Suzanne Farrell Smith

From Behind the Desk

suzannefarrellsmith — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:16:30 +0000

In the ten weeks since I posted last, I’ve been busy. Teaching and editing mostly, some writing in between. In spare moments, whether minutes or hours, J&I have been emptying our home office of its officeyness and stuffing the room with boxes and bags of nursery items, just fragments until we have time to wash, organize, and store. We did assemble one crucial part of the nursery: the bookshelves, first to go up. But of course! At long last, my collection—which ranges from Good Night, Blue to First Book of Sushi to Everyone Poops—has moved into its new home.

As I took my desk apart piece by piece—each drawer, the hutch top, the long-hanging pinboard—I recovered bits that had fallen (been swiped off by cats). Here’s one that I had to share. I think my mother sent it to me when I first started submitting my book manuscript. From Dave Coverly, likely printed in Parade. J’adore! And je n’aime pas. But mostly j’adore!

An Update from My Bookshelf

suzannefarrellsmith — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 16:27:47 +0000

Fourteen months ago, I wrote here about the Most Touching Gift Ever, a vertical bookshelf stuffed with books from my close friends and family, all of them accompanied by notes about why the books were meaningful to them or might be meaningful to me. It was my MFA graduation gift, organized by J. and put together by those who aren’t fellow VCFA-ers or in Salon Esse (my writing group). I loved that part: curated literary gems from those who spin orbits different from my writing/editing one, but with whom I have very close relationships.

I just finished another one—Patricia Hampl’s I Could Tell You Stories from M.—and thought it would be fun to return to the spreadsheet to check in.

Total books received: 40
Books read: 16

This might seem a little sad, but the truth is I’m a relatively slow reader. Plus, with reading to teach, reading to edit, reading for my workshop group, reading literary journals and magazines, and reading friends’ blogs, I suppose I do read quite a lot. How delicious, too, to make this gift last and last. More data:

Books by category:
7 children’s books (I’ve read 6)
10 novels (I’ve read 4)
1 book of short stories
3 memoirs (I’ve read 3)*
1 book of poems
7 essay anthologies
1 narrative nonfiction
3 books about cats (I’ve read 2)
7 nonfiction, including both informational and procedural, about topics like philosophy, religion, health, and history (I’ve read 1)

So … the first category I’ve closed is memoirs. And the second will be either children’s books or books about cats. Ah, data, how well you know me!

Doctorow: Reading = Writing

suzannefarrellsmith — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:36:23 +0000

“I really started to think of myself as a writer when I was about nine. Whenever I read anything I seemed to identify as much with the act of composition as with the story. I seemed to have two minds: I would love the story and want to know what happened next, but at the same time I would somehow be aware of what was being done on the page. I identified myself as a kind of younger brother to the writer. I was on hand to help him figure things out. So you see, I didn’t actually have to write a thing, because the act of reading was my writing. I thought of myself as a writer for years, before I got around to writing anything. It’s to blur the distinction between reader and writer. As a child, I somehow drifted into this region where you are both reader and writer: I declared to myself that I was a writer. I wrote a lot of good books. I wrote Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini. That was one of my better efforts.”

(E.L. Doctorow, as told to George Plimpton in a 1988 interview)

Fairness

suzannefarrellsmith — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:24:43 +0000

“In actuality, the definition of fairness has little to do with treating people in an identical manner. The true definition of fairness is: ’Fairness means that everyone gets what he or she needs.’”

—Rick Lavoie (educator and advocate for children with special needs and learning disabilities)

On Memory and Imagination

suzannefarrellsmith — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:33:11 +0000

In his autobiographical novel The Ink-Keeper’s Apprentice (Walter Lorraine Books, 1979), Allen Say writes of his apprenticeship to the cartoonist Noro Shinpei, before Say moved from Japan to the U.S. (Say has a new book out that explores that same time period.) In real life and in the book, Sensei becomes a mentor of both art and the spirit. I’m so accustomed to reading prose that moves between scenes and exposition, narrative and reflection, that this novel threw me (in a good way, I think) since it’s composed entirely of scenes. In a way, it’s a like a very mature and well-written kid’s story, as in, a story written by a kid: “and then this happened, and then that, and then this other thing happened.” Introspection and wisdom are reserved for Sensei in his spoken teachings. This one caught my eye:

“Pay attention to all that goes on around you. Remember, memory is the most important asset to an artist. What we call imagination is rearrangement of memory. You cannot imagine without memory” (31).

What we’ve witnessed, experienced, learned, read, watched, and dreamed is encoded. When we create art, aren’t we really revising all that stuff? Pulling from here and there, observing something new, mashing it all together to create something different? Perhaps not a groundbreaking statement, unless we consider its implications in writing. Thanks to Say, when the argument is made that memoir requires no imagination, the counter-arguments flow quite nicely: fiction requires memory; memoir traffics solely in imagination; all literature requires tapping the central source of memory and genre is simply the tool for expressing what we find there.

Elif Batuman’s “The Sanctuary” (The New Yorker December 19, 2011) touches on something similar. Batuman investigates Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, a site of over sixty giant engraved limetone pillars. At roughly eleven thousand years old, Göbekli Tepe just may be the world’s oldest temple. Why it was built, and what role it played in our ancient narrative, remain mysteries. In weighing the role of imagination in archeology, the scientific study of the past, Batuman writes, “Imagination is always projection: to guess how Neolithic people might have felt about anything was to assume, doubtless incorrectly, that they felt the way we would have felt about it. And yet, with no imagination at all, it’s difficult to see how any interpretation is possible. As Jens Notroff put it, ‘Without any imagination, this is all a pile of rubbish.’” I love thinking of our brain material that way…a pile of rubbish until we exercise a little imagination.

Finally, professor and researcher Shelley Carson’s April 2011 article in Scientific American, “The Unleashed Mind: Why Creative People Are Eccentric,” also relates to Say’s literary statement. “Our brains are constantly accessing imagery and memories stored in our mental files to process and decode incoming information,” writes Carson. In many people, particularly those who don’t rank sky-high on creativity and eccentricity scales, “Thanks to cognitive filters, most of this input never reaches conscious awareness.” But when those filters are somewhat “more porous” and less effective, traits now found in highly innovative people, more “stuff” from the huge pile of stimuli we’ve been exposed to gets through. “Imagery and memories” are in there, and for certain people, more of it comes through to the conscious mind. “We think that the reduction in cognitive inhibition,” writes Carson, “allows more material into conscious awareness that can then be reprocessed and recombined in novel and original ways, resulting in creative ideas.” That material becomes available for manipulation into art, language, and innovations.

This all makes me so happy. To me, it supports the notion that all our creative ideas, no matter what form they ultimately take, can be traced to one source. And if that’s the case, perhaps we can finally stop claiming superiority of one creative form over another, or questioning the validity of the stories told in memoir or personal essay, no matter the creativity used to tell them. I dream!

Everybody Needs a Father

suzannefarrellsmith — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 23:34:27 +0000

Ralph Fletcher, in A Writer’s Notebook (for ages 8–12, but really for anyone who writes), promotes the use of notebooks as incubators/ditches/containers/sponges/private rooms/mineralized rocks for our words, pictures, drawings, and scraps. He includes examples from his own notebooks and from students he’s known. This one, from a fifth grader named Stephanie, softened my afternoon of work, making me think not of missing my own father (though that can always be assumed), but of the power and loveliness of a good parent, mom or dad:

Everybody Needs a Father

Everybody needs
a father. Fatherless
children are always
trying to fight
their fears away.
You can’t just
pick any father,
he has to be a
special one just
for you. I know
this girl in
Arizona that
picked the wrong
father and
ended up
running away
and never came
back. If you
don’t know who to
pick lemme tell
you some rules
to getting just
the right father.

#1 It doesn’t
matter what your
father looks like.
You gotta see
way into his soul
to pick the right
one. I know this
boy in Texas
who picked a
father because
he was handsome,
and his father
left him. Just left
without even saying
goodbye.

#2 You gotta pick
somebody who’ll
spend time
with you. Somebody who’ll
go for walks
in the woods
with you and
take you on
trips. Trips that
take you
halfway across
California
but only
seem
like ten minutes ’cause
you’re having such
a good time.

#3 Pick a father
who likes the sound
of little feet
around the
house and
doesn’t mind
a fight with
your brother
once in a while.

Low-Residency Round Table

suzannefarrellsmith — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:03:27 +0000

Brought to my attention by my friend and fellow writer Cheryl Wilder, here’s an interesting discussion of low-residency MFA programs, set against the larger conversation about MFA programs in general. Cheryl and the three other participants, brought together by The Hinge Literary Center in North Carolina, offer a thorough review of everything: the nitty-gritty of how these programs work, what benefits and potential drawbacks are inherent to a low-residency program, tuition, community, etc. I would send this link to anyone interested in attending an MFA program, low-res or not! (Plus, Cheryl paints a picture of VCFA that rings so true to me and the other Vermonters with whom I’ve become close friends, thanks to our experience together on the hill.)

Christopher Hitchens

suzannefarrellsmith — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:56:14 +0000

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday. Say what you will about the person, his writing, and his ideas, nobody can say he wasn’t influential. Though I didn’t know him, I did spend ten or twelve hours in the same room with him. Hitchens co-taught one of my favorite graduate school classes at The New School for Social Research, Cultural Criticism, which investigated “the power of the written word—how writers use language to inform, provoke, amuse, inspire and move us” (from the syllabus). Melissa Monroe taught the majority of the sessions and handled all the assignments and grading. Hitchens swept in for discussions on Orwell, Twain, Mencken, and himself. He was combative, knowledgeable, passionate, unyielding, and brilliant. What I remember most clearly, however, doesn’t stem from his take on the material, but from his willingness to head to the bar with us grad students post-class. I don’t believe that fact carries more weight now than it did before. Instead, I just remember a man, considered a giant intellect with far-reaching notoriety and droves of detractors, who loved ideas and literature so much he wanted to continue the discussions beyond the classroom, with whomever was willing. That was a trait shared by most of my New School professors, and he, much to my surprise and delight, was no different.

Writing the Unhappy Childhood

suzannefarrellsmith — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 22:19:48 +0000

A gift to many of us, certainly to me, from a prolific author of books for children:

“They say to be a writer you must first have an unhappy childhood. I don’t know if unhappiness is necessary, but I think maybe some children who have suffered a loss too great for words grow up into writers who are always trying to find those words, trying to find a meaning for the way they have lived.”

—Cynthia Rylant, But I’ll Be Back Again

New Online Publication: Hippocampus Magazine

suzannefarrellsmith — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:19:04 +0000

On May 1 of this year, Hippocampus Magazine went live. It’s no secret how much I admire its editor, Donna Talarico, and the incredible job she’s done starting a new literary outlet from scratch, pledging new quality material on a monthly basis. Memoir and essays fill its pages, but so do reviews, craft articles, interviews, and articles on the writing life. Hippocampus’s central theme is memory, and the magazine even dedicated some of the proceeds from its first-ever creative nonfiction contest to the Alzheimer’s Association. Donna has also grown her team of writers and editors, including my friend and fellow Kenyon Review Writers Workshop member Risa Nye.

I fall squarely in line with those who believe in relationships between editors, publications, writers, and readers. Publication need not be one-and-done. When Hippocampus published a chapter of my book in the May 1 issue, I knew already that I wanted to send something else. And today, December 1, I’m honored to have another chapter, “Blaze of Gloria,” published online by Hippocampus!