murder.booklocker.com

I have mixed emotions about the latest story of an elderly person who caused an accident. The entire car went into a restaurant - it wasn’t just a bump into a wall. The woman had been involved in a similar incident just a month before.

CBS Chicago reports that Illinois has some of the most stringent driving rules and that the woman had passed her most recent tests.

I don’t want to take sides here because I understand how important it is for seniors to maintain their independence. But at what price?

and read a story in the LA Times. In my blogroll I have a site called the Reluctant Blogger which is written by Henry Kisor.

Today I saw in his post a link to a story that will (or should) break your heart. It’s about a columnist who, well. let Henry tell you.

NEED AN AGENT? LOOKING FOR A PUBLISHER?

Maybe we can help.

Killer Nashville 2007 (http://www.KillerNashville.com) has made arrangements with New York’s Maria Carvainis Agency’s Donna Bagdasarian and Oceanview Publishing’s editor Maryglenn McCombs to accept pitches from registered authors during Killer Nashville 2007, August 17-19, 2007.

Both agent and editor are actively seeking new authors.

The pitch sessions are a free add-on to Killer Nashville 2007 attendees and are on a first-registered, first-served basis. Pitch times are limited. Signing up for Killer Nashville or the pitch sessions after all times have been taken does not guarantee any new pitch times will be added. Register early to ensure you get a spot

To sign up for a pitch time at no additional cost, or to read agent/editor bios see http://www.killernashville.com/Content2007/agentedsignup2007.htm.

To register for Killer Nashville 2007 visit http://www.killernashville.com/Content2007/registration2007.htm.

Note: Assignment times are given in the order Killer Nashville registration is received, not the time in which the agent/editor pitch request is received.

I’m of the opinion - I got it first from Judith Barrington’s book Writing the Memoir and had it reinforced in graduate school — that a memoir is more than a memory written down. It’s an evaluation of what happened from the perspective of today. I’d like to share a quote I found this morning that explains even better:

“Time changes people, places and perceptions

“One of the things I love most about blogging, is that it allows us, in a very real way, to interact with earlier versions of ourselves.  What I mean is that I can look back in time, say 4 years, to a post I wrote before the advent of children, deaths and triumphs.  That Chris no longer exists; should I mourn for his passing or be overjoyed that I have matured, leaving that man to the cold blankness of time?

“Reading that post, I can answer myself across the gulfs of time and cyberspace, and say “No, you weren’t an idiot.  You were brave enough to believe in an ideal, one that had no possibility of making a difference.  But you believed and that, is worth more than can be imagined.” (Chris Davis)

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.