Courtesy of some aspects of Chinese linguistic structure the above can be read in a variety of different ways, with over 3000 poems possible here. A sort of prefiguring of Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes. Also of note in the seminar for me was the introduction to me of William H. Gass’s Life Sentences, a book that I now feel compelled to read.
Workshop with Terese Svoboda began with a freewriting exercise, on the title of “How did I get Here.” I managed to come up with a somewhat entertaining piece of 600 words which I think may get some refinement and submission.
Genre workshop was with Mikhail Iossel and Jessica Anthony. While nominally about transforming personal experience into fiction, it was largely about some expansion and compression of time and space looking at two short pieces from The New Yorker: “Getting Closer” by Steven Millhauser and “Going for a Beer” by Robert Coover.
The afternoon seminar was Stefan Kiesbye on “How We Cannot Say What We’re Talking About” which was largely about dialog, looking at some masterful uses of dialog and concluding with a bit of a teardown of some of the bad writing that is the output of Dan Brown.
It’s beginning to feel like the time is coming to an end. We began today with Tibor Fischer who talked primarily about the pre-Richardson/Fielding novel, with some examples from The Satyricon, Callirhoe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Amadis of Gaul which is apparently a bit of a pre-occupation for him.
We had workshop in the morning and then after lunch, the return of the “wildcard” workshop. This time around, I was with Jessica Anthony, who centered her workshop around the short story “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff.
Our afternoon seminar with Enid Shomer had the grand concept of creating word collages, first collecting phrases from magazines and then assembling them into some sort of poem or narrative.
After a stimulating dinner with some students and faculty from the MFA (along with a student’s wife and child), we had the evening’s reading from Mikhail Iossel and Enid Shomer.
Today was St Petersburg day. We were taken in vans from the University of Tampa campus first to the Hotel Don CeSar on St Petersburg Beach. We had workshops on the veranda of the hotel overlooking the beach, then after lunch a bit of free time that I used to take a quick swim in the ocean before spending the rest of the time on reading.
In the evening we had readings from Mikhail Iossel and Rebecca Wolff. Iossel read from his new project, a Facebook-related fiction piece. Wolff read three short poems and a short story, her first short story ever, she claimed.
And now things begin to really happen. The first agenda item was a meeting of people interested in working on Tampa Review Online, a bit disorganized in terms of planning etc., but I signed on to be a reader for fiction.
Thence to the first workshop, about which I will say nothing (what happens in workshop stays in workshop).
I had lunch at a table which was otherwise faculty, adding Nick Flynn to my list of people I’ve met who have been interviewed on Fresh Air. He enjoyed the opening paragraph of “Girls” that Josip Novakovich asked that I read.
After lunch was the first of the genre workshops, although this was less a workshop than a seminar/lecture to my mind. I’m curious to see how the faculty who will be leading the second workshop handle things and how it compares. There were a few interesting readings offered, most notably some excerpts from Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau which seems a book worth having.
At one point Mikhail Iossel said that authors repeat themselves. I almost offered up Exley and An Arsonist’s Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England as an example, but there was no opening. Probably for the best as I happened to look around the room and made eye contact with Brock Clarke.
This was followed by a seminar from Nick Flynn, entitled emotional rescue. This was the first moment that I really felt like I was learning something about improving my writing. The key takeaway here was to watch for certain red flags in our writing: exposition, abstractions and direct statements of emotion.
The evening’s reading was all Nick Flynn (again). He read selections from his memoirs and poetry, accompanied by a slideshow of semi-abstract imagery which is a nice way to add visual interest to what is otherwise a visually static experience.