Show Notes:

Aspiring novelist and screenwriter Ben Hess spent time at the April 2015 Writing By Writers Boulder Generative Workshop and gained insights on the origin of stories, on getting going using Pam Houston’s glimmer technique. The words of wisdom came from award winning writers and teachers Pam, Gary Ferguson, and Alan Heathcock.

Links:

Writing By Writers - http://writingxwriters.org
Pam Houston - http://pamhouston.net
Alan Heathcock - http://alanheathcock.com
Gary Ferguson - http://wildwords.net
Produced & Hosted By: @BenHess - http://twitter.com/benhess

Ben Hess

Welcome to the premiere episode of Story Geometry. As an aspiring novelist and screenwriter, my goal with this podcast is to glean insights on the craft and community of writing from leading professional, published writers of our day. My hunch is that their words of wisdom will help you too, wherever you are in your writing career. I’m your host, Ben Hess, and today’s theme is Origins.

I’m beyond thrilled to partner with the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers throughout all of this Season One. Their workshops and writing adventures are fantastic and not to be missed - visit writing x writers dot org for all the details and reserve your spot today.

Pam Houston

I … I like writing, I mean I hate/love writing is really what I mean to say and I came down on like which is not at all true.

Writing by Writers Co-Founder, award winning writer and teacher Pam Houston.

I hate slash love writing and it – I don’t know how to be in the world without that way to process the world, I’ve been doing it since before I can remember and I’m proud of the books I have written.

Pam’s the author of the linked short story collections Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat and novels Sight Hound and Contents May Have Shifted. If you haven’t read any of her work yet, pause my voice, record a voice memo reminder, jot a note on the back of that receipt in your pocket, or add her to your Goodreads list … Got it? All set?

I also hate slash love writing, as there’s just no way around it; writing’s a solitary sport. Hours and hours and HOURS of sculpting, molding, shaping, wrestling language into plot, dialogue, exposition, and description all to create the most powerful, impactful story you can. And typically without pay. This is the craft, the struggle we’re going to explore throughout this series, under the assumption that those hours of work are distributed over several days or weeks or months due to other responsibilities, other commitments, including travel.

I spent a decade going to Bhutan and Tibet and lots of places in Asia, and so this like that’s been really important to the writing, it’s also been really important to my understanding of the world and the planet.

Pam’s Contents May Have Shifted is a very personal novel featuring 144 vignettes capturing the wildly chaotic stress, joy, and challenges of travel to such places as Bhutan, Newfoundland, Patagonia, Tibet, Tunisia, and Iceland. We chatted in her Davis, California living room surrounded by over 200 pounds of canine love; Pam’s two Irish Wolfhounds Livie and William.

So with all this travel, adventure, stewardship of craft, how does a girl from New Jersey become such an explorer, such a writer?

Well, a lot - if you were from New Jersey you would know that that’s what people from New Jersey do. They try to leave. You know my parents weren’t great travellers. My parents often get a hard time in my telling about them but one thing I can say for them that was unequivocally positive is they were travellers, they didn’t travel far because they didn’t imagine travelling far but honestly like every time we had $10 or 10 minutes we were in the car usually driving south down the 95, you know, toward a beach and they – my dad loved travelling, after my mother died my dad lived for about another 15 years and he did a lot of travelling, he went to Italy and you know places he had only dreamed about but we were roadtrippers, we were all about new destinations and we were as happy as we ever were as a family travelling.

I also grew up road-tripping with my parents during summers, over Thanksgiving, and the December holiday season. Which is where, as only child, I read, And read. This was, of course, pre-internet. Pre-Walkman even. Though I do remember rocking out to a large ghetto blaster cassette tape deck - yes we actually called them ghetto blasters - I’d be sprawled out in the backseat reading, letting the power of story take me away from the oppressive southern humidity. As the miles and hours slid by, I’d imagine myself solving mysteries with Frank and Joe Hardy or The Three Investigators or Encyclopedia Brown.

It’s so much the shape of my life, like, all these trips and all these explorations into the other, you know, for a while that was the West you know because I grew up in the East and the other was the West and I couldn’t have been more smitten and engaged and excited about the otherness of the West and then when I sort of became a Westerner the other became Alaska and then after that it kind of became Asia, because that was really other in all kinds of new ways.

Through this travel, Pam framed a method to capture these amazing experiences into her writing which she often teaches in her workshops. Here she is presenting to me and 40 other aspiring writers at the rustic Colorado Chautauqua Lodge in Boulder.

My work is deeply engaged with what I call the physical world. Sometimes that’s the outdoors - often it but not always - but for me all writing begins in the physical world. It, it … I don’t sit around like some writers do and imagine worlds in my head or imagine problems. Stories never come to me as a what if. There’s never a what if in my mind. Um, the way I get my stories is … that … is is is by noticing. Is by noticing things that actually take place, things that actually happen out in the physical world. So I always think that my first job as a writer is to pay very strict attention. And writing down what I call glimmers.

Which are moments. Scenes. Lines of dialogue. Images. Uh, mini-stories. And, and I really just collect. I collect them. And I don’t … I try not to think about which ones go together or what they or how they’re going to work. Um I just keep a collection of them and then there reaches a kind of critical mass, and it’s time to start a story. Or start an essay. Or not. Or they just stay in a folder called Glimmers in my computer. So I have all these glimmers and and I I honestly don’t worry too much about are they getting used or are they not getting used or am I going to remember. I mean that’s what the computer’s for … to be our memory. And and then when it’s time to write something like instead of sitting down and trying to write a first sentence, I just go into the files and start looking at the glimmers.

Many of us don’t have these incredible global experiences to pull from, but even then, our own neighborhoods, our own hometowns can give us a start.

Alan Heathcock

My parents and all of my family besides my particular family are from small towns, small Mid-Western towns …

Award winning fiction writer and teacher, Alan Heathcock.

… and I spent a significant amount of time in small towns. I started off as a writer writing about the South side of Chicago where I’m from, Hazel Crest.

Alan and I talked about his collection of short stories, VOLT, outside on a chilly morning at the Chautauqua. VOLT was a “Best Book” selection from numerous newspapers and magazines, including GQ, Publishers Weekly, and Salon, and was named as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, as well as a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize.

And the very first workshop, I workshop a story someone told me, man why are you writing about this stuff, you should write about something you know about and because I’m a Caucasian man, they are like you don’t know about this place. I found I was able to write a story that would speak to kind of a homogeneity of what small towns in America look like, like I would not – I could write it in a way that it would not have to be regional when I have this town Krafton, and I never say where it is…

No, right, you don’t.

…and that’s very much intentional because I’m not really interested in writing about place, meaning…

A specific place.

…like Indiana versus Ohio versus Iowa, versus Louisiana.

Right, right.

Matter of fact, one of the first stories I published, I had said in the story that it was from Indiana, and I remember getting hate mail from Indiana. I’m like, wait a second … [BEN: Lesson Learned.] …I just need to put it somewhere, and I’m like, I’m not even trying to say anything about Indiana. So I started writing about just Krafton, and pulling it out ...

This reminds me of Stephen King’s Castle Rock, Kurt Vonnegut’s Illium, or my beloved Bayport, hometown of The Hardy Boys.

… and it allowed me to make a commentary about maybe America, but certainly just the human interaction which is the thing that I’m most interested in. Now that I find there is a common thread, and I know this now that I’ve travelled all around the country, have travelled the 49 out of 50 states with the book, and everywhere I go there are people who say, you know, this story is in this place and they try to guess where it’s at, and I had someone who was on Martha’s Vineyard saying hey, you took some stuff here, didn’t you? [BEN: LAUGHTER] And I found it fascinating to know all parts of the country that people have claimed it, and if you read reviews of the book too they are trying to claim it for different, because I live in Idaho it’s a Western town, because I grew up in the Mid-West, it’s Mid-Western, because it has some temperament of southern literature that it’s southern, so I like that. I like that.

Clearly, if our story’s primary location is relatable and identifiable, like Krafton, we’re well on our way to seducing the reader, to drawing them in.

Writer, speaker, and naturalist Gary Ferguson also paints location with lush description. His latest book The Carry Home: Lessons from the American Wilderness is a lyrical, powerful memoir.

Gary Ferguson

The Carry Home is sort of a double entendre, I carried Jane’s ashes literally home in our old ’79 Chevy Van … but the Carry term also refers to the portaging that’s done around un-runnable places for canoers, which was appropriate to this book as well since she died in a canoeing accident. The Carry Home was my title, one of only probably out of 23 books that have – that’s actually made it to the jacket, so I’m very proud of that. …. Lessons from the American Wilderness was a suggestion the editor made and yes, I have to agree, it’s appropriate because a lot of what I’ve learned how to draw out beauty, community, mystery have come to me in the times I’ve been in the wilderness.

As titles are quite important and we often labor over them let me stop Gary there for a brief aside about our name, Story Geometry. It originated late at night over a California pinot with Pam and and Writing By Writers Co-Founder Karen Nelson. As we talked, I was reminded of this:

I … I love geometry; as a kid it was the, sort of the last math that I loved, when I went on my English bent after that, and for me stories are really physical things, you know, they have a shape, they have a depth, they are really 3D in my mind when I’m writing them.

Unlike Pam, I didn’t get along with geometry all that well.

I think of geometric figures in relation to the story to help me understand the story structure. Sometimes the structures are more complicated; and sometimes it’s quite simple like I think about stories as like two intersecting triangles or a rhombus or um, uh, a parallelogram. I think of geometric figures in relation to the story to help me understand the story structure. Sometimes the structures are more complicated; [INT page 13] and sometimes it’s quite simple like I think about stories as like two intersecting triangles or a rhombus or um, uh, a parallelogram. I don’t ever think about plot. I don’t even really ever think about characters until many revisions down the road, you know, I’m thinking about form, I’m thinking about what is the shape of the story, if this story were a sculpture what would it look like, what would its geometry be.

Thus, this series just had to be called Story Geometry. Not a title I would’ve ever considered on my own, which is another testament to the power of community. Speaking of - to help prompt consistency of my own sputtering fiction and scripts - I joined a virtual community of writers I met while producing this podcast at the Writing By Writers workshop in Boulder.

Despite the varied time zones, we’ve been damn diligent about meeting on Google Hangout and providing feedback on each other’s work. Thanks Meghan, Jenn, and Melissa … and um, I’m not going to submit next week. This podcast thing takes TIME !!

As Gary Ferguson and I continued our chat, several Writing By Writers students filed past.

I want to talk to you first of all about your boyhood, and in reading the book your boyhood seemed chaotic and full of escape to me, and I’m wondering what you read as a boy during that time, if you remember what you were reading back then?

I actually do. I went down to the River Park branch library about seven blocks from my house on Mississauga Avenue, and went into those old dusty, musty stacks and first pulled out I’d say a number of Sigurd Olson books, the writer and conservationist from Wisconsin, who went on all these great canoe adventures. From there I went into other writers, men and women, from the Northwoods; eventually as I got a little older high school, freshman and high school, I discovered John Steinbeck and the ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, and the power of landscape in story.

I also escaped into stories throughout boyhood, not just on road trips. Primarily fiction. And I remember some Multiple Sclerosis Read-a-Thon summer contest sponsored by my local library. I asked family members to sign up and donate a certain amount per book read. Much to the dismay of my supporters, I read over 70 books that summer.

And so, yeah, there was a lot of escape, there were some tough circumstances that I grew up in with my mom and climbing trees and going out into the nature was a great relief that allowed me to sort of feel like I was a part of something that wasn’t judging me, there was great peace and calm that came from it and it went from there.

I am curious you wrote about your mom’s [death] – and caring for her at the end, and despite all the pain that she had caused [you] as a boy I just wonder how you came to a place where you could be there for her?

That’s a great question. I don’t know, that was probably an act of grace. I came to understand my mom’s own circumstances when she was young, having been orphaned when she was 13 and I think probably had some abuse issues that she was wrestling with, at one point I discovered that she had – when her father died after her - and then her mother shortly after had been sort of put up for adoption and one of the uncles came in and took her brother after they had made a pact to stay together and never be separated, took her brother who was named Junior and looked right at my mom and said well we can’t use her, and so she was sort of in this limbo for quite a while until an aunt took her in, and so she had her own sense of pain and disruption and chaos and need for control and for some reason by understanding her own path I was able to sort of forgive her at least to some degree what she unfortunately chose to lay on me.

In The Carry Home you mentioned beauty, community and mystery as the three elements of story and I’m just wondering when did you hit on those, kind of those three core pieces of storytelling? Was that something from decades ago or was that kind of more recent discovery or how would you define the breakdown?

Well, back in the late 1980s I was doing a book called Spirits of the Wild which required me to shift through probably 1,500, 1,600 stories from every continent on the planet about how different aspects of nature came to be, fanciful tales, but as I was reviewing those, those many, many, many tales after several hundred it dawned on me that these storytellers, some of them from a couple of thousand years ago were repeatedly suggesting that if we as humans want to live well in the world, we had to keep a relationship with three qualities, and they were those, beauty, community and mystery. And likewise that the problems that humans have, the stuckness that we sometimes get into is probably due to us having lost our relationship, especially when it came to grief and tragedy and moving through difficult periods in our lives.

fiction versus non-fiction versus memoir, and do you ever see yourself writing fiction or do you read fiction?

I read fiction all the time. I dabble a little bit in it but I’ve never gotten serious enough to try to – to approach it. Like Pam, I tend to draw the fodder for my creations from actual experience. I’m not necessarily wired in a way that makes it easy for me to just imagine entire worlds as fiction writers must do, based on their own lives and experience, of course, but nonetheless I like to go out, have great encounters with people, of all backgrounds, all sorts of people, and then from those, you know, build my framework for my stories. So I think I’ll always be inclined to write creative non-fiction.

What advice would you give those of us not yet published or just starting out?

For those people who are writing, that the act of storytelling is one of the great services they can do for themselves, as well as for any anyone they run across and they share their stories with. [20:06] Story is how we make sense of the world, story is how we grow, story is how we share who we are with the rest of the world, and for those writers who are here and those writers who are out there plucking away on their lonesome – even if they only share their work with the family, they are still anchoring a great part of who they are and they are building relationship with the world and that’s really I think the task of life.

“Story is how we make sense of the world, story is how we grow, story is how we share who we are with the rest of the world.”

I can’t think of a better way to end today’s episode which was produced and edited by yours truly, Ben Hess. Our theme music is from composer and sound designer Mark Hodgkin and our logo was designed by myself and Thatcher Warrick Hess with help from fiverr.

Special thanks to Pam Houston & Karen Nelson of Writing by Writers and all the attendees of the April 2015 Workshop in glorious Boulder, Colorado; Reminder: explore the amazing events and workshops coming up on writing x writers dot org.

And warm thank yous to both Gary Ferguson and Alan Heathcock for sitting down and sharing more about their work and process.

Story Geometry is indeed BRAND NEW and we need your button pushes! The shares, the likes, the tags, the emails, the - ahem, 5 star iTunes ratings would be lovely. Everything is greatly appreciated as we get this show out into the world. Visit Facebook dot com slash Story Geometry, drop a verse of doggerel to hello AT story geometry dot org, and if so inclined I’m @BenHess on Twitter and we’re using the hashtag #StoryGeo so you can tag us that way to promote the show.

You won’t want to miss our next episode about The Writing & Teaching Life featuring more insights from Pam, Gary, and Alan and be on the lookout for future words of storytelling wisdom from New York Times bestselling author Tom Barbash, GrubStreet National Book Prize winner Josh Weil, National Book Award Winner Mark Doty, National Book Award finalist Dorothy Allison, and writer, teacher, and self proclaimed “very good swimmer” Lydia Yuknavitch, among several others.

And a closing extra-special Premiere Episode thanks for the audio production support and advice these past months to: David Boyer, Fred Drews, Whitney Henry-Lester, Edel Howlin, Trey Kay, Cristina Maldanado, Roman Mars, Stjohn McKay, Carl Olson, Walter Petrichyn, Matthew Price, Phil Turner, Benjamen Walker, Helen Zaltzman, Sue Zizza, and I’m sure there are several other wonderful, new audio friends I’ve left out. Thank you, thank you! Until next time, may your fingers dance across the keyboard as you discover the arc and circumference of YOUR story.

the Transcript