#bret lott

[artsandlettersjournal]

Today, in our featured archives, the poem "From the Afterlife" by Kirun Kapur which first appeared in our 27th issue and Bret Lott's "Halo" from Issue 5.

[chautauqualit]

Chautauqua Goes to Seattle

More than 12,000 writers will converge on Seattle, Washington next week for the annual AWP Conference and we’ll be there. Hosted by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, this is one of the largest literary conferences in North America. If you haven’t been to one, it’s a mind-boggling symposium, with hundreds of panels, readings, and presentations; a Book Fair representing independent literary presses and journals, creative writing programs, writing conferences, and literary arts organizations across the county; plus an international meet-up for writers of every ilk. Chautauquawill be right in the middle of this four-day, 24-7 write-a-thon. If you’re going, please visit our Book Fair exhibit (A35). Pick up copies of Journeys and Pilgrimages and talk to us about submitting for our next issue themed: Privacy and Secrets. If you need any ideas, inspiration abounds at this conference. Check out this small sampling of sessions in this overview.

Explore new ways to mine your personal history with Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family Secrets (F145), or Bagful of God: Female Memoirists with Daddy Issues (R153). The task of authoring the man who authored you (“…marble-heavy a bagful of God” thank you Sylvia Plath) is necessarily fraught. If you’re going there, here’s how to find a balance between deification and bitterness.

Sometimes it’s tempting to hide deep personal truths behind detachment or irony. Invisible Geography: Writing Trauma, Pain and Loss (R159) offers strategies for steering between loud language and a cool stance. Translate your pain into words that shoulder sorrow with grace.

In this age of excessive self-exposure, how can we write something deeply private without turning ourselves into a sideshow attraction? In Full Disclosure: How to Spill your Guts without Making a Mess (F167), panelists discuss how to write about addiction, forbidden lust, and grief in a way that serves a greater purpose. In Breaking Silences: Women’s Memoir as an Act of Rebellion (R234) panelists share their experiences writing about taboo subjects. They’ll discuss the conscious and unconscious biases that keep women from the transgressive act of writing honestly about their lives.

To exorcise the overly earnest and make the tragic bearable, you’ll want to attend It’s Funny Because It’s True (R111).

When you’re ready to delve into your secret motivations, there’s Where Witness Meets the Page: Why We Write What We Write.” (F119) Or maybe you’re just looking for an unusual way to reveal your secrets? Catch What the Dog Said: Writing in Unusual Points of View (S121). Four prize-winning fiction writers share unorthodox views on using fresh points of view from the disruptive second person to the epistolary first.

Revealing secrets can be a high-stakes game. In Smuggling Words: Writers Subverting Borders (F275) international writers in exile talk about sneaking across borders, mixing languages, and transcending culture.

Writing about private spiritual matters can push your creative process to the limits of language, imagination, and cultural acceptance. In Writing God: Craft, Language and Sacred Experience (S212) an eclectic panel explores these challenges from the perspectives of editor, poet, fiction writer and teacher. In Subversive Spirit Poetry: Writing from the Edge of Faith (F138), poets frankly discuss the natural friction between the literary and faith communities and how to cultivate both a faithful and subversive spirit in your writing practice.

Wherever you go, throughout this four-day extravaganza, you’ll run into Chautauqua contributors and friends. Here’s a shout-out to just a few of them. On Thursday, Ann Pancake explores what makes a compelling child character in Writing About Children for Adults (R156). AWP Featured Presenter, Chautauqua contributor, and frequent UNCW visiting writer, Christina Garcia, together with Richard Bianco, present Narration of Identity and the Cuban-American Experience (R230).

Later in the day, poet and UNCW faculty member, Malena Morling, whose poem, “It’s Easy,” appears in the next issue of Chautauqua, is on the panel, Tribute to Hayden Carruth: Teacher, Poet, Editor, Critic (R167). For an excellent creative nonfiction session on Friday, see Seattle local and Chautauqua contributor Judith Kitchen for Organizing the Truth: Building the Nonfiction Canon (F233).

Some of the authors featured at our annual UNCW Writers Week will also be speaking at AWP. Look for Tim Seibles, renowned poet and author of Fast Animal in Emotional Depth: Tools and Inspiration from Various Genres (R247). This panel takes on the toughest challenge a writer faces: capturing emotion.

If you’re a Flannery fan, and teaching, you won’t want to miss It Would Have Been a Good Panel If There Had Been Somebody There To Shoot It Every Minute of its Life: Contemporary Writers on Teaching Flannery O’Connor with Brett Lott, nonfiction editor of Crazyhorse, and formerly editor of the Southern Review (R265).

On Friday, Lan Samantha Chang, director of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, shares her plotting secrets in Plotting the Realist Novel (F207).

While you’re in Seattle, if you’re bursting with a secret you’d like to share (anonymously), pop it in the Chautauqua Secrets basket at our Book Fair table. We’ll be tweeting the best ones during the conference. Enjoy the show!

by Diane Sorensen

[littlekine]

I felt on my back gentle pats like fragile wings just touching me, touching me: my grandchildren's hands.

Bret Lott, Jewel

[tumblngphilopoet]

Today is the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Bret Lott (1958) (books by this author). He was born and raised in Los Angeles by Southern parents, went to school in Massachusetts, and now lives in Charleston, South Carolina. "I never intended to be an author," he claims. "I intended to become a park ranger." He also considered careers in teaching, marine biology, and cola sales.

He's the author of seven novels, including Ancient Highway (2008), A Song I Knew by Heart (2005), and Jewel (1999). He's also written several collections of short stories and two memoirs: Fathers, Sons, and Brothers (2000) and Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer's Life (2005).

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2013/10/08

[prismofgrace]

"...the reality is that writers are simply people who pay attention to the world around them, and who choose to put into words what they see, feel, think, and discover, all in an effort to better understand who they are and the world around them. This is because writing is an act of discovery, not an act of announcing what one already knows." Bret Lott

[rifflechristian]

A Q&A with Bret Lott, author of Letters and Life

In addition to writing, Bret currently teaches at College of Charleston and serves as nonfiction editor of literary magazine Crazyhorse. His new book, Letters and Life, On Being a Writer: On Being a Christian is out now with Crossway Books. 

Bret graciously took the time out of his schedule to answer a few questions on writing and his inspirations for the Riffle community:

Who or what are your inspirations for writing?

My life. I think the most important thing a writer can do is to examine his or her life, watch what’s going on around you, listen for genuine moments when things are happening that most other people would take for granted. I can’t tell you how many things I’ve written about that spring from these personal moments – one early morning my then three year old (he’s now twenty seven) looked up at the sky, the moon still out and just a blue and white shadow up there, and said to me, “Look! The moon is teasing the sun!” That moment, I can tell you, ended up in a novel, as did another moment when I tried to sell the lady across the street a electric table-top rotisserie at the yard sale we were having, only to understand slowly that I was being had by how little she was willing to pay. These moments may seem cute or boring or inconsequential, but these are the real inspirations for my writing: those moments overlooked by most people, who are generally on the lookout for bigger and better and more important moments. These small instances of seeming nothingness are what our lives are made of – so we better pay attention to them.

What book is on your nightstand at the moment?

Two of them: Patrick O’Brian’s The Wine Dark Sea, volume 16 in his twenty-volume novel series about Captain Jack Aubrey and Ship’s Surgeon Stephen Maturin (this is my second time through the series); and Heat, by former editor of The New Yorker’s Bill Buford, the nonfiction story of his working for Mario Batlali and Buford’s subsequent trips to Italy to follow, so to speak, in Batali’s culinary footsteps (I love to cook, and in fact there is in the oven as I write this a batch of Ragu Bolognese slow cooking).

What do you find to be the most rewarding as an author and as a writing professor?

The very best moment in my life as a professor is when a student suddenly understands that he or she is capable, via the imagination and well-written sentences, of creating something that is larger than he or she would have expected; it’s that moment when a student is surprised at what she has made, and that it has reached someone else with what it wants to speak.

The best moment about being a writer is when I get a letter from someone telling me that a book I have written has meant something to him. Writing is such a solo venture, riven with long long long hours of being alone with words, that when what you have done sparks in someone enough energy to get that person to write to you, I am genuinely encouraged, and thankful.

If you could meet anyone in history, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?

Of course Jesus! But that’s not a what if situation – one day this will happen. So IF I could meet anyone in history (this is tough because I love history, and read more nonfiction than anything else), I’d have to say I’d like most to meet the artist Paul Cézanne, the early impressionist painter who saw the world in a new way, saw it in its beauty and light, and rendered it in a kind of love I hope my own work exhibits.

Thanks to Bret for chatting with us. Let us know what you think about Letters and Life and join us on Riffle to find more great reads!

[rifflechristian]

Enter to win LETTERS AND LIFE!

Only a few hours (8, to be exact) left for our LETTERS AND LIFE giveaway! 

Stay tuned for a special treat from the author, Bret Lott.

[dabacahin]

Bret Lott on “Townie”: “The palliative strength of written words”

“Somewhere, sometime I’d stopped expecting my father to father,” [Andre Dubus III] observes while practicing a knockout punch on a heavy bag in a rundown local gym. Maybe, he goes on, “if he stayed with us, it would have been different, but even then there was the feeling that writing and running and teaching is where he seemed to put the truest part of himself. After those things, there seemed to be little extra energy or time for anything else.”

Later in the book Dubus begins to find the palliative strength of written words placed just so, and the way stories can count in the deeper reaches of the human heart in much more appreciable ways than kicking someone in the chest. “But as I wrote that last line,” he says of his first short story, “my heart was thumping against my sternum and my mouth was dry and I felt pulled along by something larger than I was, something not in me but in this story that had come out of me.”

-- from “A separate peace," a book review by Bret Lott (The Boston Globe)