Virginia Euwer Wolff, award-winning novelist for young adults; Oregon, USA:

“A reverberant childhood memory: Silent, snowy winter fields, with my parents and my brother.  I was probably four. Towering Douglas fir and Western red cedar trees almost black against the pearl-gray late afternoon sky.  The four of us walking out from our log house, past the barn and the sighing cow, snow ssssshhhhhhing under our boots.  Three dark deer on the white field.  Mother whispered, Ssshhh, don’t talk, just watch the deer, and I said something like What? and the deer immediately looked up because I had broken the spell, and we all stared silently back.  We four had that moment with those deer.  My father died the next winter and everything changed.”

“My readers are young, age 11 and up, and they step lively on that bridge, caught between courage and caution. They no longer feel like children, and they are ambivalent about accepting rules that the adult world imposes on them. Their neurotransmitters are still wild and free.  These growing kids have Geiger counters for hypocrisy, and they make an improvisatory art form of going through a day.  It can look to us like pure mayhem.  Their excesses may appall the grownups, as those of the grownups appall them.  They are poignant beyond description.”

“The British author of books for young adults, Aidan Chambers, has said, ‘The great quality of the novel is that it’s about the exploration of consciousness.’ What could be realer than that?  We novelists for the young have a holy office.”

“Here are some things I’ve learned as a working writer:

The faces of comedy and tragedy are intimately linked, separated by a small twirk of the mouth: the gravity and the levity of being alive.”

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“We must watch and listen tirelessly. Every contact with every cubic inch of life has something to teach us.  Our brains are capable of close readings of the world: the rocks, the insults, the hillsides, the empty boasts, the sunshine, the lies.  Watch and listen.  Of course it’s stimulating, baffling, distressing, exhausting.  What else could we ask it to be?”

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“The old verities don’t go away.  For instance, we really do reap what we sow.  But we need to evolve in order to discover how true the truths are.  I think that when we’re young and our passion spills over into everything (anger about injustice, anger about politics, anger about lunch), we may try to believe that basic principles don’t apply to us.  Time shows us that they do.”

“Self-discipline makes the difference between the person who works at writing something substantial and the person who hopes to do so someday. Millimeters of progress, day upon day upon week upon year, add up.  Enough of these and a book can be completed.  A horrible first draft can be a huge step toward a good book.  See Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird, on the topic of first drafts.”

” Many of us write way too much in search of what is essential to say. When author Thanhha Lai told me that ‘writing, even bad writing, counts for something,’ she meant that our bad writing can be our necessary homework.  It can be like the extra paint on the canvas, the extra clay on the pot.  It helps us wonder what is under there, waiting to come out.  And that’s much of what our work is: seeing through the encrustation that we put there when we were full of fine intention and grand design.  The screed might become the Haiku.  (Or it might not.)”

“The pairing of editor and author is as important, as strong and fragile and accident-prone, as a marriage.  An excellent match can be beautifully fruitful, and a bad match nasty, brutish, and short.  My steadfast editor and I have worked together for more than 20 years.”

“Embracing a cause bigger than ourselves is part of our obligation in being alive.  Embracing fifty causes may not help much.”

“Museums. We must go to them. Whenever we can.  Museums force us to ask questions that we might not otherwise have asked.”

“Nothing is as simple as it looks.”

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“Regret is one of our best teachers.”

“It’s easy to embrace a single religion or to dismiss all of them.  More difficult to learn what we can about each one.  And much more instructive.  Same with every language. The language of Guangzhou, the language of Genoa, the language of rain.”

“Rage is one possible motivation for making art, but other motivations may come along that are more sturdy, more rewarding.”

“We need to know poetry. Of all kinds.  Memorizing poetry is good for us, not only for use in maintaining our sanity should we be taken as prisoners of war, but for that, too.”

“The most pressing concern anent children today is poverty.  And its concomitant curses: poor nutrition, poor dental care, decreased ability to focus in school and the resultant inadequate and distorted learning.  The easiest things to learn are anger and envy.  Harder to learn are reading skills, mathematics, critical thinking, wise decision-making. When kids have low expectations and not enough to eat they can be more inclined to learn the easy things. For children who don’t suffer poverty, the most serious problem is the difficulty of sorting out who is a better role model and who a worse one. The next worst problem is the dominion of gadgets and increasing remoteness of the natural world. The thing we most need as human beings is empathy, and it’s quite likely that poverty and gadgets can combine to diminish the possibility for children to learn it.”

“It seems to me that cynicism is the temporary privilege of the well-fed and the last resort of the starving.  For the privileged adolescent, cynicism seems to be a phase, not unlike puberty, and a fashionable mode, not unlike tattoos or the decoration of the moment.  For the hungry in places ravaged by natural disasters and/or human greed, cynicism is at least a grasp at a clenched fist; and the clenched fist is determination to last just one more day.  I do think that as thoughtful people we have to embrace the whole thing: the nasty, the heartbreaking, the horrible, the jubilation. Here are the opening lines from Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, ‘Happiness.’

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.”

“Carlos Kalmar, conductor of the Oregon Symphony, said on Jan. 15, 2012: ‘Real great artists are not divas.’  Neither are real great livers of life.”

“Much of what I’ve learned—slowly, painfully—has correlations in music.  I had one year of piano lessons at age seven. When I was eight, my mother gave in to my pleading and let me switch to violin. And how in the world could we country kids, living without electricity in pre-TV USA, have known what a violin was if our mother hadn’t taken us to concerts to see a real live orchestra playing? Nearly a lifetime spent trying to make music on this difficult instrument has taught me lifelong lessons: Listen to constructive criticism and act on it.  Don’t spend a lot of energy complaining about having to learn all those lines, spaces, accidentals, dynamic markings, time signatures, fingerings, daunting bowings, tiny details that make music in the world.  Practice the scales and etudes; there are no shortcuts. An orchestra, or any music ensemble, is a team; learn how to be a team player and don’t pretend not to know the rules.  Giving up on a musical instrument will cause regret, and that regret will gnaw into old age, long after forgetting all the old phone numbers. There is always new and harder music to learn.  Every performance can be improved. When I think I have problems, I remember the lives of Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Clara Schumann, Brahms. A few minutes of extreme beauty in a lifetime are probably worth the grievous trouble of getting there.  Tenacity, tenacity, tenacity.”

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 Kevin M. Hibshman, poet; Pennsylvania, USA:

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Myths and Relics

She came back, smelling of the river and all that gathers underneath.
Her hair was some form of wild vegetation that crackled with clean.
I wanted souvenirs from the murky floor and she did not disappoint:
A child’s sneaker, a chunk of wood and a new myth alive in her eyes.

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“My role models were usually women. My heroines include Patti Smith, Diane diPrima, Diamanda Galas, and then some male artists: William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Ginsberg…I’m very Beat! I view gender as being a very fluid state that fluctuates naturally in the absence of fear. We seem to exist in a world of polarities that are not necessarily opposites but different aspects of the whole. Gender is only a construct. I do not believe it could ever be defined as it continues to evolve.”

Earth Mother

She smelled of burning things.
The earth seemed to kiss her steps as she walked.
The sky was a song she heard and repeated daily.

She cupped the rain in one hand, the wind in the other and froze the elements
until he forgave her.

She offended the unpretty privileged and mocked the classless middle-class.
She stomped the vacuous flat and they gladly gave up their last breath.
She smiled like a mountain cat about to pounce.
She mothered fiercely and  sobbed alone in dark chasms.

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“We must contend with the darkness as well as the light. I don’t think I could write about situations and emotions honestly without exploring the deepest, darkest areas of my subconscious.”

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Autumn

She smelled of untraceable herbs.
They seeped out of her pores, her gaze, her choice of words.
We drank tea by the imaginary fire.
It was always warm in her presence.
Upon taking my leave, She advised: “Autumn is soon coming. Time to
harvest the wind and
steal back the sky.”

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“I am not a visual artist, so I must paint and sculpt with words. I get inspired by the human opera that surrounds me; and the mysteries of nature also serve as a source of inspiration.”

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Chango

I was sitting in reverie by a bright fire when he knelt and pushed back his long , beaded braids. How is it that one so fierce in battle plaits his hair like a woman? He did not speak but his gaze was lustful and self-satisfied. He smoothed bronzed hands over his sweat-soaked chest, felt the muscles in his sinewy arms aching voluptuously. His eyes held a hint of the infinite, eternity merely a strategy he had begun mapping. I handed him an apple and he bit joyfully, teeth gleaming vampiric. Standing suddenly, he reached and pulled me to my feet. Placing those huge yet beautiful hands on either side of my head, I felt a rush of electricity invade my body. I heard fearsome thunder rolling as if torn out of the earth. He released me and nearly smiled.

I raised my face to drink of the drops that would soon be falling from the blackened sky.

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“As a boy I was very empathic, somewhat alienated and fairly inquisitive. Not much has changed. My parents gave me the gift of letting me be myself, however weird I may have seemed to them.

I find sometimes I am reluctant to divulge my sexuality out of fear of offending someone’s sensibilities. I need to be coaxed a bit and feel it’s safe.”

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“There has always been this pressure in our culture to be polite and do not confront anyone with your differences. A large part of our society accepts that there is something wrong with homosexuality.”

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“The artist presents differences in smaller, easier to assimilate bits for ultimate consumption. We put information, sometimes coded, into the larger air where it can be absorbed. Making it possible for people to absorb new ideas at their own pace. Perhaps it’s time I became less shy about being identified as a gay artist, though I would hope not to be limited as having to be only that. But then, if I don’t perceive being gay as a limitation… It is complex. Just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I am only concerned with gay issues or subject matter. I don’t want a myopic vision. I like to talk about the rainbow, not just one particular color.”

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Lynn Gravatt, aerospace engineer-turned-Nia dance instructor, photographer; Portland, Oregon, USA:

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“Becoming an aerospace engineer for the Boeing Company, [an American multinational aerospace and defense corporation] was a desire for a normal life.  I wasn’t aware that I had an artist in me, that I was pushing this essential part of me down.

I was working in the lab–I was actually building things and using my hands, it was a job that had the potential to be very creative. I was working alongside these amazing young minds. But Boeing is not about scientific discovery and invention anymore; it’s all about money. Engineering is not about science; it’s about making a profit.

There are genius minds that are wasted in front of computers. We should be converting to a clean energy system by now. The technology is there. But to develop it, you would have to lose profit in the short term. And no one’s willing to do that. As a result, planes haven’t changed at all in 40 years. The airline agency hasn’t changed at all. Nobody wants to make the sacrifices needed to improve how we do things. But if we want a better life for ourselves we’re going to have to go through a little discomfort.

So I had what I had thought would be this perfect job. I had financial security. I had the potential to do some amazingly creative things. But instead, I ended up doing what all my colleagues were doing: heading straight from work to the nearest bar and getting numb as quickly as possible.

All-the-while, I was dying to be creative. I started doing musical theatre, and then it all just exploded. Two years ago, I gave up my job, the nice house, changed my sexual identity, and started training to become a Nia dance teacher.  Now I’m just a struggling artist, but I’m finally on my way to happiness.”

“The biggest challenge I’ve encountered is trying to live a life according to my values in a money-driven society. To live an intentional life is just incredibly expensive!

I know I’m not normal. What I used to see as normal, I now understand is unhealthy and insane. Normal is numbing yourself with TV and alcohol. Normal is eating McDonald’s and consuming food with pesticides. I know I don’t want that!

But it can be very isolating to make these changes. I am now that crazy person I used to judge.”

“I’m dating women now and even in that community everybody labels everyone else. So-and-so is a butch, this other person is fem… As for me, the only label I’m comfortable with is human.”

“So much emphasis in our society is placed on performance. Everybody’s comparing themselves to everybody else. And as a result, we judge ourselves so harshly. We’re never good enough.

But in my Nia dance teaching, I let my students know that it all comes down to compassion.”

“The way I connect with everyone is through the body, because that’s the one thing that all humans have in common. So when I’m teaching Nia at the gym to all these people who are where I was just a couple years back, or thought I was, I’m talking about the breath, and generating healing energy, and how to get out of your head and into your body.”

“I like to take my students through body sounding exercises because even though as humans we express ourselves through language, we really are not really speaking the same language. Sounding the vowels is a pre-verbal exercise that’s a way that we can be on the same page without having to necessarily understand where each other is coming from. One person’s releasing anger, is another person fired up with positive energy. And that’s ok! The power is in moving together in unison–but each in their own body’s way.”

“It’s interesting that now when I’m dancing, the people I most connect with are the ones completely spazzing out on the dance floor–just doing their own thing. Yes, they’re in sync with the group, but they’re also putting in their own unique explorations. And I find that when I’m around people who give themselves permission to look foolish, that I end up giving myself that permission. And pretty soon you’re being abnormal together!”

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Judith Barrington, memoirist, poet, essayist; Portland, Oregon, USA:

“When I think of how women are portraying ourselves, I tend to think in terms of memoir, which is my primary focus as a writer now, although I have also stayed connected to poetry in which we also often portray ourselves, or a version of ourselves, on the page. There’s a case to be made that we have been leaders in terms of self-examination and self-revelation—at least in the last 100 years. I say that because of course Montaigne in memoir and Catullus, as well as Sappho, in lyric, personal poetry, paved the way. But in our era, Plath and Sexton as poets, Virginia Woolf in her short memoirs, and the early memoirists of the current wave—writers like Vivian Gornick, Mary Gordon, Lucy Grealy, Lorna Sage, Patricia Hampl, Annie Dillard, and so on, strike me as pioneers in the art of the emotionally, as well as factually, true story. Of course there were men who also wrote to the heart of the matter—and I think immediately of the painful honesty and brilliant writing of Paul Monette—but I think women have taken on the genre bravely. There were more women in the field twenty years ago—which may account for how disparaged by critics the memoir genre became during the so-called ‘memoir boom.’

In terms of how women portray other women, I can’t really generalize, but I think immediately of Alexandra Fuller, whose narrator in the memoir, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, speaks honestly about her damaged mother—by anyone’s standards a nightmare of a parent. And yet, the way Fuller manages to combine the brutal facts with a sense of still loving that mother always struck me as being the achievement of a particularly female sensibility—and perhaps a female ethic too.

Again judging from memoirs and poems, I’d say that there have been certain subjects that were dealt with in particular generations. When I was teaching at the summer workshop my partner and I ran for eighteen years—The Flight of the Mind—in the late 80’s and early 90’s many women were writing about being sexually abused in childhood. For a while there was an overwhelming number of these stories from women who had arrived at an age where they could bear to look at it, and at a time when feminism was helping to open up that dialogue. It seemed like a flowering of what the poets have called ‘confession,’—though I dislike that term because it smacks of admitting to sin. Of course, there still are stories of abuse and violence, but it seems that the hard truths (I mean truths that are hard to reveal for different reasons) have broadened out to include many other topics such as spirituality, relationships with partners and children, the natural world, politics, and so on. And more recently, death.

As a radical feminist who was active in political work for women, both in London in the 70’s and in Oregon after that, improvements never come as fast as I would like. People often talk as if feminism has done its work, but there are still enormous improvements to be made in terms of legal rights and social mores. Abortion rights are definitely going backwards in the USA, and in these hard economic times, women are suffering disproportionately. As a lesbian, I’ve seen huge changes and personally hurtled from the long, dark closet I inhabited growing up into openness. My poetry certainly reflects the journey, and the memoir I am working on now tries to trace its development in my own life and the communities I’ve been part of.

The girly-girls thing seems to me just another manifestation of how hard it is to embrace a new image of femaleness—one that doesn’t rely on old stereotypes. The consumer culture bears a lot of blame in grooming little girls to adore that awful shade of pink many of them wear from their jackets to their shoes.

I think that any way in which men try to emulate the best qualities we think of as female is to be encouraged! No one gender should ‘own’ the admirable human traits. Women have certainly been open to acquiring some of the better ‘masculine’ ones. Actually, in reading about earlier women’s lives, both writers and artists, it seems there were always a number of men in those circles who embodied femaleness in some form, and not all were gay. I think nowadays, because of the feminist movement, men have more language in which to discuss their gender aspirations, but the phenomenon may not be new.

From my memoir-in-progress:

For as long as I could remember, I hadn’t felt like a proper girl. It wasn’t that I’d wanted to be a boy: how could I? I had no idea what boys were like. Until I was in my mid teens I’d known only two: Graham Potter had taught me to ride a bicycle by the simple method of running along holding my saddle until one day he launched me down a steep hill and let go. I worshiped him for a year. Later, I’d corresponded with Tony Farmer, who lived next door and left me notes under a rock between our two gardens. I worshiped him too until the day we went bike riding together, locked spokes on a steep, gravelly hill, and both fell off. I broke my arm in two places and scraped my face bloody; Tony got up unscathed. When he jumped on his battered black Raleigh and rode off into the afternoon, I assumed he was going to fetch help, but it turned out he was merely leaving to avoid getting into trouble. I didn’t blame him: I might have done the same myself.

My childhood careened through days of roller skating, horse riding, tree climbing, kick-the-can, swimming, tennis, and the construction of forts, grass huts, tree houses, miniature stables, and show-jumping courses for the two family dachshunds. On winter days in my bedroom with rain beating against the windows, time slowed down as I recounted in red exercise books the adventures of my stuffed horse, Peter. While water gurgled in the gutters and the house froze, I wrapped myself in a blanket and transformed Peter from a stubborn colt into a world-class show jumper. Along the way, he encountered cruel masters like the villains in Black Beauty and tender girls who recognized his innate brilliance and restored him to health. Cheap blue biro ink smudged the pages and stained my fingers as I scribbled at breakneck speed, but I kept going until I‘d filled four notebooks and Peter achieved a utopian retirement in a lush meadow.

The great thing about those hours with the red notebooks was that I didn’t have to be a girl. I didn’t have to be anything at all. There was genderlessness, as well as timelessness, to the act of writing.

Writing was the way I gradually acquired a sense of being a person, a separate individual, and I was very slow. I always wrote, but didn’t understand how important writing was to me until I was in my twenties. It was difficult to find myself in the culture; I tended to identify with the boys, though there were some good girl models in the Enid Blyton childrens’ adventure stories that I read. The first record I bought was ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ by The Platters. My taste ran to blighted love, probably because I sensed that I was a lesbian but couldn’t grasp it for a long time. I just felt all wrong as a woman, but didn’t know why, which was terribly sad.

Of course I write to fulfill an urge to write, and in that sense I do it for myself, but I don’t think of it that way while I’m writing. I think of it as speaking to the readers, who might be more or less anyone. I like it when unlikely readers appreciate my work or get some insight from it. Early on, I wrote feminist and lesbian poems aimed, I think, at the younger generation of women, in an attempt to encourage them to identify with feminist attitudes. But I moved away from that a long time ago, wanting to expand into a wider community of both readers and writers.

‘Poetry and Prejudice,’ an essay that is included in The Stories that Shape Us: Contemporary Women Write about The West, was rewarding in that it took a lot of work to dig honestly into the situation it recounts. I had to find, and take responsibility for, my own part in what happened to me then. It deals with an incident of homophobic prejudice I encountered in rural Oregon, and I’ve felt that reading it in public, especially in the geographic area in which it is set, has done a good job of bringing a new awareness to people who hadn’t previously thought about the issue. I rarely write to educate, and didn’t in this instance, but it is very gratifying when something does contribute to changing attitudes. I had feedback from literature teachers who used it in their classrooms and reported getting heated responses, although I never had to deal with anything too wild myself.

Essential tools for a writer: a deep and thorough understanding of the language in which you write including how a sentence works; a joy in stringing words together; a good ear for rhythm; a brazen honesty; an ability to shrug off rejection, and persistence.

Destructive: writing about real people who have hurt you before you are ready to step aside from the hurt and be the writer who shapes the story. Also, treating your life partner as if s/he were Alice B. Toklas.

Don’t do it for fame or fortune (most likely there won’t be any). Don’t do it because you fancy telling people at parties that you’re a writer. Do it only if you must and then learn from whomever you admire, in a classroom or in the pages of a book. Read constantly.

I don’t pray to the universe because I don’t believe in god, but I praise the universe and hope that my words contain shadows of that praise even when the world seems hostile.”

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Further Notes:

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Virginia Euwer Wolff is the distinguished author of six books for young readers.
Her books have won the National Book Award, the Michael L. Printz Honor, the Golden Kite Award, the International Reading Association Children’s Book Award, the Jane Addams Book Award, the PEN-West Book Award,  the 2011 Phoenix Award (Children’s Literature Association) for THE MOZART SEASON, and the 2011 NSK Neustadt Award from World Literature Today/University of Oklahoma, and the Oregon Book Award, among many other honors.
Critics have called Make Lemonade and True Believer, the previous two books in this trilogy, “triumphant” (School Library Journal), “transcendent” (ALA Booklist), and “groundbreaking” (Publishers Weekly).
Visit Virginia at her website: http://www.virginiaeuwerwolff.com or visit her page on the Combustus Bookstore.

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Judith Barrington is a poet and memoirist who has published three collections of poetry, a prize-winning memoir, and a text on writing literary memoir which is used all across the United States and in Australia and Europe. Her most recent poetry is collected in two new chapbooks, Postcard From the Bottom of the Sea and Lost Lands. Her most recent full length book is Horses and the Human Soul about which reviewer Barbara Drake, writing in Calyx, said: “These stunning poems find moral high ground in the world of nature and animals without falsifying that world.”

Her memoir, Lifesaving, won the Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. She is well known as a writer and much sought-after as a teacher. She is a faculty member of the low-residency program at the University of Alaska at Anchorage. She offers workshops at many conferences and writing events in the U.S. as well as in England and Spain.

In 2009, the Oregon State Library selected Horses and the Human Soul for “150 Books for the Sesquicentennial” (from among books by Oregon writers, 1836 – 2009)

Judith grew up in England and moved to the United States in 1976. She has lived in Portland, Oregon since then, returning to Europe to give readings and workshops every year. Visit Judith Barrington’s page on the Combustus Bookstore.

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Andreas Friedl, photographer; Thal, Austria:

http://andreasfriedl.tumblr.com/

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Pierre Gable, photographer; Provence-Alpes-Cote D’Aeur, France:

http://pierre-gable.fr/

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Mikael Raymond, photographer; Gnesta, Sweden:

http://www.mikaelraymond.com

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Denis Olivier, photographer; Bordeaux, France:

www.denisolivier.com

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Kevin H. Hibshman, poet; United States:

Kevin’s new poetry chapbook, “Incessant Shining” is now available. Published by Propaganda Press.

http://alt-current.com/pp/pp_item.html#incessant_shining

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Raphael Perez, painter; Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel:

http://www.gaypaintings.com/

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Lynn Gravatt, Nia dance instructor, artist; Portland, Oregon, USA:

www.divinedeflame.com

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