Author: vesta clare

grateful for:

007-6-22-15-cropDogs, rain, friends, family.

My father’s sense of humor and my mother’s toughness.

The authors who teach me how to write by being so good at what they do. Especially, most recently: Maile Meloy, Vendela Vida, Megan Mayhew Bergman.

The musicians whose work keeps me looking forward instead of down.

Workshop writers who patiently critique my work and the editors who do the same.

All the good people in my neighborhood.

The gardens, hiking paths and parks of the SF Bay area.

The Bay Area Book Festival.

Twitter, for saving my mornings from the Google News page (thank you thank you thank you).

The Berkeley Bowl.

Peet’s coffee.

Moe’s books.

Rasputin Music shop.

Chocolate, gingerbread, stuffing, fresh roasted chestnuts.

and again, dogs, rain, friends and family.

election madness

Getting a little weary of the decibel level and alternate reality(ies) of campaign season. It’s like a tide of static that floods through the country, turning all of us into ciphers, categories, and statistics.

It’s helped to be buried in the revision stages of some stories - 5 bright water, ocean crop 088 bisand the imagining stages of others. And I’ve found refuge in reading Langston Hughes (short stories, Saratoga Rain, Who’s Passing for Who?, On the Road) and Vendela Vida (Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name). Another good antidote: walks by the water, where the tides, grasses, and trees aren’t running for office.

favorite passages recently read

Gil Adamson, The Outlander

The world was huge, endless, and the widow in her body was not.

 

In the mornings heavy fog poured upward from the earth and drifted in ghostly forms through the trees. …She watched a gaggle of vaporous forms trouble the surface of a little forest slough, and it gave her a curious image of what her own mind endured. …Furies born and soon dead with a simple breath of sun; but potent while they lasted and terrible.

 

Jeffrey was in the stalls sorting through old bridles when the door went dim, as if a cloud had passed over. He looked up to see the silhouettes of two large men standing side by side. … He didn’t speak. He didn’t move. He waited. He was a man accustomed to waiting. And slowly, the men, who had been stiff and unmoving as statutes, began to shift and shuffle as doubt overtook and annoyed them, impelled them forward on their fine black boots into the gloom of the barn. Two horses watched them come, the animals’ long faces hanging over the stall doors with the guileless, expectant gaze common to all horses, even the hellraisers.

Visit the author site here

Book & purchase options are here

 

Megan Mayhew Bergman, “Yesterday’s Whales” Birds of a Lesser Paradise

There were unspoken routines and rituals, shoes underneath the bed and books on the nightstand that reminded us what kind of people we were, should we forget for a moment, or be tempted to change.

Access the author site here

Book & purchase options here

 

Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love

…we wait at the bus stops, managing our intricate and tiny mental kingdoms…

 

“But what if,” I said, still gazing at her, with her sly sexy smile like a little dawn on her face, “what if the love we feel, what if it’s central, what if it’s what makes the world’s soul possible, what if it’s what made the world and keeps it running…”

 

She hadn’t thought she could love a man of my race, but once I showed up in her life, I turned to be the man she loved, what is the word, regardless. To this day I don’t know exactly what she loved about me and that’s because I don’t have to know. She just does. It was the entire menu of myself. She ordered all of it.

Access the author site here

Book & purchase options here

Other voices, (4) good reads

005 cropRegret, Resignation Day First Class Literature
flash fiction by Steven Ray Smith

Read it here

Falling in Love with Bahia & Brazil: On Negritude, Saudade, & Surrender Words Without Borders
by Naomi Jackson

[Excerpt] Determined to keep my hot foot off Brazilian soil, I cut short conversations with friends who traveled to Brazil and caught Luso-fever. I thought that the Caribbean, West Africa, and South Africa, where I’d traveled in search of blackness that both reflected and diverged from my own in ways that were instructive, affirming, provocative, and occasionally downright maddening, were enough.

Read the article here

Conversations with Contributors: Brian Tierney (Issue 11, Poetry)  Adroit Journal

[Excerpt]  I…was pretty far down the path of prose and literary studies graduate-level work when I realized I wanted to be writing poetry more seriously…poetry was the most natural way of exercising my humanity.

I wanted the “I” to be recognizably me, and so, be able to hold the weight of authentic experience, but also be capable of multiplicity and difference, of expansion and contraction, of observation and experience that could mean something to someone else.

Read the article here

Translating Southeast Asia  Moving Worlds
Editorial by Shirley Chew

[Excerpt]  With Moving Worlds acquiring a second home in Singapore in 2011, ‘region’ which had meant Yorkshire when the journal was based solely in Leeds, now includes Southeast Asia…places of historical and cultural antiquity and modern nation-states astir with the often aggressive business of progress and  development.

Against the turmoil of public events, this issue explores some invigorating examples of crosscultural creativity in the region.

Read the article here.

 

Where do we go from here?

Dark Landscape treated, crop bis

My neighborhood is ordinarily a fairly social place. When the weather is warm, kids play soccer and basketball or ride bikes and Razors, calling to each other as they race past. You hear music coming from homes and passing cars. There are greetings, conversations, and laughter.

We’re from different parts of the globe. Some of us are poor, none of us is wealthy. There are newish cars and long work hours, barbecues on weekends, groans and cheers when a local team has a game televised.

After the back-to-back killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, my neighborhood fell silent. No one played music, kids stayed indoors, there weren’t any conversations or greetings. The only sound that broke the quiet was a woman weeping one night, sporadically, from dark until I went to sleep. It felt like an illness traveling through every home.

It went on for over a week. Then the sniper fire in Dallas happened and added its own sickening dimension. And the police killings in Baton Rouge. And the shooting of Charles Kinsey in Miami.

It’s a list that probably will not end soon. And, really, it can’t end soon enough. Where do we go from here? All I’m sure of is it’s going to take cool heads and calm hearts. I’m also pretty sure the solution isn’t high octane rhetoric and hair-trigger distrust for anyone who doesn’t resemble us. That’s how we got here, it’s not the road out.

When we’re on that threatened-frightened-angry continuum, what we do is hammer whoever we don’t know or don’t like into the shape of our fear. We need to step back and take a breath. We have to do better than that.

The bombast, buzz words, and simplistic rhetoric…

…that trivializes everything.

Every person who died in the Pulse shootings in Orlando was part of a network of friends, lovers, parents, siblings, coworkers, neighbors—and every one of those people now faces silence and absence where they once had the company of someone they loved or worked alongside.

That is the most important thing about what happened in Orlando early Sunday morning. A lot of arms are no longer able to hold someone precious, and a lot of minds are trying to grasp how it’s possible that something so staggering could happen.

I have no idea what it’s like to lose someone you love in such a horrific way. But my guess is I’d like real answers, carefully investigated information, and effective solutions. Not campaign histrionics and vitriol.

Maybe a measure of our presidential candidates should include their capacity to be respectful and insightful? Just a thought.

Bay Area Book Festival thoughts

677 treated cropOn Being from More Than One Place

There will probably be a few posts with roots in Bay Area Book Festival, which is a fantastic event. This one grew from a session about, in my words, the effects of interconnectedness between cultures and continents and of being a child of more than one culture or country.

It was moderated by Marie Mutsuki Mockett (Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye) http://www.mariemockett.com/, who is Japanese and American, and created by Mutsuki Mockett with Sunil Yapa, who also participated in the discussion and is Sri Lankan and American (Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist) http://sunilyapa.com/.

The panel also included Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing) who was born in Ghana and grew up in the States. Interview: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/06/yaa_gyasi_on_her_debut_novel_homegoing_and_getting_blurbed_by_ta_nehisi.html and Ali Eteraz (Children of Dust, Native Believer), who grew up in Pakistan, the Caribbean, South Asia, and the American South. Author site: http://alieteraz.com/; his writing in the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/profile/alieteraz.

One of many interesting points came from Mutsuki Mockett, who mentioned that people from different cultures literally see landscapes differently, some creating a hierarchy of perception that begins with the foreground and others having a more integrated view.

The rest of the conversation was so lively and involving I hardly took any notes. Each of these authors is someone to follow and read. Their work opens doorways to worlds you immediately want to know more about. They all had a solid sense of humor and thoughtful outlook—character traits that (I think) allow people to put themselves in any landscape without the need to dominate it, which in turn makes a person an excellent observer and synthesizer of information and experience.

Yapa spoke about the importance of successive drafts and revisions, of digging deeper and deeper into the story and point of view of each character. In something of a mirror-image observation, Gyasi spoke about the evolving process of learning her family’s history and genealogy, how things that were either curious or unquestioned became clearer and gained depth as she came to know their origins.

One of the authors, and I’m embarrassed to say I don’t recall who it was, made the point that it’s important to not promote myopia with our work, that it’s important to instead promote the opening up and deepening of our own and a reader’s point of view.

That triggered a thought about my own experience, being an American and also a child of two very different cultures in the context of my immediate family.

One of the results of this background is a discomfort and skepticism with any opinion based in the concept that there is only one point of view that has primacy and validity. I feel as though Americans fall into this because our country is so vast and populated and dominant in both good and bad ways on the world stage. It is, in a way, a myopia that prevents perceiving the validity of other points of view. I think it’s a flaw in our vision,and that it needs the correcting effect of exploring the view from other countries, people, and landscapes.

William Goldman meets Somerset Maugham

In answering a question put to him during an English Lit class, Maugham is said to have made the following now well-known observation:

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

In the realm of screenwriting, and in a documentary titled Tales from the Script, William Goldman makes this point (I’m quoting from notes taken while watching the DVD):

“We have no idea what we’re doing. If we knew exactly how to create a great film each time, we’d be doing it.”

This is where a little light went off for me, when these two thoughts bumped up against each other. The world around us, our perceptions of it, and the language we use to communicate them are continually, constantly, always changing. We try to nail things down with our binary-think ways, our categories and stereotypes and narratives, but this—in my opinion, anyway—is an illusory sense of coherence.

So maybe one of the reasons we can’t formulate and repeatably create great films and novels is they are moments in time built from and reflecting the daily flood of experience. Each of us captures our own constellations of moments and data points, each of us responds a little differently to what we read and encounter, and every day we’re a little further away from experiences collected last week, last month, last year. On separate days, the same person can react differently to the same thing, depending on an assortment of causes and circumstances.

Are we not told, as writers, to keep submitting our work, because it might land on the desk of multiple agents and editors before someone reads it at the right time on the right day and decides it should find its way into publication? (Of course, we are most likely also refining and revising between submissions.)

So go ahead and dive in. Write that crazy impossible tale. Maybe a rule or two will be broken or reconfigured in the process, but get the story down. It’s your story. No one else can tell it the way you will. Sometimes a new sort of narrative has to be created in order to tell the tale you have in mind. The guideposts for it won’t all be laid out because no one’s done it—yet.

Encouraging & new experience

- 2 IMG crop_0764

I’ve been getting feedback from writing groups for some time, but I’m relatively new to working with a professional editor. The editor I’ve worked with has reviewed three of my stories at this point, and over a period of as many years so we aren’t in touch regularly.

The most recent story she’s helped me with is about Stevie Ray Vaughan. An intimidating project, to put it mildly, with someone so well-known and loved at its center. Not to mention someone whose own work is so stratospherically good and who must have put in his 10,000 hours by the age of 14.

How did I end up with such a daunting project? At first it was more of a writing exercise, focused on a quality of his that I admire. Then I submitted it to a writing group and discovered nearly half the people who read it had never heard of him.

That was well past the last reaction I’d expected. As in a few galaxies past the last thing I’d expected to hear. It was too much, too crazy, and a little alarming. There’s no knowing how much difference a story of mine can make, but that’s when it stopped being a private project. I had to make it as good as I was able and send it out there.

You can’t just bring your A game to a project like this. You have to run it through boot camp a few times between drafts. That means finding tough reviewers, which includes working with a good editor.

So the encouraging thing that happened is a while ago the editor I worked with sent an article link to me about a musician who passed away recently (in Prince’s shadow, someone who is not as widely known). It included a few passages about Stevie Ray Vaughan helping this musician out, nudging him to do a few things that were helpful and going the extra mile to lend a hand (one of the themes of my story).

I was so touched that she’d sent the link. It felt as though the story’s point had made contact. At the very least I hoped it meant I’d managed to put SRV front and center and avoided getting in his way.

It also made me realize how important it is to only send your best work out there. Imagine burying a good point inside a story that’s not really finished and having it kind of skate past everyone, or hit people in a way that doesn’t at all resemble your point.

Of course all those things can happen anyway, but let it at least come from the best we can do, not something we tossed together and decided was good enough for now. And I have to say, sometimes a first draft is so hard for me to get down—at least in a way that resembles what made me sit down to write—it can feel as though I’ve climbed Everest and finished the project.

But it’s only the beginning.