Susan Gubernat has a book of poems called “Flesh” and if you are interested in buying it, you can find it here.

If you ever get the chance, you need to take a class taught by Susan Gubernat. She introduced me to the obsessive nature of revision and taught me about the diligent effort needed to make good work.

 She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s conference, so she successfully got into the most competitive program in the world. 

 Susan told me and the rest of my class that the real factor in success is putting the work first and finding time for it every day. When I drove all the way out to Iowa, all of the instructors and lecturers said the same thing again and again.

 Work. Every day.

 You can read her poem “Etruscans,” and listen to it at Cortland review here.

 Thank you Miss Gubernat for a challenging class that made me grow as a writer.

Professor Susan Gubernat (Center) with Graduate Student Matt Klein (Left) and Professor Emeritus Donald Markos (right)

Jim Heynen (pronounced High-nen) was my instructor at the summer Iowa Writer’s workshop. You can visit Jim’s website here.

Jim’s class was the subject of an earlier post, but I wanted to talk about him a little and encourage others to take his classes and read his work.

 When you meet him you feel like you are sharing a room with a man who is the last of his kind. He’s an Iowa farmer’s son with a unique sensibility to nature.

 We discussed the number one cause of death for beavers, how pigs outnumber people 4 to 1 in Iowa, how snails reproduce asexually, and how to turn the material of our lives into something bigger and more interesting.

 Jim has a great body of work that you can check out on his website. What I really like about his poems and his writing is that he speaks to the inner life of a person and the thoughts that often go unshared. He’s worth checking out.

 Here’s some quotes from him that I thought were especially important to me as a writer and hopefully they’ll be useful to you as well.

On writing every day:

 “Breakthroughs are more likely to occur when you are on a plateau rather than coasting.”

 “Cast a line out into the darkness and wait.”

 On writing good first drafts:

 “The best moments in Thoreau’s writing are where he loses control and goes unheeded regardless of grammar. Sometimes you need to shut down your inner critic because if you put it down too slow it sometimes stops the flow of the piece.”

 “Develop your own voice, don’t let our era turn you into a style du jour.”

 “Writers do their best when they don’t believe they understand the end of their piece.”

 On editing:

 “Most pieces will get better when you condense them. But sometimes when you Strunk and White a passage, its tender flesh falls out.”

 “Condense. You must write as if you represent the whole world in a grain of sand.”

 “You must go after the inner piece, the polished style that reflects the heart.”

 I’m gushing a bit here, sorry. I just learned a lot. 

Thank you Jim Heynen, it was a great workshop.

    What can I say? He’s my thesis director. He’s one of the most positive and encouraging people I’ve ever met. He brings out the best in people. You can visit his website here.

    There’s a fine line in teaching writing where every instructor walks between giving helpful feedback that coaxes more effort or having the same advice inadvertently make a writer feel condemned. The great grace that Steve has is his openness to listen and willingness to work with his students both in and out of the classroom. When there’s somebody off the mark or a little too vague, he always brings in an example from another short story or novel. His style is non-confrontational while illuminating for those who listen. He sneaks up on you and I owe a lot to him.

    I’m glad I started with Steve because everything with him is possible. A lot of teachers have a pretty strict definition of what they want with creative work. He’s open to hear love stories, serial killer stories, literary realism, and even fantasy.

   “I don’t care about ideas, I just want to feel something on the page.”

     With such an open teacher, I think creativity can thrive instead of being bottlenecked by limitations. Even though you can step in any direction, you still have the limit of having to write a compelling story.

    “The story is carried by the language, not the plot.”

    So, tell the story, tell it well, make the reader feel something. Seek only to connect.

On August 28th of 2009, my flash Scifi story “We Love Bunnies!” was published by 365tomorrows. You can view it here.

Interesting story on this story.

It started as a daily writing exercise, I wanted to have the excitement of escaping an alien invasion while having an encounter with the unknown. A prerequisite for interesting aliens in scifi for me has always been a lack of comprehension/understanding.

In my teens one of my favorite scifi films was “Enemy Mine,” based on a short story by Barry B. Longyear. The movie starred Dennis Quaid and Louis Gosset Jr.

Stuck on a weird planet, a human needs to cooperate with an alien in order to survive. What was really neat to me was the concept of language acquisition. The difficult part was that Dennis Quaid’s human character and Louis Gosset Jr.’s alien character had completely different ways of seeing the world.

Eventually they came to understand each other, but only after many years.

My story is about a spaceman fleeing from one alien that’s trying to kill him into the formless body of another alien that doesn’t comprehend violence.

And, since there is a language barrier, everything takes some explaining.

I cut a lot of the piece to fit it into the word limit, I suspect the Bunnies will return in a later piece….in the future….

Thank you 365tomorrows, and thank you editor Kathy Kachelries!

I won an honorable mention for Tattoo Highway’s Picture is Worth 500 words contest. You can read it here.

I owe this one to the editor of Tattoo Highway Sara McAulay. I wrote the piece in a stream of consciousness form, and my grammar wasn’t the best. The other editors dismissed it, but Sara saved it because she liked its unique structure and imagery.

The prompt for the piece you can see using the link above. Tattoo Highway puts out a thought provoking picture and challenges its readers to write the best prose and poetry about it.

What I like about this piece is how different our lives are in youth and how many new dimensions we add to our lives when we get older. But, no matter how old we get, we always return to our youth.

Enjoy, I hope it makes you smile.

Thank you Sara McAulay.