People let me know they enjoyed my love letter to some creative folks I know last week, so I thought I’d try this again. I like focusing on the creative acts that work for me, that have appeal, rather than those that don’t.

Here is the C (creative,  Crystal, calibrated, compiled) Week in Review

Writers Workshop at the Charleston Culture Center

Last weekend I was surprised when about 200 (or more) people showed for a day of free writers workshops at the Culture Center in Charleston. I have taken writers workshops with many a master writer and this day was no exception. The morning I spent with

Frank X Walker, http://www.frankxwalker.com/

I heard him read two or three years ago with a group of Affrilachian Poets and was impressed with his imagery, topics, and energy. I then subscribed to his creative journal Pluck! that focuses on creative African-American work in Appalachia. In this workshop I appreciated his attempt at boiling down the main elements of poetry: image, rhythm, economy of language, and, I also appreciated his addressing persona poems directly. As a writer primarily of fiction, a persona poem allows me to enter into poetry from a place that resonates in me rather than out of a fear of treading too heavily and stomping all over a genre. I also got to see him read last Friday and was moved and impressed again…

Doug Van Gundy, http://www.dougvangundy.com/

Doug you read about in last week’s Valentine’s post. He subbed in an autobiography class for a writer that couldn’t make it. I don’t want to give away his tricks of the trade, but his exercise was well-thought out and particularly clever. In brief, out of a list of our top ten most significant life events, he had us focus on number 10 rather than number 1. The thought being that most of the top events of most folks’ lives are commonplace (births, marriages, graduations, jobs), but that number 10 is less emotionally charged, but maybe also less commonplace. This lent me more insight into those people that do write successfully about their own lives.

Mid-week Public Radio International ran a piece on the change of mood in Japan from giddy humor and anything’s possible to more somber. This fabulous skit from the Japanese version of the Johnny Carson show from the mid-1980s was used as a pop culture illustration of Japan’s former Zeitgeist. I loved this–everything about it: the costumes, the story, the cheekiness, the kitsch, and how well orchestrated it is. You gotta love this, right?

Japan seemed to be one theme of the week. After scoring organic udon noodles at Big Lots, we did a lot on a pseudo-Japanese food theme this week…. and, then, last night, the Unitarian Church here in Charleston, WV showed last year’s foreign film Academy Award winner for free:

Departures

Apparently it took ten years to put this film together. Really some just fantastic acting. This is also some of the finest screenwriting I have witnessed in a very long time. I had wondered if it were based in a novel or short story (I can almost always tell). Turns out it is roughly based on the autobiography of a Buddhist mortician. Far from being morbid, there are layers of love stories and types of love, lots of inner and outer struggle. The scenery is also spectacular. Sometimes I have found Japanese films too outside my cultural experience for me to really get the full picture of a film event’s significance. Departures struck home with me on universal and modern themes, without resorting to the grandiose. I would certainly watch it again.

The next creative things I am going to do:

After being asked often now for access to print copies, I have set out the task of getting my two books into print publishing shape this spring. For a while I was torn: do I try again with agents and publishers or do I keep giving it a go on my own? Three years ago I gave it a shot at larger scale publishing, only to be told by agents, that although they loved what they read, they felt they couldn’t market Bombardirovka. I know that despite very encouraging and positive feedback, I haven’t pushed the novel enough… but I am thinking that the right time presents itself for each creative work. My goals are to get it and Disco Hillbilly into print form by late spring and available through our new business entity MediaCauseGlobal as our first works out under that creative imprint. I am hoping to end up a sort of Ani DiFranco of publishing and multimedia. DiFranco started her own label back in the 1989: http://www.righteousbabe.com/ and has never worked through a major label. Now, she doesn’t have to.

Okay, maybe I should have started this twenty years ago… but better late than never. This is also what writer Dave Eggers did. He started out in ‘zines, then started McSweeney’s, which now also publishes him.

There is good proof, though, that one’s facility with language and story improves with age. I am hoping this is true of marketing oneself and one’s friends and the creative folks one admires. I guess I’ll find out.

What am I up to this weekend?

Hope to go see see Crazy Heart. The guy that wrote it is from this part of the country from down in Abingdon, VA… and got his start at the Barter Theatre there apparently.

Today, we are starting a photography project (once I get Edward out of bed). We are starting with what we have: ideas and some cheap equipment. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

I also hope to get in some time updating a formatted version of Bombardirovka and also work on the next installment of Disco Hillbilly for the web.

I am also reworking a website of my dad’s…

Next Twyla Tharp questions — from her list of questions that help you figure out your creative DNA

Last time I answered questions from Tharp’s list (see an earlier post) on the best idea I ever had… here are its opposite and the links between the two…

5. What is the dumbest idea I ever had?

I am going to stick with the realm of ideas. We have all done things we regret…so the question focuses on an idea — what is the dumbest idea I actually never realized, that is, made reality?

Maybe trying to potentially set up a service that helps writers get writing work. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

6. What made it stupid?

I didn’t have the infrastructure in place to actually make it work. I spent way too much on a graphic and simple website and that would have been better spent with a consultant flushing out the ideas. My view, though, is that with time, bad ideas morph into somewhat decent ideas. I do thinking owning and starting a business was a good idea. Last summer I thought I wanted the business to focus on the nonprofit sector; now, I think the business has settled into a vehicle for exclusively creative work. Ideas need time to ferment and become what they are going to become. I am pretty happy with the idea of a business focused on creative work…. So, from a stupid idea three years ago comes a pretty good idea this year.

7. Can you connect the dots that led you to this idea?

My MFA program gave no advice or direction on the “what next” part of being a writer. Great. So now you have an MFA. What next? Only so many writing instructor positions exist, and a lot of those are now taken up by folks with a Ph.D. AND an MFA and a hefty publishing credit under their belts. I’d thought about giving seminars on the what next of creative writing, and then, using that to recruit writer-consultants. Frankly, about that time my day job amped up, and I just didn’t have the time to invest in this idea. Then online writing portals really took off, so my idea was so of already obsolete by the time I got around to thinking it.

8. What is your creative ambition?

To complete the projects I have already outlined for myself. These include:

getting Bombardirovka (which I refer to affectionately as Bomba) and Disco Hillbilly out in print and audio forms

investigating and theorizing a school of the arts and technology

becoming well-experienced in multimedia production

become well-experienced in creating art through using digital media, esp. the web

finishing a long list of creative projects: Dogfight film; Chicken Mountain project; several audio and video projects; two more Jada Perlmutter novels; several online interactive narratives; three docu-reality multimedia websites, etc.

to become a creative and learning theorist

to become/remain part of an exchange of ideas and art

I think sometimes about being part of a larger conversation on a larger stage, but I am not sure I even care about that, or have ever cared about it, really. I am not sure what a person gains, other than access to the people also on those stages– maybe more money? I don’t know, though, if that stage door closes behind you once you go through it. That would most definitely not appeal to me.