WIMTN

The Greying Ghost chap, When I Moved to Nevada, is selling fast, and I hear it will sell out soon. Get yoself a copy while there's gettin. J.A. Tyler said that it's "akin to gritting your teeth and begging yourself to stop". Yes.

I have not been sleeping. I don't know if this is a writerly contagion of some kind, because it seems like a lot of writers whom I know cannot sleep, and we often cannot sleep around the same times.

I slept a total of ten hours last week. So far this week: 7. I'm doing better than last week.

I thought that maybe if I drank I would get drunk or tired and pass out but no I just drink till it's almost morning and then I try to read and find that I just get really into Proust and then it's ten or eleven AM and I think about doing some work. I gave out an F to a student for his final grade today. His total percentage earned was 34, but I couldn't give him an H.

New Book from C&R Press

Allison Funk's

The Tumbling Box is now available from C&R Press. While laying out and designing this book I of course got to read it. I really enjoyed the series of ekphrastic poems drawn from paintings by Dürer. Here's a sample:

Virgin and Child with a Monkey

After an engraving by Albrecht Dürer (about 1498)

Where has the monkey come from?
The last thing she’d imagine
Among the irises, the lilies of the valley
That fill a German garden.
But she welcomes the creature,
Loves how he wriggles his cute little nose,
Climbs up into her lap to comb his fingers
Through her hair, playing
Just like a child. Sweet thing, she calls him
Before she begins to tire of his chattering.
So much noise, how can a person think?
Try, she tries, but cannot quiet him.
And finding no way out
Of the walled garden they’re in,
She begins to despair,
Looking for a shady section
As far as possible from the commotion.
Everywhere she hides now she hears
His raving, yes, it sounds like raving,
And her son, poor baby,
Days she cannot tell them apart,
One greedy as the next, their babbling
Driving her to distraction, to question
Even her own sense—
Soon the monkey’s tail
Will snake everywhere in her garden,
She’ll see nothing else.

Go order this book. It's worth it. It's good. It's good to buy and read poetry. Lots of other people — famous people — think you should buy this book:

In The Tumbling Box, Allison Funk offers us an exquisite accomplishment: elegant, subtle poems that confront the painful and complex enormity we call love, in particular, parental love. In spite of the best of intentions, in giving birth, we give birth not only to love but to suffering; born, we are borne not only toward love but toward suffering. Rigorously and scrupulously crafted, these lyrics move us with their hard-won wisdom, awe us with their persistent lucidity, and redeem us with their enduring grace.

—Eric Pankey

“Free as one crossing a tightrope,” Allison Funk says in one poem, and that is the freedom of this beautiful book—gracefully poised, perfectly balanced between grief and transformation. These poems are luminous as the paintings and sunlit prairie grass they observe, and piercing as the ancient tales of entrapment and release they re-imagine.
In The Tumbling Box, Allison Funk gives us the miracle of attention embodied in supple and vivid language. Like the most serious artists, she walks the high wire as one intimate with gravity, and these poems are all the more crucial for their exquisite restraint.

—Betsy Sholl

The Tumbling Box is a work of astonishing intimacy and power: subtly crafted, yet emotionally raw, honest and deeply felt, yet never merely confessional. This brave collection travels the darkest of places to emerge, at the last, in clear-sighted, undeceived grace. Allison Funk's journey is both profoundly moving and genuinely uplifting; reading these poems, I felt extraordinarily grateful for their heart-rending and heartening quest—not for a solution, or an escape from pain, but for the hard amen of fellow feeling that the long work of healing reveals.

—John Burnside

Allison Funk is the author of three previous collections of poetry, The Knot Garden, Living at the Epicenter, and Forms of Conversion. She has received the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and awards from the Society of Midland Authors, the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

I am reading Proust again

Last time I did this, it spawned a surge of creativity. Something about Proust makes me want to write. I'm into volume 2 of Remembrance of Things Past now, Within a Budding Grove.

Writing Exercises

I've been really busy this summer, and I haven't written much here. But, I've been wanting to talk about some of the classes I'm teaching, and the exercises I've been using to get these "kids" to write. Some of them are far from kids, but you know: it's hard not to think of even the seventy-year-old woman who's trying to learn how to write as one of my "kids".

I've been teaching two classes: a Regents Preparatory Course, and a Fiction Workshop. In Georgia, college students--if they want to graduate--must pass two Board of Regent's Exams in reading and writing. I taught the writing course. Students who take this class are almost always of two types: they're either students who took too many credits without taking the exam (the cut-off is 40 credits in) or they're students who took, but failed, the exam. Either way, generally, they're all students who have some serious difficulty with writing. I've come to see that all of my students--no matter the class--can't write.

So I've been trying to teach them. Here are some of the exercises I use with each class (pretty much any writing class):

Five Senses:

I explain the five senses, which doesn't take much explaining, as you can imagine. Any reasonably intelligent person observes the world through their senses of sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing. I get the kids used to thinking not about--for example--simply a car driving by, but the whoosh as it rushes past, the whiff of its exhaust, the blur of color and shine of the chrome and windshield, and, if you're close enough, the breeze it stirs up that blows about you--especially on a sultry Georgia day. So, they get that, right? I send them out of the classroom with a pad of paper and a pen to simply observe and record as much as they can with their five senses for twenty minutes. They can record the info however they want. Some write actual sentences, most simply write a list of observations. It doesn't matter. What's important is that they simply pay attention to the world.

That leads into the old cliche, Show and Don't Tell:

I know some writers don't necessarily agree with this dictum, but most of my students, and I'm guessing that most people who don't write on a regular basis, don't know the difference between showing and telling in the first place, so it's a worthwhile exercise if only so they understand. My students by now have already done their five senses exercise, so they're into looking at the world in this way. So I tell them I want them to show me how a particular character feels. I tell them to imagine a barn. Any barn, whatever barn comes into their minds. I tell them that I want them to show me the barn using their senses: what should I see, smell, hear, feel, taste, all that. But--of course--there's a twist. The character who's reporting this information to me is a woman whose husband has just died. The students' job is to show me how this woman sees this barn without saying anything about her husband or his death. Explaining this to the students takes a minute, because they don't usually get the concept at first. So I have to explain that how we're feeling at any moment usually "colors" how we experience the world. So, if I'm driving home during sunset--and it's a fucking beautiful sunset--but I just got fired that day, how'm I gonna describe that sky? By now they're kind of getting it. Usually, I still have a student or 15 who cannot help but mention the husband or the fact that he's just kicked the bucket, but mostly, they understand this little exercise about character, point of view, and showing as opposed to telling.

Both these exercises seem to work well (they're not mine, originally, by the way, but I cannot remember what writing professor or book originally imparted them to me) whether my students are supposed to be writing fiction or essays. Even my Regents students. The Regents students had no clue how to be specific about anything. This exercise at least gets them started on specificity. And, it's obviously worthwhile exercise for beginning fiction writers.