branta

One of our mandates for 2010 is to keep an eye out for places where technology and writing interface in meaningful ways. At the Atwater Library and Computer Centre in Montreal (Canada’s oldest lending library!) they’ve been archiving readings for their Poetry Project since 2005. One recent reader was Brent MacLaine reading from Athena Becomes a Swallow. Come inside and have a listen…

Late in December I asked contributors and Branta readers what their holidays would hold viz things literary. Whether writers would write or be stymied; if the readers would benefit from the downtime to catch up; what gifts of lit they were hoping to receive. This post gathers their thoughts and recommendations.

In-between is the traverse through darkness, feeling the icy breath of the forest, hearing squeak of boot on snow, bearing frost-smelling coats into warm kitchens. In-between is the starry sky, the black universe beneath which we understand our need for one another. We progress from home to candle-lit home: grateful for food, for warmth, for companionship.

“November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.” -Emily Dickinson

Insult? Compliment? Online they can easily be interchangeable. November also holds these three new pieces to refine or redefine your enjoyment of autumn:

It was cold outside
by Abigail Whitney
What I thought of in the Shoe Shop
by Christopher Willard
Cooking Corner: Orphan Thanksgiving Sandwich
by Angus Fletcher

It’s been a little while since my David Lynch / David Foster Wallace and my Beck / Korgis / Stackridge brushes with cosmic coincidence, so I though the Jungian subconscious roadway had been closed for upgrades (like simultaneously repairing all the bridges into some New Brunswick towns). Turns out that a few of the bypasses were still open for traffic. Check this post for the latest.

We just had our first modest snowfall in Fredericton. Nothing to write home about… or text home about, depending on your level of technology… but a signpost nonetheless. And since we’re not ones to ignore augury here at Branta it seemed a good time to inaugurate (oops…) the changing seasons with selections from our first volley of unsolicited contributions.

Links are inside this post.

Just seeing the different creative approaches that people brought to their work. It was very motivating to read all the stories and know that people all over were writing fiction and trying to do it as well as they could. And just because they could, and liked doing it. It obviously wasn’t about the money or pushing “product” or being part of a publicity machine. It was all very encouraging and liberating. What I’d always thought literature should be.

On the other hand, daily news is a work in progress, a constantly evolving account of the story-”history on the run,” as Thomas Griffith put it. As new information comes to light, the reporter can incorporate it into follow-up stories, coming ever closer to something resembling truth. Without subsequent editions, however, a book is immutable.

For a while, I bemoaned the fact that I couldn’t find time to write everyday, which is something that at least makes you feel as though you are a writer. But then I found a copy of Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home-actually a first edition (for fifty cents!) in excellent shape at a local library sale-and read it cover to cover. On page 147, I read this: “The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time.” Plath’s aim at around this time was to have 20 pieces out at magazines. That gave me a wake-up call, as a writer. I would stop bemoaning and start producing.

Then I make sure I have at least one Fast Wordscraper or Lexulous (Facebook scrabble-type games) going, and this seems to have become a critical part of my writing routine. You may think that playing one of these games while writing is a distraction, but I am here to tell you it isn’t: it helps. I start writing a flash story, using the set of prompts I have found, beginning with one word or phrase, seeing where that takes me, and then, whenever I need to, I grab another prompt and put it in. Something about using prompts puts me in that kind of dream-like zone where i am not thinking logically about what I am writing, I am letting it flow. And when I get to a stopping point where, if I carried on, it would be the logical mind and not the creative, I go to Wordscraper, play my turn, distracting my logical mind while the creative keeps whirring. And then I go back to the story.