Press 53 2020/2021 Craft Books

During the Pandemic, Press 53 published two craft books from two powerful writers. The Abiding Image: Inspiration and Guidance for Beginning Writers, Readers, and Teachers of Poetry by Cathy Smith Bowers is part handbook, part memoir, and part stand-up comedy routine. This collection of essays and lectures will provide inspiration and guidance for any writer, reader, and teacher of poetry. Mr. Potato Head Vs. Freud: Lesson on the Craft of Writing Fiction by Clint McCown, the only two-time winner of the American Fiction Prize, delivers ten powerful essays on writing fiction, from getting started to dealing with writer's block. We are sharing samples from both books in this issue.

Cathy Smith Bowers served as North Carolina Poet Laureate from 2010 until 2012. She was educated at the University of South Carolina-Lancaster, Winthrop University, the University of Oxford, and the Haden Institute. Press 53 published Like Shining from Shook Foil: Selected Poems, drawing from her four previously published volumes and then brought together all four volumes in The Collected Poems of Cathy Smith Bowers. She served for many years as poet-in- residence at Queens University of Charlotte, and now teaches in the Queens low-residency MFA program and at The Haden Institute’s Spiritual Direction Program and Dream Leadership Program.

The Abiding Image
by Cathy Smith Bowers

ONE

How to Read a Poem (excerpt)

When I was about ten years old, I began, to my mother’s dismay, following my teenage brother and his friends around the neighborhood. One day I watched them watch Nancy Owens, an older girl in the neighborhood, round the corner at the top of Eleventh Street. “Slut!” one of the boys yelled out as she

disappeared over the hill in the direction of Pete Byrd’s grocery store. When I asked my brother what that word—slut—meant, he snickered and hemmed and hawed as the other boys jostled around him. Then he finally came out with something about girls giving it up easy and that if I didn’t get on back home where I belonged he was going to teach me a few more words I’d never heard before.

Later, I asked my mother what it meant for a girl to give it up easy. When she finally regained composure, she responded in her usual wise and instructive way: “You shut your mouth, young lady, before I stomp the living daylights out of you!”

That was my sex talk.

It wasn’t until I had been writing and reading poems seriously for many years that I finally understood the full meaning of “giving it up easy.” Unfortunately, by that time, the good reputation my mother had so hoped and prayed for me was pretty much shot.

So, poems are like the 1950’s nice girls my mother spoke so often and fondly of, in that the best ones don’t give themselves up too easily, but yield slowly after having been courted with much patience, sensitivity, and care. But just how does one give a poem the proper reading it not only deserves but also requires for the reader to get beneath those delicate, often ephemeral, layers of compression and complexity? Let’s begin by giving the poem at least four readings—the first reading for feeling, the second for story, the third for language, and the fourth for line.

FEELING

How many times have you been given this assignment by some well-meaning but—in my mind at least—misguided teacher: “Read the poem on page three thousand nine hundred ninety-nine of your literature book and write a paragraph explaining what it means.” And how many times have you done just that— slogged your way through some poem deemed great by some invisible authority, a poem that hadn’t yet moved you in any way that would make you even give a hoot about what all that mumbo jumbo might mean. But off you went with the designated poem, determined—as poet Billy Collins writes in his poem “Introduction to Poetry”—“to tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it.”

How much more open—and unintimidated—might you have been had the teacher made this assignment: “Read the poem on page three thousand nine hundred ninety-nine of your literature book and write down several adjectives describing how the poem made you feel.”

I once heard poet Robert Bly say that when we read a poem silently from the page we take it into our heads but when we hear a poem, we take it into our hearts and into our bodies via our senses. The heart and the body are, indeed, the first places a poem should enter. This is how we feel the poem. Here is a powerful little poem by Nick Flynn from his collection Some Ether. Read this poem slowly, out loud if possible, letting the words and images wash over you. Do not worry about what the poem “means.” There will be time for that later.

Bag of Mice

I dreamt your suicide note
was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag,
& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag
opened into darkness,
smoldering
from the top down. The mice,
huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag
across a shorn field. I stood over it
& as the burning reached each carbon letter
of what you’d written
your voice released into the night
like a song, & the mice
grew wilder.

How have these words and images and sounds left you feeling? I can feel the roiling this poem has created inside of me: frantic, anxious, dreadful, vulnerable, terrified, abandoned, desolate, sad, alone. And angry. Very, very angry. Yet, for a moment, toward the end of the poem, there is that brief sense of release. Marion Stocking, previous editor of Beloit Poetry Journal, speaks of “flawlessly work-shopped poems” that “fail to ignite.” When I come across a poem that ignites in me such a powerful emotional response as Nick Flynn’s “Bag of Mice,” I am ready and eager to look more closely at the poem. I am ready now to think about meaning, or to get at what I prefer to call the story of the poem.

(Cathy continues this essay by next discussing Story, and then Language, and Line using the same poem by Nick Flynn)

Clint McCown is the only two-time recipient of the American Fiction Prize. Besides his most recent book, Mr. Potato Head vs. Freud: Lessons on the Craft of Writing Fiction, he has published Music for Hard Times: New & Selected Stories; four novels (The Member-Guest; War Memorials; The Weatherman; and Haints), and six volumes of poems (Labyrinthiad; Sidetracks; Wind Over Water; Dead Languages; Total Balance Farm; and The Dictionary of Unspellable Noises: New & Selected Poems 1975-2018). He has also received the Midwest Book Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the S. Mariella Gable Prize, the Germaine Breé Book Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and others. He has edited a number of literary journals, including the Beloit Fiction Journal, which he founded in 1984. He teaches in the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the low-residency MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Mr. Potato Head Vs. Freud
by Clint McCown

A Writer’s Checklist:
Twenty Tee-Shirt-Worthy Aphorisms on Writing (excerpt)

With the possible exceptions of the Gettysburg Address and Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech, all the smart or useful passages I’ve encountered in literature, belle-lettres, or philosophy have had one thing in common: extreme brevity. If you can’t fit it on a tee-shirt, you probably haven’t boiled it down enough. So here are twenty things I believe to be true about writing fiction. Some of it I’ve already brought up in earlier chapters, but I’ve reintroduced it here not because I want to stretch my page count, as I used to do in college lit papers, but because certain concepts are important enough to bear repeating. Besides, sometimes saying something a different way can make it more understandable. In keeping with my goal of brevity, I’ve limited each point to three words. Then, of course, I’ve beaten each point to death with a long-winded elaboration, since that is, after all, what teachers do.

1

Character Needs Backstory

Backstory provides the context for understanding who a character truly is. Characters without individual back-stories—either implicit or explicit—are often just stick figures. Types. But once you’ve given them a context, they start to emerge from the shadows and take on real identities.

Imagine: five teenagers witness a car crash. What do they do? If they have no backstories, maybe they just stare at the wreckage. After all, what else can they do if they’re just a group of interchangeable teenagers. Without backstories, there can be no individuality—and that means that you, as the author, have no basis upon which to determine their five different responses. Backstory is what makes each character unique, and it’s what triggers individual actions.

So the first teenager—the one who lost her parents in a similar wreck—begins to shake so hard she has to steady herself against a light pole. The second, who has spent too much of his life playing race-track video games and has lost empathy for real-life versions of his fantasy world, breaks into nervous laughter, because he isn’t sure what reaction is appropriate. The third—the one who thinks she recognizes the car—calls her friend to make sure he’s all right. The fourth—that straight-A student who is always so organized—calls for an ambulance. The fifth—the one who has been thinking about joining the army because he fears that, deep down, he might be a coward—rushes to the wreck to help the injured. That’s five different responses, each response determined by how the minute particulars of life have shaped each character in different ways.

That doesn’t mean we need to know entire life histories. Backstory should be selective, not comprehensive. Nothing from a character’s past belongs in a story unless it contributes directly to our understanding of something the character is doing in the present. That’s where focus comes in. When you’re providing us with backstory details, your focus mustn’t stray from the relevant incidents of the past. If there are no dogs in the story’s present line of action, we probably don’t need to know that a character was bitten by a chihuahua when she was ten. But if that chihuahua left scars on her face that she continues to feel self-conscious about, then there’s a reason to give us that piece of backstory. Characters without backstory are often names without an identity, place-cards in an empty banquet hall.

2

Traumas Echo Forward

This is an important truth about backstory. Every choice you make about a character’s past is a rock you’re dropping into the pond of the story. The size of the rock will vary, and the bigger the rock, the larger the ripple effect will be in the life of the character.

If George had an allergic reaction to ice cream when he was a child, that’s probably just a pebble in the pond, and maybe it explains why he doesn’t order ice cream when he’s on his date with Heloise. No big deal. But if George had been kidnapped by psychopaths when he was a child and tortured with a soldering iron for three days before being rescued in a bloody shootout, that’s a boulder dropped into the pond, and the ripples from that will reach every shore of his consciousness, profoundly affecting how he interacts with everyone in the present world of his story. Maybe it ruins his shot at a future with Heloise because her Southern accent reminds him of that painful episode. Such traumas never stay in the past; they always intrude in the character’s hopes and dreams. 

3

Premise Is Expendable

Maybe you get this great idea, this magnificent What if? that starts the ball rolling. That’s terrific. But maybe as the story develops, you discover other interesting and productive directions that ultimately negate the initial premise. Don’t feel bound by your original idea. Stories should grow organically, and whatever grows should be nurtured. Maybe you thought you planted a pumpkin and an oak tree grew instead. Don’t grumble about the loss of the pumpkin, embrace the oak tree. Don’t try to carve the oak tree into that jack-o’-lantern you first had in mind. The job of the premise is to get you writing. After that, your only allegiance should be to the story as you discover it.

4

It’s Never Easy

I’m often asked if the longer one works at writing, the easier it will get. No. Sorry. The work will get better, but not easier. That’s why so few people become successful writers—as soon as they realize the kind of focus and attention to detail and hard work it always requires, they quit.

Of course, it’s fine for people to pursue writing as a fun recreational activity, but that’s not the same as pursuing it as an art form. It’s one thing to have fun playing touch football in your back yard, but it’s another thing entirely to play in the NFL. The work is always hardest at the top of any field.

You’re getting better now because you’re making demands upon yourself. As soon as you stop making those demands and start coasting, you’re dead as an artist. Then all you can do is keep writing some version of the same book over and over. I know plenty of writers who have done just that. They’re usually the ones who have become brand names. Redundancy is, in fact, the most common way to become a brand name, because it’s something big-time publishers encourage. They want to position you in the marketplace and have their advertising dollars build a steady clientele, so naturally they’re more interested in predictability from you than in original artistic creation.

They’re not wrong for doing that—publishers have no choice but to view writing as a commodity in a profit-driven business. Just be aware of what signing the big contract will likely mean. If some New York publishing house brings out your gritty courtroom drama and it’s a great financial success, the last thing in the world they’ll want you to do next is try your hand at science fiction, or a western, or a children’s book. They’ll want another gritty courtroom drama. If that’s what you truly want to write, great. Maybe you can make each successive courtroom drama more complex, more literary than the last. Maybe you can stretch the boundaries of the genre and use it as a vehicle for plumbing greater depths of the human experience. But I hope you won’t do it solely for the money, cranking out multiple versions of the same book over and over, as your version of Perry Mason wins case after case in the same predictable manner. If you want to make a mark as an artist, write whatever kind of book represents the most interesting challenge for you. Growth as an artist comes through exploration, not repetition.

5

Story Before Setting

Many inexperienced writers make the mistake of giving us a lot of details about setting before launching into the story. That’s runway building, a risky tactic I’ve mentioned before, and it’s perhaps the most common stumble I encounter in student work. Most of us have a natural tendency to start by describing the locale—as if we’re staging a play at which the audience has arrived early enough to read over the program notes before the curtain rises on the action.

Skip the runway; start the story in midair. Sure, we need description and exposition, but most of that can and should be worked into the action. If you lump it all together into a cumbersome block at the opening, the reader may not make it to wherever it is you’ve actually started the story. Readers are notorious for skipping over the static descriptive parts to get to dialogue and action. Worse yet, those readers who do read your long-winded introductory passages might find themselves bored enough to put down the story and go do something else. Readers invest their interest in the predicaments of characters, not in locales, so hook us first on an intriguing situation. Don’t leave the static descriptive material out, just break it into palatable nuggets and pass it along to us after our interest has already been engaged.