July 13th
Fiction Class San Francisco
Tue, 07/13/2010 - 3:51pm | Matthew Clark D...
Upon arriving in New York, I was lucky enough to snag two tickets to see one of the final performances of THIS WIDE NIGHT starring Edie Falco and Alison Pill. One ticket for me, and one for former-multiple-session-Labber Lorena, who has relocated to NYC and has started her training for Teach for America.
This play explores exactly the kind of territory we experiment with in The Lab, and it got me excited to imagine ways to incorporate the author's process into a session. Before seeing it, I was suspicious. I'd read that the writer wrote from interviews and research from her time "living among incarcerated women."
Edie Falco is my favorite actor right now, and like I said to Lorena, I would've bought full-price tickets to see her in a musical about the rise and fall of the Cabbage Patch doll. My expectations were high, and she most definitely delivered, and Alison Pill blew my mind with her mesmerizing performance. Talk about actors having total commitment to a roles! This writer exercised an enormous amount of restraint, and was able to let the actors (and therefore the audience) grapple with the complexities in the story, which included how being incarcerated changes a person--how someone who has been locked up is decidedly different from those who have not.
Yesterday I saw, along with Mark, the host of The Douglass Street Lab, the new exhibition at
The New Museum. Rivane Neuenschwander's show, A Day Like Any Other, left quite an impression. My mentor and friend Michelle Cartertaught me, when I was her writing student, to risk sentimentality without succumbing to it; to write into subject matter that scares and excites me; to mine the stuff that feels so important I fear I can only get it wrong.Neuenschwander's show edged on sentimentality without succumbing to it. So often, for me, contemporary art, especially Conceptualism, requires at least a minimum amount of contextualization, and more often than not, it engages my intellect and curiosity more than the squishier parts of my humanity. Sure, I read the placards and was interested to see when in chronological order each of the pieces were made, but the show itself made its mark on me emotionally. One installation consisted of a wall of pencil sketches of faces drawn by an police sketch artist who listened to volunteers who described their first love.A couple of the many questions it left me grappling with: How can emotion be translated into language into image? (Think about it: usually a police or forensic sketch is something made to catch a criminal or to identify a corpse. How would the same sketch appear differently if the murderer or murdered been described by the person who claimed him as his first love?) How does memory filter and change an image over time?
Last night I went to the film "Io Sono Amore" or
"I am Love" with Tilda Swinton. Her performance and the story was so layered I have to see it again. A couple of times. My friend John's shrink suggested it to him and he invited it to me. The shrink had been to see it three times. And not just for Swinton's performance. The film-maker and cinematographer made food scenes seem like sex and sex scenes seem like food. Everything lingered to the point of excruciating beauty. There's a scene where Swinton's charter hugs her daughter after a death in the family, and the camera lingers on their embrace for what seems like days before the emotion surfaces. The viewer gets to witness what's most intimate. Not the product of the emotion--but the trigger for it--and then it follows it up and out of the actors bodies. My expectations were constantly flipped.
If these things sound interesting to you, perhaps you're a good fit for The Lab. You don't need to be a writer or to have ambitions to be a writer to take The Lab. If you're a word nerd--and interested in writing into the kinds of questions I've described, maybe you should try something new and sign up!
I've been asked by everyone I've talked to "What's going on with the manuscript?" meaning, the one I finished the first draft of last summer. Well, long story short, I found out I need to find a new agent (the reasons why are everything but tragic, and contain no drama except I need to find a new agent). In the time that went by in getting the manuscript off to my former-agent and finding out I need to get a new one, I didn't look at the manuscript once. Then I was asked to do a reading in San Francisco, and while looking through it for a scene to perform, I thought, with five eight-hour days, I could really tighten this thing and take it to the next level. So I spent the first couple weeks doing that revision, and I feel great about it. Now it's out being considered at various agencies. The feedback that I've been getting is--knock wood--exceptionally positive, so I just have to practice patience.
I'm at a cafe in The West Village finishing up this blog entry, and I'm listening to my ipod. While writing that last paragraph a bonus track by Me'Shell Ndegeocello came on the shuffle. It's from
"Cookie" The Anthropological Mixtape," and it features poets reading over Me'Shell's beats. Suddenly, June Jordan, one of my first writing teachers is reciting one of her pieces in my ears. Next, my dear friend and mentor's Michael Mullen's band, Pocket Shelly, comes on, from his album "Small Illuminations in a Darkened Sky." The song is Pismo Beach, and it's all about love and saying goodbye and being left and photographs of missing persons and salt water taffy and triggered memories and Highway 1. I must've listened to it a billion times while working on the manuscript. And I'm choosing to make those two things mean that it's all going to work out. That said, I'm open to suggestions. If you have a hardworking agent who might be able to sell a novel about a troubled lady named Janis, I'd love a referral.
Greg and Michael, my New York hosts, are so generous, and every day I have to restrain myself taking the stairs to the top of The Empire State building and screaming THANK YOU at the top of my lungs for an hour for the opportunity they've given me. To be surrounded by art (in their home/gallery), Greg's gorgeous art books, to be able to spend time recharging, to see my family--it's all such a gift. I never know, from one year to the next, what's going to happen with work. And I try to live each day of these New York summers as if it's the last one. They've been such so supportive of my creative and professional process. I used to pride myself on my idea of myself as stoic, lonely do-it-yourself hard-worker. Not any more. I need to give and receive as much support as possible. No product is every guaranteed in this business, no matter how hard one works, and because that's true, I've come to value the relationships and the process and the true connection born out of this nutty pursuit.
May 3rd
Best Writing Classes San Francisco
Mon, 05/03/2010 - 12:30pm | Matthew Clark D...
April 2010 Blog Update:
Happy End-of-April everyone. Thank You to all of you who’ve referred people to The Lab and to my 1-on-1 services for writers. Everyone knows the overall state of Arts Education these days, and I’ve been blessed to have work. I couldn’t do it without you!
It’s such a great time of year to be a teacher. Especially one at SF State. We have two Pulitzer Prize winners this year, which is almost as great as hearing from current/former students are busy preparing to take off to various places: one to New York after getting hired by Teach for America, others to grad school: one to University of Hawaii at Manoa on a full teaching scholarship, another to The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and another to San Diego State. I’m going to miss this year’s graduates very much. There is no place on earth where a more interesting mix of people exists than in an undergraduate creative writing class at SFSU. Congratulations to all of the undergrad graduates and to all of the folks on their amazing achievements.
And the grad students? How proud could I possibly be of the Fourteen Hills editors and staff? This Spring alone, they’ve produced a fundraiser and a big fiction reading all while sifting through hundreds and hundreds of literary and art submissions to make a magazine. These are students who, despite endless-seeming funding cutbacks and tuition increases in the State of California, know how to make their own education. 82 people have RSVP’d for our next event, The 16.2 Release Party, happening on May 21st at The San Francisco Motorcycle Club. (You should join us. It’s so much fun, it’s really not to be missed). By the way, Fourteen Hills is easy to follow. They're everywhere. On a blog, on Facebook, on Twitter. Sign up!
People have been asking about the manuscript I recently got off to my agent. Why isn’t the hardest part of writing a novel writing a novel? This is my second time finishing that task, and it seems relatively easy when compared to the waiting to see if an editor and publishing house will pick it up. My agent is confident, as are the people who’ve read it, but meanwhile, it’s nerve wracking, to say the least. About a month ago, I was having a conversation with a former SFSU student who has become a good friend. She asked me if I were writing. We were both surprised by my answer, I said, “Honestly I don’t know if I have what it takes to write another novel unless I get a book deal on this one.”
Both my novels took five years to write. In retrospect, I’m glad my first one never sold. It came close a couple times. Two editors wrote letters saying they brought it to the table at their publishing house to fight for it. Both times it lost when it came to discussions on marketing/audience. This feedback was more painful to me than feedback like, “It’s not ready. Get back to work.” I like “It’s not ready. Get back to work.” I’m a writer. I’m a worker. I like writing. I like working.
But marketing? Is that an excuse? Do they mean it? Does that really matter? Can’t the right person market anything? It’s impossible to tell. Some say it’s a polite blow off. Others say that people don’t have time to write extensive letters (one was two pages, single-spaced, by and editor at Crown) unless they believe in your skill.
Somehow, my actions are defying my statement. Suddenly I find myself exploring a new character in the few moments when I’m not teaching or at Trader Joe’s replenishing my food supply. He’s starting to hang out with me more, whisper in my ear, and share his opinions. I’m filling up a handwritten notebook, which is in the pocket of my motorcycle jacket. I find myself pulling it out when I shouldn’t, which is always a good sign.
Michelle Carter, one of the best creative writing teachers on earth, has a yet-to-be-published book on fiction writing. It’s unlike anything else out there. One of the things she asks her readers to consider at the beginning of the book is writing a list of things they’re afraid to write about for fear of getting “wrong.”
Number one on my list is the particular complexity it is for me to have siblings. I’m the middle of three male children. We split up when my older brother was 17 years old and my younger 10, and none of us have lived in the same state since. They’re both fathers, and married to women.
There’s nothing more charged or complicated to me—how I feel about them, the dynamics of being one of three boys. How it is to be the gay one, the unmarried one, the one who is not a father.
To complicate it, there are aspects of our pasts, years gone by with little-to-no-contact, gaps that cannot be bridged. We didn’t live together through adolescence, didn’t spend a moment together in high school, never played on the same sports team. There are so many experiences we each celebrated and endured alone, separately, even though the other two were out there in the world somewhere doing something like same thing. Why? Why did we not stay in better touch? Why are those bonds so strong that we can’t just stay out of each other’s business? Why does it feel so good to be together, even when it doesn’t? Why do their struggles or sadness make me feel so helpless in ways that my own struggles and sadness do not? What is it about the intensity and trust that they once held their tiny babies out to me, wanting me to hold them?
All of my fictional characters have been only children.
In relatively recent years, my family has become the most important thing in my life. I relish the time I get with my parents and brothers, their children, their wives. I’m fascinated by our similarities, our defenses, the ways our parents succeeded in passing down the vices and predilections of generations of Clarks and Davisons and the nuanced and glaring differences in how they manifest.
Perhaps it will not be a novel. I haven’t written a short story in over a decade and I want to spend the summer working on the short stories I wrote and started in grad school. Lots of them got published and I think I could put together a collection.
So apparently I can write while waiting to hear about another novel. I got caught in a moment of fear. I froze because my ambition and desire to be a part of the kinds of conversations one gets to when one has a book--my ambition and desire to take my teaching to the levels one can when one has a book--are sometimes overwhelming.
More good news? Apparently I can, while riding the waves of desire and ambition, even start writing about the thing I fear the most I’ll get wrong.
All of this is subject to change, but James, my new character, is a middle child. One of three brothers. He’s unmarried and childless. His brothers are not. So far that’s an exhausted list of the ways James and I are similar. Still, it's charged as if much more personal. The other day I wrote at Café Flore for a couple hours and the whole time my heartbeat felt a bit too fast for a person sitting still. I kept looking up, afraid the person next to me might see.
Who knows what, if anything, will come of it, but I'm so glad to have the teachers and students in my life who keep me pushing forward. People who've always emphasized the artist process over the product without being afraid to pursuit the product. People who have not made success bad or wrong just because of its challenges and elusiveness.
Thanks for reading my update.
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March 31st
Creative Writing San Francisco
Wed, 03/31/2010 - 1:07pm | Matthew Clark D...
March 2010 Update
It has not been easy. Luckily I don’t like easy. But this challenge went beyond. With what very much seemed like a complete lack of results in most of the classes, I wondered if there was any purpose in what I do at all. I nearly gave up, and now I’m so glad I stuck it out. Just three weeks ago the residency took a turn. After listening to suggestions from both the site teachers and my colleagues at Performing Arts Workshop, I rethought my approach. More than anything, I got over myself. Stopped being so attached to the outcome. Relaxed a bit and concentrated more on establishing relationships than imparting craft tools. (At one point I started laughing, realizing I was trying to get forth graders to write their autobiographies).
Suddenly students are happy to see me. (A couple of my students and two of my colleagues can be seen in this great video) Notebooks are out when I arrive at the classes. And kids who usually don’t speak or participate are suddenly opening up, writing stories.
It makes sense. One hour per week in the classroom isn’t very much time to established trust with anyone, never mind kids who have good reason not to trust many adults. I’m so glad I didn’t resign. Now Wednesdays are my favorite day of the week.
The thing I’ve learned this year about being a University teacher with furloughs is you’re still responsible to impart the same amount of information to the students. I scheduled my Hawaii getaway on a furlough week, which resulted in one less class but twice the reading and writing (and therefore preparation). In fact, I logged at least 20 hours of work in those four days. It turned out to be a strange kind of blessing for me to be trapped in the hotel the day of the tsunami warning. I was able to knock out eight hours of work after calling my mom and telling her I love her and if I get wiped out to tell everyone I died happy. In a penthouse. In a fancy hotel. In Hawaii.
When I lived, I was so grateful to have done so much work because I came back to full-throttle teaching and a flurry of events.
In the late 90s, I began volunteering at Glide, starting off with stuffing envelopes in their office and manning the phones in the volunteer center. Then, a couple years later, I got to work with on one the big fundraisers. I asked Cecil Williams how he and Janice Mirikitani kept people coming back for 30 years. He said, “Matthew, it’s important to leave people wanting more, not less.”
I’ve never forgotten that he said that to me, although at different moments of my teaching career you might think I had. Lately I’ve been really trying to live it. Not only with the kids, but at the adult literary events I’m a part of organizing. The 8th 8-week session of The Douglass Street Lab just had its final reading. We decided host a small benefit for ATA in exchange for their space.
The Lab attracts people interested in words who’re at every level—published writers, journalists, those with BAs and MFAs in writing—along with people who sign up for it as their first-ever creative writing class. One audience member left saying the material was so good he had no idea who was new.
I certainly had a blast. There’s something to be said about taking creative writing outside of the normal MFA academic setting (a setting, by the way, that I most-often love). Since, at The Lab, we don’t talk about our publications or where we went to “undergrad,” it lets people be. Instead of getting caught up in the nomenclature of the “fiction workshop,” we talk like regular people, trading in jargon for clear and direct feedback on what scenes are working to pull us into the world of the story or memoir, and why.
And then there’s Fourteen Hills. The editors and staff work their butts off to put on events for which people want to show up. They just had a very successful panel discussion/fundraiser celebrating the second printing of New Standards, an anthology of fiction collected from the magazine over the years. Check out the pictures. It was PACKED!
My favorite Fourteen Hills parties are the new-issue release parties, which have been held at The San Francisco Motorcycle Club. They prove (drawing over 150 word-nerds) that great food, good drinks, a fun raffle, a DJ and a dance floor (the last 14H party is where I first heard the mash-up of AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” and The Black Eyed Peas “My Humps,” which has invigorated my gym workout) can very much coincide with a quality literary reading.
Maybe now that I’m getting older I guess I want to have more fun, not less. I attended a reading last month where the participants were asked questions by the audience and some of the answers seemed so precious, so rarefied, bottled, and self-important it was practically unbearable. The writers didn’t even seem to be listening to what the audience was asking, but listening for a pause just so they could talk about themselves or how important it is “what we do.” They spoke as if there’s something inherently superior in being a writer or an artist.
Luckily the writers who struck me that way were balanced by those who just seemed passionate and nerdy about how great it is that these twenty-six letters can end up, somehow, turning into great stories. It was a good thing I was sitting toward the back and didn’t have a cyanide pill handy. If I had, I wouldn’t be writing this update.
Speaking of fun literary events, I’ll be reading tomorrow night at BaBL with three former Labbers! Brad Straw (who is organzing the event), the incredibly talented Jennifer Hasegawa (founder of The Barbie Cage and its accompanying haiku contest), John Yi (founder of Dublit); also reading is first-timer Scott Barney.
When: Thursday, April 1st
Where: H Café, 3801 17th Street, San Francisco
What time: 6:30-7:30
How much: FREE
Fourteen Hills has two upcoming events, the aforementioned release party for issue 16.2 on May 21st (mark your calendar, and stay tuned on Fourteen Hill’s Facebook Page), and Second Annual Gina Berriault Award: Featuring Adam Johnson at The Poetry Center in the Humanities Building at SFSU.
When: Thursday, April 15th, 2010
Where: The Poetry Center, Humanties Building, 5th Floor, SFSU
What time: 7-9pm
How much: FREE
RSVP on Facebook
Thanks for reading my update, and see you in April!
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February 28th
Creative Writing San Francisco
Sun, 02/28/2010 - 10:53am | Matthew Clark D...
I’m on an annual getaway with a bunch of friends. A trip I didn’t think I’d be able to afford this year until the prospect of budget cuts leaving me teaching 0-2 classes per week turned into the reality of teaching 9 classes per week. A trip in years past I loved to take turned, in the midst of the busiest and most-charged period of my life, into a trip I felt like I needed to take.
One of my friends in the hotel biz hooked me up with a luxurious room I’d never be able to afford at its normal rate—or even its near-normal rate. I still must work, but working from the beach after doing yoga and then reading in a bed with 400 thread-count sheets feels much more doable than driving from class to class on a motorcycle in the rain. My hotel-biz-friend is the same friend who has us waiting out the tsunami in the penthouse. My room (on the third floor) was evacuated to a public place in the hotel across the street.
Life is so strange.
I also just finished reading TRUTH AND BEAUTY by Ann Patchett. It’s about all the subjects I find endlessly fascinating: family, friendship, writing, the creative process, self-destruction, loss, addiction, and survival. This book really digs into dumb luck of survival--the randomness and even brutality of it—-she explores what often, and mistakenly, gets reduced down to "the triumph of the human spirit." It details her enormously complicated and compelling relationship to the late writer Lucy Grealy, who’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE I assigned along with TRUTH AND BEAUTY for my Uses of Personal Experience course at SF State.
The Douglass Street Lab, I can hardly believe, is going into its sixth of eight weeks. This session’s group, more newcomers than regulars, more people I’ve met for the first time than people I’ve known before, is producing some of the most charged work I’ve seen. I love the freedom The Lab offers, not ruled by the necessary rules of a university or grant funding. It brings me much joy.
There’s so much more I want to write about. Somehow I want to tie-in the feeling I got reading TRUTH AND BEAUTY, how the narration of Patchett’s memoir maintained its steadily-increasing tension even though the reader knows in advance what will happen—and what it’s like to be waiting for the tsunami to hit from the 21st floor from a penthouse suite—and what it’s like to be waiting to hear if I’ll ever get my first book deal now that my agent has sent out my manuscript to the first round of editors. But I just can’t.
January 17th
Creative Writing Classes Bay Area San Francisco Fiction Memoir SFSU
Sun, 01/17/2010 - 2:16pm | Matthew Clark D...
January 2010 Blog Update:
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Contents:
-2 Slots Left in The Douglass Street Lab, which starts this Tuesday 1/19
-Update from New York City
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It's not too late to sign up with 2 slots left...
The January Douglass Street Lab is looking to be one of the most exciting groups of Labbers so far. With ten people signed up (thanks to all of you who helped spread the word on Facebook!), we have, for the first time, more newcomers than veterans. This should be great because the four veterans are so talented and open and generous in their participation. They're the kinds of folk you want in a room when you’re taking new risks with your writing.
I’m excited to see where our 8 experiments take us. There are still two slots if you care to join us, I’d love to have you.
To sign up for The Lab, click here.
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Greetings from New York. My cousin Greg and his partner Michael (who also happen to be two of my best friends), surprised me around Thanksgiving-time with an invite and ticket to New York. I hadn’t been here during the wintertime in more than twenty years. I took full-advantage of the much-needed getaway and saw a ton of art. Highlights included the Jim Hodges/Felix Gonzales-Torres show, Joseph Beuys, Martin Wong, and the Kandinsky retrospective at The Guggenheim.
I saw Alan Cummings perform his live cabaret act (lower-case not capital Cabaret, see above) at Joe’s Pub & was so lucky to see David Greenspan perform his inspired show The Myopia. I reunited with a friend I hadn’t seen in seven years, met his partner, saw my NY homies, hung with my cuz and the hounds. All in a week!
Now I’m sitting on the couch, over-flowing with gratitude and appreciation at my dumb luck while procrastinating packing. I’m writing in the seat where I spent so many hours over the past three summers researching, reading, and writing. It’s a joyful/melancholic and slightly nerve-wracking sensation to reassume the position now that the manuscript is finished and out of my hands.
How strange it has been to walk through New York without the filter of “would Janis go here?” (Janis is the subject of the novel I just finished). Instead, I said, (sometimes aloud), “Janis used to go there,” and “My friend Janis loved that place when she lived in New York.” Now, because of this trip, I want to go back into the manuscript and rewrite some of the winter scenes because of what I’ve learned about the winter light.
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THANKS AGAIN TO ALL OF YOU. I HOPE YOUR 2010 is off to a great start.