistic. They make the evening news circuit. Live at 5:00, 6:30 and 11:00. Face notorious. Updates on-line regarding their whereabouts.

No novel, Post Office.

The arcade of whores and “mad women” who passed in and out of his bungalor: they carry more than just an irritating case of crab lice today.

We’ve all but slayed the myth of the romantic drunk. He’s a cautionary story. They make the cover of Busted magazine in their worst condition. TMZ.

“Local Authorities Investigate the Writer of ‘Notes From A Dirty Old Man’”.

There would be no “walls of his cage” no quiet in which to rage. Chuck would blog his thoughts, his rants, his opinions, no long hand/typed letters to rescue from a hot San Pedro afternoon and recreate posthumously.

He’d curb his riskier thoughts in response to comments from his readers.

Ring tones on the bus. People talking on the phone while stuck in traffic on the 101. Bar rooms filled with people sending text messages. Thumbs ablaze.

What would propel him, if not the sound of his typewriter keys? A MacBook makes none too satisfying a sound even in the throws of a writer’s most fertile moment.

First day of writing the feature length, Promise Before The Sword. Using Blake Snyder’s “Beat Sheet” as a guidepost, I hand sketched out the first five pages of screen time (through “Theme Stated”). All of these scenes have been hashed out in concept months ago. These are the scenes for setting tone and a baseline for action. Easiest to think of creating these as the inverse of how a painter creates his scene — this is a lot of color overlaying the outline. The story “colors” are in the autumn palette. They are wet, decaying browns and the gray color of wet city streets. I’ve decided to punctuate them with Halloween decorations (also a theme) a lot of bright orange and whispy whites like spider webs.

The classic, "M"

It’s also the time for the tone of action. I’ve known this since I started working on the idea to be a screenplay that progresses from Quiet to Loud to Quiet again. The protagonist, Kevin, is a quiet person in a quiet job, likely to continue this quiet way until the end without the adventure that occurs to him here. The catalyst incident starts out as quiet as well: there is a bag, on the side of the path he takes to work every day. It’s presence signals the onslaught of that quiet voice inside which compels him to act.

October 20th, 2009

More of the same this morning. Colors, tones and accents working together, coming into an unexpected story harmony. There is a rare moment when story falls off the bone. It feels somehow peculiar to say that the planned-for harmony in elements is unexpected but the process of transfer, from idea to seemingly random notes and then onto the actual page is one that often happens outside of intent — as a writer I don’t go in with my intellect dictating action. Getting to a good scene, or a good relationship of scenes, it’s a careful relay between intuition, faith and the constant verification.

This morning I’ve moved into that long imagined catalyzing moment: Page 12/Minute 12 when Kevin opens the duffel bag, reveals the money, but more than that, finds the secrets beneath the money then stashes it all away in a place close to home. It’s this need to keep secrets but hidden close in, along side his life’s perpetually exposed private moments that will set the tone (read: the presence of masks, Halloween, things hidden in plain sight) for the rest of the film. Without knowing that Kevin is private, there would be no internal tension. Having his private moments jeopardized will play forward in the conflict with White Supremacists and Eastern European death metal singers extremely well.

Right now that tension comes in small packages. Bruno walks in. There is a woman in his building overlooking the trash can who knows every time someone throws something away. A client, young and brash, is far too comfortable poking around at his desk. Annalise, curious and attractive, is one to ask too many questions of the secreted social worker.

The elements of drama and story assemble nicely.

October 21st, 2009

The most difficult writing comes in the “debate” section of a screenplay, the place between the catalyst and the moment the hero decides to take action. It’s the place where they debate themselves and the world about whether to go on the adventure presented to them by the story.

Movie Poster For "The Lives of Others"

Models for this screenplay, as sketched into my notebook: The Lives Of Others and The Croupier. Any film with scenes of “following” lead me to Fritz Lang’s classic, M and the great Peter Lorre. Perhaps now is the time to engorge myself once again in German cinema. It is October after all.

October 23rd, 2009

I’ve slept later and later in each of the last two mornings. Personal life, this time, more exhausting than anything else (searching for the best, most practical way to ‘family plan’ isn’t fun with an overly emotional bride). Upon sitting down though, I’ve been focused on stringing the lines together. My outline for Promise Before The Sword at least here, has been vague and generalized. Remember: writing a screenplay is many things, it’s not just scenes with settings and dialog and a Shalyman-esque twist. Layers. Writing a screenplay is the slow, well-timed building of layers, all of which can be peeled back in the next two acts.

Professor Lewis once said: “Don’t show me a fireplace unless you’re going to build me a fire.”

One dimension is that set-up and pay-off — it’s constant, putting the fireplace in the corner. Showing the audience the tinder and spark. It’s never more important than in the first act, as the action is building along side the affection for the character. In the last two days, I’ve built in elements of conflict such as: trust established/trust broken, and, suspicion opened/suspicion delayed. I think I’ve shown the room (this confining world) and shown the fireplace (the presence of possibly dirty motives in the same sack as dirty money) and left wide the swath of possibilities around it’s ignition.

Another dimension I’m working into this screenplay, something I’ve never worked consciously worked towards is confinement. Tension plus confinement. If the fire is set in a small room, it’s a greater threat than in a spacious warehouse. It’s the boilerplate for thrillers, action, characters in danger. In Promise Before The Sword I’ve looked at Kevin Seidler’s corridor of movement and vowed to narrow it at each turn. Already in my build toward Act II, I’ve handed him trust that I’ve begun to pull out.

As the mornings progress, the feeling that this screenplay “works” as well on page as it did in note, increases.