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We’ve Moved!

Check out our new website: https://chautauquajournal.wixsite.com/website

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A Brief Interview Manual for Writers

Last year, I interviewed about fifteen women in South Korea. Before I left for the country, I talked with two writers and two social scientists, who conducted many interviews for their research, to learn their techniques. I was armed with a digital recorder and computer, but still encountered issues I wasn’t prepared for. As I started to write, I found more mistakes I could have prevented if I had known more about conducting interviews. I have written a brief manual for writers who will utilize interviews in their work.

Before the interview:

1. Sound recorders: Unless you need to present the recording itself, you don’t need an expensive recorder. However, a good recorder captures clearer sounds and helps differentiate noises from voices. I recommend a digital recorder, as it is easier to replay and make copies of recordings. Research to find the best one for your project. Although there are many sites available, one I found useful was Doug at the Oral History in the Digital Age (Chautauqua is not affiliated with this organization) to find one.

When you have your recorder, learn how to use it properly and conduct a test interview. Set the correct date and time. Make sure that you have enough memory for your interview. Always bring backup batteries.

I recommend preparing a backup recorder too, even if it is your phone or computer. Device malfunction happens more often than you’d think.

2. Writing instruments: Do not assume your recorder will save everything. Written notes may save you time later and enrich your memory. You can bring a notepad or computer or any other tool. Typing is often faster than handwriting, but consider your interview environment.

3. Visual aid/camera: It is always nice to have pictures from your interviews. Some might be sensitive about having their picture taken, but even if you can’t take pictures of your interviewee, you can take a record of your setting to help your memory later. A video camera is another option, but it may make interviewees uncomfortable. Always ask permission to use these before conducting the interview.

4. Interview questions: Finalize your questions and perform a mock interview.

On the day of the interview:

1. Arrival: Arrive early and learn about your setting. Take pictures, if able, and make notes.

2. Interview: Be courteous—introduce yourself and the purpose of your interview. Tell your interviewee how you will use their information and ask for permission. Ask separately for voice recording, notetaking, and pictures. When recording, state the date, time, location, and interviewee’s name. Use your primary and backup recorders at the same time.

3. Notes: I recommend taking notes throughout the whole interview process. Include the date, time, place, and weather. If you are not taking pictures, note the appearance of your interviewee. Record their gestures.

After the interview:

1. Recordings and pictures: Check whether they are properly saved. Make copies as soon as possible and store them in multiple places—your computer, cloud, etc.

2. Daily notes: This should be like your diary. Consider the events before and after your interview and write about them chronologically.

I hope you have a great interview!

--Jooweon Park 

*Photo by Jooweon Park, 2017

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Self-Trust, or, sticking with your work even when it hurts!

From the time we enter school, we learn one lesson more powerfully than any other: mistakes are bad. This is often reinforced in our workplace and other parts of our daily life. If this is the message we’ve internalized, we may find it difficult to begin, or stick with, creative work. The very heart of creativity, after all, is exploration, experimentation, and risk taking. Which means making mistakes! 

In my own writing journey, especially over the past year, I’ve had to learn to get comfortable with the incredibly uncomfortable mess of creative work. In our school and work life, incompetence is so frowned upon, it can be downright painful to write a rough draft. This is why countless writers give up while writing rough drafts and abandon the creative process. It’s emotionally overwhelming to feel like you are bad at something. 

But the truth is, in order to be a good writer, you have to be willing to write badly. You have to be brave enough to make tons of mistakes and keep making them, day after day. 

How do you find the strength, courage, and persistence to stick with your work even when it hurts?  

I have discovered that one of the crucial keys to sticking with a creative project over the most emotionally rugged terrain is self trust. 

You develop self trust over time as you gain awareness of your own sabotaging emotions and beliefs while you write. Trusting your own mind to know what to do, to problem solve, to unravel even the most unruly of knots as you create is essential to every step of the creative process. 

When you first begin a project, you’re often at your most vulnerable. Your idea is like a baby bird, deeply fragile. You have no idea if it will live or thrive. You’re excited but also terrified. When you start writing and the magic you felt in your head isn’t transferring to the page, when you’re messing up left and right, your first reaction might be frustration, panic, or even self loathing. This is the critical moment. Become aware of what your inner voice is saying. I knew I wasn’t good enough. They told me I couldn’t do it, and they were right. Even if I keep trying, I’ll never be as great as I want to be. Now is the time to protect your project by trusting yourself! This is my rough draft, and it should be messy. The more drafts I write, the better it will get. I trust my mind to get this idea where it needs to be.

The practice of self trust will also rescue you as you grapple with the “murky middle” of the creative process, reassuring yourself that you have what it takes to see the project through to completion. Even if it’s messy, even if you still don’t know where you’re going, telling yourself I’ll figure it out; I trust myself to get there will keep you persisting through the storms where others might jump ship.

When at last you reach the brink, that most tender and terrifying edge where you cast your work into the world, it’s here that trusting yourself, and what you’ve created, will give your work wings. 

And one day your readers will say, thank you for being brave.

–Summer Hammond

Photo Credit: Summer Hammond 2017

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Q&A with Ross Gay

The final week of October was the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s eighteenth annual Writers Week. After a busy yet rewarding week of craft talks, readings, and panels with visiting authors and publishing professionals, a group of MFA and BFA students had a discussion with the poet Ross Gay about his writing process and his advice for writers and writing teachers alike. Ross Gay is the editor at Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press and a professor at Indiana University. At the previous night’s packed Buckner reading, Gay read some of his upcoming work as well as poems from his book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, which won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.      During the Q&A, Gay talked in more detail about his upcoming book and his writing process for the poems included in it. His forthcoming book is a collection of poems he called “delights,” which he wrote over the course of a year. Each day, he set a timer for thirty minutes and used that time to write a poem by hand about something that delighted him, whether that was two people carrying grocery bags or a laundry bag together or neighbors gathering around a fig tree in Pennsylvania to pick and share the fruit. After writing about ten or so poems, he would transcribe them, taking care not to revise too much while transcribing, as he felt that the more he revised, the more he was messing up the poems. He told us that writing these delights was not without its challenges. Around day four of the project, he got stuck. He felt like the work he had produced on day three was not as strong as he wanted it to be, which made him call into question the entire thing. Would the work he created be worth the time? Would he be able to maintain the project for the whole year, as he intended? But he decided to do his best and not get in his head about how the poems might be received or if he missed a day here or there. In the end, he wrote about two hundred ninety poems. Now he is working on revising, picking the strongest of the poems for the new book. As a group of less experienced writers, it was reassuring to hear that a poet many of us look up to has moments of doubt just like we do, and that we can push through those doubts by focusing less on what the end product will be and more on the writing process itself.      One question people had for Gay at both his reading and the Q&A session was one regarding the positive nature of his poems. Many of the writers felt that modern poems were usually focused on the negative aspects of life and were intrigued by Gay’s ability to focus on unabashed gratitude and delights. Gay said he worried that people saw the baseline of life as despair and that moments of joy were simply thought of as breaks from the norm. Gay believes the actual baseline of life is connection and care. He talked about how so often in a day we experience small moments of kindness—people holding the door or checking to make sure that someone who tripped is all right. Although he is heartbroken all the time that does not negate the joy he experiences.      Gay also talked about the connection he felt between writing and gardening, his other passion. He said writing poetry reminded him of his time participating in an orchard planting project, where he knew he was creating and cultivating something that would likely outlive him, just like his poetry hopefully will. His overall goal is to take great care of his plants, his poetry, and his reader.

–Sarah Wall

Photo Credit: Melissa Crowe 2017

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Chautauqua Announces 2017 Pushcart Nominations

Chautauqua, the literary journal of Chautauqua Institution, has nominated six contributors featured in Chautauqua 14: Invention and Discovery for the Pushcart Prize. The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series has been published once a year since 1976.

Robert Kirvel receives the nomination for his essay, “A Bomb in the Final Essay by Oliver Sacks,” which won the Chautauqua Editors Prize. Kirvel is a Best of the Net nominee for fiction, 2016 winner of the Fulton Prize for the Short Story, and a 2015 ArtPrize winner for creative nonfiction. He has published stories or essays in the UK, New Zealand, and Germany; in translation and anthologies; and in a score of US literary journals, such as Arts & Letters.

George Drew’s poem, “Prayer on the Line of Scrimmage” was first runner-up in the Editors Prize. He is the author of The View from Jackass Hill, 2010 winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize awarded by Texas Review Press, which also published Down & Dirty (2015), and his new and selected, Pastoral Habits, in 2016. His eighth collection, Fancy’s Orphan (Tiger Bark Press), came out in January 2017. He is the winner of the 2014 St. Petersburg Review poetry contest.

Dan Roche was second runner-up with his essay, “Emptying Eddie’s Garage.” Roche has published two memoirs, Great Expectation: A Father’s Diary (Iowa, 2008) and Love’s Labors (Riverhead, 1999), and essays in the North American Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Journal, Under the Sun, Passages North, and other places. He’s been a fellow in nonfiction literature with the New York Foundation for the Arts, and he teaches nonfiction writing, journalism, and photography at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.

Elizabeth Burton is nominated for her story, “Creakings.” She is an award-winning fiction writer from Lexington, Kentucky. Her short stories have appeared in Waypoints, Kentucky Review, and Roanoke Review. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Texas (English) and Stony Brook University (linguistics) and is studying fiction in Spalding University’s MFA program.

Johnson Cheu is nominated for his poem, “Mother, Sewing.” His poetry and essays have appeared in Family Matters: Poems of our Families, Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images, and Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out. He served as the inaugural fiction/poetry editor of Disability Studies Quarterly, and he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures at Michigan State University.

Doug Ramspeck is nominated for his poem “Roadside Glass.” He is the author of five poetry collections, and his most recent book, Original Bodies (Southern Indiana Review Press), was selected for the Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Two of his earlier books, Mechanical Fireflies and Black Tupelo Country, have also received awards. Individual poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Slate, the Southern Review, and the Georgia Review.

Supported by Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua is produced in partnership with the Department of Creative Writing and the Publishing Laboratory at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Each year a group of graduate and undergraduate students work as members of the editorial team. They read and discuss submissions, fact check and edit, search for art, and participate in the artistic process of building a book. Chautauqua is released each year in June as the Chautauqua Institution’s summer season begins.

Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. Anchored by the historic Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, founded in 1878, Chautauqua’s literary arts programming includes summer-long interaction of published and aspiring writers at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center, the intensive workshops of the nationally recognized Chautauqua Writers’ Festival, and lectures by prominent authors on the craft and art of writing. Learn more at chq.org/season/literary-arts.

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Four Points of View

One of the most important tasks for a writer is choosing the point of view. The writer must ask  who the narrator of the story is. Is the narrator a part of this story? Can they influence the events or are they simply an outsider looking in? Is this story a sprawling epic or a journey of self-discovery?  There are four points of view: first, second, third (limited), and third (omniscient).        The third person omniscient is the literal “god” point of view in which the narrator is the see-all, tell-all storyteller. Everything from thoughts to actions are revealed to the audience by the narrator. This point of view is for stories with an ensemble cast. Examples of third person omniscient include George Orwell’s Animal Farm, J. R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo.      An advantage for using the third person omniscient is the use of “dramatic irony” where the audience knows something a character doesn’t. For example, in The Count of Monte Cristo, we, the audience, are clued into Edmond Dantes’ escape from the prison. We know that it is Dantes inside the body bag thrown out of the prison and not Abbé Faria.        Unfortunately, this point of view distances the reader the most from the narration.      The third person limited is perhaps the most effective point of view. It’s an over the shoulder, filtered view of the story. This perspective avoids the problem of giving the audience too much information—something an omniscient point of view may run into. This perspective is for stories with two to three (maybe more) main characters that serve as foils for one another. For stories that feel self-contained or want to teach a lesson.       George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is a good example of the third person limited, in which each chapter is divvied up into a singular viewpoint of a certain character. Each character has their own plot that feeds into the grand scheme of things in that epic fantasy realm.      I have found that the first person is very effective for frame narratives, narratives with simple, straightforward plots, and for introverted characters where it’s easy to get lost in a character’s head. It’s a perspective where I would allow the audience to see through the eyes of whatever character I’m trying to emulate through my writing.      My favorite example of the first person point of view is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A collection of perspectives, pieced together to form a singular truth about the titular monster. This story also serves as testament to the unreliable narrator.        The last point of view, seldom used in fiction, is the second person. You will find this used mostly in nonfiction, letters, songs, and poetry, but there are a few examples in fiction, such as Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go. “Congratulations! Today is your day. You're off to Great Places! You're off and away!”      Surprise! You’re a character now and it’s time to choose your point of view for the story you want to write. Will you address the audience directly? Or will you simply use he or she and keep yourself out of the story? In the words of Dr. Seuss, “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go...”

Willam Clark Gayton

Photo Credit: William Clark Gayton, “Stairway to Orion” 2017

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What Makes a Good Editor? Thoughts from Our Team

Lisa Bain, who has edited many New York magazines, once told Philip Gerard that every writer needs an editor, and every writer deserves a good editor. As writers, when we look back on our own published work and see obvious mistakes, it is easy to feel cheated in the editing process. Editing is a dialogue between writer and editor, and in this dialogue, there must be a mutual trust

Here at Chautauqua, one of our mottos is “first, do no harm;” as editors, we always want to suggest ways to make a piece better and give the author the opportunity to bring their creative vision to the page with clarity. We asked our staff what they think makes a good editor. Here are ten of the qualities we think most important:

1. Vision. The editor wants to help you carve out your own vision rather than impose their own directive. 2. Passion. They are as passionate about the writing as you are. They’re nonthreatening and can talk about the work like you’re in a book club. 3. Solutions. They offer solution-based editing, giving specifics and taking it from a craft standpoint rather than saying things like, “I love the content.” 4. Flexibility. They point out where they’re interested and offer solutions to issues, while allowing for options. They let you address the issues in your own voice.   5. Opportunities. They point out places of opportunity that you may not see. 6. Questions. They know how to ask really good questions so you can create your own solutions. 7. Insight. They provide a chance to think in new ways, and they help you learn how to be a better writer. They help you recognize what your piece lacks and fill in the gaps to get closer to perfection. 8. Conversation. They are able to talk about the work, and any changes it may need, as a living, breathing piece. There’s room for growth through good conversation. 9. Attention. They’re alert to the music of the language and understand the deliberate nature of the work. They take the time to read everything aloud to hear the content and language; they appreciate how you say it, not just that you said it. 10. Personality. They have a sense of humor and are personable—they remind you that there’s an actual person behind the edits. Writing is too personal to discuss it at a distance.

photo credit: Marissa Flanagan, 2017 via instagram

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On Literary Performance

As someone who has stood in front of large groups of people with shaky knees and a lump in my throat, I can say that your “performance voice” is your true voice, the one that reverberates within you, the one you hear when you’re thinking. Marcus Tullius Cicero said, “If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be afraid to say it.” Like the reliable narrator in any form of literature, it is just as important to be honest with yourself as it is to be honest with your audience.

Everybody’s voice is different. That’s what makes a performance unique and exciting. We all pull from different resources, and that’s what comprises our style, our tone, regardless of whether we are storytelling, performing spoken word poetry, or singing—it’s the foundation of our voices. Use them. Accept them, but don’t use them as a crutch. I’ve heard the term “finding your voice” many times, and it has a definitive truth to it. Having found your natural voice (and being comfortable with it) can make any performance a great one. Influences can (and should) be a wide, varied amalgamation. For me, it’s a tall cocktail of rock and heavy metal music, Wolfman Jack, and spoken word via the Beat Generation and the local Wilmington, NC group Mics Wide Open. Since I was raised Southern Baptist, there’s a tinge of brimstone preacher in there somewhere as well.

The power of the spoken word is immeasurable. It has rallied troops to victory and offered words of comfort to companions. Sung to the right tune, it can summon tears of sadness or joy, or command revelry. Even today, word-of-mouth is still the best advertising. Do not underestimate the power that rests deep in the folds of our vocal chords.

If there’s any advice that I can offer from my limited experience, it’s to let your passion overwhelm you; let it take the wheel for a while. You are your greatest asset. Fear or unease can quickly become excitement and adrenaline, and that is when you are at your best. If you should ever find yourself in the company of unsavory individuals who would rather shove you down than encourage you, take that adversity and burn it for fuel. Nothing is sweeter than silencing naysayers by individual merit alone.

A quick history recap: in Rome, notable orators spoke from the Rostra, a platform built out of trophies from the Battle of Astura—six massive rostrums, the bronze battering rams of warships, twelve feet long and weighing over a thousand pounds each. It was in war as it was speech; the ships rammed enemy warships, ripping open the hulls, sinking the vessels to the bottom of the Mediterranean. In Rome, the Rostra, and its many orators, faced the senate.

This is what a spoken performance is to me—a battering ram powered by man and wind, meant to puncture and resonate within our core. It need not be violent or political; but it must find its mark. It must be felt before it is heard. You must feel it before you give it sound.

–Kenneth Thies