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The C (creative, Crystal, calibrated, compiled) Week in Review #2

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

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.

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The Hard Questions

Friday, February 5th, 2010

I said in an earlier post that I would answer some hard questions Twyla Tharp posits in her book on the creative habit. My disclaimer is that I don’t believe in everything Tharp puts forward in the two books of hers I have read. I like hard work, but I certainly don’t think everyone should like what I like, or, that working hard makes one person “better” than another person, neither in art nor production nor as a person. What one person strives to complete, may be play for another. In short, there are all kinds of ways to live; I am not sure the Protestant Work Ethic hasn’t had as much to show its weaknesses as its worths.

It’s also a bit of a red flag that one of the two books I got of Tharp’s (both Christmas gifts) is touted as a great business book. Not that I am against business, but I am not sure about business. I am not sure about many endeavors, and I am not sure why I should (given the current economic climate, the climate climate, etc.) be sure. In the book Tharp gives advice about how to work with people you don’t want to work with, focusing particular advice on how to manage an out-of-touch boss. Again, this is being touted as a great business book. We are being advised often on how to manage out-of-touch bosses. How often this comes up in books and in practice makes me feel like:

How did we get here? What has happened that, by being out of touch, a person gets promoted to “boss”? Or, is it, that the nature of hierarchies is to ensure the boss is out of touch?

In any case, what does this have to do with art? To Tharp, lots of art is about leadership, discipline, and collaboration. More or less like getting anything done in most spheres. Collaboration has gotten a bad rap in the past as touchy-feely, and now after almost a decade of the new millenium, it seems to be everywhere–what lots of hierarchical institutions now want their members to do: come together, yeah. Years ago at the New School for Social Research when I was doing my master’s degree in the science of teaching Cynthia Onore, the program’s head, focused our learning on collaboration. We learned in teams and in cohorts. We practiced how we would have our students learn. We threw fits due to not having had a lot of previous practice in collaboration, but under their stead (it’s a damn shame the New School got rid of that program in the 90s) we grew unafraid to work together, and thus, we were unafraid of our students working together when we went into our classrooms. My point? Collaboration took a lot of practice. Huge stakes also were not at stake. We weren’t going to lose millions if we misstepped. And, granted, we were probably a touchy-feely lot to begin with: we’d willingly entered a program to become teachers focused on the needs of urban students.

Oh, I digress. Okay. The questions. Soon. I will post them next post. The questions that concern what one is as an artist. See, my beef, too, with Tharp is that she comes from the school of “well, just pick one!” In one scene she writes of how much she loves color and design and that she also could have been a painter, that maybe she would have been happy being a painter. But she talked herself out of it. Do this, not that.

I can’t say I am not in a struggle over that. My life, my public life and work life, really, rather than my social one, has been a tug between social cause and education work, which, have their expectations, socially and publicly, and creative work–writing, music, performance– which have theirs. The first is a more socially conservative realm with the specter of the Progressive-era school marm and prudish reformer flying above it looking to clean up the working classes and bring everyone to middle class propriety. The second, it’s safe to say its specter is not of a school marm.

To really have a country that is able to focus on innovation, able to compete in the new creative economy, able to break forth and solve the dire, dire, dire problems we face: I ask, are the right people even teachers? The right people involved in solving social issues?

A year or so ago I entered a competition to potentially win a fellowship to start a school in Los Angeles. The people running the competition were excited about me till I turned in my proposal. Albeit I crammed in too much in terms of the local demographics, I also focused on the “what next?” after college. I’ve been that teacher–the one expounding college. But, I also had every junior high school class of mine, after my first full year of teaching, do a career project, in which they researched and presented a project on career of their choice (save being a musician, model, actor, or athlete–they could do a project on an adjacent career, not exactly on those). We traced what it would take to potentially reach those dreams.

Nonetheless, in my proposal, I focused on relationships for our inner-city students. Life had taught me that having the right degree was, by a long shot, not enough. You need to know people. People need to trust that you can do a good job. How do you get to know people that could employ you or trust you if the potential employer you seek is not a member of your own community? I think this did not sit well with the career-educators judging the competition.  My guess is they had been rewarded for being good students, wouldn’t everyone?

Teachers, on the other hand, are involved in a deep bureaucracy. If they take certain classes, pass certain tests, get the right credential, and, then, also know someone, they get a job. They keep this job as long as they do okay, take some more classes, pass some more tests, behave. How many other types of jobs work like that any more?

Many people I know get their jobs through a combination of having the hard skills and also by having the soft skills of networking, by being someone other people want to be around, etc. You can have all the college degrees in the world, but if no one knows you that is in the hiring class, then you may not get the kind of job the teachers back in school promised you.

It’s happening now. A lot of kids coming out of college and having nowhere to go, and that is not just due to the economy–they don’t have access to the people that are hiring. They were told that if they just went to college, they would soon have a middle class life and be doing something fulfilling, more fulfilling than minimum wage work. They were told they could reach their dreams…. like their teachers had? Like their college professors had? If the kids coming out of college do get jobs, they are often lower administrative positions in which they are paid peanuts for also having skills their baby boomer bosses don’t have: social networking, web design, blogging, etc. Ah, the good life.

What would happen if the school marm yokes were lifted from the schools? What would happen if a league of artists were brought in, circumventing the regular hoops, and brought a group of students from ninth to twelfth grades? Maybe add to this group of artists a group of entrepreneurs and mentors out in the community– What if schools taught classes in innovation, design, entrepreurship, collaboration, networking and then students got out into communities to work, thereby making contacts that might hire them once they go to college?

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Rethink, restart

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

The hero’s journey includes crossing water, usually a large body of water, till he gets closer to the center of the action and himself. The changing point in this journey is when the hero seems to be as far away as possible, both physically and mentally, from that which he seeks or needs to obtain. Then the ground shifts and actions propel him fully…maybe not in the direction he seeks, but anyway, all is moving finally along (finally). That is my restart with this blog. I was in Tbilisi, Georgia till October 2009. I crossed water. Now I am near the Kanawha River. You can go home again. Been thinking about New York City, too. I have often said that I grew up in West Virginia, but became an adult in New York. I have looked at the Appalachian ghosts square on. Not sure I have looked yet, fully, at the ones floating for me still in the Big Apple. They will have to wait a while longer.

The folks I have been reading lately blend together: Lilian Gish stating a well-worn notion that “Art” (her capitalization, not mine) is for the few. This is melding with a wonderful essay, The Mask and the Movietone (1929), by the writer H.D. in which she worries that films are like our dolls come to life and she frets about what will happen to our imaginations once our “dolls” become too perfect.

My husband gave me a couple of books by Twyla Tharp for Christmas.  I am not much of one for writing assignments.  In fact, I generally hate writing exercises. I don’t mind writing nonfictional analysis on demand, but I never want to write creativly what someone else tells me to write. Collaboration is fine; that I like, but I don’t want to “Imagine you are in a field and only one person from your life can walk toward you.  Write that scene.” I got enough on my emotional writing plate, thanks.

I find a good chunk of Tharp’s thinking about creativity very competitive and quite black and white (I stand by Merle Haggard’s notion that creative people shouldn’t compete, and, I also often think of more traditional societies in which everyone dances, everyone sings, everyone imbues art in their daily objects–where that life force is just part of everyone’s life, and I think, what good is Western reach for the new, Western reach for the novel, Western reach for “perfection” and “be all can you be?” Who the  hell am I, really, to judge?  I can like or not like something, but that in no way makes me, or you, right… and who cares? I am still opinionated, but those opinions, really, doesn’t friggin’ matter….).

In any case, Tharp is not screwing around, though, when it comes to one list of questions she calls “Your Creative Autobiography.”  It’s in a chapter in which she discusses “creative DNA”–basically, what is your imprint, what is important to you, and what mark do you leave, what framework do you work from?

I am going to work on these questions. They feel like the right place to start. Then, I am going to work on them in the programs I am beginning to learn, then I am going to post some kind of results here.

One last note, I don’t know whether it was Tharp, but something I was reading the last few days also spoke about the tug between being alone and being in company that creative folks have… the strange impulse for creation, which often takes solitude (even when creating with others, it may take a way of being undisturbed, at the very least) and then an impulse to share with an audience, and, how the latter can always be disconcerting. I know for me that when I share my work publicly, as publicly as I have in the last year and a half, when I first release what I do, I feel like I have been caught with my pants down.  I feel that way until some unsolicited post-publication feedback comes in, and then, my face doesn’t burn, or, burn as bright. My sense is that many more people feel that way.  I wonder.

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