Writing Certificate

  A Conversation with Lysley Tenorio

Lysley Tenorio will join the Stanford Fiction Writers in Conversation series on Thursday, May 9, at 7:30 pm in the Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall, on the Stanford campus. Lysley is the author of the story collection Monstress, and his stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Best New American Voices, and The Pushcart Prize anthologies. He has received the Whiting Writer’s Award, the Edmund White Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Lysley is a professor at St. Mary’s College, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford.

For The Writer’s Spotlight, Lysley was interviewed by Tom Kealey, Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing and On-Campus Creative Writing Curriculum Coordinator for Stanford Continuing Studies.

 
Lysley Tenorio: Everything you mentioned, I’m definitely going for, at least for the title story. Humor, in particular, I hope, is clear in that opening; if readers can detect a hint of it, then they’ll be open to the emotional shades of the narrative, which is ultimately a sad love story but has undeniably ridiculous aspects, too.

Beyond the obvious hook that an opening should have (and “hook” is open to interpretation, of course), the thing I think is essential for any story opening is a sense of disturbance: not all is well, which is why the story is being told. That tension can be situational or rooted in character, or can even be evoked in the specific language of the opening line. However rendered or expressed, that sense of wrongness, of something being a little off its usual emotional axis, is elemental when opening a story.
 
TK: Pop culture is an important element of your stories and your focus as a writer. Films, music, television, celebrities, politics. Your characters stand a little in awe of pop culture, but they also have this tension with it or against it. How do you go about weaving these elements into a story?
 
LT: Loving pop culture — American pop culture in particular — feels very Filipino to me. (There’s a centuries-old backstory to the Filipino fascination with the West, rooted in colonialism and the intertwined histories of the Philippines and the US, but I won’t go into that.) Growing up, pop culture was a way of accessing a larger world when my own life felt rather small, tucked away — we were immigrants, and lived with the challenges inherent to that life. The fascination with pop culture feels integral to my characters, whose lives, while vastly different from my own, feel emotionally familiar, so pop culture’s presence on the page feels organic in these stories, even inevitable. That said, it’s important to deal with pop culture in any piece of fiction with a delicate and strategic hand: if your characters are going to beat up The Beatles, you’d better be sure to get The Beatles right, especially in the dramatic and thematic context of the work. Pop culture should lend itself to — but not become — the story.

TK: As I was re-reading Monstress, it occurred to me that “respect” was a theme that kept emerging — for not only the many characters who are seeking (often elusively) to claim it, but also the many characters who are seeking to give it. How do these desires help drive your characters or stories?
 
LT: This question is super interesting to me. I’d never thought about the idea of respect in the context of these stories, but now that you mention it, I totally see it. In “Felix Starro,” for example, Papa Felix gives sick, even dying people false hope, for cash — pretty reprehensible. But he believes it’s the only way to provide for his grandson, so those intentions, in his eyes anyway, deserve respect. Felix Jr., the narrator, recognizes that, and even though he’s (sort of) morally opposed to their scams, he can’t deny all that his grandfather has done for him. The external drama of the story is built around that tension, and the same is true for other characters in the collection as well. In “Monstress,” Checkers thinks his caveman-horror movies truly have artistic merit and deserve respect from the woman he loves; in “Superassassin,” the narrator believes his vigilantism is morally correct, and that the world should abide by his own code of justice.
 
TK: Writing a first draft varies greatly from writer to writer. Some authors create little more than an outline, some a near-finished product, and others more of a collage of ideas and images. Could you tell us about your first-draft process, and maybe a little about the jump you try to make to the second draft?
 
LT: The first draft is slow and painful, full of doubt and nonstop self-editing. But if I believe in the story, or even just the idea of the story, I’ll force myself to get to the end. From there, it’s a rewrite from the very first word. I’m a firm believer that if you change one word, then you need to reconsider the entire sentence, then the entire paragraph, then the entire scene, all in the context of language and forward movement. It’s the same process for the third draft, then the fourth, then the fifth… I don’t really recommend it, but it’s the only way I know how to write. Which is a reminder that writing does not come naturally to me at all, and is really hard and often unenjoyable work, yet for some reason I’m compelled to do it. Some of the time, anyway.
 
TK: In a perfect world for writers, the story we’re most interested in is the one we’re working on now. What writing project are you working on currently, and how did it come about?
 
LT: I’m working on a novel. In the earliest drafts, it was about some guys trying to assassinate a pair of sniffer dogs; now it’s about a guy who wears a sloth costume at work and whose mother is an internet con artist. It’s supposed to be out in the world in 2020, right before the election, so as you can imagine, it’ll be a very relaxed and peaceful time for me.

 April 2019 

Beloved Stanford Continuing Studies Online Creative Writing instructor Rachel Howard has a lot to celebrate. Her new novel, The Risk of Us, is being published on April 9, and her wonderful essay on Lent was published on March 12 in The New York Times Magazine “Letter of Recommendation” column.

Rachel has taught memoir writing, personal essay writing, and fiction for Continuing Studies, so she is familiar with these genres, their possibilities and limitations. She and I have both written novels with autobiographical components, so I was curious to talk to her about some of the choices behind her new book, as well as about how her teaching helps to inform her writing.

Malena Watrous, Online Writing Lead Instructor

Malena Watrous: I loved your memoir about your father's death, as well as your new novel. It's interesting to me that your second book has the same introspection and sensitivity to language as the first, but is a novel rather than a memoir, even though the character seems based on you (she too wrote a memoir about losing her father in the way that you lost yours, and also moved with her husband to Nevada City, California, and adopted a child). Why did you choose to shift from memoir to fiction and what do you feel that the change in form let you get away with, or prevented you from doing?

Rachel Howard: I love this question. Thinking about the differences between nonfiction and fiction, and the possibility of a space between, is so important in my writing life. Over the years, I’ve come to feel very strongly that fiction creates a different kind of space than nonfiction. I say this as someone who loves nonfiction as much as fiction, who wants to read both James Baldwin’s essays and his stories, for instance. I think the two different modes do different things. In fiction, you enter a world that creates its own internal reality. Whether the concrete details of the story correspond to documented reality should not matter. And this means that fiction makes a space that is more whole and self-contained.

At the same time, it’s also true that I decided not to change certain details corresponding with the facts of my own life, for instance, my father was murdered when I was a young girl, and in The Risk of Us the narrator’s father was murdered. I was OK with the nonfiction/fiction ambiguity those details might create, even curious about the effect of that ambiguity. Sheila Heti writes novels that feature a main character named Sheila Heti, and people who share the same names and characteristics of her friends, but if you read about her writing process you will find that assuming all the events in those books really transpired is a mistake. I was emboldened by that discovery. I've long been inspired by writers who welcome this kind of fiction/nonfiction ambiguity: Marguerite Duras, Jean Rhys, you could even say Grace Paley. Leonard Michaels’s novel Sylvia. And recently, Rachel Cusk and the newly popularized work of Lucia Berlin. Those influences made the choice of fiction even more decisive for me.

As for what I could “get away with” or not, I didn’t think of it that way. I feel that I’m in a different mode of communication with the reader when I write memoir and essays, and I’m working on another memoir now. Memoir is a great choice when you want to rethink, openly, things that really happened, or pay tribute to people who really existed, or engage debate on historical events.

MW: I really liked your use of second person, because it felt fresh, and I loved how you used it in a specific and unique way. Sometimes "you" is the husband and sometimes the little girl, yet I never felt confused. Was that a choice you knew you were going to make from the start? Or was it something that emerged and felt right as you were discovering the story?

RH: Thank you so much. That specific kind of second person was key to how the voice of the novel emerged. It was in large part influenced by Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, which I read about four times while I wrote The Risk of Us. In that book the narrator starts in the second person, speaking to her husband, and after she learns he’s cheated on her, the voice shifts to the third person, the woman referring to herself as “she,” which reflects the self-distancing of shock. No doubt influenced by this, one day I imagined the narrator of The Risk of Us speaking the story to the husband, and the voice was there. I then realized I could use point of view thematically the way Offill had: the narrator is first speaking to her husband, and in the next chapter speaking to her daughter, and as the novel ramps toward its turning point, trying to figure out how to speak to both of them at once. So the question for the narrator is how to move from me and you, and you to us. The mode of address enacts that.

This did create some challenges. I had to make it clear to the reader which you the wife was addressing. So I started calling the daughter “Little One” and the husband “Daddy.” And I did have to stick by the choice of this point of view and just have the guts to make it work. I took the first two chapters to a writers conference and the feedback from the workshop leader was kind of saying, “Whoa, this is a complicated POV, are you sure you want to do this?” And I had to swallow and say, yep, I’m going to do it this way.

MW: I feel that as writers and teachers, one activity informs the other, in both directions. What have you learned from teaching writing that informs your own creative process? And what about writing your books would you like to bring back to share with your students? Now that you've finished both a memoir and a novel, is there anything you wish you'd "known then" (aka when you started) that would have made the process any easier?

RH: Completely agree! I love the way teaching informs my own process and I feel so fortunate to continuously learn from the brilliant new insights my Stanford Continuing Studies students bring to our readings. Teaching also forces me to try to articulate what I think is transpiring, imaginatively, between writer and reader on the page—and if I articulate this in a way that makes sense to students and also helps them make some exciting shifts in their own work, I know I’m on to something.

With The Risk of Us, the big discovery made in large part through teaching had to do with that you address, how it shifts the relationship among writer, narrator, and reader. We’re used to the narrator talking directly to the reader, but in this mode, the reader is eavesdropping, as it were, on a conversation between the narrator and someone else. So rather than being talked at, there’s a sense of overhearing an intimate exchange. And that gives the reader a little more space to be curious and to connect dots for herself, a little less pressure to feel meaning is being pushed on her. The students and I discovered this together, in our readings and in their weekly writing assignments, where I started having them try addressing their work to someone specifically imagined who was not the reader.

As for what I wish I’d known starting out, I wish I’d had in hand two craft articles that have been revelatory for me. One is “The Author-Narrator-Character Merge” (that’s not a good thing, by the way!) by Frederick Reiken, who was a close mentor of mine when I was in the Warren Wilson MFA program. Another is “What We Talk About When We Talk About Theme,” by Eileen Pollack, which I happened to spot about a decade ago in The Writer’s Chronicle. The latter article, which suggests that writers try to identify a driving thematic question for each work (ring any bells with Chekhov’s famous writing advice?*), changed my process profoundly. I will be crediting Pollack’s article for any improvement I can hope to claim in my work until I die. I have shared that article with students almost continually since first reading it.

* Writing to his brother Alexander on May 10, 1888, Chekhov listed his six tenets of a great story:

1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature
2. Total objectivity
3. Truthful descriptions of persons and objects
4. Extreme brevity
5. Audacity and originality: flee the stereotype
6. Compassion

Source: https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/10/03/chekhov-6-rules/

March 2019

This month, we are thrilled to spotlight the recent publication of The Half-Life of Everything, by Deborah Gang. Deborah was a student in an online novel writing course of mine several years ago. She was already hard at work on early draft material that eventually became this published book. The story blends contemporary realism with a speculative twist: it’s about a man who believes that he has essentially lost his wife to Alzheimer’s disease and falls in love with another woman—but once a drug restores his wife’s mental health, he has to figure out what to do next. It’s a terrific premise, wonderfully executed, with truly memorable characters. The novel is already receiving all kinds of praise and made the Michigan Bestseller List (Gang lives in the state). I highly recommend picking up a copy.

Malena Watrous: Congratulations on the publication of your novel! I’m thrilled to hear that it’s so well received. I remember your project well from when you were a student in my course. Specifically I remember a conversation when you seemed resistant to writing a sex scene between your characters that I felt needed to be on the page.

Deborah Gang: I came to realize that if you’re writing a love story, then you need to make decisions about sex. You can avoid it as I did in that earliest version, where I just did a ladylike fade-out for the ending of David and Jane’s first date. I still remember you saying, ”Oh no, you don’t get to do that. You have to write something. You don’t have to go all genitalia but you have to write something.”

MW: I don’t remember saying that exactly, but it sounds about right!

DG: Luckily, it was only this year that I read Anne Tyler’s 2012 interview in which she said, “I would never be in bed with my characters. I try to show them respect.” Anne Tyler has been a favorite writer of mine starting when I was in my twenties. When the publisher and I were getting ready to send the advance reading copy out to authors to ask for blurbs, I wanted to send her one even though she never does blurbs—by which I mean she is actively against the whole concept. Which, as a reader, I don’t agree with. My husband told me something I had no recollection of—that shortly after we met, in 1978, I gave him one of Tyler’s novels and kind of assigned it. Of course I put this anecdote in my letter to her. You can imagine my amazement when last March, I received a handwritten note from the Anne Tyler reminding me that she doesn’t do blurbs but saying that she wanted to tell me how much she liked my book—and what she liked about it. Even though I did get in bed with my characters!
 
MW: What was the hardest part about writing The Half-Life of Everything?

DG: The hardest part definitely was getting started. It’s one thing to have an idea, but that’s an ocean away from getting those first chapters on paper. It’s a frightening feeling to have basically no idea what words are going to show up on the page. I created some artificial deadlines for myself, and the online fiction-writing workshops that I took at Stanford provided real deadlines and great feedback from the instructors and the other writers. Later, if I would be away from the project for a length of time, it would be difficult to come back to the manuscript. I was worried I wouldn’t like the writing or the characters and I would have to force myself to enter their world again. Luckily, I became drawn in again each time—even though there were, of course, many things to improve.
 
MW: Well, I hope that your experiences with writing this wonderful book encourage lots of readers to grab a copy of it. Congratulations again!

February 2019

I have known this month’s featured author, Jenn Stroud Rossmann, since she was a student in a novel-writing course that I taught nearly a decade ago. When she got in touch to let me know that the book she’d worked on in that course had been published to great acclaim, I was excited but hardly surprised. I still remembered her honest and funny writing about Silicon Valley.

The novel-writing journey differs for everyone. It can take one year or fifteen to finish a book, and the book can come out linearly or in a patchwork of scenes that need quilting together. In addition to creativity, one quality that is absolutely required is tenacity: a refusal to let the “problem” go until it’s solved. That’s a quality that Jenn has in abundance, in addition to creativity and wit. This book may have taken many years to produce, but those years were well spent, and for the reader, it’s worth the wait. In this month’s Writer’s Spotlight, Jenn talks about the particular journey leading to the completion of The Place You’re Supposed to Laugh, which Kirkus Reviews called “a thoughtful, caring examination of race, class, and wealth in America.”

Online Writing Lead Instructor

Jenn Stroud Rossmann:

I began this novel just after the dot-com bubble burst: it’s set in 2002 Silicon Valley. But by 2011, I was still working to find its ideal structure and the right number of point-of-view characters. Whose story was it, really? The dotcom mogul’s neglected wife, who’d been there in the startup days but had been slowly edged out? The ad guy whose ironic, self-aware ads had helped the dotcoms prosper, but whose client list had just imploded? The Stanford physics professor whose students had dropped out to join startups? Or the fourteen-year-old black adopted son of “well-meaning but nevertheless white” parents? Was it even going to be possible to tell all these stories in the same book?

Residential workshops played a significant role in my ability to develop my craft and my community of writers, and to take my “hobby” seriously. I also was fortunate to have had a strong writing group in graduate school, but that group had become geographically far-flung, with interfering day jobs. Life doesn’t always permit the luxury of a workshop or residency far afield. I’ve wrestled with the “balancing act” (a generous euphemism) of writing fiction while maintaining a full-time job and trying to spend time with my family. Then suddenly, in the midst of a busy academic year, my in-laws gifted/nudged me with a registration in Stanford’s Online Creative Writing program. They registered me for the second of three novel-writing classes taught by Malena Watrous: “The Adventurous Middle.”

Having assignments and accountability was an enormous motivator. I treasured Malena’s weekly “lecture” posts that guided our reading and writing. I threw myself into critiques of my classmates’ submissions, and into my own writing assignments. And perhaps most magical of all were the scheduled weekly “office hours” of discussion and Q&A, when I was assigned to engage in conversation about craft and critique. Phone consults with Malena about my work extended these discussions and made me feel my project might be worth the effort.

When I signed up for the third course, “The Art of Plot,” I was well aware that I was a writer for whom characters took precedence, with plot emerging only after pages (chapters!) of situational, character-developing writing. Several of my classmates were working on mysteries and more plot-driven projects; I was self-conscious about the slow momentum in some of my polished but plotless sections of writing, and began to restructure my novel.

By the time that course had ended, I’d made progress on my own project and also become invested in the works in progress of my classmates. I think it was during one of those online office hours that a few of us embraced the idea of continuing to read and critique each others’ work. We started a private blog on which each week one of us would post 750 words; the rest of us would post our responses. Each of us had occasions when we spent the first paragraph of our critique apologizing for taking so long, but we did catch up when we’d fallen behind. We discussed what we were reading, and took turns managing the blog. It has been a gift to have thoughtful, sophisticated readers taking your 750 words seriously. That community has been thriving for several years since we “met” at Stanford.

Read more about how Jenn Stroud Rossmann has navigated the world of writing:

https://bloom-site.com/2018/11/06/lost-found-jenn-stroud-rossmann-on-making-and-taking-her-time/

January 2019

This month, we are excited to spotlight the publication of a personal essay by Judith Wagner, who wrote a draft of this essay while a student in “The Creative Habit, Part B” course. Judith was such an asset to that course, as someone who had a lot of experience writing but not in creative writing, and who took to the habit like a fish to water. Below, Judith discusses how she decided to take the course and submit her essay for publication, as well as the process of working with an editor to arrive at the finished version now in print.
Visit stanfordmag.org/essays to read Judith's story, "How Three Women Scientists Gave One Another a Boost—Without Even Realizing It."

Malena Watrous, Online Writing Lead Instructor

Judith Wagner:

Writing—lab procedures, recommendations, evaluations—was always part of my work as a biology teacher. For a time I also wrote itineraries for a nature travel company and environmental assessments for a consulting firm. And I’d published a few research papers, based on my graduate work, in professional journals. But until I stopped teaching and time opened up in front of me, I had never written my own stories. I like the sense of producing something that might be lasting, that others might enjoy. Perhaps, as I’ve joked about teaching, it’s another way for me to talk so others will listen.

I wrote this essay in 2017 with Stanford magazine in mind. In Spring 2018, looking for a way to structure my writing, I signed up for “The Creative Habit, Part B,” with Malena Watrous. Encouraged by positive responses to my writing, I sent a second inquiry to the magazine, this time with my essay attached, and they were interested. But my draft was too long, so the magazine’s editors revised it for length and style. (That was something new for me: to have a piece with my name on it edited by someone else.) We went back and forth a few times. My suggestions were accepted, and their fact-checking caught an error. (I’d said that in 1977 Stanford had no women biology professors; I’d forgotten about Hopkins Marine Station, and Isabella Abbott deserves to be remembered.) What at first I was afraid would no longer “sound like me” has come to be something I’m happy to see in print with my name on it. It’s a good story; I’m glad to have the chance to share it with a wider world.

DECEMBER 2018

This month, we are delighted to spotlight 166 Palms, a literary anthology conceived of, created by, and published by students who have completed novels in the Stanford Continuing Studies Online Writing Certificate Program in Novel Writing. These students wanted to showcase some of the fine fiction they’d read by their peers while in the program, so they set to work on an anthology that is now going into its third year of publication. While it was originally only open to submissions from students in the novel-writing certificate program, the journal is now expanding its criteria to accept submissions from any students in Stanford Continuing Studies writing courses. Please enjoy this interview with managing editor James Burnham, followed by submission guidelines for the next volume, which will come out in Summer of 2019.
Visit the 166 Palms website to learn more.

Malena Watrous
Online Writing Lead Instructor

Malena Watrous: Please tell us the story of how you came up with the idea for this literary anthology.

James Burnham: I had the idea to do a short story compilation while we were still students in the Online Writing Certificate program (OWC). Our cohort remained close after graduation in 2014, and we continued to share our writing and progress. In 2016, I reached out and asked if anyone was interested in contributing a story to an anthology. The idea was received with enthusiasm. So, I collected and edited the stories and compiled the first 166 Palms in 2017. It included nine writers who had completed their novels through OWC, and two faculty members.

MW: When did other students become involved in the editing process?

JB: The 2018 edition was more of a collaborative effort, with Linda Moore (a fellow student) serving as guest editor. While cruising around the world, she worked with authors to ready their stories for submission. She also helped with the new cover design, while Suanne Shafer (another fellow student) helped with copy editing. The 2018 edition showcased nine OWC students' short stories and three poems.

MW: What is the significance of the anthology's name?

JB: The title was inspired by the beautiful palm trees that line the entrance to the Stanford campus and the diverse nature of our cohorts. We are writers from all over the world and all walks of life who share a passion for the craft of storytelling. As I say in the foreword, it’s “an anthology to celebrate the unique voices of extraordinary writers, appropriately titled 166 Palms.”

MW: Tell us a little bit about the upcoming edition, for students who want to submit:

JB: It’s coming out in Summer 2019, and will be guest edited by Suanne Shafer. I will continue on as the managing editor and coordinate the submission process. We hope to include more writers associated with Stanford University's OWC program, and are also open to publishing pieces by students from other Continuing Studies writing courses as well. We also hope that these authors will want to participate in the production of future editions.

Submission details are as follows: 

166 PALMS 2019 SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

• Submissions are open to all writers who have taken or are currently enrolled in Stanford University’s Continuing Studies writing classes
• Submissions are due by March 1, 2019
• Currently accepting fiction and poetry under 7,500 words
• Reprints and simultaneous submissions will be accepted
• Multiple submissions will be accepted

HOW TO SUBMIT

• Email your submission to submissions@166palms.com
• Attach submission to your email as a .doc, .docx, or .rtf
• The subject line should include the word “Submission”
• Indicate in the body of your email which writing course(s) you took in the Stanford Continuing Studies Program
• Add the above email address to your “Safe Senders” list
• Include your contact information in your email

Finally, here is an excerpt from a piece in the current (second) volume of the anthology:

IF NOT WORDS
Roy Dufrain

I think of 1978 as my Kerouac period. Before that was my blustery Hemingway period, and afterward my disastrous Hunter S. Thompson period. But '78 was Kerouac, and in the spring I drifted out of college and began to dream of going on the road.

Of course, I needed a Neal Cassady—a running buddy like the mad ones that Kerouac famously shambled after and wrote about—“the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

That was what I needed. What I had was Pat Kelly.

I first met Pat in Lupoyoma City, a small poor town next to a big green lake three hours north of San Francisco. He was the new kid in eighth grade, from Texas by way of San Jose, with a junkie father locked up in San Quentin and his forty-five-ish mother shuttling drinks at the Weeping Willow Resort & Trailer Court. I won’t go into it here but, at the time, I was in a murky state of social exile myself due to a local scandal involving my family. What drew me to Pat was our shared status as temporary outsiders, and the fact that he was completely unimpressed by Lupoyoma gossip. That just wasn’t how he measured the world.

I met him because our American History teacher sentenced him to three swats for “cracking wise.” The teacher had a thick wooden paddle drilled with holes to reduce wind resistance. Pat rose from his back-row desk and said, “Now, how much history do you think I can learn from three swats?” He was taller and older than the rest of us. Straight blondish hair, parted down the middle and tucked behind jughandle ears. Tank top shirt and wide bellbottoms over black motorcycle boots, and his wallet on a silvery chain secured to a belt loop. He took long gangly strides to the front of the classroom, with his chin up and his shoulders back.

The teacher glowered. “Make it five then.”
 
Pat faced the class and grabbed his ankles. The teacher swung for the fences. Pat overacted a mockish “Ow!” with every blow, and the teacher tacked on another two swats—to zero effect on Pat’s demeanor. I had a front row desk, and after the final swing Pat straightened up and flashed his wide floppy grin right at me, then earnestly advised the teacher to watch the Jack LaLanne show. I laughed. Then the whole class laughed. The teacher pointed at the door and ordered both of us to the principal’s office. On the way out Pat paused at the threshold, looked back across the room and said, “Seven a.m., Channel 3,” with a big wink, and turned out the door. He had something I hadn’t seen before—an attitude or quality I admired, even coveted, but couldn’t name at first.

Visit the 166 Palms website to read more »

NOVEMBER 2018

This month, we are pleased to spotlight the phenomenal new novel by long-time Stanford Continuing Studies instructor Sarah Stone. Hungry Ghost Theater was published by WTAW Press last month, and is a must-read for anyone who loves character-driven literary fiction written in gorgeous prose. Sarah is also the author of the novel The True Sources of the Nile, and the co-author, with her spouse and writing partner Ron Nyren (another of our beloved writing instructors), of the textbook Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers. She has been teaching novel writing for us for many years, and this month she has generously shared a personal piece about her experience writing her most recent novel, and how it evolved over the years she spent working on it and getting to know her characters and their stories. Please enjoy her piece, join us in celebrating her publication, and check out her marvelous new book.

Malena Watrous
Online Writing Lead Instructor

Sarah Stone: Transforming the Agenda

Occasionally a novel will begin for a writer as a mysterious image or a line of dialogue: my first novel started with a fragment of a dream about a mother lying to her daughters. By the time I finished, it had turned into an attempt to understand the qualities in us that make genocide possible. My new novel, Hungry Ghost Theater, started as a short story about a couple who take a trip to Seoul (where I’d once lived for a year and a half) to rescue a sister having a breakdown. Over time, that sister became a daughter with a drug problem. I drew on family history, changing it substantially as I imagined these characters. The core issues, though, remain the same — denial, deception, self-deception, and self-awareness. Helping each other, hurting each other, fighting, and making up.

Slowly, the members of the family and some characters whose lives touch theirs developed their own interlocking stories, told in different modes and voices, set in theaters and psychiatric hospitals, in Korea, the San Francisco Bay Area, Zanzibar, and six different hells. The family members became performance artists, scientists, activists, and addicts — they had ideals and projects, loved each other, hurt each other and themselves, had to figure out ways out and through.

Along the way, the book started, for a while, to be about questions of free will and biology, the ways people use their power over each other, activism, and mythology. The ideas got out in front of the characters and story. This is something I see as a writing instructor too, from time to time, whether with the writers in Stanford’s Online Creative Writing and Certificate in Novel Writing programs or with graduate students in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Often if we care enough to write a novel about a subject, we may struggle with objectivity: our own passions and beliefs take over. We have had soul-searing experiences and want to work out their meaning, or we have issues we want to teach people about.

These kind of passions can be the engine that power the book. As we revise, though, we have to let the characters’ quirks, the unexpected turns of plot, and the images rise to the surface.

Recently, a radio interviewer asked me, “What do you want people to get from this novel?” Thinking this over, I realized that the novel had moved past the point where I had a specific agenda or anything to “say.” For me, Hungry Ghost Theater had become about Julia and Robert, who run an experimental theater company, and about their sister, Eva, a neuroscientist looking for the roots of empathy. It had become about Eva’s children, Katya, Jenny, and Arielle, all in some kind of trouble, and about Julia, Robert, and Eva’s parents, Philip and Lily, as they move into old old age. I wanted my readers to meet these people, to know them and witness their transformations, and perhaps to wrestle with some of the same questions the characters face.

One of the main roles of craft, then, is not just to create more skillful dialogue or a more engaging plot. We need to find ways to manage and transform our obsessions so that we’re creating an experience, allowing readers to have their own ideas and responses, rather than trying to direct their reactions or teach them a lesson. Instead, we’re using craft and the feedback from other writers in our workshops to find the nuances that turn our answers back into questions.

OCTOBER 2018

Here are some more specifics about the two upcoming events open to the public:

On Friday, October 19, from 9:30 am to 11:30 am, we will host a reading in the Stanford Bookstore, where any of our students who are in town to receive their certificates may read a four-minute excerpt from their novel. There’s a coffee shop inside the bookstore, so come grab a cup of joe and listen to some wonderful writing from novels that are finished but yet to hit the presses!

On Saturday evening from 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm, Continuing Studies will host a reading as part of Lit Crawl in San Francisco’s vibrant Mission District. During Lit Crawl, venues all over the Mission neighborhood open their doors to readings, and thousands of people meander up and down the streets, enjoying listening to authors share their work while sipping on cocktails. For many years now, we have hosted a reading during this literary pub crawl. This event has become a cherished OWC tradition, and we highly encourage you to come to the reading if you're in the area. Here is the address where it’s happening:

Latin American Club
3286 22nd St.
San Francisco, CA 94110

To read the bios of the Stanford authors who will read that night, please visit:
https://litcrawlsanfrancisco2018.sched.com/event/G3c6

Malena Watrous
Online Writing Lead Instructor

SEPTEMBER 2018

This month, we are delighted to spotlight the upcoming publication of Ruth Hanford Morhard's book, Mrs. Morhard and the Boys, a nonfiction account of her husband's mother, the woman who started the very first boys’ baseball leagues. In a wonderful guest post, Ruth has generously shared a bit about the experience of discovering a family keepsake, deciding that she wanted to find out the story behind it, and then using what she learned in our Online Creative Writing courses to write this book. Before beginning the project, she had written other nonfiction. But she had little experience in creative writing and used our courses to help make this dream a reality. I know you'll enjoy the story of how this book came to be—and then you'll want to read about the remarkable woman who inspired it.

Malena Watrous
Online Writing Lead Instructor

Ruth Hanford Morhard:

I began my first Stanford online course with little more than an idea, a love of creative nonfiction, and an old steno pad, its cover long gone, the once-black ink on its thirty-some lined pages nearly faded into brittle, grayed paper—and tucked in the back, seven neatly typed sheets, aged to a bronze hue.

These pages were all I had of an unfinished autobiography written by Josephine Morhard, the feisty woman who started the first baseball leagues for young boys during the Great Depression. She wrote in longhand about her childhood and her struggles after leaving home when she was twelve. On the last of the typed sheets she wrote about being framed for a crime after she resisted her employer’s advances. She was still a teenager.

It was hardly enough for a book, but I forged ahead anyway. I started doing research. Then my daughter Trish, a librarian, told me Stanford was offering online writing courses. After taking one course, I decided to apply to the Online Certificate Program in Creative Nonfiction. It was the best decision I could have made.

I’ve worked in the public relations field for many years, and I’m good at writing that needs to be concise and to the point, writing that’s “just the facts.” Creative nonfiction requires the opposite—the detail that brings a scene to life. I needed to relearn how to write.

In the first courses, I was able to try my hand at poetry and fiction, a perfect way to gain the descriptive skills I needed. Then it was on to creative nonfiction, shaping the book, and the one-on-one instruction—all with exceptionally gifted instructors and classmates. I began to believe Mrs. Morhard’s few pages could be the foundation of a book.

By the time I was finished I had the bones of a biography. My one-on-one instructor, Otis Haschemeyer,  thought it could be more. One of his comments sticks in my mind: “A life is not a story.” I struggled with that, but he was right. I’d written down everything I’d found out about her in chronological order. There was plenty of detail but little incentive for the reader to keep turning the pages. I needed to cut and paste, to add and subtract.

Not long after finishing the program, I took another course, “Creative Nonfiction: Craft a Proposal That Works.” The writing was only part of the equation, albeit the most important part. If I wanted anyone to read the book, I needed to navigate the increasingly confusing world of book publishing.

After finishing this course, I had the tools to approach a literary agent - a query letter, book proposal,  and writing sample. In November 2017, I sent query letters to the five agents I most wanted to represent me, certain they’d all reject me, and I’d need to go on to the next batch and the next and the next. Surprisingly, three responded. Within the week, I had an agent.

AUGUST 2018

This month we spotlight the success of Elaine Ray (pictured to the left), who recently completed the Online Certificate Program in Novel Writing. Elaine has been working at Stanford for decades, but is about to leave California and Stanford for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, entering its MFA program in fiction writing on a full Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award fellowship. I have been a fan of Elaine’s fiction since I first had the pleasure of hearing her read from her novel in progress at Litcrawl.

Malena Watrous, Online Writing Lead Instructor
[Photo credit: Linda A. Cicero]

Malena Watrous: Can you tell us a little bit about why you decided to apply for MFA programs after finishing the certificate program here at Stanford? Why do you feel like this is the right move at this stage in your life?

Elaine Ray: For me, it was now or never. I'm sixty-three years old.

I had considered an MFA before I started the certificate program. I've had spreadsheets for years that listed the best programs, their locations, their costs, and whether a GRE was required. But financial security was really important to me. I wasn't quite ready to leave my full-time job. I also knew that low-residency programs would also be hard to balance with a fifty- to sixty-hours-a-week job.

The OWC was a perfect way to immerse myself in the study of the craft of fiction writing and also to be in an international community of writers without leaving my job. The program gave me an opportunity to study with extremely talented, accomplished writers, teachers, and scholars. I also learned a lot about being a discerning reader and developed good writing habits. After I completed the certificate program, I continued to maintain the practice of writing and even had my first short story published. But I missed being in a community of writers and I missed having deadlines. 

MW: You are, in my opinion, such a wonderful writer. But one thing that impresses me about you, in addition to your inherent talent, is your ongoing commitment to learning and growing as a writer, and your willingness to keep investing yourself in new programs or courses in order to keep improving your already marvelous novel. Since by now you know a lot about the craft of fiction writing and novel writing in particular, what do you feel you get out of new courses and teachers, and do you have a sense of what you still want to learn or do you feel like that's something you discover in the process and can't guess at beforehand?

ER: Any kind of artistic pursuit requires continued focus and practice. I look forward to being in an intense community of writers and teachers again. What I'm most looking forward to at the Iowa Writers' Workshop is that fiction writing will be my job. I won't be distracted or diverted by emails from my office at ten at night. Working on my novel will no longer be the thing I squeeze into the wee hours of the morning before I go to work, or on weekends or vacations. It will be what I do forty, fifty, sixty hours a week. The blessing of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellowship is that I won't have to teach the first year at Iowa, so writing really will be my job.

As for writing, I think getting inside characters' heads comes fairly naturally and getting facts right has been ingrained in me from my work as a journalist, but creating exterior settings—what things look like, smell like, etc.—is something I still need to work on. I'll be taking a poetry seminar from Robert Hass in the fall and another seminar devoted just to sentences and paragraphs.

MW: For readers who might not have taken writing courses yet, or only one or two, can you share any particular nuggets of wisdom you might have gleaned as a result of your ongoing education as a writer, either from instructors or fellow students or just things you observed or picked up along the way?

ER: Keep readers in the “dream.” Make sure that transitions in time and place are smooth enough that readers are not distracted by trying to figure out where they are. Avoid cliches. Challenge your characters to do things that are outrageous. Take a sentence or a paragraph and expand it two or threefold; then take a sentence or paragraph and condense it to its most bare form. 

MW: What is your own writing process and practice like, especially when you're trying to balance writing with a full-time job? Are you a morning writer? Night? Every day? Occasional? Do you keep a notebook? Is there any beverage that you must have in order to fuel you?

ER: For several years, particularly while I was in the OWC, I sequestered myself on weekends. The nice thing was that friends and family began to acknowledge that I had a commitment to writing. I spend a lot of time either at home in my pajamas or in the public library. I have a rule that I only pay for coffee when I'm there to write. On weekday mornings, starting at 5:30 or 6 a.m., I alternate between exercising and writing. When I do write in the morning, I meditate for five minutes, free write in a journal for five minutes, then write for at least an hour.

MW: Any great recent book recommendations?

ER: I just read The Garden of Evening Mists, by Tan Twan Eng, with a book group I'm in. Even though it was shortlisted for a Man Booker Prize in 2012, I couldn't decide whether I loved it or not, but it has given me so much to think about in terms of story structure, setting, language, and emotion. I finished it and then started reading it again.

JULY 2018

This month we celebrate with Brendan Jones, one of our beloved Online Creative Writing instructors, who has received a Fulbright grant to write and research his next novel in Russia. Brendan’s wonderful first novel The Alaskan Laundry is set in Alaska, where he lives and from where he teaches. When not writing, reading, or teaching, he can often be found fishing and hunting, sometimes with his two young children. He leads such an interesting and adventure-filled life that we wanted to profile him, not only so that we could cheer on his recent success but also to find out more about his fascinating existence up in the very far north.

Malena Watrous
Online Writing Lead Instructor

Malena Watrous: Tell us a little bit about your fiction writing, and your plans for using this Fulbright to research your next novel.

Brendan Jones: I’ve been working on The Wreckage for the past year, the story around the sinking of the three-masted Russian schooner Neva in 1813 off the coast of Sitka, Alaska. It’s a remarkable tale of superstition and survival, of twenty-eight survivors fashioning fish hooks from copper spikes salvaged from the hull. Of the Russian fur-traders making contact with the Tlingit nation, and the other way around.  

The remains of the survivors’ camp on Kruzof Island—just across Sitka Sound from where I live—were discovered in 2012. It’s been a deep and abiding pleasure to imagine snowy days in January 1813 while these folks did their best to subsist off the wreckage of the Neva, as it dawns on them that they’re surrounded by a rainforest that has offered the means of a comfortable survival to the Tlingit Nation for ten thousand years.

Irkutsk, where I will be stationed in Russia, is the capital of Siberia, as well as the town where the Russian-American Company originated. Along with some teaching at the university, I’ll comb the public archives for details of the Russian-American Company’s inception, along with how it developed into an extreme and often overlooked force in the (very recent) history of the Great Land.

MW: How long have you been living in Alaska? How did you first get interested in that area and in Russia? Did your interest in the area bring you there, or did you move there and then start learning things about it that made you want to set fiction there?

BJ: I first came to Alaska in the fall of 1997, to work in commercial fishing, and to make money for college. My aunt had worked in Sitka, teaching, and she had contacts on the island.

As the former capital of Russian America, Sitka made sense, both for my aunt and me. My grandmother—her mother—was born in Russia, and my great-grandparents (I’m named after my great-grandfather Isaac) spoke hardly any English. My interest in my own Russian heritage dovetailed into my love of the woods and outdoors. My great-grandfather, as the story goes, drove herds of horses between Ukraine and Siberia. As far as the fiction goes, the poet Robert Hass has said that Alaska, and much of the Pacific Northwest, has “yet to be imagined.” While this is untrue—Tlingit and Haida tribes have been “imagining” the land for millennia—it is true that contemporary fiction has yet to take hold in Alaska. The story of the Neva is just one example of so many good stories floating around the rainforest, so lush in its moss and ice and muskeg and rock.

I’ll also add that I see myself as working in the genre of “cli-fi,” fiction interested in climate change and our shifting environment. Alaska, which experiences global warming at twice the rate of the rest of the country, strikes me as the front line of this battle, as villages are forced to move inland due to rising seas, glaciers are melting, and there are spikes in bear attacks when warm waters dwindle the salmon runs. Though it’s tragic to witness firsthand, I do consider this to be one of the jobs of the writer: to bear witness, and to report back in a lively and imaginative manner on what we’ve done—and continue to do—to the earth, where we live.

MW: Tell us about the challenges of teaching online while living and working in such a remote place.

BJ: Well, on the most basic level, there’s the time difference. This quarter I have two students in China, one in Mexico, a few on the East Coast, and one in Nuremberg. Someone always ends up biting the bullet and joining at one in the morning. Sorry, Juli.

On the other hand, what a pleasure to be able to work across great distances, and share our respective projects—stories of dance halls in Shanghai, a frustrated lawyer in West Virginia, soldiers in Vietnam. While I generally consider myself a Luddite, even anti-technology, it’s been such a deep joy working with Stanford students around the globe, either connecting on the level of writing about the wild in my essay course, or working on fiction projects in the Online Certificate Program in Novel Writing.

I’ll also say that, living on a remote Alaska island through the dark winter when all it ever seems to ever do is rain and get even darker, having a group of others to talk through the largely solitary work we do is only a good thing.

MW: What is your craziest or most exciting story from your time in the far north?

BJ: Oh geez, these are stories that come out after a few fingers of whiskey at some roadhouse. Each story separated by long, considerate pauses, before another braids onto the last.

I’ve eaten my share of bear meat, to quote the great writer Primo Levi. Dealt with boats sinking, boats up on the rocks, enough really to last me a lifetime, to be honest. I might dodge and tell you instead my favorite story of a friend who was stranded up in the interior with his buddy when their boat foundered on the mighty Yukon River. Something happened to their canoe, I don’t recall what—they hit a rock and tore a hole, or some such. It was toward the end of summer, growing colder, when they found themselves stranded, fifteen miles north of the nearest village, with a dwindling food supply.

They were worrying over their next move when my friend’s buddy, who had been raised in a leper colony, spotted a brace of ducks floating in the eddies on the other side of the river. We’re saved, he announced. Then this dude set to fashioning a series of slip knots using fishing line. He took the ends of the lines and fastened them to an alder branch. Then he stripped down, and, without another word, dove into the swift Yukon, managing to swim to the opposite bank. With each of the ducks yoked up, he then rose from the river, and began slapping the surface with a stick.

When ducks are frightened they fly downriver. And so it was with these ducks. Except this time, as they rose into the sky they took this man with them, lofting him into the air, and—as the story goes—flying him fifteen miles downriver, where he eventually found help.

A footnote to this wonderful story: my friend said an aeronautics engineer calculated the load for the ducks, factoring in the weight a single duck could carry, multiplied it a hundredfold, and admitted that, yes, this very well could have happened.

As I said: Alaska is a great place for stories.

JUNE 2018

This June, we are excited to celebrate the recent success of HJ Brennan (Jim), whose novel, Fathers' Day,was published in March 2018 and has been recognized as a finalist in the Indie Book Awards from an international field of nearly 5,000 entries. Jim workshopped Fathers' Day while he was a student in the Online Certificate Program in Novel Writing, but he actually finished two novels during the two-year program.
 
Jim Brennan always led a rich artistic life, having grown up in a small Pennsylvania town where he studied art and writing, and played the trumpet. He attributes his colorful character studies to his years dabbling in a multitude of jobs, including mental-ward orderly, bartender, barn builder, three years in the Marines, middle school teacher, art director, copywriter, and newspaper promotions director. Brennan’s writing is beautiful and a lot of fun to read, and I highly recommend picking up a copy of Fathers' Day. Following is an excerpt from the book.

Malena Watrous
Online Writing Lead Instructor

MAY 2018

This month we are thrilled to spotlight the recent publishing success of the talented Tatiana Harkiolakis. Tatiana, who lives and works as a journalist in Greece, has taken many online writing courses with the Online Creative Writing program, most recently food writing with Chaney Kwak, and has broken into new publications with several of the articles she generated in that course. We asked Tatiana to write a guest post about her trajectory as a writer and how this course helped her.
 
Malena Watrous
Online Writing Lead Instructor

Tatiana Harkiolakis

Writing is present in all aspects of my life, and journalism has long been a career I wanted to pursue. As a journalist, my areas of focus are travel, food, and culture. I love learning about the world, especially through local cuisines and time-honored traditions. Currently, I write a monthly column on food and restaurants for an English-language publication based in Athens, Greece, where I live. As a Greek-American and long-time resident of Athens, I love learning about the epicurean side of my city.

I took my first Online Creative Writing course at Stanford Continuing Studies in Summer 2015, and have completed five courses since then. My most recent course was “Thought for Food: The Craft of Food Writing,” with Chaney Kwak. This course taught me not only how to approach food as a journalist, but also how to consider the ways that food has shaped the human experience, and how we, in turn, shape our food traditions as our societies become more globalized.

What really helped me learn and grow in this course was the guidance of Mr. Kwak. He knows how to offer both constructive criticism and words of support, and he challenges every student to reach their full potential. He shared his own wealth of knowledge about food writing, gleaned from years of writing for some of the best food and travel publications on the market today. He also offered invaluable professional advice of all kinds, from how to pursue freelance writing as a career to the nitty-gritty details of structuring your first pitch letter.

When we were learning how to pitch articles to publications, he provided us with a template for constructing a pitch letter that is short and pithy, and displays our skills as writers. Using this template, I constructed a pitch for a short article I had written as a course assignment, and emailed it off to “Gastro Obscura,” the recently launched food-and-drinks section of Atlas Obscura. Not only was my idea accepted, but also I was contracted for three more articles right on the spot! Here is the link to my first published “Gastro Obscura” article: atlasobscura.com/foods/santorini-tomatoes-greece. And the other three I was commissioned for: atlasobscura.com/foods/fried-octopus-ink-sacs-kalymnos, atlasobscura.com/foods/prickly-pear-sorbet, and atlasobscura.com/foods/snake-wine-china-vietnam.

I plan to continue pitching articles and building up my portfolio of published work, with the goal of eventually being able to sustain a part-time freelance writing practice. I thank Mr. Kwak for the part he played in my first tremendous success, and extend my gratitude to the entire Online Creative Writing program for providing me with the means by which to achieve my goals.

APRIL 2018

This month we are thrilled to spotlight Online Creative Writing Program alumna Diane Byington, whose first novel, Who She Is, was just published. Diane worked on the book over her two years as an OWC student. I had the personal pleasure of serving as Diane’s one-on-one instructor, which means that I got to see this already marvelous novel in rough-draft form. I fell in love with the character of a young woman who learns about who she really is as a result of running, a sport she turns out to be very good at — partly thanks to her discipline and focus but also due to forces that she guesses at but only learns more about as the story progresses. It’s a story of a personal journey but also an unexpected mystery, as fast paced as the narrator herself. I’m eager to get my hands on it now that it’s revised and finally available for the rest of the world to enjoy.
 
For this month’s Writer’s Spotlight, Diane has written a guest post about her writing experience, which is followed by the opening chapter of the book, so you can see for yourself why I’m so excited that last month, Red Adept Publishing brought out Who She Is.
 
Malena Watrous
Online Writing Lead Instructor

Diane Byington:
 
Seven years have gone by since I began the book. My first idea was to write a novel about somebody who had a goal and then accomplished it. Simple, right?
 
What goal? Who? When? Where? What came to me was a girl or woman who wanted to run a race, maybe a marathon. Obstacles were important. Training would be hard, but that wasn’t enough. There needed to be difficulties regarding relationships, too.
 
I settled upon Faye, a teenager, as the main character. Her parents wouldn’t support her goal because of a family secret that was related to running, and it would come out during the course of her training.
 
I happened upon the story of Kathrine Switzer, who in 1967 managed to run the Boston Marathon (women weren’t allowed to run it back then) and was assaulted by the race director. Why hadn’t I known about this bit of history? I would set my book around this event.   
 
The last question was where? I had grown up in Florida, so I explored the area and photographed houses and towns when I went back to visit my family.
 
I spent a year writing the first draft. Originally, Faye ran with an older woman, and I tried to tell both of their stories. I also took Wendy Nelson Tokunaga’s course on women’s fiction, in which she read my draft and met with me. “Pick one point of view,” she said. “Too much is going on here.” I chose Faye, and the older woman became the mother of her friend Francie, who runs the race with her.
 
After a second draft, I applied to the OWC program. I was accepted and began a two-year process of honing the story. Working with my instructors and the other students was as exciting a time as I can remember. Malena was my mentor. Her suggestions were invaluable, and I ended up rewriting the book twice during the quarter we worked together.
 
One struggle was whether the book should be young adult, since its protagonist was sixteen, or women’s fiction. This question dogged me the entire time I was working on the book. I tried my best to make it YA, but it just wouldn’t go there. Eventually, I gave up and decided it was women’s fiction.
 
Getting the book to the place where it was publishable was a long, grueling process. The only thing I would change would be to have faith in my own desire to write women’s fiction, even if the protagonist is a teenager. My publisher is marketing the book as women’s fiction and historical fiction. We’ll see if the readers agree.
 
My advice to you is to have faith in yourself and persevere, no matter how long it takes. You can do it. When you do, everything you’ve gone through will be worth it.
 
Read an excerpt from Who She Is.

MARCH 2018

This month, we celebrate with Online Creative Writing Program instructor Joshua Mohr, who just sold a memoir that he is currently writing to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Josh is the author of numerous novels and one previous memoir, and he teaches both nonfiction and fiction. I wanted to take this opportunity to talk to him about why he writes in both forms, and to hear more about the new “real-time” memoir, what that means and what it looks like on the page.

Malena Watrous
Online Writing Lead Instructor

 Malena Watrous: As a novelist and memoirist, which form do you prefer – or find yourself returning to?
 
Joshua Mohr: I'm hoping to work in both forms for the rest of my life! Each scratches a different literary itch, and I feel very thankful that I can toggle between the two. Fiction is a first love, and I'll never stop writing novels. But I had so much fun writing my first memoir, I'm excited for the opportunity to extend that conversation. To my eye and ear, these are very different pleasures. I'll always have that novelist's programming, some greedy thief making up lies! Turning my imagination loose to do its worst on the page is my favorite part of fiction. I never write with a plan. I just keep showing up and making slow progress.
 
On the creative nonfiction side, it's a different sort of puzzle. I'm bound to the facts, and the task is twofold: (1) bring structure and causality to reality, which is by definition formless, and then (2) figure out the right words to make an ordinary life dramatic, dangerous, beautiful, even shameful when it needs to be. I think it was Jerry Stahl who compared writing a memoir to giving yourself an autopsy. But I actually find it to be a pleasurable experience. A voluntary self-autopsy? Is that a thing?

MW: Having already written and published a memoir recently, how did you find an idea for another one? Does the "personal well" run dry?
 
JM: "Selling" this new book is a pretty crazy story. After Sirens came out, I got—of all absurd communications—a Facebook message from a senior editor at FSG. She said she loved my memoir and wanted to talk about doing another nonfiction project together. I just assumed it was a prank. Or a Russian bot. But I knew it couldn't be real, could it? To my pleasant surprise, the editor did indeed turn out to be a real person. We hit it off immediately. The book we're putting together is tentatively called Model Citizen.
 
MW: How is this one going to be different?
 
JM: I'm writing this memoir in "real time," writing about what I'm dealing with today and yesterday, last week. There is no distance, no perspective. This project is interested in the visceral present. Specifically, this one will focus on my leaving San Francisco, my home since 1994, and continue to tell the story that Sirens started. It turns out my heart surgery—which is the through-line in Sirens—might not have been as successful as the surgeons had hoped. And we'll spend ample times in the past, too. I lived in this crazy punk house in the Sunset district when I first came to SF. Now that's fertile earth for a memoir!
 
MW: Does your teaching and work with student writers inform your personal writing at all?
 
JM: To me, they are the same thing, the same conversation. It's been happening since scribbles on cave walls. We tell stories to understand ourselves and the very confusing enterprise of being alive. Teaching directly feeds my writing because I love community and the knowledge transfer; I love nerding out with others who cherish the written word, and that's gasoline to help me keep prioritizing my art. Writing, too, feeds the teaching, and I'm always updating my essays and lectures, based on cool new things I'm learning along the way. We're all in this together, right?
 
MW: Absolutely. I feel the same way about my own students, and you remind me of something that Michael Cunningham, one of my early writing teachers, used to say: we are all writing one big book. I like to keep that in mind when I work at both writing and teaching. When we help each other in a workshop, we are helping to improve our one big book. When someone else succeeds, it’s our success too. Writing can be a solitary act, but it shouldn’t be isolating. The more of us who record our distinct experiences and get our unique point of view onto the page, the bigger and more inclusive and complete our shared book becomes.

Josh has generously offered to share a page of his “real-time” memoir, so that we might get a taste of this experimental genre in which he is working:
 
       A couple weeks back, Lelo and I had to have a talk about what we’d do if there was a nuclear strike in Seattle—and if one of us was with Ava while the other wasn’t, what should be the plan of action—how would we find each other?
       “I’d want you to leave me,” I said. “I’d want you to get her as far away from the blast site as possible, assuming that’s an option.”
       “I won’t leave you here.”
       “You absolutely will.”
       “We’re a family.”
       “Your loyalty needs to be to her, to protecting her.”
       “Then you have to leave me, too.”
       “Okay,” I said, “I will.”
       We were two spouses. Two people who loved one another. We were two people who had been together for twelve years. We were two people who couldn’t even imagine living without the other one around. And yet, if a nuclear bomb was dropped, we made a promise to abandon each other. It was one of the most romantic moments of my life.
       “I’d leave you to die alone,” I basically said to her.
       “I’ll leave you too,” she said back. “You might be instantaneously incinerated. Or you might die of radiation exposure within the first week. Or that initial shockwave would have left your body badly burned, and some topical infection will end you. Or be slowly poisoned by the air, fallout radiation, cancer—you’ll live in the rubble and hunt for food alone and die a painful tumor death, just like your dad, except you’ll be utterly alone, screaming into the concrete ruins of our lives.”
       It was a prewar love story.
       And we meant it. We mean it.
       If we have to, we will desert each other, forsake the other to a hateful fate. And it would be the right thing to do. Ava will never know that we love her so much that we’d leave the other to die in merciless ways. And for the one of us who hopefully survives with her—for the one who escapes the blast, moves north, say, into Canada—the survivor will find a flower blooming and will lean down and say to Ava, “Smell this,” and she will, and the survivor will find a glass of ice cold lemonade and say, “Taste this,” and she will, smiling at the tang. And the survivor will draw Ava a warm bath and say, “Touch the water, sweetie,” and she’ll crawl in, floating on her back, her blonde hair haloed out around her head. And the survivor will say, “Listen to this,” and will whistle one of the songs from the Moana soundtrack, and Ava, who has recently learned to whistle as well, will join in. And the survivor will say, “Look at this,” and show Ava an old picture when our family had three people, and the survivor will say, “Do you remember? Always remember,” and Ava says, “I will. I promise.”

FEBRUARY 2018

This month we are excited to spotlight the success of Rebecca Rosenberg, whose marvelous debut novel, The Secret Life of Mrs. London, was just published and is available in bookstores. Rebecca completed this novel while she was a student in the Online Certificate Program in Novel Writing, which she discusses in her guest post below. Full disclosure: Rebecca was my One-on-One student in the program, meaning that she and I worked closely through the revision of her novel, which I had read portions of when she was first a student in my OWC Novel 1 course. She found an agent and sold the novel shortly after finishing the program.

Because I know Rebecca and witnessed this process firsthand, I can say that it was her combination of talent, hard work, and tenacity that took her from idea to draft to revision to publication. She approached both the writing and the publication process as a job to which she was fully committed, and she did her best not only to work consistently but also to work smartly, thinking hard about the feedback she was receiving and then putting it to use in a focused way. I was so impressed as I watched how hard and thoughtfully she worked, and I’m so thrilled that her incredible novel about Charmian London (Jack London’s wife) will now be in the hands of readers who are sure to love it as much as I do.

Malena Watrous
Online Writing Lead Instructor

Guest post by Rebecca Rosenberg:

My novel The Secret Life of Mrs. London was published on January 30, 2018! Never mind my earlier novels still floating up in the cloud somewhere. Maybe they’ll make it into print someday, thanks to Stanford’s Online Certificate Program in Novel Writing. It took me seven years to write my first and second novels, which didn’t get published. I was determined that my third try would make it, or I’d hang up writing! So I enrolled in OWC, finished my novel in two years, and got an agent and a publishing contract six months later.

What worked for me with OWC was taking the course content, assignments, and deadlines seriously, like a job that I gave my all to. (And yes, I had a full-time job as well.) It was inspiring to have a new instructor each quarter with different viewpoints and unique aspects to teach about writing. The more I got into reading and critiquing colleagues’ work, the more I understood the dynamics and tools that were presented. And of course, receiving critiques from instructors as well as peers shook me up and made my story better. Now I know why having a critique group is essential to good writing. As a writer, I have a certain idea of a scene I’m writing, but when you get several readers giving their perspective, it is enlightening. And it prepares you for reviewers later, who can be perplexing. (Take a look at my Goodreads reviews for The Secret Life of Mrs. London and you’ll see what I mean!) Finally, the One-on-One at the end of the program is where you can polish your novel and get ready to pitch agents. I appreciated the sharp eye and concrete suggestions from a seasoned editor.

I miss OWC! But I took a piece of it with me, joining six Stanford colleagues from around the world for a weekly ZOOM.

JANUARY 2018

This month, we are excited to spotlight the recent publication of personal essays by two of our Online Creative Writing students, Cate Hotchkiss and Mike Vangel. Both worked on their pieces while they were students in Stanford Continuing Studies courses, and both happen to have written about fitness—which seems especially appropriate in this month of January, when so many of us are making and trying to keep resolutions. I’m willing to bet that lots of your resolutions center on exercising more regularly, writing more regularly, or both. These two inspiring pieces by Stanford Continuing Studies student authors merged both goals, writing about the process of exercising.

Malena Watrous
Online Writing Lead Instructor
 
Cate Hotchkiss was a student in Joshua Rivkin’s Creative Nonfiction course. She is a seven-time marathon runner and wrote this piece about how she trained for her first marathon as a way of getting over a bad breakup while in her 20s.




 

Mike Vangel has taken two writing classes with Rachel Smith, a fiction writing class on developing characters, and another class on writing comedy and tragedy. This piece about taking his first Bikram (hot and sweaty) yoga class with his girlfriend came from that class, and was published in Men’s Fitness.

MV: That piece actually was published early last year. Rachel Smith pushed us to think about the way tragedy and comedy intertwined in life, and how we might incorporate both into our work, so I'm sure part of the idea came from the prompt she gave us. With the (then) recent experience of forcing myself to try these ridiculous fitness classes, I knew I had something with clear and universal humor potential, but then I wanted to mine it a little deeper, and ended up with all these reflections about body image, too. 

I suppose you could make a connection between yoga and writing, although I haven't stuck with the former (I didn't feel like it was doing much for me, to tell you the truth). Both practices are highly ritualistic, and I've tried to approach my writing that way—it's something I do almost every day, first thing, before there are any other worries or distractions. I think developing that practice has improved my writing, and it honestly puts me in a better place to take on the rest of the day. No matter how small, I've already accomplished something creative by seven in the morning, which makes each day feel meaningful. You hear people talk about the clarity they find in things like yoga, so I guess I'd say I find something similar, but in writing instead.