GWG Writings*

An Occasional Publication by and for the Greenbelt Writers Group - Books Reviews, Discussions of Writing, Publication Tips, Etc.

GREENBELT WRITERS GROUP, 15 Crescent Rd., Greenbelt, MD. 20770

February 1997. No. 1

Welcome to the first issue of GWG Writings*!

This is an occasional publication that will help us highlight books and publications of interest to our membership -- items we've never had room for in our regular GWG Newsletter due to limitations of space. We've always had too much GWG news to print, and never had any room for book reviews. (And it doesn't have to be reviews of new books; if you happen upon a book that will be of interest to writers, no matter what the publication date, you can write about it here, as long as it's still in print or available in libraries). In addition, GWG Writings offers our members a chance to get published! Please send us your book reviews, writers' tips, info on conferences and events. Send to: Beth Blevins, P.O. Box 221, Greenbelt, MD 20770 or email to her at: beblevins@aol.com.

*Name this newsletter! This is the working title, for now. We'll ask for your suggestions at our next meeting.

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Book Review: Form With Content
DARK HORSES By X.J. Kennedy John Hopkins. 1992.

All of us literary types know Robert Frost's remark, "I'd just as soon write free verse as play tennis without a net." X.J. Kennedy, in his collection "Dark Horses", has raised Frost's net back into place in a poetic world in which formalists like Frost and Kennedy are quickly becoming relics. More importantly, Kennedy knows how to embody powerful ideas and emotions in vivid imagery and pithy language within his meter and rhyme. There is much to like in "Dark Horses." Kennedy's poems cover a wide range of themes and tones, from the tragedy and gravity of suffering through a hurricane ("The wind last night kept breaking into song,/Beautiful only if you heard it wrong.") and watching a friend suffer through AIDS ("No one, nobody human/Stays immune forever.") to the simple grace of a woman walking through the rain:

Though Kennedy works in traditional form, he expresses quite untraditional attitudes in his poems. Kennedy appropriately invokes Wallace Stevens in his reflection on skepticism, "The Waterbury Cross." "Is there/Still a pale Christ who clings to hope for me," he asks, "Who bides time in a cloud?" I don't think many Christian conservatives would be too fond of this distaste for old-time religion, or of his elegy for a closed-down brothel, in which the speaker wistfully catalogs its exotic paraphernalia while watching the IRS auction it off. Nor would the apostles of family values appreciate Kennedy's many caustic portraits of family life, like "Tableau Intime":

Every poem in "Dark Horses" contains some element of formal prosody, but Kennedy avoids monotonous rhythm and rhyme. In some poems, he strives for a strict iambic tetrameter or pentameter line throughout; in others he sprinkles extra syllables in for variety. Some poems contain lines of several different lengths, and some lines begin in a turbulent, irregular rhythm only to settle into normative meter at their end. The types of rhyme run the gamut from couplets to a looser, almost occasional rhyme resembling that used by Robert Lowell in several poems in "For the Union Dead." Many modernists maintain that modern poetry does not oppose or destroy the old "rules" of prosody, but creates new ones appropriate to each poetic situation. In this sense, X. J. Kennedy is a modernist as well as a traditionalist. He chooses to write in form because his poems fit form--because form is the tool he needs to convey their sense--and he chooses the form to fit the poem. Formalism may be a "traditional" method but Kennedy maintains it out of free will--not predestination. - Reviewed by Robert Levine

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SPONTANEOUS WRITING by Beth Blevins

Several people in the GWG have asked about spontaneous writing and about the "Spontaneous Writers Group of Greenbelt" since the SWGG published a group of essays in last year's GWG Anthology. We are an informal group of women who meet once a week in each others' homes to write together, using some of the principles outlined in the book, Writing Down the Bones, as well as those we devise on our own. Generally, we try to start with at least one idea at each meeting that will spark us to write. We write for 15 to 30 minutes, then take turns reading what we have written. (If there is time, we write for a econd period of time). The writing does not have to be polished or even be in complete sentences. Often, we are amazed at what comes out of our minds just from the process of letting the words flow -- vivid memories and descriptions of places we have lived, when perhaps we hadn't actively thought of those places in months; a particular plant, time or day we have known or experienced; friends and other people we want to remember and describe. Some of us use this writing as a way of setting down our lives; others use it as material for other kinds of writing, or as a way of keeping our writing fingers and minds nimble. We are not looking for any more members for our little group since we couldn't fit anyone else into a GHI townhouse dining room. But I am happy to share with you some of the ideas and exercises we have come up with in the last year, which you can use on your own, or with friends. GWG members: if you would like to set up another group like this, please feel free to put a (free) classified ad in the newsletter (that's how I found this group), or to make an announcement about it at a GWG reading. If you start a group, please let the interest groups coordinator know about it. (Since there is no coordinator at the time of this writing, you can call me at 345-5879 and I will pass the info on to the appropriate person).

FOUR IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED -

  1. 1. Choose some photographs which depict one or more persons. Then write about each one for 15 minutes. Write about the scene itself, the person(s) depicted, or the first thing you think of when you look at it. Alternately, if in a group, switch photographs before hearing anything about them from the people who brought them. Take five to ten minutes to describe what you think is happening, try to get a "feel" for the people depicted. Then read aloud and see if you correctly described any aspect of the people. (Doing this last exercise, one of our members actually "got" the name of the person and correctly related that she looked like she had just fallen in love -- psychic abilities can also be revealed sometimes!) Example of something written from this exercise: "He is sitting off a porch of a house a half mile from the Blue Ridge Parkway, his long, bare feet splayed on the wooden floor. He looks pensive, rested.... In high school, we'd felt glamorous together... We don't have that much in common anymore."
  2. 2. One easy way to get started is to "complete the sentence". Make up some of your own, or use one of these: - "I don't want to remember..." - "When I was fifteen, I..." (or five or twenty...) - "I'll never know why..."
  3. 3. Describe what you did today. (Even the most boring day can have interesting details -- if you can learn to describe the things you saw or might have seen).
  4. 4. Choose one or more dates that have meaning to you, or choose them spontaneously, accidentally. Use to compose a list of dates. As a group, choose two to four dates to write about from the list, e.g., July 4, 1976; April 1954; November 15, 1990. If the chosen date is not within someone's range of memory, change decades, but keep the month or day, e.g., April 3, 1952 becomes April 3, 1982. Write quickly (five to ten minutes) about each date. Imagine where you were, what you were doing, wearing, eating, what it felt like to be the age you were then. This exercise is useful in gathering material for "memoir" type writing. Have fun! I'm sorry I don't have time to personally visit those who might start separate groups. But if there is enough interest in this kind of writing, perhaps GWG can sponsor a workshop on it. Please let me know.

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Book Review: Writing About Life
THE JOY OF WRITING SEX By Elizabeth Benedict Story Press. 1996

Whether you're interested in learning how to write sex scenes (however graphic or tame) or you just want a review of memorable sex scenes in great fiction, you'll find The Joy of Writing Sex a useful book. Elizabeth Benedict, whose novels include Safe Conduct and Slow Dancing, declares that Joy "is not a primer for writing pornography" but "aims to help you write well about sex -- whether the sex is great, obligatory or unwelcome..." Benedict says she has included sex scenes in her own work because "it never occurred to me not to write about sex..." She begins the book with a chapter on "What Will My Grandmother Think?", on learning to write sex scenes without threat of internal or external censors. Throughout this chapter and the rest of the book, she includes excerpts from interviews with published writers. She asked writers how they are able to publish sex scenes without fear of family reprisal. Surprisingly, several writers said they ask their relatives not to read their books, or they mention parents who skip over the "dirty" parts of their books. Various writers also share their favorite sex scenes in fiction. The answers are unexpected because they include Mrs. Dalloway and Anna Karenina, with only suggestive scenes, at most. In her chapter "'Surprise Me' and Other Literary Come-ons", she lists techniques/principles for making characters and relationships more alive including: "...Narrate from inside your characters' bodies and minds, not from a camera set up to record the transaction", and "Hire a decorator". By this last principle, she means to give the characters a connection to their physical surroundings. To illustrate this, she gives a passage from John Casey's Spartina, a novel about a Rhode Island fisherman who is having an affair. He is making love to his mistress along the banks of a salt marsh: "...her coming was more in her mind still; when she got closer she would become a single band of muscle, like a fish -- all of her would move at once..." Other chapters include "Life Sentences: Husbands and Wives", "Solo Sex", and "The End of Bravado: Writing About Sex in the Age of AIDS". The book concludes with a list of exercises for writing sex scenes. - Reviewed by Beth Blevins

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