Happy New Year! 

Let me get some business out of the way: the iaugural Nob Hill 6-week session of The Lab starts TONIGHT (1/24), and there may still be one seat left. Email me ASAP if you'd like to sign up. 

And big Thank Yous to everyone who helped spread the word! 

(Now for the obligatory...) Keep up with The Lab :: Writing Classes with Matthew Clark Davison on Facebook; on Twitter. 

Now for a long overdue update: 

***

I hear the mail carrier below my window in the entryway of my building while I'm listening to and simultaneously re-reading "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor. By today's standards, it's a poor-quality, but none-the-less revisiting recording of her actual voice at Vanderbilt University in 1959. I'm delighted by how funny Ms. O'Connor was on that day, how rapt the audience seemed by their bursts of laughter, especially given how serious Ms. O'Connor comes across in her essays on writing, and how grim the subject matter of much of her fiction, even when humorous.

I book mark it, pause the recording, and run downstairs to my building's entryway to give the carrier a DVD mailer I've needed to return for a month. She takes it and hands me my stack of mail. In it, there's a card my mother told me to expect. I open it on the way back to my office, knowing she recently visited her sisters and mom in Wisconsin. Inside, there's a photograph with me in it from 1976. The photo is of a road trip--and while I'm grateful that ours did not end up like the one in the O'Connor story--it's not entirely unlike it either: family sets out on a vacation. A woman in slacks. A grandmother and young boy in tow. Detour onto an unpaved road. 

I stare at the photo for a while and then return to reading/listening to the story. My head is full of the imagery from the parts of the south I've never been, and memories of my childhood. Both the memory and the story act as filters and re-contextualize the other.

It's this process that makes me feel very happy to be alive. 

It's the end of the first month of The New Year, so back to school and I start of a new session of The Lab. It's been a great break, but I can hardly wait to get back into the mix. Why? Because of this: how listening to someone else's story can help you tell your own.

I reach the part where The Misfit says, "My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. 'You know,' Daddy said, 'it's some that can live their whole life without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything!'"

Most of the writers and artists I know, in a moment if being "into everything," were told a version of what The Misfit's father said. Given what you can glean from The Misfit's life circumstances, most of us who share his propensity for having "to know why" are fortunate to have found our creative outlets.

I am not implying that without art we would have become serial killers...but given the personality of a couple of the writers (and aspiring writers) I've met...well...I not ruling it out either.

In the photo, I was six: two years younger than O'Connor's character John Wesley. We'd parked on a dead-end road in Broomsfield, Colorado. I'm holding onto my Grandpa Clark's hand. Grandma Clark is holding onto Grampa's arm with one hand, and her sister Dorothy's with the other. A chain of four of us stand on a narrow and gravely road with a sedan parked a couple hundred yards in the distance at the base of a stone cliff.

Why was I the only kid in the picture? Where were my brothers? My parents? Who took the photograph? Why was there a car at the dead end? What am I holding in my left hand? Wasn't Dorothy one of my aunts who died of alcoholism? She looks so healthy and capable in her pleated white slacks and open-necked, white-and-red striped blouse. Why didn't she get help? 

Now I'm thinking of the new novel I'm writing. How little I know about Thomas' childhood, and how important it is to the story (in ways I don't know why, but nonetheless I know); specifically his childhood relationship to his brothers. And suddenly, I have an idea to interject a memory of his childhood, the only kid with a bunch of adults on this road trip. Thomas will remember it in a scene where, shortly after a tragedy happens in both their lives, he is about to see and have dinner with his father.  

My memory of my Grandpa Clark, who died shortly after my newly acquired photograph was taken, is of a very quiet man. I liked him and felt he liked me. I don't get to see Grandma Clark very often, but she, too, has always been my ally. I specifically remember her keeping an eye on me during the years my parents could describe as my time of being "into everything," before I left home for good, when my against-the-grain personality started to emerge.

Grandma Clark and I once ditched the rest of the folks in a lake house at a family reunion, got into a rowboat and made our way far from shore. Surrounded by water, she told me stories about growing up on a farm, what it was like to be married to Grandpa, what my mom had been like as a little girl. If her stories took her to a place that triggered it, like the childhood death of her oldest son, or the day my mom left home, Grandma cried freely, just like I always had, and just like my mother did and still does. That day, Grandma kept talking through her tears and snot and constricted throat until the stories shifted into scenes that made her laugh. 

Why? Neither of my grandmothers was anything like the grandmother in the story. So, did I think of myself like her? A racist, petulant, selfish, manipulative liar who seemed to require a gun in her face after witnessing each member of her family's murders before she could access her own decency? 

No, I didn't. But perhaps more importantly: Yes, I did.

It bugs me when people reduce art and the people who make it. "It's an Asian-American book." "It's a Black play." "It's Cuban art." The other night I made the mistake of confronting a dear friend for calling a movie that focuses on two guys in love "a gay movie."

My friend was merely using economical language. It didn't warrant a confrontation. Still, I couldn't help asking her if she'd refer to any of the thousands of movies focusing on a lover relationship between a man and a woman as "straight" or "heterosexual." No, I said. You wouldn't. You'd refer to the themes and the actors and the writing and the script and the cinematography. It halted--or at very least, derailed--what could have been an interesting conversation. 

Petulance?  

As a teacher, I reduce art and the people who make it all the time. If my experience allows me to assume, Flannery O'Connor's virtuosity with the short story probably has nothing to do with the fact that she was Southern, a woman, or Catholic. There are plenty of people who fit those categories and others who have lost their father to a disease they'd later suffer from, too. I sometimes talk to students as if it's BECAUSE OF these things that O'Connor was able to write these stories--rather than the fact that she was able to write amazing stories IN SPITE OF certain challenges. 

I use broad strokes of her biography in attempt to manipulate students. I want them to find her stories as moving as I find them. It's an attempt to validate my own tastes and what resonates for me. I exploit these facts outside of the story itself to further my theories about what I think O'Connor sought to achieve. 

Hypocricy? 

O'Connor, in almost all her stories, reminds me of what can happen when there's no outlet for a person's energy. The danger of being trapped. Whether it's trapped in a body that doesn't work--or trapped in a time or town or job that limits the person's options and forces the person to downsize his or her dreams and desires. 

Last semester at SFSU, I taught a graduate-level process class called Characterization. In it, ten smart aspiring writers showed up every week. In addition to a bunch of short stories, we discussed the novels Sula, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and The Yacoubian Building. On the surface, these three books have nearly nothing in common. The subject matter and style in which each author chose to depict her or his characters, allowed us to freely experiment with the limitless choices we have in how to depict our own. Even though the focus was on character, a common theme emerged in the works: what happens when the opportunities available for expression do not match the person's capacity to create and give them form? 

2011 was an especially challenging year. I didn't get a couple of things that I worked hard for and really wanted. I came close, which was, on one level, encouraging; but on another level even more painful. As embarrassing as it is to admit, I metaphorically felt a bit like there was someone there with a gun to shoot me every minute. Career stuff was hard. Family health scares were hard. Other changes, too. Hard, but not impossible. Not even close. And I owe so much of it to this freedom I have, that Sula and Oscar and Taha el Shazli and John Wesly's grandmother did not. 

In thinking about what to say in this newsletter/update, I thought of doing a repeat of last year. Of singing the praises of former students who've gone on to get into MFA programs across the country; publish books; win awards. Instead I decided to write this, as a shout of gratitude for the freedom to create. 

Looking at the picture of me as a little boy and rereading a story I discovered before I even had an inkling that I could be a writer, I see both have far I've come a long way and how much further I have to go. I'm reminded of how easy it is to become bitter. To expect more than I give. To allow the ambition to be recognized for what I've already done eclipse my desire to dig deeper, get better, try something new. Art and conversations about it are, for me, the gun pointed in my face, the thing that brings me back to the middle of the lake where nothing else mattered except listening to another person's story. 

Thanks, all. Hope your 2012 is off to an amazing start. 

. 

Dear Friends of The Douglass Street Lab,

There are six seats left for the upcoming spring cycle, which starts 3/29.

• 8 consecutive Tuesday evenings from 7-9:30
• Douglass Street near 21st Street in Noe Valley
• $395.00

I'd love to have you join what's shaping up to be an excellent group. Or if you have that friend who has been talking about taking a creative writing class, and you think she or he would benefit from a relaxing atmosphere where writing prompts are both fun and challenging, I'd be grateful if you'd forward on this email. 

Former Labber Ether Ronan, author of CUT THROUGH THE BONE, said this about The Douglass Street Labs:

"Matthew Clark Davison's passion for reading, writing, creativity, and excellence are contagious. I highly recommend The Lab, his 8-week writing program. Expect to be stimulated and enriched by the readings, discussions, and writing prompts. I left every session of The Lab feeling inspired and rewarded, brimming with the possibilities of our words." 

More testimonials here. 

More Info here. 

Sign up here. 

Email questions here. 

Facebook with potos from our most recent public event here. 

As always, those who do not wish, for any reason, to receive this email can unsubscribe by following the link at the bottom of the page. 

All Best,

MCD

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. 

Sorry folks, I'm still working out the kinks on the new mailing system. Here's the mail as it was supposed to appear. I apologize for duplicates. XXOO MCD

**UPDATE

**RENEE ZULEMA SUMMERFIELD book release party TONIGHT!!! 

**DOUGLASS READS 9

**THE (LAST) DOUGLASS STREET LAB STARTS 1/18/11...REGISTER NOW! 

**SAVE THE DATE for FOURTEEN HILLS issue 17.1   

**UPDATE

**RENEE ZULEMA SUMMERFIELD book release party TONIGHT!!! 

**DOUGLASS READS 9

**THE (LAST) DOUGLASS STREET LAB STARTS 1/18/11...REGISTER NOW! 

**SAVE THE DATE for FOURTEEN HILLS issue 17.1   

Teaching this semester in all the various places has been an endurance test and a thrill, just like I like it. The MA/MFA students at San Francisco State have impressed me. There, the students in Building Characters are a force on their own, and the work they're producing keeps getting deeper no matter what I throw at them. There's a joy in that, in being able to assign an interview or essay along with a story or novel and just let smart people respond. My biggest challenge as a teacher in that class is getting out of the way. 

I just had an overdue talk with a long-time friend who, after moving to the middle west to attend (one of) the most prestigious Creative Writing MFA programs in the country, is dismayed by the ho-hum fiction in the capital T The capital W Workshop. I told her she should've chosen SFSU! 

The editors and staff of Fourteen Hills work endlessly. At least an ambitious handful of them do, and they will leave an MFA program with actual marketable world skills. They're busy with the myriad of ways they're building community by sponsoring readings, promoting writers, and seeking innovative or undervalued or just plain good work for Fourteen Hills. They're doing themselves such a service by branching out beyond the safety of their academic program and taking their inspiration from and out into the world. 

Speaking of Fourteen Hills, there are two events coming right up, one with Zulema Renee Summerfield, the winner of The Michael Rubin Book Award, put out by Fourteen Hills Press. I was lucky enough to have Zulema as a student more than once. If you know me at all, you've probably heard me tell the story of the inspiring, completely engaged student whose deep craft analysis (reading as a writer) on Virginia Woolf's MRS. DALLOWAY taught me about the book. Later, she wrote creative responses to the text which were memorable, funny, and surprising. A year later she showed up to my office with a paper she'd written for a lit class on Woolf that detailed her journey of discovery from a text she initially loathed. Loathed? By the way she wrote about it I assumed I'd made the introduction between two new best friends! 

In the darker moments of teaching writing, it can seem "everyone" wants "everything" handed to them. Students not finding an assigned piece aesthetically to their own taste on first glance can sometimes render them into sluggish complainers. 

I've lucked out, with stand-out students like Zulema, who understand that learning happens sometimes when we're uncomfortable, when we're pushed to our limits, and made to grapple. 

Her new book, EVERYTHING FACES ALL WAYS AT ONCE is just out, and we hope you'll join us tonight at 7pm for the party. RSVP and click for address and directions. 

And as long as you have your calendar out, save Thursday December 16th for the release of Fourteen Hills issue 17.1, which will feature an interview with and novel excerpt from Adam Johnson. It'll be at 7pm at the ultra relaxed, ultra hip COFFEE BAR which has great food, beer, wine, and of course, java. 

This Tuesday DOUGLASS READS 9 takes place at The Douglass Street Lab. Historically, we've always had the readings away from our beautiful spot, "off-campus," but because this January's will most likely be the last Lab on Douglass Street, Mark (The Lab's host) and I decided it would be nice to have the reading at his place so people curious about taking The Lab can come check out the diggs. 

Here's the info on the reading along with a link on how to sign up for START YOUR NEW YEAR OFF WRITE, The January 2011 Lab starting on 1/18/11. Thanks for reading! 

Happy Autumn from

The Douglass Street Lab 

Hope y'all had a great long weekend and an even better short week! The truth is I have tons to report, lots of new news, but I'm going to save those updates/missives until the next newsletter, so this one will be short and sweet. Well, at least compared to my usual. 

First, THANK YOU to all of you for spreading the word about The Douglass Street Lab in the real world and the virtual one. It's a literal truth, rather than a mere expression of gratitude for support, to say "I couldn't do it without you."    

There are still 4 Seats Left if you'd like to join this round, and Yes, payment plans are acceptable.

We start THIS TUESDAY 9/14. email me if you want to do a payment plan or sign up here.

I'm not only getting excited about the new sessions, but to work with the people who're already signed up. I know many of the participants. They're super smart and completely down-to-earth and we'd feel lucky to have you join us.

Second, I've stopped paying lots of money for an email service. It didn't do anything that my own website's newletter program does, except provide me with way too much information about who was opening my emails and when.  

Now I have no idea if you've opened this, no idea if you decide you'd like to unsubscribe (which you should do right now if you want. Just click at the bottom), no idea if you've clicked on my links, and no idea if you've forwarded it to a friend. 

In transferring my addresses and getting this set-up, a few "test emails" were sent to some folks because of a glitch. Sorry about that. The administrator of my site fixed it, so it's unlikely to happen again. 

Third, several brilliant people I was lucky enough to have in my classrooms over the years, and one other who is signed up to take this session of The Douglass Street Lab, are participating in what looks to be one of the most unique and original literary events I've ever seen. It's called INVISIBLE CITIES AUDIO TOURS.

You download a tour which includes stories and music into your mp3 player and you take a tour out in the world as you listen. You can do it any time, but there's also a party coming up on October 1st where art will be sold along the tour, and there will be beer and coffee and other good things. I suggest wearing cute shoes and a nice top. Maybe you'll get a date! Be sure to check it out!  

Finally,

My marketing dude says I must do this:

The Douglass Street Lab on Facebook

News from me/The Lab/ about my manuscript Letters to the Dead on Twitter.