A Little of This. A Bit of That.

Here's an interesting essay in Slate magazine about taking ten years to write one novel.

Honoree Jeffers writes about the problems of contemporary black hip hop poetry in The Kenyon Review.

The winner of the Passion Project Contest on SheWrites will give an emerging writer all the tools she needs to put together a winning nonfiction book proposal.

The Idlewild Writers and Poets Conference will happen August 12-14 in Idlewild, Michigan. The focus of the conference is "the rich literary legacy associated with this historic African-American community known as one of the premier entertainment and performance venues during the 50s and early 60s."

An article in The Guardian chronicles how abandoned property in Detroit is being converted into farmland. I've been hearing stories about an increase in wildlife in once strictly urban areas. A friend who grew up in Southfield, Michigan with me says that her parents have a family of deer that visit their backyard regularly.

Why I Learned More About Writing Novels from The Wire than I did in my MFA Program

The Wire, HBO’s now-defunct drama series that ran from 2002-2008, is everything that you’ve heard and more. Believe the hype. There have been countless pieces written on how great the show is and for a long time I listened to the praise and thought “Yeah yeah, I’m not into cop shows,” but it became hard to ignore the glowing recommendations of the series by people whose opinion I valued. Several talented writers kept saying, “It’s one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.”

So this summer I rented the DVDs and I watched. "Watched" is probably not the right word. Paul and I were addicted, shuttling the kids off to bed each night so that we could stay up past our reasonable bedtime to watch episode after episode. Paul was more hardcore than me, he could watch 3 episodes back-to-back without fading. I usually had to stumble to bed and then catch up to him later by watching the rest of the episode the next day.

The characters are always complicated like people are in real life. They struggle with good and bad impulses, they have conflicting motivations. The actors aren’t your standard Hollywood actors with symmetrical, flawless features. They have scars, filmy eyes, missing teeth and these details make them much more interesting to watch.

The plot lines are deftly woven throughout the series. A seed is planted in Season One that may not blossom until Season Two or Three but by the time it does, you can look back on all the hard work the writers put into developing that particular story. I never felt like “Why did he do that?” or “That’s not believable” (well I did, but only once with a minor character, Brother Muzone, who seemed more like caricature.)

Best of all, The Wire confirmed the importance of examining social issues in creative writing, something that I felt was missing from my MFA program. Often in workshops we focused on the insular world of a story without considering or discussing the larger context of the story. I remember work-shopped story that featured a character engaged in homophobic conversations through scribblings on a bathroom wall. For a long time we talked about the veracity of the scribblings and the character’s motivation without discussing homophobia, public restrooms as sexual meeting places, the low-tech nature of this type of communication, etc. It felt like craft was being examined in a vacuum and sometimes, as a result, our stories weren’t rooted in any familiar social context. Often I felt like I learned more about writing from teaching composition courses at the university. At least those writing courses accepted that we can’t separate language from its environment.

The Wire’s language (it has multiple storylines and numerous characters) is a reflection of our complex, multi-tasking society and how we engage with industries and institutions. Although the setting is Baltimore, it is every urban metropolis in the age of our industrial decline. The Wire portrays a world that many of us grew up in.

Workshops and Readings

"Writing Across Cultures": Fifteen Cave Canem alum read on Friday, May 1 at 6 p.m. at Adelphi University Manhattan Center in New York.

"All That's Gone: A Katrina Elegy" - a presentation of poems and photographs responding to Hurricane Katrina followed by a discussion by artists and project participants who relocated from Louisiana to Arizona. Monday, May 4, 7-8:30 p.m. at Tempe Public Library in Arizona.

"Writing the Coming of Age Story": A workshop led by Tayari Jones at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown June 14-19. Scholarships are available.

Adam Bradley is reading from his book, "The Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop" at Changing Hands Book Store in Tempe, AZ on May 18th at 7 p.m.

Lucille Clifton Seminar

The Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA is hosting an intensive week-long seminar this summer on the poetry of Lucille Clifton. The seminar is for high school and college teachers interested in teaching African American Poetry.

There are scholarships and professional development credits for those who participate. I often hear from high school English instructors that they wish they could teach poetry to their students. This seminar is a great way to study the work of a renowned American poet and leave with lesson plans you cn use in the classroom.

For more information go here.