Fiction Workshop San Francisco
Thu, 03/03/2011 - 8:14pm | Matthew Clark D...
Greetings friends and friends of The Douglass Street Lab. I just made it safely past the fluke stage and I'm now happy to report I'm officially having a great semester. One superstition I have--in addition never touching the leaves of a plant when I'm angry lest they all fall out--is not saying anything in the first six weeks about how good of a semester I'm having.
But now that we've passed the first trimester of the semester, I get to say all of my work--at SFSU, at Performing Arts Workshop, and at The Douglass Street Lab--has me so inspired and invigorated I've hardly noticed how much time traveling to or from one of these places on the motorcycle in the pouring down rain.
In the lastest session of The Lab, we've found inspiration from Patti Smith, Cynthia Hopkins, Lucinda Williams, Mark Doty, Chimamanda Adichie, and Jamaica Kincaid, just to name a few. The participants in this cycle show up, open up, write, read, and respond. Then they revise and post snippets for their findings for their peers to read. It's been one of the most active cycles in a long time, and several of the participants will be reading at our open-house/reading/celebration coming up on March 19th. Here are all the details. (If you're not on Facebook and don't want to be, just email me and I'll send you an invite) If you've been thinking of doing The Lab and aren't sure if it's for you, this is a great (and free) opportunity to come check out both the space what people have written.
Speaking of the space, I know I wrote that The Lab's host Mark and his sweetie were moving in and so The Lab would be moving out. It was a lie! Mark's sweetie is nonplussed by our Tuesday night meetings and Mark, who is a great writer and a student of The Lab, likes the commute. So while nothing is forever, we'll be staying on Douglass Street for the next cycle, Spring into Action, which starts on March 29th, and still has a few seats available.
There are updates, too, on my own work/manuscript/process as well as some reflections on the importance of an aspiring novelist like me starting a new project while the finished one makes its way around the various channels that might some day result in publication.
But alas, Fourteen Hills is meeting tonight for their final decisions, and I need to avail myself to them as their faculty advisor.
So more soon. Probably after I'm done getting all the stuff ready for the tax dude.
Wishing you all the best for a happy Spring.
Oh! And if you're a former student and you have some news to share, please do! I'd love a chance to brag about you on The Lab's Facebook page.
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.
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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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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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.
Creative Writing San Francisco
Fri, 11/27/2009 - 9:43am | Matthew Clark D...
*Sign up for The Douglass Street Lab's next session starting 1/19/10.
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The new issue of Fourteen Hills is also about to be released. You can come hear some of the writers at the release party on December 16th at the San Francisco Motorcycle Club. This issue is visually stunning and the work in it will please all of the word nerds in your life. You can buy it through SPD or you can subscribe here. Either way, come to the party. It’ll be fun. And it’s free. More info on the address/time/readers here.
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Ok. It may not have been the best movie on earth but something that came out of that movie totally changed my life. Oprah interviewed the cast of the movie and several of the actresses lamented about how hot it had been on the shoot. The way I remember it, Oprah listened to the details about how hot it had been on set and Dolly Parton said nothing. Oprah turned to her and said, “Dolly, you’re the one who had to wear all those big wigs and all those layers. Weren’t you hot?” And Dolly Parton looked at Oprah, paused, then said, “When I was a little girl growin’ up in the backwoods of Tennessee I wanted to be a famous country western singer and a movie star. Now I’m a country western singer and a movie star and I’m not going to complain about the weather.”
In a recent conversation with my mother and a friend she's known for forty-five years, we all talked about the teachers who had an influence on us even when we didn’t know it at the time. I’ve had a lot of great teachers. But with most of them I’ve known how great they were even during the “during phase.” With some of them, I’ve had the pleasure of having time-delayed double-appreciation for what I’d already appreciated.
I had a high-school art teacher named Mrs. Fitz. Anyone who knows me knows that I dropped out of high school when I was fifteen. And I only attended a tiny portion of my freshman year so I couldn’t have been in her class more than a dozen times. My high school felt like an entirely hostile environment—students and faculty included—so I’d given up on any attempt to gain anyone’s acceptance or approval. Instead I rebelled, refusing any help. I don’t know if Mrs. Fitz ever even noticed me. But I noticed her. She came to our small-town conservative Massachusetts school with her spiked hair. She wore layered outfits that looked like a cross between Pat Benetar and Stevie Nicks. She called herself an artist and her teaching style reminded me of Debbie Allen’s character on the television show Fame.
Memory is imperfect, and my filters of that time were incredibly emotional and hormonal, so I’m not stating any of this as objective fact. I remember her talking to the people in the room who were most interested in what she had to offer. She didn’t exclude anyone or ignore anyone—but drew people in with her passion for the subject. To appear on her radar one needed to take risks and show some passion of one’s own. I was already too far gone. I’d hatched a plan to run away and return to California and make it as an actor. I didn’t want small town art classes. I judged her and everyone else I liked before they could judge me. I’m not sure she and I ever even had a one on one conversation. I do, however, have an awareness of how often I thought of her over the years. I wondered what it was like to be her. There. In that town. I wondered if she were married or single or if she had a boy or girl friend. I wondered if she’d sensed my gayness. (After all, didn’t all artistic people have advanced gaydar?) I’ve thought about her when in museums or when playing with clay with my nieces and any time I’ve ever attempted to sketch something on paper (a town square, an apartment’s floor plan, an outfit that I’ve needed to see first on paper in order to describe in a story). She once told me a sketch I drew of a mouse sticking his head out of a hole in a triangular piece of Swiss cheese had good shadowing. I’ve never forgotten her or it.
Why? She taught me that having a life as an artist is a possibility. It didn’t matter where you lived. It’s how you lived. What mattered was how you saw the world and how you responded to it.
Things have been tough this semester at SF State with the cutbacks, and word is that it’ll get worse before it gets better. But I’m not going to complain. Why? When I was a little boy sitting on a rock looking up at the stars in a small town in Massachusetts, all I wanted was to be around people who made art with words or paper or their bodies. I wanted to make my living not as a truck driver or a computer programmer or a waiter (all jobs held by people I loved), but as an artist. And now I’m making my living as an artist and I’m not going to complain about a couple of cutbacks.
I few weeks ago I wanted to complain about the classes I’m teaching to forth and fifth graders and at an afterschool middle-school program. But I held my tongue. And I’m glad I did. Not only because they’re starting to trust me, to open up and actually write stuff down, but because during this conversation with my mother and her friend I realized that being a teacher has nothing to do with getting the results I want to see. It’s about presenting possibilities. These classes through Performing Arts Workshop are the most challenging I’ve taught. Or maybe it just seems like that because I’ve been teaching the others for a while and I’ve gotten more used to them. At any rate, they make me feel alive.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. By the time this goes up it will be the Monday after. I’m writing this from Mendocino where my mother and I have spent the week driving up and down Highway 1 stopping to eat sushi and Thai spring rolls and avocados on benches overlooking cliffs that drop into the bright blue Pacific. I was raised in California before my father was transferred to Massachusetts and my parents took my brothers and me along this coast when we were kids. It’s quite a sensation to revisit this area with my mom. She with her head of hair as white as the wave caps and me with my baldhead and graying beard. On days like today it seems like all of it makes sense and no matter what happens it’ll be okay. Or not. And either way, everything will continue on.
Writing Classes San Francisco
Mon, 06/22/2009 - 12:09pm | Matthew Clark D...
Greetings from NYC!
June 2009 Blog Update:
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If FACEBOOK hasn't already taken over your life, here's an opportunity to increase the chance that it will. CLICK HERE to become "a fan" of The Lab. Past, present, and future Labbers and lovers of words drop by and contemplate quotes for/by/about writing and/or life and/or art. Also, up-to-date information about The Lab and the people in it.
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Since arriving in New York, I've been busy gathering ideas for Douglass Street 6, The Fall 2009 Lab, which starts Tuesday 9/8/9 and runs for 8 consecutive weeks. If you're interested, you can guarantee yourself a seat now. (The Fall session usually sells out a few weeks before it starts).
I've joined eventbrite to make signing up a breeze. Click Here for more info & to register. I'd also very much appreciate it if you'd forward this email to that friend who has been talking about taking a writing class for eons.
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Updates:
Douglass Street Lab, Session 5, had its public reading,"Douglass Speaks," on June 2nd at Farley's. What a joy is was hear the brilliantly re-visioned material generated in The Lab. I'm still gleaning inspiration from their work.
Thanks to the writers who read & thanks to everyone who came!
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On June 6th, fellow writer/teacher Michael McAlister, curator of "The Barbershop: A Reading Series" hosted an incredible night at Joe's Barbershop. 75 people showed up to the reading, fostering an incredible feeling of community.
This wasn't your momma's literary reading!
Sure there were the usual writers and word nerds gathered at the book table and sitting on barber chairs. Gathered among them were neighborhood regulars and flat-topped leather-queens and all genders of porn divas sharing cupcakes and vodkas and diet cokes as stories and poems were read.
Lorena Landeros, a former student from SFSU-turned-Labber-turned-friend brought my character Janis to life by reading a chapter from my almost-completed manuscript LETTERS TO THE DEAD. Lorelei Lee, another former-Labber, read her brilliant story before traversing the applauding crowd in a hot pink dress and cork platforms (she had to catch a cab and get to work). Wolf Larsen transitioned the shop from a buzzing intermission into stillness as she sang her hauntingly beautiful songs. As a finale, form-master Randall Mann seduced and bewildered the audience with his unflinching poems.
What a gift to be a part of such a special night. Thanks Michael & Lorelei & Randall & Wolf & Joe & Everyone who came out.
***
NEW YORK HERE I AM!
I'm very lucky to have the chance to come New York for a few weeks every summer. My cousins Greg and Michael have no idea how valuable their hospitality. It's so much easier to find the extraordinary in the ordinary when I'm able to observe and explore another's ordinary for a while. (If that doesn't make sense to you, take The Lab, and it will).
NY's offerings light a fire under my you-know-what. I'll be participating in a reading here in NYC. Former-San Franciscans-now-Brooklynites and word nerds Evan Rehill and Anne-E Wood and I are reading at Cinders Gallery in Brooklyn on July 12th. I'll keep you posted with more details on Facebook in case you're in or will be in New York.
Here's to it! Thanks for reading.
Matthew
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Spring Has Sprung
Fri, 03/27/2009 - 7:21am | Matthew Clark D...
Ahhh....Spring.
I'm not one who has a favorite season. Each one offers its delights and literary opportunities. And each one its challenges (tax preparation, for example). But on a singular practical note, as a motorcyclist, Spring rules! Still chilly enough so you're not suffering in thick leather. Warm enough so you're not screaming IT'S SO COLD in your helmet.
Spring is also time for MA & MFA application results. Each year the number of letters-of-recommendation I write increases. Partly because I teach more students now than I used to. But another part is that so many undergrads just begin to grasp the concepts of the craft of fiction, and the possibilities they offer, and then they graduate. They want more!
Each year I see talented writers and students get their rejection and acceptance letters. It's always bittersweet. And with all things subjective, it's always surprising. I've already heard reports from disappointed students, with whom I've had my 3-year-plan talk. So many think it's so crucial to continue their study RIGHT NOW and IN COLLEGE. I try to remind them that being a student of writing is about being awake. Noticing the world. Paying attention. READING. Questioning your assumptions about people. Being a writer, I tell them from experience, isn't about a degree or a book deal. I tell them that if what they really want is to go to an MFA program, they should plan on working on their prose as full-time as life will permit. Then reapply. In the meantime, make the world the classroom.
That said, I can't help but be thrilled when I hear back from former students (both at State and in The Lab) who report that they've gained acceptance into the various programs. Several of my former students will be MA/MFA students at SFSU. Others have been invited to attend Columbia University, NYU, Brooklyn College, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Syracuse. These programs are so highly competitive it's practically staggering. So congratulations to them all.
Moving Forward:
Speaking of book deals... It's easy for me to hide behind process. Especially because I love teaching, and, unlike many other writers who teach SO they can write, I'm as happy with the word "teacher" as I am "writer" when people describe me. If I'm not careful, I can allow myself to think being a writer is solely about a way of seeing the world. I also got into a lot of trouble back when I'd just finished my MFA when I thought being a writer was solely about getting published.
In 2000, the year I turned 30 and finished my MFA, I got a story accepted to The Atlantic Monthly. From then on practically every short story I sent out got taken immediately. I had short piece up on the now-defunct EVO (Emerging Voices Online), the once-online version of The Mississippi Review. A New York agent contacted me after reading that story and asked if I had a novel. I did. It was, at the time, a controversial story about a young gay runaway who contracted HIV. Arguably on purpose. It was what I worked on the entire time I was in school. Both undergraduate and graduate. He read it. Loved it. Commented on it. I revised it. He signed me.
Looking back I can also see how my last year of grad school set me up to believe things that weren't true. Before my last year, I'd entered absolutely every contest available while in grad school. Both at SFSU and the wider local, State, and National. I received nothing but rejections for two years. Then, suddenly, in 2000, the floodgates opened. I won contests and grants. I had also been hired to teach from a highly-competitive pool of my peers. Nothing had changed except my luck. The only thing I could brag about was my persistence.
That combination of events really set me up to expect that my first novel would find a publisher. My agent was certain he could sell it. He had a plan. Then September 11th 2001 happened and things changed. The Atlantic delayed the publication of my story. My agent left. I got a new agent, but no one wanted my book.
At the time, I was living in Italy and trying to work on a second novel. I had nothing to send out because I hadn't written a short story in since college. My first novel took five years to write. The second project (which attempted to be a novel), I'd come to find out, was overly ambitious. Especially since I was trying to negotiate a new life in a new culture where I hadn't yet learned to speak the language. That project required the skill of Garcia Marquez or Toni Morrison in order to pull off what it was attempting. And frankly, I hadn't lived long enough in order to earn it! (I plan on going back to that material again on my 60th birthday).
I tried for a while to send out excerpts to keep my publications going—but since I hadn't found the central conflict in the "novel"—I couldn't find it in the scenes either—and none of them stood alone.
That phase of my life was not easy. But now I'm really glad I went through it. I see young (and old) writers who seem happy when they're publishing and miserable and competitive when they're not.
I do not want to live my life that way.
It took a long time for me to get over the disappointments. I had to swallow my pride. For two years after I moved back to the U.S. and had started teaching at State again, I supplemented my income by waiting on tables. Sometimes my students would end up in my restaurant. It was humbling, to say the least, to recite the fish specials to the students who had been in my classrooms at a University.
There, I discovered what was important to me. I wanted to concentrate my energies on regaining a practice. On seeing how i might bring rigor and excellence into the classroom. I sought out opportunities to be of service to the communities that had been so good to me. I started working for Performing Arts Workshop. First as the Artist-in-Residence at LYRIC, then as an Artist Mentor. Once again, I was humbled by these people whose lives weren't defined by the outward successes of their own careers (which they were having all the time), but by what they were contributing to their communities. I'm lucky because I work with folks both at SF State and at Performing Arts Workshop who're so active as voices for their communities. Reading at fund raisers. Offering their time. Their names. Their endorsements. They're incredible educators. They bring artistry to teaching. And I really get why they're contented with their lives.
I tried the best I could to take their lead. To reconnect to how I was raised (both of my parents have always been very active volunteers and community participants). Then, finally, a new idea for a novel came to me. And now it's time to finish it. I received a grant for the manuscript when the work was in its early stages. Because of the huge generosity of a good friend (who happens to be my cousin) and his partner, I have a place to go and write in the summer, away from what could distract me here.
Now its time to finish.
The manuscript will require, as all manuscripts do, revision. But still, I have so little left to do (comparatively speaking) to get the story to my agent and couple of trusted readers.
Those in my field who I admire, the ones I was describing before, do not contribute to their communities or bring passion and rigor to their classrooms INSTEAD OF moving forward in their art forms. They do it in part BECAUSE they're always moving forward and finding new ways to express themselves.
DOUGLASS STREET LAB UPDATE:
The January Lab was one of the best yet. Highlights were a visit from Nona Caspers (above) who read from her book A Little Book of Days and discussed with The Lab participants how to look for the extraordinary which emerges from the ordinary. We were lucky to be the first stop on her tour!
Another highlight was the public reading we held:
Above, Labber Zach Grear reads to a roomful of word lovers as the fog moved east across the city as the sun set in the windows all around us.
There's another shot. A whole album of pictures exists if you'd like to become a "fan" of "The Lab" on FACEBOOK.
Speaking of The Lab, I still have 3 slots for the next 8-week session which starts April 8th. Scroll down to see how to sign up.
Thanks for reading and, as always, all my best with your reading and writing.
Happy Holidays & Thank You.
Mon, 12/15/2008 - 8:09am | Matthew Clark D...
Douglass St. Writing Lab with
Matthew Clark Davison
6 Seats Remain for Winter 2009 Session Starting January 20th
UPDATE 12/29/08: 2 Seats Remain!
UPDATE 1/1/09: SOLD OUT!
Upcoming Readings
Tue, 09/16/2008 - 4:47pm | Matthew Clark D...
THANKS SO MUCH TO ALL WHO JOINED ME FOR THESE RECENT READINGS!
Check back here for future dates.
UPDATE:
“DOUGLASS READS 3”
Kicked Some Serious Ask on
TUESDAY OCTOBER 21st
6:30-8:00 pm
Last Laugh Cafe
1551 Dolores St. between 29th St. and Valley
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 824-5524