I am trying something different, something obvious. Instead of writing my report of the day all at once the following morning, I begin this day with my own beginning: I have four miles today, two running, which is usual for a Monday. When I was a student here in 2005-2007, I ran further and away to the west. Five miles, six. Faster. I cannot do easy nine-minute miles anymore. This morning, I ran close to, through, and around campus. I circled dear Marsh Hall and Old School Hall each several times, ran all the way north to highway 8, and walked a cool-down mile. I slept better last night—seven hours. I will nap this afternoon.

In a shift of the schedule, the afternoon craft talk replaced Chris Amani’s this morning. Mike Magnuson’s craft talk, “Finding Joy in the Saddest Places: A Look at Humor in the Grief Memoir,” immediately acknowledged that emotional pain is not funny, though he was indeed very funny in talking about this. Grief is an umbrella term covering many losses aside from death, such as the loss of home or occupation or grief due to reflection. Grief is a reality in every life, and while painful, even overpowering at times, we “pick ourselves up and … return to our own baseline.” We use humor to help us get there, but humor also just appears without deliberate choice. “if you need to wallow, wallow,” he said, “but you don’t have to.” The grief memoir was born from the “confessional poetry” of Robert Lowell who dropped the mask between poet and audience. Mike says if you Goggle “funny poems about grief” you might find the terrible funeral poems he found (he shared one of them). Terrible poems, but the kind of thing you might actually hear at a funeral—the clichés, the rhyming abstractions, and vague allusions. Because everyone at the funeral knew the deceased, such poems work because they trigger memories; that is, they are abstract, but listeners can attach specific memories to the lines. To work for a general audience, the writer must provide context and details. “We write with precision and specificity in order to illustrate the abstract to an unknown audience.” He shared excerpts of novels and stories of grief that used humor to lighten the load. He reminded us that our contract with the reader is that they want to meet someone. “If you find joy in your writing, then your writing will not be relentlessly grim.” This might be because the writer “delights so much in words, we find enormous joy in invention; even in grief, we find the light.”

Omar El Akkad presented “Find Time: On Balancing a Literary Life and an Everything-Else Life” four days before he was scheduled to present. [Chris Abani will deliver his craft talk on Friday.] If the audience had any problem with his presentation “it would have been perfect by Friday. So blame Pacific University not me.” [He was also funny.] He framed the paradox all writers face: We want to say something meaningful about life, but to get that work done we need to be alone, we need life to leave us alone.” We sometimes struggle not only with the conceptual barriers to our writing but the practical barriers. We have families to care for, friends who need attention, the child to pick up from school, the house payment, dinner, sleep. He confessed that his own feelings of self-worth are very much tied to accomplishing his writing, that having written is a joyous experience, but finding space in life to do it can be a deeply unhappy experience. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Every project presents challenges, and the solution, when you find one, likely won’t work next time. But he had recommendations: “Keep everything, keep absolutely everything, even the terrible stuff, especially the terrible stuff.” Useless now, you might mine it later, but the most important aspect of keeping your writing is how it illustrate who you were when you wrote it, and “you want a decent relationship with the person you were.” Be kind to yourself. [He said that several times.] He describes his own first three books, written between that ages of 19 and 28, as “terrible.” He was specific about his personal experience attempting to chart his way to a better book: Taking total control over the writing dilutes any chance of something interesting happening on the page. With “clarity and outlining comes power, but you lose serendipity.” Control will come, but those moments [I think of as magic] do not arrive in flow charts and lists. What he did urge aside from keeping every scrap you write, is 1) finding your readers and understanding what they know about [your] writing; 2) giving yourself some structural support and allowing the writing to go off will repay you, but keep the cuts you make along the way, 3) understand the importance of your work’s negative space. He showed us the computer files he had for his first, second, and third novels [the third was “best, but still terrible”]. He told us where he was as he wrote [“Where you are bleeds into your work” and he cited the taxidermy hung in a novel that was not research but staring down from the wall in front of him at a writing retreat], what the pragmatic challenges were, and how discovering his personal writing needs was a great help. [Where and what time of day?] He urged us to know ourselves well enough to know when we were likely to write at our best. And he showed what happened to his computer folder after he wrote American War and he was abruptly a “famous writer”—pages of documents! He reminded us that “Sometimes what makes the writing worse in the short term, makes it better in the long run.”

I attended my first Graduate Readings of this residency, and the speakers were sure and clear and excellent, but I listened without taking notes. They each began with a long review of their critical essay before shifting to their fiction. Daytona Danielson’s story updated a mythical being Huldre known to be wicked but who can be tamed by marriage in a church. Daytona flipped that. Melissa Johnson’s novel excerpt also hinged on tradition, two people go out in a kayak, flip, and ultimately survive due to intercession by another life.

Faculty readers were Frank X. Gaspar who ended on a poem he used as a conclusion in his last reading and might again. Apricot Irving read an unpublished essay about the 2020 fires in Oregon and her confrontation with a young man on the other side of the political spectrum, but maybe with her about the Earth. Laura Warrell had read the first chapter of a new novel last time, and this residency she read the second chapter which included a ghost-man from an image in want of a story for twenty years!

Good night dear readers, it was a long day and I am to bed.