Advice for Writers

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Saturday, March 25, 2023

Interview with Judith Thurman: Writing Profiles

This blog is an interview with Judith Thurman, author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, winner of the National Book Award for Autobiography/Biography; and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette. A staff writer at The New Yorker, she lives in New York City. Thurman discusses her most recent book, A Left-Handed Woman.

Judith Thurman

Zack Rogow: Many of the essays in A Left-Handed Woman are profiles of remarkable women, from nineteenth-century feminist Margaret Fuller, to Amelia Earhart, to Cleopatra, to modernist ceramics designer Eva Zeisel. Do these women all have something in common? Is there a shared feature about their lives or work that stimulated you to write about them?

Judith Thurman: They all share a passionate drive to distinguish and to express themselves. They all refused or at least resisted beholdenness to the various conventions and strictures that their societies imposed on women. They also possessed an unusual self-confidence in their gifts. The four subjects you mention were, in particular, unusually fearless characters. That fearlessness took different forms: moral, sexual, political, physical, creative.

Q. Your notion of feminism seems wide-ranging to me, encompassing women as varied as Simone de Beauvoir, and Helen Gurley Brown of Cosmopolitan magazine. Would you be willing to say a few words about your own idea of feminism—what it includes and does not include?

JT: The Second Wave feminism of my generation, at least in America, had a puritanical streak that I always found limiting, not to say, provincial. Taking pleasure in fashion and décor, for example, or caring about one’s appearance, was considered a bit shameful, if not reactionary. On the other hand, girls were, and in many places, still are, oppressed by unattainable and demeaning standards of beauty. (Standards designed, for the most part, to attract the interest and cater to the desires of men.) So yes, the life and career of Helen Gurley Brown send a mixed message. But then so do the life and career of Simone de Beauvoir! Let’s get rid of feminist purity tests. A feminist is anyone of any gender who supports the dignity and empowerment of girls and women.

Q. In the profiles you write, you find surprising depth in topics that on the surface don’t seem to lend themselves to profundity. One of my favorite essays in the book, for example, is about a renowned personal shopper at the department store Bergdorf Goodman. How do you go about finding substance in situations that many people might see as trivial?

JT: That question relates to your previous one. When I started writing about fashion for The New Yorker, I got a certain amount of flak from intellectual friends who told me I was wasting my time and talents on a frivolous subject. But every person on the planet who can get out of bed in the morning, then gets dressed. Clothing is a universal language, a highly coded one, that deserves the interest of a serious cultural and social critic.

Q. There is often a turn in your profiles where you sketch the subject’s childhood or backstory. What sorts of details or incidents do you look for in a personal history to provide context or gravitas for their later achievements?

JT: I don’t look for the details ahead of time. I just listen. And the details usually emerge, or even flag themselves by the intensity with which they’re recounted. As I write in the introduction to A Left-Handed Woman, my essential though tacit question for every subject is, “How did you become who you are?” You can never ask that outright, of course, but it’s the leitmotif that I listen for in a subject’s narrative of her life.

Q. How do you decide how much of Judith Thurman to include in a certain profile? When do you feel it’s right to make your own experience part of the profile of another person? To what extent do you withhold your own connection to your topic?

JT: It’s not always or mostly a conscious decision. I don’t like writing about myself, or not explicitly. But there are no perfect human prisms: you are always filtering a subject’s story through your own experience (though you have to be careful about doing that, so you aren’t projecting). But sometimes, a personal anecdote is the launching pad for my first paragraph—a connection with the subject that eases me into the stream of the story. And sometimes a subject’s trajectory helps me to arrive at an understanding of some deep, hitherto unarticulated feeling of my own. I mention a few such moments in the introduction: moments of clarity about myself that are all the more precious for taking me by surprise.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Zack’s most recent book of translations, Bérenice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris

Other posts of interest:

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Developing Your Literary Sense of Smell: Guest Blog by Nancy Lord

This is a guest blog by Nancy Lord, former Alaska State Writer Laureate and author of many books of fiction and nonfiction. Please see the end of the blog for her full bio.

Nancy Lord (photo: Stacy Studebaker)

Smell is the most fundamental of our senses, with a direct line to basic brain functions and the emotional memories associated with odors. Smell—or even just a memory of smell—triggers the release of oxytocin, associated with the ability to trust and form attachments. It’s a powerful and underused sense to include in our writing.

In “A Natural History of the Senses,” Diane Ackerman writes: “Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines, hidden under the weedy mass of many years and experiences. Hit a tripwire of smell, and memories explode all at once.”

I’m sure it’s the same for you, that certain smells take you right back to powerful childhood memories. It might be the smell of perfume your grandmother wore, coal smoke from your neighbor’s fire, or the wet fur of your beloved dog. For me, whenever I smell a freshwater lake I’m right back at Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, where my family spent two weeks every summer when I was small. An instant picture of the boathouse and dock presents itself, along with the sound of lapping water, and then a whole surround of memories and strong, positive emotions. The smell of burning leaves brings me to the taste of baked apples (cored, with raisins and brown sugar added) that we used to wrap in foil and cook in the piles of raked leaves we burned along the curbs in the street where I grew up. I “feel” such smells in waves of nostalgia and emotion, as physical effects.

Try looking at a page of your writing and mark each sensory detail—of any sense—but put a bold box around any description of smell…. See if you use any of the senses. Pay special attention to whether you involve one or more smells. Do you see more opportunities to include smell and other sensory details?

It’s been said that modern literature has been “deodorized,” especially in North American writing, just as we’ve eliminated or covered up so many natural odors in our modern lives. If you look at eighteenth and nineteenth century writings, you’ll find a lot more smells—especially of bodies, death, coal smoke, etc.

Each of us reacts differently to a smell, in life and on the page. The smell of a certain aftershave will mean one thing when it’s associated with a loving father and something else if associated with a child molester. In other words, you can’t count on a certain smell to create a common response in readers—although something like fresh bread smells are probably mouth-watering for all of us, and the smell of decayed flesh is probably stomach-turning.)

So, here’s what’s happening in our brains when we smell. Smell is the oldest sense evolutionarily. It goes all the way back to creatures living in the sea that responded to chemicals in the water, even before sight, hearing, or touch. That’s why it’s called a rudimentary sense. Our brains started with smell. You can say that we think because we smell. Only smell has a direct line to our pre-cognitive brains.

My friend Jill McCabe Johnson has said it as well as anyone, in an essay in Brevity: “A writer’s references to the other senses help readers create an imagined facsimile, but with smell, readers just know. Not only can they experience an immediate, intimate understanding, but smell might actually help readers set aside their disbelief and bond with the characters, because smell—even the memory of smell—is believed to trigger oxytocin, and oxytocin has been associated with our ability to trust and form attachments.”

Oxytocin is known as the bonding hormone and is what allows human mothers (and other mother animals) to recognize the smell of their own babies, to tell them apart from other babies.

We’re more likely to remember details grounded in the senses than non-sensory details. Another interesting fact: because we encounter most new odors in our youth, smells often call up childhood memories. But we actually begin making associations between smell and emotion before we’re even born. Infants who were exposed in the womb to alcohol, cigarette smoke, or garlic will show a preference for those smells. To them, smells that might upset other babies seem normal or even comforting.

Brain science helps answer one more question for us: Why is it so hard to describe smells? It’s easy to sense and recognize them, but to put them into words? This is because, while the smell and memory centers are closely connected, the physiological links between the brain’s smell and language centers are, in Diane Ackerman’s words, “pitifully weak.” She’s written, “When we see something we can describe it in gushing detail, in a cascade of images... But who can map the features of a smell?”

Nancy Lord edited the collection Made of Salmon

Here are some useful words to describe smell: acidy, acrid, antiseptic, aromatic, balmy, biting, bitter, briny, burnt, citrusy, comforting, corky, damp, dank, earthy, fishy, flowery, fragrant, fresh, fruity, gamy, gaseous, heavy, lemony, medicinal, metallic, mildewed, minty, moldy, musky, musty, odorless, peppery, perfumed, piney, pungent, putrid, reek, rose, rotten, savory, scented, sharp, sickly, skunky, smoky, sour, spicy, spoiled, stagnant, stench, stinking, sulphurous, sweaty, sweet, tart, vinegary, woody, yeasty.

Here are examples of great writing about smell:

Diane Ackerman, The Moon by Whalelight: “Their guano smells like stale Wheat Thins…” “[The whale] surfaced on the other side and blew a fine mist, which poured over us, smelling sweet, like wet fur.”

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: “Through the smells of the bog, I caught the subtle perfume of butterfly wings on my fingers, a perfume which varies with the species—vanilla, or lemon, or musk, or a musty, sweetish odor difficult to define.”

Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia: “My grandmother lived in a red-brick house set.…Inside it smelled of church.” (p. 2) “The wind blew the smell of rain down the valley ahead of the rain itself, the smell of wet earth and aromatic plants.” (p. 63)

Tracy Kidder, Home Town: “The town is waking up… From several alleys comes the smell of baking bread . . .” “. . . the old Calvin Theatre downtown, a place of sticky floors, redolent with ancient popcorn fumes.”

Kathleen Dean Moore, Holdfast: “The smell [after a flash flood]. . . filled the gully to the brim. Heavy, dense, sweet—never has air been so sweet—it was the smell of cedars netted with the roots of sorrel, the piney dark smell of old stone churches at Christmastime.” (p. 54)

E. B. White: “The Years of Wonder”: “. . . I viewed much of our future forty-ninth state through the porthole of the fireman’s mess, and the picture has a special smell—a blend of cabbage, garbage, steam, filth, fuel oil, engine oil, exhausted air, exhausted men. It is a smell you get nowhere but in a ship.” (Essays of E. B. White)

Sandra Cisneros, “The Monkey Garden”: “And everywhere the sleepy smell of rotting wood, damp earth, and dusty hollyhocks thick and perfumy like the blue-blond hair of the dead.”

Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock, The Smell of Other People’s Houses: “I’ve realized over time that houses with moms in them do tend to smell better. If I close my eyes, I can just barely remember my mother’s wildflowers in their whiskey bottles. The very distant scent of my parents lingers in my brain, as they laugh and twirl around the kitchen. Deer blood on my father’s hands tinges all my memories of them—their skin, their hair, their clothes.”

Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?: “The smell of the canvas (it always rains up north in the summer), and the smell of soup cooking for afterwards, and the smell of damp paper printed with the hymns—that’s what Jesus smells like.” (p. 71)

Nancy Lord is a former Alaska State Writer Laureate (2008-2010). She is the author of three short story collections; five books of literary nonfiction, including Beluga Days: Tracking a White Whale’s Truths and Early Warming: Crisis and Response in the Climate-changed North; and the novel pH. Nancy Lord also edited the anthology Made of Salmon. Her work focuses mainly on environmental and marine issues. She currently teaches science writing for Johns Hopkins University. Nancy Lord lives in Homer, Alaska, where she enjoys the smells of mudflats and tide pools.

Nancy Lord’s book include the novel pH

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Zack’s most recent book of translations, Bérenice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris

Other posts of interest:

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Friday, January 13, 2023

Use Your Whole Personality in Your Writing

When I was a young writer, I went to hear a favorite poet read his work at a well-known reading venue in New York City. I was such a fan of that writer—I’d read all of his books, even his juvenilia published in tiny editions by small presses when he was just getting started. I looked on this poet as a terribly serious and important writer, and since then his reputation has continued to grow over a long and distinguished career.

The Donnell Library in New York City was at one time a major venue for poetry

What surprised me most about that poet’s reading that day was not the poems themselves, but the patter the poet spoke in introducing each poem. Invariably, the author introduced a poem with a humorous anecdote, terribly funny, and then read a deadly serious poem afterwards. Before hearing that poet in person, I had no clue he had a great sense of humor, a quality that absolutely won over that large audience.

What was so odd to me was that the poet never included his sense of humor in his writing. Not once. And yet that trait, as much the poems themselves, captivated the audience that day.

I promised myself when I heard that reading that I was going to try to include in my writing my full personality, including parts of it that might not be solemn, or that I might not think an audience would like. All of us are complicated beings, and unless we bring those complications to our writing, we’re going to miss opportunities to engage our readers in ways we could not predict.

Yes, literature is a serious art with a serious purpose, but it also requires breathing room for humor, for whimsy, for digressions that might not seem immediately part of the intent of a piece of writing. So use your whole personality in your writing. If you tend to be serious but you have a sense of humor, include that lighter side. If you always go for the punch line in your writing, allow more pathos to seep in. If your most widely used voice is sincere, use your sarcasm for a change. If you’re always satirical, let your empathy into your writing.

Using your whole personality involves not just character traits, but your interests as well. If you happen to enjoy cooking seafood dinners, or watching soccer on TV, or walking around cemeteries, those sides of you are gold for writers. They are areas you care about that can help get your readers deeply involved because they really matter to you. Not only that, you’re an expert about them, or you at least know more on the topic than most people. That doesn’t mean you should spend your entire literary career writing about your collection of Madagascar stamps, but it does mean you can include a poem about your favorite Madagascar stamp, or you can write a mystery that hinges on a Madagascar stamp.

So, don’t think that only part of your personality qualifies as literary. Every patch of your soul should be part of your literary quilt.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Zack’s most recent book of translations, Bérenice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris

Other posts of interest:

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Monday, December 19, 2022

Writing Fiction about Real Historical Characters: Interview with Wesley Brown

This post features an interview with fiction writer Wesley Brown about his latest book, a dynamic novella about the jazz musician Miles Davis. See the end of this blog for Wesley’s full bio.

Author Wesley Brown. Photo by Brian Cornelius

Question: Your new book, Blue in Green, takes place during one day in the life of Miles Davis and his wife, the dancer Frances Taylor. How did you pick that particular time frame for the setting?

Wesley Brown: I wanted to focus on the assault on Miles Davis by police in front of the New York nightclub Birdland on the evening of August 25, 1959. Limiting the action within that time frame was indicative of the compression of Miles’s approach to playing.

Q. The period of the novella, the late 1950s, was a sort of high point for jazz and popular culture in the USA, with such music greats as Miles, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Billie Holiday, and Lena Horne, who all make cameo appearances in your book; and dancers like Katherine Dunham, Fred Astaire, and Cyd Charisse, who also figure in Blue in Green. What about that period attracted you as a setting for the book?

WB: The late 1950s were a transitional moment in jazz. Miles had taken the modal expression within jazz as far as he could take and was about to move on to his next musical challenge. And this period ushered in the emergence of figures like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

Q. When you have a work of fiction with a very tight timeframe, like this one, what types of moments lend themselves to adding some backstory? For example, there are some fascinating stories in your book about the life of Miles’ wife, Frances Taylor, who was a renowned dancer in her own right. How did you decide where to insert material that takes place earlier in time?

WB: Since the novella focuses on memory, I was interested in the events triggered by Miles’ beating, which were related to his beginnings and the pivotal experiences in his evolution as a musician. It is much the same for Frances. The difference is that she looks back on the trajectory of her artistry as a dancer that she gave up to be with Miles.

Q. What were the challenges of writing fiction about actual historical personages whose life stories are known to many readers?

WB: The challenges were not to focus on the facts of their careers that were well known or could be found in books, but to try and get in touch with their emotional lives which I could only discover through imagining them.

Q. One of my favorite passages occurs when we are inside the thoughts of Miles Davis while his band is playing the song, “If I Were a Bell.” How did you go about imagining what Miles Davis might have been experiencing while he was in the middle of playing a number?

WB: Of course, I couldn’t know what Miles was actually experiencing by playing, “If I Were a Bell.” So, I attempted to use the lyrics of the song as a way to imagine how he might experience them.

Frances Taylor and Miles Davis

Q. The novella also deals with the complex relationship between Miles Davis and his wife, Frances Taylor. How did you approach that material, given that it shows a side of Miles that is sometimes extremely negative?

WB: I knew about Miles’s violence against Frances from interviews and books. But again, I tried to get underneath what they didn’t reveal by imagining the effects of his emotional and physical abuse had on both of them.

Q. There’s a curious section in the book where Miles Davis sees the film Some Like It Hot, and he reflects on gender, thinking that Tony Curtis in drag is a sexier woman than Marilyn Monroe in the film (some of us might beg to differ about that!). Is that section meant to tell us something about Miles, or was that Wesley Brown riffing?

WB: As the character of Miles says in that section, Monroe was a male fantasy of hyper, female sexuality that she enabled. I was riffing on that. But Miles was attracted to the androgyny of figures like Curtis and Elvis. One need only look at his gravitation toward Prince.

Wesley Brown’s previously published novels are Darktown Strutters, Tragic Magic, and Push Comes to Shove. He also wrote the plays, Boogie Woogie and Booker T, and Life During Wartime. Brown coedited the multicultural anthologies Visions of America and Imagining America and edited The Teachers & Writers Guide to Frederick Douglass. With Thulani Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, and Amiri Baraka, Wesley Brown co-wrote the screenplay for W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Zack’s most recent book of translations, Bérenice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris

Other posts of interest: