I took a Hamline University summer writing workshop from Robert Olen Butler in the summer of two-thousand-four. I was very excited about the opportunity to be in a class taught by such a great writer. I devoured Olen Butler’s Pulitzer Prize winning short story collection, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain. It remains one of my favorites.
Except for two writers among us, Olen Butler disliked what we wrote. He was merciless. He almost exclusively used his own work and practice to explain how to correct our many flaws. Many of us were finishing the last stages of MFA Degrees at the time. Students were furious.
Toward the end of the week, we all got an individual, Ten Minutes with the Author. I remember almost everything Olen Butler told me then, and I would be way ahead of myself had I followed his outline: 1) Do your writing first thing every morning, as soon as you wake up. 2) Have a writing place that is used for nothing else. 3) Don’t do anything else besides your creative writing on the computer you use for that purpose. 4) Go ahead and get your MFA if you want. But remember, you’re probably going to have to take time to recover from it later.
I once met a woman about my age who had recently published her first novel. The novel took her ten years to write. I said, “Oh no! I don’t have that kind of time left to spend on a novel.” I think that might have been ten years ago. I’m still plugging away on the first draft of my novel. I’m sorry the poems dried up. I enjoy writing my blog every week. I’ve spent years writing volumes on paper, stored in boxes: poems, essays, failed novels I am now sifting through and mostly shredding. What were those funny things the kids said? How did the dog’s fur feel? What was life like for my mother and my father on that mountain back in 1945?
Here’s a question: A couple of years ago on PBS Masterpiece, I watched what I considered to be a horrifying story, Breathless. A friend told me that if that story effected me that much, then I needed to figure out why. It took me a long time, but I finally solved the puzzle. The script included one terrifying line, “As far as I can tell, there is really never anything but now.”
Art - As I See It 