First Thursday: Tales from a Former Bank Robber

January 3rd, 2012

Mill Valley Public Library Creekside Room - 7pm - 9pm

Just for High School Students

In his youth, Joe Loya robbed more than a dozen banks and spent seven years in prison. Today he’s on the right side of crime, living a solid life as a father, husband, a writer and performer. During the January First Thursday event, Loya will discuss how taking ownership of his story, refusing to accept people’s limited expectations of him, and expressing himself through writing helped him turn his life around. Author of “The Man Who Outgrew his Prison Cell: Confessions of a Bank Robber”, Loya will also share tips on how to really get deep into your own story so you can become a more effective storyteller.

Joe Loya’s idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end when his mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness. In the two years before her death, Joe’s extremely religious father became increasingly violent toward his two young sons—a contradiction that haunted Joe for years. Then, at age sixteen, Joe retaliated during a particularly severe beating and stabbed his father in the neck. For Joe, this was the starting point of a life of crime, and after holding up his twenty-fourth bank, he was arrested and served seven years in prison. He continued his criminal behavior behind bars and was eventually placed in solitary confinement. Alone in his cell for two years, Joe was finally able to forgive his father, finding clarity, cultural insight, and redemption through writing.

Food and beverages provided.

Click here to register.

10 Pieces of Advice for Young Writers

theatlantic:

Care about things. Show it. Be funny, barbed, and pointed when needed. Slick is easy; don’t be slick.

Confidence and arrogance will both protect you when people yell at you. One is vital and one is poisonous.

Learn to be your own devil’s advocate. Interrogate your own arguments. Interrogate your point of view.

Successful writers can play loud and soft and can make a variety of harsh and gentle sounds, just like great musicians.

Look at the people whose careers you admire and think about their paths. Don’t assume you want the fast lane.

If you are read widely, you will get blowback, no matter what. Don’t let it paralyze you, but don’t reflexively blow it off.

If you try to make your fortune creating controversy, then even if it works, you’ll be expected to keep doing it.

Being young doesn’t make you dumb or smart, important or irrelevant. But you’ll be a different writer in 20 years.

“Win 20 in the show, you can let the fungus grow back and the press’ll think you’re colorful.” Obey deadlines and house style.

You are entitled to be wrong, to feel embarrassed, to feel like a jerk, and to keep writing anyway.

[as told by NPR’s Linda Holmes]

mindovermatterzine:

mindovermatterzine:

MIND OVER MATTER ZINE CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Yep: signal boosting myself. No shame / no cares.

I’ve had some great submissions so far: looking to publish this this summer, so do keep them rolling in! (Send your writing in here)

Thanks.

YO LISTEN UP: I want to publish this in the next few weeks, so please send your writing in here asap if you want to be included! Thanks so much, xo

(Source: graphospasm.deviantart.com)

"I think that that is the gift that both reading and writing can give us is the gift of escaping the prison of ourselves."

— John Green (via runalovegood)

Not Making a Living by Writing? You Are in Good Company

A Saturday Rumpus List of Writers In Unsuitable Employment

by Michelle Dean

This week brought another spate of bad job-creation news in the United States. This surprised, I think, precisely no one other than pundits, whose job it is to be professionally surprised. The culture of work in this country is unstable at the moment; sometimes I wonder whether not being sure of how to make your living opens your eyes to this in a way not available to the comfortably employed. That’s been my experience, anyway, having gone from a stable job to, well, whatever this current status is.

As a gesture of comfort I compiled the below list of kinda crappy and/or annoying jobs writers have held, along with the evidence of their instability, so that any worried/unemployed/underemployed Rumpus folk can feel they have kin in the writing lineage.*

1. Kurt Vonnegut managed a car dealership for Saab. At this link you can find the letterhead to prove it. He tried to learn car mechanics, but the Saab people felt he had no talent for it and kicked him out of their classes.

2. George Saunders was a geophysical engineer but he also bummed around Texas for a while before doing his MFA.

3. John Steinbeck was a construction worker on Madison Square Garden, and hated it. According to his biographers, he quit the day a man tumbled from the ceiling rafters and died.

4. Harper Lee was an airline reservations clerk who found herself, in 1956, without enough time off to go home for Christmas. Friends who hosted her for the holiday in Manhattan instead gave her a big present: she could take a year off to finish her novel. And she did.

5. J.D. Salinger worked as the entertainment director of a cruise line. According to a biographer, he “acted in plays, accompanied daughters of rich passengers to dances, and spent his days organizing and paying deck sports.” The biographer claims Salinger enjoyed it, but note that he only did it the once.

6. Richard Wright sorted mail in Chicago. He started as a temporary worker, but when he tried to apply for a more permanent position he couldn’t measure up to the physical requirements. He weighed, at that time, less than the then-required one hundred and twenty-five pounds.

7. Anthony Trollope worked for the postal service, too, in England. Apparently we have him to thank for the invention of the letterbox.

8. Patrick DeWitt was a dishwasher for six years, and a construction worker, too.

9. Robert Frost worked in wool mill, replacing the carbon of arc lamps balanced precariously over the moving machinery and sneaking off to the roof to read, according to his biographer Jay Parini.

10. Langston Hughes was working as a hotel busboy at the Wardman Park Plaza hotel the day Vachel Lindsay dined there. Hughes left three of his poems by Lindsay’s plate; that night, at a reading Hughes was not permitted to attend becase he was black, Lindsay read them aloud and announced he’d found a major new talent. Hughes proudly posed in uniform for the papers, who picked up the story.

11. James Joyce literally sang for his supper on occasion. No recordings of his singing exist as far as I know but here, you can hear the musicality of his voice in this recording of his reading.

NEIL GAIMAN GIVES AN AMAZING COMMENCEMENT SPEECH

(Source: themarysue.com)

"Everyone should always have two books with him, one to read and one to write in."

— Robert Louis Stevenson (via amandaonwriting)

I smoke because I’m angry

I drink because I’m sad

I’m lost in my own world most of the time

— One of my students at Juvenile Hall. I asked them to write three things about themselves. I wish I could convey to her how much I understand and how much better life can get.

“Why Won’t ASME Recognize Women Writers?

Curious what the founders of “The Count,” which tallies the number of women who get published in top literary magazines (spoiler: not many), think of the 2012 National Magazine Award finalists? Although two women were nominated in the Public Interest category, there are no ladies to be found in prestigious categories like reporting, features, profiles, essays, and columns — basically, no women were nominated unless they wrote about ladybusiness. “The National Magazine Awards have sent a pretty clear message,” co-founder Erin Belieu told Mother Jones. “When it comes to a career in journalism, chicks should stick to writing about chicks.” Read the full Q&A here.”

via jezebel.com

BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE by Jack Kerouac

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

2. Submissive to everything, open, listening

3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house

4. Be in love with yr life

5. Something that you feel will find its own form

6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

7. Blow as deep as you want to blow

8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind

9. The unspeakable visions of the individual

10. No time for poetry but exactly what is

11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest

12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you

13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time

15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye

17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea

19. Accept loss forever

20. Believe in the holy contour of life

21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind

22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better

23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning

24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge

25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it

26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form

27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness

28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

29. You’re a Genius all the time

30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

(Source: writing.upenn.edu)

nothing to writing (by maria perry)

Henry Miller’s Commandments on Writing

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.

2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”

3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.

4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!

5. When you can’t create you can work.

6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.

7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.

8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.

9. Discard the Program when you feel like it-but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.

10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

from Henry Miller on Writing

(Source: The Huffington Post)

Hey, writers! Show some restraint!

The folk at Electricliterature.com are having a contest….

SHOW SOME RESTRAINT AND WIN FABULOUS PRIZES

Before you drink all the eggnog, eat all the pie, and come-on to your co-workers at the office holiday party, show a little restraint.

Write a short short that uses each word only once, and email it to halimah@electricliterature.com by December 31 at midnight for your chance to win Electric Literature vol. 1 and be published on The Outlet.

THE DETAILS

WHAT: Electric Literature’s Holiday Restraint Short Short Contest

REQUIREMENTS: A short short of 30 to 300 words, that uses each word only once. (Do not repeat any words! Not even pronouns or indefinite/definite articles.) This contest is free. For the nit-picky rules, click here.

DUE: December 31st by midnight. Email submissions to halimah@electricliterature.com

THE JUDGE: Former publisher of High Times and author Mike Edison

PRIZES:

1st place: Electric Literature vol. 1, Paperback; Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! signed by Mike Edison
2nd place: Electric Literature vol. 1, Digital
3rd place: Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style

for more details, rules, etc: http://electricliterature.com/blog/2011/12/13/holiday-contest-show-a-little-restraint/