You Gotta Have Faith

I’m a pretty private person. Though I blog, I rarely share much of the emotional stuff of my life. The emotional stuff, well, I dump that on a few lucky friends and in my fiction. I’ve never understood the need to post every lousy thing that happens on Facebook, to tell every person in the grocery store line my life story. That’s just not my style. I’m more of a “put on a smile and get on with things” kind of girl.

So I won’t go into details, but there have been some challenges this past year that, for the first time in my life, made me lose faith. Faith that there is a point to this writing thing. What do my attempts at storytelling matter when friends die, when a loved one is ill, when life can be so hard?

When you lose faith, when you no longer know why you write, you might as well shut down the laptop and put it in a drawer. Because when the writing no longer matters to you, then what you write will no longer matter. For several months I was in that place, spending a little time writing, but spending much more time feeling guilty about not writing. When I did write I was less than fully engaged. I had a hard time caring about my characters. My heart was not really in it.

Then I remembered Carolyn See’s book, Making a Literary Life. During the writing of that book, her love of twenty-seven years died. As she put it, “As John got worse, I couldn’t help but think: What’s the point? The finest mind and soul I’d ever known was going away. All the writing in the world wasn’t going to change that.”

She made herself write anyway. And she began to find the joy again. She likens writing to a marriage, taking it on faith that you are still in love, even when you don’t feel like you are, and working at it every day, even when you’d like to walk away. So I picked up my laptop, and I locked myself in a room, and I started typing. Nothing earth-shattering, but the more I typed, the more I remembered how much I am in love with the process, how much I love putting words together.

There will surely be times again when I ask why. Hopefully, though, when that happens, I’ll remember that I long ago committed myself to my relationship with writing, and I’ll sit down and fall in love all over again.

Key West Literary Seminar 2013

by Sharon Harrigan

Sharon Harrigan, a friend and fellow WriterHouse member, was the Joyce Horton Johnson Fiction Award recipient at KWLS this year, and I asked her to share her thoughts on the experience. Thanks, Sharon, and congrats again on a much deserved award.

If the view out your window is anything like mine right now—snow on slippery sidewalks—let me offer you this mid-winter writer’s daydream: Flip flops and floppy hats on beach cruiser bikes to stir up inspiration. The sun so bright on the ocean you can swim in it every day of the year, like Tennessee Williams did. The descendants of Hemingway’s cats lounging at his house under flowering shrubs, just the sight of their softness somehow making your prose more muscular. Cafe con leche and guava pastries before writing workshop with Hilma Wolitzer at Judy Blume’s house. Panels and presentations by literary superstars like Colm Toibin, Brad Gooch, and Billy Collins, followed by dinners with the speakers and your fellow workshop writers at the lighthouse, near the southernmost tip of North America. Finally, after a corkscrew climb down the winding steps, a pink taxi or pedi-cab waits to deposit you in the jacuzzi at your bed and breakfast (aptly called, of course, Authors’ House).

It’s not a day dream. It’s called the Key West Literary Seminar. I was able to attend for the first time, last month, and the experience still helps me write more brightly, whatever gray days may arrive, outside my window or in my head.

The seminar takes place every January, and there are three ways you can attend—as a winner of one of the three prizes, as a scholarship participant, and as a general attendee. I was lucky enough to be the Joyce Horton Johnson Award recipient this year. For more information, see the seminar’s web site: http://www.kwls.org/

Spread the word about KWLS. I wouldn’t have known about it at all if it weren’t for my fellow WriterHouse members who won the award in previous years (hooray for Kristen-Paige Madonia, George Kamide, and CHRISTY STRICK!). It must be something WriterHouse puts in the water, or maybe good things just happen when you’re part of a fabulously smart and encouraging literary community. Thank you, Christy, for all your tips on Key West and everything else.

Sharon Harrigan has published over three dozen short stories, essays, and reviews in such journals as Narrative, The Rumpus, and The Nervous Breakdown.

Getting on My High Horse (and Helping Uncle Jack Off His)

“Capitalization is the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse and helping your uncle jack off a horse.” Unknown (thanks, Linda, for sending this to me)

I’m going to sound like an old fogey reminiscing about the good old days here, but I’ll risk it. It seems to me that too little emphasis is being placed on learning the basics of English these days. You know, sentence structure, punctuation, and capitalization. Seriously simple stuff. Either it’s not being taught or there are a lot of students who aren’t listening.

I once had an employee who randomly capitalized words in a sentence. Or, as he would have written, “I Once had An Employee who randomly Capitalized words.” Every email he sent made me get out my red pen. I would print the email and, after marking it up, toss it on his desk. When this didn’t get through to him, I had him take an English class. But capitalization was not addressed in that class or he was absent the day it was, because his random cap habit was never kicked, and he continued to look like a dumbass.

We’re not talking only uneducated people here. I’ve had writers tell me that they aren’t worried about that kind of stuff, that once a story is accepted for publication, the editors will clean it up. Wrong. It will probably never be accepted anywhere if the punctuation and capitalization are a mess.

My mother claims it’s a result of too much texting and tweeting. I’m not buying it. There are plenty of luddites out there who don’t know the basics of grammar and punctuation and spelling. I think the problem is much deeper than that. Many people seem to believe that it just doesn’t matter anymore, and that the rules no longer apply. Not true. Every time you send a poorly constructed, misspelled email, you are showing the recipient that you are too lazy or too stupid to communicate in proper English. And forget landing an interview if your cover letter and resume are riddled with misspellings and incorrect usage.

As for any writer who is too lazy to make certain a story is grammatically correct, you can blame the editor who doesn’t want to spend his time teaching you first grade English for that rejection.