April J. Asbury, Writer

Category: Writing (Page 3 of 3)

All things writing

Writing with Cats: Famous Purrsonages

June 10, 2021 / / 1 Comment
Black and white tuxedo cat caught on dining room table
Josie Cat says hello

A history of writers is also a history of the creature companions, furry familiars, and meowing mewses. (I’d better get this out of the way: I adore alliteration and no pun is too punishing. I won’t even apologize.) Let’s consider, for a moment, the long tradition of writing with cats.

Whatever damage the 2019 film Cats did to his feline-friendly legacy, T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats remains a poetic testament to the personality and mysterious secret lives of cats. If you spend time with cats, Eliot’s description rings perfectly true:

 When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
     The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
 His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
     Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
         His ineffable effable
         Effanineffable
 Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

Some cat non-fanciers may argue kitty is meditating on treats or murder, but let’s indulge Eliot this time. The poor guy’s grave is still spinning from that CGI nightmare in 2019.

Eliot isn’t the only contribution to the kitty literary canon. Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “Cat in the Rain,” lingers in literature books like contagious loneliness.

Meanwhile, descendants of his famous six-toed cats still roam his former home in Key West. The Hemingway Home and Museum estimates the current population may be as high as 60, which means an extravagance of toe beans.

LitHub, among others, has featured great lists of cat-lit. I’m just thankful that Emily Temple, the LitHub author and editor, specified, “15 Great Cat Poems Not Written By Cats.” Thanks to Zoom and the pandemic, we know the lines between us can be a little . . . fuzzy. (I will not apologize for the puns, I will not apologize . . .)

Josie the tuxedo kitten stretches while standing on a laptop keyboard.
What? She’s helping!

Writing with cats isn’t all catnip and cuddles. Even medieval monks endured cats getting where cats shouldn’t be.

The next time a kitty settles on your laptop, renaming your files, sending cryptic “chat” messages with her butt? This story about inky prints on a manuscript may give you “paws” . . . And remember, it can always be worse.

No manuscript is safe from a curious kitten. Fortunately, no heart is safe, either.

Writing Craft: Gospel of the Flute Master

June 7, 2021 / / 1 Comment

During an overdue cleaning of the guest room, I discovered a folder of notes from my days as a high-school first-chair flute-player. Inside this folder, I found fingering charts, tiny pages meant for flip-folders, and handwritten notes.

Some of the notes were from a tutoring session with a professional musician. This experienced flautist spent a long Saturday teaching students about posture, alternate finger positions, and better embouchure. I also found notes labeled as the instructor’s “GOSPEL.” Decades later, those notes still stand out as powerful advice, not just for musicians, but for creative writers too.

Here’s the “Gospel” for flute players:

Silver flute with gold mouthpiece in blue velvet case
My beloved flute, terror of neighbors and housepets
  1. ALWAYS build or relieve tension. Play like you’re going somewhere.
  2. Less tight = less tense = faster runs
  3. Bring everything forward + breathing [is] easier. [Remember to take] 3 BREATHS—back, belly, chest

How much of our love of music comes from suspense? We love the building up and relieving of tension. (OK, that probably sounds like certain other activities, too.) The advice is good for more than just Bolero, however. His points are great advice for the writing craft—fiction, in particular, but other types of creative work too. Even actors, when they leave the stage, are told to exit as if they have somewhere to go!

If you want lovely fast runs on the flute, tightening up will not help. Gripping your Gemeinhardt like it’s a life rope won’t make your music faster, louder, or easier. Sometimes you need to loosen your grip, take a step back, and—this leads to # 3—breathe.

Breathing lets you play the long notes, the high notes, the eerie low notes. As writers, we’re often told to practice reading our work aloud.

When we read aloud, breath means everything. What is the pacing of my work? Where am I taking a breath–or a pause–in my poetry? If I race through a long passage breathlessly, is that a problem? Or does my breathlessness heighten what I want to convey—panic, rage, little-kid excitement?

Thanks, long-ago flute tutor. I don’t know what we paid for that Saturday instruction, but the lesson was priceless.

Handwritten notes in messy cursive
The handwritten “Gospel.” And I thought my handwriting was messy now . . .

Writing Daily Pages . . . Sort of

June 3, 2021 / / 0 Comments

It’s late afternoon now, but I just finished my “morning pages” an hour ago. While I try writing daily pages, I find they are not usually “morning” pages or even “daily.” That effort has helped me recover my voice and write my way through a bout of depression. I’m a believer . . .

Usually.

Julia Cameron, famous for The Artist’s Way, has built a self-help empire for the “artist in recovery.” Even her most recent work, The Listening Path, emphasizes her three basic steps. Write three “morning pages” every day, take yourself on an “artist’s date” once a week, and get out and walk as often as you can.

Morning pages are meant to be stream-of-consciousness pages written by hand on first awakening. If you’re familiar with the exercise of “Freewriting,” this is basically your plan here: write for yourself alone, uninterrupted and unedited.

Along the way, you should discover new things about yourself. You’ll wipe away the junk that clouds your perception. (I’m reminded of Bill Hicks, who joked about getting his “third eye squeegeed quite cleanly”–with daily writing, however, no hallucinogens need to be involved.)

During my first reading of The Artist’s Way, I did the three pages religiously. But I didn’t always do them first thing in the morning. I needed food, needed coffee, needed to take care of the dogs . . . While Cameron is very firm about the early-morning part, I met one writer who always does her pages at night. Instead of preparing for the day ahead, she used her pages to put the day to bed. For this writer, her adapted system works.

So sometimes I’m writing daily pages in the morning, afternoon, night . . . Whenever I need to break out that squeegee. Interestingly, I realized I didn’t write them when I was actively working on another creative project. When I had momentum on a big project, when my “spoons” were dedicated for something else, that was when I skipped the pages. When the momentum ebbed, when my last “spoon” was a plastic spork, that was a great time for pages.

In Finding Water, Cameron writes, “I am a writer and writers write. Every day that I write, I am keeping my side of the bargain.” Writing pages helps me fulfill that bargain. It doesn’t matter if they sit unread. I kept my promise, and I wrote something.

If I did that, even on days I felt like crap . . . What else can I do?

Pile of spiral notebooks, binders, and books on a quilt
Journals for daily pages, 2019-present: that is a LOT of spiral notebooks

Publishing Tale 1: The Radio Interview

May 30, 2021 / / 0 Comments

When Finishing Line Press sent me how-to guides on publicizing Woman with Crows, one of the messages included advice on radio interviews. At the time I thought, hmmm, when in the world will I ever do a radio interview? Guess I can ignore this one . . .

Guess again.

Within a week, Monica Hoel, the Director of Alumni Affairs from Emory & Henry College, contacted me. Monica is a spirited advocate, not just for alumni, but for the entire community of E&H. When I was a student, she was on the interview panel when I applied to be editor of The Ampersand magazine. Job interviews may be even more nerve-wracking than media interviews, but Monica seemed to enjoy speaking with me as a person. She even remembered my work years later.

Staff members for The Ampersand, literary arts magazine at Emory & Henry College
I got the job! Ampersand staff at Emory & Henry College, me in the bottom center

So here I am, trying to get the word out about this chapbook, and Monica asked for a radio interview. I’d only been on the radio once, and that was for a local NPR bit about the Highlander Festival; I was supposed to talk about cultural connections and Appalachia, but the only decent quote was, “I really like haggis! Honest!”

A year of teaching on Zoom, however, makes interviews less strange. Monica and I had a fun, upbeat conversation online, and it became part of her radio show, On the Duck Pond Wall.

Here’s her article, with a link to the radio interview and a text of “A Petition for Merciful Salvage,” previously published in Floyd County Moonshine.

Thanks so much, Monica, for once again making a first-time interview a positive and memorable experience!

A place to write: woman seated in chair by railing in Brown Hotel lobby.
A favorite place to write

Where Do You Write?

May 26, 2021 / / 2 Comments

Park benches, easy chairs, floors, classrooms, beds, teacher desks, hotel rooms, coffee shops, fast food benches, desks, bean bags, lobbies, cars, staircases, boats, trees, patios, big rocks–even, at one ill-advised point, the bleachers during a demolition derby. I’ve tried to write in all these places, sometimes with more luck than others.

For some of us, “place” is part of the ritual of writing. We can get very particular: do we need to write? Music, television, headphones? Ergonomic seating, or just a place where won’t fall off a mountain?

I’ve seen impassioned defenses of writing by computer or by hand, in absolute silence or during the breakfast rush at Hardee’s, on moleskin journals or spiral notebooks. . . And, if you care about pens, that discussion will last for a while.

Some places do have a kind of magic. One of my favorite places is the upper balcony in the lobby of the Brown Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. The Brown is home to residencies for Spalding University’s MFA program; during residency, you can’t toss a legal pad from the balcony without hitting writers of all genres, all experiences, all stages.

In my favorite nook, I can see everything–friends gathered at the bar, students encircling the grand piano, new guests dragging their luggage across the gleaming floor. I can write in my own space, but I’m part of things too, and I can feel my creative impulses fizzing like Pop Rocks.

Right now I’m at home, writing on a ten-year-old MacBook (which needs to work for a few more months–pray for me, y’all) with a small tuxedo cat under my elbow and two dogs at my feet. All the curtains are open, the trees are tossing outside in the wind, the room is quiet except for a couple of fans and my raging tinnitus.

That’s fine by me. Maybe this isn’t the lobby of the Brown Hotel; maybe I’m not relaxing at a beachside retreat. But, for the moment, I have time to work, and that’s more precious than a whole bundle of brand-new pens.

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