The Academy Awards

The 84th Academy Awards aired Sunday night.  If you missed it, well, I did too.  I don't have a TV, so I couldn't watch it in real time, but I do have a computer, so I was able to catch some stuff the next day.

Let me first say that I enjoy movies both as a form of entertainment and as a form of art.  Not that those are mutually exclusive.  Some may say that movies and television have been the death of reading.  I don't know if I'd go that far, but there's probably some truth to it.

I didn't get into the Harry Potter movies until...I think it was the fifth movie.  I watched that one in the theater, and now I own all the DVDs.  Sunny and I watch them all at Christmas time, because to us they're Christmas movies.  Most of them came out around Christmas, they have Christmas scenes, and most importantly, they are fantastic stories.  Fantastic stories really make the best Christmas movies.

It wasn't until this last Christmas that I started reading the books.  Sunny bought them all for me for my birthday, which is right after Christmas (now you know and you have no excuse for not getting me a gift) so I finally started reading them.  I'm on book five right now.

While I'm one of the first people to criticize the film industry for its lack of creativity (How quickly did they remake Spiderman and The Hulk, both of which were adaptations of comic books to begin with?), I do appreciate seeing film adaptations of books that I've read.  And now, I'm learning to appreciate reading the books after having seen the films.  There's so much more story in the books.

For the fun of it, let's look at all the Oscar nominees for Best Picture and see how many were based on books:

     Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close written by Jonathan Safran Foer.
     The Descendants written by Kaui Hart Hemmings.
     The Help written by Kathryn Stockett.
     Hugo, aka The Invention of Hugo Cabret, written & illustrated by Brian Selznick.
     Moneyball written by Michael Lewis.
     War Horse written by Michael Morpurgo.
          Actually, the movie was based both on the book and the play written by Nick Stafford,
          which was based on the book.

Midnight in Paris, The Tree of Life and The Artist (the winner) were original.

When I was a kid, I would get so annoyed when film adaptations of books I'd read deviated even marginally from the original story.  Silly me.  I've now come to appreciate how different media can tell similar stories in different ways.  I'm really looking forward to seeing The Hunger Games.  Although I'm certain a film won't be able to capture the intricacies and nuances that are present in the book, it may be able to add something new.

I enjoy seeing film adaptations of books.  Sometimes I've read the books before seeing the film, and sometimes seeing the film makes me want to read the book.  So no judgment that two-thirds of the Best Picture nominees were adapted from books.

Now if you're going to create a movie based on a theme park ride (Pirates of the Caribbean) or a board game (Battleship), that's creativity.  Good luck.

On "Divided"

The universe, a kind of “whole,” is divided into gravitationally bound systems—galaxies of stars, stellar remnants, gas and dust and dare I say dark matter. We divide solar systems into planets. We divide the globe horizontally and vertically by lines of latitude and longitude. Planet Earth is divided by bodies of water into continents, which are further divided into countries, which are divided into regions, states, cities, villages, neighborhoods, houses (which are divided into rooms—some families under the same roof are divided). The pages of the Rand McNally you might keep under the passenger's seat of your car are divided by the Interstate Highway System, roadways and waterways like strings of lights draped from one city to another, each city a little bulb, lit up, or not.

The divisions on a compass rose orient us: north, south, east, and west.

            “When possible, make a U-turn,” the GPS lady says when we veer off course.

            My address: The Universe, Milky Way, Earth, North America, the United (not “divided”) States, Idaho, Moscow (I don't yet know you well enough to say exactly, but I could).

            Because of division, or in spite of it, there is no such thing as a permanent address, however—I am always moving (we are all transient). Relative to the sun, I am moving at approximately 30 kilometers per second; for Earth, as you learned in elementary school, back when you didn't consider “division” beyond obeli on wide-ruled notebook paper or the question of enough cupcakes for everyone to have two, is in orbit around the sun. Division likewise animates Earth's crust in the form of tectonic plates that diverge and converge and transform (massive rafts in motion) as the molten matter we tread upon changes beneath our relatively tiny feet. We keep walking.

            We divide time: eras, centuries, decades, years, days, even down to the the tick of a clock, the tock of that watch upon your wrist or the one that was your grandpa's hidden in your pocket.

            The body is divided into systems (you know them), all of which must function in sync to keep the heart beating, the eyes open, the feet stepping—until that final breath, that is (a great gasp), divides the living from the dead. Some say there is an afterlife, however. Some say there is rebirth, too: the Ouroborus eats its own tail. But for better or worse, as cognitive beings, depending on our system of belief, many of us operate under the assumption of binary divisions, or we challenge them as such: life/death, woman/man, happiness/sadness, external/internal, creation/destruction. Through division, we order chaos. We grid things. We keep time ticking in pockets. We frame our days on walls. To divide a batch of cupcakes evenly, sometimes we have to split them in half—there are beautiful little acts of violence like that we live by.

            Division creates boundaries and chasms (canyons grand). Sometimes these boundaries warn against trespassing: KEEP OUT. Sometimes we straddle or transgress them anyway. We hop a fence. Is there any escape from division and the boundaries it forms?

            I don't know. But even tectonic plates, responsible for the disasters we fear, are artistic—mountain-makers. Tectonic, from tectonicus, pertains to “building.”

            Perhaps the act of art is possible because of the / or the ÷. As artists, we hop some fences, or we knock them down, or we raise them up again as best we can. “Can you hear me now?” we sing, hammers swinging.

            5x5 derives its name from the ratio of signal-to-noise, or S/N, a kind of division that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise or static. 5x5 is the best possible ratio for carrying a voice through space. Thus, in terms of radio transmission, 5x5 translates to the answer all artists hope to hear: “I can...perfectly.”

            The artists in our upcoming issue are as clear as what croons from your car stereo on a good day (or when you're not driving through tunnels), and maybe even clearer. There are no “tunnels” here, no static. Stay tuned!

            Over and Out (for now)—

             S.J. Dunning

On Sound and Vision: The Soundtrack of Your Writing

As readers, we are often stunned by the prose of the page, but how many of us think about the author toiling away to get their words in front of us?

Writers do.

I sometimes sit in front of a poem, or sentence dazzled.  I think, "How could a writer do this?"  I then begin to imagine him or her in the process of composing the work of art.  Ultimately, this means that I am imagining myself writing it as well.  How could I write something this good?

When in my cups (the self-pity cups) I imagine that the writer I so admire is always brilliant and has completed the entire novel on the first draft.  We all know this isn't true, if for no other reason than editors love to edit.

Imagining other writers, helps me to consider my own writing practice.  A large part of that practice for me lately, has been listening to music.

I know that many writers compose a book or piece of work with a set of songs to help them "get into the mood."  For myself, I find words with music distract me.  I have a hard time considering the next line of a poem is "Baby Baby Baby noooo"drifts through my stereo speakers.  Sometimes the words even leak out onto the page.  The horror of find upon rereading my new draft, "The gate slapped shut, an ultimatum / a gunshot.  The car that gunned out of the driveway / the radio in the room playing on / as if nothing was going on at all/ and I was like baby baby baby ooooh."

For this very reason, I tend to listen to the classical NPR station while writing or reading.  Sometimes if I leave the radio on another channel, I will find myself composing and then yelling at the radio: SHUT UP!  When trying to summon up feelings from the past, I might play a song I associate with that period in my life or even a whole album.  I wrote an entire essay about teenage angst and The Cure's album Disintegration. http://kinemapoetics.blogspot.com/2011/07/jory-mickelson-on-cures-disintegration.html

My question for you this week is what kind of background noise fills your writing?  Is it the chatter of people in a busy cafe?  Is it the sound of your children fighting or playing Wii?  Do you impose absolute silence while you compose?

What is the soundtrack of your own writing life?

Divided

The deadline for our Divided themed issue has passed, and (I know I say this every time, but it's true every time) we're really excited about this issue.  We've got an amazing comic from Nick Straight that's going to be in it.  Get a taste of what's coming by checking out his work at his blog, Drawmit!

The rest of the issue is still in the works, but with the number of submissions we've gotten, and what we've read so far, it's going to be another great issue.  If you missed the deadline for Divided, the next theme is Backwards, and very soon we'll be accepting submissions for the theme after that, which we've yet to choose.

Stay tuned everyone.  2012 is going to be an exciting year.

Six Questions

My goodness, so much is happening right now. First I'd like to welcome Sonya Dunning to our team. We're very excited to have her as our new Nonfiction Editor. Jory Mickelson has switched his responsibilities from Nonfiction Editor to Poetry Editor, and, sadly, Mishon Wooldridge has resigned to focus on other things. So, a warm welcome to Sonya and a farewell to Mishon.

As for the Six Questions the title of this post refers to: Jim Harrington emailed me a couple of months ago now about participating in his blog. I'm happy to be a part of it. Jim contacts publishers and editors to ask them six questions, and then he posts the answers on his blog. He's gotten a lot of responses. This is great for all you overachievers (if you're reading this blog, then you probably fit this category) who want the inside scoop into what will get you published.

It's great for publishers too, because we get to be very specific about what we want to see. Hopefully it means receiving more submissions that meet our guidelines.

Today happens to be the very day that Jim posted the six questions I answered for him. Check it out here.

Since answering Jim's questions, I received an email from an artist who brought up a concern, and I'd like to address it here. Let's call this the seventh question:

I have a comment to make: Although I am technically a "youth writer", I don't appreciate the fact that writers who are younger have to be separated out in a distinct youth section. I think it's degrading to view us on a separate scale and our work should stand for itself. If it flies, it flies. If it doesn't, it doesn't.

Here's how I responded:

Thank you for voicing your concern. We are constantly trying to find ways to improve, and your thoughts are important to us.

Here's why we separate youth art from everyone else: If we believed that, generally speaking, high school students could write/create art on the same playing field as adults, we would also have to believe that college and MFA programs didn't teach anyone anything. We don't believe that. So it stands to reason that someone who has earned an MFA is going to be better at writing a great, concise story. To say that high school students can write just as well as graduate school professors is degrading to the education system as a whole and everyone involved in it.  This doesn't mean that an individual high school student can't write an outstanding piece; we just have to set up our system for everyone, not individuals.

And there's more: I like to believe that we receive submissions from high school students who haven't even shown their work to their friends and family. That they've done some writing, and they're proud of it, but they don't want to show it to anyone else until they know that it's good. Those people aren't getting advice from their peers as to how they can improve the piece for publication.  So they're at a bit of a disadvantage, because as you probably know, getting input from other artists is a great way (I'd say the best way) to improve your art. Although these kids don't have this advantage, I want to let them know that their work is good. Maybe all they need is to get something published and then they'll know that it's safe to share it with others. We can provide that anonymous feedback. But, without telling us that they're too young to have gone to college and gotten feedback from other college students and professors, we don't know why the story isn't written as well as Sherman Alexie can write. I'd say it's unfair to put that teenager's work up against Sherman Alexie without giving some sort of advantage. 

And more: We just don't get very many high school submissions right now. We're trying to get more, and one way of doing that is by publishing youth art and advertising that it is in fact youth art. Hopefully we'll get more in the future. Right now we get close to 500 submissions in five different categories. Probably ten to twenty of those are youth. What I've discovered in the three years that I've been doing this is that the more submissions we receive, the more good submissions we receive. If we were receiving 250 youth submissions and 250 submissions from everyone else, I have no doubt that we'd accept a youth piece without having to give the advantage of telling us that they're youth.

And finally: the work does still have to be good enough. We don't simply publish a youth piece just because it's written by a high schooler. This issue is testament to that. We're publishing one youth visual arts piece. The poetry and fiction wasn't up to par because it just wasn't written well enough, or it didn't fit the theme as we wanted it to, or, in the case of both of the fiction pieces I had to reject, it was too explicitly sexual. We do tailor our magazine to high school students, among other demographics, so we do have to be mindful of sexuality in stories.

I hope I've assuaged your concerns somewhat. You can see that I've put a lot of thought into this, and your concern has been one of mine as well. I still think that the benefits outweigh the cost. I hope you agree, but if you don't, I'd love to hear more about what you think.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.  All of you.  I'd also love to read your submissions.  The deadline for the Divided themed issue is only two days away!

About This Blogger

As 5x5's new nonfiction editor, I want to use this blog post as an opportunity to introduce myself and maybe say a thing or two about the kind of nonfiction I “practice,” and the kind of nonfiction (or literature in general) I admire. But first, a confession. I have never been a blogger before, nor have I ever been the editor of anything (I'm not counting editing my own writing or marking student papers). And as it turns out, I am not as technologically savvy as I'd thought I was—I've been feeling a bit like a granny off the grid (not to generalize grannys or off-the-gridders) as I test the waters of 5x5's submission manager, and email, and now this blogspot (each site, of course, requiring a different user name and password, or so it seems). I would also like to clarify that I never used to use this many parentheses, though I think that development is not too relevant here. At any rate, I am not complaining. I am, in fact, very happy to have been invited to join my fellow 5x5 editors, an opportunity that kind of just fell in my lap, and when it did, I picked it up, and I said, “Heck, yeah.” If I had been channeling my soon-to-be brother-in-law, I would have said, “I don't see why not!,” which is the philosophy by which he has recently been living. Jory, 5x5's Poetry Editor, is the one who tossed the opportunity my way. Thank you, Jory.

Onto other matters...

I'm not very good at introducing my writer/editor-self, which is to say, I am still figuring out what my practice entails, and I still find it hard to pinpoint with any exactitude the KIND of literature I like to read. But I think the two questions are related (what I write and what I read). I want to borrow some words from Barry Lopez, whose collection of essays, About This Life, I devoured over X-MAS vacation, telling my fiance (who became my fiance on Christmas Day) that I think Lopez is a kindred spirit, and why didn't I know about him until now?!? Here is what Lopez says about his own goals in the introductory pages to About This Life: “If I were asked what I want to accomplish as a writer, I would say it's to contribute to a literature of hope..I want to help create a body of stories in which men and women can discover trustworthy patterns.” What has stayed with me most about this statement is “a literature of hope.” What does Lopez mean? I used to think all nonfiction had to be really sad. I thought it was supposed to be serious and full of lament and I almost wished my life was a little more tragic so that I could increase that seriousness and lament to a higher decibel (truthfully). I am not sure where I got that idea. I do think the stories I love most (both those I love to write and those I love to read)—and by story, I am meaning essay, too, and memoir—do often stem from a place of sadness, or hopelessness, but I think they are ultimately concerned with matters of hope, with characters who persevere in the face of disasters, both large and small, characters who have courage to acknowledge the unknown, to speak up, even when it seems like there's no point. I like to write and read about survival (physical, psychological, emotional), which, in the face of a given disaster, is oftentimes impossible WITHOUT the presence of hope. I don't know if that's what Lopez means, but that is what has been on my mind as I work on a memoir concerned with concepts such as family, home, the American Dream, loss, nostalgia, foreclosure. Hope is a life-force. Hope can be redefined (and sometimes it ought to be). And none of this is to say that hope is always hopeful or the opposite of "sad." I think hope can be sad. Sometimes a little hope is the saddest thing in the world, because sometimes hope is hopeless but we are inclined to hope anyway. If asked why I write, or why I love literature (and maybe nonfiction in particular), I would say it's because within the open arms of literature I am encouraged (more so than in any other “place”) to explore who I am and how I became who I am and whether I want to keep being who I am. Particular to my writer/editor-self goals, I suppose, is the desire to offer that place to readers as it has been offered to me--to lead them through a little door they maybe didn't know was there, or that they haven't opened in a while, or ever, and take their coat, and invite them to stay awhile, out of the wind. 

In closing, I want to share with you the tips Lopez once offered a man on a plane who asked him what advice he should give his fifteen-year-old daughter, an aspiring writer:

• “Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she's reading trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language.”
• “If she wishes to write, she will have to become someone...if her prose doesn't come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in no great need. Help her discover what she means.”
• “Tell [her] to...“separate herself from the familiar...when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar...[to] give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things.”

Over the next couple weeks, you might consider these tips in terms of how they apply to your own writing and/or reading practices. Have you recently had to defend your choice in reading materials? Were you able to stick up for yourself in that situation? What DO you believe? What do you REALLY mean, or what is the story REALLY about (rarely is the first answer the true answer...keep digging)? Finally, when is the last time you “got out of town,” so to speak? How might you step outside yourself, or outside the familiar, and see your project with a fresh set of eyes?

A New Year for 5x5

I suppose you have been wondering where we've been.  We do too.  It is a new year and so here is to a new resolution to keep this blog up.  There are several changes going on at 5x5 and we encourage you to visit here and our website regularly to keep abreast of all that is happening.

1)  We finally attained nonprofit status!  Thanks to several generous donations, we have cleared the final hoop.

2)  We said goodbye to Mishon Wooldridge, our Poetry Editor for the past two years.  Thanks for your hard work.  You will be missed.

3)  We said hello to Sonya J. Dunning, our new Nonfiction Editor!  She is one hell of a writer and brings with her a sharp eye for good writing and a growing list of publications.

These are exciting times for us here at 5x5 and we hope that you will stick with us.

I had meant to talk about writing.  Recently, I entered a 30 Day Poetry Challenge with my friends.  Rather than make New Year's resolutions that always end somewhere in February (or earlier), I committed myself to 30 days of writing every single day.

So far, this has been a success.  I hated sitting down every day to hammer out some new material, but I suppose this is the point of writing every day--to generate new material.  Today marks the half way point and so far, I have been successful.  It is humbling to realize just how much work writing is.  I write every day no matter how I am feeling.

If I am sick, I write.
If I am really busy, I write.
If I am depressed, I write.
If I have nothing better to do, I write.
If I have a deadline for something else, I write.
If I don't want to miss the next episode of Dowton Abbey, I write before or after the show.

I have not been writing at a fixed time every day as my schedule is slightly different each day of the week depending on work, teaching, classes and events.  Sometimes I spend no more than twenty minutes writing.  Other times, I come back to the piece again and again throughout the day.

I used to think that I could only write when I was inspired or that if I wrote every day it would be crap.  The key for me during the past fifteen days is to sit down and actually do the work.  Something will get put on the page.  I have to suspend my judgement and just let myself write.

I encourage each of you readers to set your own writing challenge this year.  Thirty days seem too daunting?  How about 15 days?  How about one week, seven whole days of writing?  Set your goals and set your marks!  I hope some of you will share with us what your own writing challenge was like.

Best wishes in the New Year,
Jory M. Mickelson
Poetry Editor, 5x5