I had a lovely time at Richard Hugo House this Saturday leading my workshop "Looking & Seeing: Generating Prose with Paintings." Back in December, I did a mini-lesson at Write-O-Rama, where I talked a bit about this concept of using visual art as inspiration and introduced the idea of deciding whether you would work "inside" the painting or "outside" of it - meaning whether the writing refers to the fact that there's a painting or only focuses on the story within.In December, we did one exercise focused on stories outside of paintings. This is the prompt I gave: What if a particular painting somehow changed the course of a story? The Picture of Dorian Gray, My Name is Red, and The Idiot are a few examples of novels in which art plays a crucial role in the unfolding of story.This past Saturday,we focused mainly on working within a painting. We looked at a range of paintings, examining possibilities for the stories behind what was immediately visible through details such as posture, gaze, movement, color, mood, and light. This was the prompt: If we widened our imaginative lens beyond the frame, what might we find?  What came before? What comes next? One textual example we discussed briefly was Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea, which uses Titian's painting "Perseus and Andromeda" but is set in England in the 1970s.****In honor of Valentine's Day, here's an old favorite short-short of mine: http://cafeirreal.alicewhittenburg.com/szilagyi.htm

I am thoroughly soaked with things AWP. Most treasured among my bookfair finds is a beautiful, beautiful book of short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, from Archipelago, one of my favorite small presses.Yesterday afternoon, I saw Mary Gaitskill and Sapphire read. Gaitskill read from a novel-in-progress, generating about her an unearthly hum; in one bit of the excerpt a woman noted how everyone must accept darkness, how much easier life becomes when one does so; and at one moment this question is posed: what is fertilized by a decomposing personality? I'll be on the look out for that next book. Sapphire read from Push (I don't think I was the only one on the verge of sob; in high school I think I bawled through most of the book). She interspersed this with poems by Lucille Clifton, Carolyn Rodgers, and Ai, poets that had influenced her work and died in the past year. Her second novel, The Kid, is coming out this spring. I can't wait.Finally, of the many panels I attended, I think I'll most remember a very instructive anecdote Steve Yarbrough told during Politics in the Novel:Back when he was in graduate school, his professor brought in a photo of a starving child in Africa - with a distended belly and all the things one might immediately think. He held up the photo to the class and said: "This is what's wrong with sentimentality in fiction."  A calculated move, directed at a student in the class who'd been in the Peace Corps. The student reacted angrily, as expected - how can you say that, etc.The professor replied that the photo was reductive: you can only have one emotion in response to it. Then he held up another photograph. The second photo showed two children, also starving, from the same place, except it was not so focused on the starving body. The angle widened; you got a sense of the landscape. One boy was hitting another boy on the head with a tree branch. The photo elicited questions; what was happening between them, why the fight? One boy had been singing; the other told him,  "you have the ugliest voice I've ever heard." This photo was complex and human; multiple emotions, multiple questions arose. Such a useful, helpful anecdote.Those are the highlights. I have loads of other notes on the business of finding an agent, on epiphanic and episodic stories, on Robert Coover's defamiliarizing the known so that we may see again (that was Brian Evenson speaking, at my professor Maya Sonenberg's panel). Perhaps I'll write more as other bits reverberate.

I had a rude awakening in my practicum seminar yesterday. We talked about an article called "A challenge to second language writing professionals," by Ilona Leki, focusing on the claim that "Writing is personally fulfilling" and that that's one of the big reasons why writing is so important. Basically, Leki says this claim is bunk:

"The argument that learning to write is important because writing serves a few people so well is reminiscent of parents' argument to coerce children into practicing violin--some day the learner will be grateful. But we are not dealing with children, and we are not our students' parents."

The instructor asked how many in the room actually found writing personally fulfilling (we're a class of 8). Two or three including myself sheepishly raised our hands. Fact is, writing is not fun for a lot people, and torture for a lot of language learners-- a notion I never really considered but am beginning to understand. How can we ask them to see writing as "cathartic" if they're still struggling with the language (another question posed by Leki)?

So I was left with this dangling question: if students are not the creative type prone to playing with languages in the first place, do we not bother? Do we focus forever on English for academic purposes and business English and all-things-dry-and-pragmatic? That doesn't really lend itself to flexibility with a language. And that doesn't seem practical either. Hm.