and now, a word from our Fellow...

Sarah Gerkensmeyer, you will recall, knocked our socks off with her story "Monster Drinks Chocolate Milk" when she accepted her $1000 Fellowship. She has not disappointed us in her year of living writerishly (is that a word?) - she is currently at the Vermont Studio Center at a writing residency (yes, she has small children!) and she writes a guest-blog from there about an article that was in Scientific American last month...among other things. Her story collection, What You Are Now Enjoying, is forthcoming by Autumn House Press on February 15, 2013.

Please welcome: Guest Blogger and 2012 Pen Parentis Writing Fellow, Sarah Gerkensmeyer!

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“ScientistsDiscover Children's Cells Living in Mothers' Brains.”  I wish this were the title of one of my short stories. 

            As someone who juggles the roles of mother and writer (among many others), I was most definitely intrigued by this article in Scientific American last month.  I think that many parents who are artists spend a great deal of time thinking about the gulf that seems to exist between their work and their family life.  And this gulf can be so discouraging.  So riddled with guilt and worry.  Since becoming a mother, I've wanted to insist that my writing has opened up, that among the new joys and stresses of a family I can now conquer the world in my work.  And yes, there have been glorious, fleeting moments when I've felt this kind of spark, pushed into an urgent and intoxicating sense of discovery while writing during my sons' nap time or while they are away for a couple hours at school and daycare.  But often the negotiation of my family and my writing life seems fraught with imbalance and uncertainty.  I haven't read my four year old enough stories today.  I haven't worked on my novel in weeks.  If I let my writing slide, I'll lose a piece of myself.  If I devote myself too much to my writing, I'll become that nutty woman who locked herself in the attic with her notebooks and her Shirley Jackson and her Carson McCullers.  My two sons will never see me again—a mother who got lost in the wilderness of her stories.

            But then I read this article about fetal microchimeric cells that have been discovered burrowed into mothers' brains and bloodstreams and who knows where else.  I gave birth to two sons, but it seems that my babies never completely left me.  And what a comfort that is.  I wrote some of my strangest short stories right after my second son, Charlie, was born.  I was too overwhelmed during the sudden quiet of his nap times to try to dive back into the draft of my novel, and so I allowed myself to write very short and peculiar tales, little stunted creatures that I didn't  recognize when they landed there on the page right in front of me, the cursor blinking in confusion.  But I didn't care.  I was writing again.  And my new baby was asleep, warm and well. 

            Quite a few of those little stories ended up cementing my story collection together in unexpected ways.  Suddenly, I had a book.  I had a new baby and I had a book.  I like to think, now, that those newer stories are Charlie's in so many ways.  When I was huddled at the dining room table during his naps, hunched and desperate and spewing out odd tales, I wasn't fighting against the pull of my tiny newborn baby.  I was inspired by him.  When I was pregnant with him, those weird stories were in me, washing around and fusing together right alongside my developing son.  It's a nice, strange thought, isn't it?  That he gave me those stories to tell? 

            My husband and two sons dropped me off at the airport a couple days ago so I could head out to the Green Mountains for a two week stay at Vermont Studio Center.  I am lucky.  I have a generous husband who insists that I am a writer, not just a mother and all of those other things.  He insists that I deserve time on a mountain, with just my stories.  He insists that I fight through the guilt of leaving home, that our sons need to grow up seeing a mother do what she loves.  And I have two sons who are happy.  Who love me.  Who will welcome me home in two weeks.  But my family is also right here with me, my two sons especially—little bits of them burrowed into unexpected parts of me and my work. 

            On the way to the airport, Charlie (now twenty months old) chattered away in his carseat behind me.  He listed things, a mash of words I could recognize (horse, snow, mama, dog) and things I couldn't.  He was absorbed completely in the urgency of his language.  Now that he has started to talk, he often gets frustrated when we can't understand him.  He'll jabber a string of sounds that we don't recognize and he'll cry when we don't catch on—pointing at the television or the refrigerator or a stack of his books, a concrete need bursting to get out.  But I like to think that sometimes he's telling us something else entirely.  Sometimes he's lost in a long-winded diatribe that we will never be able to piece together.  Maybe it's the stories.  The ones that were swimming around alongside him when I was pregnant.  The ones I wrote after he was born.  The ones I haven't written yet. 

--Sarah Gerkensmeyer

2012 Pen Parentis Writing Fellow

www.sarahgerkensmeyer.com

Three-part writing process: a theory.

Tragedy.  I wrote this idea out in an email to a friend. Wrote it in gorgeous, bloggy detail. Then I cut it from the email, realizing that she (not a writer) wouldn't be interested in my theories. Intended to paste it into a blog entry.

But, as life would have it, I got randomized and forgot to paste it...anywhere. So when I finally got to this window, I discovered the computer actually has the link to a website stored in the paste function.

Rats.

But! It was my brain that thought it up to begin with, so I'll recreate. Less than spontaneously, but maybe more thought out.

Here's the concept. Writing has always been considered a two-step event. Writing and then Editing. You write your novel. Then you edit it. Sometimes you edit it over and over again. 

But let me pose this theory:

Great writers write in three steps.

Creating. Polishing. Editing.

Yes, those are in the correct order.

Writing is really a combination of creating and polishing. This is where the various "writing styles" come in - some people create an outline first, then fill it in with details. Others write copiously, then cut and rearrange. No matter how you come up with your fully functional narrative - that's your goal in the creative phase. A narrative draft that is "finished". That's what people mean when they say "I finished the first draft of my novel." It means, "I have written a narrative that holds together, and I won't be rearranging it in any significant way." 

(probably.)

Most of the work of new writers is to figure out how they best hammer out the skeleton: whether through the inspirational and copious bloodletting known as "getting it all on the page" followed by major manuscript surgery (as I do) or by thinking hard and writing from an outline that's been a few months or even years in the making and then filling in the prescribed scenes and details (my friend Nick Kaufmann writes his fantastic urban-sorcerous crime novels this way).  Professional writers are really good at knowing when a skeleton is unfinished. They are slaves to the feeling that "something isn't right here." And they will tweak and cut and rearrange until it feels "finished."

Before sending out that "finished" story, they polish that filled out skeleton. This is where you edit your own writing. You choose better verbs. You cut characters that steal scenes for no good reason. After you absolutely know the frame of your story (Victor LaValle has some great things to say in interviews about this) you go through and "fix" -- whittle down scenes that are too long, add descriptions so that scenes don't happen in empty rooms with blank walls unless they're supposed to. 

This sounds so obvious, right? So why do writing students so often send out stories in the middle of the Creative phase? Teachers of writing often have to select the scenes to cut and mark where the story actually "begins". 

A great editor I recently worked with agreed with Victor that you can write your outline AFTER the novel is written, but you still have to have an outline.  Every story has to have a skeleton that makes sense and that can be filled in (with scenes that function...like organs?) and can be overlaid with details (skin, eye color, hair?)... despite my extended Halloween-induced metaphor, I do think that the skeleton of the story is important, and the creation of this core of every narrative should be thought of as a separate action from the polishing (finding the perfect words, describing the perfect weather, adding the crazy character traits that will make Mr. Blusty an unforgettable professor of science) -- but I also hold that the polishing of the story is NOT the editing of the story, because polishing is still fun. It's making your story all shiny and glimmery and yours. 

The editing is the painful part. After you already think the story is perfect. "As good as you can make it" - you give it to your trusted readers. Then your agent. Finally, professional editors. Each of these rounds will give you feedback which you can opt to use or not - but which you MUST look at with a critical eye. Not your inspired, vulnerable, genius writer self. A critical, consumer, teacher, word-count, sort of eye. And that is editing. Editing hurts. It's letting go of the paragraph you kept in (though you kind of knew it should go, certainly you moved it six different places)... 

So what do you think of my three-part writing process? 

Just in time for Grandparents' Day

A lot—maybe too much—has been written and philosophized about the effect of our parents on our lives. But what about their parents, Dr. Freud? Once upon a time, Oma and Poppy, Gramps and Gramma were the loving/hateful monsters that our own parents would have discussed to pieces with a therapist—so why don’t we ever stop to wonder how Nana or Grandpere have influenced our own lives?

They’re just stories. That’s why.

Just stories.

The last AARP Grandparent Study was in 2002 and at that time the average age of becoming a grandparent was 47 with eventually, an average of six grandkids... Now? Merely ten years have gone by and the average age of becoming a first-time mother is climbing every year. In 2010, the American Fertility Association (AFA) reported that 20% of American women wait to have their first child until after age 35; meanwhile the average death age in 2010 was 78.7 (numbers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics).

Do the math.

But does their death make their influence irrelevant?

I’m an author; stories are my living. Stories are the most memorable means of transference of an idea from one person to another. Stories can expand horizons, quell fears, expose the reader to new situations, and teach them appropriate behavior. So let’s take a close look at grandparents-as-stories:

·      The ambitious guy who left everything to come to America

·      The desperate guy who lost everything gambling in Vegas

·      The brave woman who was the first in the family to earn a high school degree

·      The feminist who abandoned her husband and kids to start a career in law

·      The tailor who slaved his whole life at a job he hated, just to make ends meet

·      The couple who celebrated their 50th anniversary and divorced the next year

Just stories: easily summarized in one sentence. I submit that we routinely undervalue the influence of grandparents on our life-stories because we are looking at the wrong part of their lives. We are looking at the biological entity we met when we were kids. We look at them as Grandparents, every one of them old, and therefore “irrelevant,” as MIT software guru Phillip Greenspun argued in a 2009 blog post. Few of us ever got a chance to really know them; they had little direct influence on us.

But think of them as stories: who were your grandparents? I’ll start.

My grandfather was a smart and determined guy who ran away from home at 19 so as not to have to fight on the wrong side’s army.

My other grandfather grew so angry at being called a stupid immigrant railroad worker that he earned a living winning word contests by converting a language he barely spoke into math. Then he  got a job as an engineer and returned to spit at his ex-boss' feet.

One grandmother was a famous opera singer who left her career behind to raise a family and always regretted her decision.

The other invented her own medium in visual arts at 40 and continued to gain respect as a visual artist until she had her first public art show in Manhattan at the age of 90, which is also when she started winning prizes.

See? Just stories.

But oh, their resonance.

Like the memoirs, blogs, and reality TV that have captivated and nearly taken over the general entertainment industry (With the notable exception of epic movies with crazy special effects. Hang in there Hobbits!) these stories are true. These heroes are real. These stories actually happened.

Truth has resonance.

In practice, the direct influence my grandparents had was to introduce me to their hobbies: fishing, word games, chess, sewing, music, art, fashion, and heavy drinking.

You probably have a useless passion that some grandparent inspired: crossword puzzles, knitting, a card game, cruise ship travel, genealogy. Grandparents have been studied, of course: one study in 1994 by a psychologist named Laura DeHaan described their direct influence as “significant others who have a great deal to do with one’s view of life.”

But I submit, based purely on anecdotal evidence, that our parents give us our limitations while our grandparents-as-stories offer us our ambitions. The web is full of blogs of grandkids eulogizing the deaths of grandparents by following in their footsteps in some way. In the introduction to their book Grandparents/Grandchildren: the Vital Connection (Transaction Publishers, 1985), Arthur Kornhaber and Kenneth Woodward complain that “the literature of social science treats the three-generational family as a myth” – but isn’t that its very strength?

•      Madeleine L’Engle's granddaughter, Léna Roy (one of our devoted members! yay!) has a young adult book of her own, Edges.
•     Gifford Pinchot III, the grandson and namesake of the former Pennsylvania governor and first head of the National Forest Service, is carrying on his famous relative's legacy of conservation.
•       Fabien Cousteau is following in the footsteps of his famed grandfather, ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau 

A myth is a powerful story usually concerning a hero experiencing a series of events. Want to know what characteristics your kids will admire as adults? Stop looking at your aging parents. Instead, listen to the stories you tell about them. These are going to be the main characters in your kid’s life story. Not the complex psychological inner-demons you deal with: no. Your parents will become the simple heroes of a bedtime story. But one that is true.

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Don't forget to help us out by blogging, Tweeting, Facebook liking, and word-of-mouthing the fact that the Pen Parentis Literary Salons season opener is THIS COMING MONDAY, yes, September 11th. We have spectacular writers in a stunning location. You'll need every adjective you know. Come! We offer wine! Books for signings! It's fabulous! You'll be so happy you live in NYC! 

here's the link: https://www.facebook.com/events/491504440878779/

cheers! I for one am desperately sad to see Summer slip away. But Fall is notorious for getting people working, so who's complaining?