“Did you hear about the trees in Texas?”

February 2022. Andy presents me with a bouquet of strange facts: Texas. A historical cold. Frozen sap. Pressure. Kaboom! A thundering in the chest. Tree shrapnel. “Thanks to Climate Change,” writes Lizzy. “Thank you, oil barons!” I say.

October 2012. Long Beach. Hurricane Sandy. Ocean waters mixing into bay waters flood and kill the Sycamores. 2,700 trees dead, according to the arborists. 2,700 trees replanted. Once a historical Sycamore. Once a symbol of an innocence the natives revealed in — a tree-lined childhood riding bikes in bathing suits. Our two Juniper bushes planted as symbol of our beginning in 2005. Our two Junipers — straggly contortions of indigenous greenery. A symbol of the brute strength of Long Beachers. Two of the few things we had that survived Sandy.

“Did you hear about the trees in Texas?”

“They are exploding,” Andy says.

I frown. “Exploding?”

“Yeah, it is so cold there that the sap is freezing. The frozen sap expands, causes pressure, and breaks the branches with such a force it sounds like gunshots.”

Andy knows I like strange facts like this, so he chooses each one carefully and presents them to me like a bouquet of flowers.

I find the story between boredom and frenzy at work on a website called Greenmatters. The title of the article is “Thanks to Climate Change, Trees in Texas are Legitimately Exploding,” by Lizzy Rosenberg, Feb, 8^th 2022. I appreciate her sarcasm in the piece, but I wonder if it is misplaced. I would thank the oil barons.

There aren’t many trees here, on our end of Long Beach, but there were Sycamores in the middle of town before Hurricane Sandy destroyed them in 2012. Before the strong winds and high tides caused the ocean waters to meet the bay waters in the middle of Park Avenue. The salt water infiltrated their root system and killed them. Native Long Beachers remember them fondly for their shade and beauty as they lined the streets. The city had to replace 2,700 trees. When we first moved here in 2005, we planted two Juniper bushes in wine barrels and put them on our deck. When Sandy toppled the barrels and soaked their roots with sea water, they didn’t die. Of everything we had, they are one of the few things that survived.

As if to disabuse Freud of the idea that adults are too ashamed to play, the TED Radio Hour just ran an on “reconnecting” with play–with a lot about plays relation to making art. (There’s also one about rest and one about work.)

https://podtail.com/podcast/ted-radio-hour/work-play-rest-part-2/

Alaska Quarterly Review presents

JANE HIRSHFIELD & DORIANNE LAUX

Two of America’s most esteemed poets, Jane Hirshfield and Dorianne Laux, discuss poems that have emerged from factual sources and their craft approach to writing those poems.

A playful writing tip from Mira Jacob:

J: When I was working on The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing—which took me about 12 years to write—whenever I didn’t know what the next scene was about, I would draw an item from that scene so that I could relax. Lynda Barry says this thing that is so true, that when you draw the movement of a line it relaxes your brain. Much in the same way a walk can. You begin to process things differently. So, if I was locked out of a scene, I would draw, say, a jar of mango pickle. If I drew that jar I could figure out what needed to happen in that scene without it being forced. It gave me a new perspective.

In the course of drawing a jar lid, it would begin to occur to me what the characters would be saying to each other. If they held the jar this way, then this is going to be the conversation that they’re having. It would just relax me enough to be able to believe in my characters.

You can read the rest of the interview here.

Hi, all! I just came across this episode of Write-Minded, a podcast hosted by founders of SheWrites and NaNoWriMo:

https://podcast.shewrites.com/craft-is-never-neutral/

It’s an interview with Matthew Salesses, and I’m still in the middle of listening myself, thought others might like to check it out. The interview part doesn’t start until shortly after 12 minutes in, but it’s interesting to hear the hosts talk about the book in the beginning, especially as we are in a nonfiction workshop here, and the SheWrites host works mostly with memoirists.

I also hosted a video conversation with Courtney Maum and Matthew Salesses about a year ago, when CRAFT IN THE REAL WORLD first came out, and the video is now hosted in the free online Resort network I founded/manage here:

https://community.theresortlic.com/events/happy-half-hour-craft-book-discussion-with-matthew-salesses-and-courtney-maum

(Warning: you have to set up a profile and join the Resort network (https://community.theresortlic.com) before you can view anything there. Absolutely no pressure here from me to do so, of course! But if you’d like to, it’s free.

Finally — I see that we have Jennifer Baker visiting our MFA program later this semester. She was a guest on the first season of my Cabana Chats podcast about writing and community (a podcast I started developing during a previous workshop with Jason!), and you can check that out on Apple here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cabana-chats-jennifer-baker/id1574534168?i=1000534546457

Cabana Chats is also available on Spotify, or here, among other places:

https://anchor.fm/the-resort/episodes/Cabana-Chats-Jennifer-Baker-e170rm5

Cheers!
-Catherine

*All at 7pm, on zoom, links forthcoming

Wed March 9: Matthew Salesses talk, “What is Craft?”

Matthew Salesses is the author of the recent groundbreaking book CRAFT IN THE REAL WORLD: RETHINKING FICTION WRITING AND WORKSHOPPING which has changed the field of creative writing pedagogy.

Thurs March 24: Jennifer Baker talk, “Potential Careers in Publishing.”

Jennifer Baker is a writer and editor who was named the 2019 Publishers Weekly Star Watch “Super Star” for her “varied work championing diversity in publishing.”

Mon April 11: Ghostbird Press Birdhouse Prize roundtable reading

Ghostbird Press is a chapbook press founded by MFA alum Peter Vanderberg which showcases emerging and established writers of all genres.

Wednesday April 27: Poets Tracy K Smith and Tina Chang reading and conversation

Tracy K. Smith is a former Pulitzer prize winning poet who now teaches at Harvard, and Tina Chang is the Brooklyn Poet Laureate and author most recently of the collection HYBRIDA.

Thursday May 5: Queens College MFA alumnae Open Mic.

Welcome to English 757, a Creative Nonfiction Workshop focused on the interplay of fact and play in the genre–and intuition and intention in the writing process. We’ll use this site as an online syllabus. I’ll post announcements here. You’ll post occasional assignments, and I encourage you to post announcements and discoveries related to the work we’re doing together.