Tag Archive for: author

Notebooking

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Zines for Creative Exploration            Timothy: As a novice artist, I once spent several months drawing pictures of lizards and turtles for researchers in an animal behavior lab. I loved being around all the gadgets and learning the jargon of science, but the most interesting aspect was watching everyone fill up stacks of green notebooks with scribbled facts, figures, and thumbnail sketches. This largely unseen work of scientific exploration revealed to me a vastly bigger and more complex process than I’d imagined before.

Since then, my education as an artist has taken a pinball’s path, rolling and rocketing from bumper to flipper and back again. Now in the afternoon of this journey, after trying on a dozen different identities, I tell people (and myself) that I make books about books. But, ever skeptical of neat categories and descriptions, I wonder every day what this actually means.

It helps reaffirm my practice to think back to all those amazing lab notebooks overflowing with blue, black, and red ink. Their rich beauty, not meant for the eyes of the lay public, made me interested in the stories behind stories. Of course, I also have the privilege of living with a writer, who has filled so many shapes and sizes of notebooks with ideas. A finished book on the shelf or a painting on the wall can be wonderful things, but to me the messy, freewheeling preparatory work that flows though notebooks and sketchbooks is every bit as fascinating. So, I make, or at least try to make, book-like objects that talk about the often overlooked labor of art.

 

Bryn: And I have the privilege of living with a visual artist whose sketchbooks burst with wild, beautiful drawings and annotations. Our artistic disciplines intersect in the realm of notebooks: writers, artists, and other creative thinkers, as Timothy mentions, find these compact paper spaces crucial for process and discovery. Time and again, I’ve scratched bits of imagery, scenes, and characters during long walks or early morning coffee; later in the same pages, I’ve refined and expanded those bits or ditched them altogether. I’ve pasted encouraging quotes, pictures, and notes to self. When I drafted Sycamore, I first highlighted and tabbed pages in the stack of notebooks I’d been working in. Some of those scraps made it in wholesale.

Living with an artist, I also know how valuable it is to make a notebook for a project. Book artists in particular build mockups for their projects, mapping and testing structures, and then filling the pages with calculations and notes, before embarking on the final piece. Why shouldn’t writers, too, make their own project-specific notebooks? These serve not only to capture our ideas but to remind us from the start that this work should have its own personalized, playful space that also is practical and portable. Anyone can buy a readymade journal, but slowing down and constructing one from scratch is a kind of promise: This work matters. It’s in my hands now.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTORS:

About the Instructors: Bryn Chancellor is the author of the novel Sycamore, a Southwest Book of the Year and Amazon Editors’ Best Book of 2017, and the story collection When Are You Coming Home?, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, with work published in numerous literary journals. Honors include a 2018 North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship and the Poets and Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award. She is associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Timothy Winkler is an illustrator and book artist whose Modern Fauna Art & Ephemera Studio is currently based in Charlotte. A native of Nashville, Tennessee, he has long studied and worked in all the various media of printmaking. He earned his MFA in Book Arts at the University of Alabama and has taught letterpress printing at Penland School of Crafts and a course on Outsider Art at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Winkler was a 2020 recipient of an Arts and Science Council Artist Support Grant.

CREATE ZINES WITH BRYN & TIMOTHY: The road to a story winds through myriad notes and drafts. Join Bryn & Timothy on April 30, 2022 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. for Little Notebooks, Big Ideas: Zines for Creative Exploration. Making notebooks by hand lets writers immerse themselves in the critical early creative process and helps them commit to a project. We’ll make fun, easy, affordable, and portable notebooks in the spirit of zines, closer to Anne Lamott’s index cards than to fussy bound journals. We’ll start to fill the pages with targeted prompts for characters, settings, and scenes, and play with simple printmaking and collage to make them our own.  Register Here

Note: This class includes an hour break for lunch. You can bring your own or visit one of several walking-distance options.

My Creative Writing Journey Began at Charlotte Lit

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Brooke Dwojak LehmannAfter not touching a pen for years since high school, I showed up to Charlotte Lit in 2017 for my first creative writing class. I had taken a recent medical leave of absence from my job, and decided to start exploring forgotten creative longings, which after years of neglecting were starting to take a toll on my physical health and well-being.

I showed up with the desire to write, but had little understanding of writer’s craft or discipline. I immediately felt invited into the spaces and classes created by the co-founders, Kathie Collins and Paul Reali. I began with an interest in personal essay and memoir writing, then moved into discovering my love of poetry.

I met wonderful teachers like Kathie Collins, Dannye Romine Powell and Gilda Morina Syverson that immediately made me seen and valued. One of the first Charlotte Lit events that I attended was a 4x4CLT with poets Jessica Jacobs and Nickole Brown. I was drawn to their authentic voices and lyricism.

Through Charlotte Lit, I was also introduced to contemporary poets like Marie Howe, Mary Oliver. Ross Gay, Ada Limón and Terrance Hayes. Charlotte Lit helped me draw connections to poetry that I loved in my youth—Shakespeare, Dickinson and Keats—and see how contemporary poets incorporated craft elements like imagery, sound, rhythm and metaphor into modern language.

Charlotte Lit also led me to other personal artistic and creative endeavors. I began doing morning pages after hearing about the book The Artist Way which opened me up to exploring fashion and modeling, essentially the freedom to explore creative play.

Eventually, through the writing guidance and instruction that I received during my time at Charlotte Lit, I began to have some of my poems published. Now, I am currently working on my first chapbook through the Poetry Chapbook Lab.

I am grateful that I found a refuge in Charlotte Lit during a very difficult season of my life, which managed to help me during my own recovery and writing life. I found an entire community of people that are interested in similar ideas to me—poetry, mythology, beauty, mystery and the way language can help us describe the ineffable, both the joy and suffering in life.

Now, I am excited about coming aboard as Program Director to continue growing Charlotte Lit’s program offerings to the Charlotte community. I believe in the power of storytelling, and how literature brings us into conversations around belonging, empathy and personal/communal healing. I hope to infuse my passion for creative writing and strategic visioning by expanding the already vibrant list of Charlotte Lit’s programs to reach a growing and diverse audience of engaged writers and readers.

Below is one of the first poems that I had published, my first draft written during a poetry workshop that I took with Danny Romine Powell. The poem first appeared in Tipton Journal Issue 45.

Elegy for a Traveling Consultant

That year I worked in Philadelphia,
and I cried each time I packed my suitcase.

On the Mondays that ended early,
I strolled through Macy’s

sashaying through glittery shoes,
on ivory marble floors,

the Wanamaker Organ jolting
me from a phantom reel.

The evening recital became my respite
from a life that felt borrowed –

Walnut Street, Palomar Hotel,
mandatory happy hours,

snow falling in late March,
alone in my bedsheets.

Most days, I walked to the office,
except when rain showers soaked

the black and gold leather Tory flats
that a decade later, rest in my closet.

When summer arrived,
I ran through the city at night

like a breathless fugitive
down by the humid river

that made it feel hotter
than the South

where I longed to be back home.

Brooke Lehmann is Program Director at Charlotte Lit. She would love to hear your thoughts on our programming. Things you love? Things you’d like to see? You can reach her at brooke@charlottelit.org.

Understanding the Three Act Structure

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What is the three-act structure, really?

Paul RealiMost stories are this: a character takes a journey of change.

Let’s take this one level deeper. At the start, there is something internal the story’s protagonist must learn (such as overcoming an original wound or dispelling a misbelief). The story provides an external problem that forces them to confront their internal need.

Experienced novelists (and screenwriters, playwrights, and memoirists) share a secret: stories recount this journey using the same basic structure. And while there are many ways to skin this cat (including the construct called “Save the Cat”), its essence is the three-act structure.

ACT 1

  • Setup: Establish the protagonist, their everyday life (the ordinary world from which they will depart), and their inner desire, wound, or misbelief.
  • Inciting Incident: An event forces a change in the character, setting their adventure in motion.
  • Plot Point One: The protagonist accepts the challenge and crosses the point of no return.

ACT 2

  • Rising Action: The protagonist encounters roadblocks, and allies and enemies, on the way to achieving their goal.
  • Midpoint: The protagonist faces their biggest challenge, which threatens to derail their mission.
  • Plot Point Two: The protagonist — who has so far been reactive — makes a choice to become proactive.

ACT 3

  • Crisis: As the protagonist faces their final challenge, it would seem that all is lost.
  • Climax: The protagonist manages to overcome whatever is holding them back. They triumph over the antagonist (or antagonistic forces).
  • Denouement: Our hero returns to their previous life, having changed — with their ordinary world having been changed, too. Loose ends are tied up and tension is released.

Think of these nine bullet points as essential scenes or story beats. Consider them to be your guides for a novel, memoir, screenplay, or stage play — a writing journey that is worth the trip, and after which you, too, will be changed.

ABOUT PAUL: Charlotte Lit co-founder Paul Reali is a writer and editor, and co-lead of Charlotte Lit’s Authors Lab. He is the author of Creativity Rising, and editor of more than a dozen books and journals on the subject of creativity. His writing has been published in the Winston-Salem Journal, InSpine, Office Solutions, and Lawyers Weekly, among others. His fiction has won the Elizabeth Simpson Smith and Ruth Moose Flash Fiction competitions, and he received a Regional Artist Project Grant from Charlotte’s Arts & Science Council in 2018. Paul has an M.S. in Creativity from SUNY Buffalo State, where he also the managing editor of ICSC Press.

LEARN ABOUT NOVEL WRITING. Join Paul Reali for Novel Structures, Tuesday, March 15, 6-8 p.m., or work intensively with Paul and Meg Rich in the 4-week mostly-asynchronous studio, Novel Jumpstart, beginning April 3. More information here.

Historical Fiction

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Paula Martinac

Paula Martinac is the author of the forthcoming historical novel Dear Miss Cushman.

The Past Comes Alive on the Page

The task facing the historical fiction writer is to bring research to life. In a journal article or history book, you might read that 19th-century American theaters were rowdy places in which audiences frequently booed actors off the stage. In contrast, a historical novel would take you into the boxes and “parquet,” or orchestra seating, and show the repercussions of a poor performance. This excerpt from my forthcoming novel, Dear Miss Cushman, set in the New York City theater world in 1852, demonstrates this idea.

 

When the audience began hissing, I knew Othello wasn’t going to end well. The response jolted me. We weren’t at the Bowery Theatre, where the audience in the pit tossed apples and vegetables onto the stage if a performance didn’t please them. The Prince Theatre was one of New York City’s finest establishments, catering to the upper ten.

Worse, the actor they hissed at was my father.

I was attending my first theatrical performance. Incredible, given that my father was a renowned leading actor, but Mama maintained that theater wasn’t a place for young ladies. For my eighteenth birthday, she gave in to my pleading and permitted Uncle James to accompany me to my father’s performance of the Moor, one of his most acclaimed roles. Mama insisted I have a new dress, and my sister Maude oohed and aahed over the sky blue taffeta until I wanted to take it off and give it to her. I myself put little stock in puffy lady things, especially in pastel hues. Plus, the heavy horsehair crinoline the skirt required for shape made beads of sweat trickle down my stomach.

Still, I could abide these discomforts if it meant I got to sit beside my dapper uncle in his lushly adorned box, draped with red and gold silk, and marvel at the glistening gas-jet chandelier that lit the space. Best of all, I got to watch my father tread the boards as I’d imagined him doing, in full costume and makeup for the Moor and sporting his prize sword.

We were barely one act in when Pa dropped a few lines. Then more—even the ones I ran with him that morning “for good measure,” as he’d urged. He’d appeared in Othello dozens of times, but now the role appeared to baffle him. Although the movement made my stays pinch, I leaned forward, mouthing the words, willing them into his memory.

Taunts rose slowly through the cavernous parquet. Pa squinted toward the footlights in bewilderment….

The audience response crescendoed into boos. Uncle James colored crimson. “We’re leaving,” he announced, spittle collecting at the corners of his lips. He tugged me to my feet. “Now, Georgiana.”

Paula Martinac is the author of the forthcoming historical novel Dear Miss Cushman (Bywater Books, December 2021), and six others, including Testimony; Clio Rising, Gold Medalist, Northeast Region, 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards; and The Ada Decades, a finalist for the 2018 Ferro-Grumley Award in LGBTQ Fiction. Out of Time, her debut novel, won a Lambda Literary Award. She has received fellowships from North Carolina Arts Council and the Arts and Science Council and teaches in the creative writing program at UNC Charlotte.

EXPLORE HISTORICAL FICTION WITH PAULA: Join Paula for Writing Historical Fiction online. Historical fiction has the power to bring people and places from the past to life. If you’re drawn to this genre (or one of its sub-genres, like historical mystery or romance), this class will provide you with motivation and skills to start writing. By the end of the class, you will have a scene or chapter for a work-in-progress or an outline and character biographies that give you a solid path forward. This class meets on three Tuesdays, November 30, December 7 and 14, 6:00-8:00 p.m. More information here.

Rewriting Southern Traditions

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Beth Gilstrap

Beth Gilstrap

LAKE HARTWELL, SOUTH CAROLINA

By Beth Gilstrap

 

It’s past lunch hour and Grandmother is still wearing her

housecoat. Tings and sprays bounce from the stovetop. A

glimmer of steam gathers on her upper lip, not sweat, mind

you—not sweat. The peonies on the fabric are wide and

heavy pink, like they’d fall over if they were out in the

side garden as they always are during late April. But we are

in July and July is sweet and frayed, the grass only green

down on the banks of the lake. Me and Juna played chicken

on rafts all morning. Our suits still damp when we put

them on, hers only halfway up as we ran out the door, letting

it slam too hard, hearing Grandmother say, “Watch my

nerves. For Lord’s sake. My nerves.” By the time we come in,

we were striped, our torsos a wormy kind of white, our fingertips

wrinkled, begging for fried squash and okra Grandmother

had in heaps by this point, for smushed-up peaches

meant for the ice cream churn, for teeth-cracking chunks of

rock salt, the wayward bit of a watermelon seed, you know,

that stringy bit you can’t get down no matter how hard you

try so you wind up spitting the seeds on Grandmother’s

floor even though you wasn’t supposed to be eating them in

the house cause y’all know better, cause she done told you

twice to get your butts outside. And once you’re outside,

the menfolk stand in a circle around their cache, taking

stock of M-80s and bottle rockets and whirling spiders and

whistling dixies, which was basically the same, but hateful,

so hateful you could feel it blow your cousin’s pinky off

even though some grown-up yelled “fire in the hole” and

dumbass stood there in a sulphur fog like it was all happening

to someone else and next year when you and Juna went

in at lunch you were practically teenagers and ate rolled-up

honey ham cigars and Chicken in a Biskit Crackers—those

buttery rectangles with a chemical chicken flavor—instead

of spitting seeds on the floor cause now y’all were good girls,

making sure to let Grandmother lie down awhile and have

herself a little peace in the back room with the big box fan

and a single bed and her thin, yellow sheets.

ABOUT BETH: Beth Gilstrap is the author of the Deadheading & Other Stories, Winner of the 2019 Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize due out October 5, 2021 and available for preorder now. She is also the author of I Am Barbarella: Stories (2015) from Twelve Winters Press and No Man’s Wild Laura (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press. Her stories, essays, and hybrids have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Wigleaf, The Minnesota Review, New Flash Fiction Review, and the Best Microfiction Anthology, among others. Born and raised in the Charlotte area, she recently relocated to Louisville where she lives and writes in an ornery old shotgun house.

LEAN INTO LYRICAL TRADITIONS WITH BETH: Join Beth for a reading and book discussion of Deadheading and Other Stories on October 20, at 6 PM for our next Wednesdays@Lit. And join Beth for Uneasy Women: Writing Feminist Southern Gothic Fiction on October 21st. In this workshop, you’ll examine writing traditions, how they’ve changed, and how we might craft them for 21st Century readers by examining excerpts from contemporary female authors including: Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and Dorothy Allison. We will examine how they subvert traditional gender roles, how they give agency to characters (often deemed outsiders) who have traditionally been victims of the American capitalist patriarchy. More information is here.