Tuesday evening

Participant reading

The first participant reading was interesting. There was a powerful piece about cormorants and a kid who can see auras and a hilarious one about octopi and bottle openers. There was some stunning fiction, and even a good poem or two—as I’ve said, I tend to zone out around poetry. When I did my reading, you could hear a pin drop. People came up to me afterwards and told me it was really good—multiple participants, some I’d never met, as well as Patricia and Liz. Patricia and Liz! Published authors with enough experience to be our teachers! Liz, a published poet! And one girl who came up and told me her story, and made me really grok that I have had it good. I wrote her a poem, the first I’ve written for a person that wasn’t a love poem. But, wow. To know that people who aren’t my peers think I have talent—what a rush. I have straight up no idea what the guy after me read, but I think I can be forgiven for that.

Ana Maria’s lecture

            Ana Maria talked about the bigger picture, historically/culturally speaking. Look at the surrounding events, big and small. Read books, for starters. Read those big fat books. Look at old newspapers—all of them. She talked about how she couldn’t find anything about her father, but it turned out that she was looking in the white newspapers, and in the days of segregation, there was a separate black newspaper. Go to special collections, look at microfiches, visit historical societies, find people who lived through it, if possible.

            “Tip number two: Make it accessible, keep it plain, and don’t dumb it down.” ~?

            (I missed tip #1 in typing.) She described a book about a young black girl who died of cervical cancer, and whose cells were used in cancer research for years—without the permission of the girl or her family. The author tracked down the family to find out what they thought about it. She read a passage where the author describes the different types of cervical cancers, being careful to make it both precise and easy for a layperson to understand.

            “Tip number 3: Avoid the information dump.”

            She read us a Wikipedia article about riots in Detroit, which included all sorts of extraneous information, such as the fact that Detroit is the only American city to have been occupied three times by federal officers, one such time by paratroopers of the 82^nd Airborne.

            Finally, she said, keep track of your sources! You never know when someone’s going to ask you how you knew that.

I think all of these points are very sensible. I don’t tend to write about historical/cultural surroundings, but I do write about subculture, queer subculture, and this will help me remember how to do it. I think I’m pretty good at not dropping information, less so at explaining things clearly. I’m also appreciative of the example with cervical cancer, since I’m always interested in medical stuff and will undoubtedly use it in a story someday (already have in fanfiction). I was struck by the mention of segregated newspapers. I can’t stand research, but I did a lot of it for this book and I’m not done yet, so who knows whether I’ll change my tune.