Let Them Eat Crêpes

Like the saying goes, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, or to make crêpes for that matter. Had we known the process of creating an anthology would take three years and have about as many downs as ups, would we have made the decision to proceed? We had nothing to lose, and in the end, we have a book that makes us proud.

Here’s what we learned about good food writing, the publishing process, and ourselves.

What makes for good food writing?

A food writer works like a chef and incorporates basic writing elements in new ways. A strong sense of storytelling, sensual images, compelling characters, a fresh sense of place—all these classic writing ingredients are found in the best food writing. The food itself is another character in the story: sometimes the hero, sometimes the villain, memorable in whatever role it plays.

Stories that took us on unique journeys—not just to a restaurant or kitchen table, but to a vivid, compelling, particular place in a writer’s life—were the ones that made it into the book.

Why do people write about food?

One of the most intimate ways you experience life is through food. You take it inside your body; it’s life giving. Life’s most important events always include food: first dates, the night you become engaged or break up, weddings, holidays, funerals.

Food stimulates the senses, and memories are often triggered by food smells—the yeasty aroma of bread that reminds us of Grandma’s house, the tang of citrus that calls to mind a particular summer. The simple mention of a certain food or the scent of a familiar dish wafting through the air is enough to transport us to memories and experiences in which that food was involved, whether good or bad.

Writers use food as a way to explore memories, relationships, and events that connect us all. It is a way to dig deeper into an experience. As complexities reveal themselves during the food experience, we use writing to think deeply about what the food represents, and go beyond the sensory experience to reveal new truths.

Essentially, food is one way we connect—whether in shared meals or passed-down recipes. Writing is another way we share our human experiences. It’s just natural that these two activities—food and writing—come together.

Why do we like to read about food?

Food writing is accessible to a wide range of people. We may not have other hobbies in common, but we all eat, we all share meals, we’ve got this human sense of taste that is always seeking out new flavors, new stimulation. Food writing is a way to be an armchair diner at someone else’s table.

Reading about food always makes us hungry—to create new food experiences with our own families, to make new connections, and to eat something great. That, ultimately, was our goal in publishing the anthology. We found the selected stories inspiring, and we wanted to share that with other readers.

What was it like coediting an anthology?

Coediting requires trust, teamwork, and commitment. And lots and lots of communication. With so many tasks—culling through submissions; selecting and editing them; writing our nonfiction book proposal; signing with an agent; working with her as she went through the submission process; creating, maintaining, and updating multiple online sites—there was always plenty to do. And ultimately when we decided to self-publish, we took that relationship to another level. We needed to make agreements about the amount of time and resources we were going to commit to get the book published, whether we were going to publish at all, and eventually how to arrange for a cover, copyediting, and publicity.

How did that work?

It is definitely a lot of work and coordination—and not for everybody. The process requires tremendous patience. And, as we mentioned, trust.

The two of us have a unique skill set: We both have project management and document skills from our days working together as marketing writers. We know how to manage a large document with lots of contributors. We know the rudiments of writing press releases and publicity information. But more than that, we trust each other to make good decisions and value each other’s input.

Finally getting the collection into print was the easiest step. Building our nonfiction proposal and going through the process of trying to get the book picked up by a publisher (during the economic downturn!) was the hard part.

We were delighted to find that both of us have an innate ability to sell the book. We networked to get on the inside track with independent bookstores and other retail locations and placed newspaper articles whenever we could. The end result was beyond our original goal of just getting the book into print: our book was our publisher’s number two travel book during November (the peak of holiday buying); we even placed third in their November sales contest.

It just goes to show that if you feel passionate about something, it’s easy to have the motivation to let everyone know about it, and get everyone you can behind it.

What are the dynamics of having two editors?

Melissa Koefod

Being part of a team forces you to take a second look at things you might pass over. Each of us can think of an essay that the other didn’t even notice at first, but is now a favorite in the book.

We kept each other motivated and focused. One could take the lead when the other felt overwhelmed. Our abilities complemented each other, but we shared one key goal: how to bring these wonderful stories to readers.

What were your most successful methods of gleaning work?

Susan Doffing

The collection was inspired by an essay by former Loft Mentor Program participant and Loft teaching artist, Anika Fajardo. During one of our writing group meetings, Anika read her story “Eating Crêpes in Colombia.” We had a crazy idea that there were more stories out there. We just had to figure out how to find them. So, we started networking, using our connections in the Twin Cities literary community. We posted our call for submissions at the Loft and at all the local colleges and universities. We also posted on Craig’s List in Minneapolis, San Francisco, and New York, and with listserv at the University of Pennsylvania. We paid for an ad in Poets & Writers (all the others were free), which gave us a lot of great submissions.

We set up a website, blog, and Facebook and Twitter accounts where we could post information about the project, develop our platform, and build our future audience. We also kept our eyes peeled for potential writers or crêpe stories in the media that might fit with our project. We asked our friends and they asked their friends.

Now that the book is out, readers are telling us more crêpe stories, making us wonder if Let Them Eat More Crêpes should be our next project together.

Melissa Doffing and Susan Koefod live and write near the Twin Cities in Minnesota. They were drawn together for this anthology by a hunger for good writing and crêpes. Doffing enjoys reading and writing in a variety of genres and is currently trying her hand at fiction. Koefod works during the day as a business writer and moonlights as a poet and novelist. Both can be contacted via eatingcrepes@gmail.com. Web address: www.eatingcrepes.com.

A Question-and-Answer Session with Rebecca Frost and Linda Shapiro

Linda and Rebecca are the founders of Dancers Who Write, a reading series showcasing the literary talents of writers who are also movers.

The View: How was the Dancers Who Write series born?

Rebecca Frost: Our project was conceived somewhere alongside the fall soccer games of our de facto godniece in common. Linda and I, who knew each other from myriad connections in the dance world, would show up to watch the games in chilly weather, intermittently, independently. In between cheering for preteens’ near scores, we’d talk, compare notes, stamp our feet. Turned out we were both writing a lot and had no idea the other was as well.

Linda Shapiro: As a published freelance writer on subjects ranging from dance to the research of University of Minnesota faculty, I had been thinking that I needed an outlet for my newly hatched fiction. As a choreographer, I always had plenty of opportunities to present my work in various stages of development. I wanted that for my writing.

I’d also been thinking about other dancers I know who write and have published or performed their text-driven work, and thought there might be more waiting in the wings. So we chatted a bit about the possibility of a modest series somewhere and started doing some investigating. Todd Boss graciously offered us three evenings in his Verse and Converse series at Nina’s Café in Saint Paul (January, March, and May 2010). They were successful enough that we wanted to continue into the summer at the Bryant-Lake Bowl—to see what would happen in a Minneapolis venue, and, as the Nina’s events were free, to see if anyone would actually pay to hear dancers read their stuff.

V: What was the motivation for pairing dancing and writing?

LS: Well, our press release asked “Does the body-mind connection endemic to dancers foster a distinctive kind of poetry and prose? Can visceral impulses spark literary invention?” I wrote that a bit tongue in cheek, but it gave us a hook to hang the series on. We also believed that dancer-writers could put on a good show. They are natural performers even behind a podium.

I believe that my years as a choreographer have influenced my writing in numerous ways. I constructed dances by allowing the movement material I created to find its own form in time and space. The expressive dimension of the dance emerged as the material took shape. Writing fiction is a similar process for me. I begin with a situation and/or a character-narrator’s voice and point of view, allowing the rhythm and texture of a scene to shape its thematic development. I try not to impose a plot or force narrative continuity, but allow those elements to emerge.

Dance is the only art form where the artists create directly on human beings. I think this is why it can never be truly abstract—it always partakes of the people on whom it was created. In that sense choreographing is somewhat analogous to getting to a point in the writing process where your characters begin shaping the story. On the other hand, writing is a more direct and private activity that can take place almost anywhere. You don’t have to write grants to pay for space and dancers. You don’t have to deal with other people’s schedules or egos, or warm yourself up for an hour before you can even begin to “create.”

RF: For me, the motivation of pairing the two art forms in a project like DWW had to do with an ongoing investigation into how I might integrate both the separate lifestyles each form demands, and an urge to see cross-pollination between the two communities. How do I sit still long enough each day to generate my masterpiece and also move my whole self enough to stay sparked, limber, free, present to a world beyond the page? How do I express and fulfill my introvert and my extrovert? And how do I get my friends who dance to play with my friends who write? Is there any room big enough for all of us?

V: What is the importance of adding movement to story? How has art played on art, the melding of words and dance?

RF: When I was in graduate school I’d often get scribbles back on my workshopped pieces that said some version of “there’s a lot of movement in here.” This was true for stories and poems and essays. My tendency was to write scenes that described more movements by human beings than was common in the prose my peers (and teachers) were reading. The way my pieces were constructed made the material move. The content I was writing about—and what I thought important to show the characters doing—involved physical action done by live bodies. The form I was evolving was often described as lyrical or musical or even rhythmical. I employed organizing principles such as orchestration, which borrowed from music as a means of ordering and layering my written pieces, which I often referred to as scores.

In the early to mid-’90s I was one of five trained dancers who founded the Women’s Performance Project. Over the course of four years, we produced five original evening-length works. We infused the performances with stories, many of them gleaned from our own experiences. Sometimes we used texts we’d written, and sometimes we gave voice extemporaneously. The combination of organic movement and structured improvisation, woven through theatrical ritual and choreographed dances, allowed for the kind of combustion traditional cultures have understood throughout time. Energy expands when we don’t separate our parts.

. . . Unless you’re wearing a blaze-orange jumpsuit, the kind prisoners wear. And you’re performing an art installation piece adjacent to the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, like I did in the summer of 2008. Confined in a 6½- by 8-foot Guantánamo Bay prison cell re-created by Amnesty International, I used movement, amplified by my own silence, to transmit the visceral misery a detainee experiences. In that instance the suspended separation of movement and story made sense. Not until it was time to articulate the facts of the situation to reporters from Korea, Mexico, and the UK covering the RNC did my voice come potently into play.

LS: Many choreographers, including me, have used text in their work. And what is termed

Linda Shapiro

physical theater—theater that is movement based—has been around for decades. I think melding text and movement is a tricky business. Much of the text-based choreography I see is cringingly literal, or earnestly abstract and fragmented. Much of the physical theater I see is mindlessly athletic—actors just throwing their bodies around to up the dramatic ante. But when the play of movement and text works, it can generate fascinating worlds in which the abstractness of dance and the concreteness of language riff off one another. I once created a solo based on an autobiographical monologue about a harrowing experience in a subway. I wanted to find a way to communicate the terror I felt, the loss of control. So I performed it in a narrow beam of light, moving rapidly back and forth, slamming backward into a wall. I could never predict at what points in the monologue I would hit the wall. So the simple dance elements of confined space and linear directionality became the form that exploded the text and heightened its sense of menace.

Of even more interest to me is how the two forms can indirectly influence and support one another. New York choreographer Terry O’Connor reads prodigiously to develop what he terms different modalities of thought, but he doesn’t use preexisting forms from literature in making a dance. He does, however, use novels as an exercise in structure. Borrowing from literary structuralism the idea that the meaning of an image is completely a matter of its relationship to other images, he might consider something like the numerical outlay of characters: How many times is one character with another as opposed to a third? Is the number ordered or random? Does it indicate a hierarchy, or is it an imitation of the spontaneity of things? So it’s not so much adding one form to the other, or even blending the two, as it is finding ways for them to collude, shake up, and ultimately reinforce one other.

V: What impact has the series had—on you, on audience members, on the community at large? What reactions have you had from audience members and participating artists?

RF: Beyond the distinct camps among dancers and writers, each with its own aesthetics, all

Rebecca Frost

defining themselves accordingly, the primary thrill for me is so many of these artists coming together in the same space—dancers and writers seeing, responding to, discussing the same work. That convergence—of supposedly unrelated families—had an impact on my sense of what is possible. It gave me a sense of the integration I was seeking.

A highlight for me was when participant Lightsey Darst answered a question from the audience about her process as a writer. She said she uses assorted models or choreography schools as prompts for how she assembles her poetry. She was answering, not identified as a performer, but in terms of the formal elements of craft.

I’ve had audience members e-mail me before and after readings detailing what they loved and what they “couldn’t stand.” In that latter category falls a frequent, and not surprising, reaction I’ve heard from dancers and writers—older and younger generations alike: a pronounced disinterest in watching stilted, monotonous readings. I think many of our DWW readings transcended jaded expectations of what literary events could be.

LS: For some writers, it was the first public reading of their work. Others, including Lightsey Darst, Anya Achtenberg, Mary Easter, and Rebecca, have given many public readings and brought to DWW writers already familiar with their work. But I think the atmosphere was unlike that of most readings I’ve attended. Much of the audience was composed of dancers who discussed the work very differently from the way writers would have. For instance, one woman compared something I’d written to some of my choreography in a way I would have never anticipated, and her observations helped me gain a new perspective on my writing.

One of our readers, Mary Easter, wrote, “DWW gave me a wonderful audience who understood me by their laughter during the reading (I didn’t know I was so funny!) and supported me with engaged comments afterward. (‘I wanted to yell, “you can do it, Mary, you can do it!” ’). The attendees were more varied than the dance community I expected. One totally unexpected result of the evening was my inclusion (with different writing) in a literary quarterly. I was selected to participate in the publication reading because ‘I heard you at Dancers Who Write and I knew you’d be a great reader.’ The impact of the series then, is not only on the dance community (which would be enough in my view) but carries farther into the literary world, a cross-pollination that I have found difficult to achieve in the past. Long may DWW continue!”

Rebecca Frost is the winner of two mnartists.org’s What Light Poetry Project competitions, a Writers Rising Up online journal contest, a Jerome Foundation Spoken Word grant through Intermedia Arts, and, as a member of the Women’s Performance Project, the beneficiary of two McKnight fellowships in choreography. A longtime dancer, she’s performed on nearly every stage in the Twin Cities. Her poetry has been published in Grounds for Peace, Honey Land Review, Currents magazine, and Close to the Ground, as well as a prizewinning broadside. Rebecca served on the editorial board for Water~Stone Review. Her MFA thesis novel, Love, House, was once finished. Now, it’s asking for another pound of flesh. Rebecca teaches performance skills to writers (and others). www.rebeccamfrost.com

Linda Shapiro was a founder and artistic codirector of New Dance Ensemble. She has received numerous grants and awards for choreography, including a Bush and several NEA, McKnight, and Jerome Foundation fellowships. Currently she writes about the performing arts and other subjects for publications such as the St. Paul Pioneer Press, City Pages, Minnesota Monthly, and Dance magazine. She was a 2009 finalist in fiction for the Loft Mentor Series.

Ellen Baker

Quiet. I’m lying in the October sun on the deck of my just-rented cottage in storybook Castine, Maine, a coastal village of white clapboard houses and a glistening harbor surrounded by elms and maples dressed in their fall colors.

So quiet. Every writer’s dream?

I’m clenching my teeth.

It’s Day 3 of the final push on my second novel and because the sporadically all-encompassing demands of the writing life sometimes clash with preplanned reality, I’ve just had my eyes dilated at the eye doctor. Deadline or no, I can’t focus on small print. I can only cover my eyes and lie there, flat on my back on my yoga mat. The “corpse” pose, I realize. Yep, this book has finally killed me.

When my manuscript arrived (that exciting, almost ceremonial moment when you see that this book I’ve written is real!), the copyeditor’s red and blue pencil marks didn’t, at first glance, seem excessive. Still, Day 1 was prefaced by the contemplation of the many career options that seemed preferable to revisiting a manuscript I’d rewritten and resubmitted to my exacting, patient, brilliant editors eight times in the past two years. Perhaps becoming a gardener, a cadet at the nearby Maine Maritime Academy, a lobsterwoman?

Enough: I had to face it. I want to be a writer, I am a writer, I am, I am, I am.

I dove into the stack on a Monday morning, reading every word aloud, fortified with zucchini bread from the farmers’ market and strong Scottish Breakfast tea. Six hours in, on page 70, I became convinced the entire book was irredeemable. At least, it was missing a crucial (undetermined) scene—cause for despair, especially considering the eight rewrites. I still hadn’t gotten it right? Where’s the academy admissions office? I think I might look good in one of those caps I see the sailors wearing around town.

Sleep. Day 2. A new day. And I saw page 70’s problem: two paragraphs were unnecessary. Giddy, I drew lines through them and pressed on to page 110. Only two days, and I’d grown so accustomed to the sound of my voice in the empty house that I occasionally broke into song, said things out loud (“I need more chocolate now”). I determined that Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” was my anthem. I sang to myself about a joke that was on me, about getting older, getting nowhere.

Wondering: Will I get through this manuscript before I die? Who wrote this book?

The words seemed familiar, but all wrong. And, despite my brand-new “Titanium” mechanical pencil, my power felt limited: the characters were who they were and their story seemed to exist, independent of me, whether I liked it or not.

So—lying in the sun. Day 3. Dilated (pupils, that is). Quiet.

Thinking: How lucky I am to have this work I love! How lucky to have this time, this space, this quiet. Every writer’s dream.

Wondering: Why did I come to a village 20 winding miles from the main road and any supermarket, 50 from anyone I know? (Well—I had planned to do research for my next book, not fine-tune this one. That timing versus reality thing again.) Why did I write this book? Why did I spread my inadequate heart all over these inadequate pages? Why do I want to write another, do it all again? Am I crazy? Why do I love this work?

“Corpse” pose. A laughable effort, with these racing thoughts. My breath shallow.

Springsteen’s melody in my head: “I’m sick of sitting ’round here trying to write this book.” Nine times now! And this month is a liminal month—I’m between homes, between books, between lives.

But, as the sun sinks, my vision normalizes. I plow on.

Days upon days. A nor’easter blows in and knocks out the power. I light candles, and the words flicker, and still there’s the sound of my voice. Progress through the middle is slower; I tear chapters apart, perceiving that some scenes may be out of order. Page 220. I am used to being alone; I even like it. Get another cup of tea. Watch baseball awhile. The artistry of the windup and the pitch. The plodding pace and uncertain outcome, always the chance of a new beginning.  I Google “Dancing in the Dark” and sing along, watching the video on YouTube. Go for a walk. Around town, rosebushes hang on to their fading pink blooms, red leaves scatter the streets, maritime cadets navigate tiny white sailboats in choreographed dances in the blue harbor.

And then—something in me shifts. I begin to see my book in a new way. In previous rewrites, I’d focused on adjustments to the story, characters, arc, how everything fit together. Now, I seem more able to give each word and sentence its due. I find that if I used “inevitable” on page 73, I can be conscious of how the word resonates on pages 220 and 310. I am thinking all the time of my words—I have the book nearly memorized. On Saturdays in Castine, there are football games, cheering crowds; the cadets shoot off a cannon whenever the home team scores. I think how someone should do this for me every time I find a word to delete, a phrase to improve. Once, waking in the night, I realize: on page 79, I should swap “dragging” and “towing”! Sentences from the manuscript surface at every occasion. I fry an egg for breakfast and think, “Violet, watching, was unable even to say, Be careful, you’ll burn yourself!” Walking down the street in Castine, I watch the sunset coloring the sky and water and a schooner sailing by and recall, “She felt the strange thrill of it, at the same time she wanted to cry for home.”

Quiet. The pages are my warden and my refuge. The phone rings and it’s bad news. The phone rings and it’s my birthday. Day 20. (I’ve asked for an extension.) “What are you doing to celebrate?” “Editing! It’s okay—I’m having fun.” I honestly want to give these pages, these words, these people, everything I can.

Quiet. Now reading the manuscript again, silently, picking up on different issues. Sondheim’s “Finishing the Hat” in my head: “How you watch the rest of the world from a window, while you finish the hat.” Clicking my mechanical pencil. Erasing lines I’d made the last time.

And then it’s the last day of the month. My chocolate supply has dwindled—alarmingly—to one tiny square. It’s time to pack my books (none of which I’ve opened this month—if I’m not studying my pages, I’m staring at the wall) and clothes into the car and start back to Minnesota. I’m working, this last day, on putting the middle sections back together, on restructuring a chapter. Seeing a new way to connect the book’s ending more meaningfully to its beginning. Will it hold? My deadline is tomorrow. A few last words to add. A last walk at sunset, the roses fading, the smell of snow on the air. Everything into bags and suitcases.

I stop at the UPS store on my way south, car packed full. I fit the manuscript into a box and select overnight shipping. The month is a blur, a lost time, but the pencil marks on these pages seem the marks of my transformation, of finding the truth of my work and myself—of every writer’s dream.

Ellen Baker is the author of the novel Keeping the House, winner of the 2008 Great Lakes Book Award.  Her new novel—as yet untitled—is coming in August 2011. She lives in northern Minnesota.

Bev Bachel

The great thing about the new year is the chance for a “do-over.” What you didn’t get right—or done—last year, you can try again this year. This is especially true for writers. It seems that every novelist, poet, playwright, and memoirist I know longs for the big T: time.

But no matter how much more we desire it, we’re each given just 1,440 minutes each day. As a college professor once said when I complained about having to read ten novels in ten weeks, “It’s not how much time you have, it’s what you do with it.”

Here are some tried-and-true tips that can help you make the most of your time.

Go for your goals. You won’t be able to complete anything if you commit to everything. Be willing to say no, even when it means disappointing others. That way, you’ll be able to say yes in a big way to the goals you consider most important and the tasks that will help you achieve them. No, I can’t go out to dinner. Yes, I will see meet you for the movie that’s set in the same era as my historical novel. No, I can’t write a lengthy response to that e-mail. Yes, I will spend 15 minutes making a list of my main character’s flaws.

Break them into bite-size pieces. Going for your goals all at once is like trying to swallow an apple in one bite. Instead, break them into chunks that you can easily accomplish. Take one Loft class. Make a list of three agents. Write seven paragraphs. Doing what you set out to do, even it it’s just getting out of bed when your alarm goes off, unleashes an adrenaline rush that can help fuel you through your next to-do.

Get started. One of my favorite writing tools is the kitchen timer. The next time you find yourself procrastinating, set the timer for 15 minutes and start doing. When the timer goes off, stop. Or continue. It’s your choice. And regardless of which you choose, you will have gotten an important start on whatever you’ve been putting off.

Make use of the margins. If you’re like most writers I know, it’s hard to find time to write. There are work, kids, household chores, and more, all screaming for attention. Rather than waiting for a day off or an evening when you’re home alone, start making use of the margins, those small pockets of unexpected found time—when you’re on hold, when your gal pal is late for coffee, or when your teenager refuses to get off the phone. Take advantage of the small, and you’ll be surprised at how much you’re able to scrawl.

Track your numbers. Tracking your numbers every 30 days will help you make better decisions. There are many different numbers you can measure: minutes spent writing, word count, queries sent, queries accepted, poems written, and freelance-article income are just a few examples of the types of numbers that should be guiding how you spend your time, energy, and creativity.

Good enough, move on. Rather than agonizing over whether the protagonist in your novel should be wearing an amaranthine sweater or one that’s aubergine, call it purple and move on. As my friend and fellow writer Carolyn says, “Done is better than perfect.”

So, whether you long to finish your novel, journal more consistently, or make more money as a writer, now’s the time . . . ready, set, restart. It’s the best way to make the most of the coming year.

Bev Bachel is a full-time writer and author who’s enjoying her 2011 restart.

by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

—Robert Frost

Robert Frost’s words point to the foundation of all good writing:  the writer’s open heart. A writer’s willingness to be moved by his or her work is an invitation to the Muse; it is a free, exploratory state that allows what’s hidden in the recesses of our being—ideas, imaginative worlds, unanswered questions, psychological battles, memories—to emerge. What lurks in the private unconscious also lurks in the collective unconscious, and so the work that bubbles up when a writer puts pen to page is a glimpse, however brief, of the great mystery of being human. We writers must enter into relationship with this mystery, in one of its trillions of guises. Only then do tears and surprises—the transformation of both the writer and the text—become possible.

In my experience, the most significant tears and surprises of the writing process occur during revision. Successful writers testify that revision occupies the majority of their writing time. Writing is revision, I’ve heard many authors claim. Barring exceptional brilliance, writers usually move their work through many stages, trying on new structures and different tones of voice, adding layers of insight until the final product is far richer than the initial version. What we read between bound covers is a crafted text—a work transformed, not just evidence of an author transformed. When we revision our text, we force ourselves to look at our creation in a new way, and this shifts elements within our being. If our material is autobiographical or if it wrestles with the questions dearest and most pressing to us, then the transformation wrought by revision can be profound. “The holy work of making literature is in revision,” Carol Bly wrote. The holy work of pursuing the heart’s deepest longing is in revision as well.

Why, then, does the text of a rough draft often seem immutable? The surprises, beginning writers assume, are over. The writing feels carved in stone. Revision means bringing out the teacher’s red pen, crossing out words, moving around sentences, and otherwise destroying the outcome of a Muse-inspired rush. Revision is dull, mechanical, perfectionistic. All the fun of writing—the thrill of discovery—is over.

These assumptions are based on rotten experiences from high school and college; they are not representative of the creative process. Writers can and do remain open to surprise throughout revising and even into the final editing and proofreading stages. In fact, a great many writers dislike drafting far more than revising. To me drafting feels like scraping up clay with a baby spoon. Only once I’ve got a nice pile of material do I sigh in relief: now I can begin shaping the pot.

I like to compare revision to building a telescope. In our first draft, we shape the tube and put in an eyepiece. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we slip in a lens or two. There’s a galaxy out there—our subject matter—that we want to gaze upon, and our writing is the instrument. The first draft homes in on a region of stars. Our heart starts thumping with excitement. Indeed, even this much work brings greater clarity. But each subsequent lens we slip in pulls the stars a little closer until our telescope is powerful and we can make noteworthy discoveries.

Every great work of literature sits atop a pile of drafts. What we see in print is the tip of the iceberg; the enormous weight of seeing and reseeing the subject is what keeps it afloat.

Robert Frost’s insight, that a writer’s transformation is directly related to the reader’s transformation, suggests that the floundering journey through many drafts is the essential ingredient of good literature. “Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing,” Frost continued in his introduction to a 1939 collection of his work. “There may be a better wildness of logic than of inconsequence. But the logic is backward, in retrospect, after the act. It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader.” Our seeking and our discoveries imbed themselves in the text. Without them, no revelation is possible for the reader. No amount of genius or skill can make up for their lack.

Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is the author of Swinging on the Garden Gate; Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir; and On the Threshold: Home, Hardwood, and Holiness, a collection of personal essays. She teaches creative nonfiction at the Loft, is an instructor in the Loft Foreword program, and coaches writers independently. Her website is www.spiritualmemoir.com.

Jonathan Odell

In life, you can either live out of your imagination,

or you can live out of your history. ~Stephen Covey

That’s what we adults do with much of our lives. We live out of our history, doing the things that have worked once upon a time. We obey the rules. We avoid the things that didn’t work while stubbornly refusing to imagine a new story for ourselves.

One of my favorite quotes about childhood is from Graham Greene: “There is always one moment in a child’s life when the door opens and lets the future in.”

I remember plainly that happening to me when I was four. My father and I are out driving. As always, when he approaches the railroad tracks near our home, he comes to a complete stop, even though no train is in sight.

This time I ask him, “Daddy, why do you stop?”

He nods up at a big white sign with black writing. “ ’Cause it tells you to.”

I didn’t hear anybody tell my daddy to do anything. “Who told you? What’d he say?”

He points. “See, it says, ‘Mississippi Law Stop.’ ”

Those were the first three words I learned to read. And they held magic. Not because they told my father what to do. But because he did it! Nobody ever told my father what to do.

I mean nobody.

Yet these strange markings held a power over my father. I was impressed. It had to be God speaking through things called words.

That’s when I illogically, insanely, and unscientifically fell in love with language.

From then on, when we approached a stop sign or yield sign or a dead end, I begged to get out of the car and for Daddy to hold me up to touch the sign, to let me run my fingers over the raised lettering. In that moment, the door opened and let the future in.

Soon I would forget.

The door didn’t shut all at once. It began in the first grade. Education was about being taught to see things like others have seen them for generations before. About learning the cold, dead facts of the world. Competence, proficiency, and performance. Meeting others’ expectations.

Imagination and creativity were not appreciated.

I hung on a few years trying to live out of my imagination, trying to believe in magic. But day by day, the world became less enchanted. Music was no longer something you spontaneously sang when you were happy. It became a dead animal that could be dissected into bars and notes and key signatures.

A flower could be analyzed by its component parts—petal, stamen, pistil, sepal—without once taking into account its beauty, its fragrance, the way it made you feel loved by God. Everything could be pulled apart, sorted and compartmentalized, pinned down like butterflies poised, midflight, in a glass display case.

I was in the fifth grade when a critical break with my imagined life occurred. My teacher was Mrs. Ainsworth. Her motto was, “A child’s learning will never interfere with my lesson plan.”

I remember Easter was approaching and Mrs. Ainsworth told us we were going to have an art contest. I was excited. I loved to draw. To a kid, a blank page, like the future, is an invitation to create something totally your own.

I remember exactly what I drew. I put three crosses on a purple hill. Purple was a sad color and I knew God was sad watching his only boy die. So of course the ground had to be purple.

Mrs. Ainsworth chose my picture to use as a bad example of art. She said she had never seen purple grass. She told us real art, art that counted, was about color schemes, geometric shapes, and proportion.

I learned once and for all that enthusiasm, originality, and joy did not count for much in life. Keeping your head down and following the rules did.

Your masters didn’t care what you loved, only how well you mimicked their thinking.

A door shut. It took another 40 years to pry that door open again, reclaim the magic, and become a writer.

It’s taken a lot of work, spiritual and emotional, to recover what little bit of boldness I now possess to imagine a new future—to transcend my history and see new options.

One way I’ve done it is to give myself “do-overs.” Kids get to do do-overs all the time, when they shout, “That doesn’t count! Let me do it again!”

Last September I had a chance for a do-over I hadn’t planned. I got a call from a one-of-a-kind schoolteacher. He knew about the work I was doing with story and wondered if there was anything that could apply to kids.

His students were at an age when they were learning competencies like reading and writing, but he wanted to make sure they didn’t lose their internal voices—their creativity and imagination.

I could almost hear their doors creaking shut. “What grades are we talking about?” I asked.

Of course I knew what he was going to say. “Fifth grade.”

Talk about returning to the scene of the crime! I was going to get to do the fifth grade over, without Mrs. Ainsworth.

When I showed up I had 54 children looking up at me. I could see in their eyes that the magic was still there, their willingness to believe the unbelievable. I asked myself, if I were one of them, what would I have loved Mrs. Ainsworth to tell me in the fifth grade? I had the overwhelming urge to shout, “Run for your lives! Don’t believe what grown-ups tell you! The magic is REAL! If you lose it, you’ll never get it back.”

Instead I slowly looked around the room, taking in the attentive, respectful group dressed in their Catholic school uniforms. Blue slacks and jumpers, white shirts.

I asked, “How many of you played dress-up when you were a kid?” This quiet, well-behaved group of kids, who were trained to raise their hands to speak, spontaneously erupted in laughter and animated chatter. They were all telling their stories at once.

When I was able to get their attention, I asked, “Now, how many of you had fun getting dressed this morning?”

The energy died. No one moved. The question had returned them to the world of competence, of right and wrong, of denying your uniqueness so you don’t stand out. A world in which imagination only gets you in trouble.

I told them that this was like writing. Writing has a lot of rules you have to master or you won’t get very far. Punctuation, spelling, neatness, grammar. I told them it was like wearing a uniform to school. Sometimes you had to do it.

But I told them our story writing was going to be different. “When you write your stories, I want it to feel like playing dress-up.

“There are no rules. Spelling doesn’t count. Neither does grammar or neatness. You can write at your desk, on the floor, or standing on your head. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. You get to try things on and decide if they fit you or not. Just listen to what makes your heart jump. That is your own personal voice trying to speak. Write that. That’s what the best writers do.”

One of the kids is known by his teachers as shy, not good at sports, a boy who always sits in the back of the room. Dale is a loner. His teachers worry about him socially as well as academically. They can’t get to him. They are afraid they are going to lose him.

After I had met with the class over a couple of months, Dale gathered the courage to slip me a two-page story when nobody was looking. When I read his work that evening, I was dumbfounded. It was brilliant. It hummed with life and energy and spontaneity and imagination. I couldn’t believe this work came from the same boy. He told a better story than most of the adults I teach.

I wanted Dale to read his story to the class. The teachers were afraid he would choke. Or that the other kids wouldn’t respond favorably and he would end up even more isolated. But we thought it worth the gamble. There was something about this boy. In my heart, I knew what this boy was up to. He was making his move. He was close to being overwhelmed by his history. The door to an imagined future was closing. In the only way he could, he was telling me, “My time has come.”

The day arrived when Dale, this shy wallflower of a boy, stood alone before his classmates. The notebook pages shook in his hand. For a moment, Dale stopped breathing. Then he began to mumble his story.

I panicked. The teachers’ fears were going to be realized. I went up to Dale and whispered into his ear, “Dale, this is a wonderful story. And you know what? It’s yours and nobody else’s. I want you to read it like you love it.”

He looked down at his story, as if recognizing it for the first time. He smiled and began again. When he spoke, it was with authority. I was transfixed. This boy was speaking his words, telling his story, and he was, in that moment, living a life that was uniquely his, one that no one had lived before. Dale was imagining a future better than anyone had predicted for him. And he was doing it right before our eyes.

We all sat mesmerized.

As he stood there reading, I’m sure everyone was thinking the same thing I was: “Oh, this is who Dale is. I never knew.”

In that moment he was larger than all the labels the world had put on him. He was bigger than the reasonable conclusions of all the experts. Dale was throwing off his history. And the future was saying “yes” to the man he was becoming.

When Dale was finished, the kids gave him a wild round of applause and flocked around him like he was a football hero, congratulating him, patting him on the back, peppering him with questions about the man-eating dinosaur he had created and about the two boy hunters who went tracking it. They wanted to know more about this new person who had magically appeared in their midst. And Dale had found an abundant supply of himself to give.

I looked over at the teacher who was so worried about Dale. She had tears in her eyes.

Dale and the other 53 kids had become our teachers. They taught us that the urge to tell a story is innate, fragile, unique, and must be honored, unconditionally affirmed, and protected from the critics and naysayers, the soul killers of the world.

They taught us that story is a communal experience. We need each other to tell our story. No one, the listener or the teller, is ever the same after a story has been told and witnessed.

I’ve decided Graham Greene was wrong. The opportunity doesn’t come around just once. It’s there every day of the year. I think the universe is always opening the door and showing us a new life never before imagined, whispering to us, “Stay alive until the very end!” Yet in a world of deafened ears, children are usually the only ones who hear it.

And if they are very lucky, at least one of the coauthors of their stories, a teacher, a mother, a father, someone they look up to, will tell them in a thousand different ways, “Honor your story, kid. Hang on to your voice. It’s the only thing that’s going to get you through this world alive.”

Jonathan Odell is the author of the The View from Delphi (Macadam/Cage 2004), which deals with the struggle for equality in pre-civil rights Mississippi, his home state. His novel, The Healing, has just been acquired by Nan A.Talese/Doubleday and will be released early 2012. Website: jon-odell.com

His short stories and essays have appeared in Stories from the Blue Moon Café (Macadam/Cage 2004), Men Like That (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Letters of the Twentieth Century (Dial Press, 1999), Breaking Silence (Xanthus Press, 1996), Speakeasy Literary Magazine, Gertrude Journal, and the Savannah Literary Journal. He has also written for Commonweal Magazine and has had his work featured in the Utne Reader.

Jonathan recently designed and implemented a groundbreaking literary intervention for elementary and middle school children that uses story creation as a way to increase a child’s love for reading and writing, self-esteem and classroom safety. A regular instructor as the Loft, Jonathan will be teaching a one day class April 2^nd, entitled “Beginning in the Middle: Writing at Midlife”

A version of this essay appeared first on Jonathan’s website, www.jon-odell.com.

by Jim Northrup

Jim Northrup is an Anishinaabe newspaper columnist, poet, performer, and political commentator from the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation in Minnesota. His Anishinaabe name is “Chibenashi” (from Chi-bineshiinh “Big little-bird”). His award winning column, the Fond du Lac Follies, is syndicated through several Native American papers. Books include the Minnesota Book Award-winning Rez Road Follies and Walking the Rez Road. Jim’s third book Anishinaabe Syndicated is scheduled for release early 2011 by MHS Press. He is currently working on a new collection of fiction titled Dirty Copper.

This article first appeared in A View from the Loft, November/December 2007. Reprinted with permission.

Ben Obler

In poker, when I call half the pot with a straight draw and middle pair, against one other player, in late table position, I know where I stand. I know it’s the right decision. However it shakes out, I will regret nothing. But in writing, when I put my protagonist, Gus, in the aisle of a home improvement store for the scene when he gets the call from Priscilla, how can I gauge this choice? As he eyes the mole/vole repellent package midconversation, finding the cruelty unexpectedly tantalizing, can I be assured there’s not a better symbol in the lumber aisle? Or lighting, or plumbing? Maybe Gus should be kinder. Maybe he shouldn’t be talking to Priscilla at all! Uncertainties stack up in a hurry, as numerous as cards in a deck.

In poker and in writing, it’s in your best interest to get comfortable with precariousness. Odds can help. Odds are irrefutable mathematical backing that places the sanity of your decision on a linear spectrum, somewhere between zero and 100 percent. In poker lingo, if you play close to zero percent, you’re a donkey. If you’ll only bet on a sure thing, you’re “tight.” You don’t want to be either all the time, but you do want to be each some of the time.

Let’s say Alice moves all-in at me, and I’m holding pocket nines (that means a pair of nines in hand). I know that if Alice has the best starting hand available, a pair of Aces, she’ll come out the victor 80 percent of the time. That’s a pretty dim prospect for me. But if she’s just a little weaker, holding an Ace and a King, all of a sudden, I’m on top: run that race with all possible outcomes, and my nines prevail in 55 percent of them. So how do I know what Alice has? I don’t. But I know that my losses are capped by the amount of chips she has. Can I afford to lose that amount? It’s a calculated risk. Odds are a consolation. They relieve a player of the onus of personal judgment and help him avoid acting on specious passion.

Is the same true in writing? I’d say yes. Writing doesn’t have odds so to speak, but it does have coherence, believability, the logic of story. You want to follow your zaniest plot idea and see how it pans out, or vent that overheated description of the open-pit mine at dusk. It might bring unexpected rewards. But don’t chase all the long shots. Can you afford to lose your reader’s attention or confidence? Get back to nuts and bolts: action, dialogue, conflict. If an off-the-wall scheme bears fruit, keep the story tight for a time. After all, that’s how you’d follow up a loose play at the card table.

It’s a balancing act between temerity and timidity.

In poker, you’re selling a story. The flop comes Ace, four, four, and I bet the pot out of the small blind. I’m trying to convince my opponent across the table that I’m holding a four and just lucked into three-of-a-kind. Does he buy it? I’m looking for signs that he does, just like I listen for laughter when my wife’s reading my work (a comic story, that is).

Sometimes in poker you have to change your story. You get reraised, and you didn’t have the three-of-a-kind. Happens all the time at the card table and in fiction. In poker it’s “slowing down.” In writing, revision. In both, if no one’s buying it, best to rethink.

In poker, you take it hand by hand, pot for pot. That’s how I’m taking it in my novel now. Chapter by chapter. I make notes about the upcoming work—what I want to happen to Gus, what I want Gus to make happen. I treat the themes and motifs and characters that come to me like the cards I’m dealt. When they’re good, I get aggressive with them. Marginal, I see what pans out. Junky—let ’em go.

In both, be prepared to lose. In every hand there are cards in the deck that can render your strong hole cards weak. And with every good story, poem, article, there will be journals, agents, and publishers who inexplicably pass. But by knowing your strengths and honing your game, word by word, sentence by sentence, project by project, you will, as we say at the poker table, “get in with the best of it” and come out on top.

Ben Obler is the author of the novel Javascotia. Visit www.benobler.com. This winter, Ben is teaching “Literary Fiction: Everyday Drama” at the Loft.

Writers’ Journeys to Cuba

by Anya Achtenberg

Es la poesía la única patria real del hombre.

(Poetry is the only real country of human beings.) ~Derbys Dominguez, poet, arts instructor, in Matanzas, Cuba

I first traveled to Cuba from Boston when I was a barely published poet, at a time when those who worked against the US blockade of Cuba faced threats and sometimes murderous retaliation. I made a second trip a year later. After our translator Lilia Berta learned that I loved poetry and was trying to write it, she began to call me “Poeta.”

For that trip, “Poeta” became my name in Cuba. And for the first time, I experienced my deep desire to express my vision of the world with the power and music of language as something respected, nurtured, and recognized by society. This valuing of the arts, this belief that all can create, enjoy, and understand art, is something the Cuban Revolution is known for. This is a place that values ability, effort, and desire to create over résumés, a place that cultivates love and understanding of the arts. This is a place I would return to.

I knew there were a number of ways to go to Cuba: direct challenge of the blockade with Pastors for Peace (I went in July 2009) and the Venceremos Brigade; educators’ tours and academic conferences; groups of environmentalists and communities of faith. In 2008, I began working with the Minnesota Cuba Committee. A committee member, who perhaps doubted my ability to pull it off, suggested I organize a writers’ trip to Cuba.

Perfect! I wanted to go deeply into the literary work of Cuba and connect to writers at all levels. I wanted to know why it was that Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, who coined the phrase lo real maravilloso—the central concept of magical realism—and had been living in exile from the Batista regime, returned to the Cuba of Che and Fidel in 1959. I knew that in the United States most writers don’t know of Carpentier’s central importance—nor are they familiar with his extraordinary novels and other works.

A winding path reconnected me to a pediatric psychiatrist in Havana who also programs for conferences and tours, and she became my programmer. She in turn connected me to Marazul Tours, and they facilitated program development and contact with Cuban counterparts for a profound level of exchange among writers and other creatives. Writers’ journeys to Cuba were born.

But there would be hurdles to jump over to get a group of writers to Cuba.

About 15 years ago, I got on a ferry in Algeciras in southern Spain, and after three hours of passing by the Rock of Gibraltar and watching the coast of North Africa, I disembarked in Tangiers, Morocco. I had my passport. No one stopped me going in or out. Porous, at least for a traveler who is neither immigrant nor exile. This crossing makes sense to me. But the US keeps Cuba on the list of “terrorist” states. Cuba has not been guilty of any terrorist act against the United States. The US, however, has supported some lethal acts of terrorism against Cuba. Truth on its head.

To navigate US regulations to get to Cuba in a way sanctioned by the US government, one must indeed stand on one’s head. Academics are permitted, if engaging in research of a “noncommercial, academic nature,” with a “substantial likelihood of public dissemination,” according to the US Department of State. While academics have a fairly easy time getting into Cuba under US sanctions, creative writers and other artists face strict regulations. A full-time research plan must be developed and in place for each visiting writer to satisfy licensing regulations.

Added to those bureaucratic hurdles are high air fares to Havana for US citizens—due directly to the travel ban and blockade. Citizens of no other country face this. Also, phone and Internet communication are very costly and slow. The United States blocks access, through the embargo laws, to the microfiber optic cables surrounding the island. This makes our work organizing the trip much more difficult.

How does the language of art break down language barriers?

The arts are key in breaking down our language and cultural barriers, and helping us leap the chasm dug and deepened by an archaic foreign policy. The literary arts are most bound by language barriers. Translations of our intense discussions—and songs, poems, stories, and film—made it clear how much we connect. And we are hungry to do so, beyond “policy,” in the land of poetry and the arts, perhaps our most “real country.”

We moved in an atmosphere of shared passion for the arts, throughout our planned meetings with writers and others, and in our wanderings. When we browsed a table covered with handmade books like none I had ever seen; or sat in animated discussions, ate, and even danced with Cuban writers and scholars, we revitalized the deep connections between people kept apart for so long.

What kind of impact have the trips had on writers?

In spite of our group being a bunch of writers and artists, there were, after all, tough guys among us: people not automatically predisposed to think that if it’s Cuba, good things must be happening. But there are qualitative differences in how Cuban society sees each individual, and how art is regarded, that made the trip a revelation and shed light on what many of us have yearned for: how to arrive at the valuing of artistic quality that does not devalue the individual; how to do the hard work of developing as artists without competition that is crushing and exclusionary. When we finished our visit to a high school that trains future instructors in the arts, people in my group were weeping. Some of those were tough cookies.

How do social activism and art collide in Cuba?

Here is an example of the deep ways in which social activism and art collide: a quite successful actor, 25 years ago, walked through empty fields in Matanzas Province and said, here, this is where I want to build a school for the arts. He is still that school’s director and his students graduate with a level of training in the arts that is exquisite. Throughout Cuba, it has been guaranteed that schools that embrace the arts are present in the countryside as they are in Havana and other large cities.

Social activism and art are intricately, intimately integrated, at a profound level. José Martí, 19th-century writer, philosopher, poet, and revolutionary, said, “Ser culto es el único modo de ser libre”  (To be cultured is the only way to be free). Cuba, a previously colonized island, had no film industry of its own, but was often used as an “exotic” backdrop for films made by directors from other countries. One of the early acts of the Cuban government in 1959 was to establish the Cuban Film Institute (El Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, ICAIC). Cubans, many of whom had never seen a film, now had access via cinemobiles—mobile film trucks that traveled the countryside. Discussion groups were created: How does one look at film? How does one critique film? Radical, socially conscious filmmaking with a piercing and critical vision of Cuban society has been supported from the start. “Only through criticism does a society improve. Films show . . . our dirty laundry,” I was told in discussions at ICAIC.

Cuba established a system of pre-university schools for arts instructors (Fidel’s idea). Students graduate with a degree in humanities and have taken exams in their specialties. They teach in elementary through high schools or work in one of the many casas de cultura or with senior citizens. Yeny Marisol Carmenate Falcón, director of the School of Instructors of the Arts, René Fraga Moreno, reminded me of some of the most passionate and intelligent teacher-writers I have known. “The mission is to create a human being, with artistic values, to be better, to appreciate art, to teach how they became artists!” In the past ten years, 33,000 of these instructors have graduated, about 1 for every 333 people. “This is my most important work of art: to help the community,” Falcón said.

What is in the works?

At Ediciones Vigía, a book arts facility that “promotes writing and publishing” and makes amazing handmade books, I had a long conversation with poet Israel Dominguez. Dominguez is a great admirer of US poets, he said. When I asked, “Like who?” he gave me a great list topped by Allen Ginsberg and his contemporaries. It hit me powerfully that for many Cuban poets, their familiarity with ours ended somewhere around 1959 (and yet they still know more about our literature than we know of theirs). So, of course, I wanted to find ways to get books and writers to them, and to expose their literature to more writers and readers here.

Here is the idea that I know must become a reality: we need to publish combined anthologies of Cuban and US poetry and short stories. One of the reasons I am thrilled to be going back to Cuba is to help move this project along. Potentially, these books will be read the world over, but certainly in Cuba, where books are very inexpensive, and, as I was told, “Kids here have a big habit of reading.”

Another project brewing is to plan trips for US writers and educators to participate in courses focusing on the writing and times of Alejo Carpentier and Cuban culture, and on Cuban literature now and since 1959, hopefully as a joint project with the Alejo Carpentier Foundation.

My writer’s being was thrilled to be in a world where music is visible, the dance jumps through traffic, history continually reveals itself, and the texts are as rich as any in the world.

As Luís Octavio Hernández, president of the Cuban Association of Artisans and Artists in Matanzas, said, grinning, “Imagine what these crazy people could do without limitations, without the blockade.”

And imagine what we crazy writers can do with Cuban writers—even before the blockade is lifted.

Anya Achtenberg, award-winning fiction writer and poet, has authored a novella, The Stories of Devil-Girl (Modern History Press); two books of poetry, including The Stone of Language (West End Press); and a novel, Prairie Angel, excerpted in Harvard Review. For her novel in progress, History Artist, she is a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant. She teaches creative writing nationally, including her multigenre Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World Workshops; Claiming Our Stories workshops in fiction and memoir; and online both with Writers.com/Writers on the Net and through her website. As a writing consultant and editor, she has worked individually with many fiction writers, memoirists, and poets. She writes about the art of writing at anyaachtenberg.com.

Forthcoming writers and artists trips to Cuba

Can you imagine dancing with fiction writers Mirta Yáñez and Nancy Alonso? Can you imagine open-ended discussions with screenwriter Ambrosio Fornet or novelist and revolutionary Marta Rojas? Would you like to visit the Museum of the Route of the Slave in Matanzas? Casa de las Americas, the Union of Writers and Artists, and the Cuban Film Institute in Havana? Can you see yourself at a performance at La Colmenita, the internationally renowned children’s theater, admiring the work of sculptor-mosaicist José Fuster in the streets of Jaimanitas, and moving to the beat of Afro-Cuban music with gracious and talented rumberos and salseros? Or researching for a novel, a series of poems, an academic article? Then a writers’ trip to Cuba is for you!

Contact information for Writers and Artists Delegations to Cuba: anyaachtenberg.com www.minnesotacubacommittee.org or aachtenberg@gmail.com

Emily Brisse

Early on in my life, I knew what I wanted to be: worldly.

experienced; knowing; sophisticated: as in the benefits of her worldly wisdom

I was the child who read Jane Eyre at ten (or tried to, anyway), convinced it would open up some corner of the universe. I was the teenager who read Jane Eyre again (this time actually) while nested between two branches of a tree, feeling that this was what people in love with the world did. At 21—after many more books, many more secret trysts with vocabulary words and foreign-language dictionaries, many more far-off yearnings, after finally a study-abroad term in Paris—I went east, to Maryland, my desire for worldliness a warmed stone in my hand.

So it should be no wonder that when I ordered a hamburger and fries with my new peers and, to wash it all down, a cool glass of pop, at their giggles I reddened. Deflated. Betrayed by that stowaway word. I understood immediately that to cling to such colloquialisms was to defeat the worldly self to which I aspired.

I had always loved the word before. Pop is exactly what the drink does—pop and fizz and tickle faces with its syrupy sweet leaps.

But it was so quickly that I gave up the word. Said soda consciously at first, those several months in Maryland, feeling the deliberateness of it, its correctness. After I returned home, my mom and dad raised their eyebrows and my brother teased, but what could they do? I’d acquired sophisticated experience, and there was nothing that would make me let my worldly wisdom go.

I wonder now how I became so convinced that Minnesota was not part of this cultivated crowd, that my local experiences were inferior or banal. Probably it was just curiosity at first, a mind ignited by the exoticism I found in books. But at some point I must have noticed: stories didn’t happen here. Or, if they did, the setting served only as a platform for a physical or philosophical outbound train.

In his 1995 essay “Imagining the Midwest,” Scott Russell Sanders talks about the literature set in this part of the country, and amid his fascinating observations, one stood out for me: the midwestern artist’s tendency—when regarding his or her home in the light of some “more cultured” place—to feel shame. He refers to a section of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915), in which an Illinois painter has fled his small town for Rome but still needs to insist:

There was no culture, you know, in Spoon River,

And I burned with shame and held my peace.

And what could I do, all covered over

And weighted down with western soil,

Except aspire, and pray for another

Birth in the world, with all of Spoon River

Rooted out of my soul?

Sanders goes on to point out that in much of our canonized literature that involves the Midwest—Winesburg, Ohio, Main Street, My Ántonia, The Great Gatsby—sensitive, educated characters don’t stay around. Why would they? As they see it, their hometowns offer only limitations, and like the authors who created them, these characters decamp to modern cities, to the bright coasts, to Europe, even to the Far East. And if they come back, it is to glance about at a safe and superior distance, satisfied that they are no longer of that plane.

In many ways, the custodians of “culture”—be they editors of Norton anthologies or creators of top-ten lists—instruct midwesterners to look back at our roots with condescension, and it’s my guess that one of the reasons many local artists leave is because there lives a loyalty in all of us for our homeland, and it’s always more comfortable to betray from a distance. I know. I have done this, and in many of those moments I felt relief.

So, maybe it’s still shame that fuels these words. Maybe I have simply never fully escaped. Although my small growing-up town was rife with judgment and oppression and a heavily taught caution—none of which, it’s true, is preferable soil for artists—there were also asparagus hunting and campfire songs and the games I played among the cornstalks. There were many times when no one told me what to do or what was important, when I could simply imagine.

Perhaps it’s also pride—my own fierce midwestern optimism—that will not allow me to dismiss the stuff of my Minnesota life as culturally irrelevant, that now takes issue with sophistication as a goal. As artists, it seems to me, we should allow ourselves our own lens. As artists, we should listen to the truths inside us, no matter how backwoods or backwater or backward we’ve been socially constructed to believe them to be. Some midwestern artists have done this—Bill Holm, Jon Hassler, Faith Sullivan, Patricia Hampl—and lately I’ve been taking their books into fields of tall grass, reading their words with the spirit of discovery, so thankful that they’ve stayed, that I can feel them working close to me.

One hot afternoon this past summer—the green and gold landscapes made rich by sun and rain—I reached down and chose a can of Sprite from the cooler. From the depths of all these thoughts, I heard myself say “pop,” and though I had not yet opened the can, a familiar sweetness spread from my tongue throughout my body. Such a simple word, I thought. Yet it shook me in a startlingly powerful, I’m-going-to-burst way.

I’ll never stop wanting to know the world, to feel that it has affected me, for where is our vitality if we are only vessels of standing water? But Minnesota nourished me first. And I won’t forget the well from which I first drank.

Emily Brisse is a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts’ MFA program. Her work has been recently published or is forthcoming in Orion, New Plains Review, A View from the Loft, and Third Wednesday. Emily teaches at Watertown-Mayer High School and the Loft. She blogs about Minnesota and the importance of place at www.landingoncloudywater.blogspot.com.