Back to School: Creative Writing 2.0.2.0

Three years ago, I was asked to relocate to a new classroom in my school. I packed up ten-plus years of teacher things and moved to a more-or-less identical room in another part of the building.

This summer, in another shuffle of classroom assignments, I was asked to move again — back, it turns out, to 226, the room where I’d started out and taught for so long. I was happy to discover, when I returned, the ghosts of my old decorations — postcards, photos, bookmarks, bumper stickers, students drawings — still lingering on the big bulletin board at the front of the room, three years after I left, their memories imprinted into the cork.

I’m a big believer in classroom decorations, not the mass-produced posters and banners you can buy from the teacher store, but decorations of a more personal and DIY sort. What’s on the walls can go a long way toward establishing the classroom as a safe and creative space, and the less one classroom looks like the next, the better. This year, things are a bit different: most of my decorations are still in boxes from this last, hurried move, and many of my students are learning from home, not in the classroom at all. The need for a safe and creative space is at least as important as ever, but that “space” is more metaphorical. For the moment, in Room 226, the ghosts of decorations past will do.

One Friday in March, we left school for the weekend and did not return until August. I swept through my room just once after that, to grab some necessary books and papers. I didn’t set foot in the school again until July, when I started the move to my new (old) classroom.

In this last room, the one I packed up this summer, I’d made a mural of huge photos of writers, figures I imagined as some of the patron saints of our class. The students and the photographed writers had no choice but to gaze into each other’s faces all year, which I liked. Early on, I asked my Creative Writing students to warm up for their writing day by drawing, in their notebooks, one of the faces from the wall. Then they moved on to drawing the faces of their own creative heroes. (To see the original mural and a few student notebook drawings, see this blog post from last November.) Before the schools shut down, we started using the drawing time to learn more about the world: students would take about five minutes to Google Czech or Nigerian or Bolivian writers (for example), then choose an arresting face from the images that resulted, draw it, and finally surround the drawing with a few biographical facts, culled from a brief internet search. As an alternative, they could type in their own first names, followed by the word writer, and quickly research and draw a writer with whom they happened to share a name.

In February or March, students had started taking turns drawing their pictures on the classroom’s two whiteboards. I hoped to have every available whiteboard inch covered by the end of the semester.

But then the virus came, and we went home, and the school stood empty for months. So when I finally returned to pack up the room, I was greeted by all these faces, each of which I still adore. Every one of them is somehow alive with the unique personality of the student who made the drawing:

I was reluctant for a long time to push my Creative Writing students to draw pictures — or even sometimes sing — which are decidedly not activities they signed on for in a writing class. But these whiteboard faces persuade me to believe that our drawing time is time remarkably well spent. If nothing else, the drawings have brought me enormous joy — I’ve looked at them so much it’s hard to believe they might never have existed. And it made me glad to know these figures stood watch over the classroom all spring and summer, when no one else was there.

Our first assignment in Creative Writing this year had nothing to do with writing. It was inspired in part by Kurt Vonnegut’s now-famous letter to a bunch of high school students in 2006, the one where he implores them to “Practice any art … no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.”

I share the assignment here, in case you would like to do any of it yourself. I’ve also included, at the end of this post, a few student responses, which have convinced me that this, too, was time well spent.

Thanks for reading, y’all. Stay safe, and be kind.

FRIDAY, 8/21/20:

This isn’t a writing assignment, but more like an invitation to play. The purpose is to shake off some self-consciousness, to do something silly and pure, to open yourself up to art and accident and vulnerability, to express yourself by yourself, for yourself. I will not see the results of this activity, but I do want you to send me a short email after it’s done, telling me how it went.

Do ONE of the following:

1. If you have a driver’s license and access to a car: Make yourself a short playlist of the songs that give you the most life and the most energy and the most joy, the kinds of songs that are best if you play them loud, songs you know or can at least fake every word. Go for a 20 minute drive, by yourself, blasting those songs, signing along as loudly as you can.

2. If you don’t have a driver’s license or car access, skip the playlist and the driving. Just go take a shower and sing your heart out. If possible, do this when you are alone in the house, and really sing your heart out. Loud! Make it a long shower, with lots of songs.

3. Without consulting the internet; spend at least 10 minutes trying to do an impression of each of the following. Don’t worry if your impression is terrible. Don’t be afraid to laugh at how hilariously bad you are at impressions. But do make a mental note of which impression is your best. Spend at least a couple minutes each trying to imitate each of these:

+ a family member

+ a famous actor

+ a famous singer

+ a famous politician

+ a cartoon character

When you’re finished, consider: what would an impression of yourself sound like? Can you do an impression of yourself?

4. Spend 10 minutes making funny faces in the mirror. For inspiration, you may want to first watch the first three minutes of this video, in which Patton Oswalt makes faces for the camera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVNCm8lhB80 (The second three minutes may also be of interest, but they don’t include funny faces.)

5. Pour a tall glass of water. Spend a few minutes gargling some of your favorite tunes. Optional bonus challenge: after you’ve done this by yourself for a while, invite a family member to join you. See if you can gargle in harmony or gargle a duet, swapping lines of the song. For best results, do this standing face to face.

6. Draw each of the following from memory, without consulting the internet: a giraffe, a koala, an orangutan, an ostrich, an owl. Don’t spend more than 5 minutes on any one of them. Live with (and celebrate) your mistakes. Only once you are finished, compare your drawings with online photos of the real thing. Revel in the differences.

7. Find a place, maybe but not necessarily your bedroom, where you can be totally alone. Lock the door, if possible, and put on a favorite, high energy song. Play it loud enough to drown out the rest of the world. You know that phrase, “Dance as if no one is looking?” Do that. Don’t even watch yourself, because then you have an audience and it becomes a performance: avoid all mirrors. I ‘d recommend going a step further and finding a dark place, a closet or a bathroom, maybe. Turn off the lights and do your dancing in the dark, where all there is is your invisible body and the music. If you have trouble picking out a song, try this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMXBJW1PuU8. Whatever song you choose, dance to it at least twice, back to back.

8. Draw pictures with your feet, holding the pen, pencil, or marker in between your toes. A marker may be best because of the thickness; feel free to experiment to find the best writing utensil for you. Draw your own self portrait, first, and then at least 2 of the following, on separate sheets:

+ your home

+ your family

+ your biggest crush, if you’ve got one (either someone you know, or a “celebrity crush”)

+ your pet, if you’ve got one, but wearing a cape

+ Dracula

+ Spiderman vs. Batman, the ultimate showdown

9. Only if you don’t already know how: spend the weekend learning to juggle. Get as good as you can by Monday, even if it’s still pretty rough. Feel free to consult internet videos for help.

Okay, that’s the list. Do one of those things. If you want to do more than one, that’s fine, too, but make sure you do at least one of these, and do it whole-heartedly. Do it alone, and try your best to be as unself-conscious as possible.

Immediately after you do this, email me a brief description of what you did, how it went, how it felt, etc. Just 3-6 sentences documenting the experience is all I need.

That was the assignment. You’ll have to take my word that I received a bunch(!!) of inspiring responses. Here are just a few:

I took a shower and sung my heart out as you said, and really gave it my best shot! It was loud, ugly, and loaded with vocal cracks, and unruly shrills! It was … the most cringe-worthy and satisfying thing I have ever done! I butchered: Lewis Capaldi “Bruises” “Someone You Loved” “before you go” and many other great songs. And let’s say…I felt as powerful as a battalion, and that’s a statement!

I did the first option and made a short upbeat playlist and drove for 20 minutes. This made me feel energetic and I wanted to accomplish things after I got home, and I did the rest of the day I worked out did speed drills, and went to the park to play basketball.

During the weekend, I stayed in my bedroom singing national anthems of different developing countries. I didn’t dance because I don’t dance and dancing is not my thing. It made me feel extremely good while singing them because I feel like I want to help those countries.

So, I drove around with the music up pretty high. Higher than normal. It was after work and I was going home. I had a terrible, stressful day and I went on my favorite playlist and felt free. I took the long way home and I normally go under the speed limit, but I decided to go over. I know, so rebellious and scary. In that moment, I was as free as a bird with the world in my hands. I felt absolutely elated and when I came home, I was in a better mood than I had been for a week.

I did the impressions option for today, and it was a funny experience. For the singer portion I tried to do Ariana Grande, and I was way off, though that was expected. But the funny thing about the whole thing is that my mom heard me from the other room and started laughing. She actually came in to try and help me with my impressions, but we just kinda sat there and laughed for most of the attempts. Then we went out and got ice cream and fries, because why not?

Why not is right. That right there is what I would call some homeschool at its finest.

Draw Your Ancestors

1. Classroom Faces

At the start of this school year, I moved into a new classroom and had a new, big, blank cinder-block wall to fill. So I used one of those giant printers to print out life-sized and larger-than-life photos of a few American literary icons, and I arranged their faces into a huge collage:

Your Words Can Change the World — *(Left to right, this is Eudora Welty, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Walt Whitman, Flannery O’Connor, and Toni Morrison.)*

I think of it as a (partial!) Mount Rushmore of American writing, a wall of literary ancestors. Their job is to remind us that our words, too, can change the world.

Over the course of my Creative Writing course, we’ll read at least a little something by most of these writers, and sooner or later we’ll talk — at least a little — about the rest. To be sure, it’s a subjective and incomplete wall of ancestors, filtering the “canon” through my own biases and tastes, but it’s a start. (I keep in the hollow space of my podium a huge, rolled up head of Kurt Vonnegut, whose impish sidelong glance I just couldn’t fit, physically, anywhere into that puzzle of faces. Later I may create a second line-up on another wall; in the meantime, when Vonnegut comes up in discussion, I can whip out and unfurl his image.)

2. Student Drawings

Especially because Creative Writing happens to be the first period of the day — and because I think some “mindless” drawing can awaken some playful, spontaneous, unpredictable part of the brain — I sometimes like to start the class by asking students to draw for five or six minutes. I’ve asked them to reserve the first three pages of their Creative Writing notebooks for these start-of-class drawings and doodles, so that by the end of the year those pages will be crammed with all sorts of images — images which will serve as untamed and untranslatable intro to all the words that will follow. Of course, half the class complains that they “can’t draw,” which is the real point (it turns out, they can). But because they only have five minutes for the drawings, the perfectionists have to abandon perfectionism and the slow-to-starters have to jump in, ready or not. There’s no time to think, and everybody is equal.

I started the year’s drawing times by having students choose one of the big literary faces on the wall and try, quickly, to draw it. At the start of the year, they’re likely to know something about one or two of these writers — probably Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes — but the rest, so far, are strangers to them. Ultimately you have to choose your own creative ancestors, and I know my students haven’t chosen these particular writers as theirs. But that’s part of what I like about these first drawing activities: I tell them to just choose whichever face stands out or interests them the most, and spend a few minutes with it. Maybe later a voice or a meaning, or some historical weight or baggage, will attach itself to the face and the drawing. But for now you’re just moving your pencil or pen across a sheet of paper, waking up your brain.

Later on, students will add to the same three pages their own self portraits — and self portraits of themselves as superheroes or supervillains — and they’ll look up pictures of their own creative heroes and their own creative ancestors and draw their faces, too. The ones on the wall are just our starting point, and I absolutely adore the results:

Another reason I like starting with the same limited group of faces, before students branch out into their own, is because I love the variation you get from a few repeated, recognizable images. Each Gertrude Stein reflects its drawer’s personality above all; the result is part Gertrude Stein and mostly that student. No two Gertrude Steins are alike — but they’re just enough alike to make those differences magical.

You can see a few of the students’ own heroes and ancestors mixed in among these sample drawings; I’ll post some more later on in the year. (One day I gave them the option of drawing anything in the room. A student in my film class had recently brought in a wonderful, creepy E.T. mask that her father had made her, out of felt, years ago, as a Halloween costume; it was still hanging on a hook in the front of the room, which is why you see that E.T. There are a couple of stuffed Kermit the Frogs on my bookshelf, too.)

So:

3. Your Turn

Here’s an assignment, if you want one. I recommend starting your day with this, to warm yourself up — if not first thing in the morning, then right before you begin the most productive part of your workday. Take about five minutes to draw one of your own creative heroes or ancestors (a writer, artist, musician, filmmaker, comedian, teacher, lawyer, whatever — maybe choose somebody you admire from your own line of work, someone whose example reminds you why you do what you do).

Keep it to about five minutes. That way it’s not a huge time commitment, and it takes the pressure off: you can’t expect it to be super-accurate, and you can’t worry about whether it’s “good.”

When your five-ish minutes is up, look back upon your creation. Don’t ball it up or throw it away. Take a picture or scan it, and send me a copy (burgin@bhammountainradio.com). Then put the original on your refrigerator or over your desk, or leave it in a public space for a stranger to find.

Here’s an idea, if you want to really go all-in: get a notebook just for this. Spend five minutes doing this, every day for 30 days — or, if you like, for 365 days. Set a goal and keep it up. Create a diary of five-minute faces, a one-of-a-kind, homemade, ever-growing book of ancestors. Occasionally send me pictures (again: burgin@bhammountainradio.com).

Or, finally, an alternate assignment, if you prefer the mystery of losing yourself in a stranger’s face: Google “Czech authors” or “Ugandan authors” or “Indian” or “Hungarian authors” (someplace whose literacy ancestry is unknown to you). Choose the face that most arrests you, and spend five minutes drawing it. Be sure to write the author’s name beside, around, or under the drawing, and maybe (quickly) add to that a book title, birthdate, or fun fact, whatever you get when you click that person’s picture.

I am certain that you will create something magical that otherwise would never have existed. Give it five minutes and see.

P. S. This week I got my hands on the new book by Lynda Barry, Making Comics, and it’s wonderful, offering many of Barry’s own exercises to draw your way into unexpected and extraordinary, imaginative places. Don’t let the title fool you: her book isn’t for aspiring comics artists (although those people should get it, too), nearly so much as it is for the rest of us — especially those of us who quit drawing pictures around the same time we stopped being kids.

P. P. S. Here are a few of my favorite things from the drawings above: Langston Hughes at an enormous, blank typewriter; all the Toni Morrisons; the bored, tired, or mildly annoyed Whitmans; “powerful.” Also this truth: that sometimes when you’re drawing, your pencil produces something your brain didn’t mean or want (a “mistake”) and you just have to run with and reclaim it. So Zora Neale Hurston becomes “Evil Zora Neale Hurston” — which is pretty wonderful in itself.

Don’t forget to send me your drawings! Thanks for reading.

Some Birthdays & Obituaries & Lives Well Lived

Lately we’ve been losing some greats — musicians, poets, and icons of various stripes. A couple of weeks ago, my friend Gerald posted these words on Facebook:

“The recent passing of Dick Dale (81), W. S. Merwin (91) and earlier this year Mary Oliver (83) has caused me to reflect on how my heroes have changed. When I was young I worshiped artists who flamed out early: Ian Curtis, Arthur Rimbaud, Jimi, Janis and Jim. The list goes on. Now, I’ve come to admire artists that not only live a full life, but those who continue to do their work until they pass.”

Hear, hear. I’d add to this list the poet Donald Hall, who died last year at the age of 89, and whose Essays After Eighty I adore. For the last few years I’ve kept by my bedside either that book or its follow-up, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety. I look to Donald Hall’s last books for their wisdom and their wit but above all, I think, for the simple beauty of their sentences, each laid carefully after the next. I hope that something in those books will rub off on me and that somehow, someday, I’ll write sentences that seem so effortless and clean.

Then there’s Andre Williams, the outrageous R&B wildman original, who was funny, creative, irreverent, raunchy, prolific, and gleefully strange all the way up to his death, just a couple of weeks ago, at the age of 82.

He’d released his last album at the age of 80. It’s called Don’t Ever Give Up.

Some of our creative elder-heroes still walk among us. Austin Kleon’s new book, Keep Going, opens with a quote from Willie Nelson. “I think I need to keep being creative,” Willie says, “not to prove anything but because it makes me happy just to do it…. I think trying to be creative, keeping busy, has a lot to do with keeping you alive.”

Willie Nelson turns 86 this month. Last year he released his seventy-third album. It’s called Last Man Standing.

And then of course there’s Lawrence Ferlinghetti, still with us at the age, now, of a hundred. For his birthday a couple of weeks ago, he released a new book, Little Boy. City Lights bookstore threw him a huge birthday party. (I couldn’t make it to San Francisco, but I did make him a card.)

Meanwhile, a little closer to home: last Saturday, in Petal, Mississippi, the British-born ballet dancer Henry Danton celebrated his own centennial. He still actively teaches and dances and is writing down the details of his long and celebrated career.

“I don’t have a lot of free time,” he told the Hattiesburg American. “And I want it that way. I don’t want to retire.”

Stories like these keep popping up into my news feed lately. A week or two ago I read about Delana Jensen Close, who just published her first book, a novel called The Rock House, at the age of 95. She started writing it sixty-plus years ago, back in 1955. She told the Associated Press that “It had to come out” and compared its long-awaited release to the birth of a child. “In the days after it was published,” the A. P. reports, “she literally treated it that way — carrying the book around in a basket with a baby blanket.”

The Indie Book Awards gave Close the prize for this year’s best historical fiction. She has two new novels underway.

Maybe, like I did, you grew up on Beverly Cleary books. This Saturday, Cleary turns 103.

Back when she was just a hundred, someone asked her the secret of her longevity.

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” she said.

And here’s my favorite story from 2018: “Alabama man turns 99 this Fourth of July, plans to cast his first vote.” John McQueen of Montgomery voted for the first time in his life last summer, in Sen. David Burkette’s runoff election. (Burkette won.) According to Al.com, McQueen stays active today, working in his garden and singing gospel music. “I still work,” he told the paper. “I ain’t never stopped…. I believe if I stop and rest I won’t last long.”

Here’s McQueen, just before his ninety-ninth birthday, singing at a rally for Sen. Burkette: “You Don’t Know What the Lord Done For Me.”

* * *

All this has gotten me thinking about Stranger Malone, a musician I interviewed at length some years ago and wrote about for the Old-Time Herald magazine. The first time I laid eyes on him he was already past ninety, performing onstage at a summer outdoor festival in Western North Carolina, blowing a clarinet and playing the bones, standing in the hot sun in a heavy corduroy suit. Long before that, way back in the twenties, he’d played clarinet on records by Gid Tanner’s Skillet Lickers and Clayton McMichen’s Melody Men. After he died, he was inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records for having the longest working recording career in history, one that stretched from 1926 to 2003.

Stranger didn’t care to make distinctions of musical genre. “I like sentimental music,” he told me, defining the common thread in his repertoire. “I feel sentiment about life: I think life is a marvelous thing, and I think we should take care of it. And I like songs that express that idea, that this is a marvelous world, we better take care of it.

“So I like that type of music. But the nonsense I leave behind.”

Malone died in 2005, at home and in bed in his Rome, Georgia, apartment. A musician friend found him there, after he’d failed to show up for a recording session. By his hand was a book called Life is Worth Living.

And then there is Doc.

My dear friend, the late Frank “Doc” Adams, told me, in our very first conversation, about his cousin, Arthur “Finktum” Prowell. Finktum was a roustabout, an old carnival worker, a comedian and singer. He was a dirt-poor rambler and a lifelong bachelor; he refused to profess religion, and his own family declared him no good. Doc adored him. No matter what others thought, Finktum was wholeheartedly and unrepentantly himself.

“And,” Doc told me, “when he died, he died singing: ‘Life is Like a Mountain Railroad.’ See, he could sing, man, and he died.”

That, I think, is the way to go.

Doc himself died at the age of 86, in 2014. That may sound old to you, but the news of his death shocked everyone who knew him: Doc was so alive, so fundamentally full of youth and vitality, that the thought of his dying just didn’t compute. He and I had published a book together in 2012, and Doc was still brimming with new ideas every time we met. At the time of his death, he was trying to reunite some old musician friends for a recording session in his basement. He had some poems he was planning to set to music And he’d been working on a barbecue sauce he intended to market — he’d just perfected the recipe and was working on a design for the label. The ideas just poured out of him — for collaborations, research projects, presentations, performances, recording dates — and it sometimes breaks my heart to think of those projects that never reached fruition.

But then again, that’s the only way it could have been, and that was the beauty of the man. If he hadn’t been still working on a million new ideas at once — if he’d finished everything and just sat back and slowed down — he wouldn’t have been Doc.

In our book, I asked him how he wanted to be remembered, and he said this:

“I want to be remembered as a person who didn’t quit.”

And that’s the thing about all these creators — Stranger Malone and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Dick Dale and Doc Adams and Delena Jenson Close and Henry Danton and Andre Williams and Mary Oliver and all the rest of them — they’ve shown us how to keep going, to keep creating, to never give up, to continue the work. They didn’t, don’t, and won’t quit.

And, listen: I know we’re just lucky to be here at all, that we’ve got to make the most of the days we’ve got. I’m not betting on making a hundred, or even forty-five. Of course, I can’t help but hope I’m here a long, long time, still creating new things, still getting closer to my best, all the way up to the end; and that when I do come to die, I’ll die singing, like Finktum.

In the meantime, for however long I’m here, I’ll just be doing my best — to learn from a wealth of ancestors and elders, to keep my hand on the throttle and my eye on the rail, and to leave the nonsense behind.

Thanks for reading this blog. If you’d like more, take a minute to hit the “follow” button. You can find my radio show, The Lost Child, on Instagram and Facebook, and find my book Doc: The Story of a Birmingham Jazz Man wherever you buy your books. If you’re in or around Montgomery, Alabama, this weekend, stop by the Alabama Book Festival on Saturday (April 13); I’ll have a table there with the Doc Adams book and a whole bunch of zines. Hope to see you around.

Tell me what you think.

Okay, friends and strangers, I could use your feedback.

Here’s a short, working synopsis of my book in progress. I invite your input (on content, style, or any nitpicking details) in the comment section below. To chime in, you need zero prior knowledge of the subject matter, just an honest gut reaction. I’d like to know what works for you here and what doesn’t, and what could work better—anything you think might better persuade a person to pick up and read this book.

Thanks for taking a look.

Magic City Bounce and Swing tells the story of one of American music’s most essential unsung communities.

In an era of pervasive segregation, African American educators in Birmingham, Alabama, created a pioneering high school music program that offered students a life outside the local mills and mines. After graduation, students trained under John T. “Fess” Whatley and other Birmingham bandmasters fanned out all over the country, joining the nation’s top jazz bands. They backed Bessie Smith on stage and on record and populated the bands of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong and others. The Erskine Hawkins Orchestra, an ensemble full of Birmingham players, became one of the swing era’s most popular and enduring dance bands, and their biggest hit—“Tuxedo Junction,” a tribute to their hometown scene—became an American anthem. When the country went to war, other Birmingham jazzmen filled the ranks of the Army, Navy, and Air Force bands that provided a soundtrack for the cause.

Often making their mark from the sidelines or behind the scenes—as composers and arrangers, sidemen, businessmen, mentors and teachers—Birmingham musicians exerted a broad influence on the popular culture of the nation. Drummer Jo Jones pioneered the shimmering, propulsive rhythm that came to define the sound of swing. Bandleader Teddy Hill helped launch the careers of some of the giants of modern jazz and, as manager of Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, became a catalyst for the bebop revolution. Sun Ra—one of American music’s most inventive, iconoclastic originals—pushed the jazz tradition to its furthest-out, most exploratory fringes, communicating a new music for the cosmos. Other players remained in Birmingham, shaping the local scene and passing the tradition to new generations. The contributions of these musicians and others meant more than mere entertainment: long before Birmingham emerged as battleground in the struggle for civil rights, its homegrown jazz heroes helped set the stage, crafting a unique tradition of achievement, independence, innovation, and empowerment.

Drawing on troves of previously untapped sources—interviews, news reports, home recordings, and more—Magic City Bounce and Swing reveals, for the first time, the story of this remarkable community. Tracing the intersecting lives of its unforgettable cast of characters, the story crisscrosses an America that’s been largely forgotten: from segregated high school band rooms to the swanky gala dances of the South’s black elite, from jazz-fueled religious revivals to smoky urban night clubs, from touring vaudeville tent shows to the world’s most glittering ballrooms. What emerges is nothing less than a secret history of jazz—and a joyful exploration into the hidden roots of America’s popular culture.

That’s it. Thoughts?

P. S. Thanks for reading (and commenting)! If you’re curious about the book above, please in the meantime check out my previous book, Doc, which was just reissued in paperback. If you’d like to see more of this blog, look for the “Follow” option at the top of this page. If you want more music-related stuff, please check out my radio show. And if you just want to say hello, just say hello!

Back to the Future & boxes of books

When Back to the Future begins, it’s 1985 and George McFly is in every sense a loser. Then his son Marty travels thirty years into the past and sets off a chain of events that rewrites forever the whole family’s reality. When the movie ends, it’s 1985 again, but it’s a different 1985, one in which George McFly is no longer a loser at all. He’s a writer. And in the last minutes of the movie a box arrives in the mail, full of the first copies of his first book. The family opens up the box and it’s stacked with hardback copies of A Match Made in Space, a novel, with George McFly’s picture on the back.

I loved that movie when I was a kid — I still love it now — and that little moment thrilled me every single time I saw it. Because even then (I guess I was eight or nine), I wanted to write books. And so that tiny, unlikely moment at the end of Back to the Future became for me, for a few decades and running, what I imagined it must look like to be a writer. You were just a sort of regular guy (a little nerdy, maybe, but no loser), but then sometimes a box would show up on your doorstep, full of the books you’d created. I never could imagine much in the world that might be better than opening up that box.

Usually the way something looks in the movies isn’t much like it looks it real life. So when my book Doc first came out, I was surprised and delighted when it happened just like it did in Back to the Future, in that scene that was still so much in the back of my mind. A box arrived on my porch, and my heart raced, and I opened it.

I’m working on another, brand new book now — an outgrowth and kind of sequel to the first one — and I can’t wait for the day its first copies arrive on my doorstep. But in the meantime another happy milestone happened today: Doc has just come out in its first paperback edition, and this afternoon I got a box full of the things.

FullSizeRender-1

I’ll admit, the delivery this time was a bit anticlimactic: the release date was yesterday, but there was a glitch with the distributor. A release party and reading, scheduled for last night, had to be postponed at the very last minute, so we pushed it all into the new year. (If you’re in Birmingham, mark your calendars — it will be on Thursday, January 10, at the Little Professor Bookcenter in Homewood, come hell or high water.) But still it was satisfying to open that box. I’m very happy that this book is out at last in paperback. I hope it’ll get Doc Adams’s important and inspiring story out to a new world of readers. And it’s $15 cheaper than it was before, which is no small thing in itself.

In 1955, Marty McFly tells his future dad, George: “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.”

Later, in 1985, George McFly opens up a box of books, hands one of them to Marty, and tells him the same thing.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

This is what writing is like.

Emily Brontë, age 21, in the margins beneath a new poem:

“I am more terrifically and infernally and idiotically and brutally STUPID—than ever I was in the whole course of my incarnate existence. The above precious lines are the fruits of one hour’s most agonizing labor between ½ past 6 and ½ past 7 in the evening of July – 1836.”

There’s also this, from Flannery O’Connor:

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.”

Hang in there, writers. Better luck today.

Create Your Own Creative Writing Exam

For the last several years, the first semester exam for my high school creative writing class has come in two parts, spread out over a few class periods.

For Part One, students receive a small slip of paper that says “CREATE YOUR OWN CREATIVE WRITING EXAM,” and just a couple of sentences’ instruction. They have one 50-minute class period to create an exam for the course, and the only requirement is that they use the entire period. They may take the full 50 minutes to make the exam, or if they finish it before the period is over, they can actually take the exam themselves. One or two students usually panic, afraid that they won’t do it “right”; I more or less refuse to give any other direction, but if a student is sincerely worried I’ll just tell them, “Create an exam you would like to take” or “Just be true to the spirit of the course, and I promise you’ll be fine” — and after a little hand-wringing they start writing.

Somehow I usually manage to convince at least most of the students that Part Two of the exam will be completely unrelated to Part One, that Part One is a stand-alone exercise, a warm-up for something more exam-ish. But of course it is all a set-up: before they come back for Part Two I compile questions and prompts from all twenty-something exams into a single, epic document. They have a little more than two hours, over two days, to accomplish as much as they can. They can skip any questions and go in whatever order they want. Again, the only requirement is that they use the entire allotted time: they shouldn’t try to do it all, just to do as much as they can.

Both parts of the exam are always great fun for me to read. I’m always impressed by how funny and poignant, how creative and absurdist and profound these students can be, even in the middle of exam week, and I’m always reminded how glad I am to know all of them.

In case you would like to take this year’s exam for yourself, I am posting it in the link below. Set a timer for 60 or 90 minutes or whatever feels right and see what you can do. I did not create any of these questions; each one was created by a sophomore, junior, or senior in high school.

Good luck.

Create Your Own Creative Writing Exam 2017

P.S. A couple of students’ questions reference the wonderful artist and writer Lynda Barry and this 14-minute video, which we’d recently watched in class — and which I recommend also to you.

How to be a poet (drawing)

Wendell Berry

A few years ago I drew this picture of Wendell Berry for my friend Daniel on his birthday. Daniel’s wife Lucy commissioned the drawing and gave me one of Wendell Berry’s books as payment. She also suggested the text, “How to Be a Poet.”

A few weeks ago, while I was moving, I came across my copy of the drawing, which I’d mostly forgotten. Now I’ve put it where I see it every day. I’m not a poet exactly, but I find Berry’s reminders a comfort and encouragement. Here’s the full poem. Maybe it will be useful, also, to you.

Don’t forget to breathe.

How to Be a Poet

By Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.

Sit down. Be quiet.

You must depend upon

affection, reading, knowledge,

skill—more of each

than you have—inspiration,

work, growing older, patience,

for patience joins time

to eternity. Any readers

who like your poems,

doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath

the unconditioned air.

Shun electric wire.

Communicate slowly. Live

a three-dimensioned life;

stay away from screens.

Stay away from anything

that obscures the place it is in.

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places

and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.

Make the best you can of it.

Of the little words that come

out of the silence, like prayers

prayed back to the one who prays,

make a poem that does not disturb

the silence from which it came.

Happy Birthday, Doc

“I was born—they tell me I was—on Groundhog’s Day: February 2, 1928.”

This is how Doc Adams started our first interview together, one Saturday afternoon in August of 2008. We’d met only once before, but I’d been eager to meet him again. I’d told him I wanted to write an article about him and his music—he’d played with Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and others and had been a mainstay of the Birmingham jazz community for years—and he agreed to an interview. I arrived with three pages of questions, none of which I got around to asking. The moment I turned on my recorder, Doc launched into his story, starting at his birth and proceeding chronologically from there, laying out his life in remarkable, loving, specific detail—describing, even, the tile on his parents’ living room floor, whose pattern he’d studied from infancy.

Doc had many gifts; just one of them was his power in storytelling. At the end of two hours, he was about to graduate from high school—and I’d abandoned my notebook of questions altogether. As the interview came to a close, he found a place to pause his reminiscence: with the letter of recommendation his early mentor Sun Ra (then still “Sonny Blount”) sent on his behalf to Howard University. It was an effective cliffhanger.

“We’re going to have to have another session,” Doc told me. I happily agreed and came back the next week. And the week after that. For two and a half years we did it again, every Saturday and occasional Sundays, until his story stretched out across a hundred cassette tapes. Eventually I started asking questions. What was going to be an article turned into a book—and, more than that, a life-changing friendship.

Doc died in 2014. For his birthday today I’d like to share this remembrance I wrote after his death for the weekly paper Weld. Of all the things I’ve ever written, this is easily the most meaningful to me. I hope you’ll click the link below to read the full story—and join me in remembering Dr. Frank Adams, with gratitude and love, on this, the anniversary of his birth.

Happy birthday, Doc.

doc-by-jessica

Remembering “Doc” Adams
November 11, 2014 // WELD for Birmingham

Like a lot of people, I knew Frank Adams most of all as “Doc,” but over the course of an extraordinary life he went by a variety of names. To many among his friends and family he was first and foremost “Frank,” and to years upon years of students at Lincoln Elementary he’d always be “Mr. Adams,” the much-loved teacher and role model.

As a high school student in the ‘40s, he traveled with comedian Mantan Moreland’s Hot Harlem Revue, and Moreland dubbed him “Juniflip,” a name for the young and unpredictable, the energetic but untested. (“You’re just a little Juniflip,” Adams liked to explain in later years: “You might flip over into greatness, or you might flip back into mediocrity.”) Other, older musicians in those days knew him as “Youngblood.” In college at Howard University, his bandmates called him “Francois” — a name which they on some occasions extended to Francois DeBullion (“I never knew where they got that DeBullion,” he said), but which on other occasions, as he launched into an especially hot solo, they might abbreviate to just “’wa.”

“Get it, ’wa!” they’d shout from the sidelines, and — as he’d do from many stages, for many decades to come — he’d get it.

He had an insatiable appetite for education — his students’ education, of course, but also his own — and so he pursued a series of degrees, culminating in the one that made him “Dr. Adams.” The title suited his role as gentleman and scholar, but he shook loose its stifling formality every opportunity he got.

“Please,” he’d plead, “just call me Doc.”

Click HERE to read the rest of this article…

P.S. We are lucky that one of Doc’s students, Jessica Latten, documented his spirit so beautifully in her photographs. The photo on this page is hers; others are included in the Weld story, and she’s taken many(!) more just as good. Thanks to Jessica for sharing these loving portraits of a man whose memory means so much to so many.