The Lure of Lyrics

I'll be teaching this songwriting workshop in Basel on Saturday, March 17, as part of the BScene Festival's new workshops.

The Lure of Lyrics: A Songwriting Workshop 
Workshop 
A workshop on lyrics and songwriting from a "creative writing" perspective. (In English)

When
17. March, 10 am - 4 pm (with lunch)

Where
To be announced

For whom?
Songwriters, Lyricists, Rappers, Poets, Writers of all kinds and every age. A group of six to twelve participants is hoped for.

Register by March 9 at:
workshops@bscene.ch

Foe

''But seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose its particularity. All shipwrecks become the same shipwreck, all castaways the same castaway, sunburnt, lonely, clad in the skins of the beasts he has slain. The truth that makes your story yours alone, that sets you apart from the old mariner by the fireside spinning yarns of sea-monsters and mermaids, resides in a thousand touches which today may seem of no importance, such as: when you made your needle (the needle you store in your belt), by what means did you pierce the eye? When you sewed your hat, what did you use for thread? Touches like these will one day persuade your countrymen that it is all true, every word, there was indeed once an island in the middle of the ocean where the wind blew and the gulls cried from the cliffs and a man named Cruso paced about in his apeskin clothes, scanning the horizon for sail."

I have just reread J. M. Coetzee's Foe for the first time since I wrote my final undergraduate paper on it back in 1987, right when the novel was published. I had always remembered it as a powerful book, and in the meantime I have become a enthusiastic reader of Coetzee, but still, I was taken aback by just how powerful a book it is. I should not have been surprised to discover that JMC writes great books, but just how great they are never ceases to amaze me.

Here, the castaway Susan Barton is speaking to Robinson Cruso; she arrived as a new castaway on "his" island many years after he first landed on it with Friday (who, in this book, is mute because he had his tongue cut out).

Or rather, Susan Barton, having returned to England with Friday (Cruso died on the return voyage), has written a sketch of her experiences for one Daniel Foe, whom she has asked to write a book about her (and not about Cruso and Friday alone). In that sketch, she includes this comment she made to Cruso, who was completely uninterested in producing any sort of "version" of his story (whether oral or written), and who did not want to return to England.

The "thousand touches" of everyday life are necessary to make a story (whether the adventure story of a castaway, in this case, or the story of a disillusioned professor who loses his job because of an affair with a student, as in Coetzee's Disgrace, or the story of a young wizard at a wizarding school) into an individual story, rather than an archetypal one.

It almost reads like advice in a good workshop for beginning or intermediate writers: stop treating writing as an attempt to produce archetypes, and focus instead on the details that both ground and undermine the archetypal elements of the stories you want to tell.

Or in the language of my post on Arthur Ransome's Great Northern?, you cannot get away with writing that is just in your "favorite style"; you have to ground that style in "the simple dreadful truth" — in the physicality of the experience that renders it individual, precise, and perceptible for others who have not shared that experience (be it real or imagined).

Workshop in Alicante with Matthew Sweeney

Matthew Sweeney, who was here in Basel a few weeks ago for a workshop with students and another workshop with Thin Raft (photo), just sent me the note below about a workshop in Spain in June. Before I get to his note, just let me say that we had a great time with Matthew; he gives good workshop. (A snowclone!)

Here's what Matthew wrote to me:

I'm tutoring a course next month in Spain, June 21st to 28th. Booking numbers are low, and the organiser, Christopher North, has asked me to help get more people.

The week is part of a regular series, recommended by the Poetry School, and advertised in key publications, such as Poetry London. The setting is a village, Relleu, in the mountains near Alicante, and the house itself, Almassera Vella, is large and beautiful, with a well-stocked library, and a swimming pool. It was once Relleu's original olive press. The cuisine for the week is Mediterranean, with good Spanish wine.

This course in June is different because it offers an opportunity to go twice to Alicante while the Fiesta is happening, with its fireworks and fascinating hogeuras figures. Because of this additional feature, the course is a little more expensive than other courses (£575 all inclusive) but I'm sure Christopher will offer a slightly reduced price to late bookers. His email address is christopher@oldolivepress.com and the telephone number is 0034 966 856003.

Thrill Me

Reginald Shepherd was kind enough to send me his essay on "Some Issues in the Teaching of Creative Writing," which he has been quoting from on his blog recently. One passage that he did not put on his blog struck me (I hope he does not mind my quoting it here): "When I read a poem, by a student, in a literary journal, in a collection of poems by a single author, or in an anthology, I want to enjoy the poem, to immerse myself in the poem’s world."

This reminded me of my time at the Spoleto Writers' Workshop (summer 1998). On our last full day in Spoleto, the writers went to the master class of the Spoleto workshop on bel canto singing, which we had been invited to observe.

In the singing workshop, each singer would sing an aria or a song which he or she had prepared, then the teachers (Judith Coen for the women, Bob Shewan for the men) would comment on the singing and work with the singer for a while. They would grab the singer's face in mid-song; they would have them sing while flapping their arms like birds; once, Bob even made faces at a singer in the middle of his aria! (We couldn't actually see Bob's face because his back was to us and his face was literally in the singer's face.) What was most striking to me was the metaphorical meaning of all this for writers who had just been workshopping for ten days: the workshop leaders had been doing the same to us the whole time — but the writers (including myself) tended to respond differently to our teachers' proddings than the singers did. If they seemed to take it all in a fairly professional way, we would often take it all in a very emotional way, as if the teachers' criticisms were personal. As Judith Coen said to one of the singers: "I'm pushing you so hard because I want you to thrill me."

I have told that story to students over and over again in the past nine years: if I criticize their writing (whether creative or scholarly), it is because I want them to thrill me.

Reginald's essay also reminded me of another anecdote. Reginald wrote: "One student rather disarmingly admitted during a class discussion of Shakespeare’s sonnets that 'I can understand this when I work at it, but I don’t like having to work.'" I had a similar disarming remark once: while I was discussing essay writing with students (quite advanced ones), one of them said, "So what you are saying is that you want us to think about we write." Bingo.