Author: ellen

“Don’t write: just listen,” Gill Solomon is telling me. We are on the Boston Common for the annual rebuilding of the fishweir, but more about that later. First there is Solomon putting his hand over my notebook and telling me to learn as his ancestors did, by listening. Solomon is a member of the Massachuseuk, the Native people who gave our state its name, whose language was spoken only, not written.

“Just listen,” he says, “and my words will become part of you.” It is a mark of how dependent I am on the written word that I feel a little panicky. Will I remember what he is saying? I listen hard. I try to picture the long winter nights he describes, when the tribe would have gathered around a fire and the evening’s entertainment would have been the telling of their history.

One of the elders would have started. Then maybe someone else would have said, “That’s not the way I heard it” or “I think it happened this way” and the story would have expanded, grown rich with embellishments, longer with each generation.

But we who rely on the written word, never heard the story. And so we learned only recently about the fishweir. Fishweirs–essentially fences placed in flowing waters–have been used for thousands of years to trap fish. Beginning in 1913 with subway excavation under Boylston Street and continuing through the 1990s as foundations were dug for Back Bay office buildings, workers uncovered wooden stakesdthat were eventually identified as remnants of ancient fishweirs. Carbon-dating of the stakes indicates that, instead of the 350-plus years Boston proudly claims, the human history of this land actually reaches back some 5200 years.

Because it was not written down, most of us do not know this story. But since 2001, led by artist Ross Miller, the Ancient Fishweir Project has built a weir each spring at the Charles Street edge of the Boston Common. It sits where tidal waters once lapped, looking mysteriously and magically out of time and place on the grass. And each spring in what Miller refers to as “this place we now call Boston,” the story is now being told.

Watching this year’s weir being built by schoolchildren recently, I think about how much our understanding of our world, and our city, is rooted in written language. I think of what has been lost by not writing down the story of the weir. It could be as familiar to Bostonians as Bunker Hill and Samuel Adams.

“Think about what you are going to do today,” Solomon tells the children, explaining that this was the time of year when the Native people would gather to repair the weir. “The medicine man would tell them, ‘It’s time for the fish to come back to fulfill their part in the circle of life, to give up their bodies to sustain us. And our role is to sustain the earth.’ “

Solomon says his tribal name is Feather on the Moon . Are there hyphens between the words, I ask him; I will need to provide the exact spelling for my editor. Solomon shakes his head. I am still not getting it: This. Is. Not. A. Written. Language. Well, of course, it is written now to some extent, a concession to the other world the tribe must live in. But exact spellings, which words are capitalized, if there are hyphens are all questions without relevance. Even the name of the tribe, the Massachuseuk at Ponkapoag, Solomon explains with a shrug, just refers to “the place where they put us.”

I can barely imagine living in an unwritten language. But then I think of what could be gained by not writing down the words. I picture those winter nights, those children hearing from the lips of their elders the story of themselves and their people, the stories passed down not as cool words on a page but with the sound of voice and breath, the force of feeling. I picture listening hard.

Not for the first time I think of the atavistic pleasure of going to a reading where the audience sits mesmerized by the sound of someone telling them a story. How much more compelling could it be if the story we were hearing were our own?

For a poet trying to get a little work done, April can be “the cruelest month” in ways T.S. Eliot never envisioned. Ever since it was declared National Poetry Month in 1996, this has been the time when poets are besieged with interviews, readings, and guest appearances that keep them from writing poetry. But shouldn’t this be a special month for the writers as well as the readers? I’ve gone back to some past City Type poets to see how they are observing the month.

Sam Cornish, Boston’s first-ever poet laureate, reports:
I am re-viewing the films of John Ford, America’s foremost cinematic poet; immersing myself in the language and speeches of Martin Luther King (and their wonderful Southern cadences and idiom); and observing very closely my fellow Bostonians, as they are a source of inspiration and material for my poetry.

Susan Donnelly, the author of Eve Names the Animals and Transit, has taught poetry in Cambridge for 15 years. One of her poems was featured in The New York Times last year as a winner in Nicholas Kristof’s Iraq War Poetry contest. I will breakfast with Elizabeth Bishop, (through) the Library of America edition of her collected works and I plan to rearrange a week’s work schedule to give myself five mornings of writing.

Charles Coe, author of Picnic on the Moon, says:
Shucks…I hadn’t planned anything…but now that you mention it, I was thinking of taking a few “mental health” vacation days later this month—like a weekend with a couple of extra days tacked on. I’ll do that, go away somewhere and hole up with my laptop. Thanks for the inspiration.

Frannie Lindsay, author of Where She Always Was and Lamb, tells me:
Writing’s not so easy for me these days, move to Belmont, some other big changes. But I have finished manuscript #3, joined an amazing manuscript group, and have been getting good news, little by little, from good journals (Yale, Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review). I’m kind of happy to be less booked up with readings this year. I remember how overwhelming the last few Aprils were, enough to make me cross out each day of that month until it was finally over and I could get some time to make soup and do laundry!

Joyce Peseroff is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Eastern Mountain Time. She is director of creative writing and MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Since for me every month is poetry month, I’m not altering my usual routine of reading, writing, and getting to as many readings as possible. I’m not even sure if events in our literary town increase in April, since every month seems to be poetry month in Boston

Doug Holder, the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press, was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes in 2007. His most recent collections are No One Dies at the Au Bon Pain and Of All the Meals I Had Before.
I am putting together a new manuscript for The Cervena Barva Press of my poems, The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel. I am reading Mark Doty’s new poetry collection Fire to Fire.

Gloria Mindock is the editor of Cervena Barva Press and author of Blood Soaked Dresses
On April 3rd, I was guest speaker at a poetry marathon by the Bay State Underground Reading Series at Boston University. I am taking part in discussing the special translation issue of Poetry magazine by holding a discussion group to talk about the poems in the issue. On April 16, Cervena Barva Press celebrates its third anniversary with a reading at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge at 7 with Flavia Cosma, Dzvinia Orlowsky, and Catherine Sasanov.

I’ve been reading Still to Mow, the luminous new collection from Maxine Kumin, and The Best American Erotic Poems From 1800 to the Present, edited by David Lehman, which includes Whitman and Dickinson, of course, but also Francis Scott Key (who knew?) and Isabella Stewart Gardner, great grand-niece of that Mrs. G.

Happy Poetry Month, one and all!

Looking at “All Shook Up,” the exhibit currently on view at the Boston Athenaeum, reminds me of two quotations about books. Alfred Hitchcock, that 20th century master of suspense, once said of a book he was reading, “This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book–it makes a very poor doorstop.” And Cicero, in the first century BCE, said, “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”

While I wonder what these two very different men in two very different times would say about Kindle and audio books, I know they had one thing in common with each other and with the Athenaeum exhibit: they were looking at books as physical objects.

This is exactly what Thomas Kellner, a German photographer has done in “All Shook Up.” Kellner generally photographs architectural landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, Stonehenge, or Times Square. Here he concentrates on the Athenaeum’s interior spaces, using the presence of books to help define them. His process is unique, producing contact sheets of photographs taken in a precisely determined order that he deconstructs and reconstructs, turns and tilts to show us something familiar that we have not seen before.

In the Athenaeum group, shelves of books dance in juxtaposition to windows, columns, dark wooden tables, and lacy metal railings. It’s a visual representation of that heady feeling you get in a library or bookstore where the air is filled with the buzz of books and the sense of what is contained in them. In Kellner’s photographs, the jaunty angles turn the books into advertisements for themselves, enticing us–daring us–to pick just one.

The tilt of the elements and the black contact sheet edges that run through them create images reminiscent of stained glass, something the Athenaeum’s Stanford Calderwood director and librarian Richard Wendorf finds particularly apt.

“Libraries and museums are almost our secular cathedrals,” he says. “They are the new important space for individual and community growth.

“In the interior of a very traditional library such as ours, kinetic movement animates the whole collection and has a visual energy that is a way of talking about the intellectual imagination and energy that lies within the books themselves.”

In Kellner’s photographs the books do look filled with energy, each a tiny glimpse–like a single word–forcing us to look at the pieces that make up the whole scene.

“They celebrate what’s here and give us different ways of thinking about what is here,” says Wendorf. They may also offer a look at what might be there in the future for this 200-year-old institution that was one of the country’s first membership libraries. The Athenaeum also houses a major collection of visual art, so again there is the sense of books as objects, rather than only as containers of text.

Wendorf reminds me, in fact, that the word “text” carries intimations of weaving and is related to “textile,” “context,” and “texture.” In that case, the “All Shook Up” photographs return books to their proper context, weaving them into the chairs, the lamps, and the walls, so we can be surrounded and sheltered by what they have to offer.

This column usually focuses on writers and poets, but that’s only half of the conversation. The other half, of course, is the reader. And so I recently spoke with Abdi Ali who spends his days encouraging a new generation of readers to discover what literature can bring to their lives.

Ali is a teacher of humanities at the Boston Arts Academy, a pilot school that is the city’s first and only high school for the visual and performing arts. He has taught there since the school’s opening in 1998 and is the founder of and faculty advisor for Slateblue Arts, the student art and literary magazine. Ali is also an advanced doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

What he wants his students to recognize is how literature can give us words for what we have no words for. He mentions a two-line poem by Louise Bogan called Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell, that reads: “At midnight tears/Run in your ears.”

“That kind of reading experience where you might not even know who the author is and you might not know the intent of the work, can still have something to say about your life.. You couldn’t articulate it, but you find articulation here.”

It’s that kind of deeply transformative experience of reading that Ali tries to make possible for his students

“The teacher in me is always trying to find texts that do for my students what books do for me,” he says. Among the books that he has seen make a strong impression on his students are White Noise by Don DeLillo and Flight by Sherman Alexie.

As for his own reading, Ali characterizes himself as an “unusual” reader.

“Reading, for me, is a private pleasure. I have friends who read a lot of fiction recommended by their friends. But for me reading is not so public. It’s a very private activity. I’m probably more fussy about what I read, so I take my time with recommendations.

“Some writers never let me down. I’m very forgiving of them, like Michael Ondaatje and poets like David Ferry, Thom Gunn, and Robert Pinsky.

“I read like a writer. I want to read something that takes me to someplace at a high level of language. The first or second sentence has to grab me, though sometimes I’m open to the first paragraph. I read to be informed but more importantly, I read to be surprised,”
Ali and I talk about how, at its best, reading becomes a deep conversation among book, author, and reader. He mentions the poet and critic Mary Kinzie’s image of the reader reading, but at the same time, being read.

“We can have a connection with the part of the work that is reading us and telling us who we are. It’s a kind of reading experience that is saying something about our own lives that we couldn’t articulate but that we see being articulated in the book.

“I think we’re all seeking some language, some metaphor, some word to say the things we’ve felt profoundly, deeply. The act of reading is our best chance of that.”

It ‘s a kind of connection that, Ali admits, doesn’t happen for everyone, but then there will be the moment when it happens for one of his students.

“The student for whom it does waits for me after class to talk. Then I know.”

Michael Epstein does what I’ve always meant to do. He keeps a list of the books he has read. In fact, it’s a list of 1082 (and counting) books he’s read since 1978 . And since he retired last spring from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he was chief operating officer and executive vice president, the list has continued to grow even more impressively. What began as simple listing has expanded to include a brief synopsis and what he calls “nuggets,” meaningful passages, pithy quotes, memorable characters.

Suddenly book lists are part of the zeitgeist, it seems, almost hot in the way “journaling” and “scrapbooking” were just a season or two ago. Art Garfunkel has one on his official website–1023 books read at last look since June, 1968 (cq). The United States Army Chief of Staff has one, too, broken down into categories from Sublist 1 for Cadets, Soldiers, and Junior NCOs to Sublist 4, for Senior Leaders Above Brigade Level.

After talking with Epstein near his Cambridge home, I am filled with regret that my pathetic attempts resemble those diary entries where “not much happened today.” What Epstein has, by contrast, is an organized body of work listing the books, yes, but even more documenting time spent and ideas encountered. His list shows a way of honoring the passing days by paying attention to them.

“It’s a reaction to the total fleetingness of life and our inability to stop time,” he says. “Maybe it’s aging or maybe it’s the pace of the world, but having started the journal and having it now in its 30th year, I think it’s one of the best things I’ve done.

“It’s a day by day record of your life. How many days can we remember? How much can you keep in your brain’s CD-ROM?” Epstein asks, laughing that he’s got a lot of 1950s song lyrics in there that he’d like to delete. But, looking at his list, he can remember not only the books, but the days spent with them– the summer at the rented house in Wellfleet with his baby daughter.

Part of the pleasure for him, too, is the tactile experience. If you’re looking for a gift for him, don’t get an audio book.

“I like the physicality of books, the heft of a book, the look of the cover.”

Lately Epstein has added a new dimension to his reading, memorizing poetry. I am reminded of the beautiful old-fashioned term, “having a poem by heart,” that acknowledges the reader’s ownership of a poem that has been committed to memory.

“The act of memorizing opens up a new level of understanding of the poem,” Epstein says. “The poet worked to get every word right and, in memorizing, I have that same struggle.” He tells me about a William Stafford poem he has begun to memorize and how working on it word by word has made the alliteration and the sensory images spring to life. He stumbles a little reaching for the first line and we laugh when it turns out to be “Starting here, what do you want to remember?”

That is a question can be asked, too, about why one might want to keep a reading list. Starting here, what books do you want to remember? What days?

It isn’t just about the poetry. That’s the message I take away from my conversation with Boston’s brand new poet laureate, Sam Cornish. Don’t get me wrong–he is certainly not downplaying the art he has been chosen to spotlight. Far from it. In fact, in the few days since his appointment was announced he has been busy responding to requests from news reporters and radio talk show hosts eager to discuss poetry. And, as a member of the Mayor’s Task Force that selected him, I know that he was chosen from a field of outstanding candidates because of his commitment to poetry and his impeccable credentials as a poet.

But the holder of this newly-created position has a broader view of the role that poetry can play in the life of the city.

“I picture a family thinking about what to do for entertainment and deciding to go to a poetry reading as a cultural event with meaning,” he says.

But, again, more than that. “I picture people carrying around a camera for recording visually what they see around them and a notebook to jot down lines about what they’re seeing and what they are thinking about. I want people to notice the ordinary things and see that there’s something more beautiful than a sunset.”

Cornish wants, in other words, nothing less than a city of noticers–people who can shake off the daily fog of routine, step out into the ordinary streets, listen to ordinary words and recognize them for the extraordinary experiences they are. He talks about seeing how people think of themselves as “quite ordinary” and “don’t realize how free and open and special they are.”

“The poet and Madison Avenue may both use the same language, but they have different intentions,” he says, noting that even learning enough about a presidential candidate to make an informed decision comes only after paying careful attention to the use of language.

Which brings us back to poetry. Cornish freely admits that people are sometimes intimidated by what he describes as “self-indulgent, convoluted poetry filled with self-regard that ignores what kinds of lives people live.” He encourages readers to trust their feelings.

“Don’t be put off by a book. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. Poetry is too important and gives such pleasure. Readers shouldn’t be prevented from enjoying it because of a few over-exposed and narrowly focused writers.”

That said, Cornish is the first to insist that understanding and enjoying poetry takes effort.

“It requires a commitment on the part of the reader. You have to take responsibility. You have to give the book your complete attention. You have to interact and pay attention the way you would in a conversation.”

Cornish laments that, because poetry is generally not reviewed widely in the media or displayed prominently in bookstores, it’s not always easy for people to find work they might want to read. He advises readers to search out work from gay and lesbian poets, racially and ethnically diverse poets, women poets, Irish poets.

“These are categories that might sound like political correctness, but it’s poetry people can identify with.” Cornish notes, though, that whatever its origin, good literature has universal qualities that transcend category. His own current bookbag holds three new books of prose: Tattoo for a Slave by Hortense Calisher, chosen for his interest in women writers and Jewish writers; Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, a novel about Native Americans in World War I; and Property, a novel by Valerie Martin, whom he likens to Alice Hoffman for prose he terms “inventive and magical.” His personal reading habits involve having four or five related books going at once so that “one book speaks to another.”

Cornish hopes his role as poet laureate will have an impact on the city. “Boston is a wonderful city,” he says. “Literature can give people something to talk to each other about.”

And it can help them notice the extraordinary world.

Folks Like Me

In the unemployment line
with those early morning
economic blues
at home
on my feet the president
said the economy is doing fine
(guess it’s just taking its time getting
down to folks like me)

Ohio After the Shooting at Kent State
(June, 1970)

We enter the mountains,
The sudden trees are quiet,
Moonlight finds stones and dust,
The bones of slow animals in the grass.

“There are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” Willa Cather (cq) wrote that in her novel O Pioneers! (cq) and it feels increasingly true to me with time. Maybe that’s the reason we are fascinated with other people’s stories–because they are our own. They give us knowledge of those other people, yes, but they give us insight into our lives, too.

Irene Koronas is a poet and visual artist whose new book, self portrait drawn from many, focuses on life stories of people that interest her. The diverse group –the book’s subtitle is “65 poems for 65 years”–includes Emily Dickinson, Ella Fitzgerald, Hans Arp, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charlie Chaplin appear in tightly drawn, deliberate shapes inside frames of fixed, even margins. Set in what she calls “square paragraphs,” these portraits drawn in spare, unpunctuated writing cross the boundary between the written and the visual, hanging on the page the way they might on a wall.

The minimalist writing feels like a natural outgrowth of her visual art, which most often
incorporates a grid of finely drawn lines.

“There are no shortcuts,” she says. “Once you start, you have to keep doing it–like life. It’s intimate. You have to come close to see the lines and see that each line is different.”

Her word portraits, too, invite the reader to come closer and watch the fragmentary details blur, like pointillist dots, into a picture of a person. A poem titled Louise Nevelson, for example, begins “broken pieces from bureau draws (cq)/fidgets and legs twist hidden in the/bosom of her skirted cities” (cq). And even though the art forms look different to the viewer or reader, in Koronas’s mind the process blends into “writing painting.”

“Painting is easier for me because I’m a visual learner,” she says, but she goes on to describe a similarity of process, with the initial impulse and then the more detached and cerebral re-envisioning.

(An aside here: as Koronas talks about her visual art process I confess I’m jealous. I don’t know a writer who doesn’t long to have “stuff” to manipulate once in a while, something to relieve the stark confrontation with the blank page. Oh, to have colors to mix on a palette or tools to sharpen and arrange or the mantra of drawing line after line rather than having to find word after elusive word.)

Koronas talks, too, about trying to figure out exactly who her subjects were. Joseph Cornell, Einstein, Emily Dickinson–what shaped them, made them tick? And how did they contribute to the way we think? Of Emily Dickinson, for example, whom Koronas refers to simply as “Emily,” she wonders about that famous aloneness and how that affects creativity..

“She had time to be alone with no distractions. So how do I do that?”

How indeed? What do we take from the lives of other people, whether presented to us in words or images? With their ability to show us ourselves do they simply magnify our self-involvement? Or can they make us somehow larger? Maybe they lure us out of our shells and into an empathetic engagement with our fellow beings when we look at the people around us and see (surprise!) ourselves?

rosa parks

too heavily upon her purse it may be
composure the grave old aloe tree
leaves she remains on the front row
seat she remains the beginning
for change

un-related
virginia woolf

inside with sun glasses on my knees
ache my lips blister her voice tidal wave
star marigold petals spiral open with
moisture on my cheeks fallen green
leaves virginia woolf left her hair under
mouth full of slugs solemn rinses
suddenly my life is very exciting her
vision enters and swivels shivers with
whatever buttons a long book

This month of holiday lights and frenetic cheer opened with World AIDS Day, reminding us of a disaster we are in danger of forgetting. It is one I have felt compelled to write about often through the past two decades. That is is what writers do: we refuse to not see.

Every day we wake to newspapers full of new human catastrophes of all types in various places year after year, decade after decade. Bosnia, Aceh, Sudan, Bhopal, blur in our minds into a vague disaster stew. And though we are caring people, we are human and the tragedies are painful. So we ignore. We forget. Unless someone insists on reminding us, as Gloria Mindock does with the civil war that raged in El Salvador from 1980 to 1992 . In her new poetry collection Blood Soaked Dresses, she holds up the events so we cannot look away.

Mindock, the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant in poetry, is the author, also, of two chapbooks and the forthcoming collection, Nothing Divine Here. She the editor of Cervena Barva Press and the online journal Istanbul Literature Review and is the former editor of the Boston Literary Review . The poems in Blood Soaked Dresses began when Mindock had the opportunity to speak with refugees from El Salvador.

“I’m very political,” she says. “I get so angry when I see what mankind does to mankind.”

She notes that the book is written in memory of one of the refugees, Rufina Amaya, who was the lone survivor of an infamous massacre in which the entire village of El Mozote, including Amaya’s family, perished at the hands of the government-linked Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) death squads.

“They would hang body parts in the trees. One woman saw her husband’s hand with his wedding band on it and that’s how she knew he was dead,” Mindock says, adding the stories were so horrifying to her that writing about it felt almost like a calling. Now she wants us to remember that as long as there are survivors to remember, tragedies continue to echo long after the news photographs and on-the-scene reports have faded. And if there are no survivors, the facts still remain. And so Mindock has made it her mission to bear witness as centuries of writers, composers, and visual artists have done before.

Blood Soaked Dresses begins in Rufina Amaya’s voice: “Death crawls underneath this world and waits. Who will be next? Three months ago, the soldiers murdered my two little girls….Their screams were like bad music….I talk to them every morning….At night, they invent my dreams.”

Mindock continues her book with the sad indictment that, no matter how high the cost in human suffering, our attention will not be held. We will forget, turn away, move on with our lives. But maybe we can be persuaded to remember, if only for the time it takes to look at a painting. Or read a poem.

El Salvador, 1983

Somewhere, someone is mourning
for the body of a brilliant one.
Man or woman, it doesn’t matter.
The tears in this country, an entrance
to a void…shadows touching skin like frost.

A star fell north of this city. Armies parade around
in their uniforms bragging about the killings.
Dead bodies thrown into a pit, cry.
Flesh hits wind, wind hits flesh.
How many dead?
Finally, they are covered with dirt at noon.
All eyelids are closed.
No one knows nothing.
No breathing assaults to hold us. The bitter ash
weeps over the world, and no other country
wants to see it, taste
the dead on their tongue or wipe away all
the weeping.

As the weather descends into another endless New England winter, I’m thinking of Sundays spent by the fire with a good book. And “book,”for many of us, generally means a big fat novel, not so much because we want a lot to happen as because we want characters we can spend time with, get to know. But a recent conversation with John Fulton has me reaching for shorter fiction.

Fulton makes a strong case for short stories and novellas, those “writers’ writers” literary forms that are, for readers, the road less traveled.

Fulton teaches in the University of Massachusetts at Boston’s master of fine arts program in fiction writing and poetry and is, himself, the author of a novel, “More Than Enough”; a short story collection, “Retribution”; and his newest book, “The Animal Girl” which contains two novellas and three short stories. His work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and citation in The Best American Short Stories. He is particularly fond of the novella, a form that, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was frequently serialized in magazines. Heart of Darkness”; “Animal Farm”; and “Goodbye, Columbus,” are all examples of how the novella’s impact can far exceed its word count.

“I’m a huge fan of this orphaned form,” Fulton says. As a writer he feels, as many of us readers do, that it’s all about the characters, and he appreciates the room a novella gives to let characters develop.

While some fiction writers have the story plotted out from the beginning Fulton belongs to the group that places the people on the page and lets them find their way.

”With a short story,” says Fulton, “as soon as I start I immediately have to think about the ending. In a longer work, I can have more patience with the characters. It’s not as if, in my own process, I sit down and decide I’m going to write a novella or I’m going to write a short story. But after about 10 pages of so I begin to recognize signs of a more expansive story. And then you just follow your characters.”

His tend to encounter incongruity. He may give his students a writing prompt like “a wheelchair on the beach,” noting that, in a hospital setting, a wheelchair is practically invisible. But put it on a beach and it takes on the kind of surreal dimension that gives texture to a story and leads the characters to respond in unexpected ways. In “Hunters,” the story that opens “The Animal Girl,” the reader learns in the first sentence both that Kate is answering a personal ad and that she is dying. It’s the kind of balance between opposing impulses that Fulton relishes.

“What is grief like when it is suffused with beginnings, with the awkwardness of new love?,” he asks. “How do we relinquish life and affirm it at the same time? We rarely experience pure joy or pure fear. More often we may feel hopeful and pessimistic, fearful and expectant.

“To get a character acting on the page they have to want something. The story is exploring what they are willing to do to get it. We don’t always know what we want or what we’re capable of doing. Writers have to be aware of what their characters want and let the characters make mistakes.”

Fulton, who is the father of a baby daughter, likens the writer’s role to being a parent. “You want to keep your characters safe but you also have to release them and see what they’ll do.”

Grace Talusan was a little girl when she read Maxine Hong Kingston’s book The Woman Warrior .

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, this exists? A book about a Chinese family that looks like me?’”

And, although Talusan had assumed she would become a doctor like her parents, she found the pull to writing impossible to ignore. Now she is the author of short stories and essays that, following that early inspiration, are often rooted in her Filipino background. And now people tell her how much they appreciate seeing the stories that don’t always get told, with details only a writer immersed in the culture would know.

“Little things like people pointing with their lips,” she says. “These are details my relatives would never be able to see in print unless I wrote it.”

Talusan’s stories usually grow out of an image–some detail, maybe sensory, or an event or scrap of dialogue–along with a pinch of self-deception.

“I don’t say I’m writing a story. When I just ‘play’ and don’t imagine the end product I do a lot better than when I think about the outcome,” she says. “Even at the lowest moments when I felt despair and didn’t know if I’d ever see one of my stories published,” she says, “I would have a story in my head and would want to write it. That’s what makes me want to get up in the morning.”

The recipient of an Artist Grant in Fiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, she teaches writing at Tufts University and a course called “Jump-start Your Writing” at Grub Street, an independent writing center in Boston. She encourages her students to think of writing as something to practice, to put time into, get comfortable with, and build up muscle for like sports.

“I tell my students a draft is like a rehearsal. It’s not the final performance.

“I used to think I needed to be inspired. But then I found myself waiting. Now I write a little every day. I like to think I can do something every day to improve my work. I’m trying to work on being more compassionate for myself, ‘paying myself first’ by working on my own writing first. If I don’t spend time on myself, I don’t give other things my best self.”

Talusan’s drive to work also comes from her family history of cancer. In her award-winning essay Foreign Bodies, which appears in the anthology Silence Kills, to be published in November, she writes:

“As the first grandchild in our family, Joli was the most photographed child in our family’s history. That night, after hearing about Joli’s diagnosis, my father studied hundreds of photos of her. “I didn’t see it,’” my father said. “How could I not see it?”

Talusan says, “I know time is a limited reality. I would like to write books that people love in my lifetime.”

From the essay, Foreign Bodies, published in Silence Kills

My brother Jon was almost two when he fell from the bed, hitting his eye on the corner of the wooden headboard and falling to the floor. It’s taken decades for me to learn the details: How my father carried Jon through the Emergency Room of the hospital he worked at, past the waiting room and nurses’ station. He sat my screaming brother on a bed and pulled the yellow curtain around them. My father didn’t trust the resident on call; apparently didn’t trust anyone but himself to hold the sharp points of the syringe, the threaded needle, and surgical scissors close to Jon’s eye. My mother helped hold my brother down. My father sobbed as he sewed the stitches, but his hand was steady and careful. He understood how important the face is to human interactions, how a scarred and disfigured eye could impact his son’s future. The pink scar drawn underneath Jon’s left eyebrow is a faded testament to close calls and my father’s expert hands.