I used the forecast of rain to skip my run, but it’s not raining, and now I feel guilty for still sitting up in bed, draining my second cup of too-strong coffee (the only coffee I like), and listening to Jack Driscoll in a video from January of last year. I was there. In “First, Do No Harm” from January 2023 in Seaside, Oregon, Jack reminds us: find your character on your page, care deeply, even for the flawed characters, especially for their flaws, because that’s what we all are. That story he read got me again. [I hope the link opens.] I have not heard the other two talks that are linked on the residency Bulletin. I’ll need more time to go there.

For Jack, Gary went over to campus and sat on a bench and played “Parting Glass” by the High Kings, the live version where the pipes come in [at 2:32], turned up all the way on his phone, and cried because it was for Jack and because of the pipes and because… We think Jack would like that. We’ve listened to it a few times now.

This morning’s craft talk, Pete Fromm’s “WHAT’S SEEN IN A SCENE, or Writing Cinematically,” advocated seeing your story like a film. Yeah, he concedes he’s going to talk about show, not tell. He concedes that line is sort of a cliché, but we need to try putting “a leash” on our narratives, he also concedes that “the poets have got this down.” Don’t worry, Pete’s not asking for a permanent change in your writing, but try “going cinematic” and discover what you can show with action and dialogue without the commentary, adverbs, and fancy attributions. “Let your reader do some of the work.” If you don’t tell the reader what to think, you are respecting them as reasonably intelligent—as intelligent as you are—and they will “get it.” No director ever called: Lights! Action! Explanation!” Pete’s pretty sure if you create enough visual and dialogue action, “directed showing,” you will lead the reader to clarity about what’s happening and what it means. He read examples, of course, and he made his audience laugh and trust him. He’s also pretty sure we have the best job in the world as writers. He says he wakes sometimes in the middle of the night, and he gets right up once he admits to himself that he’s not getting back to sleep. His wife makes sounds that can be downright exasperated, depending on the hour. “When I worked as a carpenter, I never once woke in the middle of the night and thought ‘I’m gonna go knock together some walls!'” Somehow that work wasn’t nearly as fun as “playing with imaginary friends.”

Pete says, “The MFA is a camp for weirdoes hanging out and talking about books and writing.”

The graduate reading are ongoing and brilliant and grads might be forgiven for feeling a little stunned when they’re done. I recall that feeling. I could not today tell you what I read or who read with me, what anyone said or what I did afterward.

Kwame Dawes’s craft talk, “Postlude/Home: Poetry and Place,” began with his insistence that everything he had to say could be covered in five minutes. But then we want examples? That question, “Where are you from?” has a lengthy and complicated answer from Kwame, stretching across continents and islands. We need, genuinely need to be “writing a place into being.” In his childhood he read books about people and places he’d never known. That is our task as writers, to make places alive on the page. He cited Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry (he shared “Acceptance”), how readers understand he is writing about human struggles, but this is accomplished with the support of landscape, the details of home and place. The land is not central to his (or necessarily our) poems, but provides necessary support to everything we want to talk about. We should know the names of the trees and birds in our place in the world because everything about our place can become the stage on which all our pain and passion find voice. He played a scene from Bend in the River (2020)—”not a great movie,” he said, but he cried even so as the point of view character talks about home, the scenes of forest and land. Kwame shared Derrick Walcott’s “My City’s Death by Fire” and a recording of Kamau Brathwaite. He countered the claim that “we who have created nothing must live on nothing” with “And on that nothing, we build something.”

Lorraine Hansberry was not yet a famous playwright when A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway (first Black playwright with a play on Broadway; first Black director on Broadway, Lloyd Richards). Ruby Dee was already a Broadway star, but Sidney Portier became on in that role. It won four Tony’s The New York Drama Critics’ Circle named it the best play of 1959, and in recent years publications such as The Independent and Time Out have listed it among the best plays ever written. Within six months the play opened in Manchester, and then in Japan and many other countries. Hansberry was asked how such a play, set in Southside Chicago could appeal to such a wide audience? She responded that only in specificity can we achieve universality. Those particular people lived in that particular tenement in that particular part of that city. I think she would have nodded right along with Kwame’s talk today.

The final faculty reading of the week began with Claire Davis read from a novel-in-progress: “You’ve heard doing a novel is like giving birth? This one’s breech… triplets.” W. Ralph Eubanks read a essay that is the genesis of the nonfiction he’s working on, When It’s Darkness on the Delta: An American Reconning. And Mike Magnuson gave me a funny story to read as part of his introduction, and then told another about Ginsberg and his dying dog and a backyard picnic.

This was my seventh and final introduction for the Pacific University MFA program faculty reading. It has been a great pleasure, and having introduced 20 authors, I feel I’ve gotten the hang of it. I will post tomorrow and the next day to finish off my days at the residency.

I did go for my morning run after all, scattered clouds and I judged absolutely no chance of even a sprinkle. I did my 10-minute mile short run (usually 2-3 miles) and found Gary waiting for me outside Gilbert Hall. Sprinklers going all over campus again to water the lawns and adjacent sidewalks.

Gary spent yesterday cleaning our condo—it’s only something over 500 square feet, so the cleaning is easy and quick compared to the work we invest in maintaining the family beach house. He came back to campus today because, really, we do not thrive alone.

Goodnight to all, I am about done reading a 400+ page fantasy and looking forward to beginning Omar El Akkad’s American War. How did I miss it in 2017? Ah! That’s right, I was still teaching, and sicker than a dog that year.