Category Archives: Writing

“Don’t be a writer. Be writing.” -William Faulkner

Ten Minutes to Tell a Story

Every year, Flagstaff Theatrikos hosts a 10-minute playwriting contest, and this year I intend to enter. I’ve submitted plays in past contests, but they all had one thing in common: there was too much in the plot to fit into ten minutes.

The rules are simple. There can be no more than three characters and the play should be no more than ten pages, and must not involve complicated scenery or props. Apart from the rules there are certain parameters that a ten-minute play should reside within. To move the plot, it is best to have a change in action every two to four minutes. It should be like a short story, with a beginning conflict, a middle crisis, and an ending resolution. Because other people volunteer to direct the plays, stage directions from the writer should be kept to a minimum.

On the surface, it’s just one more writing contest. At the same time, it’s different from short story contests because in this case, the audience watches the story unfold rather than imagines it unfolding. It’s an opportunity for a writer to pack a great deal of information into a thin wedge of time for a live audience. For me, writing plays has always been more difficult than prose. My plots have always been too ambitious, too embedded in history, and had characters too complex to develop in sixteen hundred words. A few years ago, one of my plays was about the Napoleonic Wars; another was about Irish independence from England.

Conversely, the few full-length plays I have written have always been too short, and involved plots and characters more suited for a sitcom. How can I pack conflict, crisis, and resolution into ten minutes and keep it important? Similarly, how can I make a simple story worth telling? The deadline is fast approaching; this will likely be my last opportunity to enter, and I’d like to be able to hone this particular skill, like packing five weeks worth of luggage into one carry-on bag. It’s a unique challenge, and the entire Watergate scandal simply won’t fit into a ten-minute play, no matter how hard I try.

Enough thoughtfulness and reflection. I have a play to write.

-JK

One Final Poem

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Today marks the end of National Poetry Month. Tomorrow, I will begin a short story I have been planning to write since March. For me, this month brought numerous rejections, one after another, including three short stories, several poems, and a complete poetry manuscript. Nevertheless, I have written twenty-two fresh poems, and to make things better, some of them are not too bad. To celebrate the end of April, I will post one more poem I wrote this month, entitled “Carpe Nix.” Enjoy.

Carpe Nix

There may be no good days to be useless,
but what use is today
when it snows three inches, when professors

grow pale over glasses of wine,

when coffee shops contract like muscles
as students file in one by one
preparing for public execution
sanctioned by professors
with sharp wine on their breath?

What good is today
over any other day
when we can’t make snow angels together
because there are convoluted superstructures
to deconstruct into postmodernity?

But I insist on today’s uselessness. I lean in
and whisper to you that you need not
sever your ear and mail it to the Dean
of Arts and Letters for inspection.

That can wait, but
snow angels dance only for so long
before curling up in blankets of mud,

just as you and I will curl up beneath six feet
of fattened worms and swollen soil.
Today it snows voraciously

and you spend three hours conducting surgery
on Albert Camus’s footnotes.

Let them soak for a while in Chardonnay.
The snow angels are calling to us,
announcing a need for dance partners
atop their moistened deathbeds.

Today is a fine day to be useless,
even though coffee-stained idols
must be composed for wine-drunk priests
holding the keys to our future.

But what good is a field of grass
beneath three inches of snow,

or a poet beneath a tombstone?
No more useful than warm fingers,
smooth hands, or sloping shoulders
if they freeze holding a pen
tucked indignantly over the nail-solid logic

of how useless it is to be useful for so long.

30 Days of Poetry

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Today in Flagstaff, it is likely to be another windy Spring day. One hundred trains will pass through the city and frustrate drivers on Beaver Street on their way to Macy’s. Today, people will drink their coffee, polish their motorcycles, steal away a quick hour of yoga, and hopefully realize that it is the start of National Poetry Month.

For me, poetry is already a fundamental property of my structure. It’s a religion for me. It’s a way to orient my life toward a deeper understanding of myself and my place in the world. I am the first to admit that I am not a great poet, and probably never will be. But most poets are not great. Most write privately for their own purpose, like prayer or meditation, a quiet ritual done in secret. Nevertheless, I strive to become a better poet because I believe it will improve myself as well as my relationship with the world around me. It may not be real magic, but it’s as close to magic as we can get. Stephen King once called good writing is a kind of telepathy. Poetry, to me, is no different.

I cannot become a better poet in a month, short of miracles or cheating. But I can improve my devotion to it. This month, I intend to read and write more. I hope to write at least one poem every day. I’ll be lucky if I get two or three good ones out of thirty, but by the start of May, I’ll have written two or three good poems. Statistically, that would be an improvement. I also hope to spread more poetry using this blog as a venue, certainly not ever day, but regularly enough that people discover a few new poems.

So I wish you a happy April and a good, long month of poetry.

A Letter From Ludwig van Beethoven

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On this day in 1827, Ludwig van Beethoven died at the age of 57. He completed nine symphonies, twelve concertos, numerous arrangements, sonatas, trios, and quartets. He was a prolific composer whose impact on the musical world and western art is immeasurable. He was young when be began to lose his hearing, and there was at least one distinct moment when he weighed the burden of his life against the value of his art. At that moment, Beethoven considered the possibility of ending his life.

In 1802, he moved to Heiligenstadt, a short distance from Vienna, to rest while facing the reality of his deafness. In October, he wrote a letter to his brothers Carl and Johann in which he expressed his grief and anguish over his loss of hearing, lamenting incidents when, for instance, a flute played but he could not hear it. Of these incidents he wrote the following: “Little more and I would have put an end to my life –only art it was withheld me, as it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce.” He was twenty-eight years old when he wrote this letter, but kept it secret. It was only made public after his death.

I have always been fascinated and inspired by his reasoning to refrain from ending his life, that the world demanded he keep composing. I think of it as a humble and intellectually sophisticated approach to his struggle; he could not hear music, but his community could, and he felt he had an obligation to contribute. His life could continue so long as his ability to compose remained, even if he could only imagine the music he produced, the applause he received, and the praises of his family.

Although I find it inspiring that he allowed his art to take precedence over his misery, I wonder about other artists, musicians, and writers who chose to commit suicide. Could Ernest Hemingway have written one more novel? Was Sylvia Plath depleted of poems? What more would Vincent van Gogh have painted had he held out a few more years? I cannot speculate about most artists, but I know that if Beethoven had chosen to end his life when he seems to have considered it most seriously, we would not have his third symphony Eroica, his D Major violin concerto, or my favorite of his late string quartets.

I know too many people who contemplate suicide regularly. They are my close friends, loved ones, and colleagues. Today, I think, it is easy to romanticize Beethoven’s life and call him a tortured artist. In truth, there is nothing romantic about considering suicide. Most, if not all, writers who suffer from depression or bipolar disorder will tell you that it’s detrimental to creativity. But despite the darkness that so many of us inhabit, I know many people for whom art is the only sustenance. I know poets, musicians, painters, and writers who contemplate suicide but feel joy and meaning in their creative outlets. For them, art is a necessity during the worst periods of depression, no matter how difficult creativity can become during those periods.

I don’t know if we can determine that Beethoven suffered depression by current medical standards, but I think more honestly we can say that he found himself questioning the value of life and decided that there existed something more important than, and yet at the same time dependent upon, his life. I think that this is a great paradox for artists: what sustains the artist is a product of the artist’s own efforts. It is a positive cycle. I know that when life no longer feels worth living, I can take comfort in Beethoven’s decision, and like him I can treat my life like the rough draft of a magnum opus.

There Are Heroes and There’s Pete Seeger

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This week, Pete Seeger passed away at the age of 94. If you are not familiar with him or his work, he was a folk singer who popularized songs like “This Land is Your Land” and “If I Had a Hammer.” He also composed controversial songs such as “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” a veiled criticism of the Vietnam War. He was a musician, activist, for a while a communist, and as far as I’m concerned he was a hero. He did not have powers beyond his voice; he could not fly or turn invisible, and he did not hide his identity. Instead, he openly challenged what he viewed as wrong. He was a public figure, not private martyr, as so many heroes are portrayed in our TV and movies today.

Unlike many of our fictional heroes, he was not a cyborg, a CIA-trained assassin, or a mutant from a lab accident. He did not use his fame or wealth to fly around cities beating people up. Instead, he relied on his banjo and his voice to make the world a better place. People like Pete make me wish that our media would create more realistic heroes, activists who use music, art, humor, and speech to save the world, rather than fists, guns, bombs, and money. Such depictions, I think, expose a collective fantasy in which a stranger solves our problems with simple violence. Pete, along with heroes like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rigoberta Menchú, saw peaceful activism as the only solution. In stark contrast, the people we often describe as villains are murderers and dictators, those who resort to brutality and violence to bend the world to their will.

I wish we could see more fictional heroes portrayed accurately. I would like to see people use books as weapons. I would like to see heroes replace guns with speeches and super strength with musical talent. Pete Seeger was a hero, and he challenged the world’s villains with nothing more than a few songs and a little determination. If we can learn anything from him, it’s that truly heroic actions are for the commoner, for you and me and everybody else with a little talent and a lot of ambition. We do not need to have been born on Krypton to save the world when traveling with a banjo on our knee will suffice.

So rest in peace, Pete Seeger. You left us with a brighter world than the one you knew.

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Why a Liberal Education? Your Guess is as Good as Mine

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I study English, poetry and fiction writing, literature, twentieth century history, the Western and Central Asia, colonialism, post-colonialism, feminism (waves 1-3), war, culture, comparative religion, social movements, world religions, and philosophy. I spend my time reading, then writing about what I read, and then reading what people wrote about what I wrote about what I read. Why do I do it? Because I have no choice. I am compelled to study the world as it is today by studying the way it was. I read and write fiction and poetry as a way to make sense of the world, only to find that I am still as ignorant. I pore over Persian poetry, Soviet policy records, and Twitter feeds from Tahrir Square, even when I’m not required to for a class, and I still have no answers.

That’s what it feels like to study in the liberal arts. You want answers to questions, but the only answers you find lead to more questions. You are taught to question all answers. There are no answers. For that matter, there are no questions. But that is an answer, so it must be wrong. Right?

Keene Short

Writing \ Research \ Photography