Writing Full Tilt

Critique: borrowed from French, borrowed from Latin critica, borrowed from Greek kritiké: discerning, capable of judging. What does it mean to be capable of judging the art of writing?

In college I was given an assignment to choose a writer I did not like and write a critique of a poem, essay, or short story. I chose the English poet and satirist Alexander Pope. I dislike him primarily for his misogyny. As I studied his writing, however, I saw his craft. We have him to thank for Fools rush in where angels fear to tread; To err is human, to forgive divine, and Hope springs eternal. I despise his opinions but admire his genius with language.

A friend of mine wallpapered her living room with patterned paper. It wouldn’t have mattered if she had used plain white, the result would have been just as disastrous. Everyone who came into the room immediately saw the flaws, how the pattern didn’t match up, the bubbles at the edges, the slightly askew alignment of the strips. Everyone and anyone could identify what was wrong with the job. It did not take an expert to see what was wrong. I once worked for a professional painter and wallpaper hanger, mostly cleaning brushes and doing prep work. I watched the careful application of glue then “booking” a strip of paper by folding the ends in to meet the middle and letting it rest before beginning to hang the strip. And I learned that hanging patterned wallpaper doesn’t start at the corner. I watched an expert paper around the windows and doorways with diagonal cuts and work away from the light.

What does wall paper have to do with Alexander Pope? The art of critiquing is not to find all the ‘errors.’ It is to notice what is going on, both what is successful and what is not successful. From both my experiences of examining Pope’s work and watching a master wallpaper hanger, I learned that almost anyone can find mistakes. It doesn’t take a lot of skill to notice when something is out of whack. But it does take skill to recognize when something contains precision, balance, lyricism, exacting care, and achieves a masterful effect. We call a well wallpapered room seamless because the seams are invisible except to those who know the craft. We call a powerful poem timeless because we are still quoting it today. A useful critique is based on knowing the craft and then knowing how to deliver that knowledge so it can be used, not to claim authority over someone else’s work, but to share knowledge so the writer as artist can add to their repertoire of skills. A good critique ends with every writer inspired by what can happen next.

Join Me For Five Days Of Writing!

February Writing Retreat in Malibu! Two spaces available: February 12 – 16, 2024. The hills overlooking Malibu Bay are the perfect setting for a writing getaway. Bring your already-started or your not-yet-begun writing ideas! All writers are welcome, no matter the genre, no matter the level of experience. For more information: maureen@maureenbjones.com https://www.writingfulltilt.com/retreats/

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Twenty-eight years ago Elie Wiesel and Maya Angelou had a conversation that focused on what the Black and Jewish communities hold in common, especially regarding racism, hate, and oppression. This exchange of ideas took place in a stadium of 10,500 people at the University of Massachusetts. Deep into the conversation Maya Angelou stood and looked out and up into the audience. Turning and pointing, she said: You have been paid for. Each of you, Black, White, Brown, Yellow, Red—whatever pigment you use to describe yourselves—has been paid for. But for the sacrifices made by some of your ancestors, you would not be here; they have paid for you. So, when you enter a challenging situation, bring them on the stage with you; let their distant voices add timbre and strength to your words. For it is your job to pay for those who are yet to come.

I was far up and way back in that stadium, but I felt her voice, her eyes, her words speaking straight to me, and I’m quite sure every other person in that arena knew she was speaking directly to them too. It gave me chills and still does. In this season of remembering those who came before us, Maya Angelou’s words speak to us writers who have the gift of giving voice to the ancestors and letting them add timbre and strength to our words. The ancestors before us paid our tickets, creating a series of chapters that link together in strange and nearly forgotten ways.

Lena is a name I heard only when I was an adult. She was my great grandfather’s second wife. They were married after all my great grandfather’s children were born in his first marriage to Winifred Hart. When I asked for Lena’s original last name, everyone spoke fondly of her, but no one remembered her last name. Yesterday, through the magic of digitized records, I learned that she was Lena Caselbaum, born 1878 in Poland and arriving in New York City in 1887 at nine years old. These are facts. But her story is more than this. What I do know is that Lena was a Practical Nurse, and she was the first person to hold my father. She helped my grandmother deliver him on a kitchen table in Flatbush. Lena Jones, nee Caselbaum, is very much a part of my story. Her hands shaped the future; she did her part to pay my way here. 

As writers we have the gift of remembering and imagining the people who came before us, who worked with their hands, or studied hard, or fought fiercely to be heard, or quietly helped the person next to them. Each made it more likely that we would arrive to stand where we do. This Solstice I am looking up at the stars and claiming Lena Caselbaum Jones as one of my great grandmothers. 

Events

Listen in to an Interview with Sharon Israel on Planet Poet-Words in Space podcast. Poetry reading from my book, blessed are the menial chores and from the novel, Maud & Addie. Plus a conversation about Amherst Writers & Artists with both Sharon Israel and Pamela Manché Pierce. Click here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/maureen-buchanan-jones-writing-at-full-tilt/id1528029902?i=1000638704231

February Writing Retreat in Malibu The hills overlooking Malibu Bay are the perfect setting for a writing getaway in February. Bring your already-started or your not-yet-begun writing ideas! All writers are welcome, no matter the genre, no matter the level of experience. For more information: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/retreats/

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The poet William Carlos Williams said, “No idea but in things.” He then gave us the red wheelbarrow upon which so much depends. What was he telling us? This is one of those enigmatic statements that creates mystery around the idea of craft. What does the red wheelbarrow mean?!

I inherited three of my mother’s hooked rugs. To say she made them doesn’t do justice to the labor and artistry she employed. She cut lengths of cream wool fabric then dipped them into boiling pots on the stove one after another for varied amounts of time. The result was a multi-dimensional, dappled array of hues and tints of one color. These pieces were cut into strips with a device she clamped to the edge of the kitchen table. With the strips sorted by color, she hooked them into a canvas, creating flowers and leaves that fooled the eye with lush veracity. The three rugs I brought home after she died graced my wooden floors for a few years until a vicious infestation of moths decimated the fibers. I did my best to rescue what remained, freezing, thawing, refreezing to kill the moths. I set the protected rugs on my back patio through two deep winters. I don’t have the heart to look at what is left.

The moths were a rage that swept through my mother’s artwork, a shocking violence that ate at my confidence to be a responsible caretaker, a familiar turmoil about shame and a presence that insisted I was guilty beyond what I could control. These emotions are also part of my mother’s legacy. Until I found one piece of untouched dyed wool that had never been sliced into strips. It remains the unformed intention and energy of my mother’s artistic genius. It holds my mother’s electric and inspired charge that I wanted to understand as a child and now feel when I write. This piece of fabric holds the conduit between our shared creativity. It expresses the unspoken conversations in which her emotions informed mine and both restricted my patterns and set my wild imagination free. In a season of remembering and honoring, William Carlos William’s words about ideas and things speak to an object’s ability to represent inchoate, undissected meaning. The object embodies metaphor’s direct arc to a flash of understanding. One rectangle of infused and saturated color is an idea beyond measure.

Upcoming Events

Malibu Writing Retreat! The hills overlooking Malibu Bay are the perfect setting for a writing getaway in February. Bring your already-started or your not-yet-begun writing ideas! All writers are welcome, no matter the genre, no matter the level of experience. For more information: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/retreats/

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One summer I took myself to see Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, starring a very young Shirley MacLaine. I bought my ticket in the lobby along with a package of Snow Caps and entered the theater. I gauged the exact center seat and sat down to in an otherwise empty theater with an unobstructed view of the screen. As the lights dimmed and images appeared, it was as if I could step directly into the story. Fifteen minutes passed, then a couple came down the aisle, edged sideways into the row just past mine, and stopped precisely in front of me.

My point of view had been altered. My intimate, one-on-one connection to the plot and characters was not only shared but impeded. I thought for a few moments, picked up my belongings and moved several rows back and several seats over. I now had a different point of view. Did this greatly alter my experience of The Trouble with Harry?

A character’s point of view is certainly about physical location in the theater of life. But it’s more about where and how and why their attention is focused based on how they make meaning out of circumstances and events. If I had chosen to stay where I was, I would have viewed the film from between the heads of two other people. By moving, I gave myself an altered but uninterrupted view. However, my experience now included the couple and my reaction to them. As the hero of my story, I was entertained, annoyed, surprised, and intrigued by the film and my fellow movie goers.

Although I remember the film quite well, what I mostly remember about that night was the couple arriving and sitting smack in front of me when they had every other seat to choose from. And now I am telling you my experience based on that altered focus. Point of View means what a character sees because those are their surroundings. But they also choose to see because what is happening around them has meaning to them. As I watched the movie, part of my mind was working on the question of why the couple sat right in front of me and whether I could have behaved differently. That movie, for me, will always be equated with that odd experience. Point of view is not simply naming who will tell the story, it’s allowing that voice to express overtly and implicitly its entire sensibility with all the nuances and contradictions any living being contains. The Trouble with Harry became, for me, the trouble with heads

Upcoming Events

Radio Interview with Sharon Israel on Planet Poet Words in Space. We will have a conversation about my poetry, Maud & Addie, and the AWA Workshop Method. Join us on November 21 at 1:00 p.m. EDT to listen live. Podcast replay available December 5th. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-poet-words-in-space/id1528029902

Malibu Writing Retreat! The hills overlooking Malibu Bay are the perfect setting for a writing getaway in February. Bring your already-started or your not-yet-begun writing ideas! All writers are welcome, no matter the genre, no matter the level of experience. For more information: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/retreats/

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The summer high school poets asked how to know where to break a poetic line. They examined and discussed the issues of complete thoughts; controlling rhythm; creating emphasis; the rules of prepositions, conjunction, and articles; and helping the reader to understand meaning. They looked to me and I nodded.

As a kid, when I pestered my father with questions, he answered, “Why is the end of Broadway?” I heard this question as poetry, and I took that question seriously. His question sent me on a search for profound meaning. Where does any road actually end? Why does it end? What does it mean when it ends? Are we left to our own devices as we wander off the pavement and into a wilderness of grass and woods, or open air? I knew there was deep philosophical understanding to be had if I could get near this very adult examination of life and the world. I was grateful my father had included me in this heady conversation. It was not until I was fully an adult that I realized he had not, in fact, asked me a question. He had simply stated: ‘Y is the end of Broadway.’ It was a joke to deflect my unending questions. A joke to help his patience with his talkative daughter.

Poetic line breaks are the end of Broadway. Why, Y, they end where they do is not arbitrary. But it is up to the poet. Where a line breaks adds the elements that the students discussed in each line in every poem. Line breaks are where the road ends or curves or drops down a hill or swiftly swings back into the track or flings us out into space. Line breaks, some could argue, are what makes poems, poems. They are the breaking wave against the shore of the white page. My father was onto something in his gentle humor, and he trusted that I would find my way, directing me to stand forever at the poetic crux of why.

Upcoming Events

One-Day Online Flash Fiction Workshop! Flash! Sudden! Quick! Nano! Whatever we call it, this genre gets right to the point. Join me on Saturday, October 14th 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. to create this snapshot genre. We will follow the AWA Method as we write, listen, and respond. Cost: $125 For information: maureen@maureenbjones.com

Malibu Writing Retreat! The hills overlooking Malibu Bay are the perfect setting for a writing getaway in February. Bring your already-started or your not-yet-begun writing ideas! All writers are welcome, no matter the genre, no matter the level of experience. For more information: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/retreats/

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It’s a premier summer day, my thoughts are bumping around in no particular direction. I stand at the edge of a pond hoping for inspiration but doing nothing to encourage it. A small dragonfly alights on my arm and stays. She stays, keeping me where I stand. I have been hijacked by a hitchhiker and I’m happy to be her ride. I find out later she is a chalk-fronted corporal, a pond lover with clear wings. She is exquisite and mesmerizing. I wonder if she’s stuck or maybe asleep. No, not asleep. She rubs her little face with her forelegs. Is she uncertain which direction to go? I peer closely and we stare at each other. She is taking a moment and enjoying the view from my arm.

Many writers talk about being ‘stuck.’ Some are in the middle of novels or memoirs. Some are at the beginning of a project, and some adhere to the spot of their last creative expression. Having experienced this ‘stasis’ myself, I have begun to wonder if we are actually stuck. Fear of going into the unknown is real. But isn’t there something to be said for sitting still rather than flitting about or bulldozing on?

Sometimes it’s right to stop charging forward and take in the 360º circumference of sky and universe. It’s good to stop struggling and accept that we don’t know what comes next. This release can turn to openness. And openness allows for new perspectives, characters, scenes, and subtexts. In these last days of summer find a place to lightly land, shed the purposeful striving. Let the soft random currents of playfulness loose. Don’t try. A small updraft will eventually appear. Float with it. The dragonfly stays for a long while. When she lifts off, angles her wings, and zips among the ripe cat tails at the edge of the pond my daydreaming is aloft.

Upcoming Events

One-Day Online Flash Fiction Workshop! Flash! Sudden! Quick! Nano! Whatever we call it, this genre gets right to the point. Join me on Saturday, October 14th 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. to create this snapshot genre. We will follow the AWA Method as we write, listen, and respond. Cost: $125 For information: maureen@maureenbjones.com

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I hate losing anything. I arrived in Jeannie’s town and got on the school bus. I was a Sophomore, and this was my fourth high school. Jeannie touched my arm as I walked down the center aisle with a pit in my stomach. “You can sit here,” she said. For one year we were inseparable. We have the photo booth pictures to prove it. And then I moved away again. Jeannie visited me, we wrote a bit, and then life swept us up and on. Four years ago I received an email requesting a copy of my poetry book. I wrote back and asked, “Is it you?” The buyer was Jeannie. This week Jeannie came to visit. We have not seen each other in fifty years. Jeannie found me twice. The first time I was lost because I was the shy new kid for the 12^th time. The second time because I had no idea anyone would want to find me.

What does this story have to do with writing, besides that it is, in itself, a good story to write? Everyone loses something. It happens to us and our characters all the time. And the most important thing we lose is people for all kinds of reasons. Every one is a story about who lost whom? Why did the losing happen? What kept the people from finding each other again? What happens if they do find each other? These are great questions for beginnings, middles, and ends of stories.

When Jeannie and I talked on the phone after our decades in separate orbits, we both admitted that we were afraid. We asked each other what our fears were about, and both of us said we didn’t want to disappoint the other. We wanted to be the kind of friend we were to each other fifty years ago. We were full of curiosity and courage. See? Another set of fantastic questions that have all the right ingredients: character development, plot, dialogue, setting, points of view, subtexts, and tension. There is losing with all its facets and there is finding with a parallel, but different set of dimensions. Everyone has lost and maybe found a story.

Upcoming Events

Online Weekly Workshops Beginning September 2023. I closely follow the AWA workshop method by treating all writing voices with respect and as equal artists in their writing explorations. A manuscript review is included but not mandatory in each workshop. Priority given to returning writers. All times are Eastern Time

Monday Evening: September 18 – November 6. Eight weeks, 6:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. $360.00. Tuesday Morning: September 19 – November 21. Ten weeks, 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. $500.00 Friday Morning: September 15 – November 17. Ten weeks, 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. $500.00

Flash Fiction: Online Writing Retreat: Saturday, October 14th 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. $125 How many words do we need to create a story? What does flash fiction do that a longer story doesn’t? We will write, experiment, share our work, and talk about this snapshot of a genre!

For information: maureen@maureenbjones.com

Publications

Maud & Addie “Sure to enchant, Maud & Addie is a touching novel complete with old skeletons, new friends, and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.” Vivian Turnbull, Foreword Reviews. To purchase: https://regalhousepublishing.com/product/maud-and-addie/

blessed are the menial chores “Should anyone ask what poetry is, hand them a copy of this book.” Sue Brannan Walker, poet laureate of Alabama 2003 – 2012. Purchase here: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/author/

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In an old movie, two people are very much in love but can’t bring themselves to do anything about it because they are middle aged, shy, proper, and afraid. Instead they row out onto a lake, utterly alone. They talk and until one of them says, “If I turn around and never look, would you undress to your underthings?” The back is turned, while the other removes every article of outer clothing. They sit for a few minutes before the one in almost nothing puts everything back on and says, “I’m ready.” That is the end of the scene. That is love.

This is not how most romantic scenes are written. We know the tropes, the expectations, the fantasies. But love is as varied and as quirky and as individual as the number of creatures that have ever existed on this planet. We writers know that strangeness is the quality that brings us to our own writing and what brings readers to identify with characters. Love is infinitely more interesting in its oddities, its clumsiness, its suddenness, and its rarified gentleness. Romantic love can be a tango or a stumble out to the trash bin. Why follow a formula? Why not let love transect all the assumptions and all the patterns?

There was the day when I was flattened by life, asleep in a waiting room chair. I woke for a drowsy moment to see a woman dressed in a custodial uniform bending over me and carefully extracting the candy wrapper that had dropped onto my lap. As I looked up at her, she put her finger to her lips, smiled slightly and moved away to continue her job. That too is a generous, gentle love.

When my father was diagnosed with malignant melanoma at forty-five, he left the oncologist’s office and headed to the car where my mother waited for him. She knew the news was going to be bad. “What did he say?” my mother asked. My father answered, “He told me that we have to have as much sex as possible.” They laughed their heads off, because that’s the kind of love they needed to face the moment.

Love is fierce and weird and just exactly what it is: an attempt to let someone else in. We writers can tune our binoculars, our listening devices, our antennae to recognize it and translate it into poetry, flash fiction, novels, and memoirs. Writing about love means falling in love with love in all its splendor and foolery.  Write about that.

Publications

Maud & Addie “Sure to enchant, Maud & Addie is a touching novel complete with old skeletons, new friends, and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.” Vivian Turnbull, Foreword Reviews. To purchase: https://regalhousepublishing.com/product/maud-and-addie/

blessed are the menial chores “Should anyone ask what poetry is, hand them a copy of this book.” Sue Brannan Walker, poet laureate of Alabama 2003 – 2012. Purchase here: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/author/

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I have walked one part of the Robert Frost Trail here in Amherst for years. I know the boulders at the trail head, the skunk cabbage and horse tail ferns in the spring, the gold aspen leaves in the fall, the little bridge over the stream and the flat rocks that lead down to the water’s edge. It’s a familiar path that includes a wide meadow and overarching oaks. Today while walking in a neighborhood on the other side of town, I came upon a different trailhead for the same trail. I stopped in my tracks and wondered how the two sections connect. I tried to imagine but couldn’t make them meet. A map would show me, but I wouldn’t feel it or fully understand it. There was nothing to do but walk it, cross the dry ravines, step over roots, get diverted behind back yards and to know how this part is included in the whole. Only then would I understand what this part of the Robert Frost Trail means to me.

Novels and memoirs are trails too. We can be very familiar with long segments of it, travel them back and forth as we write, but often there is at least one section or tributary that seems disjointed or cut off even though we know it’s very much a chapter or scene that is somehow connected and needs to be included. How do we make it fit? How do we follow the moments and show their partnership with the roots and geology of the rest of the story?

We walk it. It’s fine to map a story with index cards or Venn diagrams, or outlines, but until that segment is written out, perhaps multiple times, and explored fully both ends won’t coalesce and speak to each other. Trekking every part of the narrative trail allows all the intermediary scenes to make their contribution to the full meaning. And along the way, specific fallen logs, wasp galls, and overstory openings to the sky display the full evolution of the story. Readers then become hiking companions as they walk the trail along every bit if its topography and habitat.

Publications

Maud & Addie “Sure to enchant, Maud & Addie is a touching novel complete with old skeletons, new friends, and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.” Vivian Turnbull, Foreword Reviews. To purchase: https://regalhousepublishing.com/product/maud-and-addie/

blessed are the menial chores “Should anyone ask what poetry is, hand them a copy of this book.” Sue Brannan Walker, poet laureate of Alabama 2003 – 2012. Purchase here: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/author/

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As I walked into a poetry class I took decades ago, the professor and a fellow student stood by the window laughing. The professor held a page of poetry in her hand. They stopped laughing when they saw me. The professor said to me, “When you read this poem to us, I think you should stand up and put your hand over your heart.”

I don’t say that it was a great poem. I don’t say that it didn’t need editing. But it was an expression of something I was feeling, and, in truth, it was meant to be sardonic, poking fun at my romantic self. But it was not meant to be made fun of. That moment compelled me to ask: What exactly is a poem supposed to do?

Poems are acts of bravery both to write and to read. They use words to get behind and before language; they run along the nerves and whisper into our bones. But let’s get technical to see if that helps. Is it the way poems achieve their force that gives a poem meaning? Should a poem always have metaphor, line enjambments, rhythm, rhyme, heightened tone, or alliteration? Perhaps, but there can’t be a formula, because poetry, as Robert Frost said, “starts with a lump in the throat.” And it should also, as Emily Dickinson declared, “blow the top of your head off.” Tall orders.

Perhaps a way to begin both writing and reading a poem is to accept any one of these courageous options: notice the  shadows and sparks of light in an idea; an argument; an emotion; a story; an accusation; a conversation; a joke; a hint of something not understood before; an acceptance; an apology; a recognition; a call for help; an offer to help; a bold announcement; a shy hidden hope; a way to get back home; a way to break out of everything once known; an invitation; a celebration; a mourning sigh; a simple truth; an ordinary object; a strange visitation; a driving rebuke; a shameful confession; a winding envious path; a jungle of sound; the taste of apricots; sand in a shoe; a yeasty smell; a pit in the stomach; a lift off; an itch. Or simply worship the bronze/gold buds of a shag bark hickory in April and their invitation to be part of everything. A poem, then, stops us in our tracks and helps us live.  

Upcoming Events

August Writing Retreat in Hawley, Massachusetts

Open Spots in August 6 – 9, 2023 Retreat Join me on a sunny, quiet hillside with views of the western Massachusetts hills for three days of imagining, remembering, restoring, and inventing. Writers with all levels of experience and genres are welcome. The retreat is firmly based in the AWA Method of respect for all voices and an atmosphere of adventure. Single rooms, shared baths, organic, home-made meals, and time to rest and wander. Fee is $1000 with a $200 deposit by June 1st. For further information: maureen@maureenbjones.com

Publications

Maud & Addie “Sure to enchant, Maud & Addie is a touching novel complete with old skeletons, new friends, and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.” Vivian Turnbull, Foreword Reviews. To purchase: https://regalhousepublishing.com/product/maud-and-addie/

blessed are the menial chores “Should anyone ask what poetry is, hand them a copy of this book.” Sue Brannan Walker, poet laureate of Alabama 2003 – 2012. Purchase here: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/author/

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