MWP Creative Nonfiction

Keys of Effective writing of a narrative

1. Use scene to create an immersive experiential narrative

2. Use of specificity and concrete detail by focusing on vivid, sensory-rich descriptions

3. Develop vivid, sensory-rich character details that convey both the essence and individuality of a person.

4. authenticity in dialogue.

5. Writers must thoughtfully choose whether to tell their story using first, second, or third person to create a specific narrative experience

6. use of image and metaphor as central tools for organization and expression.

7. By varying sentence structure, length, and voice, writers can engage readers more deeply and evoke emotional effects, using rhythm to enhance the meaning and impact of the prose.

Keys to Writing Compelling Poetry

1. Less is more

1. Writing with Nouns and Verbs (not adjective)

1. Let specifically be your friend

1. Let actions speak for themselves

1. Show, don’t tell.

1. Create a shared experience

Selected Poem #1

Hochzeit by Debra Marquart

160 I remember circles—the swirling cuff of my father’s pant leg, the layered hem of my mother’s skirt. A neighbor lady polkas by, the one who

yells so loud at her kids every night when she walks to the barn that we can hear her across the still fields. She has a delicious smile on her face

tonight, and the creamy half moon of her slip shows under her long, tight dress.

The dance hall is an octagon, eight sides squaring off in subtle shades to a circle. The Ray Schmidt Orchestra is on the bandstand, a family of

165 musicians. The two young daughters wear patent leather shoes, chiffon dresses and white tights as they patter away at the drums and bass.

Their mother, her lips a wild smear of red, stomps and claws chords on the jangled, dusty upright.

The father and the son take turns playing the accordion, the bellowing wheeze of notes, the squeeze, the oom-paa-paa. Years later, this son

will become minorly famous—wildly famous in this county—when he makes it onto the Lawrence Welk show. He’ll be groomed as the new

170 accordion maestro, the heir apparent to Lawrence Welk, a North Dakotan who grew up thirty miles from here. This is polka country. The

accordion is our most soulful, ancestral instrument.

Someone is getting married, a cousin? Who knows. Everyone is a cousin in this town. I have a new dress with a flared skirt and a matching

ribbon; I get to stay up late. This has been going on for hours and promises to go on for more. Old ladies in shawls, looking like everyone’s

175 Grandma, sit around the edges of the dance hall, smiling with sad eyes at the children.

A man who looks like everyone’s Grandpa makes the rounds with a tray of shot glasses, spinning gold pools of wedding whiskey. The recipe is

one cup burnt sugar, one cup Everclear, one cup warm water. The old man bends low with the tray—three sips for everybody, no matter

how small. Sweet burning warmth down my throat, sweet, swirling dizziness. This is Hochzeit, the wedding celebration.

180

Someone lifts me up. An uncle, an older cousin? I have no idea. He dances me around the circle in the air, my short legs dangling beneath me,

then returns me to my seat. The old women are there to receive me. They laugh and pat my shoulders, straighten my skirt.

The music speeds up, the accordion pumping chords like a steam engine. My father clasps my mother’s hand and pulls her tight. The dance

185 floor flexes and heaves like a trampoline. Women swing by in the arms of their partners. High whoops and yips emit from their ample

bosoms. They kick their big, heavy legs and throw back their bouffants. The building sweats, the accordion breathes.

My father secures his arm around my mother’s waist. They spin and reel as they polka circles around the room. If left to itself, gravity could

take over, centrifugal force could spin them out, away from each other. My mother smiles behind her cateye glasses, confident of her partner.

190 They hold tight, their young, slim bodies enjoying the thrill of almost spinning out while being held in. My parents. Everyone says they are the

best dancers on the floor.

Selected Poem #2

A Thing of Air by Andrea Rinard

When your son is on a ventilator, you need someone to say it’s just a precaution. In the space those words would fill, I tuck his man-hand along

with the answers I didn’t have when I brought his limp body to this place. How much has he had to drink? Always too much. I stroke the long

445 fingers, trace the stubby lines on the palm, listen to the suck and pull of oxygen through the tube. In. Out.

I match my breaths to his just like when I taught him to swim, how to take enough breath to keep the lungs earth-bound. If you breathe

underwater, you must rise and choke out the interloping fluid until the body remembers where it was born to belong. Stay down too long,

and you might never come up. He was always slow to learn, gagging again and again and now again on everything I’ve begged him not to

swallow.

450 A nurse, the nice one, the one whose eyes don’t stab judgments about what kind of mother lets this happen, puts a hand on my shoulder on

her way out. I fold and refold his shirt, damp with its slurry of rum-vomit and loneliness. I straighten the sheet. I touch the bruise blooming

above his right eyebrow, fist-shaped and fury-purple. I keep breathing with him. I’m lightheaded because the rhythm is not mine, but I will

match our inhalations and exhalations, waiting for him to break the surface

Selected Poem #3

Neurod(i)verse Sounds Like Universe By Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

I am still adjusting. To prose. The endless line. Adjusting to nonfiction. To motherhood & writing mothering so my “I” has nothing to hide

870 behind. The lyric stripped of so much music & light. I used to turn to moon, then the stars. Now, my son turns to them too, & beyond them.

Satellites, gas giants, black holes. He says he wants to feel them, wants to be farthest from where his feet touch ground.

Neurodiverse sounds like universe. Neurodiverse. I repeat & hold it in my mouth. He holds it in the whole of him. Neuron-universe, a world

all his own. Fluttering neurons we cannot see or make sense of. I say neurodiverse sounds like universe versus—him against everything else—

verses, verses. I am still signing, writing what is & isn’t lyric to get closer. I don’t know to what. Every word takes me father away. The black

875 & white against the page is the negative, a counter image of countless stars—black glimmers against a white expanse.

I tell him he could land on the moon, on Saturn’s rings even. He could study black holes. He could know these celestial things. There is

something solid in such reaching.

No, he protests. He wants to touch the body of the planet, its hydrogen & helium, his hands outstretched towards black matter. He wants to

sink into something. To be consumed wholly. If only we could detach from sense, unbind from gravity, from our eyes, our senseless feet.

880 Unbound by our “I’s” too. How beautiful his longing. How distant. Maybe that’s why we both turn to the moon, to rock that is heft &

weightless, glow & shadow.

Why is the moon still here? he asks, when its ghost-halo stays white into the morning. I don’t know how to explain the science. The way the sun

reflects off stone. The way our sky hangs on longer than she should.

I tell him, Sometimes, the moon waits for you to wake, so she can go to sleep. I tell him it’s a game of hide ‘n’ seek, & he has won. I tell him whatever

885 is close enough to true to hold him, grounded to this earth.

Neurodiverse

is a universe

of black holes—

we do not know what it is made of or where it leads. We know it is wonder. Magic even. We know it is full of “I” & at once, completely

890 drained of it. We know, if we get too close, it will swallow us, & if we stay away, we will never feel the gravitational pull of something

greater than any god.

Selected Poem #4

We’ve Waited For Vaccines by Rebecca Entel

Of when my father had polio, I’ve heard disjointed details but no narrative. Scalding baths, quarantine, how many adults held him down for

the spinal tap, the iron lung, paralysis that one day disappeared.

480 In the world outside, my grandmother lengthened his Hebrew name with Chaim, Life, and my grandfather delivered bread through the night.

Under the covers, his sister plucked the braces from her teeth with scissors.

Each time visiting hours ended, my grandparents stood outside the hospital staring up at a window.

Polio came to him in 1954. The vaccine came to him in 1955.

We’ve spoken of 2020 itself as a golem. We’ve started posting pictures of injections or envious responses to others’ pictures of injections.

485 No social media archive exists indicating whether my grandparents dreamt of a vaccine/knew it was coming/raged it had come belatedly

for their kid/had never felt such relief when it came, even when they thought they could feel no more relief than three of them leaving the

hospital, six legs walking.

There’s one photograph of the bicycle bought for him after, with pooled money, and in it my father’s blurry with motion.

We’ve let words into our hourly vocabulary: quarantine, distancing, strains, herd, cases. Daily math problems so vast we can’t see each

490 individual number. We’ve said/meant we, but we’ve been mostly wrong.

Both of my parents remember waiting their turn at school for the shot. When I ask them for memories of receiving the vaccine, that’s the only

one: standing in line.

My mother tells me I had the Sabin oral vaccine—drops on my tongue—rather than the Salk injection. She tells me to google, just for

curiosity’s sake, the sugar cube version. My mind conjures an image of children not chewing or sucking but letting the cube slowly, slowly

495 dissolve. Thinking of it, I can feel it. A year of sheltering has been something like this: mouth, tongue, et cetera, holding still but activating in

anticipation of the sweet.

We’ve reached for metaphors.

Salivating sounds bestial, carnal, silly. I mean more like a waiting that demands all focus. I mean more like a wanting that can’t be helped.

Feedback (Use this when completing the last part of the reflection!)

Feedback from my professor, Dr. Drevlow

Overall Feedback

Wow, Amy, so many great things going on here.

I love how you use the models as a framework for rhythm and line breaks but then make each poem entirely your own.

So many nuanced metaphors and similes here in both. And you're ability to extend the metaphor in the second one makes me jealous. It's hard to do that and you nailed it.

I would say as you move on to nonfiction, let's try to work in a bit more of grounded, specific "real-life" lines like the Sheila one that would help ground this a bit more in terms of motivations and the true meaning of the similes.

The metaphors are really great but we need a bit more of tangible relatable details about the actual "dramatic situation" (i.e. what is actually being compared here in the metaphors). Right now the comparisons are often connected to vague or abstract ideas or feelings which makes it hard to see the "real/literal" world you are exploring.

That said, can't wait to see what you come up with next.

--d