A NOVEL IDEA FOR NaNoWriMo: WEEK 1

WEEK 1 : Prompts, News, and a Poet Who Did It

As I mentioned last week, I am encouraging poets who have not yet written 30 poems in 30 days to do so this month while in the company of writers hard at it for National Novel Writing Month (NaNo).  And to help you along, I plan weekly to feature a link to a daily prompt, to poet-related NaNo stuff, and to an interview with a poet who used these prompts last spring. 

Prompts for November 1-6

Nov. 1 Beginnings: Write a poem about a first in your life, such as having a first child, first looking into Chapman’s Homer, or tasting a cannoli for the first time. Do not use the word “first,” “one” or “beginning.” Do not use the phrase “for starters.”

Nov. 2 - Create a spine poem by stacking up books with appealing titles from your bookshelves. Arrange them, spine out, to form poems. Take a photo to preserve your literary remix. If you’d like, share your images on Twitter with the tag #readwritepoetry and #spinepoem or #spinepoetry, where you will also find examples. (Thanks to Laura Weldon for this great idea.)

You can find these two prompts at the "Read + Writer 30 Days of Poetry," here.

For the rest of this week, Nov. 3-6, use days 3-6 from that site here  

News

This week's news comes from Cat Russell, this week's featured poet. Cat is also taking the challenge to write a novel this month. She believes the NaNoWriMo site provides a lot of information, encouragement and connection for participants. She says, "If you register at the NaNo site, it's free, you can access everything." (See the NaNo link above.) She notes that even poets who don't want to write a novel can register and sign up for the Discussion Forum titled "Rebels," and she says "the biggest difference is if you rebel you can't win the sponsor prizes. Otherwise, you can do anything you like." 

Prizes? Prizes? We don't need no stinking prizes. Or badges. Or nothing. Just bring on the prompts and viva la company!

The Poet: CAT RUSSELL

AUTHOR BIO:

 
I'm an author living in NE Ohio. My work has been published in the 'Best of Friday Flash – Volume One' and 'Volume Two' anthologies, Lightning Flash magazine, and Flash Me magazine. I share my life with my high school sweetheart, our son, and assorted creatures in the Wilds of Ohio while writing short stories, producing poetry, and learning more about the craft every day. 

More of my work can be found on my writing blog, Cat Russell,  at catherinerussellwriter.wordpress.com

Interview with Cat:

Q: Could you tell us about yourself as a poet? How long have you been writing poetry? How does it fit into the rest of your life?

A: I've written poetry off and on for several years now.  I've been heavily involved in the online #FridayFlash community via Twitter and Facebook, so I generally write one piece of short fiction a week. Writing a complete story with few words means knowing how to pick the right ones, cutting out excess, and focusing on what's most important.  That's what I like about writing poetry. It allows me to practice that same type of crafting while breaking the rules of prose.

Last year I joined a monthly Poetry Workshop through Lit Cleveland, and that's really helped expose me to new poets and approaches I had not known before. Between that group and the Cuyahoga Poetry Month prompts, I've gotten much more heavily involved with both reading and writing poetry.


Q: How many of the three years have you used the CCPL prompts?

A: I've used them every year, and I love everything about them. I get great recommendations for new authors, inspiration for my own work, and get to read one poem by a local poet each day.

Q: Do you know anyone else who has been writing to them?

A: I know one other person that has used the prompts, as well as several online participants through social media.

Q: Are there any of the prompts that seem to work better for you? that don't work?

A: There were a few prompts that were timed badly for me personally this past year, such as writing about things that occurred on certain days. Others I haven't written yet, but saved the prompts for later use. However, I found most of the prompts to be very helpful and have started submitting some of the poems they inspired. Mostly, I find the daily ritual combined with the posted poem to be a great creative boost that makes me want to write. I'm especially fond of the prompts that introduce me to new forms--such as six-line fibbonaci poems.

Q: Have you presented any of the poems in workshops or readings? Have any been published in print? (If so, can you provide titles and/or which prompts you were writing to?) Have you gotten any response to those particular poems?

A: This year, the poetry prompts came at a particularly turbulent time in my life, so they provided a much needed emotional release. I have shared a few with favorable results, but some are still being worked on or are too personal to share right now. I have submitted several for publication, though I have not heard back on all of them yet. (P.S. I actually have sold one poem written to the prompt to write a poem that consists of a single, long sentence. :)

Q: Would you like me to publish or republish one of the poems? Please keep in mind that most journals consider blog publications as publications, and I don’t want to get your prize-winning poem disqualified for having been used as an example on a blog.

A: Thank you, but I'd rather not. I've published them on my blog in the past which reduced their marketability. This year I restrained myself, and I've gotten two sales! (not direct responses to the prompts but rather written as a result of being in poet-mode as a result of consuming so much poetry in April.)

*****

All best wishes to Cat for her poems and for her novel writing month, and to all you novelists, poets, and rebels.

 

A NOVEL IDEA FOR NaNoWriMo: INTRO

INTRO: Why not write poems in November?

 

Several decades ago, Jerry Roscoe and I were ferrying Robert Creeley around for the day in Jerry's salesman car, heading east to meet Jim Lowell, of Asphodel fame. He was still selling wonderful broadsides and fine letterpress books but now instead of the bookstore downtown, he was working  out of a room next to his wife's beauty shop way out in the country. As we drove (ahem) Jerry asked Creeley about the novel Creeley had written-- was it the only one he had written, Jerry wanted to know. There was a long very long silence before Creeley responded:

"Yes. I learned novels are long and life...is short."

Creeley had a relatively long life that yielded some of the greatest poems of the 20th century, and while he didn't  seem to have any regrets about having written the novel... well, it seemed he wouldn't have had any regrets if he hadn't written one either.

If you are a writer who would like the fun or rigor or challenge or pain of writing every day in the month of November, when all your friends are yammering about their novels, but you just aren't the novel type, consider writing a poem a day. I know, I know. We were supposed to do that in April during National Poetry Month. But face it, sometimes there is just too much poetry going ON to write anything during April. If you go to just half of the readings your friends give during that month, you don't have time to shower, let alone write.

True confession: I created the 30 prompts for the "Read + Write: 30 Days of Poetry"  online project of the  Cuyahoga County Public Library (CCPL)  last April. In my profession as a creative writing professor for two decades, I had always done the prompts myself ahead of time that I then gave to my students. But I was too busy January through April with writing events, editing, and e-mailing to try them. By the middle of April, with no writing done, I felt guilty as heck and promised myself I'd do the regime in May. And I did! And it was wonderful! I wrote 30 poems, over half of them worth sending out, two of them published by now.

When I finished, I wrote some of the Ohio poets whom I knew had written during April-- a few of whom had responded to TWO prompts a day-- to ask them what they got out of it. Their responses were so generously descriptive and enthusiastic that I thought I'd use them to excite writers for next April. But then, the problem with April is everything poetry that's going on. Whereas November is...novels. For some of us, November may be a little slower than April. The Indians should have sewn up the World Series by November 3rd. There are very few graduations coming up. The holidays are a whole month away. It's too cold for grass and not quite time to shovel.

If you have the time for a novel in November, you go. But if you are a writer who doesn't have the time this month, or a poet, who doesn't have the tendency, consider writing a poem a day. Weekly, I am going to be linking to a week's worth of April prompts and posting an interview with a poet who wrote to those prompts and has some things to say about it. 

Cat Russell (who does plan to write a novel this month)
Chuck Salmons (Pres. of the Ohio Poetry Assoc.)
Julie Ursem Marchand (Lorain County Librarian)
Kerry Trautman (author of To Have Hoped)
Laurie Kincer (Co-ordinator, CCPL Skirball Writers Ctr.)

Stay tuned!

MY DAD'S DOGTAG and DYERSBURG

73 YEARS LATER, DAD GETS HIS DOG TAG

Russ Kendig, opening the mail

THE CALL

It's Sunday night, the phone rings at 190 Perry Drive in Canton, Ohio which has the same phone number it's had since 1949 when my dad built the house. Some woman leaves a message: she's looking for Russ Kendig--does she have the right number? Her voice is so hesitant and sweet, she can't be a telemarketer, and I phone her right back and say, well sort of. I am his oldest daughter: how can I help her?

Diane Seat is calling from Halls, Tennessee to tell me her family has found my dad's WWII dog tag in a soybean field near what used to be the Dyersburg Army Air Corps base. Rather, after much sleuthing, she thinks it is my dad's. She asks,

Diane Seat

"Was his mother's name Bessie? Did they live on Tenth Street?" Yes and yes. We talk a fairly long time, for two strangers. I tell her about all the trouble Dad's crew got into at Dyersburg before shipping out for Europe, and she tells me about going on Ancestry and there, finding Grandpa and Grandma Kendig and their thirteen children, among them Russ, whom she figured would be 91 and probably not alive. She has tracked down two other dog tag owners and found one had died in the war and one had died in his early 80s. She'd be glad to mail the tag to us-- she knows if someone found her dad's tag, she'd love to get it. We trade addresses and phone numbers and emails and friend each other on Facebook, and then I wait.

Telling Dad

I drove over to Dad's senior residency to tell him. I have to drive over because he is never in his room, so reaching him by phone is impossible, and he never checks messages. He is sitting out front, and laughs at the news. He had another tag when he returned from the war; it's in our files, and it doesn't have Grandma's name and address on it. He has no memory of that first dog tag. My dad does have some dementia, but many of his WWII memories are crystal clear (he can still recite a lot of accurate numbers and co-ordinates for firing from a B-17), but only one really from Dyersburg.

My cousins say that they have two tags of their dad who is my Uncle Les and Dad's deceased big brother: one tag with Grandma's name and address and one without. Maybe stateside tags were one way, and then soldiers got new tags when they shipped overseas? I've asked a few vets. None recall, which is no surprise because there was much much much more to recall once you arrived "over there." Uncle Les survived the Battle of the Bulge and came out with purple hearts and bronze stars, and Dad survived many missions and earned several medals that are now in the files with the dog tag. Who remembered the stateside base? Well, actually, my dad does remember one story and The Canton Repository files hold the story too.

Backstory: Dyersburg to Canton and Back in the Dark of the Night

Russ Kendig in 1943, 18 y/o

This story has nothing to do with the dog tag, but it does have to do with the Dyersburg Army Air Base, where the tag was found, and it is such a good one, I am sneaking it in here.

My dad had started in training to be a pilot at a base in Lincoln, Nebraska, but as the war heated up, the army didn't really need any more pilots and sent him and many pilots in training to gunnery school from whence he ended up at the Dyersburg base, assigned to the crew of pilot Robert Ellis. That was the setup for one of those lifelong friendships the war cemented for some lucky men. Uncharacteristically for the makeup of a crew, both men were from Canton, Ohio. Bob was the only child of a sometimes single mother (when she wasn't married, which she was, five times) who was a flamboyant character. Dad was one of thirteen children of two loving and fairly strict, religious parents. Bob, an officer, was son of a fairly famous army officer who did not approve of his son's friendship with an enlisted man. Bob didn't care. My dad, who had six older brothers, really adopted Bob as another big brother in his life. Bob went on to live in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Columbia, and the United Arab Emirates, but whenever he got back to the U.S., he visited Dad, who never wanted to live anywhere but Canton, and they'd stay up late talking and talking.

Ellis Crew at Dyersburg

While they were stationed in Dyersburg, the crew was assigned to fly a night mission for practice on a Sunday evening. I don't know where exactly they were supposed to fly to, but I know where they were not supposed to fly to, which was Canton, Ohio and where Bob decided they would fly, to see the hometown once more before they left for who knew what, but it wouldn't be easy. What anybody else on the crew thought, I have no idea, but they did fly to Canton, and then they flew low over it. My dad says that his family, yes, living on 10th Street, near the Fairgrounds, came out on the front lawn, and that Grandma knew exactly who was in that plane and waved as they dipped the plane and flew up.  They then headed up Tuscarawas in Reedurban, where Mrs. Ellis lived and dipped again.

Canton Repository story from that night

Keep in mind they were flying a BOMBER and this was WWII. Three police cruisers were sent out to shine spotlights to help the plane land because the pilot had flashed his landing lights (in helloes to the moms out there, but the police thought he was looking for a place to land). It was all in the Canton Repository  the next day, noting it would go down in the police records as "The Mystery of the Low-Flying Bomber," and ends, "The pilot gunned the engines, all four roared and he climbed into the darkness and sped on his way."

Only, as Dad tells it, they did not have enough gas to get back to the base, had to stop to refuel and were busted. He says they were court-martialed, and the morning of sentencing, he received a letter from Grandma Kendig, with a copy of the clipping from The Canton Repository, which Dad says he burned immediately. The army was more anxious to get the crew to Europe than to punish them for a few gallons of gas, and they were shipped out shortly after.

The Tag Wends Its Way Home 

Yesterday, my mailman came up to my back porch and yelled at me as I worked in my garden,

Dad with the new tag and the old and Dyersburg reading

"Diane, I have certified mail for you!" Diane Sheets wasn't taking any chances on the tag getting lost. I signed and drove over to take the package to Dad.

He opened the small envelope with the tag and we studied it. The thing I love most, after seeing my grandma's name and address, is that a tiny bit of Tennessee dirt is still clinging in the metal fold around the edge of the tag. Dad immediately took his current tag and chain out of his pocket, took his nail clipper tool out and cracked the chain open, added the new tag and draped it around his neck.

Then we looked at the rest of the material in the envelope. Diane Seat had sent us the brochure from the yearly air show at the base, a pamphlet on the base, which is now a veterans museum, and a history of the base 1942-45. She and her family are the heroes of this portion of the story.

I have a trip planned to Louisiana in the fall, and I am hoping to visit the museum along the way.

What did Dad have to say about this latest episode? He's a storyteller, but not much of an emoter or chatterer. (That was my mom.) When asked what he thinks, he just chuckles, shakes his head. He has no idea how the tag got in the field, no idea when he last took it off. Like much of the rest of his 91- year- old life, this provides another interesting tale, a small mystery with a happy ending, or as he does say, smiling, "I get a kick out of it!"

Favorite Northeast Ohio Libraries for Writers

As National Library Week is in April, when I am all about National Poetry Month, I am

Halfway into my walk

celebrating libraries this week by writing about a few of my favorites.  Actually, I celebrate libraries every week, every day if you count that my 3-mile morning walk usually takes me past my local Stark County District Library branch library, Perry Sippo. 

I wrote in this blog a while ago with excitement about a big research archive I visited in Atlanta, and with my academic husband, I have gotten to work in the grand libraries of UC-Santa Cruz, UC- Berkeley, Princeton, and the Library of Congress. Loved all those places and many others, near (Massillon, Ohio  Library's video collection) and far (Trinity Library in Dublin, and oh, dear heart, the British Library in London). 

This week, though, I am going to focus on five Northeast Ohio libraries which are particularly strong in resources for writers.

First, I will celebrate the new and exciting Cuyahoga County Public Library's South Euclid-Lyndhurst Branch with its William Skirball Writers Center. (Read it Here.)

Then, I'll go a few miles away to the Literature Department of the  Cleveland Public Library (Here )

Third, I'll write about the Performance Center and activities at the East Cleveland Public Library. (Here)

and a terrific Teen Writers Workshop at the Canal Fulton Public Library. (Here.)


And finally, I am going to come back to my own county, Stark, to show you around the writer activity at the Stark District Library (Here.)

I'm a big fan of all the digital resources that libraries are making available, but in this series, while I will be including two digital resources for writers, I am more interested in spaces, hard copy collections, and other in-person stuff. This series is about working writers and writers working in communities, assisted by our libraries and their great librarians, working with us. 

NE OHIO LIBRARIES FOR WRITERS, Part 5

STARK COUNTY DISTRICT LIBRARY

Website and Writers Series

 

Backstory: My Childhood and Youth in the Library 

Living as I do between Massillon and Canton, I have the great fortune to live nearly equidistant between two very good local libraries, the Massillon Public Library and the Stark District Library, with the added advantage of being just one-half mile from the branch library that I walk to most days, the Perry Sippo Branch.

When I was in third grade, I did well on the verbal part of the Iowa Tests, and my mother began her lifelong campaign to take my siblings and me to the Massillon Library every two weeks. There was no Sippo branch then, and the Massillon Library had the best children's librarians (we LOVED Mrs. Binns). This past week, the writer Francine Prose in the New York Times has said, "The age at which I fell most pasionately in love with reading, at around 9 or 10, roughly coincided with the time when I somehow sensed that the reality-fantasy border was about to tighten." Like Prose, I loved the Edgar Eager books that I found at the library, a series on four siblings who always managed to find a coin or charm that transported them to magic places. Being the oldest of four, I held hope that the Kendig Kids would stumble on similar adventures. I read all the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Cherry Ames books twice and all the Louisa May Alcott three times. I owe nearly all my rich life in childhood reading to my parents and to the Massillon Library, which today I mine for its movie collection.

Still by the time I got to college, the Stark District Library had more of the primary materials that I needed when I was home studying, and I spent a lot of weekends there in the old library with the glass floors that put me so in awe as a child. I still miss that space. But I love the new space, with its airiness and openness and bright colors. Upfront is one of the 10 best library gift shops in the world. (I rank the NYPL and the London Library among those ten, too.) The Friends of the Library Gift Shop has Lady MacBeth Soap and literary socks and cards with writers quotes, used books and snacks. It is separate from the library itself, which is "The Smart Store, Where Everything Is Free." (The library's current branding.) 

And I love the Sippo branch, with its reading room facing the little lake I was raised on and have returned to and the nature center that shares the space and has a naturey gift shop.

But my theme today is the main library of the Stark County District Library and two of its special connections to local writers.

Local Authors: A website and a reading series

Fifteen years ago, I had been teaching two courses on literature and the internet and my students were teaching me how much they appreciated literature on the web. I had both traditional students (18--22 on campus) in face to face classes and non-trad students (adults, mostly in business and hazardous waste engineering) in online classes. They especially liked how they could find photos, videos, sounds files, bio, and other information on the living writers we studied that made the writers and by extension, their writing, more immediate. Once I left teaching, I was looking for a way to use that conection, and the Cuyahoga County Public Library enabled me to curate a 30-day site on local poets which was very popular.

Marianna DiGiacomo

Looking to bring it home two years ago, I met with librarian Marianna DiGiacomo, to pitch an idea. I asked her if the library would try a 7-day blog on its website for National Library week that would feature local writers. For the library's benefit, I would ask local writers if they would be willing to write a passage on what libraries had meant to them. For the writer's benefit, we would publish that passage, along with a passage of their work, a bio, and a photo, on the library's site. The library offered to provide the online link to check out the authors'  books from its collection, too. I began looking for passages related to libraries, reading, or books, and found seven local writers who had such passages: Vance Voyles, Robert Miltner, Bonnie Jacobson, Richard McElroy, Charita Goshay, John Estes, and Tom Barlow. Among them were fiction writers, poets, a local newspaper columnist, and a college historian. When contacted, all of them responded quickly, graciously, and generously with permission to reprint their passage and with their beautiful new passages on the importance of libraries. Clearly, most writers had found the library as important to their childhoods as it was to mine. The project was quite a success, and you can find it still up here.

This year, Marianna came to me and asked if we could tweak it in a slightly different direction. The library wanted to pull several events together, including a new event, a writer's series, to create a "Local Authors Week," and they wondered if we could curate a weekly blog around local authors for that week. The week would end with an event at Canton's gorgeous, historic Palace Theater with first-time novelist Lisa Beazley, who has Canton ties. We chose the theme of "Place," and I went reading for passages by local authors that dealt with places, real and imagined, in poetry and prose. Beazley's novel Keep Me Posted had plenty of setting to choose from, as did Audrey Lavin's detective series. I also found apt passages in the poetry of Theresa Gottl Brightman, Molly Fuller and David McCoy, and local color in an essay by  local journalist Gary Brown's. This time the writers didn't have to write anything new, and as before, they all responded quickly and generously with permission to publish. The library's very new web designer got with the program immediately, and the whole online publication went smoothly and helped to produce an audience for the live event. The six author passages are still up for reading here.

Probably because of my own early positive experience with libraries, which provided me with the only connection to living writers I had until I got to college and met some writers in person, I really enjoy making connections between libraries and living writers, in person and on the web. It is a service libraries and writers can provide to their communities, and the service comes back to them in traffic to their sites. I'd like to see more libraries and writers using the world wide web to bring local authors closer to their neighbors and readers. 

NE OHIO LIBRARIES FOR WRITERS, Part 4

CANAL FULTON PUBLIC LIBRARY:

Best Teen Writing Group Around

Preliminaries 

A few months back, I got a call from my branch librarian wondering if I knew anything about writing groups for teens. A father was searching one for his daughter, who had a deep interest in creative writing and could find nothing available for her, except adult writing groups, which he didn't think would work. At the time, I couldn't find anything either, and then Shelly Rayborn contacted me to speak to the Teen Writing Club at Canal Fulton Public Library. I arrived in Canal Fulton (population 5,749...or so) and had lunch in the Dragonfly Tea Room down the street, which might seem off the subject except for in my mind, writing and food are pretty well inseparable, so there I was. It is a wonderful tea room and gift shop, and if you are going over to Canal Fulton with your teen, or if you are a teen going over to Canal Fulton, I highly recommend it. Doesn't matter if you are a guy. The two most important guys in my life (my dad and my husband) love tea rooms and have joined me in tea rooms in London and Thorpe Abbotts, England; in Dublin, Ireland; and Findlay, OH. We love tea rooms. The Dragonfly is in keeping with the best, both its dining room and its gift shop.

After the tea room, I headed over to the library, a lemon-yellow place as small town lovely as any, and there, I just fell in love with the Teen Writers group and with their librarian.

Teen Writing Contests

As many of my readers know, I am really down on writing contests for children and teens. I have written about this at length in my blog, "For the Kids Who Want to Create, Not Compete."  I have not yet written this: I believe that much of the impetus to hold writing contests comes out of the competition model of sports. And yet, in most incarnations of the sports model for young people, leading up to the competition is practice, modeling, and guidance. For the vast majroity  of the creative writing competitions I have seen for youth, there is no practice, no modeling, and no guidance: the entries are primarily from children who have scribbled down the first thing off the top of their little heads. For another sorry minority, these works have been improved upon by their parents before being sent in.

To be fair and to give teachers their due, the best entries tend to be from young people who had a teacher leading a class of them through writing and revising. But to be honest, most teachers I  know are so beleaguered by testing mandates which never ever value creative writing, that with sinking hearts, they don't get around to much story and poem writing for class. Here's a salute to the teachers that do, including the Stark County teachers who submit their work to the library's annual contest and a shout-out to Dawn Neeley Randall of the Elyria schools who is a teacher of all middle school language arts beyond envy.

Shelly Rayborn and the Teen Writers of the Canal Fulton Public Library

 

Shelly's group is active, ongoing, and long-standing.  When I went around the group asking them to

Shelly Rayborn, Canal Fulton Librarian

introduce themselves, each teen was able to articulate what s/he wrote and why, what writing meant to them, individually and as a group. And when a person was shy, their group mates spoke up and added to their list of talents. They were all unabashed about naming their weaknesses and what they needed to work on too-- a sign of writers and not dilettantes. Writing can be the most lonely of the arts, and one meaningful purpose of a good writing group is to offset that loneliness.

Another is to learn. I had told Shelly that I wanted my presentation to involve what they felt they wanted to learn, and they had sent me these topics:

1. How to develop a good world

See Spine Poems here

2. What makes a good main character

3.  How to be consistent throughout your story

4.  How to be original (and not rip off other people's ideas)

5.  Any Publishing advice            

6.  Tips for writing poetry

Clearly the group had already been at work, clearly they had some specific things they wanted to learn. In the course of the workshop, I learned a lot about what they had tackled under the guidance of Shelly, who is up to the minute with what teens are reading and writing and what's out there to try. When I mentioned the Spine Poems, which I had just tried this spring during National Poetry Month, I found the kids were all ahead of me on that one. In July, they are creating memes and turning them into buttons to wear. Teen writers can get as entrenched as any of us in writing their same thing over and over, and I love to see them being nudged to try the new while staying at work on their grand opus.  And each teen seems to be working on an opus, in addition to Shelly's prompts.

And that's what makes this group a model one to me. I see other teen librarians doing a great job with a writing exercise here and there, innovative and interesting ones that I'd like to try. The Canal Fulton Teen Writers Group does that but also has a regular meeting schedule and a connection among themselves and their adult leader that is clearly productive.

The last thing Shelly reminded them was to get their entries in for the library's writing contest. And you know what? These teens were ready for one. I have no objections whatsoever.

If you know of other teen writing groups in Northeast Ohio, do tell here in the comments. I suspect there are young writers who'd like to find them.

Canal Fulton Teen Writers Meeting Space