It is with incredible gratitude that I share the news that last November American Short Fiction awarded me the Gold Star for Teaching and Mentorship. If you are not familiar with this organization, they are one of the top-notch literary magazines in the country, known for their discerning taste for engaging fiction.
It is an incredible honor to be recognized by them, and although I am sharing this news a little belatedly, I couldn't be more proud to be acknowledged for the self I try to bring to my teaching and community-building.
More on this soon!
In the meantime, here's a short piece I wrote for ASF: https://americanshortfiction.org/the-invisible-string/americanshortfiction.org/the-invisible-string/

I’m starting to think that some of our first drafts mis-steps, such as an over use of adverbs or passive sentence construction, are actually part of the imaginative process. Perhaps when we are imagining our creative worlds, no matter the genre, we have to rely on the small things that might inhibit the strength and power of our final drafts. Maybe we need to use the words “just,” “began” and “moment” because our creative development requires us to do so.
 
Consider this: you are at the writing desk and you’re asking yourself to conjure up the exact language to name an experience. The distance between what you want to articulate and what you able to articulate in this moment is grand—if we think about it too much, it overwhelms. You're lost in the forest and unsure of the way.
 
So, what do we do? We take tentative phrasing steps as we seek to give birth to our ideas, to naming the memory, to finding the image that conveys the emotion we are exploring. And these steps often fall into the rhetorical moves that ultimately, in a final draft, will most likely need to be edited out. But, we don’t have the ability to recognize such moves in the drafting process—BECAUSE WE NEED THEM to deliver on our ideas. We show ourselves the path by making mis-steps.
 
I recommend we embrace the possible requirement of such moves – and know that later down the writing road, we will come back and do a search for those sneaky little words that worm their way into our work. And we might even be a little grateful for how they’ve helped us to get to this point in the draft.
 
This blog post from 2013 explores how to “catch” such errors, “On High Alert For Rhetorical Tics”
 
One such move we might do is something called “filtering” – and I think it’s might be necessary as we imagine a character in a situation: we are envisioning a character in a situation, and to do so with clarity and precision, we often go overboard in relating the scene through that character. Here’s an example of before and after:
 

1. Mikayla walked into the dark room. She smelled gasoline, and she heard a skittering in the far corner. She began to walk forward, each of her steps seemingly so loud. She felt a gust of cold air against her skin. She heard voices down the corridor. To her, they sounded like women.

 

1. Mikayla walked into the dark room. The taste and smell of gasoline filled the air. A small animal skittered in the far corner. Her steps were so loud in this dusty space. A draft of cold air gusted, rattling the drawn blinds. Voices carried from down the corridor. A group of women.

 
I hope you can see and feel the difference between these passages—to me, the second is more immediate, engaging, atmospheric. The second passage allows me to enter into the character’s experience more fully with her – rather than through her.
 
But, I need that first paragraph in order to hone the second. So, rather than be embarrassed or annoyed with the awkward, amateurish nature of the first passage – I’m grateful that it helped me imagine a scene, that it provided the necessary entry point into the material. I'm pleased I'm in the forest, moving toward the light, one step at a time.
 
 
 

Last May, I graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with a MFA in Creative Nonfiction. This is a talk I gave about two memoirs I studied to help me write my own:

https://vimeopro.com/iaiamfa/mfagraduates2016

This blog post is a summary of a panel I attended last January for my MFA in nonfiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts. This presentation dove into the subject of writing about one’s own life for both fiction and nonfiction. The audience was deeply encouraged to put the concern of how people will receive and respond to the work aside during the first draft. If we worry about the material when it will be out in the larger world, we are not giving the story its best chance. Melissa Febos emphasized we need to not censor our work in the process of creating it. For her, she works to find her biggest, most uncomfortable questions and then tries to write her way to those answers. We’ll have time later to consider what should stay in and what should come out. Melissa added that, “Chases out the things I have been hiding from in my mind.” Elissa Washuta opened with this great nugget: in the two different process of writing and publication, we will change the work greatly and there is enough time for us to consider what should stay in the work and what should not.
Then a discussion followed about how each writer creates a complicated and compelling persona/narrator on the page. It is important to remember that we will never be able to represent our full selves on the page. Melissa put it this way: (and my, how helpful these words were) pluck out a single thread within the work and consider the version of yourself defined by a single thread of pursuit – Ask yourself: what am I chasing? And are the scenes revealing this chase? Once a single thread is identified, search for what to leave out and the surprising news is that we might need to leave out almost everything.
Regarding audience and writing about people in our lives, it was suggested that a consistent voice was one of the most important ways to engage them. For Melissa, she thinks of one person she might be writing for, and often, this person is a younger version of herself, offering something that might have provided resonance and meaning to that younger person. For Elissa, she tries to implicate herself more than anyone else. She stated that, “The narrator’s culpability makes for more interesting reading.”
This makes me remember a thought from the writer/priest Frederick Buchener – he says that the phrase, “Love thy neighbor as thyself” needs to be flipped – to love thyself as thy neighbor because we often treat others in our lives with more compassion than we do ourselves – and to show compassion to all the various selves we’ve been along the way – and if those selves are unseemly, all the more call to show compassion.
 

This past week, I attended the fourth residency of my MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. And again, what an incredible rich set of offerings. I began feeling pretty low about the memoir I’ve been working on—it is worth it? Do I have the skills to tell a compelling narrative? Do I understand enough about the story I’m drafting to complete a 120-page thesis? Even though I had excellent insight and feedback from my third semester mentor, Elissa Washuta, I was experiencing the typical memoir blues.
 
On the first night, a conversation with Marie Helene Bertino helped me understand how important confidence is to finding one’s voice.  And feeling lost is a huge part of the journey. Then, for lunch the second day, I sat next to Manuel Gonzales who reminded me that we have to write 5-7 drafts before we begin to understand what we’re writing about.
 
That night, I had the honor of introducing one of the evening readers Lidia Yuknavitch. I’d heard her speak at AWP last year, and this experience was transformative. And she certainly delivered, opening our hearts with honesty and vulnerability, and healing us through craft and insight. Her talk helped restore some of the initial spark I felt when I started this memoir.
 
I was feeling stronger about my material, and being in workshop with Melissa Febos was a big part of this. She would often ask us, “What stood out as high topography” in the given piece we were discussing. This simple question helped me strengthen my revision sensibilities–I’ve written over 250 pages while in this program, but what should stay and what is left to be written?
 
I attended craft talks about what it means to be a part of a Native-writers focused program and how we can learn to deal with cultural conflict in the classroom. Other topics included how to deal with competition, how to make the personal public, and writing as a healing act, Natalie Handel.
 
I also watched two films: Drunktown’s Finest, written and directed by Sydney Freeland and Imperial Dreams, co-written by Ismet Prcic. All of these experiences, along with the side conservations between talks and at meals, helped me gain traction on the material.
 
The final craft talk and reading was offered by Joy Harjo, and, of course, she shared so much that was instructive and resonant, with the top take away being that healthy systems need movement, and memory is a system, and in writing memories, they will change, and that is part of the point.  
 
I left feeling restored and connected and part of something powerful and important. I am grateful for this program and the level of insight it offers again and again. If you are looking for a MFA program, put this one at the top of your list. The deadline to apply is February 1.

  Ramona Ausubel is faculty at IAIA and I heard her speak this last summer about the revision process. She’s a master storyteller and the insights she offered were practical, inspirational and specific She asserted that it’s really important to slow down when thinking about how to revise, especially when one is trying to make sense of the heap of the advice one might get after finishing a draft. Finding one’s approach to revision is key, and what works for her is what she calls the “black hole” strategy.
 
She offered these steps:
 

1. Consider the black hole to which all things are related in the piece – what is the story about? Everything has to part of that swirl – sucked into this. She provided the example of her current in-progress novel. It’s about money – what it can get and what it can’t get you.
   

 

1. Next, consider the ways the story isn’t yours. Underline the places where someone else’s ideas or phrasing is showing up. Think of these as open doorways as piece of yourself that you’re afraid of – these are possibilities; doorways for us to walk toward and through. She also asserted that the old adage of “get rid of your darlings” is bad advice; instead, we need to dive into the darlings and write the shit out of them.

 

1. Think about the opposing forces in our work beyond the usual tensions of humor and sadness, etc. Make a list of 10-20 elements/things in the work – what’s pulling against it? What’s the opposite pole in the ground? Work with these opposing poles to create deeper tension, so that readers feel the tug. As we engage these opposing forces, they will strike an emotional note on the wire strung between the two poles.

 

1. Take inventory; look around the room of our material. Underline the objects in the draft underline it and ask ourselves, if we had to call the prop people, would it be worth the time and expense to keep this object in the scene, then, consider what the off label use of said objects might be and dive in. She shared the example of cabbage soup, how on the eve of a girl’s departure from her family they sat down to eat soup. Ramona asked herself – what would be an unusual thing to do with this soup? And the girl began to wash her hands in the soup – and the family joined her.

 
I loved the unusual ways to frame revision offered in Ramona’s talk – it felt like at the end of her presentation, I had more tools in the revision kit, giving me more power to take my work deeper.

Here's something fun! Please vote for our SWSX panel:
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/48582

Public Vote accounts for 30% of the ways SWSX selects its panel for the EDU conference - it'd be great if we could talk about how the Digital Story talk created community, explored personal challenges and embraced technology as a means for personal expression. 

To use the word transformative for the past eight days might seem an exaggeration, but in this moment, with the day dawning and the inspiration percolating, it fits.

A few insights from my third residency for my MFA program include:

-Using poetry to teach and inform memoir is a brilliant move – thank you Chip Livingston for the amazing care and approach to our writing and to the improvement of our work. Using the prose sonnet for both my fiction and nonfiction might just be the thing I need to re-enter my material. Thank you to my workshop peers for the community, richness, and connection.

-From Melissa Febos: Writers shouldn’t avoid themselves – we can be afraid and we can still write. We are not merely navel gazing, we’re navel knowing, and there’s power and importance in that knowing, especially when the craft is stellar and the knowing is profound.

-Ernestine Hayes: Told us that she always begins her talks with two truths:

1) Almost every textbook and academic source defines pre-European contact to North America as pre-history, but indigenous people had/have their own history. Before colonialism, indigenous people possessed vigorous legal, health, educational systems that functioned well for thousand of years. Don’t forget this.

2) Even if colonialism hadn’t happened, Indians would be in the 21st century; they’d have roads and airplanes; they would be modern. However, there would significant differences: the populations wouldn’t be so vulnerable to diseases, especially alcoholism; people would speak their own languages; the children would have more opportunities.

-Ramona Ausubel: One of her many excellent revision insights included: Think about the opposing forces in your work beyond the usual tensions of humor and sadness, etc. Make a list of 10-20 elements/things in the work – what’s pulling against it? What’s the opposite pole in the ground? Work with these opposing poles to create deeper tension, so that readers feel the tug. As we engage these forces, they will strike an emotional note on the string on the wire between the two poles.

-Stephen Graham Jones: Hook lines matter, and make sure you have a second hook line somewhere in the first page. If a first line intrigued a potential reader, then the effective second hook line will guarantee that the reader will stay in the story for its entirety. He also proposed, “If you don’t have an axe to grind, how are you going to sharpen your teeth?”

-From Derek Palacio: With these two opposing forces being true: not knowing enough and still being inextricably connected to a cultural and family legacy, we must write toward our fears.

I am deeply grateful for the chance to grow my understanding of craft while in this program, for the many insights available at every turn, but I’m more grateful for the kind of people here: for the ways teachers treat students as equals, as fellow travelers in the country of writing. Thank you, IAIA MFA program.

-Charlotte

We're all so busy, aren't we? I'm having a terrible time keeping up with folks' birthdays or sending them a note or even a text to let them know how much they mean to me. I'm being selfish - as a writer must. Almost all my spare time is going into this work: revising a novel, developing a memoir, teaching, trying to spend time with my family.

So, I'm taking a short cut here. I'm simply going to post the footage from my June 10th reading at Malvern Books (a gorgeous book space), so splendidly hosted by AR Rogers and Wade Martin and RawPaw Press.

I'm reading from one of the two memoirs I have started over this past year, tentatively titled Upstream. It's a book exploring the role of institutionalized education on one family. I read 3 sections (and yes, I have a memoir section written in the 3rd person pov!). The third piece has language (lots of it), so maybe if that's not your thing, don't watch the last portion. Thank you to those that came, to AR and Wade, to Malvern, to Nathan Brown and Elizabeth Bayou-Grace, my fellow readers.