Workshop Blues

With my usual trepidation, I’m reading manuscripts, sharpening my perceptions, concocting exercises to prepare myself to lead another brief poetry writing workshop.  I’ve been a participant from time to time in the kind of leaderless, round robin cabal that often springs up when writers know each other, live close by and like to talk about both the age-old issues (like “who do you perceive as your audience?” and “why rhyme?”) and the immediate ones (like “wouldn’t an iambic verb carry the melody better here?” or “will this metaphor bear so much repetition?”).  The conversations usually helped me for a while, then sputtered out and began to seem like a task.  However, it’s been two decades since I was a participant.  Confession here: I’ve never actually been a student in the kind of semester-long for-credit college workshop (which might have saved me plenty of time), but I’ve taught some forty of those and been the leader of another thirty or so short-term, no-credit, for-the-art-of-it workshops.  What I’m headed for this weekend should be familiar territory.

Despite the fact that I’m a seasoned workshop leader, I’m always concerned that I’ll seem too ruthless, no matter how gently I try to break the news that a particular phrase is a cliche or that the whole sentimental content of a poem is bringing long-dead fish to the party.  There’s a delicate balance between being admirably honest and being harsh, and in a brief workshop, it’s hard to know how much criticism a particular participant can take.  Truth is, there’s a point for each of us when quantity trumps intent, and too much of even the most gentle criticism can begin to seem cruel.  What’s a body to do?  Seek the middle ground, straddle the fence, try to tell as much truth as the situation will bear.

My usual plan is to let the participants do the obvious work, while I walk behind, wiggling the switch, letting it crack now and then, even giving myself a touch or two.  It’s always a comfort to remember that this usually works; the stronger or more artful or more teacherly students will take to my mild guidance and do most of the talking, and when it’s time for me to sum up, I’m less the muleskinner than the mediator.  Of course, I can’t let my attention stray or fail to hear the nuances.  “Vigilance” is the watchword.  Sometimes someone will throw a live grenade into the action, and I have the job of getting the pin back in.

Happily, I have been supplied in advance with poems by the participants, and I’ve had time to peruse them, and as I did, I began to remember so many of the ingredients of the witches’ broth that makes a poem.  My rememberer rouses, and I start thinking, “I know how to do this.”

But it’s not a foolproof plan.  Three times my taking the backseat hasn’t really worked, and in all three cases the workshops were not as productive or provocative as I’d hoped for.  In one small workshop, the more skillful and erudite students simply tuned out when we came to the work of the weaker students.  Even when I called on them by name, they had little to offer.  Most of them had been in workshops together before, and the better students were simply tired of repeating basic advice.  So the buck stopped with me.  In another case, some of the students thought my comments were too demanding, so they became more a support network than a critical community.  They came to like everything their peers wrote.  I like to see a balance between these two, but I really don’t like to be the sole provocateur: it can result in an adversarial dynamic.  Two of the students in that second group made it a point to tell me that this workshop was usually taught by X, who was much more encouraging and thought the poems before the group were generally very good.  (If you notice that all this sounds generic — no descriptions of site, no atmospherics or humorous asides — it’s because I don’t want to punish any cats by letting them out of the bag.  I’ve tried to put most of the details behind me.)

Those two are far in the past, but about half a dozen years ago I went to a private retreat and directed a small workshop whose four core members (in a class of 7) had been in previous workshops together and were pals.  One of them was often paid to be the teacher, but in this case she had enrolled as a student because, as she said, she “respected my work so much.”  By the second day, that respect had turned to scorn.  This usual mentor for the group was certain that I was not only prejudiced against the content of her work but that I was part of a conspiracy to deny publication to the writers of the area they all hailed from.  When she wasn’t scolding, she was sulking, especially when I admired the work of other members.  When I praised hers, she still didn’t seem satisfied.  The great misfortune was that most of the other members were afraid of Ms. X, who’d been published a bit in the region, was clearly aggressive and would surely be their teacher again, probably soon.  Another, who didn’t seem to be afraid, told me she was embarrassed for Ms. X and felt sorry for her.  I remember we did a lot of exercises in the second half of the workshop, and I left feeling I could not claim success on this occasion.

But why am I telling you this?  I have some time to plot and design, learn and scribble, and I should get to it, make my notes, muster my resources, steel my nerves and still my soul.  After all, “Whose woods these are, I think I know,” as I like to begin a workshop, and I’m now confidently remembering how that poem can lay a foundation almost no one can crack.

However, if anyone out there is listening amid this dog days’ haze of a week, let me know what workshop tactics or approaches have proved to be the most or least valuable to you.  It’s not to late for me to alter my course, though the destination remains the same.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

John Ehle’s The Winter People

I was recently re-reading John Ehle’s The Winter People, one of the novels I regrettably had to omit from my “Appalachian Literature: Idea and Identity” syllabus.  It just missed the cut, and my memories of it (from about a decade ago) were fond.  I also watched the film version in which a young Kurt Russell plays the clockmaker Wayland Jackson and Kelly McGillis portrays Collie Wright, the woman at the center of the book’s pivotal conflicts.  The two versions vary greatly, and in matters of character development, I mostly preferred the novel, while in matters of sheer plottery, I favored the movie.  Probably that’s as it should be, a good screen writer can make a virtue of the necessity of thrift — trimming, melding and telescoping — but a good novelist (and Ehle is that) can reveal both the clarities and ambiguities of a personality.

What I would praise in both versions is the artists’ reluctance to portray the highland folk as backward or simple.  The narrator of Poe’s “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” set in the hill country of western Virginia, says, “I remembered, too, strange stories told about these Ragged Hills, and of the uncouth and fierce races of men who tenanted their groves and caverns.”  Of course, Poe’s narrator also claims to have seen a hyena in those environs, but he was expressing the view of Appalachians that has long outlived any excuse we have for maintaining it.  Ehle certainly offers a picture of the fierce class, in this novel represented by the Campbells, who seem about as far from urbane as anyone who builds chimneys, reads scripture and hunts with firearms might be, but even among their number there are those who aspire to more than woodcrafting and roughhousing.  The Wrights constitute the other side of the spectrum, with overlap, of course.  They are presented as storekeepers, blacksmiths, led by a deeply reflective patriarch with a keen sense of the ambiguities involved where ethics are concerned.  Into the delicate truce between these two clans stumbles the widowed clockmaker, who soon falls for an unmarried Wright with an infant.  I should stop summarizing here, as mysteries which will hover for a hundred pages follow in close order.

It’s common practice to imagine mountain people, “winter people,” as lacking initiative, resistant to change, disinclined to consider or deliberate.  John Ehle is a writer dedicated to revealing Appalachians in their deliberateness, their attentiveness (which anyone who can follow a trail must have) to nuance and shading.  As in his other works  The Journey of August King and The Widow’s Trial, Ehle concentrates much of his own attention on the conversations and considerations of the characters, but he does it as much with their speech and actions as with their thoughts, so his stories never stall, even in the prolonged trials or family councils he recounts.  And when he narrates the process of a wild mountain bear hunt, he has a cinematic eye and the right word hoard to rivet even a woods-dumb reader (And the good sense to borrow some bits from Horace Kephart).

Another of Ehle’s convictions appears to be that people don’t come as Good or Bad, but as mixed.  We’re like metamorphic rock in that respect, and what we perceive will depend on how we turn a piece and where the light strikes it.  He keeps showing facet after facet, layer after layer, until he reminds us that, in the matter of 3-D language, can compete with film.  The flaw that runs through the movie is Wayland’s consistent (though not rigid) generosity and courage; he’s too much the steady pendulum that keeps the clock, the story, on time and on track.  The novel is more rewarding for revealing his shadow side, but his rendering in the film is not enough awry to spoil its suspense or authenticity.

Granted, both Ehle and screenwriter Carol Sobieski (Fried Green Tomatoes) make some compromises to assist the audience, but for a story that combines romance, violence and suspense against a backdrop of dangerously beautiful mountains (filmed in Anson County, N.C.) and hard-wrought existence, The Winter People ranks high on my list.  Its complications and refusals to take the easy path make it not just a drama but a genuine tragedy.  The film is available from Netflix and the paperback version (hardback was from Harper & Row, 1982) of the book from Down Home Press.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

My Favorite Word

Why isn’t contemporary English good enough for me?  As I run through the glossary of terms which crop up often in my writing, no particular word gives off a luster that sparks my heart more than my mind, though owl  and the old Appalachian term ruddock come close.  Something birdy in all that, but the word that does summon me back again and again, I can seldom get away with using.  It’s an Old English word we can’t even spell — matholode — but the “th” is more accurately represented by an obsolete letter called thorn.  Maybe my computer can make it, but not with me at the controls.  Imagine a backwards “6” with the loop smaller and a horizontal slash about where a “t” would have one.  It’s a voiced dental fricative approximating the “th” sound in “thief.”

I love the four-syllable sound of it.  I believe I was taught that the stronger stress is on the initial syllable, the secondary accent on the third — ma‘ tho lo da, the “a”s and first “o” short, the other “o” long.  [Somebody correct me if I’ve misremembered.]

So what?  The word occurs in the opening line of the anonymously-authored OE poem “Widsith,” which recounts the professional life of a gleeman (or scop or bard), tells what stories he sang and to whom and to what affect.  It’s a beautiful piece, 142 lines ending in the claim that fame and glory don’t fade.  (OK, so it’s a bit over the top.)

What has possessed me for four decades, however, is the problem translating that “matholode.”  Most people just write “sang” and move on, but Tom McGowen suggested to me those eons back that the word implied “sang,” “chanted,” “breathed” all together, and it has since seemed to me the ideal mode that poets should aim for, especially when they perform a poem they’ve toiled over.  Frost could do it, Heaney, Roethke, Carolyn Kizer, Merwin, Ann Deagon.  So many can’t, straining for it and overshooting or not even trying, too cool to care.  When I read a poem in the arena of my imagination, I want to make that chant-song sound, but nothing falsely portentous, more a homespun ceremony.  And it has something of “told” in it too, of story.  “Matholode” — maybe an owl’s call, maybe a ghost or the core of the self.

Why not raise the bar, knock yourself ou? I ask, fail better each time?  I do love that word.

Here’s a girl with the kind of harp Widsith would likely have strummed.  I hope she knows the poem.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.