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Today’s Spotlight is on Chicago Writers Association member Diana Zwinak.

How 18 people came to write more than 70,000 words in November
and lived to tell about it
By Diana Zwinak

I believe that teenage writers have a wealth of creativity inside them that should not be ignored and that our schools’ curriculums, focused as they are on standardized tests, push many students away from acquiring the very skills that teachers want adamantly to drill into their heads. For this reason, and as a response to the needs of several of my students, I created a non-profit corporation (Teen Writers and Artists Project) that tries to help supply these teenagers with the outlet that they so desperately crave. This is beginning to take up a serious amount of time, but when I am not tending to my corporation, or writing my own work, I am teaching at a rural high school in Illinois. Our entire student body is less than 500 students. However, last year 17 of them started the journey to became first time novelists, at least by NaNoWriMo standards. It all started on a pretty typical day in November. . .

Students in my high school English classes never know what to expect. In the course of a typical day I may get overtaken by inspiration several times and spontaneously start bouncing up and down in front of the classroom, a signal that I am about to send the whole class, or a select few adventurous souls, off on a project that takes us places we never even thought of before. That is what happened to us that day in the middle of the first week of last November.

I had just started my first attempt at participating in NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month. I was brimming with the exhilaration of just writing without a direction, just letting words flow for once. I hadn’t written in this way since high school or early college when I seemed to be a pipeline of words that poured forth and shaped themselves into their own amazing projects destined after a little tweaking from the internal editor to become pretty solid creations. I had honestly forgotten how good that felt.

So I was telling my students about it. They thought I was nuts. Most of them have never attempted to write anything beyond the papers demanded of them by the school system, and once they get to high school in our district, these papers become dry and unimaginative. Wrapped up in the MLA style manual and a formula that makes them easy to grade, they are boring to write. Students soon lose interest in writing at all, much less writing well. However, these papers are also designed in such a way that the department believes their are sure to learn various skills mandated by the state, so I can see why they exist in the format they do.

But that day I was filled with the joy and the lightening that true creative freedom can bring, and I challenged them to try to take part in the project with me. The NaNoWriMo Young Writer’s program allows students to make an agreement with a teacher and set a word goal for themselves. Students are not restricted to the 50,000 words that adult novelists are given. I offered my students 25 extra credit points if they set a word limit and succeeded. If they got half-way to their goal, they got 50 percent of the points. A quarter of the way got them 25 percent and so on.

Seventeen of my students took me up on the offer. Surprisingly, many of them were not from actual classes I taught but from my creative writing club at the high school. These people weren’t currently taking classes with me so they could not earn extra credit for their work. Some worked individually, some worked in pairs. Six of my students met their word goals and several NaNoWriMo novels came into existence. Everything from love stories to teen angst and horror stories poured through their fingers and into their computers. Periodically, students would turn their novels in to me electronically so that I could upload their novels into the NaNoWriMo counter.

My students who wrote the greatest amount of words 17,220 out of a contracted goal of 12,500 wrote a semi-Gothic exchange of letters between two twins battling for survival against their emotionally abusive father. One twin was sweetness and optimism; the other was eerie and weird. Overall the novel flowed well and descriptively for a piece that was not given a chance for a rewrite. They were proud of the work they had done and were presented with blank books to serve as journals to honor their achievement.

As a whole the student body of Indian Creek High School in Shabbona, Illinois had set a goal of 50,000 words. They wrote 70,430. Not too shabby for first timers.

Most importantly of all these students were given a chance to attempt a feat their peers would not. They came away having felt the joy of unbridled creation, and the confidence of accomplishment. One memory that sticks out in my mind was the day one of my freshmen came to me describing with wonder how she had cried uncontrollably while she wrote the scene in her novel in which her heroine died. She was amazed and I was pleased that she could feel so deeply for someone she created. I smiled and nodded, remembering the times when I , myself, have lost my heart to a character.

Upon completion of the project, all students’ names and word counts were posted on a bulletin board in my classroom, and any other passing student who dared to comment negatively on someone’s lower word count was asked how many words they had written last November. I never had that problem with the participants. Those other students got my point fairly quickly.

This year we plan to start outlining in October. We will approach it in a more organized manner, and I hope to complete more that 1900 out of my own 50,000 word goal. I also plan to offer NaNoWriMo Young Author support groups to teens in the Chicago area that are planning to try. Anyone interested in having a support group in their community can contact me at TeenWritersAndArtistsProject@gmail.com. Or they can visit our weblog and online journal link at TeenWritersAndArtistsProject.blogspot.com or through our page on myspace.com

From Natalie d’Arbeloff, author of Interviews with God:

“MY APPLE PERFORMANCE

“I had written a short introductory speech, complete with jokes, to warm up the audience before switching on my PowerPoint show. I rehearsed it in front of the bathroom mirror, in the street, in the bus, in the taxi and I thought I had it down pat. But as soon as I got up on the platform, facing the cinema-style seats filling up with people who had actually come to hear me, I forgot it completely. Apart from one joke which could have done with better timing:

I see there are some…(pause)….mature faces here tonight. Like mine. Well, I want to tell you that anything you’ve heard about brain cells dying when you get older is a lie. They don’t die. They just get bored….(pause) And then they die. (pause). The way to keep them bouncy is to work on something you love.”

UPS planted my prize from Seattle Gourmet Coffee on the doorstep yesterday as the dog barked hysterically. Once the truck had pulled away and the noise settled to a grrr, I opened the door and retrieved the package. [In case you forgot, I won the Red Envelope contest and have been waiting for my prize.] 

Aside from the large piece of burlap - which I assumed was part of a bag that used to hold coffee beans - I was tickled to find TWO pounds of coffee. One of whole bean Colombian Supremo and one of Seattle Gourmet’s Northwest Blend, both medium roast. Now if we can just find the coffee bean grinder ….

Luanne was really excited about the stainless steel travel coffee mug. Maybe I’ll get back my XENA: Warrior Princess mug since it appears the one from Seattle Gourmet Coffee is superior. With all due respect and gratitude for the prize, there’s something about reading “I just want to get through the day without having to kick somebody’s ass” that makes me prefer the XENA mug.

Oh yeah, and they also tucked in a white chocolate dipped biscotti. Thanks!

I had the odd experience last night of having someone read my own words to me. A black woman. I was astounded by how different they sounded with her inflection as opposed to how they had sounded in my head as I was writing.

I’ve never consciously thought about my readers beyond wanting to connect with them as human beings. Sure, I realize that some things just won’t translate into other cultures. Like in my novel, none of the murderers at the senior center used a gun as a weapon. The centers with which I’m familiar are primarily white suburban centers. I’m guessing - could be my own bias - that most of the members don’t carry guns.

But how odd to think that someone in a senior center, perhaps in a city, would find my book “stupid” - or something like that, maybe “naive” - because I didn’t simply have the murderer shoot his victim. We talked a bit about that last night on the radio. Well, I mentioned the recent shooting over cards at a senior residence in Chicago.

We also talked about something that struck Dr. Ni as peculiar, which was my use of “the Spanish-speaking woman.” I confess I used it too often but for the life of me could not think of another way to identify her without being crude. I grew up in the whitest of white neighborhoods. The closest we came to persons of color were when the stray migrant child was plopped into school for the brief time that their parents worked on nearby farms. Mexican was used in a derogatory (two gs or one?) fashion.

Besides I couldn’t use “Mexican” generically - although I guess that my parents might. Spanish-speaking folk come from everywhere. I just read this morning in the DePaul Alumni news that Chicago has the third largest Spanish-speaking population - ahead of Miami!

Dr. Ni said that coming from California as she did her choice would have been chicana or latina. Duh! Never occured to me. But I do know enough not to use those interchangeably. Latina meaning someone of Hispanic descent born outside the U.S. Chicana is reserved for someone born here. [I hope I've got that right].

Ah me. So much to consider.

Last night I was the guest of radio show host Dr. Niama Willams. At first it sounded easy enough - call the station, they conference me in and we talk. Unfortunately, there was a typo in the number they gave me to call, the station manager was late (which meant I had to call back later) and …

Well, once we got it together it was okay. The show was scheduled from 8-9 p.m. Eastern BUT because of the delay we ran over - all the way to 9:30! That’s how I spent the evening - talking about myself, about PARK RIDGE (my novel). Oh! And I read. Two pieces. One called “Bearing Witness” which strings together real life incidents that I witnessed interpersed with personal memories. The second was a short fictional story called “Flight” about a wintery morning “L” ride. 

Dr. Ni has a doctorate in literature so it was a bit of kick to have my work analyzed on air. Folks from Chicago should get a chuckle when I say that she wondered what secret message I was trying to convey by saying that the train tracks were “squeezed between the in-bound and out-going lanes of the expressway” or my use of “Eden.” I don’t think she believed me a bit when I insisted the Edens Expressway was the real name and that I had no hidden intent!

She was lavish in her praise - both on the air and in email:

“Bearing Witness” is an excellent piece of writing, and I think what I love best about it is your listing of the choices when one has been victimized as a young person:  1) become an abuser, 2) continue as a victim, 3) I haven’t figured that one out yet ….

3 is such a brilliant move as an essayist because it represents a journey that many survivors must and often do go through.  One cannot avoid, if one is at all a conscious, aware human being and survivor, confrontation of that question. 

Too many of us stand aside when witnessing the kind of behavior that you describe in the essay, and I for one have stood aside, helpless and angry:  helpless because I don’t want someone to pull out a gun and hurt me and angry because my fear forces me into powerlessness. 

I’ll let you know when the podcast is available.

Today’s Spotlight is on Chicago Writers Association member, Lisa Maroski, author of The One That Is Both.

Exploring the Frontiers of Language    Many years ago I read a small book called The Limits of Language. It had been written much earlier, in 1962–a collection of essays by philosophers, scientists, and writers who all pointed to a boundary of sorts. If there were a sign at the border it would have said something like “Caution: No Adequate Language Beyond This Point.” However, none of the authors did any more than point at a dark void; none offered a solution, none ventured into that void. I resolved to be the person to do that. I have taken some first tentative steps, which I will share in the hope of sparking someone’s imagination, to join me in this adventure into a frontier as exciting as deep space, deep interior space this time.

My own quest began while studying physics and Eastern philosophy. From both those perspectives, the world seemed to be a paradoxical unity, not the nice linear, rational world that I had been conditioned to expect. The interpenetration of opposites–such as body and mind, energy and matter, subject and object–was more compelling to me than analyzing them in their separateness. And aside from clumsy compounds, such as bodymind, there was no way to express succinctly the dynamism, cocreativeness, and inherent unity of such oppositions. In graduate school, I experimented with equally clumsy constructions, but it wasn’t until I hit upon the idea of getting away from the alphabet that I struck paydirt. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Let’s look a bit more closely at the boundary. If you come from the perspective that each thing we have a word for is a separate entity distinct from other entities, then the language we’ve got will do you just fine, and you can stop reading this. If, however, you come from the perspective that everything is profoundly interconnected, then the limitations of language become more evident. The very act of predicating, of saying X is Y keeps X from ever being one with Y. My friend, Steve Rosen, describes this limit very concisely, “Of course, any act of predication, any assertion that ‘X is’ or that ‘X is not,’ is an act of circumscribing X, rendering it finite, implicitly (if not explicitly) turning it into an object that is cast before the subjectivity of the predicator. Quite irrespective, then, of the explicit content of my thoughts or words, when the form of my discourse is that of predication, implicitly I finitize, objectify, create an other. Therefore, in predicating self, I actually produce what is other, what appears over against this existential self that predicates.” In other words, our language implicitly keeps the subject and object separate, keeps the unity of interpenetration of such opposites forever a poetic metaphor.

This is not the case in some languages. A Navajo woman once explained that when they say something like “I see the mountain,” it is implied that I am also that mountain, that it is not separate from me. English implies that is absolutely must be separate.

So how do we expand this language, English, to be able to express that inherent non-separation of subject and object? How do we increase the bandwidth of our language?

I have taken a stab at it by inventing new types of words, words that don’t have letters but have graphic images, since images show relationships. Here is an example of what one of them means: “fu-an-gu: its meaning translates roughly as ‘the deeper you get, the less it looks like itself, and when you reach the core, it looks like the opposite of what you started with.’” (Check out my book to see the actual graphic.) This concept embodies the paradox of wholeness, wherein you express the simultaneity of opposites. That is one way to increase the bandwith of language. I’d love to hear your ideas for other ways.

Lisa Maroski, author of The One That Is Both
website: http://murder.booklocker.com/www.theonethatisboth.com
blog: http://paradoxplayground.blogspot.com

I was checking my site stats for Blooking Central and saw one “Recently Came From” entry was from Wikipedia. I backtracked and discovered that Blooking Central is one of two external links listed! Not bad for a site that’s less than 2 months old.

I’ve put a lot of hard work into the blooking site - 24 blooks examined the last month, 15 blooks or blooks-to-be so far this month and it’s only the sixth of July.

Just a quicky to tell you that CWA’s own Paul Wolf has a new website.

I just watched the Today Show’s interview that Lester Holt did with Bill Barnes. When senior citizen felt the pickpocket’s hand slip into his pocket, he reacted immediately by beginning to attack his attacker. Much is being made of the fact that Barnes is a former Marine and Golden Gloves boxer.

Barnes had just withdrawn money from an ATM which leads me to believe that the pickpocket had been watching for someone he considered an easy mark. He was wrong in assuming that a senior would be “easy.” Follow this link for a video of the fight.

I’m a little annoyed. Yesterday in the morning’s email I found a request to proof something for a friend. I did and within hours received the jubilant message that it had been accepted for publication and it would be appearing in the next issue of some magazine.

Okay, so maybe not annoyed. More like jealous. I’m happy for my friend. Really. But golly gee whiz, why don’t things like that happen to me

On the other hand, I’m signed up to do an internet radio show next week. I’ll be reading one pretty long piece entitled “Witness” and a short story called “Flight.” Getting the opportunity was not as easy as my friend popping her piece into email.

When I inquired about appearing as a guest, I was sent a document with some really stringent requirements regarding content for work to be submitted. I was amazed at what I found there. The show purports to be interviews with book authors plus short reads by the authors. THIS was NOT THAT.

Undeterred, I located “Witness” which did fit the criteria. I waited almost a month to hear that the show’s host rejected it. Seven minutes after receiving that email I received another saying that she changed her mind. But did I have another piece to fill out the hour?

I submitted short story that had been published in DePaul’s literary magazine, Threshold. It was rejected (don’t ask). Then I submitted two more pieces. One of these was found “acceptable.”

And so next week I’ll be doing the show. I can only hope that I get to mention the name of my book.