 But this, I think, these are a couple of quotes about what makes it difficult. I'm not supposed to move around. Bill told me. I forget. Okay. As usual, nobody said this better than Virginia Woolf in her very famous essay on being ill. Okay? Virginia Woolf knows from where she speaks on being ill. But this is just a little quote from the beginning of that long essay. Considering how common illness is, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels one would have thought would have been devoted to influenza, epic poems to typhoid, odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache. But no, with a few exceptions, nor is the reason far to seek to look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer, a robust philosophy, a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth. It's a little intimidating, huh? Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. But it is not only a new language that we need, more primitive, more sensual, more obscene, but a new hierarchy of passions. So that's Virginia Woolf, okay? I was just interviewed for a magazine called Transatlantica, which is a French journal devoted to the study of American literature about my, somebody up there hates you novel. And I'm just going to read the question and part of my answer because it really gets at what people think about when they're writing about illness. This is the question. It's a good question. Wonderful professor who teaches the book came up with really hard questions. It took me about two weeks to finish this interview. Email. No matter how weak a team may be, Richard, that's my main character, never wants to tell others, nor does he complain, yet he describes his impressions in funny or not so funny images such as being, quote, hollowed out like a cantaloupe or something. Why did you choose this metaphoric approach when some critics like Susan Sontag and specialists in disability studies argue against the use of metaphors to refer to illness? Susan Sontag's belief is that that weakens the writing, to use metaphors. And I sort of had to think about this answer for quite some time. This was my answer, part of it. I'm not a specialist in disability studies. That was the first sentence. I'm a fiction writer. Ergo, ideal in metaphor. And I would contend that all descriptive imagery is metaphoric anyway. Descriptions of illnesses are no different. When we say that someone has a stabbing pain, a burning ache, or a rosy rash, what else are those but metaphors? How else can anyone ever convey in words purely physical sensations? Even when we ask patients to assign a number for the depth of their pain, one to ten, you all know that one, okay? Isn't that a kind of metaphor? Giving a symbolic value to an otherwise indescribable sensation? And then this is something I was quoting back to her. In your introduction to the Journal of Youth, I'll say it to the American, Study of American Literature. You quote that powerful line from Elaine Scarry's book, The Body in Pain, great book. Physical pain does not simply resist language, but actively destroys it. So all writers trying to convey the sensations of illness and pain are in for a challenge. I can't figure out any other way to write or talk about illness other than through metaphor. And I hope that metaphors like feeling like a hollowed out cantaloupe give readers a way to feel Rajee's experiences, okay? So where does that leave us? Well we've got troubles, right? We have a topic that apparently we don't have the right language for. We need to invent a language more primitive, sensual and obscene. I'm telling you, I really tried to do that. I really tried to get the obscene part and somebody up there hates you. Do we need the courage of a lion tamer? Well, that's a little daunting, okay? So I would like to give you some ways that I think are not quite so terrifying to approach this. But first of all, to take heart, it's been done well so many times. I have a very brief, this is a handout you can take when you go, an idiosyncratic list of books that deal with these topics, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, mix genre, anthologies, websites, that does have the right thing on it. These are just some of my very personal favorites. Some written by friends, some written by people we know. There are more out all the time. Every time I turn around, I find a new one. Sonya has a book coming out next year, right? Pain Woman Steals Your Keys, okay? Sounds wonderful. If I'd known about it, I would have put it on there but I only found out just a few days ago. This one by Samuel Sham called Spirit of the Place is published by Kent State University in their literature and medicine series. It's a whole series of wonderful, wonderful books. Some from patients, some from doctors, some using poetry to analyze this kind of stuff. It's a great series. So I just found this the other day and I volunteer for my library and somebody donated it to be sold in our shop and I took it. I don't get paid so my pay is I can skim books right off the top. So how do they do it? How do people do it who are trying to do it well? And let's think about what makes things good or not. So we're going to actually, this seems a little silly, but we're going to try. We're going to talk about things that are good qualities of this kind of writing and things that are bad qualities and we're going to generate some lists. First a couple of quotes from critics. Philip Lopate, many of you know him because he's so well known in the nonfiction field. He reviewed a nonfiction book called Old Age, A Beginner's Guide by Michael Kinsley. These both came from April 2016. I made myself a little challenge, just go to some New York Times book review and see what they're saying about books that are dealing with these topics and there were two perfect ones a couple of months ago. This is a nonfiction book, a guy who got an early Alzheimer's diagnosis. So he's writing about it. This is a rave review, so these would all go on the good column. But it's always a little qualified, so this is a short part of what Lopate said. If it's possible for a book about illness and death to be delightful, this one is. And some of the words that are descriptors used by Lopate. Short, that might be good, short, short, witty, refuses to wallow in self-pity, sardonic, funny, clear, conversational, addressing the reader with rhythmic, that's hard to say, with rhythmic little pokes, prods and provocations. So those are some words of praise for this book. And Lauren Groff, I don't know if you know her. She's a wonderful short story writer. She reviewed a novel by Charles Bach, who'd written other novels called Alice and Oliver, and this is, as he has said himself, this is an autobiographical novel based on his wife's leukemia, okay? I wouldn't have wanted to be Lauren Groff in this thing because you hate to pan a book about somebody's wife's leukemia, you know? It's awful, but she did, I think, a fair, balanced and good review, but these are a couple of things that she mainly objected to the characterization. These are quotes. Characters often seem to be static accretions of characteristics rather than real people. Oliver, main character, is reduced to humorless smirking and anger, underdeveloped relationships, remove the autobiography and the book seems drained, worn, the characters, ghosts. Although she ends it by saying he's a talented author. It's like, ouch, you know? So that gives you some idea, I think, maybe of what people expect of these books and what they want them to be and what they don't want them to be because reviews, as always, are one person's opinion. Even in the New York Times where it has a ton of power, some of them have made me furious because I think they so misread somebody's book. And I really, really hate it when somebody misreads a new writer's book. Seems to me unnecessary to do that. All right, so let's think about it. If you had to just come up, and this can be really quick, with a couple of adjectives, what makes a book or any book that you've read or maybe something you've written yourself that you're liking, what makes it good, Sam? Okay, layered, that's nice. Explain just a little bit what you mean by layered. So there's multiple narratives depending on the novel. And so those are the layers, just the narratives that can pile on top of it. Because they don't necessarily have to. They think there's a parallel to each other. And articulate is making those narratives a character. Okay, that's really nicely said. So that's a kind of literary value of someone who is able to keep different storylines going and layer them. And at the same time, keep you clear, right? Keep you into each storyline. But cumulatively together, they add up to more. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. That's a good, so story versus case study. This is an interesting distinction, right? And it's hard for people, actually sometimes people who come from the health field, there you are, to realize if you have been a practitioner, a medical practitioner, you are used to doing brief case studies to the point and not very, not emotional. I mean, they're not supposed to be emotional, right? You're supposed to be standing back a little bit. This is why I think at NYU and Columbia University in New York City, they actually require all medical students now to take writing classes. Classes in writing narrative, because their idea is, they want them to see their patients' histories as interesting stories. And they want them to be able to communicate the treatment, the diagnosis in an interesting story. And so they all take writing classes. And literature classes, medical humanities. I spoke to a medical humanities class up near where I live about this book. They had read it for class. I went up there, it was really amazing, because they approached it so differently. So differently than the literary classes I had talked to. They really wanted to know, was this the right thing for this nurse to do in this situation? I don't know whether that was ethical. I don't know about this. Would they really do that? Should we do that? What would I say to that patient? And that was interesting to me. They weren't writers, but as readers it was interesting, because it was a different approach. Yeah, good. Yeah, Alan? Vivid? Vivid, okay. Explain that one a little bit. You mean you want to be in the scenes, right? Imagery, it pulls you in. Kind of what Virginia Woolf is saying, a language more sensual. At this point we may have to, you know, you may have to get physical, if there are parts. But you don't want it to be a list of symptoms either. So there's that balancing line again. When do you do that? When do you pull back? Et cetera. Yeah, yeah. I do want to go back. Sure, oh yeah, we need bad. Is there anything in my books called One Lives and the Other Doesn't? These Mother Don't Die, spoiler alert? I'm sorry. I'm sorry, that one just made me laugh. My daughter read these over and over again, and she was 10. And she'd come stand in the doorway of the office where I was working after her bedtime with tears and rives. I said, did you read another word of this for her? Are you afraid of me? But what is the quality that makes them? What? Modeling. Modeling. I was going to say, is there a noun for, more lenity? Modeling. We're just going to stick with the adjective. They're modeling. Modeling. And also, she's not big on the details. People lose their hair, and they are sick, but she doesn't go into any more details than that. Nobody prepares special food to accommodate the chemo. Nobody cleans the house to accommodate. Yep. And so I would say unrealistic, both medical and maybe just plain old life. Right? Yeah, we did that in workshop today. I showed various covers of somebody up there hates you from the various, the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese. And in some of them, they simply refused to make them look sick. Richie in some of those covers has a full head of hair. He never has hair. He's dressed in a nice dress shirt and pants and black shoes. The kid, first of all, he wouldn't own that stuff. He's very poor. And secondly, he's never dressed the entire book. And so they just did not want, they wanted it to look like a kind of cute teenage boy that they didn't want. Their readers turned off by the fact that it's a very sick teenage boy. Nobody went as far as to make him look sick. My background is nothing. Nurses are actually trained a little bit more like he's sad to feel and think. Yes? And actually to have a story subjective and objective. So I'm always a little put up when it's unrealistic, but then inauthentic. Yeah. And if you're going to use medical terminology, it's similar to how the editing and some of the kinds of things like that, but it's not realistic. Inauthentic. And that's, it's a little different than unrealistic. But inauthentic, it doesn't really feel real. And you know that out there, there are people who are going to, yes, there is. Thank you. It's hard to write on the board. Yes, Lynn. I think back on the good side, that it has to be something that's universal. It's got to be something that's more than just about the design of the disease. It's got to be something that's the human condition. We're putting it up here. OK. It's rather appeal. Because it's, but I would also contend that you could write about the rarest disease in the entire world, let's say. Something that only four people have. And yet it could still have that broad appeal. And be very universal. We talked about this a little bit in workshop already. It has to open out to the world, OK? And let the world back in. Because we may never experience that thing. But we will then say, oh, but I know what that would be like, or I can feel the way this mother feels, and that kind of thing. Yeah. What's interesting is, as I'm not a nurse, I don't have a nursing background. I have lots and lots of life experience with illness. One of the critics, the kids, the young teenagers that read the book, teenagers will say anything, and they'll say it online. But they would say, like, oh, no. Well, first of all, they're like, he can't really be in love with that girl because he wants to go out and get sex from this other girl. And I'm like, he's 17, and he's dying. Dudes, what is your problem? Teenagers are really prudish, it turns out. There was bad words, they didn't, et cetera. There are bad words, lots of them. But also, they would say, well, this would never happen. They would never let that happen in a hospice unit. But I got many, many messages from nurses who said, of course it would. We, young people in a hospice unit, everybody will go out of their way because they get, and in this book, they get drawn into the romance. They're rooting for these kids. They want these kids to have whatever life they can. And in every hospital I spent time with my son, they were amazing at letting the kids be kids. These kids got in huge trouble. I- You can go in there, but that's the humanistic part of it. I think somewhere that you mentioned, they throw open comments. Yeah. Well, I guess just humanity, right? Just really echo rooting it off. And I think also, many adult readers, at least in the case of this book, don't give kids the kind of credit that even in very last stages of very serious illness, they will get up and do their hair. So that there, because there's gonna be a party at the nurses station that night. And I saw girls near death being wheeled down to have their hair washed and cleaned, because they were not gonna be seen with dirty hair. So people, I think it depends on how much experience there is. But I was careful when I really didn't know things to ask. I had wonderful, amazingly good copy editors who did charts and all of the, they knew more about this book than I ever would have, but they kept track of every nurses shift in the book. And they said, excuse me, why is Edward still on? Edward was on this morning. Edward should not have been on. And Edward's the favorite nurse in there. I was like, Edward worked a double shift because somebody called in sick. Edward just stays toward the end with Richie because he's his friend and he wants to stay. So I was like, oh my God, Richie goes out on Halloween night and parties in the city of Hudson, drinks, little drugs, little sex. And he's drinking blue moon ale. I said that the pumpkin on the blue moon ale bottle was blue. It's not, see, they had people who went out and they said it was a hardship, but they bought blue moon ale so that they could tell me exactly what the bottle looked like. So some people did that kind of thing. So that's very helpful to a writer. They told me that a very minor character had blonde hair on page 30 and black hair on page something else. And so we could fix that kind of thing, you know? So, okay. All right, so let's just go with this for a while. And I guess we're, you know, of course we're always, we are aiming for this and we're aiming for literary writing, which is gonna have that, yeah? May I add something to that? Okay. More accessible, you know, so often with medical terminology, there's phrasology in terms of just our incomprehensibles. So maybe something that the reader can get without having to go to a dictionary. And that makes it interesting, right? Because we're wanting both. We're wanting authenticity and accessibility. And that's another balancing act. And you get to see the sort of theme here. This kind of writing, you're always balancing a little bit between one thing or another. But absolutely, no one wants to have to get it, sit there with the medical dictionary the whole time. You might want, I don't mind looking up a word or two, but not the whole thing. Yeah. Not having to have a degree. Yeah. All right, so let's go with the good. And I'm gonna give you what I think is at least one hint. There are many, many ways to approach this. And I really urge you to ask people, Sonya and others who've been writing in these fields and get other ideas. But this is one that occurred to me again, partly because of the interviews and stuff that I had to do. And as always, you can tell I rely on quotes and other writers a lot. People say things a whole lot better than I ever could. So I look them up. And this one is gonna say it better than anyone ever could. Because it's Emily Dickinson. And I think we can take our advice on how to do this from Emily Dickinson's very famous poem, Tell All the Truth But Tell It Slant. That's how I think you can get around some of these problems. I'll just read the full poem. It's very short. It's Emily Dickinson. Tell All the Truth But Tell It Slant. Success in circuit lies. Too bright for our infirm delight, the truth's superb surprise. As lightning to the children eased with explanation kind, the truth must dazzle gradually. Or every man be blind. So you wanna look straight at things sort of, but you also need sometimes to put your own slant on it. So we're gonna, again, use her very loosely in a sense. And this is what I want you guys to think about. What slant, you can also think of it as angle, are you going to adopt in your writing on any of these topics that will help you bridge those thin, fine lines? In other words, what is gonna make your piece be totally personal because you wrote it and universal and out there. It's your own slant. And every writer is gonna do this differently. But I think if you think about it a little bit, it helps you to say, first of all, I want an agent and an editor. Some of you people were talking about this too. Pick mine out of the great big pile. And one of the things that's gonna make them pick that out of the great big pile is that they've not seen this essay before. They may have seen a million, not maybe a million, a whole bunch, hundreds of short stories about pediatric cancer, but they have never seen Laurie Moore's canonical babbling in Piedonk, okay, until that story came out. Heartbreaking, heartbreaking story. So what are you gonna do? So I think, again, to use some models and examples first might help us. So these are two poems that were assigned for the readings, but I thought I like to have things in print myself. I think we have enough. This is the pairing of Donald Hall's poem and Jane Kenyon's poem, The Sick Wife, and Donald Hall's The Ship Pounding. Husband and wife both writing about her terminal illness. And it's from, her poem is from Otherwise, and what Donald Hall tells us afterwards to the book, he edited it because she had already died, was that this was the last poem she wrote. This is a quote from him. Jane dictated a draft of The Sick Wife. This is when she's, there's nothing more that medicine can do, she's home, typed it, lay on a reading table beside her chair. On several occasions, she dictated a revision and a new draft replaced the old. She would have made more changes if she had lived. So right up until the end, so that's a poem she was working on. So anyway, if you have a copy, great, if not, I'm just gonna pass these around and take one, if it turns out to be not enough, you could share. There's a little bit of analysis of the two poems on the back. I'd like you not to read that for now, but some of you have jumped ahead, I can tell. I like print myself, although this is pretty small print. I'm like, wow, is there enough so everybody can at least look at it with somebody else? Okay, first of all, because these are poems, I'd like to have them read, I'd like to hear them and then I'll tell you what we're kind of looking at. Anyone willing to read? Go ahead, read the ship pounding, sure. And then Sam, you'll do the sick wife? Okay. Each morning I made my way among gangway, elevators, and nurses pods to Jane's room to interrogate the great helpers who tended work through the night while the ship's massive engines kept his propellers turned week after week. I sat by her bed with black coffee and the bloat. The passengers on this voyage were mass or cannula were dental devices that ripped chemicals into their wrists. I believed that the ship had looked through a harbor of breakfast, work, and love. I wrote, when the infusions are refused entirely, falling narrow, restored, and lymphoblasts remitted, I will make my life fall with Michael Jordan back to our dogs and day. Today, month later at that home, these words turned up on my desk. As I listened in case Jane called for help, we spoke in Galerium, ready to make the educated drive to emergency again for readmission to the huge vessel that keeps water month after month without leaving port, without moving a notch, without the license for decimation, it's a great region to come in. Thank you, lovely. Go ahead, Sam. The sick wife stayed in the car while he bought a few groceries, not yet 50, she had learned what it's like not to be able to button a button. It was the middle of the day and so only mothers and small children were tired of coming, they stepped through the muddy parking lot, driving in swan, on clean containers, in the colors of the prosperous, how easily they moved to such freedom, even the old and relatively infirm, the windows began to steam up, the colors of either side of her all the way, so personally, that it made her sit in the car. Thank you. Okay, so we happen to have this pairing and we know based on real life, et cetera, and I think some of what makes both of these poems good would be normal things, it would make any poem good, right? Very specific imagery, very vivid, very clear wording, clearly crafted, clearly worked on. Jane Kenyon was obviously working on this right up until the end, Donald Hall, and these had both been poets forever and ever, ever. But what I want you to do, and you can just kind of scribble on there, you can do whatever you want, is I want you to take each of these poems and tell me what is the particular slant? What is Donald Hall's slant? He's telling a story about the illness of his wife, but what makes it a little more than that? What makes it so clearly his? And what is her slant, so if we can look at them both? And in some ways, what stops these, if you would agree, from being maudlin, from being self-pitying, what makes these good poems in general about this particular topic? Okay, so just really look at them, think about it, anything, form as well as content, always, always look at the form too. So just take a few minutes and then we'll start trying to talk about these. So just try to have a thought or two about each one and then as we talk, you'll probably have more. One second. Yeah, just finish writing what you're writing. Okay, and just before we start that again, I think we're going to grant these qualities, right? For both, in very different ways. They're very different poems, amazingly different, even though they're about the same person and the same topic, okay? So, Sam, stars. Okay, yeah, often just helps us to look at the shape on the page, right? That is a non-broken, non-standard, not gonna let you go kind of poem. You can't rest in that poem, okay? And they both have, I don't know if you'd call them distancing devices, right? But something that takes you away from just, she's sick, she's dying, this is awful, you know? Yeah. Oh, that's interesting, yeah, that sort of condensation on the car. Yeah, I think it's a huge point that she tells this in third person, right? This poem does not use a name. His poem does, he says Jane. She says the sick wife. And it's also interesting that the only way she identifies herself is as a wife, not as a person, not as a woman, as if in some ways she is also understanding his sorrow. You know what I mean? She is seeing him in relationship to her and understanding the loss he's going to have, maybe. But also, I love those details that she includes. Just the everyday, it's again, and if you said it the way they'd say it in a TV ad, it's a cliche. Well, you know, when you're really sick, you begin to appreciate the everyday things in life. Who cares? But when you see, actually one of my favorite lines here is, she's learned what it's like not to be able to button a button. Smallest thing, beautifully simple wording. She didn't get fancy and try to say fasten or anything, just button a button. And then she notices the mothers with small children or retired couples, both of which carry their own sadness, right? She'll never be part of a retired couple. She's not yet 50. She never had children. So, you know, some of it is, she's watching things with this great sense of loss, but she never says that. She's just watching. While he's seeing the activity that's happening with her, she's in the car waiting for him, doing something routine, observing the routine that she misses. Yeah. So, it's just this. That's a lovely point, right? We know, although, it's not that he's not going to grieve and not lost, but he is maintaining his routine and her routine is completely gone. Okay? The other thing, the sub-counting, she may be getting that to serve a topic with disease. It's kind of keeping up with the relentless progression of disease, right? It's continuing. It's going, it's taking her down. And he does what we talked about, what we had here, which is, this is an accessible poem, but it does have the medical language. It's authentic. Somebody who's been around, knows what lymphoblast means and almost anybody is going to get that. What I, I think it's, although this is not a stanza poem, it's broken into very clear sentences. Okay? Very clear, I think I, you know, six sentences total. Hers is one sentence per stanza. His is six, not, you know, any particular length. His is first person. Okay? It seems like it shouldn't be distant, but what here is the distancing device? The ship, I think. Remember, I was just told not to write in, about illness in terms of metaphor. This poem is an extended metaphor. It's called, it's a conceit. When you take a metaphor and extend it as far as you can possibly go. The entire thing, but what is this, what is the ship a metaphor for? What stood out to me in both of these poems is a sense of entry of motion. Motion. From life into the own life. This is, this is. And the ship. Yeah, it's just being a pounding process. A sense of inevitability of death. Yes. Through the cycles of life, pounding on and moving on. Yep. But it's interesting that both have vehicles, the one is a ship and the one is a car, and it holds pieces, neither is going anywhere. The ship, he specifically says, is not moving. And the car, it's like the end of the road, there's stop, this is it. Yep, it heaves water month after month without leaving port. Not moving and not. Without moving and not. In both of those sense of inevitability. Exactly, the pounding, the inevitability, the lack of movement, even the only thing moving in this set of poems is the illness. And it's moving quickly. And the ship is the hospital. I believe that if you just took it on the most literal level, yes, the ship is the hospital. And that's where he thinks they're gonna have to run back when they need to take one more emergency visit. She can be home with the dog and her day, I like that phrase too. And that little bit of levity, people actually do smile when you say she's bald as Michael Jordan. I mean, it's an unexpected image. That's another thing that I think works is for any of you is to try to go with the unexpected image. The one that makes you go, whoa, what's Michael Jordan doing in here? How did he get in this poem? It doesn't make it silly. I don't think it lifts it out of the tone, but it is, and they apparently watched a lot of sports together. I'll ask a question, I guess, about this, the ship pounding one. Who is this poem about? Listen to the verbs and the I made my way, I sat by her bed, I believed, I wrote, I will take my wife, I listened. This is a very active first-person narrator, right? She is a very passive third person watching from afar. It's almost as if she's already left that body. Exactly, yeah. But again, I mean, these names are very well known names, but think of yourself in an editorial position and you're reading 350 poems a day that have to do with illness or healing. I think you would look, okay? You take a second look. I would take a second look by the first two lines of each poem, right? Gangways, elevators, and nurses pods. That word is odd enough to pull you out, a little sci-fi-ish, a little, which is that feeling of stepping into the hospital if you're a civilian, you know, if you're not always there. It's, and then clearly thought out things like to interrogate the grave helpers using both meanings of the word grave, serious, and they're helping her to the grave, okay? So, and his skill with keeping that metaphor going without doing it to the point where in less skillful hands it would be, I get it, Donald, it's a ship, I've got it, stop it, you know? I think, and also remember in the review we were talking about short, short, witty, and witty doesn't always mean funny. Witty means intelligence, wit, and I think both of these show that quality. So there's slants and angles are very different. There are similarities, but there's slants are different, right, and they each slanted it. So, where are we in time? Okay. I don't know how many people got to read this story from Birds of America by Lori Moore. This is the canonical bag bling in Peed, Ankh. Story. I have some copies if people didn't but take it and read it later, but if you have read it, I'd just like to talk about for a minute about her slant. That's it, that's it. Going, going, going. Oh, you have. I read it, but I didn't know. Since I have now officially retired from my full-time DTing job, I lost Xeroxing privileges. So the day I had to hand in my ID and my key, I went in there and Xeroxed everything I could find. They're gonna say, who came in here on a Sunday? And why did they run the Xerox bill up? I'm like, oh my God, I can't go in there and Xerox things anymore because I loved Xeroxing. I love copies. If you have read it, and if people would like to talk about it a little bit, I'm gonna tell you just a little bit of my personal slant on this story, which I have taught, I have read many, many times. When I signed it for this seminar, it was without even thinking. I mean, here is one of the best stories I know that talks about having a child ill. And then when I sat down, not long ago, to reread it for the seminar, I thought I can't go through this again. This story is so painful for me. I spent years with a baby in the hospital. I almost couldn't do it. And then I thought, stop being a baby. Which is, stop it. If you're old enough to retire, you should be old enough to read the damn story again. So read the story. But also it was every time I read it, I get over that horrifyingness just because of the skill. I think of the storytelling and the immediacy of it, although it breaks my heart every single time. So I am not neutral about this story. I will say that. But anyone who has read it and who appreciated this particular story, what's her slant? How does she do it? Somebody said it almost sounds like nonfiction. You just said that. But she's playing with that, right? Because someone told her to take notes and write this as a nonfiction story. That's what I love at the end. Here's your notes. Now where's my money? She's, there's a lot of anger. Good anger. It's as much about a marriage as it is about the homeless. And it's about a woman who doesn't want to be part of the counselor's mother. No, she doesn't. She's totally, you know, these women wear sweatpants. They're all Midwestern nice. She's not nice. She makes kind of a, her whole persona is built on not being nice, right? She makes jokes. She makes inappropriate jokes. She is not, she does not want to be one of them. But as somebody points out, people like that are the only people here, you know? So what other slant? So it's about a marriage. It's about that beside the illness or the illness encompasses it. But yeah. Again, she distanced. Okay. I think that's the primary distancing device in here is that the baby, the mother, the father. It is autobiographical because she has talked about it, but that's all, you know, she's never saying beyond this story. So, and the doctor and, you know, et cetera. The other mothers and fathers too. The other kids are given names. Yeah. The other little ball boys are given names. Yes, you're the mother. You become the mother. Where's the mother, you know? Ask mom, that was the one I hated the most. Ask mom, you know, to get her son out of the morgue sort of thing. My son could travel. And he, Columbia Presbyterian, it goes over six blocks in New York City, it goes through tunnels underneath. He and his little friend realized that they could go all kinds of places. They had to help each other a lot because one had to push the IV pole and the other one had to, they went down seven flights of stairs lifting the IV pole down each time because they were bored. Where is it, he's in the ICU. Why is he in the ICU? I said, I don't know, where is he? And they said, and my son would come out and say, there's really interesting stuff going on in there. Do you know that this woman was hidden ahead with a baseball bat? And I was like, so, they, yeah. The other kids become very, very real. It is as close and intense an environment as you can imagine, right? It's, everybody's crammed into little rooms. You sleep on cots, there's no privacy. Everybody shares the same bathroom. The parents have the little crummy waiting room that she talks about all. This one's kind of nice because somebody donated a waiting room. Although she said it was kind of a fuck you rating room because that person's child died. Other reactions, slant? Let's ask your question. Did it feel authentic to you? It got to be too much non-fiction. It was all just confusing to me actually. Okay, you wanted to know the genre. You really did want to know. It's not like the video. They had showed her this nice video with everything is all gentle and all. And then it was not like the video. That's what gets her, right? She starts crying. It's not like the video. Yeah, and that's where people visit. You know, I'm excited to get to the next one. It seemed authentic to be experiencing it with Mother. But you know, it's interesting. Did you hear her say that, right? I mean, it's a general rule of mind, right? Your perception is, you're the reality, right? So, there's some others yet. I think it seemed like that. Yeah, I found it. Looking up was it? Very authentic to that. Also, I think though this is an interesting story for writers to read because it's just as much about writing a story as it is about the story. She's been asked by her husband to take notes during this whole experience. Now, we get the sense that he's very grief stricken. I'm not saying that he's, you know, totally being a jerk, but he asks her to take notes so she can write the story. And the whole time, she is trying to fulfill that because they're gonna need money. And so, it's also, how am I gonna write this? How can I write this? How can you take an experience that is so, if she keeps saying, you can't put the word baby and tumor in the same sentence. You can't put these things together. How will I write this story? And clearly she found a way to write the story in a kind of metafictional way of, I'm gonna write the story about writing the story. And I think that's where the nonfiction versus fiction thing gets complicated because she's been asked to do one thing and she's doing another. She's doing another. Yeah. It's really another point. Yeah. But I love the writerliness of this, how that also impacts her. She is obsessed with words, right? She wants to know when the doctor tells her her baby has the Wilms tumor, she wants to know where the apostrophe is. Is it before the S or after the S? It's like, I can see anyone of us here saying that. Wait a minute, you know, where's apostrophe? And the doctor going, but you know, I think her writerliness for me is one of the things that lifts this story out of just sad maudlinness, et cetera. Okay. I don't have copies of the other story, but you mentioned it, Sam, the Amy Hempel in the graveyard where Al Jolson is buried. Did you have anyone to say about it, Sam? And then I wanna have you guys do a little something. So. Mm-hmm. I'll do some stories almost, but then like this larger story of a friend who's selling other friends. And it's almost as if the sick person is having an effect. Like this kind of like, they didn't get enough of much of an apostrophe. Interesting. And that's just for you was mostly the placement, right? The white spaces, the fragments. Again, I think for me, what lifts that story out, which gives it its slant is all of those incredible trivial things that she throws in. And that's what her friend tells her. Tell me things I won't mind forgetting. Just junk, just trivia, except it isn't just trivia because at the end you're left with that incredible image of the chimp signing to her dead baby. I mean, this one kills me too. This is why eventually you have to stop teaching literature. If you can't get through your class without balling like a baby, you have to leave. I can't teach TSLA's jail for proof rock either. So, you know, for reasons unknown to me, I cannot read that poem without balling like a baby. So that's, I think in that sense is she brings in all those sort of funny references and, you know, did you know this and some little fact and the California landscape and the fear of earthquakes and the fear of flying. And I was thinking about what you said really early Sam about layering. I think that is one of the most layered stories. You could, if you tried to diagram that thing, you'd be there forever, right? And movement. And also again, it's a story much more, I think about the narrator. Her feeling of having failed her friend so terribly, having not come till too late, having not being able to stay. We don't know for sure whether she even stays the night. And then that sudden leap from, oh my God, she wants me to sleep in her room. She wants me to stay here. I have to be a witness to at the funeral. We don't know. We don't know whether that narrator could face it. But I think the choice of narrative voice there is genius. Two funny friends, two girls have been funny and they watch movies together and they're just good buddies and then to have to be in this relationship, whoa, that changes your level of friendship. And she just doesn't know if she can live up to it. I just wanna take just a couple of minutes. This is just for your own self. So a little tiny bit of free writing and then I'll wrap it up by five because it's so hot in here. You guys need a little break before dinner. What I'd like you to do is think about any piece you are writing or you might be writing or you might in the future write, okay? And what slant in the particular piece can you bring to it? How can you slant your work to give it that really personal and lift it above the maudlin or the self-pity or whatever? Just think about it. It has to do with any of these topics even if it's a scene in a novel where someone's confronting a death or a loss. Even if it's a few moments, what's your slant? What can you bring as a writer? Besides your normal good writing skills, we're assuming that. Either way, whatever makes most sense to you you can just jot down some ideas or you could try to actually do something with the scene. Yeah. How are you going to lift it out of the maudlin? What's your slant? What are you going to do to make it yours? And you can think of it in any way. What am I gonna do to make this authentic if that's what you're worried about? What am I gonna do to make this not depressing? You know, whatever you are worried about in terms of these kinds of topics. Just a few minutes. This is just for you, for your notebook, for your private thinking. One thing sometimes you can do is just ask yourself a set of questions. You know, what should I do about this? What, how might I approach that? You don't even have to have any answers yet. Just thoughts. Just, you know. Things that are just, you would understand is so-and-so's voice too chipper. Does this character look too healthy to be sick? You know, that kind of thing. Just your own questions. And I guess one last question that I would ask and everybody just think about it for a minute is, if you know that being human, as we are, you have avoided the really hard stuff. How are you gonna face it and make it work? You know, where you get scared? Where you don't wanna write anymore because you don't wanna go through that. Where you're afraid of some of these privacy. You know, is this fair for me to write this about my father's death? Is this fair? Think about that. Because that's where the power in your peace lies and you have to find a way to deal with it. Doesn't mean you have to find a way to publish it. You have to find a way to deal with it as a writer. Before you're even thinking about somebody else reading it. Go where it hurts. And that's where I think, and we'll, I'm just gonna end it with a couple of poems. Go back to Virginia Woolf. You need a language more sensual, more obscene, more primitive. You need to be able to do some of that. It's often gut writing. And then when you revise it, you also make it brainy, witty. But you're gonna have to go with gut writing. At least to start. Okay, so if you've just finished those up and I'd be happy to talk to anybody afterwards. We can dismiss the seminar, but I'd love to talk to folks anyway. But I wanted to, again, give us some moment of hope on doing this well. And I just got this from Sally Knacker, a poet who graduated with her MFA not too long ago. She published a book of poetry called Virio, which is really quite wonderful. These are two new poems that she just had published online. Virio, V-I-R-E-O. It's actually on the recommended list here, okay? Sally lost her parents in fairly quick succession, okay? So she's been writing about this as well as she can, as we would all try to do. And I'm gonna read just these, they're very short. Two little poems. And I'll tell you in advance what I think her slant is. This is me, I didn't ask her, okay? I just, you know, this is me. In the first one, which is called Flores, florist during loss, she works as a florist. You can just see it, Sam sold us to look at form, so you do. These are little tiny, rhymed couplets. Very graceful, very easy, very flowing. They seem almost childish. And in some way, what I think is quite amazing about this poem is that it's that she uses very tight little rhymed couplets to express an emotion that's huge. You know what I mean? Where the form is controlled, the emotion is allowed to come in. So florist during loss, I asked her permission and she said, we could hear these. I have in blue cotton gardener's gloves slips over the hand of my grief like love. Through a mist of tears, the yellow yarrow softens soothes my harrowed sorrow. As do Esclepias for the butterfly, high swells of sunflowers, purple canterbury bells and alfineums, fine tall stems of rich blue flowers, little hanging bells of their own this hour. Basho sang of the sound of the temple bell coming out of the flowers. My flowers knell. Come night on my pillow, I lay my head as though in a ringing flower bed. Big sorrow, beautiful little poem. Very specific, the details, that's authentic because of the flowers. And this is another one again. This one uses the same little tiny rhymed couplets. Prayer during rain, grant me always the little birds. They do not know me or my words or how they lift me in the rain with a song that tenderly eases pain. In a wet world like today, I know their music during sorrow. Rain tumbles from the gutter drain onto the burying ground. Rain shudders on the green leaves, then drips down. Rain continues to come down. Gift me hope when grief is long. Grant me a little floating song. She pulls that together at the end, nicely. Okay, and again, I would like to give Jane Kenyon kind of the last word. She is not here to ask permission, but in this book called Otherwise, she has two poems, they face each other on the page and they both use the word other. And so I think they really are meant to be kind of a pairing. And I also think the word other is so appropriate for the ill, for the dying. They suddenly become other, other than what they were outside of us. That's why we often don't want to look at them, put them in the hospital, don't look at them, et cetera. First one is called Otherwise. Jane Kenyon wrote this when she had been diagnosed with a terminal illness but was not yet terribly ill, as you'll hear from the poem. These are both short. I got out of bed on two strong legs. It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birchwood. All morning I did the work I love. At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise. We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have been otherwise. I slept in a bed, in a room with paintings on the walls, and planned another day just like this day. But one day I know, it will be otherwise. And then this one she actually imagines, this is called Notes from the Other Side, she imagined having crossed into the Other Side. And if, by the way, you are ever asked to give a reading at a funeral, it works really well, okay? It's short, you can probably get through it, and it ends on a note of grace, I would say. And this is the last poem in this book, last one she wrote before The Sick White. Notes from the Other Side. I divested myself of despair and fear when I came here. Now there is no more catching one's own eye in the mirror. There are no bad books, no plastic, no insurance premiums, and of course, no illness. Contrition does not exist, nor gnashing of teeth. No one howls at the first clot of earth hits the casket. The poor we no longer have with us. Our calm hearts strike only the hour, and God, as promised, proves to be mercy closed in light.