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Episode 7: Mary Mackey

by Angie Powers | Nov 25, 2015 | Show

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Mary is a master of many forms, and we discuss and compare writing screenplays, poetry and novels. She tells us about compartmentalization, visual plot and character. In film, Mary says, character is demonstrated by what you do in difficult circumstances when you are given a choice. Mary is a retired professor, and we get into day jobs and PhDs. On the other hand, we also delve into liminal states, transcendental meditation and that article in the New Yorker about psychadelics. Does writing require an altered state and how do we get there? Robert Olen Butler talks about the “Dream State” for writing. Mary writes across many genres and has written for many decades. We discuss science fiction, feminism, the role of reading in writing, and editing: ruthless cutting, reading aloud, motivation, evoking world and more.

Books Discussed

Travelers with No Ticket Home

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Remembrance of Things Past by Proust

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Station Eleven

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From Where You Dream by River Olen Butler

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Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

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Time and Again by Jack Finney

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From Time to Time by Jack Finney

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The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

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Links
Inception
Renee de Palma co-writer and filmmaker
Mary's web site resources, interview series and newsletter

Mary Mackey

Mary Mackey is a bestselling author who has written six volumes of poetry including Sugar Zone winner of the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. She is also the author of thirteen novels some of which have appeared on The New York Times and San Francisco ChronicleBestseller Lists. Mackey’s novels have been translated into twelve languages including Japanese, Russian, Hebrew, Greek, and Finnish. Her poems have been praised by Wendell Berry, Jane Hirshfield, Marge Piercy, and Dennis Nurkse for their beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range. Garrison Keillor has featured her poetry four times on The Writer’s Almanac. Also a screenwriter, she has sold feature-length scripts to Warner Brothers as well as to independent film companies. Mackey sometimes writes comedy under her pen name “Kate Clemens.” She has a B.A. from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from The University of Michigan and is related through her father’s family to Mark Twain. At present, she lives in northern California with her husband Angus Wright. ” In Spring 2014, Marsh Hawk Press will publish a new collection of her poetry entitled Travelers With No Ticket Home.

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

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Episode 6: Meliza Benales

by Angie Powers | Nov 25, 2015 | Show

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Talking with Meliza Banales is like riding some amazing, brightly-colored roller coaster through the church of creativity. What? She’s just inspiring, whether she’s talking about reframing the promotion process as part of the creative process, being willing to fail, living with lupus as a writer, or launching her new novel into the world.

She gave us terrific tips on using separate spaces to juggle different aspects of writing, and she never forgot that everyone doesn’t have the luxury of living alone. She talked about committing to your writing (“Give it what it needs or walk away”), getting help, going on art dates with yourself, and reading your work in public as you go. About this last, she really urged writers to pitch your work to the street and stay current with your readers. This might reflect her status as a former Poetry Slam champion. Poetry Slam is a boot camp for writers: “It’s all about telling a story and you only have three minutes to do it.” Drawing on her filmmaking experience, she looked at the practice of writing in pieces the way filmmakers shoot films and then building the plot and the sequence with the time frame around the core concept.

Reading, she reminded us, is integral to being a writer. She urged us to look at books “as a refuge rather than work.

Some of the books and authors we discussed:

Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Paula by Isabel Allende

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

To Show and to Tell by Philip Lopate

Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Charles Bukowski

Lynn Breedlove

We also talked about:

Chicana feminism

punk rock chick coming of age

character growth

inherent conflict

writing as refuge

Find Meliza at missyfuego.com, get her novel, Life Is Wonderful, People Are Terrific and her chapbook, You Smell Like Danger, and more.

Meliza Bañales

Meliza Bañales aka Missy Fuego is the author of Say It With Your Whole Mouth (poems, Monkey Press) and has work in Without A Net: The Female Experience of Growing-Up Working Class (edited by Michelle Tea), Baby, Remember My Name: New Queer Girl Writing (edited by Michelle Tea), The Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Change, Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders of the Spoken-Word Movement (edited by Alix Olson), Lodestar Quarterly and Ladybox Books. She was the first Chicana/Latina on the west coast to win a poetry slam championship in 2002, has toured with Sister Spit and Body Heat, and gained national recognition for her appearances on NPR and The Lesbian Podcast. Her short film with J Aguilar entitled “Getting Off” won the Jury Award at TG Fest: The Los Angeles Transgender Film Festival in 2011. Her second book, a work of fiction titled Life Is Wonderful, People Are Terrific, will be out in June 2015 on Ladybox Books an imprint of Broken River Books. She has a spoken-word album, And Now Introducing Missy Fuego, expected to be released on Crunks Not Dead Records in 2015. She is a community builder with Con Fuerza Collective, a radical, Xicana Feminist collective in the heart of East LA. She lives in Los Angeles.

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

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Episode 5: Rhona Berens

by Angie Powers | Nov 18, 2015 | Show

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Rhona Berens is a life coach extraordinaire. We should know--we’ve worked with her, as have many “creatives.” She’s also got a background in film, screenwriting and writing for television, and writes poetry and other forms as well--so she was the perfect guest for Story Makers. She laid out some key ideas about prioritization, and explained “saboteurs”--the parts of ourselves that bring voices of fear and judgement into our lives and art--and how to work with them. We discussed how to make your intuitive a voice as powerful and heard as the voices of your fear and negative consequences. Listening to the voice that says, “I’ve got a story to tell” and some tools to support that voice to thrive. At the end of the episode we touched on subtext. If you are ready to transform your relationship to your creativity, your writing, your story making, or the necessary self-promotion, this is the episode for you.

Links and Books Discussed:
How to Be Both by Allie Smith

Puffy Chair, a film by the Duplass brothers

Einstein's Cosmos

Rhona's website is http://www.fortedreams.com/

Link to article by Rhona about how to remove some roadblocks to promoting ourselves as writers: http://bit.ly/1MRnHQv

Rhona Berens

Rhona presents her bio as stories about herself, and they are each wonderful and add more to the last, so check out this conversation and her website if you want to know more beyond:

My Professional Story (a.k.a. What Some of the Letters After My Name Mean): My degrees from McGill University and UCLA are in Communications & Media Studies. I worked at UC-Irvine for close to a decade, where I earned tenure, chaired my department, served as Director of the Professional Film & TV Internship Program, and taught a range of courses, like Performance in Film & TV.

I eventually left academia for business and held VP posts in Strategic Marketing at Online Partners; Client Services & Customer Care at PlanetOut Partners; and Business & Community Development at PeoplesMD. I've also worked as a Business Consultant focused on customer experience. What are the favorite roles I played in this part of my story? Teacher, mentor, advisor, which lead me to...

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

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Episode 4: Indigo Moor

by Angie Powers | Nov 18, 2015 | Show

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The wonderfully named Indigo Moore is three artists in one--at least. He’s a poet and a playwright who is now writing the screenplay for a play that was optioned for film. (Not to mention that he’s got a high-tech day job we talk about a little bit.) He’s also an editor--and we were sure to get that perspective on submission and what he learned as a writer from editing.When we caught up with him, he was also writing a new play on commission, and we talked about having that kind of external deadline, the art of submitting, as well as the different mindsets required for different genres. He described playwriting as a language-driven medium, as compared to the image-driven medium of poetry. In addition to laying out the process of calling or stripping a poem, he gave us a terrific description of a scene that you might see in a novel and how it would be written for a play and then how to make that same scene imagistic and wordless in a screenplay. Since writing is rewriting, we also looked at revision in different genres. We also got into following the character and trusting the process. He urged us to hunting inspiration down with a stick rather than sitting around and waiting for it.

Books/ Authors/ Artists/ Screenplays Discussed:

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Henry Dumas
Desiree Cooper
Jimi Hendrix
Paul Robeson
The Pulp Fiction screenplay

Indigo Moor

Indigo Moor is a poet, playwright, and author with 12 years’ experience teaching creative writing. His second book of poetry, Through the Stonecutter’s Window, won Northwestern University Press’s Cave Canem Prize. His first book, Tap-Root, was published as part of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Select Poetry Series.

Three of his short plays, Harvest, Shuffling, and The Red and Yellow Quartet debuted at the 60 Million Plus Theatre’s Spring Playwright’s festival. His full-length stageplay, Live! at the Excelsior, was a finalist for the Images Theatre Playwright Award has been optioned for a full length film.

Indigo is an honors’ graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program, where he studied poetry, fiction, and scriptwriting. In addition, he is a graduate member of the Artist's Residency Institute for Teaching Artists, former Vice President of the Sacramento Poetry Center, and a distinguished Cave Canem alumni.

An engineer by trade, Indigo emphasizes ingraining elements of poetry as tools for the writer’s arsenal. His students learn the “how” as well as the “why” of effective poetry, enabling the individual to better understand how their own work can be refined. Indigo encourages emphasis on the conciseness that drives powerful, evocative poetry.

Indigo received the 2005 Vesle Fenstermaker Prize for Emerging Writers and the 2008 Jack Kerouac Poetry contest. Other honors include: 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist finishes for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Crab Orchard First Book Prize, Saturnalia First Book Award, Naomi Long Madgett Book Award, and WordWorks Prize.

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

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Episode 3: Jillian Lauren

by Angie Powers | Nov 10, 2015 | Show

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"I don't get stuck," Jillian Lauren says. She tackles resistance. Pray to write the most mediocre page, she told us. Write through your writer’s block. Jillian Lauren is a superstar. She’s written two bestselling memoirs and a novel, as well as an ongoing, award-winning mommy blog. We caught up with her at the launch of her tour for Everything You Ever Wanted. She gave terrific, clear insight into the process of finding an arc of your memoir, pinpointing the character shift and the moment that exemplifies that shift, and handling leaps in time deftly. We comiserated about the pain of reading your old journals, and she had an excellent tip for that, too. She showed us how to create a time map for your memoir, when to show and when to tell, and what it means to write through the body. In terms of structure, we talked about specific underlying forms and how to find the beginning. Jillian has a “board of directors”--the readers she trusts to read her drafts. She talks about when to show the work and what to show to whom. She inspired us with a frank look at honesty, rigor and self-reflection. “Art,” Jillian reminds us in a discussion of happy and unhappy endings, “is hopeful because it's an act of creation.”

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Authors

Jillian Lauren

Jillian Lauren: I’m a writer, storyteller, mom, rock-wife, and Los Angeleno, by way of Jersey. I’m the New York Times bestselling author of the memoirs Everything You Ever Wanted, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem and the novel Pretty. Some Girls has been translated into 18 different languages and is currently being adapted for TV. I write a lot of essays and articles, some of which have been in The New York Times,The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Magazine, Elle, The Daily Beast and Salon, among others. I speak and tell live stories, often with The Moth. Howard Stern interviewed me once and he was actually really nice! I did a Tedx talk about identity and adoption, in 2014 at Chapman University. I’m married to the musician Scott Shriner, and together we adopted our son Tariku from Ethiopia in 2009. We’ve slept a total of seven hours since.

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

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Episode 7: Mary Mackey

Mary Mackey

Episode 6: Meliza Benales

Meliza Bañales

Episode 5: Rhona Berens

Rhona Berens

Episode 4: Indigo Moor

Indigo Moor

Episode 3: Jillian Lauren

Jillian Lauren

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