Sewanee

Writing Conferences Part 2

Arrived in a storm. Pouring rain and wind rushed us up the mountain to one of the prettiest places I’ve ever seen. Tennessee was like how I’ve always imagined Louisiana would look with lush trees dripping in dark green vines, the hot air lit up by the call of a catbird. And Cumberland nights roiling in fog, trees throbbing with the singing of a million tree frogs!

And did I mention there were fireflies…!

All day long church bells echoed against the Sewanee sandstone… if it wasn’t so hot, I would say it reminded me something of Durham England with the solemn beauty of the old stone buildings amidst woods so green they looked blue.

I am not going to write too much about my workshop—you can ask me privately, and I will be honest. I did not get placed in my first choice to study with favorite writer Kirstin Valdez Quade, and instead was put in Vanessa Hua and Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s group, which I think in the end was a great fit for me. I love how the workshops are run by two faculty, each with their own six students.

The best part for me was a book recommendation that Vanessa gave me for Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book. As I mentioned in the Goodreads review, it was my information-laden dialogue that was critiqued mainly during my workshop. As was my overuse of exposition— so I was amused that both these same two issues were brought up regarding Brooks’ novel in the review from the New York Times by Lisa Fugard While I do agree that I need to tidy up my dialogue, I LOVED Brooks’ dialogue and her beautiful excursions about art were my favorite aspects of the novel! So I disagreed with the New York Times Reviewer.

The nightly readings were such a treat at Sewanee. I cried when Maurice read from his new book, coming out in March. Will be a masterpiece. Also emotionally moving was listening to poet AE Stallings talk about how rhyme is a kind of quantum entanglement. At one point she put up a slide containing only the last word of every rhyming line of a favorite poem. I instantaneously recognized Frost’s Stopping by Woods. The experience reminded me something of how reading kanji-dense text generates understanding in one moment. There was something pictorial about the experience.

Perhaps most exciting of all was sharing a meal with my favorite poet Camille Dungy and later hearing her read from her memoir, Soil. She is a national treasure.

Onward…I realize now what a stupid mistake it was to send the same submission —the first twenty pages of my novel— to both Sewanee and Bread Loaf. So now, I have all these significant changes to the manuscript but the workshop at Bread Loaf will be reading work that I plan to change. Vanessa thought I should inform my mentor at Bread Loaf, novelist Jess Row, about the changes, but two agents as well as the fellow of the workshop told me to say nothing and see if the same issues bubble up or not. Because I definitely do want to make those changes, I feel sad about going forward with work that is not up-to-date. Maybe that is a rookie mistake?

I just uploaded my bio for Bread Loaf and have read half the submissions of my nine-member cohort.

My essay in Aeon Magazine Earthly delights Noticing first one then many parrots, peacocks, owls and more birds in Old Master paintings taught me to truly see the world (not the original title!) was published at last. I loved the layout! And was surprised that they did not want the real-life birding content and asked that I stay focused on art symbolism… so far, I’ve received two emails from scientists questioning some of my bird identifications…

Information about the moon mission I mentioned in my bio can be found in this recent article in the New York Times: The Lunar Codex: A Time Capsule. Going to the moon are a few translations I did of Takamura Kotaro’s Chieko poems… You can more of the translations here and here.

A few more photos from Sewanee below…