ArtSake

The 2011 Commonwealth Reading Series of events with MCC writers and poets concludes with a reading at Newtonville Books in Newton on Tuesday, April 5, 7 PM.

One of the participants in the 4/5 Newtonville Books reading is Leslie Williams (Poetry Fellow ’10), whose poetry collection Success of the Seed Plants was published by Bellday Books in 2010. We asked Leslie about Success and the secrets to her winning ways.

ArtSake: You won the Bellday Books Prize and the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America in the same year you won the MCC grant. You’ve cracked the code to poetry contests! Please promptly divulge your secrets to success.

Leslie: Good things happen in threes! Honestly, I was floored by all of these at once, after years of writing quietly without a lot of encouragement. I would say the secret is a bit of stubbornness, continuing to send my poems out year after year and not paying much attention to rejection or silence on the other end – that is, writing the poems I wanted or needed to write and then seeing where it felt right to send them. I am not very savvy about it. I’m so grateful for the recognition!

ArtSake: Your poems are so invested in the places they’re set. I’m thinking of “So Long,” which compares nostalgia versus memory to Cape Cod’s breezy summer tourist season versus its more severe history of whaling and hardship. Does the place you are writing in – and about – change the way you write?

Leslie: This is a great question. I’m obsessed by “place,” whether literally or in the sense of “the past is another country.” I am very slow to assimilate things, so some poems are the result of jagged outcroppings of memory that keep recurring and start to bother me. Writing a poem is a way to deal with these mental insistencies. Often a place I’ve been, or even lived for a while, does not get processed for many years, as is the case with “So Long” – I first visited Nantucket in the 1980s and the scene took a long time to bubble up into a poem. It’s also easier to write about youth from the vantage point of “not so young anymore!”

ArtSake: As a David Lynch fan, I must ask: is “The famous director said I love to see people coming out of darkness,” which explores an encounter with the film director’s ex-wife that has a profound effect on the narrator, autobiographical?

Leslie: How did you know? I did start out with David Lynch, because I thought his line was a terrific way to explain things, not only visually, but emotionally. I wanted to write a poem that did a similar thing. James Merrill said that once a poem really gets going, it’s like an eddy, and everything just gets sucked into it – that’s what happened here – random bits of experience started sticking, such as meeting a woman at a party who let me know she’d been married to a celebrity, and too many details about it. I find it amazing that strangers will unburden themselves in these settings and then move on, never to be seen again – you’re left carrying these odd pieces of their lives that you don’t really have a place for and don’t know what to do with. I should say a word about the “I” – I am always inventing personae who can trip around in poems – as Emily Dickinson wrote: “When I state myself as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.” There are always elements of autobiography, I don’t think any honest writer could disavow that, but then the imagination goes off and leaves your actual self behind.

ArtSake: Your poetry is rich with details from the natural world. Do you have any background in that area – an amateur gardener, a former plant biologist, perhaps? Or is it mainly a poetic interest?

Leslie: I am a very amateur gardener! I did study biology for a while and was completely fascinated with plant life and dissecting earthworms and trying to watch tulips actually burst out of the soil on a really warm spring day. The world is enormously beautiful and mysterious and I just try to capture that and, I hope, to praise it. I have such a metaphorical turn of mind that everything in nature seems to have a lesson in it, for me.

ArtSake: Can you point to any one decision you’ve made as an artist that has had the most impact on your career?

Leslie: Thank you for calling it a “career” – it doesn’t always feel that way, so it’s edifying to have recognition by the MCC and others, that makes me feel I’m on the right track. I wish I could say I made “decisions” in the sense of strategy, or even in being fully conscious about the work of poetry. The main thing for me has been sticking to it over the long haul, which is not really a choice, as anyone who writes poems knows – even in the dry spells there are little nagging lines and phrases in your head that call you back. For me it’s been crucial to find a group of serious working poets to meet with on a semi-regular basis. I was fortunate enough to stumble into the most magical summer group the first summer we moved here and that too has really sustained me.

ArtSake: What writers and poets are you excited about, these days?

Leslie: So many! I read in phases and right now it’s autobiography, so Mary Karr and Reynolds Price, who just died, and Patti Smith, though I was disappointed in that one. Poetry I dip into all the time so right now on my desk is Larry Levis, Robert Hass, Amy Clampitt, A. R. Ammons, Gjertrud Schnackenberg and an anthology of the Romantics. I always go back to Stevens, Hopkins, and Bishop, even though I try not to like her so much. Right now I have a small obsession with Lisa Robertson’s R’s Boat. I love reading poems that are energizing, that make you want to move – which is a really difficult charge.

Leslie will join Regie Gibson, David Lovelace, Tova Mirvis, and Lara JK Wilson for a Commonwealth Reading Series event at Newtonville Books in Newton on Tuesday, April 5, 7 PM.

Leslie Williams is the author of the poetry collection Success of the Seed Plants (Bellday Books, 2010), which won the 2010 Bellday Books Prize. She is also the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Award, an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship, and awards from the Ragdale Foundation. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Slate, The Southern Review, Shenandoah and in many other magazines. A North Carolina native, she now lives near Boston with her husband and two sons.

Images: Leslie Williams, photo by Ira Jacobs; cover art for SUCCESS OF THE SEED PLANTS by Leslie Williams (Bellday Books, 2010); MCC Executive Director Anita Walker with Leslie Williams at the Massachusetts State House, November 2010.

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The 2011 Commonwealth Reading Series of events with MCC writers and poets continues this week with a reading at Porter Square Books in Cambridge on Thursday, March 31, 7 PM.

We asked one of the participating literary artists, Sharon Howell (Poetry Fellow ’10) about her work and life, about being a poet in every time.

ArtSake: You received your MCC award for poems from the collection Girl in Everytime. The poems are structurally and linguistically inventive, with lovely, even odd wordplay (at times it calling to mind Samuel Beckett). Can you talk about where the poems in Girl in Everytime are coming from?

Sharon: I was spending a lot of time on an island in Maine, in Penobscot Bay (interestingly, where George Oppen used to spend summers: and it’s a simply tiny island with only one family – the same as when Oppen and his wife were there – who lives there permanently), and a couple of summers ago I was there by myself in a little cabin with no electricity reading Ovid and Virgil. So I was in a mythic space and a natural, pretty uninhabited space, and started thinking of the natural world in terms of origin myths and the presence of gods that explain and domesticate big elemental forces. Also the way the time of the gods – the way Ovid has them experience time – feels a lot like geological time in its distention and awkward relationship with human time. I remember the first lines of what became this sequence were “Once along a time, and everywhere is another. It kept up.” That to me configures this funny relationship between the time of origins or eternal time and the daily time we experience, and all the other times alongside. I imagined time after a while as a character.

I think that may be where some of the Beckettiness comes from: finding a personality where you didn’t think there was one, in the abstraction – which happens in Stein, as well. It’s also in the fun, I hope, of this defamiliarization of a girl also being an island who has a “westward eye,” a “north slope,” or a road going up and down her spine – and then suddenly becoming a bell hanging from a tower, or a monarch butterfly coming out of her case.

ArtSake: I’m always interested in writers’ and poets’ day jobs. Yours is teaching at Harvard and serving as their Resident Dean at Adams House. How does that work accommodate your writing?

Sharon: I first want to say how amazed I am by the MCC’s Artist Fellowships, which are something of a miracle in the scheme of things: it was incredibly encouraging to receive this award at the moment I did, and it has been such an honor. I feel a great deal of responsibility to write because of it, too – it’s a gesture of great faith – which is something that I did not feel before and has helped me seriously to carve out time from what can be an all-consuming job. So I’m extremely grateful.

Being a House Dean at Harvard involves living in an undergraduate house (which for me is lovely because it puts me in the middle of Harvard Square, and infuriating because it puts me in the middle of Harvard Square) which contains around 450 upperclass students and is host to an endless number of events, performances, programs, dinners, concerts, readings, and crises. It’s extraordinary and exhausting. I also teach in the History and Literature concentration, where we work very closely with students in tutorials to design constantly different courses of study, so that keeps me hopping intellectually. So I think what I’m saying is that my day job is fulfilling and exciting in lots of ways, and I’m awfully glad to have it, but does not in the least accommodate my writing, except in one important way: summer. I make the most of summer and the other academic year breaks we have, and I’m well aware that long stretches of time away are unavailable in most other jobs.

ArtSake: You founded a series of poetry podcast called Ramblebarrow, where you converse with poets like Oni Buchanan and Joanna Klink. What prompted Ramblebarrow, and what are some of your favorite moments from those conversations?

Sharon: My husband is a big podcast listener, and suggested a couple of years ago that it would be a fun idea to do a poetry podcast – he bought me all the sound equipment and arranged all the logistics. He’s much more entrepreneurial than I am, so it wouldn’t have happened without him… basically he set me up in front of the microphone and said “ok, now talk about poetry.”

Doing these podcasts is so much fun for me, and I’ve met some amazing people through them who are now friends – Anna Deeny, who translated Raul Zurita, Patrick Pritchett, Joanna Klink. I have also enjoyed talking with people whose primary work isn’t in poetry but includes poetry interestingly, like Bill Powers and Mark Wolf. My favorite moments have been in the readings – Zurita’s amazing voice, and Mike Doughty’s singer’s reading of “Here’s How it Ends” – where it makes such a difference to have poetry in the ear, resonating non-intellectually.

This isn’t a favorite moment, but my most pathetic moment was when I interviewed Zurita for the first time – he was so gracious, letting me bring all my equipment into his house, and he did these wrenching, emotionally intense readings, and Anna Deeny translated for us – and I realized when I got home that I hadn’t recorded any of it. I was mortified. Amazingly, they let me come back and did it all again, just as wholeheartedly.

ArtSake: I understand a collection of your poems will be published by Pressed Wafer – congratulations! Can you talk about how that good news came to be? And when can we expect to see it published?

Sharon: Yes, I’m very excited about this, for sure, it’s my first book. I am so indebted to my friend, the poet Patrick Pritchett, for the whole thing. He handed the Girl in Everytime poems to Pressed Wafer’s founder, Bill Corbett, and then Bill beneficently also took the other half of the book, a series called Lefty in Luck. So, Sharon in Luck.

The book itself will be called Girl in Everytime, and it’s coming out soon: this spring, probably May.

ArtSake: What are you writing these days? What are you reading?

Sharon: I never read enough contemporary poetry: I do get review copies of FENCE Books that I look forward to. And I’ll read anything by Charles Simic, Anne Carson, or Michael Cunningham. I did scholarly work in English and American Literature previously, and the nature of my current teaching is quite eclectic, so I tend to get hijacked by the canonical before I can attend to the new.

I have just finished another book-length series of poems, this time about a Thief and a Wife. So while doing that I read Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson, and Moll Flanders (who is a thief and a wife, in one), and Melville’s The Confidence Man, etc. etc. and watched thief movies like Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Thomas Crown Affair.

I’ve become fascinated with the problem of the con, and the heist, in the current place we find ourselves in America… bankrupted by thieves who aren’t much like us at all. Part of what I’m doing is eulogizing the thief as a glamorous figure, as someone whose work takes place outside of the realm of everyday exchange, where values are already arbitrary. Jewels, art, etc, are things that only the wealthy monetize, and all of these iconic fictional thief figures have a kind of sympathetic Robin Hood quality, where they steal only from the rich who will not suffer from it, and exploit the folly of arbitrary value. What’s happening now that feels so repulsive is the opposite in every way – our thieves are stealing from the vulnerable and poor to further enrich the rich, and doing it insidiously with no personal risk. No tiptoeing across the roof at night or riding hard away from a train, just sitting cowardly high up in a tower and bundling up toxic assets.

I also realized while doing the piece that almost every good story is about a thief in some way or another – I couldn’t keep up. So in one poem there’s a bronze of him in the town square, to suggest that combination of ubiquity and nostalgia for a brand of heroism. He gets away, though, in the end. Not to spoil it.

ArtSake: Have you found it challenging to balance the unconventional challenges of a writer’s life with other aspects of your life?

Sharon: Absolutely: but up until recently I wouldn’t have even thought of myself having a “writer’s life,” because that part of my existence was so marginal and stolen. As I say, the MCC fellowship and the imminent book have helped me to justify working on poetry to myself and others.

I have a husband – who is an artist – and two children under 10, so my life has some significant delightful chaos in it. One thing we’ve been doing as a family over the past couple of years has been helpful, if difficult: my husband and kids have been spending about half the year in the rainforest of Costa Rica, living on a farm and riding horses to a little bilingual school (called “The Cloud Forest School”). I miss them terribly, but the unaccustomed solitude here in Cambridge has allowed me the mental space to write in a way otherwise impossible. I also get to visit them and hike through the mountainous jungle looking out to the Pacific Ocean, where giant blue morpho butterflies float by and you see toucans and monkeys regularly. This provides a healthy contrast to winter in Massachusetts.

All in all, I can’t imagine a much luckier life.

Sharon joins John Canaday, Kathryn Kulpa, Allan Reeder, and Julia Story for a Commonwealth Reading Series event on Thursday, March 31, 7 PM, Porter Square Books in Cambridge. Following that reading, there is one more event in the series, at Newtonville Books in Newton (4/5).

Sharon Howell‘s work has been published in Colorado Review, Diversity and Distinction Magazine, and Notre Dame Review. A forthcoming poetry collection has been accepted for publication by Pressed Wafer Press. She is the creator/director of Ramblebarrow, a bi-monthly podcast radio show about poetry (download on iTunes). She has a Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University, where she teaches.

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The 2011 Commonwealth Reading Series of events with MCC writers and poets continues this week with a reading at Forbes Library in Northampton on Wednesday, March 23, 7 PM.

One of the featured writers at the Forbes is Jendi Reiter (Poetry Fellow ’10), who recently won the Anderbo Poetry Prize. Once a practicing lawyer in New York City, she now writes – and champions – poetry and prose in Northampton, MA, and here, she shares her winning approach to the writing life.

ArtSake: Divulge your secrets! I frequently see your name as a finalist or winner of writers’ prizes (including, obviously, the MCC fellowship). What’s your winning formula?

Jendi: Be a good reader. Know what makes one publisher’s style different from another. Target your work.

I credit my high school, St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights, for a fantastic training in how to read poetry. I’ve never gone in for the standard creative writing class where you share your drafts in public and a random group of people pick them apart. I think poets can get far more benefit from wide reading in literature and literary criticism, on their own or in a teacher-guided setting, with the goal of developing a refined intuition about what makes Sylvia Plath, for instance, sound different from Anne Sexton. This skill will then help you understand, first, whether your own work has an original voice and what that voice is, and second, which magazines and presses are publishing work that is sympatico with that voice.

ArtSake: Great advice. And I should mention that you’re the Vice President and Founder of WinningWriters.com, which finds and creates resources for writers and poets. What led to your creation of WinningWriters.com?

Jendi: Back in 2001, my husband Adam Cohen and I were living in NYC and working for large publishing companies – Adam as circulation director of the Atlantic Monthly, and myself as an editor at Facts on File News Service. It was becoming clear that we would be happier as entrepreneurs than as middle managers in a large organization. We’re both pretty opinionated and independent people! Besides that, I wanted the freedom to focus on my own writing. Every other career path I tried felt like a compromise to pay the bills.

So we brainstormed about what we could do that would pool his considerable skills with computers and direct marketing, and my expertise in the creative writing market. The Internet had developed to the point that an online publishing business was feasible and affordable for us.

We initially thought that the “fun part” would be an online anthology of our favorite poems from literary journals, rather like Poetry Daily. But how would it pay for itself? Like most subscribers, I suspect, I buy Poets & Writers Magazine for the contest guidelines, and view the editorial features as a bonus. To make our product a must-have, we needed to create our own contest directory, only better – searchable, with live links, complete formatting guidelines, and background information on the winners and judges.

And (venturing where more cautious institutions feared to tread) we got the notion to rank the contests based on how prestigious they appeared to be, and how favorable their terms were (e.g. prize/fee ratio, scale of marketing efforts for your book, simultaneous submissions rules). Beginning poets often make the mistake of submitting to the most famous contests, where their chances are poor. Scam contests also prey on these inexperienced writers. We’ve always felt our mission is to serve all segments of the poetry community, from happy amateurs to literature professors, and help them succeed in the market niche that is right for them. Our rankings are one tool for this purpose.

That anthology of reprints never happened, but the five poetry and prose contests we administrate have generated a large online library of exciting original writing, from flamboyantly off-color humorous verse to true tales of life on the battlefield.

Ten years later, we have over 35,000 subscribers to our free newsletter, from all over the world, who are eager to share their publishing successes with us. It’s a wonderful counterbalance to the isolated life of the creative writer. We love doing this work!

ArtSake: Along with your poetry, you also write fiction and nonfiction. Do you approach writing prose differently from the way you approach poems?

Jendi: Yes, definitely! Poetry and fiction must be written by hand with a mechanical pencil in a 6×9 Mead Five Star notebook. Nonfiction, by which I mean my blog posts about gay rights and Christianity, is written on the computer. I don’t know how to shape a narrative in creative nonfiction. There are too many facts, and most of them were hard enough to live through once.

When I write poetry, I’m not thinking about an audience. What wants to be written, gets written. It’s like a computer’s self-diagnostic. I write to find out what I think. Naturally, my values and preoccupations are reflected in the poetry, so in that sense, it often contains a critique of society, but it’s driven by my own need to express my authentic inner experience, rather than to have a particular impact on others. (Though I wonder whether the two are really so separable – doesn’t every self-disclosure cherish a tiny hope of being recognized and responded to in kind, however much one tries to cultivate self-protective detachment?)

My novel-in-progress is about a young fashion photographer in 1990s NYC who struggles to reconcile his faith and his sexual orientation. With this project, I have more of a conscious intention to bring about social change, along with telling an entertaining story.

Writing a novel is harder than poetry because it’s impossible to be in the “flow” for that length of time. With a poem, by the time I figure out where my subconscious is taking me, the trip’s over. I don’t have much opportunity to get in my own way. Far more planning has to go into the novel, which means that there are many chances for self-consciousness and ideological agendas to seize control, instead of letting the work tell me, itself, what it needs to be. I counteract this problem by conceiving of the novel as a collaborative effort between myself and my characters. They’ve got to retain the freedom to surprise me. My job is to see enough of the big picture so that they don’t get lost and despondent, but not be so directive that they lose their independent life force. It is a constant, elaborate, frustrating, fascinating dance that calls on all my relationship skills, and maybe even improves them in the so-called real world.

I do my creative writing by hand because this slower, temporally linear method allows intuition to take the lead. Writing on the computer, it’s too easy to pull back and see the big picture, to let the analytical mind start rearranging and criticizing, and skip past that quiet inwardness where the soul of the poem or story gestates.

ArtSake: Your poetic voice is truly idiosyncratic. Is the uniqueness of your language something you cultivate? Something innate to you as a writer? Some of both?

Jendi: I am a weird, smart person and a lot of difficult things have happened to me.

ArtSake: Your poem “Barbie at 50″ is just the blend I love in literature – funny, irreverent, but at the same time almost unbearably sad. Where did that poem start for you?

Jendi: I should probably be on that TV show “Hoarders” because of the number of dolls I have. Like my poem, which you described so insightfully, dolls seem to me to combine playfulness and sadness. They can’t give a voice to the emotions that their faces and bodies are designed to suggest. Thrift-shop dolls are the best. They were loved once, but time moved on and left them behind. The unfinished quality of their stories makes them a great writing prompt. And of course Barbie symbolizes so many of the contradictions of woman-as-doll: the power of beauty and the powerlessness of being an object designed to please others. Middle-aged Barbie has to learn to make the best of events that were outside her control, and find, I hope, a kind of strength and even panache in that.

ArtSake: What writers and poets are you excited about, these days?

Jendi: I have a poetry crush on Ariana Reines – her first collection, The Cow (Fence Books, 2006), was a huge influence on my chapbook Swallow, in that it gave me permission to explode the limits of language and self-consciousness in order to be true to some powerful, embodied, grotesque yet sacred-feeling emotions. Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg’s anthology Gurlesque includes all this plus fabulous pictures of decorated animal skulls and tongues dripping with glitter – what’s not to like?

A lot of the work that comes out of Fence Books excites me because their authors’ voices are unique, though I can’t say I always understand them. Nick Demske’s self-titled collection is one example. From Wave Books, I liked Dorothea Lasky’s AWE and Mary Ruefle’s The Most of It, both of which arrive at spiritual clarity in a very roundabout, Zen-like way, by playfully demolishing our everyday concepts yet enjoying the texture of the detritus, that is to say, without the self-righteous asceticism we associate with the high priests of religion or (for that matter) poetry. To hold my attention, poetry that is experimental or “difficult” must have some humor in it, some physical pleasure in language. It shouldn’t simply be punishing the reader or testing her intelligence.

At the other end of the accessibility spectrum, I was incredibly charmed and nourished by the formalist, pastoral poetry in Charles W. Pratt’s From the Box Marked Some Are Missing, a recent release from Hobblebush Books in New Hampshire. Temple Cone’s No Loneliness (FutureCycle Press) is reverent but unsentimental about rural life. I enjoy the frankness and magnanimity of working-class poetic voices like Jeff Walt, Michael Meyerhofer, and my good friend Ellen LaFleche, whose collection Workers’ Rites was just selected by Dana Gioia for the Philbrick Poetry Prize.

For classics, I return (not as often as I should) to the favorites of my teenage years, Richard Wilbur, W.H. Auden, Anne Sexton, and T.S. Eliot.

My prose reading list is pretty consistent: queer/feminist theology, gay male short story anthologies, and mystery novels. I’ve tried to branch out but I always wind up muttering about “straight male privilege” and “depressing endings” and then I pick up another Mary Higgins Clark at the thrift shop.

Jendi joins Rosann Kozlowski, Nancy K. Pearson, Cynthia Morrison Phoel, and Jung Yun for a Commonwealth Reading Series event on Wednesday, March 23, 7 PM, Forbes Library in Northampton. Other events in the series include Porter Square Books in Cambridge (3/15 and 3/31), Grub Street in Boston (3/18), and Newtonville Books in Newton (4/5).

Jendi Reiter‘s first book, A Talent for Sadness, was published in 2003 by Turning Point Books. Her poetry chapbook Swallow won the 2008 Flip Kelly Poetry Prize and was published in 2009 by Amsterdam Press. Her poetry chapbook Barbie at 50 won the 2010 Cervena Barva Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published that year by Cervena Barva Press. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The New Criterion, Mudfish, Passages North, American Fiction, The Adirondack Review, Cutthroat, The Broome Review, FULCRUM, Juked, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Alligator Juniper, MARGIE: The American Journal of Poetry, Phoebe, Best American Poetry 1990 and many other publications.

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In the introduction to her recent book, Gigi Rosenberg shares an anecdote about her first grant proposal: an application to the Boston Film/Video Foundation (now, sadly, defunct) for a documentary project. She says that instead of clearly and confidently expressing her goals and intent, she was really hoping that a grant would confirm something more personal: that she really was an artist.

The foundation didn’t fund her project. But the experience set her on the path to discovering how best to approach the grant writing process, which she did with the systematic rigor of a scientific researcher. The result, years later, is The Artist’s Guide to Grant Writing, which she calls “the book that I wish I’d had when I didn’t know whether I was an artist, or even when I did know and I wanted both the money and the validation that winning a grant provides.”

We asked her about the book, about her journey from grants novice to expert speaker and grants writing workshop leader, and about some common struggles artists face in searching for funding for their work.

ArtSake: You bring up that artists sometimes seek “permission” for their projects rather than confidently present them as worthy of support. Not to stoke the whole art vs. science notion, but why might an artist be more tentative about proposing a project than, say a scientific researcher?

Rosenberg: I have made this mistake and I know other artists who have too – we apply to the funding organization for money but we’re really asking them for so much more than money – we’re asking them to love our work, to support us in non-monetary ways and to cheer us on. This kind of support really isn’t the job of the funders! I encourage artists to find artist groups, colleagues and friends to support their creative endeavors. Scientific researchers have all kinds of support – their collaborators, research partners, laboratory workers, and so on. They also have a society that has a high regard for scientific research – a higher regard (in some circles) than for artistic endeavors. But don’t let that dampen your spirits – artists need to foster networks, communities, friendships, colleagues, and groups that support them to do their best work.

ArtSake: I really like that you acknowledge the emotional and psychological aspects of looking for artist funding. What’s the first thing you’d say to a disappointed applicant who didn’t receive funding?

Rosenberg: The first thing I’d say to a disappointed applicant is don’t take the rejection personally. This isn’t about you as a person. The second thing I’d say is: Can you use this rejection to learn anything about your proposed project? If you can, find out why the funder rejected your application. Ask them: What could I have done to make this a stronger proposal? You may discover that they only had money to fund 5 projects and you were number 6! Or you may find out that they aren’t interested in a particular aspect of your project or that you made a big goof on the budget. Any information you receive in this follow-up can be a gold mine of information for your next proposal.

To be an artist you have to have the skin of a rhino and the heart of a poet – this is one of the hardest aspects of being an artist – but you could say the same thing about being a human being! Rejection is a huge part of the business of being an artist. People are going to say “No” a lot. Sales people don’t take it personally when a potential customer says no – and if there’s any way you can, in the best way, adopt that attitude it will help you continue to make work and get it out there, any way you can.

Lastly, don’t isolate yourself. All of us need cheerleaders – just don’t rely on arts organizations to be your cheerleaders – find friends and colleagues who can do it.

ArtSake: What are some of the common missteps you see in artist statements that prevent them from effectively representing the artist’s voice?

Rosenberg: It’s very challenging to write about your work in an artist statement because you have to write about your work as if you didn’t make it. Few of us think about our themes when we’re making something – we’re just making it. I think it helps to interview other people to ask them what they see in the work – that can help an artist find the language. Or have someone interview you and get you talking about your big idea.

Artists tend to write clichés in artist statements or use lingo and jargon when they get scared and just want to sound smart. Write past the clichés, talk through your ideas, until you’re expressing them with fresh language that really means something.

ArtSake: In the book, you describe a demo from your workshops, where you have the artists pretend to be funders being asked for grants. Can you talk about your first experience on the “other side?”

Rosenberg: My experience sitting on a panel judging artist applications blew my mind. I realized how many artists have great ideas but don’t know how to write about the idea in a way that engages others or even to follow directions. Also, many applicants don’t understand how daunting it is to be staring at a mile-high pile of applications. As a panelist you want to find any way to make the pile smaller. And if an applicant didn’t follow directions, that’s a great reason to toss them from the pile. Competition for grants is stiff and the margin for error is narrow. I learned how important it is not to give the panel an easy reason to disqualify your application. I also learned how to see the process from the other side of the table. So, now when I apply for a grant, I ask myself: How can I make this project irresistible to this funder? This helps me prepare an application that has a much better chance of succeeding. Don’t forget, however, that you don’t want to tweak your project so much that it doesn’t feel like your project anymore.

ArtSake: Along those same lines: your book has smart, practical tips for grant applicants. Do you have any advice for grants panelists and arts funders? Or just a message they could benefit from hearing?

Rosenberg: Being a panelist and an arts funder is a hard job – they are underpaid and overworked – but they already know that! I’d want to tell them how much I appreciate what they’re doing – trying to find the right artists for the funding they have. They are so underappreciated – so I’d want to say thanks – it’s a hard job you have and you do it with so much integrity!

ArtSake: Your book’s epilogue has the title “Make Art,” a reminder never to let that part of the process drift out of sight. How does your thinking about, writing about, an artist’s career affect your creative work?

Rosenberg: I think what you’re asking is how writing a “how to” book affected my own creative life as a writer – is that right? If so, writing the book turned out to be incredibly creative. It was like editing a documentary film – where you have all these interviews and your own experience and then just plain advice and tips to share and then figuring out how to splice that all together in a way that is coherent – that process was intensively creative. I loved interviewing successful artists and having the right to ask questions about their own creative process and how they are successful with getting their work recognized and funded. I loved having the right to be nosy and the interviews were very inspiring to me. Of course it’s always easier (I think) to cheer somebody else on – but the book gave me lots of practice in being an encouraging presence – on my good days, I follow my own advice – which is to work as deeply as I know how on my own writing and then when it’s good enough to send it out!

Gigi Rosenberg has upcoming events in Seattle (keynote at BizArt Conference, Friday, March 25); New York City (author events at Foundation Center, Monday, March 28, 2 PM and at Barnes & Noble, sponsored by New York Foundation for the Arts, Thursday, March 31, 7 PM); Washington D.C. (Foundation Center, Friday, April 1, 1:30 PM); and Baltimore (keynote at Maryland Writers Conference, Saturday, April 2, 9 AM). See a full events schedule.

Gigi Rosenberg is a writer, speaker, and workshop leader. Her book The Artist’s Guide to Grant Writing (follow on Facebook) grew out of the professional development workshops she launched in Portland, Oregon, and teaches in New York, Chicago, and throughout the Pacific Northwest at colleges, conferences, and arts organizations. Her writing has been published by Seal Press, The Oregonian, Parenting, and Writer’s Digest; performed at Seattle’s On the Boards; and broadcast on Oregon Public Radio.

Images: Gigi Rosenberg (photo by Christian Columbres); cover art for THE ARTIST’S GUIDE TO GRANT WRITING by Gigi Rosenberg (Watson-Guptill, 2010).

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The 2011 Commonwealth Reading Series of events with MCC writers and poets, which began this week, continues TONIGHT, Friday, March 18, 7 PM with a reading at Grub Street, Inc. – Boston’s creative writing center.

Among tonight’s readers is Adam Schwartz (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ’10), author of the “stunningly good” (says Don Lee) new novel A Stranger on the Planet. Here, Adams answers a few questions about his work, his writing life, and the truth in fiction.

ArtSake: You’ve had a number of author events surrounding your new novel. Are there any questions you dread being asked by an audience during the Q&A?

Adam: Why it took me so long to complete my novel. I’m comfortable with questions about how autobiographical my novel is, but questions about why I spent so many years on it feel too personal to explain in a brief answer.

ArtSake: Indeed, in your note to readers on Amazon.com, you say that A Stranger on the Planet took you over 20 years to write. What benefits does a long gestation bring to a work of literature?

Adam: Spending so much time on a book brings both advantages and disadvantages. The benefits are a richness and complexity that ferment over time; on the other hand, it was an enormous challenge to seamlessly incorporate material that I felt I had out-grown with more recent sections of the book.

ArtSake: I was fascinated by another quote from that article, that “everything in the novel is invented and that it’s all absolutely true.” Can you talk about the truth that fiction gets at, for you?

Adam: Invented details always feel more “true” than the details I draw directly from life. The parents in the novel bear a very close resemblance to my real parents, and I did live in the same places where my protagonist lives. But one of Seth’s most important relationships is with Sarah, his twin sister, and I don’t have a twin sister. Several years ago, I was sitting at my desk on a Saturday morning writing a story about a character based on my mother when the phone rang – it was my mother, of course. I was irritated that she had interrupted my writing, but then my mood brightened when I heard the profound dissonance between the voice in my ear and the character in my head. It meant that my writing was going well, that the character based on my mother had a fictional life of her own.

ArtSake: You teach writing at Wellesley College. What do you try to instill in emerging writers?

Adam: To keep writing because it brings meaning to their life and not because they have visions of fame and success.

ArtSake: Can you point to any one decision you’ve made as an artist that has had the most impact on your career?

Adam: To be the best father possible to my daughter. I adopted my daughter in 1996, and that happened to be the last year in which I published a story before my novel came out. I didn’t have much time to write between having a demanding teaching job and being fully involved in my daughter’s life. I’m reluctant to say, though, that it had a negative impact on my writing career. I’m sure that the experience of being a parent will enrich my writing for years to come.

Adam Schwartz will read from his novel at Newtonville Books in Newton on Sunday, March 20, 2 PM. Also, Adam joins Jamie Cat Callan, Cheryl Clark, Ron Spalletta, and Marc Velasquez for a Commonwealth Reading Series event on Friday, March 18, 7 PM, Grub Street, Inc. in Boston. Other events include Porter Square Books (3/31), Forbes Library in Northampton (3/23), and Newtonville Books in Newton (4/5).

Adam Schwartz is a Senior Lecturer in the Writing Program at Wellesley College. His stories have been widely anthologized, and his first novel A Stranger on the Planet was published in January 2011. Previously, portions of that novel were published as stories in The New Yorker. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop.

Image: Cover art for A STRANGER ON THE PLANET by Adam Schwartz (Soho Press 2011).

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The 2011 Commonwealth Reading Series of events with MCC writers and poets begins this week with a reading at Porter Square Books in Cambridge (Tuesday, March 15, 7 PM).

That’s just the beginning. The series continues this Friday, March 18, 7 PM at Grub Street, Inc. – Boston’s hub of literary community and just general coolness. One of the writers reading at Grub is the superb Jamie Cat Callan (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ’10). We had the chance to ask Jamie about her writing, books, and unmistakable joie de vivre.

ArtSake: Your writing experience is so varied – young adult novels, short stories, screenplays, relationship advice, writing tips, memoir. When you conceive a new work, is the form (novel, script, nonfiction work, etc.) immediately apparent, or do you sometimes have to explore different forms to find the right fit?

Jamie: And you didn’t mention poetry and plays!

Honestly, I just like to write.

Still, I suppose the form is very much determined by the influences in my life and who is around me. For example, I wrote short stories and plays during a time when I belonged to The Writers Bloc, a group in Los Angeles made up of writers and actors. Then, I wrote screenplays while I was getting my MFA from UCLA film school. After film school, I began teaching at Wesleyan University, Educational Center for the Arts, NYU, Yale and then at Grub Street, and so I created The Writers Toolbox, out of the games and exercises I used in my classes.

Most recently, I’ve reconnected with my French roots and discovered more history relating to my French grandmother. I loved how she had this spicy marriage with my grandfather. They didn’t always agree, but they certainly adored each other. This is how I became inspired to write French Women Don’t Sleep Alone. I think I wanted it to be an advice book because I wish my grandmother could sit down and tell me her secrets to romance, love, marriage and elegance. Oh, and how to make a great coq au vin!

My latest book, Bonjour, Happiness! is an interesting mix of memoir and advice. I actually wrote a proposal for a memoir about my travels to France (beginning in the 1970′s and up to the present) and my editor said she wanted the book to be “prescriptive” but that it could be still be “narrative.” And with that, I think I’ve created a hybrid genre – the literary advice book!

Anyway, perhaps this is another answer to your question about what determines the form my writing takes – it’s unpredictable and it’s just how the stars happen to align.

ArtSake: You mentioned Bonjour, Happiness! Secrets to Finding Your Joie de Vivre, which is just about to be published. But you won your MCC award by submitting a work of fiction. Writing is rarely ever easy, but does either form, fiction or nonfiction, come more naturally to you?

Jamie: For me, fiction is delicious and dreamy. I enter into an imagined world and just let it lead me into surprising, sometimes illogical places. Along the way, characters introduce themselves to me, take me by the hand and together we get into trouble. Lots of trouble (narratively speaking, of course). For the story that won the MCC grant, I was inspired by my husband who told me that when he was growing up in Madison, Connecticut during the 1960′s, the town was mostly a summer community and that because only a handful of people stayed over the winter they formed a “Winter Club.” This is where the title “Welcome to the Winter Club” comes from. I envisioned the club as a metaphor for loss of innocence and adulthood. From here, I imagined what it would be like for an adolescent boy experiencing his first sexual awakening in this community in the 1960′s during the Camelot years, when Kennedy was in the White House and Vietnam was a shadow in the not-so-far distant future.

In terms of craft, when I am writing fiction, I write fast and let the characters lead me. At the end of the day, I put the work away. The next morning, I look at the writing with fresh eyes and see where I may have gone off course, or if I let one of the characters take over the story or lead me astray, and so I trim and edit and bring the story back into alignment.

Now, you might be surprised to learn that when I am writing nonfiction, this process is rather similar, because I am still writing stories. The difference is, these stories are framed by a more obvious lesson or suggestion in terms of creating a happier life, as with Bonjour, Happiness! Even with this book, each chapter offers it’s own mystery to me and while my characters are real French (and sometimes American) women that I’ve actually met and interviewed, there are the same challenges as with fiction, in that I let a kind of narrative grow out of the basic idea of a chapter topic (for example, why lingerie is very important to a French woman’s confidence!) but then in the clear light of day I may find that perhaps I need to edit and trim that part about the history of lace corsets. Wink. Wink.

ArtSake: How did Bonjour, Happiness! come to be?

Jamie: In 2009, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts awarded me a fellowship to spend a month writing in Auvillar, France. The village of Auvillar is a magical place in the southwest filled with fig and olive trees, roosters, and a town known for welcoming artists from all over the world. One day after I first arrived, I walked into the village around noon, only to find everything was closed. I was able to visit the ancient stone cathedral (built in the 11th century), but the boulangerie, the library, the shops and most of the restaurants were all closed. The streets were silent as if everyone in town had disappeared.

But then, I peaked through the cobblestone courtyards and behind the lace curtains to find couples and families enjoying their mid-day meals. This is when the thought came to me – this is the secret to the French joie de vivre. Unlike our American “pursuit of happiness” the French find happiness in simple, pleasurable moments. In America, we often think that bigger and faster is better. For the French, smaller and slower is better. Happiness is an experience, not a thing you buy or own. And I felt so happy in that moment, relaxing in the sunshine of Southern France, knowing that the boulangerie would reopen at 2 p.m. and I would be patient, imagining that the baguette would be worth the wait and even more pleasurable because of it.

ArtSake: You teach extensively, including at Grub Street writers’ service organization in Boston, and you wrote The Writers Toolbox. As a teacher, what do you try to instill in emerging writers?

Jamie: Actually, The Writers Toolbox is not so much a book that I wrote, but a box of tactile writing games I created – you know, sticks and spiny dials and a little three minute egg timer, cards and then an instruction book. It’s all based on right brain theory – writing from that intuitive, nonlinear place. And this brings me to what I try to teach emerging writers: Follow your muse. Don’t worry about where you’re going or where you’ll end up. Write from the heart and believe that there is a place in this world for your voice, your story, your style. No one else can be you. You are completely unique and amazing in your own way. And as long as you stay true to yourself, your contribution to the world will be completely true and unique. Oh, and one other thing. Be kind to your writing. It lives and breathes outside of you. It’s a gift to you from your muse, so if you are kind to your own creations, your muse will make a habit of visiting you often. I don’t believe in tough love when it comes to teaching writing. I believe in love. Kindness. Gentleness. And of course a whole lot of joie de vivre. This is why I adore Grub Street and the Grub Street teaching philosophy. There’s a whole lot of love going on and I can’t imagine a place where writers receive so much support. We’re lucky to have them!

ArtSake: Can you point to any one decision you’ve made as an artist that has had the most impact on your career?

Jamie: A long time ago, I decided to let go of the debilitating idea of becoming an overnight sensation. I let go of the notion of the acclaimed debut novel. I no longer care about being the next new thing.

Rather, I’ve embraced the idea that I can be that gal who has been quietly and consistently writing all along (since 1973) while raising a daughter, making a living, moving around, experiencing all the unexpected ups and downs of living a full life. The overnight sensation ship sailed long ago, but I am here and this is my journey.

All this is to say, no one decision had the most impact on my career, but the decision to move forward, have faith and just write no matter what, has made all the difference in the world.

ArtSake: What are you reading these days? What are you writing?

Jamie: I am reading Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw. I love his writing!

I am writing the book proposal for my next book, Bonjour, Beautiful – Secrets to Finding your Ooh la la! And I’m also working on turning “Welcome to the Winter Club” into a novel. If anyone wants to give me a nice advance, please speak up and don’t be shy!

Jamie joins Cheryl Clark, Adam Schwartz, Ron Spalletta, and Marc Velasquez for a Commonwealth Reading Series event on Friday, March 18, 7 PM, Grub Street, Inc. in Boston. Other events include Porter Square Books (3/15 and 3/31), Forbes Library in Northampton (3/23), and Newtonville Books in Newton (4/5).

Jamie Cat Callan is the creator of The Writers Toolbox (Chronicle Books, 2007) and the author of French Women Don’t Sleep Alone (Citadel/Kensington, 2009). Most recently, she received a grant from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Auvillar, France where she wrote her latest book, Bonjour, Happiness! (Kensington/Citadel, 2011) Jamie is married to a Woods Hole Oceanographic climate change scientist. The story of how they met (he was a student in her creative writing class) and eventually married – appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column.

Images: Jamie Cat Callan; cover art for BONJOUR, HAPPINESS! by Jamie Cat Callan (Citadel Press, 2011).

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Tuesday, March 15 (7 PM at Porter Square Books in Cambridge) marks the first event in the 2011 Commonwealth Reading Series, a schedule of readings by Fellows/Finalists from our Artist Fellowships Program.

So, first: Woo hoo! This series is like a warm front of exciting writers rushing into a cold (as in super-cool) front of great reading environments, producing a veritable tornado of literary awesomeness. Run for cover, Dorothy!

One of the writers featured in the March 15 event is Kathryn Burak (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Finalist ’10), a writer, teacher, and soon-to-be-published novelist who generously neglected to delete or mark as spam the interview questions we emailed her and instead responded in the following entertaining and enlightening manner:

ArtSake: You teach writing at Boston University, and in fact, co-wrote the textbook Writing in the Works. How does your work teaching the craft of composition inform your own work as a literary artist?

Kathryn: I teach in the College of Communication, a class that surveys writing from across the fields of journalism, advertising and PR, and film, so it’s a creative class even though it’s not a traditional creative writing set-up. It’s been interesting to find out how much writing in the world is based on narratives, and that’s what I stress in my class. Stories are everywhere and they reach out to people.

ArtSake: Congratulations on your book The Dress (read an excerpt) being accepted for publication by Roaring Brook Press/Macmillan! I’m curious where the story of The Dress began for you. With an idea? With a place (Amherst)? With its young, Emily Dickinson-obsessed protagonist?

Kathryn: I got the germ from a boy who was in seventh grade at the time. (The “boy,” Colin Faherty, is now a young man getting ready to go to college, so you can see it was a while ago.) I had volunteered to be the leader of a small filmmaking club at my daughter’s middle school, and they were brainstorming ideas. One of the kids – whose name happened to be Emily – drew a picture of a woman who looked tired and hungry. The woman had a long neck and severe hairdo. Colin said, “Hey, that looks like Emily Dickinson, and she’s a vampire.” I told him that idea made some sense, considering her poetry, and said, “Why don’t you write that story?” He said, “Nah. It’s all yours.” And though there’s only a single line that mentions this, as a joke, it was the beginning of my thinking about the book. (Thanks, Colin.)

I fooled around with this idea for a long time and then the summer just before I wrote the book, I took my son to see Robert Pinsky read from his translation of Dante’s Inferno at the Summer Institute for Poetry – which is a program that brings high school teachers to Boston to learn about poetry. (Because he’s a teacher’s son, my boy has to be patient while I enrich the heck out of him.) The line from Canto 32, “The suffering of my hunger had power over my grief,” stuck in my head. Somehow that poetry reading inspired the whole thing, and the story about a girl who fights her way out of grief because she feels a hunger for life, got mixed up with the story of a young man, who wants to be a teacher and who loves poetry. And because I lived in Amherst (and love it with all my heart) and know it well, it seemed natural that the story be set there.

And of course, Emily Dickinson’s dress is so iconic, it had to be in the story somewhere. I hadn’t ever planned on it being the center of the book, but one day I found my main character stealing the dress from the Dickinson Museum. You know how your protags sometimes take on their own lives and do the most surprising things? Well, Claire’s stealing that dress was one of them. She just did it. And I said, “Okay, let’s see where this goes.”

ArtSake: Can you talk a little bit about finding a publisher for the work? What has most surprised you about that process?

Kathryn: I really wrote the book one summer – after years of fooling around with the idea – in eight weeks. These were twelve-hour days, of course, but yes, eight weeks. I read some of it to my family one day and they all were asking questions about the characters and the story, and I thought maybe someone other than my relatives would also be intrigued by Claire and her story. So I started looking for an agent because that’s the way it’s done – or so I read on the internet. At the same time, in the course of cleaning out my basement, I happened to come across a letter I had received – but never answered – fourteen years earlier, after I had published a story in Seventeen magazine. I could barely remember the particulars, it had been such a long time, but I remembered the agent was interested in the possibility of my writing a novel for young adults. This letter was dated 1994. It said, “I would welcome the opportunity to read more or hear from you.” I have to say, after all those years I felt so angry at myself: You had an agent interested in you and you let her slip away?

I got up enough courage to google her and found out that she had her started her own agency in the meantime, and that she represents some really successful writers. I did a little more self-chastising, of course, and then thought about emailing her. Without a doubt, she would probably think I was crazy if I emailed her after all those years. But most writers are at least a little crazy, and I – with equal amounts of fearlessness and foolishness – emailed her my query, and included that we had worked together ever-so-briefly years and years ago. And I was astonished when Elizabeth Kaplan emailed me back a little while later – just one line: “Okay, I’d be happy to read.”

So, I had an agent who loved the book, and we still had to find a publisher. After ten long months, we had a publisher who liked my writing but had issues with some of the elements in the story, and asked if I would be willing to rewrite. I was swamped with final papers at BU and getting ready to teach summer school. I asked Elizabeth how long I would have to do the revision. She said, “Two weeks. It’s time to get your career going.” (She always says two weeks, I know now, but I didn’t at the time.) So, I rewrote the entire book in two weeks. In the end, that publisher did not buy the book, but we had the rewritten manuscript when another editor suggested that she liked it but… And Elizabeth, who is brilliant, said, “It just so happens we have this new version.” Around this time, I also found out I was one of the finalists for the [Massachusetts] Cultural Council’s fellowship. A little while after that, Nancy Mercado at Roaring Brook Press made an offer. It was a year of rollercoaster rides, for sure, and I have more, many more, ahead of me as the book gets rewritten again. I have to say how wonderful it is to have an editor who has such great enthusiasm for creatures who have sprung from my imagination. I’m always wondering how I got so lucky.

ArtSake: You’ve also published poetry. Other than the obvious difference in form, do you approach writing poetry differently from writing prose?

Kathryn: Ever since I was a little girl and my mother said, “I’m nobody. Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us – don’t tell,” I understood that words had a power over me. But I’m also a visual artist, and I majored in studio art in college until, in my senior year, I noticed I had written more poetry in my sketchbooks than I had drawn, and I had taken more English classes than art classes, so I switched. I have an MFA in poetry from UMass Amherst, and I love the way poetry can recreate a place and emotion while adding this layer of language that redefines words. I love the way poetry contains both pictures and the sound of words. I revere poets. But I found that though I wanted to write poetry, it is the most difficult thing in the world. I stopped writing altogether after graduate school, and I suffered because I missed it. I mourned. And then I read Jayne Anne Phillips’ Black Tickets. I discovered poetry in story form. In fact, my first published story, which was rejected 32 times (it’s true) was finally published in a journal that I had targeted because they also published Phillips – Fiction magazine.

It was such a relief to be writing again, even though I wasn’t writing poetry. And as I read Mark Richard’s Fishboy, Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, Gabriel Garicia Marquez, Lorrie Moore, Elizabeth McCracken, I began to see the possibilities for me in prose. As I experimented, I began to find my own voice and that voice, it was clear, was poetry and prose merging. I have to say this has been both a plus and a minus for me, in terms of publishing. Some editors say the voice isn’t accessible enough. That’s my poetry influence, I’m sure.

ArtSake: What are you writing these days? What are you reading?

Kathryn: A couple of months ago, my editor, Nancy Mercado, asked me what my “day job is.” Honestly, this was even bigger than signing with an agent or a big publisher – that I have something other than a day job (!?!?!?!). In my day job, I read lots of student papers and write textbooks. In between those gigs, I have discovered a writer named Julia Leigh, who has the most remarkable, tiny book called Disquiet. It’s just the kind of writing I was talking about in the last question – hers is the perfection of poetry and prose merging, of story and poem in one. I hope everyone reads it, just to see what can be done in so very few words. Just to digress a bit – Leigh responds to an interview where she is asked why this book took her ten years to write and she says that her training as a scientist has taught her that writers, too, have to be prepared to waste effort. I tell my students this – about the importance of “wasted effort” in their writing lives. And you can see, from my influences – seventh graders in film clubs, forced outings to classical poetry readings, and reading my own students’ writing – I don’t believe effort is ever wasted, really.

Now, I’m working on my second novel, which is about a young filmmaker whose mother is a convicted serial arsonist. The story takes place on a moody cove in Maine, during the girl’s last few months in foster care, just before she turns 18. Following my interest in writing about literary characters, this story was inspired by Jane Eyre and is based on seven lines from the Elton John song, The Madman Across the Water, so you know there’s some water in the book as well as fire, and a man who may or may not be mad.

Kathryn joins Jessica Bozek, Preston Gralla, Cathy Jacobowitz, and Anna Ross for a Commonwealth Reading Series event on Tuesday, March 15, 7 PM, Porter Square Books in Cambridge. Other events include Grub Street in Boston (3/18), Forbes Library in Northampton (3/23), Porter Square Books (3/31), and Newtonville Books in Newton (4/5).

Kathryn Burak has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and teaches writing at Boston University. She is the co-author of Writing in the Works (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) has published fiction and poetry in Fiction, Missouri Review, Seventeen, Georgia Review and others. Her novel The Dress, an excerpt of which earned her the MCC award, will be published by Roaring Brook Press/Macmillan in Spring 2012.

Images: Kathryn Burak; Emily Dickinson’s daguerreotype, circa 1846, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections

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In January, we shared the first half of a conversation between Lise Haines and Elizabeth Searle, where they talked about recent projects, like Lise’s novel Girl in the Arena and Elizabeth’s rock opera Tonya and Nancy, and otherwise explored the writing life and their life as writers.

In this second part of the two-part conversation, they discuss new trajectories in their careers, the things you don’t talk about in polite society (but you write about in interesting fiction), and the fun kind of suffering that is a writer’s work.

Elizabeth: I’ve noticed that we’re both going on a new trajectory, in our careers. You could say that our earlier works would be classified as literary, capital L, which is sort of like the word liberal, people don’t say it anymore. And with Girl in the Arena, not that it’s not still the high quality literary writing, but it’s definitely got the page-turner, plot element that’s very clear and strong. And I also feel that Girl Held in Home will be a plot-driven book. It was based on an actual incident in our neighborhood, where a girl – in real life, it was a grown woman – was being held in a wealthy home as an unpaid servant, and her visa was under the family’s control. They had frightened her somehow into believing that she had to do this. In my version of it, a teenage boy discovers this situation and gets a crush on the girl. In his All-American way he wants to help her but in a way he’s exploiting her. What set this book in motion was that some of the boys who lived in the real-life house where the woman was being held did a very strange thing on Halloween of 2001 – right after 9/11. They came from a family that claimed to be related to the Saudi royal family, and they went Trick or Treating in the neighborhood dressed as, in their own words, a terrorist and a dead American. In my fictional version, they have a reason: in their own misguided way, they think they’re protecting their family. I have no idea why, in real life, they did what they did. But it was one of those incidents that I wanted to explain to myself, to delve into.

Lise: It sounds like we’ve both found ourselves wandering into a very political area. Why do you think that is, for you?

Elizabeth: I come from a very political family. You mentioned 9/11. Girl Held in Home is very much a post-9/11 book. And Girl in the Arena strikes me as a post-9/11 book.

Lise: I still write mainly about families, triangulated relationships, how we move on from loss. But suddenly, I found I couldn’t hold back about something larger. It feels as if all of the stakes are higher, now.

Elizabeth: Have you ever written scripts?

Lise: No, I haven’t.

Elizabeth: You’re the one writer in America who’s held out and not written a film script!

Lise: I’m giving serious consideration to the screenplay, and maybe a graphic novel at some point.

Elizabeth: You should do a graphic novel of Girl in the Arena – do the sequel! I love that form, and you’re such a visual person.

Lise: I’m finishing up a novel as we speak, and then it will be time to clear the board again. I like this concept of transmedia overall, where one creative product can take many forms: a novella becomes a libretto becomes a film becomes a rock opera. And can’t you just see Tonya and Nancy The Game? It’s such a playful concept, that we can invent and reinvent and completely torque things around. And maybe in some ways this keeps us ahead of some of the unending anxieties with bookstores closing, lower profits on e-versions, the closing of libraries, less people reading in a traditional way. It would be very easy to simply get depressed and derail. But I think we have to fall back on that adage about the mother of invention and get re-energized. And that gives us the steam to do the fundraisers and other events to help the libraries and bookstores, and so on.

Elizabeth: The direction I’ve moved in is mixing writing and music. I’m a huge music fan, so putting words to music is such a joy to me. I got to do this for the musical and for the rock opera, and now I’m working on a new full-length opera with a terrific locally based composer, Pasquale Tassone. It is based on a play by an Italian playwright, and I am translating it into a libretto.

Lise: Do you sleep?

Elizabeth: I don’t. I don’t sleep. My son goes down around nine, and the hours between nine and one AM are very key for me.

Lise: That sounds like my schedule, though my daughter stays up late too. I usually get about four and a half hours of sleep.

Elizabeth: But nighttime is a great time to write, because everything shuts down. I get a lot of work done during those times. And I enjoy it.

Lise: Another thing about graphic novels and musicals and the themes of celebrity: it’s an interesting blend of high art and low art.

Elizabeth: I love that blend. It’s a very current thing.

Lise: We have that impulse to turn everything upside down and re-examine it, make sure we haven’t boxed ourselves into a corner with art that nobody can relate to.

Elizabeth: I think the current generation – even including us – is so steeped in pop. Pop culture and popular entertainment are about the only things America does well. That’s why the words “Celebrities in Disgrace” mean so much to me. (Ed. note: “Celebrities in Disgrace” is the title of Searle’s novella, short film, and blog.) That’s a title that came to me with the Tonya and Nancy incident, back in ’94, but to me, it just becomes more and more what our culture is all about. I feel like that part of a writer’s job is to engage your times, whatever they are, and our times are certainly tabloid times. These are our stories, our folk tales. And that is in a way what my blog is all about. Not only do we just dish on celebrities in disgrace and indulge in it, but especially in the guest posts, people talk about the weird deep emotions they feel about some of these people. One of the impetuses of the blog was a conversation I had with Steve Almond. At the time, he was worried, he said, about Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise was having his jumping on the couch moment, and not many people were sympathetic to him. But Steve was reading all sorts of mid-life crises things into whatever was happening with Tom Cruise. And I know that feeling. Again, I think people can identify heavily with something from a tabloid story. Maybe they don’t want to talk about it. But those are the most interesting things in writing, these weird feelings you wouldn’t talk about in polite society. But you would on my blog.

Lise: Okay, to switch tracks for a second. Here we are in an organization that supports and funds artists. What do you think it takes to feel really supported in this culture? Do you think we’ll see a point in time where people can no longer create art because they simply cannot afford to produce it?

Elizabeth: I feel the thing that writers, and artists in general, can do, that can save us, is to band together in groups and support each other. I feel, for instance, that self-publishing can work, but it’s often not a good model. It’s one person doing everything. If only these people would band together, form a collective – there are models for that in poetry publishing, like Alice James Press. People are constantly bemoaning how many people are studying to be writers. Why can’t that work for us? We could support each other, buy each other’s books, support our local small presses.

Lise: So what’s going to happen when we see the day, as with music, when you can download literature for free? And suddenly, all of those years of the writer crafting an individual property, a novel…

Elizabeth: With e-books, I think there will be, as a literary agent acquaintance of mine told me, a period of chaos. And then things will start sorting out.

Lise: Although, the difference between the writing world and, say, the music world is that the musicians are living off their performances, right? We don’t have that track.

Elizabeth: But I feel like we’ll come up with things. It’s not like we’ve been making a mint the old way. Just to come back to Literary Death Match (Ed. note: discussed in part one.), which was packed with people: if you make it – whatever it is – a fun, interactive experience, you give people a reason to get off their couches and come out for an event or off their computers and into your book.

Lise: That brings up the idea of how much art is here to entertain, and how much we’re afraid of that idea, that it’s somehow too commercial if we actually entertain someone through our art. But look at the classics. Dickens, that’s pure entertainment, with those really deep notes in it.

Elizabeth: He would have won the Literary Death Match! People would pack the halls to see him read. The global economy has had a terrible affect on fiction publishing, but I think the smart, small presses are going to find ways to make it work for them – like e-books, like events.

Lise: I think as life gets more sketchy on the financial end, my characters go more and more into survival. The novel I’m working on now certainly echoes that.

Elizabeth: Writers tap into the zeitgeist.

Lise: Where does your sense of humor come from?

Elizabeth: Well, I think a dark place. (Laughs) I often find things funny that I don’t know if everyone does. The various plots I’ve mentioned are terrible things, really scary in real life. But they have a dark humor to them that’s appealing and interesting to me. It’s just where I’m drawn. You are not on the bubbly bright side of humor, either!

Lise: No, it’s a very dark humor. I think mine comes primarily from my stepfather, whom I call my dad. He just has a certain sensibility. Kind of wry and dark. I see my daughter has it now.

Elizabeth: The kids these days!

Lise: Humor is, in another way, a survival skill.

Elizabeth: I remember something you said once at a reading, Lise, “I dedicate this reading to my daughter, who will never be old enough to read this book!” (Laughs) That, I totally relate to. I told my son that. He’s starting to get all-too-curious.

Lise: Yes, that was my first book, In My Sister’s Country. Another story I tell is that when Sienna was a baby, I was very focused on her as a stay-at-home mom. So when she napped was just about the only time I would write. Sometimes if I was right at the end of a scene, I’d turn up the heat a bit in the house. So she’d keep sleeping.

Elizabeth: I can remember doing that in my car. If we were driving along; I’d turn up the heat so he would fall asleep, and I could sit up in the front seat and get some writing done. Every writing mom knows those feelings.

Lise: And you can also change the type of project you’re writing. When my daughter was little, I wrote in small sections – prose poems or flash fiction that I eventually strung together.

Elizabeth: I’m glad you mentioned that, because one of the factors in me getting involved in theatre and film writing was that it much better suited having a young kid. I hadn’t had a book published in a while, partly because I tried a couple of times to write a novel with a young child, and I just could not get that continuous trance that you need. But I got the opportunity to write for the theatre, and I found I could do that in short bursts.

Lise: So when you actually sit to write… for me, I’m probably the happiest when I write. The actual act of writing-

Elizabeth: Is always fun.

Lise: Is such an absolute high.

Elizabeth: And if you lose touch with that, you’re in trouble. I’ve never lost touch with that. If I’m not happy with what I’m working on, I switch to something different. That’s the advantage to having all of these different projects.

Lise: But there have been well-known artists and writers who really suffer all the way through-

Elizabeth: You do suffer, but it’s a fun kind of suffering!

Girl in the Arena by Lise Haines was recently nominated for a South Carolina Book Award.

Elizabeth Searle is among the authors participating in Books in Bloom at the Robbins Library in Arlington, MA, on Friday, March 4 at 6 PM. Watch for another production of TONYA AND NANCY: THE ROCK OPERA in Summer 2011.

Lise Haines is the author of three novels: Girl in the Arena, a CYBILS nominee in 2009, was published in the US (Bloomsbury) with foreign rights sold in Turkey (Alfa-Artemis Yayinevi) and Brazil (Editora Underworld); Small Acts of Sex and Electricity (Unbridled Books), a Book Sense Pick in 2006 and one of ten “Best Book Picks for 2006″ by the NPR station in San Diego; and In My Sister’s Country (Penguin/Putnam), a finalist for the 2003 Paterson Fiction Prize. Her short stories and essays have appeared in a number of literary journals, and she was a finalist for the PEN Nelson Algren Award. Haines has been Writer in Residence at Emerson College since 2002. She has been Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard, and her other teaching credits include UCLA, UCSB, and Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. She holds a B.A. from Syracuse University and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She grew up in Chicago, lived in Southern California for many years, and now resides with her daughter in the Boston area.

Elizabeth Searle‘s new novel, Girl Held in Home, will be published in Fall, 2011. Her previous books are: Celebrities in Disgrace, a novella that the New York Times called “a miniature masterpiece”; A Four-Sided Bed, a novel, and My Body to You, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Prize. Celebrities in Disgrace was produced as a short film in 2010 by Bravo Sierra. Elizabeth’s theater works have been featured in stories on Good Morning America, CBS, CNN, NPR, the AP and more. Her Tonya & Nancy: The Rock Opera was reviewed as “brilliant and touching.”

Images: cover art for GIRL HELD IN HOME by Elizabeth Searle (New Rivers Press, Fall 2011); praise by author Tom Robbins, from the back cover of GIRL IN THE ARENA by Lise Haines (Bloomsbury, 2009); Elizabeth Searle with the cast and creative team of TONYA AND NANCY, performed at Club Oberon 1/31-2/2 (photo by Barry Weiss); cover art for IN MY SISTERS COUNTRY by Lise Haines (Blue Hen, 2002).

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One of the perks of working at a place like the Massachusetts Cultural Council is meeting artists like Henriette Lazaridis Power (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ’06), who along with being great practitioners of their craft, also contribute in fascinating ways to the creative community at large. Henriette founded and edits the innovative audio literary journal The Drum, will partner with the ultra-nifty Four Stories series for an upcoming reading (November 15 at the Enormous Room in Cambridge), and writes for Beyond the Margins, a blog of writers’ tips and publishing information. (And I happen to know she’s a competitive rower and right nice lady, to boot.)

We caught up with Henriette to discuss her many lives in the Massachusetts literary ecosystem.

ArtSake: It seems to me The Drum taps into two current trends: a resurgence in oral storytelling and the growth in digital forms of literary presentation. In a sense, it’s both old-fashioned and quite contemporary. What was the initial impetus behind The Drum and its unique model?

Henriette: You’ve hit on exactly what I was interested in in coming up with The Drum: that intersection of the very first experience of narrative that we all share (having stories read aloud to us or told to us) and the contemporary experience of interacting with culture through headphones. A little over a year ago, I was in the midst of listening to a number of audiobooks that were performed extremely well, and, to put it simply, I wanted more. I’ve always loved the performative aspects of writing (I think one’s prose has to sound good for it to be good). And I’m a keen admirer of the skill certain readers and actors bring to the speaking voice, using it as no less an instrument than the singing voice. So it seemed to me there had to be a way to bring stories into an audio format, and to present the whole thing using the template of the literary magazine. In a way, I figured why should books have all the fun? Why not find a way to give stories and essays a regular outlet?

ArtSake: Speaking of an outlet for literature: can you talk about the upcoming reading you’ve got at the Enormous Room in Cambridge, as part of the Four Stories series?

Henriette: When I heard about Four Stories, I realized that Tracy Slater (its founder and organizer) and I had similar interests and missions. We’re both presenting writers reading their work aloud. The only fundamental difference is that, with Four Stories, the “readers” come to the writers, and with The Drum, the “readers” can bring the writers with them (in their headphones) wherever they go. But we’re both about – to use The Drum’s standard phrase – Literature Out Loud. I approached Tracy with the idea that we should find a way to collaborate, and she kindly offered one night in the series to The Drum. We’ll have four authors whose work has already appeared in the magazine reading again – probably something different – for an audience. Michelle Hoover, Bret Anthony Johnston, Lynne Griffin, and Ethan Gilsdorf are all local authors we are lucky to have in the Boston writing community. The Enormous Room is a great venue where you can order drinks and food while you hear the writers perform. Our contributing editor Faith Salie will be hosting the event – which means, among other things, she’ll be fielding the often irreverent questions from the audience, and choosing the best ones to receive a Drum-themed prize. We’ll be recording the readings to post them on The Drum and on the Four Stories site, so if you miss the event, you can always listen later.

ArtSake: At the Four Stories reading, there’s a prize for best audience question asked of a participating author (I love this detail). As an author yourself, are there any questions you would dread being asked by an audience?

Henriette: I actually look forward to being able to talk about my writing with interested readers. There’s no really bad question, in my mind. And if I were to get a boring question, I can answer it quickly and move on.

ArtSake: You’re one of the writers for the terrific Beyond the Margins blog, a craft-based exploration of the writing and publishing process by a host of local authors. Your post on “Embracing Discomfort” as a writer struck me as a great insight (with a nice opening line, “I’m not comfortable writing this blog post.”). How does your work as an editor, a blogger, and even your competitive rowing (which you reference in that post) impact your creative writing?

Henriette: Most of the time, having all these responsibilities is a good thing for me. Being productive in one avenue generally seeps over and helps make me productive in another. Of course there are periods when there simply isn’t enough time in the day to get everything accomplished when you had planned to. But overall, I’m finding it useful to be able to shift gears rather than staying in one mode of expression for a very long time. Writing for Beyond The Margins requires a different style, a different pacing, than writing a novel. And editing The Drum requires all sorts of wonderfully non-writerly skills that I’m enjoying developing – like working with sound files, recording writers, pitching various projects to organizations around Boston and elsewhere, emailing writers and editors, and all those sorts of networking things. And then the rowing is a very useful break. It’s a different kind of work altogether. It’s repetitive, it’s highly technical, and it’s physically strenuous. But as I mentioned in that BTM post, I’ve found that I can learn real lessons from rowing that transfer quite helpfully to my creative work, like embracing discomfort (which in writing can mean not knowing whether you’ll succeed, find an audience, get a scene right), and like being able to let go of a bad training session (the rowing equivalent of murdering your darlings).

ArtSake: What are you writing these days?

Henriette: I’m delighted to be able to say that I recently accepted an offer from a major publishing house for my first novel Clean Monday, so I’ll be busy working on some revisions with my editor.

ArtSake: Congratulations! So, that’s your writing schedule for the foreseeable future; what’s next for The Drum?

Henriette: I’d like to build the readership for The Drum, and to generate more submissions, so that we can keep the quality of the magazine high. We’re working on tweaking the website so that our authors can have substantial profile pages, and so that our listeners can contribute to discussions on the site. We have some potential collaborations in the works with some Boston-area institutions that I’m hoping will take shape. And we’d love to get people involved in contributing to our Dispatches and Stories on The Street features. These are short audio pieces – one involving public-domain work that contributors can record on their own, the other involving essays on place, recorded by the author in that place. We’d love to get those projects up and running, alongside the high-quality short fiction and essays we’re publishing.

The next Four Stories reading, “Stories from The Drum, a very cool new literary magazine… for your ears,” takes place on Monday, November 15, 2010, at the Enormous Room in Cambridge, 7-9 PM. The event features readings by Michelle Hoover, Bret Anthony Johnston, Lynne Griffin, and Ethan Gilsdorf, with guest-host Faith Salie, writer, television producer, and Drum contributing editor.

A Rhodes Scholar and a Ph.D. in English, Henriette Lazaridis Power taught at Harvard for ten years before remembering that academia had never really been part of the plan. Since turning to writing full time, she has published work in Salamander, The New England Review, The New York Times online, The Millions, and Middlebury Magazine, among others. She was Grub Street Writers’ nominee for the 2009 Best New American Voices, and has earned finalist or semi-finalist spots in various fiction contests. She is also the founding editor of The Drum, a literary magazine publishing short fiction and essays exclusively in audio form.

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THE ROYAL FROG BALLET is an amoeba of collaborators, a producing body, a shouting household of households, and an aspiring dance team in search of parade.

- from the troupe’s website (do you, too, get the feeling its audience is in for an interesting time?)

The Royal Frog Ballet is a cross-disciplinary group that blends performance, visual art, music, movement, and a sensibility that’s equal parts Vaudeville and avant-garde. And that encapsulation undoubtedly leaves out important facets of the RFB, because it’s just one hard-to-encapsulate group.

So we asked Sophie Wood, co-director of the troupe (which is based in Northampton but includes members from elsewhere on the East Coast), to elaborate, in advance of an appearance in the upcoming HONK! Festival in Somerville (October 8-10) and a Surrealist Cabaret and Pumpkin Walk in Amherst (October 22-24).

ArtSake: I’m interested in a recent collaboration by The Royal Frog Ballet, The Leaving Nest at the A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton. Can you talk about the interdisciplinary nature of that project – it was billed as “an installation, performance series, and window garden” – and how it relates to the identity of your troupe?

Sophie Wood: Our original idea for using the gallery was to expose our art making process, as well as a product or performance, as part of the showing. The A.P.E. Gallery (as a space) is aesthetically very different from the spaces that we were used to performing in and creating installations for: usually we’re in a barn or a field or a community center or someone’s living room. I think that we were all a little unsettled by the idea of being in a very classy, clean, professional gallery space, and have spent lots of time intentionally creating art that isn’t meant for galleries. But we also wanted to try something different, and were really intrigued by the giant window that is the front of the gallery space which is right on Main Street in Northampton, and generally the down town location as a way of reaching new audiences.

The desire to present our process is part of our aesthetic and identity, I suppose, in that we want to create art that is accessible, that feels down home, that feels like you could make it too, without compromising the quality or the vision. We try to use materials that are cheap or reused, to use spaces that aren’t traditional performance venues, singers that have never sung before. I think part of that is a desire to create art that inspires other people to make art, and part of that is a desire to inspire ourselves to try anything that we want to, regardless of whether or not it’s the ‘art’ that we study or practice. We want to make encouraging art, not untouchable art.

The Leaving Nest was a three week installation. The week before the gallery opened, two muralists started painting on the big walls opposite each other, a team of builders started building a giant boat/house like structure (on wheels) in the center of the room, some gardeners put 30 amaryllis bulbs that had been started a month before in pots in front of the window on Main Street, a pin hole camera was set up with props, and the dancers and writers and costume makers wandered around making little messes in the corners.

The first week we had a gallery opening, and at that point the murals and sculpture were all in a state that could be called finished, the bulbs were poking up in various stages, headed towards blooming, and there were about 8 costumed living human statues amongst the plants and on the boat, and the visitors were being photographed by the camera.

After the opening, we were in the gallery each night after hours, changing the installation, adding to the sculpture, watering the plants painting more on the murals, adding more props, but each day when the gallery opened, all of the art was “finished” and ready for gallery viewing. At night people were always peering in the windows, watching us work or rehearse; we did a lot of singing and dancing in the space at night also.

The second week we performed a costumed and performative singing show from on top of the boat/house, that had been rehearsed and created that week in the space, and the third week we presented a performative choreographic spoken word show that had also been created in the space. The changes made to the murals and the sculpture reflected and added to the performances. Characters from the first show appeared in the murals by the second show, writing from both shows inspired additions to the sculpture and murals, images from the gallery appeared in the writing.

It was an incredibly exhausting, challenging, intensive experience for us as a collective and as individuals. It was extremely educational and thought-provoking and opened up a lot of discussion in the collective about how we present work, how we advertise it, how we structure our decision making. We’re just figuring it out as we go along, following what excites us.

ArtSake: Artists in the Royal Frog Ballet have been creatively collaborating for a long time (you call it an “ever-extending collection of housemates, friends, loves, siblings, classmates, co-workers, neighbors, and networkers”). What are the benefits of a deep and sustained creative partnership?

Sophie: We’ve all been developing our individual art heavily influenced by our surroundings, which, for many of us, for a long time, has included each other. We read lots of the same books, see lots of the same shows, hear lots of the same music; Our thought patterns have become similar, but our brains and how we process ideas, images, organization, are still very much individual. We introduce each other to new concepts, images, sounds, and pick them apart or build off of them together. The benefit is never having to explain yourself and who you are before you explain your idea. The benefits are similar to the benefits of family; Sometimes they drive you bonkers, but their confidence in you is irrationally solid, their support is unending, and their understanding of who you are is inexplicable.

We know what each other’s abilities are and what our weaknesses are and where we struggle and where we excel and when and how to push and when to encourage and make tea, and when to stop. We know how we tick. We can usually read each other, for better or worse, as whole humans, not just as artists. If someone is struggling with an idea or at a rehearsal, we can often read or feel comfortable asking if it has to do with the art or with something unrelated. We know what to expect, and also we know what wonderful, creative, irrational, unexpectable beings we all are. We have a lot of minds to help us create that know us well, that live in our same world of place and of image and idea, but don’t see or process the world in the same way.

ArtSake: I love the premise behind the Surrealist Cabaret: an open studio for performance artists. Can you offer a few snapshots of what an audience visiting your “studios” might experience?

Sophie: That’s top secret. Or, maybe the studio hasn’t even been opened yet.

Could be that they see moving sculptures, a dance number or two, unexpected instruments, extravagant pumpkin art made by lots of ‘pumpkin artists’, magical landscape occurrences, unusual tree fruit, beasts of all shapes and varieties, and masked story tellers of questionable quality.

Couldn’t rightly say.

ArtSake: The Royal Frog Ballet is participating in the HONK! festival for the second time. Can you talk about how your troupe’s aesthetic jells with the spirit of HONK?

Sophie: I think our ‘aesthetic’ as a group is based whether or not it’s going to be a good time, satisfying, joyous, magical, or cathartic. HONK! is an unbelievable event. To me the most radical part of HONK! is how much pure fun it is, how inclusive that fun is, and that the inclusivity doesn’t make the fun lose any of its grittiness or edge. So, when we had the opportunity to bring our clowns (who follow no rules or choreography) to the streets with our ‘instruments’ (sculptures), it was too much of a good time to pass up.

ArtSake: Sophie, do you create your own solo work? And if so, how does it differ and/or crossover with the work of the troupe?

Sophie: I do, I have, I will, it’s complicated. I write poems and little books for bad days, I make exotic pinatas for weddings, paintings and collages for birthdays, papier mache sculptures, I dance, I perform, I make puppets and masks and costumes, I write plays, I dream of mastering the spoons. I co-direct a Shakespeare and physical comedy program for young people in Vermont. I make and do whatever strikes my fancy. Since a fair amount of my time goes towards the organizational and secretarial aspects of the Ballet, and setting up events in which to share work (which I then share work in), the difference between my work and Ballet work sometimes feels murky. I think the bulk of work that I make that seems most clearly my own is work that never gets shown, (or isn’t meant to be). One of the main reasons that working together was so appealing from the beginning is that it’s intimidating and exhausting to show work by yourself. It can lead to a lot of lonely artistic doubt. Support and encouragement to show and put art out in the world, regardless of how ‘ready’ it is, is one of my favorite aspects of working with the RFB.

ArtSake: What’s up next for The Royal Frog Ballet?

Sophie: A nap. A meeting. A bowl of french fries. A winter full of of individual touring and art making. A street performance event in Northampton in April, featuring members of our collective and other companies and artists from New England.

The Royal Frog Ballet will participate in the HONK! Parade in Somerville, Sunday, October 10, 2010. They present the Third Annual Surrealist Cabaret and Pumpkin Walk at 5:30 PM (rain or shine) on October 22, 23, and 24, at Old Friends Farm on Bramble Hill in Amherst, MA.

Sophie Wood co-directs the Royal Frog Ballet and the Get Thee To The Funnery! Shakespeare Program and several other theater workshops for young people in Central Vermont.

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