Welcome to the Astra Arts Festival Memoir Workshop Blogsite!
We all have stories to tell--let's start writing them! Come to the Astra Arts Festival's FREE Memoir Writing Workshop this Sunday from 2:30-3:30 in Independence, KS. All ages and skill levels are invited. I swear it'll be fun, informative, and not stuffy at all. Chansi Rose Long and I will be excited to talk about your ideas, stories, and writing. We will also have a fun writing exercise during the session.
First Presbyterian Church, 201 S 5th Street, Independence, KS 67301
July3, 3:30-3:30
Rachel Gail White is a memoirist, essayist, poet, and MFA graduate of the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in Midwest Quarterly, Essay Daily, and To the Stars Through Difficulty: A Kansas Renga in 150 Voices. She currently lives in the Kansas City metro area, and teaches at Metropolitan Community College in Independence, MO.
Chansi Long is a former journalist for the Lawrence Journal-World and graduate of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Riverteeth, the Washington Post, and Brevity, among others. She is currently working on a memoir about foster care and poverty.
Recommended Reading list:
“The Shawl” By Cynthia Ozick -- - short story illustrating the objective correlative
“Alone at the Movies,” essay by Jonathon Lethem
“Stoptime,” Frank Conroy
“This Boy’s Life,” Tobias Wolf
“Angela’s Ashes,” Frank McCourt
"A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana," Haven Kimmel
“Woman Warrior,” Maxine Hong Kingston
“Bishop’s Daughter,” Honor Moore
"Knoxville 1915" James Agee (http://www.davidpaulkirkpatrick.com/2012/06/30/james-agees-masterwork-knoxville-summer-of-1915-written-in-ninety-minutes/)
"Wild" Cheryl Strayed
Experimental/Nontraditional Memoiristic Readings:
"A History of Bombing" Sven Lindquist
"The Trouble With Being Born" E.M. Cioran
Writing About Writing:
"The Art of Memoir" Mary Karr
"The Figure a Poem Makes" Robert Frost (http://www.mrbauld.com/frostfig.html)
"Letters to a Young Poet" Rainer Maria Rilke (https://kbachuntitled.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/rainer-maria-rilke-letters-to-a-young-poet.pdf) or (http://www.carrothers.com/rilke_main.htm)
Extended Excerpts from Recommended Readings:
Rainer Maria Rilke
About writing, Rainer Maria Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet, tells us:
“...write about what your everyday
life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that
pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty —
describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when
you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your
dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life
seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that
you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for
the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And
even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of
the world’s sounds—wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that
jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your
attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this
enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude
will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight,
where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. —
And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own
world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether
they are good or not. Nor will you try to inte4rest magazines in
these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a
piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has
arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. So,
dear Sir, I can’t give you any advice but this: to go into yourself
and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its
source you will find the answer to the question whether you must
create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without
trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called
to be an artist. Then take the destiny upon yourself, and bear it,
its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might
come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and
must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life
is devoted. But after this descent into yourself and into your
solitude, perhaps you will have to renounce becoming a poet (if, as I
have said, one feels one could live without writing, then one
shouldn’t write at all). Nevertheless, even then, this
self-searching that I as of you will not have been for nothing. Your
life will still find its own paths from there, and that they may be
good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say.
What else can I tell you? It seems to me that everything has its
proper emphasis; and finally I want to add just one more bit of
advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your while
development; you couldn’t disturb it any more violently than by
looking outside and waiting for outside answers to question that only
your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.”
(Pages 5-6)
“[H]ave patience with everything
unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves
as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign
language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to
you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point
is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday
far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live
your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the
possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and
pure way of living; train your for that — but take whatever comes,
with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of
some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and
don’t hate anything.” (Page 14)
Robert Frost
“No tears in
the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no
surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the
surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I am in a
place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen
out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and
the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps
growing. The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those
I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time when taken, and
the conclusion is come to that like giants we are always hurling
experience ahead of us to pave the future with against the day when
we may Want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere. The
line will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight. We
enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick. Modern
instruments of precision are being used to make things crooked as if
by eye and hand in the old days.” - Robert Frost (excerpted from
his essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes”)
