Category Archives: Audience

What does it mean to be a Minnesotan writer?  In this age of placelessness—sitting in a Starbucks or Motel 6 or airport lounge or on a Facebook page, you could be anywhere—even our literature is without landscape or regional identity.  Especially literature from the Midwest, which, when compared with New York City writing or the work of Southern writers seems bland in its vernacular and hard to locate. “There is nothing worse than the writer who doesn’t use the gifts of the region, but wallows in them,” wrote Flannery O’Connor, the ultimate advocate for regional voices.  “An idiom characterizes a society, and when you ignore the idiom, you are very likely ignoring the whole social fabric that could make a meaningful character.”  What is Minnesota’s idiom, our social fabric?  Many years ago I read an essay by David Mura in The View from the Loft; it struck me so much,…

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I write about love because I tell stories; and it is impossible, I believe, to tell any kind of powerful or valuable or meaningful story without writing about love.  And, too, I have found that it is impossible to write a story without love.  The writer must love her characters, must open her heart to them, give the whole of herself to them, in order for those characters to give themselves back to her.                                             –Kate Dicamillo, “Characters who Love Again” Today I’m pondering love’s role in the making of literature.  Love is a basic ingredient, like water in a soup.  Without water, you have no soup. Before there’s any hope of writing well or of an audience appreciating your work, you must love writing itself.  You must love…

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As I move to the close of my second decade of teaching creative writing, I’m experiencing a dramatic shift in my philosophy.  Writing has always been for me a means of personal discovery; I came to understand and claim my identity as a bisexual Christian when writing Swinging on the Garden Gate, and then melded my spiritual direction training with writing coaching to support others in profound personal healing and exploration through writing.  I’m a firm believer in the power of privacy at the start of a writing project.  If a writer’s heart isn’t on the line, what that writer writes hasn’t much chance of mattering. Because I’m well-trained as a feminist, I know the personal is political.  So I’ve always trusted that deeply private explorations play a powerful role in public discourse.  By reconciling my sexual identity with my faith, in my heart and in Swinging, I believe that,…

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This past weekend my sister married the man she loves in a sunny meadow.  Because this was her second marriage, she had resisted it mightily—“marriage” is a story the culture imposes on couples, and it doesn’t necessarily work.  You have to understand—Marcy is a woman who, on her own, adopted two boys from Guatemala; she started a community farm and has midwifed countless babies into the world.  Her performance artist sweetie moved in two years ago; the boys already call him Dad.  Why bother with marriage? Eventually Marcy conceded that a wedding would give them a communal and sacred blessing.  The couple created a “family union” ceremony with their Lakotan spiritual leader that involved the guests hiking across a canyon, drumming, washing in a stream, and making vows to one another and the boys.  The guests cried and danced. What made my sister’s wedding powerful?  It was faithful to tradition…

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When I teach, I often ask the question, “What’s at stake for you in this story?”  I’m not alone; it’s a common question in the world of writing.  Students are puzzled by it, however, and usually ask me to explain. Really I’m looking for the intersection between the writer’s heart and the words on the page.  How does this subject terrify you, compel you, wrap its sweaty hands around your longing and jerk you into unexplored territory?  When a story nags, it always shares some fundamental passion with the writer.  It always taunts the writer with the promise of discoveries that cannot be made in any other way.  How does this project set you on edge?  What’s the rabbit hole you’ve been skirting?  Your writing will take you down. For people who keep journals and new writers, writing is a natural extension of the self.  We don’t recognize any separation…

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You must sympathize with the reader’s plight (most readers are in trouble about half the time) but never seek to know the reader’s wants.  Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. When I came upon these words in Strunk and White’s classic writing handbook, Elements of Style, I felt pleased as punch.  For years I’ve tried to convince writing students to surround themselves with a safe, protective bubble as they draft projects and begin revising.  We all know how concern for our audience can loom over our shoulders, pestering us with questions like “What will your mother think?” and “Who will give a rat’s ass about that?” and judging our language or ideas as inadequate.  As soon as we allow that dreaded entity, “the reader,” into our writing room, we begin censoring and performing. …

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Whenever I get swept up in the competitive, audience-seeking dimension of the writing life, I turn to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet as an antidote.  Rilke returns me to my essential, life-giving reasons for writing. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it and not lose too much time and too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people. Art-making both awakens and fulfills basic spiritual needs, Rilke says, and that this role is ultimately sufficient. A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. Out of the cacophony of writing advice out there, Rilke stands alone in emphasizing love as the central creative force in our work.  We must love our doubt, love our solitude, love the questions, love our subject, and make love our subject.  Even suffering in the creative process is worthy of love: Why…

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