Guest Blog Post, Anne Colwell: What Writers Can Learn from Actors

Photo Credit: https://flic.kr/p/7eVwrs

On Mondays, after our graduate Shakespeare seminar, we would get lunch at The Malt Shop on Main Street. Four tiny tables huddled in the rear of the store; a counter stretched across the front. Behind the counter was the chalkboard full of the day’s salads, soups, sandwiches, and also behind the counter, three or four of the most attractive young women at the University of Delaware. It was a very popular lunch spot.

Our Shakespeare seminar ended about fifteen minutes before the graduate acting seminars did, so when the actors came in, we had already snagged at least two of the four tables for their show. That’s what we used to whisper to each other as they entered to the jingling of the bell on the door, “Here comes the floor show.” It wasn’t just their clothes – the long, brightly colored scarves, the patchwork pants and Birkenstocks, the hats. It was everything. How they ordered a sandwich – “I would ADORE a tuna MELT” – that final “T” clear and ringing, bouncing off the chalkboards. How they stood in line – taking up space, gesturing to the ceiling and floor. How they each picked up their order and swept out the door, calling back to those waiting, the exit line hanging in the air. We writers and literary types found them amusing and a little absurd. I discovered later that the actors found us, when they found us, arrogant, and frankly, a little dull.

Ironically, of course, we had all spent our mornings falling in love with exactly the same plays, exactly the same characters. With Shakespeare. And we’d all been trying to discover the same things: character motivation, dramatic arcs, the symbols in the world of the play. As a young writer and a new teacher, all these things fascinated me, but especially Shakespeare’s genius at creating characters I felt I knew, even hundreds of years away, characters I believed. Falstaff deciding that “discretion is the better part of valor” and pretending to die. Ophelia, bereft and mad, passing out imaginary flowers and singing bawdy songs. But even though the acting students and I shared this fascination, we lived in different worlds. When the actors came in to The Malt Shop for lunch, they may as well have been speaking another language.

Fast forward a dozen years.

My husband, James Keegan, who’d attended that Shakespeare seminar with me and gotten a literary Ph. D, realized that the dream he’d put off when he was eighteen, the dream of going to Cal Arts and becoming an actor, could not be deferred any longer. Even in graduate school, he’d come as close as he could to uniting the two worlds, the world of the writer and the actor. He’d done his Ph. D. specialty exam in “Shakespeare in Performance,” a study of different stagings of Shakespeare’s plays. In 2003, he bridged the gap between the two worlds. He auditioned for the American Shakespeare Center (the ASC) in Staunton, Virginia and became a professional Shakespearean actor, all the while retaining his roles as a college teacher and a writer. He taught his literature and writing classes at the Georgetown Campus of the University of Delaware on Monday and Tuesday, and then drove five hours to be on the stage Wednesday through Sunday. He worked with some of the same people we used to gawk at in The Malt Shop. He spent his days rehearsing and performing, not reading and talking about the plays, but embodying the characters. That’s the crucial word, and the one I want to talk about here – embodying.

Because he became an actor, I had the tremendous opportunity of seeing the plays he was cast in, not just once, but sometimes over a dozen times during the ASC’s long summer/fall season. Hamlet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Henry IV and many, many more. I may be one of the few people in the world who has seen plays so often as a true audience member and not someone connected professionally to the production. I also had the opportunity to go to rehearsals and to live with the actors and listen to and watch them prepare to do their work. All of this has profoundly changed how I feel about myself as a writer and about the creation of character. Don’t get me wrong, the actors were often every bit as absurd and amusing as they had been when they came into The Malt Shop. But now I understood in a much more profound way how closely our worlds were related. Suddenly, I found critical lessons for my own writing in the actors’ craft and in their preparation.

One of the amazing things about watching an actor become a character is that they have to do it first in the flesh; they can’t think themselves into the character, they have to find the character in their bodies. Although actors might begin the process intellectually, memorizing text, talking about themes, when it comes to the stage and the performance, the actor must be in the body. In the house my husband shared with other actors, right across the street from the theater, everyone would come into the kitchen to make lunch or dinner before rehearsals or the evening show. They warmed up their voices as they microwaved leftovers or made sandwiches, and the kitchen and house filled with sound. They sang snatches of songs softly and then loudly, hummed strange high notes, yawned to warm up their facial muscles. In the hallway sometimes, you’d find an actor with a leg thrown over the bannister, talking to himself, or someone holding the bannister and leaning forward like the figure on the prow of a ship.

In just a little while, someone else would inhabit their bodies, and they to prepare their bodies to let them in. King Lear’s voice would be my husband’s voice. James, only forty-seven when he played Lear, an eighty-year-old king, would, as he and his director agreed, “not put on age, but remove youth.” He found the movements and the posture that made him young and set them aside. His shoulders and hips stiffened. He shortened his stride. When James played Macbeth, he had been certified in stage combat, and he planned the way Macbeth would hold himself in a fight –erect and forward, the way he would command space on the stage — central and large. All the actors did similar work for their roles.

So, if you are a playwright, you can count on trained actors to do this for you in every performance. The beautiful thing about writing for the stage is that your work will be literally embodied. I remember my friend and teacher, Jeanne Murray Walker, telling me that one of the most surprising things to her when she transitioned from being a poet to being a playwright was that the words that she wrote on the page became real in the world. When she said that a character wore pink Mickey Mouse sunglasses, someone went out and found pink Mickey Mouse sunglasses.

Ironically, then, it’s playwrights who have the least to do to bring their fictional worlds and their characters to life.

However, as a fiction writer, and even as a poet, I began to realize the extent to which I need and want to do the actor’s work on the page, to imagine myself into the body of the character that I am creating – or better said, the character that I am discovering as I write — and to ask myself a new set of questions. How does it feel to be in the body of this character at this moment? What is he doing with his hands? What aches or pains does she have? Do these pains change the way she walks? How long has she lived with them? Are his feet cold? What happens in her body when she gets angry?

What are you doing with your body right now? What are you aware of in your body?

These are questions that I think it’s easy to forget when we are writing. Sometimes even the best writers get so deeply consumed by the thoughts and emotions of a character that they all but forget the character’s physical existence. Not long ago, for example, James and I listened to Amor Towles’ novel Rules of Civility. It’s an excellent novel, and I appreciated his intelligent structure, his vivid description, and his strong sense of the voice of particular characters. However, one of the things that was missing for me was this sense of the embodiment of the character. In this paragraph from the novel, you can see Towle’s great clarity in his description of the Hotspot Nightclub in Greenwich Village, but you can also feel the absence of the body of the narrator, Katey Kontent:

“From a look around the club, you couldn’t tell that it was New Year’s Eve. There were no hats or streamers; no paper trumpets. At the back of the club, looming over a small empty dance floor, a jazz quartet was playing loved-me-and-left-me standards without a vocalist. The saxophonist, a mournful giant with skin as black as motor oil, had apparently lost his way in the labyrinth of one of his long, lonely solos. While the bass player, a coffee-and-cream mulatto with a small deferential mustache, was being careful not to hurry him. Boom, boom, boom, he went, at half the pace of a heartbeat.”

To be fair, a couple of paragraphs later, Katey does mention that she wears comfortable, flat shoes, but that’s it, and that’s it for pages and pages. It isn’t that the writing is bad – it’s detailed, careful, vivid – it’s that I am missing the sense of the body that an actor will give Katey when the book gets made into a movie.

Why is that important? As a writer, when I think deeply about the physical body of a fictional character, I have a chance to enter the world that character inhabits in a specific and unique human body, that is, in an imagined human form. And, as a reader, if I feel within a character’s body, I move through that specific and unique world with a depth of compassion that isn’t possible in any other way. It is our bodies that separate us, but it is also bodies and inhabiting a body that connects us.

I yawn when I see someone yawn. I have been cold, so when I write about a character trudging through snow who struggles to breathe the freezing air and can no longer feel her numb feet, I am connected to her humanity in a deeper way, and my connection becomes the reader’s connection.

A passage from Amy Tan’s book The Bonesetter’s Daughter comes to mind. This moment is from Part I, and here the main character, Ruth, a preteen, wrongly believes that she is pregnant:

“Now whenever Ruth saw Lance, she breathed so hard and fast her lungs seized up and she nearly fainted from lack of air. She had a constant stomachache. Sometimes her stomach went into spasm and she stood over the toilet heaving, but nothing came out. When she ate, she imagined the food falling into the baby frog’s mouth, and then her stomach felt like a gunky swamp and she had to run to the bathroom and make herself retch, hoping the frog would leap down the toilet and her troubles could be flushed away. . . . First she cried a lot in the bathroom, then sliced her wrist with a dinner knife. It left a row of plowed-up skin, no blood, and it hurt too much to cut any deeper.”

The beauty of this passage comes from how deeply we as readers are allowed into Ruth’s physical reality, and I think that the connection to her body, particularly to her body in this tense, human moment, allows us to feel her panic and have a kind of compassion for her that isn’t possible without imagining ourselves all the way into her situation. I’m also arguing that Amy Tan, as the writer, had to inhabit Ruth’s body first, to imagine what it might physically feel like to be an uninformed, terrified young girl staring down at the toilet and trying to throw up. We make the connection as readers because Tan made the connection as a writer. Through the character, we all overcome the loneliness of the individual body and imagine ourselves, writer and reader, into a shared humanity. Actors teach us that characters begin in bodies and move out into the world.

Guest Post, Donald Morrill: Nonfiction Fact and Poetic Fact

Donald MorrillIn December 2002, a justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was castigated by his colleagues for delivering a legal opinion in quatrains.*

The case involved a woman who sought damages from her estranged, much older fiancé because he had lied to her about the nature of her engagement ring (not to mention its value). The majority of the court denied her claim, declaring that she, given the difference in their ages, had relied foolishly on his assurances.

But the poetic justice dissented. And thus sangeth:

A groom must expect matrimonial pandemonium

When his spouse finds he’s given her cubic zirconium.

Given their history and Pygmalion relation

I find her reliance was with justification.

One of the justice’s colleagues observed that “every jurist has the right to express him or herself in a manner the jurist deems appropriate,” but he was concerned about “the perception that litigants and the public at large might form when an opinion of the court is reduced to rhyme.”

Reduced to rhyme.

Perhaps the offending justice is merely a bad poet (though he defended his work, accurately, I think, by declaring: “You have an obligation to be right, but you have no obligation to be dull.”)

His critics, however, seem to be suggesting that the musical properties of verse are insufficiently serious for the task at hand; and that the characteristic virtue of poetry—to condense and transmute whatever it wishes into memorable, indestructible language—somehow harms the facts, stripping them of the gravitas appropriate, in this instance, to an instrument of law.

Yet there is a venerable legacy of serious nonfiction in verse. For instance, Lucretius in his treatise On the Nature of Things, from the first century B.C., presents in hexameters a full-scale exposition of the Greek Philosopher Epicurus and the atomic theory of Democritus. There is also Ovid’s satirical but no less serious handbook of seduction, The Art of Love.

So maybe poetry, or even merely verse, is not the problem here. Maybe the justice’s quatrains—his creative nonfiction, if you will—are unsuitably creative because they employ the wrong poetic techniques. If he had written his dissent in a less galloping meter or even in verse libre, if he had chosen fewer polysyllabic rhymes, or had used slant rhymes, or had dispensed with rhyme altogether, perhaps his colleagues, and the guffawing public they imagine, would not think his verse a diminishment.

Poetry, in its official get-up, is a matter of lines and line breaks, of course, and the interplay of these with sentences draped down the page, through the stanzas, across the pauses. It’s a spectacular confinement, and at its best, a delicious, necessary unsettling of the language.

But we also know that poetry appears in prose, as prose, perhaps as often as it appears in verse, as verse. It’s something other than just lines. So we might assert, for the sake of argument, that verse is to poetry as nonfiction is to creative nonfiction.

Nonfiction prides itself on trafficking in facts. But many poets assert that poems should be factually accurate, even when fictive. So what happens to the status of a fact once it is introduced into a poem? Is there such a thing as a poetic fact? If there is, can it be introduced into nonfiction? How is its status changed by doing so? And how does it alter the status of nonfiction?

Poetic writing consorts with a lyric consciousness, of course, and with the metaphoric—saying one thing by saying another, saying one thing in terms of another but in a more controlled and sharpened way than the metaphoric slip-slop of ordinary speech. A poetic fact—not a fact made poetic—embodies more than one kind of perception. It registers more than one kind of measurement. And it inspires in us a devoted restlessness among those perceptions and measurements, because it also welcomes the possibility of discovery at its edges. It presents—and verges on presenting something more.

Let me give just one example of a poetic fact, though they abound, of course—a line from “Chimes” by the wonderful poet Robert Dana:

Every day I live I live forever.

The statement is true, undeniably factual in several ways but not like My heart beats sixty times a minute now.

Both lines might be verse, since they both scan, but only the first is poetic, or poetry.

We might wonder how, then, a poet would rewrite the versifying justice’s opinion in order to include poetic fact and whether the law would still be the law if that were to happen. We nod yes when Ezra Pound says poetry is news that stays news. But if the newspaper were poetry, we certainly wouldn’t need a daily edition. (And can you imagine the 11 o’clock news as a poetry reading?)

***

Consider now Norman Maclean’s masterpiece Young Men and Fire. It is a book of nonfiction fact, relating the story of the death of a dozen smokejumpers—and the unlikely survival of three others—in a forest fire blow-up at Mann Gulch, Montana, in 1949. Maclean meticulously replays, rethinks, re-imagines and researches the last thirty minutes of the doomed men’s lives—setting this quest for comprehension against the backdrop of what was known about fire at the time of the disaster and what has been learned in the 38 years afterward. The book brims with historical documentation and scientific data about fire fighting, about burn rates and the effects of wind; it contains maps and photographs, diagrams, transcripts and mathematical equations; and it also draws on his and others’ intimate knowledge of the local landscape, gleaned from lifetimes spent in the Montana woods.

As he writes: “In a modern tragedy you have to look out for the little details rather than big flaws.”

The word “tragedy” should cue us here. Maclean is also drawing on a lifetime of teaching Shakespeare and the Romantic poets, and this is where the poetry comes in. His book is haunted by the search for compassion and understanding about the earth and our place on it. While acting as a factual detective, Maclean is also confronting the problem of identity, which, even as he faces old age and his own mortality, remains unsolved for him—unsolvable for us all.

It is probably not surprising, then, that the book was left unfinished at his death, though it is, most assuredly, complete.

Maclean’s task lay beyond the power of nonfiction facts alone, so he turned to poetic facts, of which the book contains many. Consider, for instance, this passage from the concluding pages, which illustrates how he extends nonfiction fact with poetic fact. About the doomed men running up the steep mountainside from the fire that will consume them, he writes:

The evidence, then, is that at the very end beyond thought and beyond fear and beyond even self-compassion and divine bewilderment there remains some firm intention to continue doing forever and ever what we last hoped to do on earth. By this final act they had come about as close as body and spirit can to establishing a unity of themselves with earth, fire, and perhaps the sky.

This is as far as we are able to accompany them. When the fire struck their bodies, it blew their watches away. The two hands of a recovered watch had melted together at about four minutes to six. For them, that may be taken as the end of time.

If this were not enough, a few sentences later, Maclean writes, in what is the concluding passage of the book:

I, an old man, have written this fire report. Among other things, it was important to me, as an exercise for old age, to enlarge my knowledge and spirit so I could accompany young men whose lives I might have lived on their way to death. I have climbed where they climbed, and in my time I have fought fire and inquired into its nature. In addition, I have lived to get a better understanding of myself and those close to me, many of them now dead. Perhaps it is not odd, at the end of this tragedy where nothing much was left of the elite who came from the sky but courage struggling for oxygen, that I have often found myself thinking of my wife on her brave and lonely way to death.

It is a thematic coda, of course, but at the very end of it something wholly unexpected flares up. Maclean has mentioned his wife only once before, briefly, telling us of her death from lung cancer, and that there is a valley near Mann Gulch named for her. (Another place where fire can make its strange appearance.)

These few details become supreme poetic facts because they allow the nonfiction facts about the nature of fire—and the facts about the smokejumpers’ deaths, the strange solitude of their deaths—to also stand metaphorically for the obscure solitude of Maclean’s grief at his wife’s lonely death. These poetic facts revise our understanding of the book by suddenly multiplying the dimensions of its assumed subject. The nonfiction book of nonfiction facts is called Young Men and Fire. But the poem it also becomes by virtue of that final passage could be called Old Man and Ashes.

Thus, we might assert that creative nonfiction—if we can now think of it as a form of poetry—is the most impure, and thus capacious, of poetic forms because it allows the broadest range of rhythms and “content.” It honors the nonfiction fact, reveres and seeks the clarity of definition that nonfiction fact aspires to, but, like Maclean’s fire, it knows and submits to the earthly reality that, in a moment, a fact of that sort can become quite something else.

 

NOTE

* “Justices Call on Bench’s Bard to Limit His Lyricism:” The New York Times, December 15, 2002, Adam Liptak

Guest Post, Jacob M. Appel: Transcending the Particular

Transcending the Particular: Why All Stores Do not Matter Equally

 

Jacob AppelShakespeare and I have far less in common than meets the eye.

On the surface, we’re both Caucasian, male, reasonably well-off for our times, and, in the eyes of my students, roughly the same age. And, as it happens, we also write plays—although his have received a somewhat more enthusiastic reception. For the time being, at least.

That’s roughly where the commonality stops. Shakespeare was English, and left countless artifacts to prove it, as every huckster in Stratford-upon-Avon will assure you. Meanwhile, in Shakespeare’s day, my forebears, a motely crew of impoverished fishermen, brick layers and subsistence farmers, struggled to survive the brutality of the Russian Pale. They practiced a rigid breed of Orthodox Judaism, spoke Yiddish, and suffered the brutality of Cossacks. Novels and plays were likely as alien to them as the church bells of London. Later, those relatives who survived the Pogroms found their way to the gas chambers of Poland. To describe Shakespeare’s drama as my cultural heritage, merely because of the demographic characteristics enumerated above, would reflect the worst of whiggish anachronism.

I emphasize this context, because I want to explore an argument advanced by a Sacramento high school English teacher, Dana Dusbiber, in a Washington Post op-ed last summer, in which she argued against assigning Shakespeare to her inner city students, a majority of whom are low-income kids from minority backgrounds. She wrote:

“….I enjoy reading a wide range of literature written by a wide range of ethnically-diverse writers who tell stories about the human experience as it is experienced today. Shakespeare lived in a pretty small world. It might now be appropriate for us to acknowledge him as chronicler of life as he saw it 450 years ago and leave it at that.”

I do not mean to dismiss the entirety of Dusbiber’s argument: Certainly, students should be able to relate to the literature that they read and a strong case can be made for allowing young people a say in designing their own curricula. Having exposure to literary role models with whom they can connect is essential if we are to welcome a diverse generations of future writers. My concern with Dusbiber’s column is that it does not just dismiss Shakespeare, but embraces a philosophy, increasingly present in literary circles, that writing does not transcend context. One might as easily argue—and I think this would prove a grievous error—that Frederick Douglass lived in a remote antebellum world of chattel bondage, so why read a slave narrative? Or dismiss the distinct rural feminism of Willa Cather, because nobody dwells in sod houses any longer. What makes great literature, as I see it, is precisely the opposite: The ability to capture your own “pretty small world” in a way that speaks to people nothing like yourself.

One need not be African-American to be moved by Richard Wright’s Native Son or Jewish to connect with Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer—or, I’d like to hope, to see the commonality of experience endured by Bigger Thomas and Yakov Bok. The joy of reading lies in recognizing the universality of human experience lurking within the particulars: seeing your own tedious cousin in Jane Austen’s William Collins or an ex-girlfriend in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jordan Baker, or, I have no reason to doubt, a friend or acquaintance lurking in the great oral narratives of Latin America or Southeast Asia—even though one has not grown up in 19th century Britain or Jazz Age Long Island, has never stepped foot in the Andes or the Mekong Delta. When in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, she describes the “long littleness of life,” I understand instantly, even though my politics and lived experience might prove closer to Shakespeare’s than to hers. Whitman’s “multitudes” may be vaster than my own, but the moments of overlap leave me breathless. Growing up as a Dumbo-eared, funny-looking child with a lisp, I remember discovering Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and feeling a deep kinship with her—not to suggest, obviously, that my suffering was anywhere as severe as hers, but I cannot emphasize enough the solidarity, and solace, I found in our parallel fantasies.

Great stories look outward. What is the point, after all, of speaking to people who share your own values and experiences and sensibilities? I wish to emphasize very strongly that this observation is not directed only or primarily at minority writers. Quite the opposite. Far too many of today’s celebrated A-list literary figures are upper-middle class white men who write specifically for people precisely like themselves. (Brooklyn Heights, I hear, crawls with them.) They are often enabled by a publishing industry populated by editors who share similar lived experiences. That is not to say that one cannot cull worthwhile, transcendent truths from Sutton Place or Westchester County—as, for example, does John Cheever—but that many authors no longer seem to be trying. Similarly, a resistance exists to reading about people different from ourselves, or to do so primarily to witness their differences, in lurid exoticism disguised as open-mindedness, rather than to enjoy our similarities. So much of publishing has become inward looking—about marketing to specific audiences, branding, and targeting insular literary communities. I want my students to write for people as unlike themselves as possible. The stories that matter most, at least to me, are not those that merely capture an unknown world—but those that bring me a world I do not know and teach me how it reflects or connects to my own.

With increasing frequency, when I speak at conferences or on panels, audience members ask some variation of the question: Can I write effectively about people whose backgrounds and lived experiences are fundamentally different from mine? (It is worth noting that the questioners tend to by an extremely diverse lot—far more so than the audiences at these events.) To my surprise, and dismay, authors I admire are increasingly answering “No.” I think this approach is misguided, but also tragic. Needless to say, it is much harder to write about cultures and experiences distant from one’s own—and the room for error is significantly greater. Exploration is not an excuse for carelessness or stereotype. But do we really want to create a literary world where the next Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee can’t write about heterosexual couples? Or in which William Styron, whose Sophie’s Choice rivals The Diary of Ann Frank as the most compelling of Holocaust narratives, confines his intentions to Tidewater Virginia? I believe we should be encouraging our students to write about people far different from themselves—to hope for empathy rather than to fear appropriation. (This is a distinct issue, I believe, from the serious problem of the chronic underrepresentation of certain stories and groups in mainstream publishing, but the two matters are often—and, in my opinion regrettably—conflated.) I dream, maybe naively, of a world where we tell each other’s stories, and do so with such insight and identification, that they truly become our own.

So back to Shakespeare.

A host of plausible reasons exist for reading less Shakespeare. But I’d hate to believe that one of them is that he doesn’t speak to low-income minority students. To me, that sells those students short. I’d hope that their teachers can find a way to show the relevance of Hamlet’s doubt or Macbeth’s ambition to their own lived experiences, much as my teachers were able to do for me. Obviously, students of all backgrounds should also be introduced to the universal human experience found in writers who “look” nothing like Shakespeare. But there’s a magic to discovering that someone very much unlike oneself—let’s say a playwright who lived on a distant island more than four centuries ago—shared recognizable fears and longings.

If literature cannot bring us together, what can?

A Celebration of Shakespeare

Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication, School of Letters and Sciences, ASU Polytechnic Presents

For the Love of Shakespeare:

A Celebration of Shakespeare, Theatre, and the Arts

Come join us for an exciting and entertaining showcase of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, as well as a daring dueling display, performed by the students of ASU Polytechnic.

Admission is Free.

Where: The Black Box Theatre in the Arts Pavilion next to Santa Catalina

When: Wednesday, April 11. Two Shows, one at 1 p.m. and one at 5 p.m. Running time: 40 minutes.

If you need more info, please contact Professor Barnard @ James.Barnard@asu.edu