Southern Literary Festival 2014

Each year in the South, a group of undergraduate English majors and their professors descends on one member institution for a weekend of readings, workshops, and fun. This year, the host school for the Southern Literary Festival was Ole Miss (University of Mississippi to the rest of the country), who did a fabulous job arranging panels and entertainment. It didn’t hurt that the festival ran concurrently with the Conference on the Book, an annual event hosted in Oxford, so there were quite a few other authors milling around and some of the events were combined. So, for instance, we all got to witness the live Thacker Mountain Radio program as it was recorded for public radio, there was a Blues performance, and of course there was a chance to wander around the Square and browse in Square Books. SLF panels included readings by Cheryl St. Germain, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Chiyuma Elliott and Dereck Harriell, Megan Abbott, and of course the student prize winners, whose work was published in the annual literary magazine of the festival. Students also had master classes in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting, and there was an open mic where anyone could read.

Started in 1937 at Blue Mountain College by a group of professors, which included Robert Penn Warren from LSU, the festival has a long and storied history. It has fostered many young writers, including the young Flannery O’Connor, and has featured many greats of Southern Literature. Each year is a little different, tailored to the strengths and talents of the host institution. Yet each year features the literary contest, readings, and workshop or master class experiences. It is a great asset for Southern schools, and membership is open. So if you are associated with a college or university in or near the South, contact me or the current host for more information.

The opportunity to hear good writing and have conversations about craft, and the chance to interact with students and teachers from schools around the region is an incredible experience. Though I know well how hard it can be to pry yourself loose from the demands of the current semester, those days spent in a festival like this can be incredibly invigorating and rewarding. If you don’t live in or near the South, search for opportunities like this in your area. Then make the time to attend. You won’t regret it.

How Smart are Smart TVs?

First, let me say that we’re pretty happy with our Samsung SmartTV in terms of its picture quality. It was a good replacement for our previous model that bit the dust (don’t ask). And it does stream Netflix relatively well, even if browsing titles is more than a little clumsy. But the promise of the SmartTV features seems to be more hype than reality.

First, most of the Samsung apps involve subscription services. Free internet TV is hard to come by, though Samsung does provide a web browser app. This is the biggest disappointment. Not only is it next to impossible to navigate with the supplied remote — calling it clumsy would be an incredible understatement — but it won’t play much and is constantly in need of updates.

The main problem seems to be with Flash. Videos on some sites tell us that we need to update our Flash player, which we can’t do except by updating the whole SmartHub or the browser or possibly the firmware. Other sites tell us we’re out of memory, but we can’t delete apps because Samsung doesn’t allow that for their recommended ones (the subscription apps). So we could buy movies and TV shows with the recommended apps. Or if we subscribe to cable, we could watch TV on demand if we had the premium channels.

But to watch the content we’d like to stream from network TV or other free sites, we might as well hook up a computer to the TV. Or an AppleTV or possibly Roku or other box might work. So where’s the value in the Smart features?

At least we got a good deal on this model, so we could not feel cheated that the hype of SmartTV was mostly hype. I’d rate the IQ of our TV at maybe 100. It does a few things relatively well, but there are serious limitations, and it has a long way to go before it will be a full replacement for a computer (even just for watching video.) It always felt like a waste to dedicate a computer to the TV, since there was so much processing power that we really didn’t use. The idea of a SmartTV makes a lot of sense. The reality is far from perfect, though.

We’ve read that Samsung will make major revisions to its apps on March 26, getting rid of all paid apps (not the subscription apps). There may be more changes in the works, which could make the experience better for awhile, but then it could all change again as Flash gets updated on websites, for instance. Oh, and there used to be an app called SwipeIt for streaming iPad or iPhone video, but I could never get it to work. Now it has disappeared from the Samsung apps store. The constant flux in what’s available and what the capabilities are may hold out some hope for the future, but it also makes the user experience more frustrating in the present.

Concrete Poetry

I always have a little fear and trepidation introducing concrete poetry to a class of creative writers, as I did today. On the one hand, I’m afraid I may get a lot of texts written in a shape that don’t have much poetry to them; on the other hand, I am convinced that the visual side of poetry is at least worth considering. Concrete poetry can lead to abuse or innovation, in other words, so it helps to show some examples.

What I like about concrete poems is that they can develop their own, visual sense of grammar. There is a syntax to the spatial arrangement of words on the page that works counter to sentence syntax. Indeed, often there is no sentence and the ‘words’ may not even be pronounceable. I like getting students to think outside the box and to think of poems as something other than prose. But I don’t like to give the idea that concrete poetry is static.

Far from it. The best concrete poetry challenges our linguistic norms, including challenging our habit of making language sense from left to right and top to bottom. So I show them a poem written in different lines that curve and bend in different directions, even one circular line. There is no logical place to begin the poem. If you start with one sentence and end with another, you might get a completely different sense of the poem than if you did it the other way around, or another way. There are multiple readings of the same text, depending on your entry point.

Writing a poem like this may take more technical prowess with typography than your average undergraduate can muster, but being exposed to the poem (and to other concrete poems) might allow them to think of poetry as not being (completely) linear. If they begin to look for connections around and within a poem, and not just in the straight line of prose, then they may pay more attention to other ways of creating meaning in a poem. Some of those may be more visual than auditory.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog: Be Useful

I keep marveling at how much my blog’s traffic has increased in the past year and thinking about the posts that made this happen. On the surface, the best advice I might give for driving more traffic to your blog could be: write about technology. My techie posts, which weren’t part of the original concept for the blog, have garnered far more hits than my poetry or teaching posts. But I don’t think that writing about tech is the only solution. Some of my food posts have been fairly popular, and there’s even a post where I was trying to define Nonfiction that regularly gets a hit — welcome students from Full Sail University (wherever you are) who must be assigned to find a page like mine. I see you in my stats now and then.

No, rather than taking the easy solution, to write about tech issues, I want to suggest that you write about whatever is on your mind, but make it useful. That said, I know it’s hard to predict what will be useful for others. So my rule of thumb has become to write about things that are useful to me. Then if others think so, too, I may have a hit, and if not, at least I can use it.

Case in point: when I was having problems with my DSL modem last year, I started a series of posts chronicling my problems and eventual solution. I tried to be very detailed about what my symptoms were and how I fixed them. I described every step as accurately as I could remember (without giving away personal details). I did this at the time, so I wouldn’t forget what I’d done if I ever had the problem again. People (and then search engines) started to notice. It was a rant, and that felt good, but it was a useful rant because it also provided information, and I’m convinced that’s what drove the traffic to my site.

I’ve done the same with a rare blood disease that our dog came down with a year ago. I recounted what I had learned about it, but I also recounted the experience of caring for and ultimately losing our beloved pet. I don’t think it’s the emotional content that draws viewers, but instead they want to know what someone else has experienced and what they might expect. I don’t know that our experience will be similar to theirs — and I sincerely hope theirs will be one of the cases where the dog responds to treatment and goes into remission — but knowing our experience must be useful.

Of course, I’ll continue to write about poetry, teaching, cooking, and the occasional odd-ball topic like the Motorette my mother eventually sold (thanks to someone who found out about it on my blog). You can’t always predict what will be of use to others, after all. So don’t let this advice stop you from writing about your passion even if that seems like the most useless topic in the world. As long as you approach it with the goal in mind to make it useful, at least to yourself, then my bet is there will be others who find it useful, too, and they will find you.

The Power of Twitter for Writers Looking to Publish

I often forget about reblogging. This is a post by a former student (who’s gone on to do some great things in her young writing career) that I found very helpful in thinking about new ways to make use of Twitter for writers. We got into a discussion of Twitter lists, which got me started collecting lists of magazines, magazine resources, and writers. Not only does this help me organize my Twitter feed and see more of what I want to see when I want to see it, but since people can subscribe to my list (or I could subscribe to yours), they could see what’s tweeted on my list. My next project is to hunt for some similar lists and subscribe. Who knows what I might discover. After following New Pages, Duotrope, and a number of literary magazines of interest, I’ve seen some cool announcements of open submission periods and found a few new lit mags I want to keep an eye on. Thanks again, Christy, for the original suggestions.

Christie Collins's avatar

If you’re anything like me, you set up a Twitter account when it was just reaching popularity in 2008-2009. You followed the short list of your friends who had a Twitter account. Then, for funsies you followed a few starlets just to add to your following list and to be trendy (I’ve followed Ellen DeGeneres since day one).  If any of this rings true for you, then you (bored and let down) may also have left your Twitter account stagnant for the next four years. This was certainly my Twitter story.

Just last year, I realized what millions of Americans already knew about this social medium.  For some people, 3,000 of your closest friends are on Twitter, and for you, this is why Twitter matters. For the rest of us, finding a niche for your account is vital to its usefulness. For years, I already had a niche – writing…

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Mississippi Philological Association

Today is the annual meeting of the Mississippi Philological Association, a scholarly organization focused on language and literature, which also encourages creative panels. I’ll be reading a few poems at one of the sessions, Kim is reading a paper, and MUW has three students who will be reading fiction, poetry, and an essay. It was one of the first regional conferences I attended when I first was hired at the W in 1994, and it’s been a good group to be associated with. The journal of the association, POMPA, publishes creative and scholarly work side by side, and for quite awhile there was a very active group of poets who attended every year. Recently, I’ve been more involved in the Southern Literary Festival, so I haven’t always made the annual conference. But this year, it’s just down the road in Starkville, so I’m glad to be able to participate again. The association has also begun accepting more papers and writing from undergraduate students, so Kim and I really wanted to encourage our students to take part. I’m looking forward to hearing them read, and seeing them take advantage this opportunity for young writers and scholars to branch out from their own universities and see what other students and their faculty are doing.

Haiku Revisited

Awhile back, I wote a post on judging a haiku contest and mentioned that I had written a few haiku. It’s not my main form of poetry to work with, so I’ve always felt a little like a fish out of water with haiku, yet it was a form I wanted to explore for awhile. The problem was, when I submitted to haiku journals, the response was always negative. I’m used to that with regular literary magazines, but there aren’t that many haiku journals and I didn’t want to keep getting turned down by the same places, so I gave up submitting.

Then last year I let John Z. look at a few of them. He also said my haiku weren’t quite haiku by a strict definition, but at least he tried to explain. And he offered some revisions. Naturally, his revisions didn’t match my vision and for awhile I decided to give up on the form, at least for these poems. I rewrote them as two to four line stanzas, but still didn’t feel satisfied. I called them “meditations” but that didn’t really fit the tone. To me, they were haiku, after all. Or if they didn’t quite master the form, they were at least haiku attempts.

This weekend, I decided to give them another look. My plan in revising the first time was to get them away from the form they had been in and let them sit. Enough time had gone past that I could look at them fresh. I got out my friend’s comments and reviewed the changes and suggestions he’d made. I paid closest attention to the one poem he had said was a haiku. If one got it right, then the others couldn’t be that far off, so I wanted to figure out what was missing.

I read some more about the “cutting word.” In a Japanese haiku, there is a word, sometimes described as an exclamation that marks the turning point in the haiku. It comes at the end of the first or second line in English, though in Japanese a haiku is written in one line with three parts or 5, 7, and 5 syllables (which are different than English syllables, so English language haiku don’t count them). I knew all of this. But in reading, what really sunk in this time was that the cutting word in English is often accomplished with punctuation.

What I realized was that my previous haiku, though they had all of the elements of haiku that I knew about, were too grammatically correct. Or I might say, too complete. What I’m realizing now is that the successful haiku has a silence in it in place of the cutting word. Think of a rap haiku where the cutting word was ‘yo.’ To translate that into non-rap and still try to replace ‘yo’ with a word like ‘ah!’ every time would sound ludicrous. Leave it out, but in such a way that the feeling of a revelation is still there.

With this in mind, I revised my haiku by rearranging and restating things so that the two states or two perceptions are disconnected grammatically. Or connected with a colon or dash. Both perceptions are their own statement. One is not dependent on the other syntactically. I also looked for balance, to make that break after the first or second line, and I tried to keep the weighting of lines at about 5, 7, 5 (so the first and last lines are even and shorter than the middle one without counting syllables), though I didn’t stick to that religiously.

I was happy with these revisions to poems I thought I was done with –either they were haiku or they weren’t, but I didn’t think I could take them any further. In the process, I do think the poems improved. It was more than just rearranging syntax and syllables, in other words. It was an exploration of new linguistic possibilities. Now we’ll see what the haiku journals think. They may still be full of other people’s haiku or opt to choose ones from the haiku writers they recognize, but I hope they are more encouraging.

Who knows, I may feel like adding a few more poems to this sequence of haiku or starting another.

Yet I should add that not all of the original sequence worked as haiku. Four of them were too interconnected, and I felt they really needed to be seen together. I gave them a different title, rearranged a bit more, and wrote them as a four-stanza poem (at least for now). If I decide I don’t like the poem in its current form, I’ve also thought of trying it as haibun, using prose to form the connections and provide the context that I felt was necessary to understand the individual haiku stanzas.

ATT DSL Woes Resolved (for now ?)

When we came home from our Christmas travels, we had a little time on our hands and wanted to watch some Netflix streaming. Fortunately, we also had a couple of DVD’s to watch, since our DSL connection speeds had dropped to the point that Netflix wouldn’t load. I tested our connection using speedtest.net and got speeds that ranged from over 2 mbps (we should have 3, but 2+ isn’t bad for an average) down to .20 mbps. Typical scores were around .5 mbps. Clearly, something was wrong.

So I spent a couple of hours with ATT Support. Getting to the right person made me feel like the main character of a Kafka novel. We have DSL, but they still routed me to U-verse first, then to DSL Southwest, and finally to the Southeast division who needed to help me. This happened a couple of times, since I was disconnected whenever I tried ATT’s speed test. The third time, I got right back to the service rep who had been helping me.

When I was talking to the right guy, he was very helpful. He didn’t make me go through all the typical trouble-shooting, like resetting my modem, once I explained what I had done already. He listened well, and had some good suggestions, none of which solved the issue, but which did isolate the problem. He believed me when I told him (the truth) that I had the same problem when my computer was connected directly to the modem and not through my Airport Extreme, and he didn’t make me keep testing it that way. This allowed me to be on the chat line while others in the family were working or playing online. And he didn’t balk when I told him my modem is set to bridge mode. He did have me connect directly from the phone jack to the modem without a filter (disconnecting our phones), in case an old filter were causing the problem. For a brief moment, we thought we had fixed it when we got two or three high speed tests. Then it went right back to .40 mbps or lower. He tested the line remotely, but couldn’t find a problem other than a high ping-back rate. On the basis of this, he dispatched a service tech to our home  with the standard warnings that it could be expensive if they found something inside and I didn’t have inside line maintenance, which I don’t. He did say we could refuse that service and make the repairs ourselves if that were the case.

When the service tech came out the next day, he checked our line and replaced the line coming into the house since it had a splice that could cause problems (didn’t help) and checked our bridge taps (I think he called them this), which are connections on the line coming to our house from the main office that could cause problems. He didn’t find anything there either. Essentially, he said our wiring was perfect, yet our internet connection was lousy. He explained it as our sync rate (the ability of the copper wire to deliver a signal) was perfect, but our surf rate (our actual experience online) was lousy. He said there were two possibilities. On ATT’s end, our port could need replacing, and on our end our modem or possibly just the ethernet cable to the modem (or the router) could need replacing. Since our modem and router are less than a year old, I was confident they weren’t the issue.

The next business day, ATT replaced the port on our line, and presto, our speeds went back to 2.8 or higher (and this is testing over wifi, so I expect lower results than if everything was hard wired to the computer). FaceTime calls and Netflix streaming has been much better.

So what did I learn from this experience? The main thing is that when ATT support tests your line remotely, they aren’t seeing the whole picture. They test your line from the port to your house, but they don’t test the port itself. (And I learned it’s called a port.) So it’s worth pushing until they send someone out who can really check the line and then can put in an order to change the port if they can’t find another cause.

All in all, I was satisfied with this ATT support experience. It took longer to get to a resolution than I would like (wouldn’t it be great if they could tell your port is bad when you call in?), but with due diligence we were able to find and correct the problem. It helps to be knowledgable about your service and to do as much trouble-shooting as you can before you call. What pleased me was that ATT support believed I really had a problem and took my complaint seriously. This time. I’ve had good experiences when technicians come to my home and mixed results from phone support. Having used both phone and chat support, I prefer the chat option, mainly because I don’t have to listen to hold music and I seem to get through to a person sooner, even if I did get misrouted several times. You do have to be patient and calm, but remain persistent: your problem should be resolved. Hopefully, it will be awhile before we have any more connection issues!

New Semester

It’s always nice to see a new batch of students in your classes at the beginning of a new semester, along with a few returning faces. This semester, it looks like I have a good group. Classes are reasonably sized, but not too huge. I’m excited about using my new textbook in creative writing with another group of 12. It’s one I’ve been writing and publishing as an e-book for my students. So this semester, I can test it on another group of creative writers.

Besides Creative Writing, I’ll be teaching two sections of Late World Lit — one online and the other in the classroom — and one section of Modern Poetry, which is always a lot of fun. My class sizes are not too big and not too small, so I’m happy with the numbers, too. I wouldn’t mind a few more in my face-to-face sections, but there are enough in each to have good discussions. Should be fun!

New Year’s Resolution 2: Complete a Book of Poems

Some readers of this blog will be familiar with my series of poems on the paintings and logs of Walter Inglis Anderson, which I’ve called “Barrier Island Suite.” They’ve been around for a few years and have been published individually in magazines over the years, but I’ve never quite decided what to do with them as a collection. Enough have appeared in magazines now that I can begin to think of book publication, but the collection is on the long end of chapbook range and a little too short for a full-length book. There are 20 poems in the series so far, though most would go to 2 pages in a book, so I’d be looking at a 40-page chapbook. I’ve never been quite satisfied with that, and recently I began rethinking the collection.

Since a suite is a related series in art, a suite of poems could be any length, but a suite in music is a more definite form of related movements, usually 4 in the suite de dans, though modern suites especially can be any length. To break up the series, I had initially thought to organize them in sections, which might roughly correspond with a movement in music. With this idea, I’m considering using the first several poems as a prelude, then having four more movements, which would involve keeping two existing series of poems intact and composing two more new sets. What I like about this idea is that it would allow me to write on two themes I would like to include.

Most of the poems take place on the barrier islands where Walter Anderson would camp and draw or paint for weeks at a time. They explore his relationship to nature, but also the relationship between madness and civilization, since Anderson suffered from an undiagnosed mental condition, which led him to leave his family and the Shearwater pottery for these extended solo trips. Though I initially wanted to keep the family and life at the pottery on the sidelines, it has begun to intrigue me how that part of his life was related to the solo artist. I’m planning to do some more research into his life at home and incorporate some images (especially from the mural he painted in his cabin) and stories from that side of his life into a movement that may take a different poetic form than the other poems.

Again, the idea of a suite helps here, since the music is typically in different time signatures and tempos. It may mean making some changes to existing poems as well, and I might add a few poems to the sections that already exist. The last section I’d like to write is on the Mississippi River, and will be based on his statue, “The Father of Waters” and may enlarge the focus of the suite to encompass more than Anderson himself.

Those are just a few notes of what I’d like to do. It’s a project I’ve been mulling for some time now, and 2014 seems like the right time to take it on. The additional research is exciting, as is the prospect of returning to this project with the goal of creating new material.