North Korea, La Mission, and Found Plays -- just another week in San Francisco

Last night, fiction writer and Stanford lecturer Adam Johnson read at our second annual Gina Berriault award event at San Francisco State University's Poetry Center. He read to us from a novel in progress that is set in North Korea. One of the story's main characters was a loudspeaker that made us, as an audience, chant nationalist propaganda in English and Korean.


Johnson was, in a word, phenomenal.

Every now and then I have these glimpses of how other people live creatively. On Monday, while interning at KQED's Forum, I had the opportunity to meet Benjamin Bratt and his brother Peter, two talented men in the film industry whose latest work, "La Mission," tackles the thorny yet common theme of clashing cultures and ideologies in one of San Francisco's most fascinating districts. The younger Bratt, who is most known for his television work, spoke eloquently about this desire to channel both the artistry and complexity of a bridge between generations and ideologies. I was struck not so much by both Benjamin and Peter's obvious talent, but by the way they made it all so personal. They grew up here. They've heard stories. They've driven low-riders. They have a desire to reconnect with a population that they both identify with and systematically question.



One local story that I find particularly exciting is a new SF State project headed by Theatre Arts Professor Joel Schechter, who while researching a book on 1930s Yiddish plays, stumbled across a lost script outline originally devised by the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project in 1937. Schechter and a group of his graduate students then adapted the outline into a musical called Money, an aptly named piece both for its Great Depression origins and for its current economic relevance. Talk about the creative process - what must it be like to revive a story decades old, one that brings startling new meaning in the post-housing-crisis world.



I wonder what our country would look like, if we had a Federal Theatre Project now, if the government valued the arts in a way that it did the sciences or academia. Maybe then there'd be more out there about up-and-coming writers and artists whose work makes life digestible, even powerful.

My First Pet will be a Squirrel Named Nutkin

"I first read this book {the Charterhouse of Parma} in 1972. When I looked at the passages I had underlined and the notes I had written in the margins on that first reading, I laughed, a sad laugh at my youthful enthusiasm. But I still felt affection for the young man who had picked up this book then and who, to open his mind to a new world and to become a better person, had read it so eagerly. I preferred that optimistic and still half-formed young man, who thought he could see everything, to the reader I've become. So whenever I sat down to read the book, we were a crowd: my twenty-year-old self, my confident Stendhal, his heroes, and me. I liked this crowd."

--Orham Pamuk, "The Pleasures of Reading" (from the collection, Other Colors)

I'm finally in a writing class that excites me. It's a short story workshop with a professor whose work I admire. For our first assignment, we have been asked to recall the first book that had this same impact on us; that mixture of innocent pleasure and the pretense of understanding everything.

The pressure in any writing program is to give the impression that one is well-read, that the power of literary analysis came at a young age and has stuck indefinitely. However, I've never been one to read a writer simply because he or she has won prizes, or belongs to a certain "canon of literature." I've got the same zeal for Little Women or as I do the dozens of graphic novels that now sprawl across my floor. My relationship with reading has ebbed and flowed over the years; at times, books were a comfort, an escape; at others, they were homework, laborious assignments to be chopped into little pieces and over-analyzed in lengthy, pretentious papers. But every now and then I stumble across that one book that keeps me up at night, not because I'm dying to understand the author's use of perspective or the timing of the flashbacks, but because the story is one I want to know, memorize, and follow. Understanding itself is not as important; I admire the mystery of an author that doesn't explain, as frustrating as that may be.

But the book that had that impact...? I think of books from my childhood as pastoral paintings: beautiful, luscious things that made me want to go outside and explore. Beatrix Potter was my first obsession, hands down. I saved my allowance for weeks so I could buy the $42 illustrated story collection at the Discoveries store downtown. What was it about her work that captivated me? The stories were so short, so concise, so beautifully drawn, little parables that featured squirrels, rabbits, hedgehogs, birds.

I didn't care much for stories involving actual humans, or contemporary social issues; I was seven years old. I wanted to know where animals lived, and what they named their offspring. I wanted the creatures I saw outside to talk back to me, and they did in her books. Potter made me hungry to read; I wanted to know all about her, and the countryside where so many of her stories are set. I'll never forget the day I realized that my elementary school was founded in the same year she was born: 1866. At seven, eight, nine years old, squirrels and rabbits and hedgehogs were very much a part of my world, both factual and fictional. I wanted to read every word she wrote, and collected every version of her stories I could find. At one point, I even had a little Squirrel Nutkin bookshelf with a copy of Pierre Lapin and El Cuento de Pedro, el Conejo. It didn't matter that I didn't yet understand Spanish or French; the words were already emblazoned in my brain. It was the exercise of opening the pages, feeling the book's spine in my hands, and absorbing the story through color and emotion.



Are they stories I have returned to in time? To be honest, I haven't revisited my Potter collection in years. At one point I even bought a collection of the letters she wrote to her fans, for hopes of deciphering some writerly wisdom from her scrawling cursive. Going back now, I see her stories for their original purpose: creative ways to write letters. A carryover from her botanical illustrations, an expression of something quieter yet bigger than she was, a meditation on setting and character. Even now, writing these words, I feel like the asshole twentysomething that Pamuk describes, but that internal admiration and reverence for Potter--that hasn't gone away. In fact, it makes me wish I had one of those collections with me here in San Francisco, so I could curl up in bed and lose myself in the Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan, the scary one about the dog that thinks she will be served in a mouse pie. What the hell, right? But that's just what I loved about Potter and her stories: the inconceivable was normal, because all of her protagonists were animals, and yet they had all the same fears and desires that I did at seven, ten, twelve, sixteen, and now twenty-five. I don't want to be cooked in anybody's patty-pan, literal or metaphoric.

Beatrix Potter was just the first in a series of literary obsessions, many which echoed similar themes of animals, the countryside, an old-fashioned sensibility that struck a chord somehow. There was Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods series, Carol Ryrie Brink's Caddie Woodlawn, Sid Fleischman's Mr. Mysterious and Company (read that one five times, five summers in a row), Dick King-Smith's Babe and E.B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan. All lovely books written for children, all set long before I was born, many of them wonderfully illustrated. Nostalgia runs deep in these childhood classics, and yet somehow none of them possess that innate darkness that Beatrix Potter's tales did, that acknowledgment that with good fortune came the occasional random bad luck.

How wonderful it is to remember books that didn't require lengthy explanation, whose stories and character were left refreshingly alone because I simply trusted their existence on the page. Even now, the prospect of writing or (gulp) publishing a Potter-esque "tale" feels out of reach. The authenticity of intention, and the relationship between words and art--those are two things I have yet to learn.

Next time I'm at my parents' house, the first thing I'll do is grab my old $42 Potter anthology and go to the public park, nestle down in the grass, maybe under a family of squirrels, and remember what it means to truly read.

On Learning to Write

Clarity comes in disguise. I think.



I'd like to peel through the fog sometimes, to suck the very condensation out of the air as it creeps over Twin Peaks and into the city. I find myself in a writing program where I am reading, critiquing, editing, and editing; that is, doing everything except writing itself. I can't tell if what I'm feeling is more the mismatched alchemy of being back in school again after three years working, or maybe if I've somehow trained myself to instantly miss that which I no longer do. The comfort of routine is something so embedded in my bones that I don't know how else to shake it off. That, coupled with an inbred pressure to get a job, any job, to look ahead, to afford health insurance (that which shackles me and so many others to jobs we don't love), to be practical, pragmatic, responsible, efficient.

I want to learn how becoming a better writer will solve all that. And the thing is, that's a tall order. Expecting some mind-altering short story or career-launching novel to suddenly give birth in my brain is a little like hoping, no, demanding, our current president to solve all the world's problems. Now that he's got a Nobel Peace Prize, he can get down to the nitty-gritty and actually be that change he promised us last year. Right?

Ever since I quit my job to start grad school, I find myself waking up every weekday with a hummingbird's heartbeat. The first thought on my mind is to get shit done. This is motivating, yes, and sometimes crazy-making. My dad always jokes that if I were a dog, I'd be a sheepherder, because I always need a job to do. The irony is that good writing is the one task that is really difficult to instantly produce. Coffee--that I know how to make quickly. I can answer phones. I can improvise a short lesson. But how does one demand creativity of oneself? The demand itself can kill an idea.

One way I've tried to jumpstart my creative brain is to take on multiple side projects. Every Monday I volunteer at KALW 91.7, a radio station based out of Philip Burton High School here in San Francisco. Every week, a team of reporters and volunteers produce Crosscurrents, a half-hour segment devoted to culture, context and connection in the Bay Area. I've done a few short interviews, have learned to use the recorders and hope to learn ProTools in the coming weeks.

I've also started blogging for Eduify, a start-up company whose aim is to use social networking to help high school and college students improve their writing. Writing these posts forces me to focus in on exactly I want to know as a writer myself, and what resources out there will help me and others develop. So far I've written two Halloween-themed piece (one on zombie romantic comedies, the other on Edgar Allan Poe), and interviewed children's book author and poet April Halprin Wayland. I've since done two other interviews, and will be interviewing a few more writers in the coming weeks.

All this to say that sometimes the things we want most desperately are the things we must go out and create on our own. Which is why I've always wanted to be a writer, and why at the same time it is a very hard thing to be. I saw music critic and radio host Greg Kot speak this past Friday at the Booksmith. His new book, Ripped, covers the revolution that has occurred in the music industry in the past ten years. Kot's main message was that the best artists are the ones who love what they do so much that they see their art as something they simply must do. Music as oxygen. Words--the continuation of our fingers. That's the urgency I feel when I get up in the morning: the need to do, to be, to act, to write.

And who knows? One of these days, maybe all these actions will add up. Until then, I'll keep my eyes on the horizon.

In essence, I poop Frisbees.

This is my dog. And my father. And, somewhere in there, a Frisbee that aforementioned dog was supposed to deliver during Davis' Picnic Day festivities. Bear with me for a moment while I make a wild personal comparison:

I sympathize completely. I mean, Taj was under a lot of pressure. He was capable of achieving the task at hand, and had demonstrated his ability many times before. He had a task to do (i.e. retrieve Frisbee successfully as many times as possible in 60 seconds), he enjoyed doing it, and when it came down to it, the very concept of performing said task in front of such an expectant audience was so overwhelming that his body just took over.

So, grad school. You see the parallel, right? So much energy and effort placed into something so effervescent, so well-intended, with surprisingly high stakes. Such earnest attempts to manage time. And, as always, there is that sixty-second clock. Metaphorically, that is.

I'd like to crack open San Francisco as if it were an egg, watch as its life slips through my fingers. I want a character I could date, adopt, despise (not necessarily in that order). Basically, I'd like to be this:



Well, maybe without that crazy gleam in my eye, sans canines. I'd like to stand up a little taller, take a little more control of what stories my fingers digest and compute. Maybe what I need is a little less manic and a little more awkward-goofy:



Someone with flair, unafraid to look away as others point and giggle.

Although, who knows, that might already be happening:




Note: All dog photos should be credited to the lovely and talented Lyra Halprin.

On Maturity

Transitions. I forgot about those.

It is official now. I quit my job. I'm going to visit my best friend in Chile in about four days. I will be starting a graduate program in creative writing a week after I get back. There are moments when this feels like the best decision in the world, and moments when it feels like I just shed about ten years of maturity, lost and unsure of myself.

Last night, while at a dinner party in my parents' neighborhood, I met a young man who is doing an MFA at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, perhaps the most prestigious graduate program for writers in the country. I asked him what his experience has been like, and he asked me what my goals were. I sputtered like an old gas pipe and started to repeat the feeble little mantras that have been rolling around in my brain for the last three years.

"I want to write," I said first. "I mean, I want to be better. I want to know what I'm doing, and know what to do next. I want to know how to submit work properly. I like teaching. I could teach. I want to learn about publishing and editing. Journalism's cool too."

He looked at me blankly. I cringed. It sounded like I was reading the back of an educational leaflet and highlighting all the words in bold. That's kind of what this application experience has been like. But I've got to start somewhere, right? The reason I quit my job was the same reason I am going back to school: somehow I've learned how to do whatever work I am assigned, but I never manage to get around to what I feel is important. This sudden invitation to write what I want, and to work creatively, is so open that I find myself missing the confines of a 9-5 job.

And then I blinked, and he pushed a glass of red wine across the table to me, and I remembered where I was, and how these are the internal ramblings of a truly lucky person. It was just past midnight, and we were sitting at a long table in my neighbor Lizzy's dining room. Lizzy had just prepared a gourmet organic meal for twenty people. Almost all of the guests were kids I had grown up with, a band of tall, loud and happy siblings who have since scattered across the globe and come back. I watched them all in the dimmed white lights, many of them bearded, nearly all of them over six feet, all of them grinning. All of them, from my high-school-science-teacher brother to the Lizzy, the event-planner-turned-chef, had made their careers piece by piece. There's no one way to be. I knew that, and I know that, but sometimes it's easier to allow others the freedom you can't (or won't) allow yourself.

Freedom, eh? I guess freedom starts with a ticket to Santiago, Chile...

The joys of Engrish

I am helping produce an ESL newsletter for our school. Every Wednesday I teach a study club for an hour and a half, where I perch on tables in our fifth-floor lunch room with a cluster of would-be journalists to talk about writing. Each month we produce one issue for the following month.

The longer I work with international students, the bigger kick I get out of the way we all (not just ESL learners) communicate. Here's a sampling of our current headlines and stories:

DUSTIN: MMM, HIS STUDENTS, AND JUICY
(an "in-depth" interview with a teacher about March Mustache Madness, with a reference to a Dating Game play we performed a few weeks ago, in which a fellow male coworker dressed in drag as a girl named 'Juicy')
RUSSIA: WELCOME TO OUR 11 TIME ZONES
THE ART OF CORALINE
DR. NICK & HIS NURSE
(this is our version of "Dear Abby," as written by a Chinese kid who wants to be a psychologist, and his sarcastic Brazilian friend)

and, one of my personal favorites, a student comic which depicts a group of pigeons trying to speak English.

I forgot how much of a better human being I am when I get to do creative things. Our newsletter has been a big success, and I have learned so much by the sheer force of student enthusiasm. Not only that, but in between registering students in classes, grading level tests, organizing orientation materials, and answering the phone, I can also devote a healthy amount of time to a group project that actually students together, in English.

Writing has always been my indoor bird, the fierce and forgotten passion that keeps banging itself against the window. Maybe one day it will open. I want to write and be inspired and offer creative ideas. It's taken me a little while to realize that banging my head against my own windows--comparing myself to others, worrying about the rent, failing to find the time to write and read--is the act of creative expression itself. I'm so grateful to recognize that there's a window there in the first place.

In the meantime, I inadvertently pick up ESL grammatical mistakes, and get to show students exactly how expressive they are, and can be.