Writing Story / Finding Poetry / Freeing Voice

April 30, 2009

Let’s face it. An economy in shock is not such a shock if you are not only a writer, but a writer from and remaining in the working class.

I am not allergic to the thought of making big money with my writing. Not at all. But the real joy would not be receiving a bargeload of wealth from my writing but enough for my writing. Enough to write as my main occupation, and to do the kind of in-depth study of craft and of whatever subject writing a novel may require me to do.

For me and for many of us, the real connection between writing and money is not about how much money we do or might make with our writing, but, rather, it is in obtaining the money that gives us the time and peace of mind and a healthy environment to help make possible the writing itself.

As some of you might know, I received a 2008 Artist’s Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This has been a great help to me in the project I am working on, a novel called History Artist. Part of what this grant has given me is certainly support for some more writing time than I was looking at with my work schedule. We all know how remarkable a gift that is, how freeing of our time, and how affirming to be paid to do just that thing which feels so central to writers and yet usually goes unpaid: writing.

They used to tell us to write what we know. The imagination be damned. Although, indeed, the realm of imagination is a realm of knowing, yes? Sometimes, it is the only realm in which we know aspects of our own stories, or that of our families or tribe. We imaginatively know those who are gone, whom we have never met. We imaginatively know the places our ancestors, or parents, came from, and we imaginatively know the very places we came from or were born into, since they exist in those ways, no longer.

We know things in many different ways, and at many different levels. We know things from the images that haunt us, or invade us, from memory, from the news, and from the imagination. And it is all that and more which cooks within us and comes forth in writing a novel.

This State Arts Board Grant gave me not only some free time to write, but it gave me a chance to do some very intensive research for this book. I went to Boston to do research about Cambodia and the war in Southeast Asia, and about relief workers in Cambodia after Pol Pot fled to Thailand. I spent time going through the resources at the American Friends Service Committee (thank you, Paul Shannon), and at the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences (thank you, Kevin Bowen). I spoke to many people, walked many streets, and immersed myself in the archives at Healey Library at UMass Boston (thank you, Elizabeth Mork), where I listened to taped interviews of war vets, read carbon copies of communiqués in the field, some in French, and peered through a magnifying glass at contact sheets of photographs of war, its aftermath, and the “clean” negotiations and ceremonies as power was transferred from hand to hand. I watched old films and studied slides at AFSC, going back again and again to images that opened a door to truth for me, that called up my characters. I have been in touch with many people in a network that keeps growing and blessing this work (thank you U Sam Oeur and Rony Toeum).

Research therefore helps me more deeply and precisely know what I already, in some ways, know. It reveals things that I have been blind to, opens terrain into which the imagination rushes. Research offers a kind of “reality check” to a writer of fiction who wants to respect truth if not mimic it, pour truth into imagined images, pour story into images gleaned from research, and yet not violate. Such a fine line, such an unknown, that line between the way the imagination functions and the way that an agenda is imposed, or that a misplaced old story is projected onto the images of history.

At dawn on April 17, 1975, Cambodian New Year and the day after the U.S. pulled out of its embassy in Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge entered the city and began the forced evacuation of its two million residents, perhaps half of whom had been refugees from U.S. bombing in areas outside of Phnom Penh. Pol Pot considered cities and all things modern as evil and intended to recreate the 12^th century greatness of Cambodia as seen in the largest religious complex in the world, Angkor Wat, by developing an agrarian society without cities, as well as without intellectuals, teachers, artists, monks, family and religion.

What was left in Phnom Penh during the Pol Pot years was a city emptied of people.

Imagine.

A completely empty city from which 2 million people (about the same number of Cambodians slaughtered, tortured, starved, and worked to death by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge from that day until the very end of 1978) had been forced out.

Imagination rushes in to that empty/haunted place.

But how to avoid that syndrome of violation which Marlowe in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness could not? Africa’s heart, for the narrator of that novel, was a great empty space, this “heart of darkness”, upon which he could, and many Europeans did, project any and all ideas of people savage or noble, as well as reformulate images of themselves as aristocrats of superior race and intelligence, adventurers of supreme courage and resourcefulness. This idea of Africa’s center as a “blank” space served the colonialists but made its inhabitants static, deformed, backdrop, in the narratives of their own land.

I am looking at film, the camera moving at the rate of a slow car, of Phnom Penh emptied of men, women, and children.

This is research. Research to teach me what I do not know, but also to understand what I do know. I am now to do the delicate work of not violating, and yet allowing the full work of the imagination to happen, to be filled with what I learn, what I see for the first time, what is familiar, what I am haunted by, what lives in my bones, what I cannot remember, what others tell me, what I read, in the sacred quiet places, in the archives of people’s fragile, enduring, brutal, exquisite, unfathomable and familiar lives.

Thanks so very much to the Minnesota State Arts Board, for this chance, and to all who have been helping me in this work.

I had just better do a good job.

Peace,

Anya

Just a quick announcement to let you know that I will again be teaching online for writers.com/writers on the net, sessions beginning May 4:  Claiming Our Stories: Working with the Power of Autobiography and Autobiographical Fiction. Part One and Part Two.

These are both 10 week courses for writers of both memoir/creative nonfiction and fiction. For full descriptions and registration, please go to http://www.writers.com/achtenberg.html#story

I also want to let you know that I have been in Boston doing research for my novel-in-progress, History Artist. I did this with support from the Minnesota State Arts Board in the form of an Artist Initiative Grant. One of the incredible resources in Boston for my work is the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, which also conducts a yearly writers workshop in the second half of June, and has done so for many years. I was blessed to teach some workshops there in writing for social change, but went there as a participant as I was working to move more fully into fiction, and was able to study with Vietnam War vets Larry Heinemann and Tim O’Brien, among many other writers, including Grace Paley, Carolyn Forche, Yusef Komunyakaa, Claribel Alegria, Robert Creeley, Bruce Weigl, Stratis Haviaras, Martha Collins and Fred Marchant. Demetria Martinez, with whom I have often co-taught and will do so again this August in Michigan at the Leaven Center, is a regular there as well. I have met and heard in panels and readings many Southeast Asian writers as well, those both living in the United States and those coming in from Vietnam, Cambodia and elsewhere.

Here is a note from  the Joiner Center:

“The William Joiner Center is named after William (Bill) Joiner, an African American veteran who served as the university’s first director of Veterans Affairs until his untimely death in 1981 from liver cancer associated with his exposure to Agent Orange while serving in the military. The center promotes research, curriculum development, public events, and educational, cultural, and humanitarian exchanges which foster greater understanding and innovative means of addressing the consequences of war. Responding to wars in the 21st century, the Joiner Center has begun to focus on the consequences of the Global War on Terrorism, particularly as manifested in the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Their website is : http://www.joinercenter.umb.edu/

Please check their events and resources, and consider attending their June writers workshop.

Back to you soon as I can.

Peace,

Anya Achtenberg

March 19, 2009

(coincidentally, the day before spring)

Interesting times, no?

Hope? Change?

Doom?

Restorative justice? Innocence Project?

Families Destroyed. New Kinds of Families Being Created.

War Crimes. Truth and Reconciliation.

Environmental Destruction. Melting Ice Caps.

Reclaiming the Rainforest. Greening the World.

Financial Collapse.

Greening the Economy.

Dying Newspapers.

Global News Online.

Sometimes it feels like the same old, and getting worse by the moment. Sometimes it feels like an extraordinary and urgent opening of possibility.

Which direction do we move toward, submit to or leap into?

And how might this affect our writing? 

I have often spoken with writers about what I feel might be a kind of “default mechanism” in my process of writing, and in theirs, something to watch out for. Basically, when we get on shaky ground, hit a rough spot in our material or just feel stumped about what to write, sometimes we go to a kind of default writing—doing, in terms of style, that which makes us feel good, that which we sense we can do well. Our strength in writing—what has worked well before to free our voice, leap over the obstacles to expression. It may be vivid description; it may be terse dialogue. It may be lyrical, internal narration, the character remembering a lost and beautiful moment outside  of the current goings-on.

I think there is also a kind of default writing that has to do with the events of the story. There may be an argument, or a character disappearing; a party in which all the characters meet and there is an emotional explosion; a revelation of a secret that a good reader suspected all along. Genre writing often has an expected ending, a kind of default to that ending instead of some process of discovery which deeply explores the characters and the situation. A good book for me might even reveal the ending at the beginning, but give such an extraordinary view of what happens along the way, or why and how the end comes about, that knowing the ending from the outset only adds to the emotional and dramatic power as we work to understand this world of the story, as perhaps we internally fight against the ending we know is coming.

There may be a happy ending or a tragedy.

I think in a way, then, there is a kind of emotional default, a path of least resistance emotionally that we may take in our writing. It may show in what actually happens, how the story ends, what happens to the main character; it may show in the tone of the narrator. But sometimes we might feel that no matter what we are writing, we are in some way barreling towards a certain kind of ending. Not an ending which we are discovering, which is unknown as we write but which has a sense of the inevitable because of the characters and the situation, as in House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III—an ending which both surprises and makes complete sense.

I am talking about an ending to which we are drawn, because of whatever reason in our own history or emotional makeup, or because we have discovered that such an ending works to get attention or response from readers or from ourselves. An ending which is not a discovery but a habit.

What does this have to do with the little list up-top?

Maybe everything.

When we look at the polar opposites we understand are structured into our world and our lives, we make choices. And yes they range somewhere between despair and joy, apathy and passion, avoidance and commitment, slow destruction and consistent creative work. Abdicating or taking it on.

Of course this takes an infinite number of forms. And some people have a pile-up in their lives of what might push them to one side or another. As do our characters in a fictional world.

So, here’s what I think about this and about writing fiction.

Fiction writers work to create, indeed, we do create, a world. This world works in some similar ways to the world which produces in us humans that tendency toward despair or toward joy and hope. As fiction writers, we listen to the characters we “create”, the characters that have “chosen” us, have come in search of an author, as in the old Pirandello play, “Six Characters in Search of an Author.”

Do we always listen well? Do we ever have something in between what we hear our characters saying and what we push them to do?

 
We may indeed be structuring their world or moving toward an ending which expresses our own emotional tendency or bias or habit or default, rather than allowing them and their situation and their historical moment to fulfill itself.

We have the ability to say yes in our world, in our actions and attitudes, and still live with doubt. Hopefully, our characters do as well. Many of us, human writers and “fictional” characters, are also filled with the tragic, the violent, the dark. Reasonable enough. I admit it.

But can writing such endings, such resolutions, in our fictional world become a default mechanism rather than a “mirroring” of the “real” world? I am not talking about channeling Pollyanna each time we finish a story. (I never worry about being accused of that!)

I am talking about opening up our writing to the urgent complexity which we as a species are and face, opening our consciousness and our daily actions and approach to this precious world and our precious lives.

It may sound a bit wack, couldn’t resist using that word, but here it is: as we look out at all that we have made, a fictional world which we have indeed created in language, we may get too big for our desks. We may think that our own emotional tendencies, our own default mechanism earned by disappointments or beatings, by world weariness or early rough stuff, by loss, by the enormous knowledge we have gained of the too ugly underpinnings of the workings of greed and power on this planet in both the small and the global stories, is the only way. The proper ending.

Yet, all over the world there are people working daily for a better world. Hard to discount when we really take a look at it.

But back to the fictional worlds we have created, and in which we have a godlike power, especially if we do not listen to the beings which inhabit those worlds.

This is the question I ask you and the question I must ask myself as I work in fiction. How will this story end? Must it be tragic, a story of destruction and loss, a payback of some pissed off or despairing creator, a default into death-in-life? What are the characters saying in their deepest hearts? What are they yearning for, straining for, working for? Is the ending you have chosen for your story inevitable or a habit, an old habit, helpless as the past pushes it? Or is it a vital new ending, perhaps not without destruction or loss, but fully informed by, infused with, the complexity of the real, the re-energizing that may indeed be the true nature of our times; the complex emotional response that has more information about the history of genocide and its current activities than ever, for example, and yet will work harder and more consistently and in more ways than ever before.

Will we work toward endings in our fiction which are not necessarily simple markers of doom and grief, but steps in a great process of flowering?

How will the story you are writing end? How will mine, each one? I am working to not end it by default, the same old, an emotional tic, a disengaged drama, a bit of doom and on to the next. Not one note joy, I am thinking. Not one note despair, either.

Symphonic, wondrous, truth discovering itself.

Peace,

Anya Achtenberg

March 10, 2009,

Below is an announcement for a reading this Friday in the Minneapolis area, near the astonishing Mississippi River.

I am racing to do too much. Little wheels spinning like a cartoon character. Haven’t posted. Great excuses. The world is the biggest. Visiting my senator (we still only have one in Minnesota), and my representative.

But I wanted to tell you about the reading, if you are in the area. And tell you about the river even if you are not.

Simply this.

Long silences. Frozen river. Extraordinary life underneath the frozen surface. The magic of a moment, a shift, a sudden change. Driving over the Lake Street Bridge, each time, I see the changes, small subtle ones often. But now, a completely white frozen river, left among the trees for a couple of days, and when I return, the water is rushing. At play. The stillness lifted. Speaking water language.

So, don’t you ever believe your silent neighbor is frozen, your dear friend is stilled, your own heart dead under the water. Don’t you ever believe your writing is done, until it truly is.

The river is rushing.

If you can, come hear Peggy and me read by that river.

Details below.

That’s all, folks.

Anya

Translated from water language.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

BANFILL-LOCKE CENTER FOR THE ARTS PRESENTS:
Anya Achtenberg and Peggy Vork-Zambory

Friday, March 13, 2009
7:30 PM at Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts
6666 E River Rd. Fridley (DIRECTIONS BELOW)
Free and open to the public.

Hosted by Anna George Meek.

ANYA ACHTENBERG….

PEGGY VORK-ZAMBORY is the unpublished writer of the daily blog Pearl, Why You Little… (http://pearl-whyyoulittle.blogspot.com) and has written speeches, short stories, and essays for the past eight years or so, some true, some outright lies, and all without compensation.  She is willing to write for food.

Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts
6666 East River Road, Fridley
TEN MINUTES FROM DOWNTOWN MINNEAPOLIS
Directions:

From I694 take the East River Road exit. Head north on East River Road (from the West, this is a right turn; from the East, a left turn). Go through 4 stop lights. After the fourth light, prepare to take the first left turn; you will see a small brown sign for Banfill-Locke on the right side of East River Road, and a left-hand turn lane will put you right into the parking lot. The center is an old white farmhouse with a sign in front; enter off the parking lot in the back.

December 7, 2008

Dear Writers,

I have a confession. I am in love with a dead white English guy, a writer. If it isn’t love, at least it is a shock of recognition, a wave of gratitude at being seen, the kind of amazement when someone brings something into words that illuminates, or puts into relief, or gives name, gives terra firma, gives refuge, touchstone, to the whirl of ideas one has about things important to the spirit.

This love is not jealous. I want to share. If you are writing a novel or a book of memoir or creative nonfiction or short fiction, or anything that might not fit some precise box of language; if you have ever chafed against what feels like authoritarian instruction about writing, or the structure of story, and yet wanted and yearned for honest assistance in your work, so you buckle to what feels wrong and yet has the back-up or entitlement of positioning or market or university sanction; if you are so sure there is magic in your work and so unsure as to how to fit it into the world; pick up E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel.

Again, that’s E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel.

A friend in Boston, a wonderful playwright, Barry Brodsky, mentioned it to me a while ago, and you know how some books don’t get read until they are urgently needed? Well, I urgently needed it and zap! I read and it did its work with me.

I want to talk a bit about what I found there in my next posts, but for now, I want to reaffirm this: trust yourself. Trust your deepest sense of yourself as a writer. Trust your sense of language. Trust your sense of time, formed in the very cooking of your life from before you knew there was a way to break apart reality into time; this sense of time, these infinitely varied senses of time human beings hold, have a great deal to do with how you tell story. Some are formed easily, or some writers rigidly hold to a preordained sense of time or buckle to one dictated to them and then proclaim it as The Reality.

Many of us form a very different sense of time and with that a very different sense of story structure.

Many of us have a badly formed sense of time. Sometimes we write less of “a life in time” and more of “a life of value”.

Good. So be it. We need to have our series of events, our story and plot and action, but what Forster says, ooooh la la! He gives the infinite ways human beings form their imagination, the room to move between poles of “time” and “value”. Long story, this story. And I really must go, but his discussion of this is LIBERATING.

As is his discussion of kinds of voices and novels, including those voices of prophecy as Melville, Dostoevsky, DH Lawrence, George Eliot.

Trust me, I don’t fall easy for dead white English guys. Well, maybe sometimes. So often as I have been “…in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes…” So, actually, don’t trust me. Don’t trust anyone when they push you this way and that way, trying to package your spirit; trying to package the magic, the energy, the nkisi, the medicine packet, the infinitely particular sense of things you have — the contribution of which through writing helps make the full chorus of what literature is likely truly about.

I will be back, next time sooner. I am off to spend a little time with a dead white English writer, and oh, it is divine.

Blessings,

Till soon,

Anya

or,

The Blood Diamond of Story.

Perhaps the wonderful thing about story, about writing, is the chance to reframe everything. The free field of language which in its spiderwebbing way leads us to more truth, hidden truth, forgotten truth, truth which has been obscured and deformed.

Reframing everything. Putting everything back in context.

I taught Children’s Literature last spring at a wonderful community college in Minnesota, and the first thing I asked my students was, well, what is a child? When discussions of poverty and homelessness, child soldiers and human trafficking, present day slavery and prostitution and abuse, came forward, perhaps some students expecting only adorable pigs and wise spiders were a little surprised. But the courage and energy with which this beautiful and diverse group entered this material was nothing less than a true crossing, an entry into larger truths, a reframing. When a student from Ethiopia did a presentation about child soldiers, some of the students from suburbs of the Twin Cities wept, and one, through tears, thanked him, through her anger at her own not knowing, thanked him.

So much amnesia we battle, and that is part of the source of story. The search for antidote for amnesia. Affirming context. An acceptance that a diamond can be a blood diamond, and so much of the suffering for instance in Sierra Leone, the country of Ishmael Beah, who writes his own story in A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, is looked at through the lenses of amnesia, through the idea that Africa is a continent whose current violence came from within. But it was Belgium’s King Leopold who was the first to cut off limbs in Africa, 1 for every 100 slaves, as a warning, so this act did not originate with the Africans in Sierra Leone. Take a look at the very moving film Blood Diamond, and think about your or someone else’s diamond engagement ring.

So, many of the stories we are pushed to tell are the stories of the unseen. Or the familiar stories that seem to have a queasy hole in their middles, a spiraling silence that has its effects in so many ways. A loss of time. Waking up in another place and time as many people who experience severe trauma do, people with dissociated identity or multiple personality disorders. When people in the US woke up to the horrific September 11^th attacks in 2001, for many it seemed as if amnesia had flung them into an arbitrary world, no cause with great effects. However one looks at this horrible day, this idea does not serve. We need context. We need to face causes.

Here is a simple example of something made invisible, something of significance, I believe, of how different points of view see and do not see something which is there; how, then, reality is rendered invisible by a kind of negative magic; and how our voices, our stories and images, are needed to lift that invisibility and restore the world in its fullness, in its truths, in the complexity of its workings.

Let’s go back 11 days. It is September 1, 2008, and the Republican National Convention has come to St. Paul, Minnesota and clogged the streets and been preceded by confiscations of video equipment and raids on the houses of suspected anarchists with no more suspicious materials than exist in anyone else’s house, plus perhaps a bag of shit. Not exactly WMDs. The week will go on with the use of pepper spray and tear gas and concussion grenades and beatings and arrests of journalists, including Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman and 2 of her producers (charges not yet dropped) and rubber bullets and 800 arrests. Minnesota Nice long gone.

And very little of this will appear in the mainstream national news, although we here in the Twin Cities saw it as we see our grocery stores and our gas stations and our neighbors and our magnificent trees.

There is a massive anti-war march (many different numbers given of those in attendance, but these marchers are minus many people who have been carefully intimidated for weeks with threats of violence against demonstrators from our caring Homeland Security and local forces). 

There are many descriptions of this elsewhere, so I will just say this: We gather at the State Capitol, and after a rally we march through the streets of St. Paul towards the Excel Energy Center where the Republican festivities are in process, although without Bush and Cheney, who are staying in out of the rain. As we approach the center we are funneled, or herded like cattle, through enormous riot gates. Very clever, but somehow not the free expression I had envisioned. 

Before we get to those gates, as we are marching the streets of St. Paul, there are lines and lines of riot police to either side of us. No identification. No faces — their faces are covered with helmet and shields, and they are entirely dressed in black riot gear, flak jackets, with an array of weaponry hanging from their costumes.

I must be more threatening than I thought. All that salsa dancing is paying off.

But this is what I see and what captures me. In front of most of the lines of riot police up and down the streets (and they must be at least 7 feet tall and rather intimidating), there is a line of young East Africans, I am thinking mostly Somali. Young people. Beautiful young people. Some of them, even children. In front of these lines of massive, armed and well protected riot squads. Between them and the marchers. Between them and me. Young people standing still with such focus in their faces that I know I am protected and honored and in the presence of something holy.

And I cannot stop looking, and I think, this, this is The Photo of this march, of this movement in some ways. In the 1960s, the photo of the young white woman stuffing a flower down the barrel of a National Guardsman’s (or policeman’s?) gun, or of the 4 students lying dead in Ohio after a protest, did not show us the Black students killed at Jackson State in a protest, did not show us so many others. So I understand that one image, one aspect of an event, is not supposed to eclipse all others.

But here are immigrants for whom everything is at stake: their new home, and the home they have left, still under bombardment and in suffering. Everything is at stake: the way they are and remain Somali or Ethiopian or Eritrean, and the way they are becoming American; the very ground under their feet is at stake, their jobs, their homes, their families, their cultures, at stake, each day at stake, each word, each statement, their very names, at stake.

And though this is THE picture of this march for me, I see it no where, in neither the establishment media nor the left media, the media of protest. This photo is No Where I have yet seen, although I must look at the local Somali and African newspapers and I think, I hope, it will be there. (More information about the very large Somali community in Minnesota below this posting.)

Always a story, an image, a point of view unheard.

Now, maybe I missed the appearance of these photos, having been a bit submerged with deadlines. But so far as I can see, or hear from others, no such photo.

And back to September 1^st, I am marching under banners that demand an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. I am marching with dear C who is part Ojibwe, and she sees the many signs, “End the Israeli Occupation”, as we march side by side with S and J who come from New Orleans, who had to search for parents, for grandparents, through the effects of Katrina and the genocidal negligence of this current government, and I feel the ache of stories converging, not told, being told. On my back, C leans to write another sign on the other side of the one we had put up in the air, a sign that recognizes the first occupation of what would become the United States. “America out of Turtle Island”, it says – and we swing that sign around and around as we walk, and this dizziness is the dizziness of the truth, the hidden truth, and the connectedness of truths in this text of the world we live in, and this is story to me.

This is story.

Please Vote! Vote for those who truly value all our stories, yours and mine and those who stood between this writer and the very heavily armed, faceless, riot police in St. Paul, Minnesota, next to the stories at the Republican National Convention, where they laughed at our communities and at those who work in them for positive change.

(this is written in a hurry, so much to do)

Peace,

Anya Achtenberg

PS: For those who know how central, how urgent, are stories: 

From 9/11/08’s DEMOCRACY NOW!

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/9/11/on_7th_anniversary_of_9_11

From The Somali Action Alliance at http://www.somaliactionalliance.org/readarticle.php?article_id=1

July 30, 2008

Dear Writers, 

I wouldn’t exactly say I am on a roll, like some blog-crazy youngster, but I do feel the need to write more on writing, this big mystery, not as great a mystery as determining the location and nature of evil, or understanding what love actually is, but it is a grand mystery which intersects for me with all the other mysteries, which are the stuff of the writing.

I do want to mention, before I go on, the first publication reading for my novella, The Stories of Devil-Girl, published by Modern History Press, which also appears on my Calendar of Upcoming Events:

August 22, 2008, Friday at 7:00 pm at Amazon Bookstore Cooperative, 4755 Chicago Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55407. (612) 821-9630 or http://www.amazonfembks.com/  ”Founded in 1970, Amazon Bookstore Cooperative, Inc. is the oldest independent feminist bookstore in North America.” I will be reading with Sherry Quan Lee, who is also celebrating the publication of her new book with the same press.

Back to the mystery of writing. I hear so many people whom I know to be fine writers and full of knowledge, talk about having writer’s block. I am blocked, they say. I have writer’s block. I know of course pretty intimately what that feels like. I know it from different directions, at different ages, with different incomes, in different living situations, in love and heartbreak, in health and in pain. I know it from different moments in my development as a writer, and at different moments at work in a project, and from different projects. Different genres.

So I am certainly giving my healthy respect to people’s statements about their having this thing, this writer’s block.

But going through my mind is this, the line from Psalm 118 which reggae icon Bob Marley quotes in his song “Cornerstone”:  “The stone that the builder refused / will always be the head cornerstone.”

We know there are a million applications of this view, an infinite number of applications. We have all been in one way or the other or more, “the stone that the builder refused”, whether by society or family, by lover or friend, by publisher or basketball team, by plane escaping hell — I must here pay homage to Hmong writer in Minnesota, Mary Yang, who lately shared a piece which in part concerned those family members who got on the few U.S. planes evacuating the Hmong they had promised to assist in exchange for their help, if the war went badly for them, and the family members who were unable to get on to the plane. A people refused, in their own land, and by the “Americans” who refused the help they had promised in a deal very helpful to themselves.

An infinite number of ways we experience being that stone the builder refused.

In any case, I want to suggest something quickly and will talk more about this in the next post. It may be that whatever is connected to, hanging on in its barnacle way, to the deep hull of the writer’s block we may currently be experiencing, may be in part what we need to look at in order to write. That this “block”, this paralysis and silence, this wordlessness and judgment, this numbness and lack of ability to feel, to stay with a subject and feel it and write it, is the cornerstone of what we may have to write. It may not be appropriate for what we are trying to write, or it may. Mystery, I am sure. But it may be the cornerstone of what we are needing to write, now.

The stone that the builder refused.

And we as writers know ourselves as builders, forming the very stuff of building, from sound to word to great ornate structures.

What have we refused?

Oh, believe me, I am asking myself this, and ready to spit fire at myself for the mere asking of it.

I simply say here, may the stone of what I have refused come to me, crack open, yield its truth, become the necessary part of the structure I build to embody mystery. May it do so in my writing, in my life, in my teaching, in my relationships, in my everyday.

A little more soon, on this “writer’s block”.

Blessings and Peace,

Anya Achtenberg

July 15, 2008

The re-entry into writing a blog after so long is a little thorny. Along the road, here is a wonderful quote from Faulkner’s Light in August, in which Mrs. Hines, Joe Xmas’s grandma, muses after his death:

“It is because so much happens. Too much happens.”

Alfred Kazin mentions this in his essay, “The Past Breaks Out” in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser.

But for me at this moment, it’s not a fabulous mining of literary power for creative use; it’s just my excuse.

So, excuse duly noted, and excessive and ineffective details left out, I want to mention this:

The Stories of Devil-Girl, my novella, is now in print, published by Modern History Press, and available for purchase from Amazon and from the publisher, as well as from me directly at workshops and readings. It is still available in audio at my website, and a few samples are at http://anyaachtenberg.com/?page_id=46

Having said that, I want to respond to something someone suggested about the book, and then get to what I really want to talk about, which has to do with the process of writing strong characters, and the profound reasons for doing so. The statement said something to the effect that this character of Devil-Girl, this book, or this author, speak for those who can’t speak for themselves.

Maybe so, but things have changed, and this is not the intent, and certainly does not describe how the character is formed or activated or filled with breath.

Neruda said in “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” from the Canto General, his mind-blowing history in verse of Latin America, “Yo vengo a hablar por vuestra boca muerta….Hablad por mis palabras y mi sangre.” (Macchu Picchu was an abandoned Incan city “rediscovered” again after hundreds of years.)

“I come to speak for your dead mouths….Speak through my speech and through my blood.” This was how prominent Neruda translator Nathaniel Tarn rendered these lines in the 1960’s.

The curious thing was that por in the first sentence was translated “for”, and in the second line, translated “through”. Jack Schmitt uses “through” for both lines in his 1991 translation:

“I’ve come to speak through your dead mouths….Speak through my words and my blood.”

One small word but it makes a world of difference. The entire attitude is different. The worlds obscured and “spoken for” come forward in a different way. The process of bringing someone into voice, on a political level and a creative level, is completely different. It is not done with a missionary posture. It is not foreign “aid”, or invasion, or bringing the “democracy” of a writer’s voice to cover up the actual population.

To say, I speak for you, presumes a lot. This at a time when more and more we see and hear others around the globe, human and animal, in a million ways, by music and dance, by grief and testimony in the news, by cloth that travels, by imprint and fossil, by podcast and witness, by migrations and more. To speak for another, without an explicit request, seems an old style presumption. And an inaccuracy. One that does not face the responsibility of what it means to say, we speak for another.

When was the last time it was a good idea for someone to speak for me? For you?

But to say, I speak through a mouth that is not mine, that can no longer speak in this world, transforms everything. It says something about the writer’s understanding that a profound process has occurred. That by some road, by some labor, by some apprenticeship, by experience, by prayer, by possession, by blessing and curse, by magic and mystery, by dream and imagination, by research and whispers, by bone and ancestral memory, by being haunted, by being visited, by being permeable and by seeking, by breaking one’s heart and finding one’s strength, somehow, this writer can use the power of his breath, blow it through the flute of another’s soul, and speak. Speak through the dead mouths of Macchu Picchu, most especially, the laborers, the herdsmen, the slaves.

And to say then, in return, “Speak through my words and my blood”, says even more. Says, here I am, I offer myself to be of use. I make myself vehicle. I empty myself of myself in many ways, to make place for you. Speak through me. This is how possession works. This is how writing character, when it is really happening, may work. I am still there, my craft, my heart, somehow forming the vessel which the speaker will fill, the speaker who comes to life through me, who speaks through me.

So, to say that I or my character Devil-Girl is speaking FOR those who cannot speak is a bad translation of English to English, a bad translation of intention, and of a process that is completely other than this kind of missionary, presumptuous “speaking for”.

This character speaks with others. This writer speaks as directed by the characters that come to speak through her. If this is possession, so be it. Would that it were more successful, and all my characters spoke with the vital breath that comes from some magical mix of other beings and my words. This is the work of the writer who writes stories. There are a thousand, a million, an infinite number of ways to talk about how it is that some character comes to a writer and must be written by that writer, and speaks through that writer in a true way, from a deep well.

Having the courage to work with this powerful process of developing characters also means that one has the courage to listen to the planet, to its voices, whether clearly heard or muffled, hidden in a cloth or belting a song, dying in a fruit sprayed with pesticide or living in a photo nailed onto a wall in the desert, clinging to an ice floe or hacked up for sale.

There is nothing like this listening. There is nothing for a writer like being chosen by a character who aims to speak through your words and through your blood. And it is a bloody business. I have stepped around it for years. Let’s see what happens, listening, writing, speaking through dead mouths, speaking with others. Let’s see what happens for each of us writers and each of our characters, to whom we rededicate ourselves and our labor, since it matters so very much.

Peace,

Anya

May 6, 2008,

A breathless time, spring, with all its upheaval. Its approach, its elusiveness. Its promise.

Forgive my lack of blogginess. Lots of good work in the way, some of it to meet a publication deadline. My novella, The Stories of Devil-Girl, will be published in print in June 2008 by Modern History Press as part of their “Reflections of America Series.” The Series highlights autobiography, fiction, and poetry that explore the search to discover one’s context within modern society. Modern History Press is an imprint of Loving Healing Press. The novella was previously recorded on CDs, and is currently on sale as an audio file to be downloaded at this website, at http://anyaachtenberg.com/?page_id=46

Other news. I am soon to finish teaching Claiming Our Stories: Working with the Power of Autobiography and Autobiographical Fiction online with writers.com / writers on the net. It has been pretty glorious, and somehow gathered a group of astonishing writers, and astute responders to each other’s work. I will be teaching this same class online beginning June 23^rd, so please visit http://www.writers.com/ if you are interested.

And here’s something I really want to tell you about. I recently saw a film called Hunted Like Animals, by Rebecca Sommer, about the ongoing genocide of the Hmong Lao people. It is urgent that what this film contains become known and acted upon by more people. This concerns the 30 year campaign to wipe out the Hmong who remain in the jungles of Laos, and the coming push to send Hmong refugees in Thailand camps back to Laos, to be killed. I am beginning work to get this film shown more extensively than it has been in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota.

Here is more specific information:

HUNTED LIKE ANIMALS is an eye-opening documentary about an ongoing, but unknown, genocide — against the Hmong people in the jungles of Laos. Coerced into joining the CIA’s anti-communist efforts during the Viet Nam war, the Hmong in hiding are still mercilessly hunted, attacked, raped, tortured and killed by the military. Since 2004, the military crackdown on the Hmong has intensified and those who can escape seek refuge in Thailand. In this documentary, the Hmong Lao refugees speak for many thousands of voiceless people still trapped in the jungle, surrounded by Lao and Vietnamese soldiers. WorldFest Remi Winner 2008; Official Selection Amnesty International Film Festival 2008.

NOTE: Rebecca must be contacted prior to any showing of her film, and the film cannot be cut or edited in any way. DVDs are available for purchase from Rebecca.

Rebecca’s contact info:

Email: SommerFilms@gmail.com ; phone (718) 302-1949 http://www.rebeccasommer.org/ 

http://www.rebeccasommer.org/documentaries/Hmong/news.html

Hmong contact:

Kue Xiong, President

Lao Human Rights Council:  http://www.laohumanrightscouncil.org/

P.O. Box 17363 St. Paul, MN 55117

phone: (651) 253-3709 fax: (651) 488-9102

email: laohumanrightscouncil@yahoo.com

The information below comes from dear friend Marilise Tronto, active in work through the UN and elsewhere for the rights of indigenous peoples:

“It is vital for the Hmong to get their story out; particularly in countries that are large donors to the UN (such as Canada), and there are diplomatic solutions that can be achieved through the international community if enough pressure is brought to bear on Laos. The crisis is accelerated now not only for the 20,000 (?) still hiding in the jungle under daily attack from the Laotian army (documented in the film), but because the 8,000 Hmong in refugee camps in Thailand are set to be deported back to Laos by the end of 2008, where they will be murdered. Thailand can do this because it never signed the UN international refugee legal instrument. Additionally, the Laotian general in charge of the Hmong refugee camps is being changed. At present the soldiers guarding the camp are friendly to the Hmong; the new leadership coming in (May 1, 2008) is not.

…

“This film has already created quite a revolution in the UN. It documented the Hmong as targeted and threatened people, not as insurgents, as commonly believed. This is unequivocally a human rights situation in need of urgent attention and repair.

“One young woman among the handful of Hmong at the April NYC screening thanked the sparse audience who attended. She said, ‘The most important thing is that we have had a chance to tell our story.’ That is their prayer; their hope; that one person in one audience will take the next step, be it diplomatic or picking up the phone, passing on the tape. As I said to the Hmong at the screening, this MUST be seen widely; one never knows where help is going to come from but a call as clarion as this will not be ignored. There are diplomatic solutions possible under the purview of the United Nations Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) that would allow for resolutions. The International Declaration of Rights for Indigenous Peoples, passed Sept. 13, 2007, may help as there is now an international legal instrument that may give diplomatic efforts greater effect.

“Rebecca Sommer, the filmmaker, told me that at one showing of Hunted Like Animals, she went outside and there was a line of Hmong people literally for blocks. They stood there, silently, for 4 hours, while the meetings around the film/ the screening went on. She said their presence moved her so deeply. They told her they came because they wanted to show support.”

If you can set up a screening or can be of assistance in Minnesota in any other way, please contact me (Anya). If you want to set up a screening elsewhere, please contact the filmmaker, Rebecca Sommer.

Thank you so much.

Peace,

Anya

Dear Friends,

Get in on it! 

February 25, 2008 I will begin teaching an online class for Writers.com called Claiming Our Stories: Working with the Power of Autobiography and Autobiographical Fiction. There are not many places left, so if you have been fencesitting, jump in and sign up as soon as possible! I am very excited about it, and aim for it to really move each participant ahead in their projects, and their development of voices and forms that fully use the richness of autobiographical material, whether in fiction or nonfiction. Details are at http://www.writers.com/achtenberg.html 

Important, too! Just a few more days to apply to Intermedia Arts’ Writer-to-Writer Mentorship Program in Minneapolis. Here’s all the news about that; please carefully check the descriptions for my group in strengthening characterization, and for Sherry Quan Lee’s group in the power of poetry as memoir. Thanks!

Information:

SPRING 2008 WRITER-TO-WRITER APPLICATIONS STILL AVAILABLE!
EXTENDED Deadline to Apply: February 20, 2008

Calling all writers! Applications are now available for our spring session of Writer-to-Writer, the artistic mentorship program designed to give advanced writers the opportunity to reach their next level of artistic development. Writer-to-Writer creates intimate relationships between artists; mentors act as artistic catalysts and partners, providing each mentee with artistic feedback and professional guidance.

WRITER-TO-WRITER: SPRING 2008 MENTORSHIPS:

Anya Achtenberg (fiction/memoir)
DISCOVERING THE UNLIVED LIFE:
WRITING INTO THE MYSTERY OF YOUR CHARACTERS
The work of character development is central to discovering the real story, rather than imposing a story onto our characters. Full development of character in story work is not separate from the real work we do in the world, that of continually crossing borders—internal as well as external—with openness and knowledge, compassion and respect. For our characters to unfold their truths in their full dignity or brokenness, their astonishing beauty or cruelty, we must work to understand their deepest yearnings in a way that often goes beyond their own ability to articulate them.

In this mentorship, each participant will agree to “live with” one or two characters for the duration of the mentorship, although new characters may emerge, and new dimensions open of other, perhaps less central, characters. We will work to deepen our ability to bring the power of authentic beings into our writing, and extend our range to include characters we may dislike or fear, characters that puzzle or fascinate us, as well as those with whom we identify. We will challenge ourselves to go beyond our preconceived notions, our projections of our own points of view, our societal and cultural biases, our fear and lack of knowledge, into understanding the lives of others in our global community, in our own neighborhood or family.

We will go beyond the back story, beyond what a character has lived up to the moment that we meet them. An unlived life is hidden within the life each character must live to get by. You will explore your character’s internal terrain, a land of yearning bordered by frustration, overwork, social pressures, forgetting, distractions, and violences, large and small, yet charged by the deep human desire for expression and connection, for fulfillment of the individual and social self in creativity and community. We will look at these evocative and emotional issues in our discussions and in the illuminating work of diverse writers. We’ll work in far-reaching but focused writing explorations to cross boundaries that not only free our writing, but deepen our understanding of, and respect for, the worlds and characters we write about.

Sherry Quan Lee (poetry)
Bookmaking: Writing to Save Your Life
What does the map of your life look like? Are there stop signs, detours, back roads, freeways, and tunnels? Do you travel one particular road over and over again? Are you writing that one story over and over again? Does your collection of stories need closure? Is closure possible?

Memoir can be the stories remembered and made sense of as you chart the map of your life. Memoir can be the connection, the collection of those stories. Memoir can be your stories written in poetic form. Memoir can be poetry enhanced with pictures, and other visual materials.

In this mentorship, we will explore the healing power of poetry as memoir. Initially, we will examine the stories that navigate your life in order to discover the theme of your memoir. Your theme will be your writing prompt to gather more material. We will discuss poems belonging in your book, but emphasis will be on overall theme, organization, format, and production. This mentorship is for poets (who may sometimes write prose) interested in completing a chapbook or manuscript draft.
* * * * * * * * *

Read more about our Spring mentorships with Anya Achtenberg (fiction/memoir) and Sherry Quan Lee (poetry) online here: http://www.intermediaarts.org/pages/programs/literary/wtw.php. Applications attached, and available online!

This program is supported by the Jerome Foundation in celebration of the Jerome Hill Centennial and in recognition of the valuable cultural contributions of artists to society.

Ok, dear friends. The dancing continues, as does the writing. So, I can’t help but repeat this:

Please check out Rene Thompson and his Latin dance classes at the Midtown Global Market in Minneapolis! http://www.renedance.com/

Rene is one of the striking resources of the Twin Cities. With his international reputation, his long experience as Latin dancer and teacher of Latin dance, his deep knowledge of the roots and history of Afro-Cuban dance, and his building of diverse and interconnected community, he transforms ice to heat in the body and heart of Minnesotans regardless of the season. Blessings on Rene, and Nate, and all who help make this community what community should be.  Alabanza!

Peace,

Anya