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:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introductionthe Sonnetthe Sestinathe Ghazalthe Tankathe Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

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:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introductionthe Sonnetthe Sestinathe Ghazalthe Tankathe Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

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:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introductionthe Sonnetthe Sestinathe Ghazalthe Tankathe Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Tuesday, November 8, 2022

Writing Tips from Italy: Guest blog by Giulio Mozzi and Laura Pugno

A friend gave me a copy of a wonderful manual for writers by the Italian authors Giulio Mozzi and Laura Pugno. Their book is full of great ideas and prompts.
 
Link to: Oracular Manual for Poets
Though the book is particularly for poets, I’ve translated three sections that I think are of interest to all writers. Grazie, Giulio and Laura for giving me permission to reprint these!
Co-author Laura Pugno

Co-author Giulio Mozzi
Do words have souls?

A poet considers every word and every thing as if it were alive. They might actually be alive. What do they want to say?  

 

A good poet is an animist who looks at things as if they were saturated with life, death, stories, and words. And in the same vein, a poet looks at every word they hear, read, say, or write as if it were a living being. Not only that: a good poet is a matchmaker who brings together words and things based on their affinities and preferences. To sum it up: a good poet is like that clever servant who pretends to do the bidding of things and words, but who in reality is the one in charge, the one who masters them, and bends them to meet a particular need in a piece of writing.

 

Who lives in your poems?

 

The “us,” that unknown. How many homes can you make in it that you’ve never even thought about? Collective poetry, choral poetry. There’s a whole world out there: the others.

 

With your own voice, unique and private, you, as a poet, are the founder of a community. But how is it possible that poetry, which is such a lyrical and solitary form of expression, can create a community? Well, each of us is a person who belongs to humanity, so in each of us there’s something shared or held in common with others, maybe with a few others, maybe with many, or maybe even with everyone else. When you speak as a poet, with that shared something, you’re speaking the ”us.” Even when you use the “I.” Even when it seems you’re speaking completely impersonally. As the philosopher Rocco Ronchi once said, “Communication…is not a form of transmission. At its root, communication means to create a common ground, to fasten together a community, even if it is a minority, and to give that community identity and recognizable traits. Communication is the creation of a sense of community.” Poetry does not communicate by transmission, it fosters commonality, founds a community. To quote the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska: “[Jean-Paul] Sartre said one of the most horrific things ever uttered: ‘Hell is other people.’ («L’enfer, c’est les autres) What does that even mean, that hell is other people? In fact, I would say that other people are the true paradise. Doesn’t ‘other people’ include loved ones, neighbors—not just anybody? And I’m not only referring to lovers here, but also to relations, friends, the care of a neighbor, etc. Where would we be without others? Who would we be? Nothing. A hell.”

 

Rearrange the poetry books on your shelves.

 

Discover the books you forgot you had.

 

When you’re a new employee in a bookstore, the first day on the job you’re taught that you have to dust the books. Every day, when there aren’t many customers in the shop, you run a cloth over one, two, or three shelves and give them a good swipe. Romano Montroni, the founder of Italy’s Feltrinelli Bookstore chain, explained why, in his book Selling Souls: The Bookseller’s Profession. Montroni said that this is useful for memorizing each book, the author, the title, and a couple of sentences from the back cover. Similarly, if you have a few shelves of poetry books at home (and I certainly hope you do!), take the time every once in a while (maybe once a month?) to rearrange your books. You might reorganize them by author, or maybe chronologically, or by the colors of their spines, or by their size, or by when you bought them, or according to which ones you like the most or the least. This will help you (you’ll see, it works!) to find forgotten books, to resume interrupted readings, to read again passages you  haven’t looked at for ages, to discover that, just as you have changed over time, so have your books.

 

From Oracolo manuale per poete e poeti, @2020 by Giulio Mozzi and Laura Pugno, published by Sonzogno di Marsiglio Editori. Reprinted by permission of the authors. Translation from the Italian © 2022 by Zack Rogow.


Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies


Wednesday, November 2, 2022

Alison Luterman Guest Blog: How Long Does It Take to Finish a Work of Writing?

This is a guest post from poet, essayist, and playwright Alison Luterman

I was walking with a novelist friend in the woods the other day and she was telling me about how she’d had to tear apart the structure of her draft (which I’d read and loved), change the point-of-view of several characters, eliminate some extraneous material, and was now, basically, rewriting a very different book. I asked how she was feeling about it all.

 Oh, you know,” she shrugged. “At first I was pissed at my mentor for telling me my structure wasn’t working, and then when I accepted that she was right I was sad that I’d wasted so much time polishing that early draft, when I should not have been polishing it at all, I should have been restructuring it. Then I was overwhelmed with how much work I’d have to do to make this new draft work, and feeling doubtful if I could even pull it off. But now I’m into it, and one of the main characters is emerging as more twisted and interesting than he ever was before, and I’m enjoying getting to know him. This new book is going to have a very different tone than the draft you read. It’s going to be much darker. Actually, I'm loving working on it."

  I did know. My dear friend Leslie Absher just published her remarkable memoir Spy Daughter Queer Girl, a book she worked on for more than sixteen years. The layers of living and feeling and research and growth really show in the story. Sure, she didn’t think it would take that long when she embarked on this project, but she stayed with it and she stayed with herself and her own changes and the work shows the benefit of that patience and care and earned wisdom.


Alison Luterman

I’ve got students and writing clients who are concerned about this. They ask, How long does it take to get a book out? The answer, infuriating as it is, is “It takes as long as it takes.” Each of my books of poems has taken years longer than I thought it “should.” I always fondly imagine things are ready long before they are. I’ve sent out so many manuscripts to contests only to realize, five minutes after paying the thirty dollar entry fee and hitting Send, that it was really just a lump of raw dough rather than a fully baked loaf.

  On the other hand, sometimes lightning strikes and a poem comes out whole. The writer Ruth Stone contended that her poems came to her whole, like tornados on the horizon. She would sense one coming and run as fast as she could back to her house, in order to grab a pen and scribble it down. If she didn’t outrun the poem it would blow right past her.

  And Bob Dylan sometimes wrote three songs a day at the height of his powers. There was apparently a conversation between him and Leonard Cohen about writing. Cohen confessed it had taken him seven years and zillions of drafts to write “Hallelujah.” “How long did it take you to write ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’?” Cohen asked Dylan. “Ten minutes,” Dylan replied. So, there you have it!


Alison Luterman’s books include the poetry collections In the Time of Great Fires (Catamaran Press), Desire Zoo (Tia Chucha Press), The Largest Possible Life (Cleveland State University Press), See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions); and a collection of essays, Feral City (SheBooks). Luterman's plays include Saying Kaddish with My Sister, Hot Water, Glitter and Spew, Oasis, Touched; and the musicals The Chain (with composer Loren Linnard), The Shyest Witch (with composer Richard Jennings), and the song cycle We Are Not Afraid of the Dark (with composer Sheela Ramesh).


Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies