wordstock » 2010

Guest post by: Benjamin Percy

Author of The Wilding, Benjamin Percy appears at the Wordstock festival on Saturday, October 9th from 12:00-1:15pm for a writer’s workshop in room B119, as well as October 9th at 2:00pm on the Columbia Stage and 4:00pm on the Wieden + Kennedy Stage.

Oregon will eat you. That’s what I told the filmmaker James Ponsoldt (whose excellent Off the Black starred Nick Nolte and Timothy Hutton) before we scouted locations in Central Oregon for the adaptation of my story “Refresh, Refresh.” Every year Mt. Hood crushes people in avalanches, swallows them in snowstorms. Every year hikers vanish in the woods. Every year the riptide sucks swimmers out into the ocean and fills their lungs with water. A wrong step takes someone tumbles off a cliff in the gorge. A wrong turn sends someone down a logging road from which they will never return. I went to school with a girl who skied into a tree and died. I went to school with a boy who snow-mobiled into a tree and died. In Central Oregon, where I grew up, turkey vultures turn in lazy circles, coyotes gnaw on bones, black widows scuttle under porches, and scorpions burrow under rocks.

How and Why I Wrote Little Green

Guest post by Loretta Stinson

Author of Little Green, Loretta Stinson appears at the festival on Saturday October 9^th at 4pm.

If you could have told my fourteen-year old self that one day I would hold two Masters degrees and have a published novel to my name I would have said you were crazy. Things like that don’t happen to girls like the me I used to be.

I ran away from home when I was fourteen and didn’t go back to school for real until I was in my early thirties—that was after the restraining order, the divorce, and the year of hiding out that I did to stay safe from the man I was married to. His addiction and the resulting violence that accompanied it were my reasons for leaving but it took me almost sixteen years before I walked out for good. I left just about everything I owned—house, car, pets, that summer afternoon in 1991. I started over from square one, and one of the things I started over was my education. I’d always been a big reader but I regretted not having a diploma, just a GED.

Barry Smith’s new novel Only Milo continues this week as the title antihero broods over his alter ego’s success and visits the dark side for a solution to his problem.

.……………………..………………...

24
Margaret was glowing.
I don’t think she noticed.
No mention of Milo.
None.
NOT
ONE
WORD.

25
When the next segment began, the first novel was
discussed.

Set outside Mexico City. Young police officer hero in a rural village terrorized by a serial killing priest. Innocent children, including the police officer as a young boy, initially received love and comfort from the priest, protection from a world of poverty, hunger and fright.

Sexual molestation.

Serial killings.

Long, hushed pause.

As a boy, José had sought solace from a harsh and
unfair world. The church was his sanctuary, the
priest his surrogate father, the weekly homilies the
inspiration for his poetry, his fiction, his life.
Sexually molested by his priest.
Writing about the abuse. Catharsis.
Finally moving forward.

Long, hushed pause.

Oprah was concerned.

Writing Process/Writing Practice

Guest post by Loretta Stinson

Author of Little Green, Loretta Stinson appears at the festival on Saturday October 9^th at 4pm.

Writing is just writing—a practice, if you like, a discipline, an art, a craft. It’s not a mystery. If you write a page a day for a year you will have a first draft of a novel or several short stories or whatever it is you want to write. We sit down with our tools of choice—pad and pencil, laptop, typewriter and become still enough to hear the story that’s ours to tell. It whispers itself to us. It’s a very quiet little voice and if you’re too busy, too loud, too distracted you might not hear it. We practice coaxing the words out by writing so often and with such regularity that we become good friends with the process. We quiet the mind and simply start regardless of how we feel about it. There is no good or bad, there is only you showing up with attention to listen to the story you need to tell. Later there will be revision of the story and time to shape and fix, but not at first. At first there is only sitting still and listening with openness.