Happy July 4th Weekend!
Sun, 07/03/2011 - 1:59pm | Matthew Clark D...
*Next Session of The Lab will start 9/2011
*Reading at Book Thug Nation in Brooklyn
I’m at Charles de Gaul airport waiting to board a flight to New York. This after spending over an hour in line for the only airline left on earth that does first-come/first-serve live-in-person-not-online check-in. This after sitting on a train that took over an hour to get to the penultimate stop, and then a half hour to get from that stop to the airport. It was 95 degrees and two dehydrated and grouchy families surrounded me in my drenched tank top. By the time I got in line at the airport, I looked like I’d just taken my turn at a wet-tee-shirt-contest. And no one on earth could possibly love his life more than I do mine right now.
The tiny tiny apartment in Paris my friend Ebi rented was a half-block from a bakery that almost always had a line of Parisians out the door. This morning, on the way back from my workout at a neighborhood park, I bought enough quiche and bread to feed a family of five. She and I had our final Parisian lunch in the shade of the trees on the lawn at the place of my first Parisian outing: outside the architecture museum at Trocadero facing The Eiffel Tower.
We packed melon and cheese and quiche: one with tuna and black olives; the other with salmon and spinach. Also a baguette with pistachios, walnuts, golden and dark raisins. Spread out on Ebi’s sarong, we talked about how extreme the weather was(we both froze and boiled on the trip), the heft of our accomplished itinerary, and we congratulated ourselves for staying within what may’ve been the tightest budget Paris has ever allowed.
While others were drinking their coffees and eating their nicoise salads in sidewalk cafés, Ebi and I had our bags full of goodies: sandwiches with French ham and French cheese on French bread…all bought from the grocery store…so we could eat on the steps of Notre Dame or in the Pompidou’s sculpture garden high above the city or on the left bank’s walkway hugging The Seine.
Afterward, we drank coffee standing at the bar. We returned at 9 for a homemade dinner and showers and change of clothes before heading out to the Marais to walk among the Parisians until 1 or 2.
Museums, shops, churches, views…we wanted it all; and we got it. The only thing we didn’t get was sleep.
A relatively long time has passed since I’ve sent out a monthly check-in from my life as a writer and teacher as it relates to The Douglass Street Lab; and it hasn’t been for lack of inspiration.
This year has been a trip in more ways that one. I taught 6 classes last year at State, did three sessions of The Lab, and interned four or five new artists at Performing Arts Workshop. I also subbed a bunch of 3rd grade poetry classes, started a new novel, redrafted the finished manuscript, all while looking for a new agent.
I was lucky enough to spend Christmas in Pittsburgh with my older brother, Jon, his wife and three daughters, before and after flying back and forth to Colorado Springs. There, I stayed with my mom, sister-and-law, niece, and brother Paul as he prepared for and then underwent chemo therapy and radiation for neck cancer. More than ever, I committed to teaching, art, and exercise (I lost 20 pounds without noticing) as vital outlets for the full gamut of human emotion as it vibrated through me.
Professional envy, impatience and frustration with the agent search mixed with the joys of my own creative breakthroughs and the successes of students. I experienced spotty and breathtaking inspiration as the kids (and the teachers) at The Workshop struggled to fit all their huge humanity into their creative movement, theater, world dance and creative writing classes.Session after session of The Lab saw its participants take risks, engage in critical thinking, and use the arts to practice seeing how seemingly distinct forms have more in common than it may seem on the surface. If that wasn’t enough, I rode waves of appetite-robbing fear that I’d lose my brother. The fear would wane and a strange peaceful acceptance of the absurdities of life and my complete inability to control almost anything would wax..
I applied to Yaddo (got wait-listed…wish me luck), a MacArthur (form letter rejection), and after a bunch of very encouraging notes from agents who said some version of no before I signed with agent Mark McVeigh. Almost immediately afterward, I received two other offers.
In the middle of my trip to Paris (my first) I was able to go to Italy and visit my friend Daniela who I met 20 years ago soon after my best friend Richard died of AIDS.
Daniela was the person who made me feel young again. I was young. In my early twenties, but at the time, I was so old. Two close friends’ deaths a year apart the two years of relentless illness leading up to their deaths preceded our meeting. She and I were inseparable. We worked at the same restaurant, had slumber parties, and went dancing three, four, five nights a week. Now she’s a married mother of two and I’m the godfather of her oldest son.
The years I lived in Italy were nothing like what my former-teacher Francis Mayes described in UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN. The last few months in Italy vie for first place in the category of most challenging times of my life.
In was during this time that my friends Eddy and Lore and Ebi, perhaps without knowing it, came to my rescue. All three were people I’d befriended after starting as an English teacher. I don’t like to ponder, not even for a second, what that episode in my life would’ve been like without them.
Through Daniela and Eddy and Lore and Ebi—I learned something new about my own family. To others, we may seem an odd bunch—and while we’re all living lives quite different from one another—the older I get the more I realize how wrong I may’ve been at times.
What I interpreted as the crimes my parents committed against my freedom (which added to the reasons I had for running away at 15), I now understand the emotional filters through which I was interpreting their behavior.
All of it makes sense. Their interpretations through the years. Mine. But the reuniting that started after my oldest niece was born continues to sustain me emotionally.
The strange bonds of my family fascinate and move me much in the way great fiction does.
Susan Sontag says, “A great writer of fiction both creates—through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through new forms—a new world, a world that responds to a world, the world a writer shares with other people but is unknown or misknown by still more people, confined in their worlds: call that history, society, what you will.”
As they own their own business and work close to home, I was invited to join them as soon as I’d had all the time I needed to prepare. Without adequate time to do and dry additional laundry, and with luggage weight-restrictions that prohibited traveling with damp clothes, I decided to do a session of P90X wearing only a hand-washable pair of underwear.
In the middle of a kick-punch combo, Lore’s 80-year-old mother, walked in to pick up their recycling, leave lettuce from her garden, and “check-up” on “things.” No call. No doorbell. Just a key in the door and then a greeting while I dripped sweat and tried to cover my very exposed body.
She seemed completely un-phased.
I like the fact that my family calls before they visit. I’m pleased that most of them prefer to stay in a hotel rather than try and squeeze into my 400 square-foot apartment. I appreciate that there are locks on the bathroom doors of my own and every bathroom in the members of my family’s individual dwellings. (Daniela’s and Eddy’s do not, and when Daniela’s kids wanted to know where Uncle Matthew disappeared to, they came looking).
Naked? No big deal. Mid-business? No big deal. The two years I lived in Italy also encouraged me to ponder the context in which I grew up. It was the time of the talk-show obsession with “The Dysfunctional Family.” It told me my family should not have been the way it was, it may’ve skewed my objectivity, and worse: it interfered with the joy that can come from accepting people for who they are.
This is an adult’s perspective, and I was a teenager at the time I left home—and the context of The Dysfunctional Family was only one of several complicated dynamics in my life at the time. I’m not implying that a person should stay connected to his or her family under any circumstance. Those choices are personal, and I’m happy that I left home at fifteen.
I might as well be. It’s what happened.
Like in a good play, no one in my family, including me, was blameless—and at the exact same time no one was exactly to blame. It’s so much richer when I look at it like this. I’ve been able to glean so much joy from the strange and compelling bonds of family.
Speaking of good plays, I’m back in New York now, and last night I saw Larry Kramer’s The Normal Hearton Broadway.
Twenty years ago, when I aspired to become an actor, I used a monologue from that play as both a rehearsal and audition piece.
At the time, my friends and coworkers in the restaurant business were dropping one after another of what Kramer calls The Plague.
It seemed the only monologue that captured what it was like to be me at the time. It contributed to my becoming a writer and reader and lover of art. In the monologue there’s a long list of gay or presumed-gay artists throughout history. I looked up every one I’d never heard of and read their work.
Until last night, I’d never been to a “straight” play (meaning a non-musical) where the audience burst into applause between acts. More powerful for me today than it was then, I’m utterly encouraged by Kramer’s ability to have two matched sides in scenes where a lesser writer would’ve skewed the argument to one side.
Like with all the best work, the play seems more of an investigation—a desperate yearning to grasp the motivations of a group of people all responding in such different ways in the early years of the crisis.
The play is autobiographical. The characters Ned and Ben Weeks are similar in every way to Larry and Arthur Kramer, brothers who had a complex relationship filled with love, occasional estrangement, disagreement, and passion.
Arthur put Larry into therapy to “cure” him of his homosexuality at a time in history when this was thought of as a kindness. Over the years, Arthur was interviewed and said he’d changed his position. That he’d become convinced that his brother’s homosexuality wasn’t an aberration, but a mere difference.
There’s a scene in the play when both brothers argue their positions, when Ned is desperate to have Ben validate him—and Ben will not. He can’t. He believes his brother’s sexuality to be an illness. The actors, Joe Mantello and Mark Harelik managed to play Kramer’s scene with so much passion and humanity—I found myself agreeing completely with each of the characters as they spoke. This while I completely disagreed with each of the characters as they spoke.
Ah! The theater!
Because of my own complicated relationships with my brothers, I wondered what if Larry had given up on Arthur because of his struggle? What if Arthur had given up on Larry? For one, Yale University would not have had The Larry Kramer Initiative from 2001-2005.
On the Italy trip, I noticed how expressive my Italian friends are with their love and affection. They wouldn’t stop showing me and telling me how much they cared about me. Maybe because I only had a week. Perhaps they’d always been that expressive but I didn’t register it. Or maybe because both of my friends have had kids and perhaps they’ve gotten used to saying “I love you” a lot.
Or maybe because some serious shit has gone down in all of our lives since we’ve seen each other last. Who can know? but Jesus,did we demonstrate how we feel for one another.
This is not one of my strong points—but I think it needs to become one. What am I waiting for? I slept on the couch the three days I stayed at Daniela’s house. Every morning, her husband/father of my godson woke me up at 5:30 in the morning to tell me to go get in his bed with his wife. “It’s more comfortable and the kids won’t wake you later,” he whispered.
The first morning, I padded into the bedroom, timid because of the cultural context I come from, but because he insisted, I groggily followed instruction. Daniela, without opening her eyes, folded the comforter like giant bird opening its wing. After I was in the bed, she covered me. In minutes bother of us were asleep again.
I dreamt of my friend Richard and San Francisco in the early 90s and Daniela’s and my slumber parties. During the day I couldn’t stop telling her I loved her.
Lore and Eddy were my hosts for another three days. Lore had her first and only daughter at around forty. When I told her that she seems to have taken well to motherhood, her eyes welled with tears and she told me she has the sensation of being in love with her own child.
We talked about the decision I made soon after I left Italy, nearly seven years ago, to try and practice abstinence from anything with a chemically depressive effect: nicotine, alcohol, even refined sugar—what led to it and the joy it brings me—and I realized right in front of her, that while both of us have our fair share of complaints—we’re happy.
If you know me well, you know I’m incapable of syrupy happy. More like: content; invested; present.
Lore and I didn’t romanticize our lives. I told her of my struggles as a single guy in San Francisco. My struggle to let go of what I perceive to be my autonomy and independence, and she spoke of her own trails.
All of our best conversations have taken place in the kitchen while preparing food. We put together a feast and carried dishes from the kitchen to the table on their outside garden deck—and I remembered Thanksgiving one year at my first apartment on Divisadero.
I was 19 years old and my lesbian (at the time) roommate/bosom-buddy always said we’d always be each other’s family. That one day we’d have kids together. She sent me to Safeway with a shopping list and on it she wrote, among the ingredients for stuffing and mashed potatoes, “Turkey Baster: the reusable kind.”
This before anyone I knew was dead of AIDS. Chuck was already sick but he hadn’t died. That day that year he’d starting having occasional dementia. He also liked to experiment with his own dosage plans for the pain meds, so no one really knew what was up when he showed up in Jackie-O sunglasses and a head scarf carrying a centerpiece featuring a Barbie Doll in Alice Cooper hair and make-up.
She stood in a field of Gerber daisies. I remember that we were all so alive and all so afraid and was that a wonderful Thanksgiving.
So I’m back in New York and I haven’t even talked about the art I saw in Paris or the flight I took in a tiny plane over the lakes of Northern Italy.
I’m feeling open. Hopeful. Wanting to take a step toward that freedom to express emotion that I learn from my Italian family of friends. In fact, my cousin who hosts me in New York every summer just came in to say hi and I wanted to pick him up and spin him around and soak his cheeks with kisses for the opportunities he and his partner have given me over the years.
The support and the freedom to get out of my daily life and such a wonderful place to write. I didn’t do it, because that’s not exactly how we roll, and I trust I’ll find a way to let him know. He’s one of the angels that lets me have this amazing life.
My friend Mark who hosts The Lab on Douglass Street; the people who sign up for it; my peers at Performing Arts Workshop; my colleagues and boss at San Francisco State. If you made it this far: congratulations! Now you get some practical updates. Thanks for reading and for all of your support.
I’m reading Saturday in Brooklyn at Book Thug Nation with Leigh Gallagher, Evan Rehill, and Anne-E Wood. Here’s the invite on Facebook. NY homies: PLEASE COME!!
Former Labber Ethel Rohan has a new chapbook out by PANK.
Former Labber Roseli Ilano is the editor of a new anthology.
Former Labber Lorelei Lee is teaching: Sex, Death, Laughter, Disease: Writing and the Body at The Center for Sex and Culture. Are you a former Labber?
Do you have any writing-related announcements?
Reserve a spot for The September Lab.
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.
MFA Creative Writing San Francisco
Thu, 01/13/2011 - 12:38am | Matthew Clark D...
Happy New Year.
As of the writing this update, The Douglass Street Lab starting on January 18th is sold out. Please contact me if you're interested in getting on the wait list or taking the next 8-week cycle of The Lab, which will most likely start late-March. I'm also on the lookout for new places to physically house The Lab. Mark, the current host, has been so good to me, but his sweetheart just moved in and I want to give them their space. Let me know if you have any suggestions as to a conducive, affordable place that can sit 10-15 people.
I started this update last week from the burbs of Pittsburgh. My sister-in-law Vicki was out of town, so I went to hang out with my brother and his three daughters for a few nights. One night I went out for a drive in the rain and came home to everyone sleeping. The East Coast's winter had stripped its trees and browned its grass and covered both with glinting frost. That and the ground soak of a sunny day's thaw and Pennsylvania's windy roads reminded me of the bittersweet time I last lived with my brothers, in 1985, in Massachusetts, when I was learning to drive, soon before I made the first series of choices that would turn me into a writer.
While in Pittsburgh, the girls wanted to read me their stories, show me their art, their photographs, their scripts. They wanted to hug me and hang on me and call me all sorts of nicknames. Jon admitted that he "totally relies" on Vicki for food so I whipped together some meals. My brother's instructions? "Do what you do to make it taste good and I'll do the dishes."
What a great way to transition into the new year: feeling loved, wanted, and useful.
Most people who've become writers haven't because they've spent their lives feeling the way I did at my brother's this New Year's. In fact, my senses are honed to pay attention to situations alive with mystery and contradiction, charged with static, things compelling and disturbing. When I first became serious about writing, I realized that its these situations I need to mine, as almost nothing else is worthy of fiction. Friends would occasionally comment about how detached I could seem in dramatic situations--and they had reason--because of the intensity with which I was observing and recording the nuances. I could be absolutely miserable about what was falling apart in front of me while simultaneously giddy, fascinated by what it might provide for my stories. This was true even when the thing falling apart in front of me was me.
Even in the early days of my writing, in the face of AIDS and watching friends die young, I'd become transfixed by contradictory details in the hospital room: the smell of maple syrup from under the plastic lid covering uneaten French toast on the table next to the plant where the new bud of an orchid flower had started to push through its spike.
This tendency, while good for my writing practice, I realize only in retrospect, kept me from fully experiencing relationships. Ignorant (or perhaps indifferent) to what likely started as a defense mechanism, I felt lucky, even if occasionally inconvenienced. I must have believed that I did what all writers do. I wasn't betraying my friends by using their personal lives in my fiction, so there weren't consequences. Instead of sordid details, I paid attention to tendencies, moods, the specific ways people reacted in extreme situations (bad or good). I paid attention to people justifying their bad choices, saying yes when they wanted to say no. Keeping score.I filled notebooks with facial expressions, imagined dialogue that I came up with while studying their expressions.
You may remember me writing about the first class of a former session of The Lab, one where I borrowed from a Michelle Carter exercise and asked participants to consider the thing they most fear writing. Not because it's so hardcore or punk rock or revealing or shameful (yawn)--but for fear of getting wrong. The subject or theme or experience so fraught with meaning that they avoid it for fear of failing to capture its depth and all its complicated nuance.
In that update, I talked about my relationship with my brothers. All of my characters have been the "only child." Soon after this discovery, I started writing about a character--like me in some ways--not at all like me in others--who has a complicated relationship with his brothers, full of physical distance, age differences, lifestyle differences. Much had been lost and disfigured because of the violence and addiction in their childhood home, causing the two older brothers to flee at young ages. The imaginative world revolved around the reuniting of the main character with a second brother after the third's death.
Soon after I started this story, I got a call from my own real-life younger brother who told me he has cancer. That was early November. Since then, I've made three trips to be with my family. Two to visit Paul as he goes through radiation and chemotherapy. He now has an excellent prognosis for a full recovery after a grim initial prognosis. He's finished with chemotherapy and only has a few radiation sessions left.
These past few months my real work has been staying present for my family. I never once thought of how the events might've worked in a scene. Instead I concentrated on the soup I was making my brother. Or sitting in the hospital room listening to the clicking of the keys of our laptops while he received his fluids through an IV. We all wanted to feel better, to try and have some modicum of control in the outcome, whether it was to get him to drink a Gatorade or eat some soup or take a walk. If I could be the one to convince him to do something "positive," when he felt too tired or depressed or overwhelmed, I could fool myself into believing he'd have a better chance of getting better because of me.
Of course this caused nothing but tension. My brother is a smart man. He understood the consequences the doctors explained about not remaining fed and hydrated. If he had been able to eat or drink when he did not; he would've. When I just sat with him and talked to him about his coaching (he's a soccer coach) or his daughter or whether or not to get our mother an ipad for Christmas, he seemed comforted. Or perhaps that's when I felt comforted.
I knew I needed to quit smoking and drinking years before I quit smoking and drinking. All of the signs were there. Yet no person telling me I needed to quit made me quit. The only advise that I ever got that helped me stop was my friend Michael's. He said, "Honey, smoke until you're done and try to enjoy it while it lasts. When you're ready, you'll quit."
2010 was a professionally satisfying year in some quiet ways, though it may seem on the outside, disappointing. In response to a difficult literary fiction market, my agent decided to concentrate only on non-fiction. I took the news in stride and used the time that had passed since I finished the first definitive draft of a novel manuscript and reread it and rewrote it. I finished the new draft over the summer and have started the new agent search. As tough of a time as "they" say it is to sell a first novel, with so much pressure from the big commercial houses to buy potential best-sellers, and with talk of electronic publishing making the literary agent a job of the past, it's also a tough time to be an agent.
I remember when I used to believe that the hardest part of publishing a novel was writing a good one. I've learned a lot about the business, and I'm moving forward in a multitude of directions. I also feel much more prepared than ever to continue writing in a time of transition. Why?
There has been a resurfacing of the close examination of what tragic things happen to students and teachers within academia. Does teaching in the MFA program make the writer weak? Does it rob him of his time he could be spending pounding away at the laptop? Is he so inundated with mediocre student work that it infiltrates the creative centers of his brain and render him mediocre too? Is he sacrificing too much? Do under-published academic writers become the most bitter people at parties? (I have seriously seen all those and more mentioned recently).
With so many great books and stories coming from those both in and out of academia, in and out of the commercial mainstream publishing world, it seems absurd to even engage in this discussion as if "it's good" or it's bad" to teach could be concluded. It's almost always someone who feels rejected by academia posing the argument as to why it's bad and someone struggling with his street-cred who valiantly defends the institution. We all make choices. I don't know a single person attempting to write--either within or from outside academia--who doesn't make a list of sacrifices and compromises to have a life including writing. And none of them are tragic.
And moreover, Who, besides writers, care about how writers write? Sacrifices are being made by people I know who're blowing glass, painting on canvas, collecting fine wine, raising kids, and passionate about surfing. Slate and NYT aren't running articles on that (but then again articles aren't written by glass-blowers usually).
To me it seems ungrateful, an excess of navel-gazing to even have this argument. There isn't a person teaching creative writing who couldn't apply for a different job and there isn't a person not teaching creative writing who couldn't pursue an academic life.
There is, at very least, an opportunity from within various academic environments to learn something enduring. Not everyone takes the opportunity (though many of my own teachers have and continue to) and that is to come out of oneself. I know that there are teachers who teach writing to gain a means to an end, but they must be plain stupid because it's too little money for too much work. At least in the adjunct circuit.
I want to read an article about those artists who see teaching as a separate and sustaining art form. One that allows the writer to listen and seek out and reflect back the kernels in early drafts that might lead an aspiring artist to risk more. Whether in or out of academia, most artists I know have a list of people in and out of the art world who they credit for helping them sharpen their senses and broaden their vision. I've met a few who seem to think that their so-called artistry and so-called vision comes entirely from within--but I've yet to meet one with whom I'd like to have coffee.
Which brings me to my concluding paragraph. It's a big thank you. This last year has been a tough one--I won't lie. Lots of little disappointments added up in my own creative career. I let personalities bug me. I felt as frequently wary as inspired by San Francisco's lit scene, but had to continue to be in it for work. Paul's diagnosis and the utter lack of control I had in being able to change it or do anything to take away his pain set me close to the edge. And it was teaching that saved me. Not every moment was glorious. No particular student breakthrough gave me the illusion that what I do is good. But seeing people engage, listen to one another, set out to earnestly help each other come closer to what they hope to write for fear of getting wrong. It moved me. Or rather, it kept me moving. So thanks. And Happy New Year.
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.
Fiction Classes in San Francisco
Sat, 07/11/2009 - 1:51pm | Matthew Clark D...
This Blog Entry Contains:
*Updates.
*NY Reading with Anne-E Wood and Evan Rehill on 7/12.
*Fall 2009 Registration Douglass Street Lab.
*1-on-1 Manuscript Consultations.
*Become "a fan" of The Lab on FACEBOOK.
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Updates:
I'm delighted to report that the finished draft of my novel manuscript is finally in the hands of my agent and a couple of trusted friends. I've learned a lot about writing (and about myself) from the last phase of the process, and wrote about it a bit in a blog entry I posted this past spring.
"Do not hurry. Do not rest." is a Goethe quote for which I've come to gain the utmost appreciation.
Now I'm vacillating between complete and utter calm and serenity (which very well may be denial) and impatience to get back to work. Happily for me, the ratio is about 80/20.
Given that I'm here in New York, with the splendid good fortune to be living in an art gallery, I have no shortage of activities with which to fill the time I'd been working on the novel. I've been going to plays and museums, walking around taking photographs, talking to visual artists about their processes, and reading, reading, reading.
In those ways life feels so very good.
The same day I finished my manuscript, I also received a phone call from my boss at SFSU. Two of the three classes I was scheduled to teach have been canceled due to the disastrous state California finds itself in.
That's never a fun call to receive.
But it's not surprising when one makes one's living in Arts Education in a state institution. After all, California employs a former bodybuilder as the governor.
It'll be interesting to see the art that will result from particular time in history.
My hope is my SFSU students will not be entirely discouraged by their ever-decreasing educational options—but will instead keep reading, keep writing, keep on engaging in the activities that ignite that fundamental human impulse to create.
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R/A R/A READING with Anne-E Wood and Evan Rehill.
If you're in NY, or know someone who is, please consider coming to and/or forwarding this invite to your NY friends:
Sunday, July 12, 2009
7:00pm - 8:00pm
I'll be reading from LETTERS TO THE DEAD with the following two former-SF-writers who now live in Brooklyn:
Anne-E. Wood's fiction is forthcoming or has appeared in Tin House, Gargoyle, Able Muse, Agni, The Chicago Quarterly Review, New Letters, Karamu Literary Journal, Beloit Fiction Journal, Other Voices, The Cream City Review, Fiction Attic, Fourteen Hills Magazine, Hustlers: An Anthology of Gay Male Sex for Hire (under a pen name) and others. She has an MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University and won the 2006 Michael Rubin Chapbook Award for her collection Two If By Sea. She has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University, Rutgers University, The New Jersey Institute of Technology, the Gotham Writers' Workshop in New York City, and in public schools, juvenile halls, homeless shelters, and youth centers all over the country. She currently lives in Brooklyn and is at work on a novel.
Evan Rehill grew up in Jersey. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Instant City, Watchword, 14 Hills, Big Bell, and Kitchen Sink Magazine. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2006, won the Miriam Ylvisaker Award for Fiction in 2007, and earned his MFA from San Francisco State University in 2008, where he was also an Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing. He has delivered lectures at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and on Neighborhood Public Radio. Push Press published The Way We’re Used To (limited edition) in the summer of 2008. Rehill has completed a collection of short stories (Night Comes Later) and is at work on a novel. He currently teaches fiction at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in Manhattan. He lives in Brooklyn.
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Douglass Street 6, The Fall 2009 Lab, 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). As it stands, a few slots remain.
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.
Click here:
to find out more about The Lab
about Matthew
or to read testimonials from people who've taken The Lab.
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OPEN SLOTS FOR MANUSCRIPT CONSULTATION
Since I'll be teaching less at SFSU this Fall, I'll have a few extra open slots for 1 on 1 Manuscript consulting. For nearly fifteen years, I've been working with fiction/memoir writers who're interested in tightening their work to send out or to apply for graduate school, fellowships, grants—or to simply improve upon their craft. My clients have included Pushcart and O'Henry winning authors, and writers whose imaginations and hard work got them invited into MFA programs as competitive as University of Oregon, Syracuse, Columbia, and NYU.
While The Lab is ideal for people who want to generate new work and/or to expand a project; working 1-on-1 is best for those who have an existing project they're ready to work hard on finishing. Click here to find out more about how it works. Click here to read testimonials with people who've worked 1-on-1 with me.
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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 andlovers of words drop by and contemplate quotes for/by/about writingand/or life and/or art. Also, up-to-date information about The Lab andthe people in it.
Late Spring Update
Mon, 05/18/2009 - 6:31pm | Matthew Clark D...
Thanks for visiting my blog. Hope everyone receiving this is enjoying their Spring. San Francisco is having INCREDIBLE weather. As soon as I'm done with this entry, in fact, I'm off to Ft. Mason park with some sunscreen, a picnic, and pile of final papers from my writing students at San Francisco State.
This update contains:
*Fall 2009 Registration Douglass Street Lab
*Save The Dates! 2 Upcoming Readings
*Douglass Street 5 Update
*Matthew's New York Summer
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If you're interested in being a part of The Fall 2009 Lab, which starts Tuesday 9/8/9 and runs for 8 consecutive weeks, you can garauntee yourself a seat now. (The Fall session usually sells out quickly). I've joined eventbrite to make signing up a breeze.
For more info & to register, CLICK HERE.
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Save the dates:
1. Douglass Street Lab Session 5 will be having its public reading "Douglass Speaks" on Tuesday June 2nd, so save the date! Exact time and location to be announced soon on The Lab's Facebook Page.
2. To help kick off the inaugural evening of "The Barbershop: A Reading Series," I will be reading (along with a very special guest) from my almost-completed manuscript LETTERS TO THE DEAD (a novel-in-progress) . Randall Mann and Lorelei Lee, both wildly talented writers, will also be reading. Please join us for the fun. There will be an optional $5 suggested donation to help cover the cost of snacks, chairs, wine, beverages, etc. Here's the info:
Saturday, June 6, 2009
8:00pm - 9:30pm
2150 Market Street (between Church and Sanchez)
San Francisco, CA
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Douglass Street 5 Update:
Last Tuesday Douglass 5 completed their 6th Session. We read an interview with Rafael Campo, who is, among other things, a gay Cuban-American, a Harvard Medical School physician and poet, who describes his writing process this way
"I’ve been drawn so irresistibly to so-called received forms...they are physical touchstones that provide a kind of entrée into the arduous imaginative journey back to my lost, decrepit island, to inhabit the beautiful but forbidden body of my desire. So I try to rewrite the sonnet, pushing against its narrow walls, asking it to contain a not-so-different love; beneath the scaffolding of a villanelle, I imagine I might rebuild the fanciful architecture of crumbling Havana."
Members of The Lab, after reading the interview and one of Campo's poems, were then challenged to see what they could get onto paper about their characters using exactly thirteen lines (Campo's poem was five 13-line stanzas) under the catagorical prompts of: Injury, Esctasy, Dispair, & Repair.
While some of the members showed some initial resistance, the findings were INCREDIBLE. They were then encouraged to continue with or completely abandon the formal constraints of the exercize as their projects and vision deemed fit. THRILLING!
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NEW YORK HERE I COME!
After a quietly glorious year of writing and teaching and frequent immersion in San Francisco's art & performance scene, I'm putting the finishing touches on the first real definitive beginning-to-end draft of LETTERS TO THE DEAD to send to my agent and a couple of trusted readers.
Then I'm getting on a plane to New York to spend 6 weeks with Greg, Michael, Jetson, and Frizbee (my new canine nephew who I have yet to meet.)
I plan on recharging by immersion into New York's artistic offerings while doing the final revisions on the novel. I'm also very excited to get back into short fiction. I recently took an inventory of the stories I've written and hope to be able to compile them into my next manuscript.
I'll update you in June and July from New York.
Happy Late-Spring early summer everyone!