Ana Maria is the author of Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going and several previous nonfiction books on nature, work, civil, indigenous, and LGBTQ rights. Her previous books include: Reclaimers, stories of elder women reclaiming sacred land and water, which was a finalist for the 2016 Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the memoir/history Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey, winner of the 2010 River Teeth literary nonfiction prize, 100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (as We Know It) which is a humor-infused exploration of how to live more lightly on the planet, and two essay collections, Potluck and Now Go Home. 

Her first novel for young people, The Luckiest Scar on Earth, about a 14 year-old snowboarder and her activist father, released in 2017, and her first chapbook of poetry, Mile Marker Six, will appear from Finishing Line Press this fall. 

Ana Maria’s work has been recognized by the Nautilus Book Awards, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, and as a four-time finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Orion, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Normal School, and regularly in High Country News.

After working fifteen years on backcountry trail crews for the National Park Service, she turned to teaching and is currently on the faculty of the low-residency MFA programs at Antioch University, Los Angeles and Western Colorado University.

In this episode Ana Maria and I discuss:

• How to write, assemble, and edit collections for two genres at the same time.
• The importance of non-writing work and why it is so valuable to the process.
• What writers of prose can learn from reading and writing poetry.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Ana Maria Spagna

Ana Maria Spagna is the author of Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going (University of Washington Press, 2018) and several previous nonfiction books on nature, work, civil, indigenous, and LGBTQ rights, including Reclaimers, stories of elder women reclaiming sacred land and water, a finalist for the 2016 Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the memoir/history Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey, winner of the 2010 River Teeth literary nonfiction prize, 100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (as We Know It) a humor-infused exploration of how to live more lightly on the planet, and two previous essay collections, Potluck and Now Go Home.  Her first novel for young people, The Luckiest Scar on Earth, about a 14 year-old snowboarder and her activist father, appeared in 2017, and her first chapbook of poetry, Mile Marker Six, will appear from Finishing Line Press in Fall 2021. 

Ana Maria’s work has been recognized by the Nautilus Book Awards, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, and as a four-time finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Orion, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Normal School, and regularly in High Country News. Her current NF work-in-progress about Chinese miners along the Columbia River in the late 1800s has received support from Washington Trust Grants for Artists Program. After working fifteen years on backcountry trail crews for the National Park Service, she turned to teaching and is currently on the faculty of the low-residency MFA programs at Antioch University, Los Angeles and Western Colorado University.

Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going

For many years, Ana Maria Spagna has stayed put, mostly, in a small mountain valley at the head of a glacier-carved lake. You’re so lucky to live there, people say. She is lucky. But she is also restless. In Uplake she takes road trips, flies to distant cities, fantasizes about other people’s lives, and then returns home again to muse on rootedness, yearning, commitment, ambition, wonder, and love. These engaging, reflective essays celebrate the richness of it all: winter floods and summer fires, the roar of a chainsaw and a fiddle in the wilderness, long hikes and open-water swims, an injured bear, a lost wedding ring, and a tree in the middle of a river. Uplake reminds us to love what we have while encouraging us to still imagine what we want.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Mile Marker Six

From the back cover:

From Rancho Cucamonga to the Lost Coast, from the scablands to Tupshin Peak, Ana Maria Spagna’s debut poetry collection quakes with the full magnitude and magnificence of a life spent up close and personal with nature. Coyote pups “nose into rattlesnake weeds” and mud bees nest in knotholes under a “sky awash in waves of stars.” Taut lines etch an account of contemporary life in the Anthropocene, chronicling humanity’s effect on the earth, and just as importantly, the earth’s effect on us. “How rarely, now, we drop to our knees,” Spagna laments, “to protect what’s ours,” though she reminds us that “None of it is ours!” Tender in their recollections and observations, these poems teem with the poignancy, precision, and clarity of cut diamonds or, more accurately, splitting “a fir needle lengthwise to spare it harm.” Pulsing. Dazzling. Fierce.

–Jill McCabe Johnson, author of Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown and Diary of the One Swelling Sea

“Having read some of the poems that have become Ana Maria Spagna’s At Mile Marker Six since their beginnings, I can advise the reader to follow—follow her anywhere, into the deep, over the edge, back to brass tacks, and forward into the somewhere that is a dream of the each and the every.  Most crucially—and with a sacredness she invents through her clear-eyed, open-hearted looking—follow Spagna’s language to its precise and lyrical root.  Such is her capaciousness that the poet invites us to introduce what is known to what is felt, and that is where love roosts, not just for us, but for every made, built, or born thing.”

–Carol Ann Davis, author of The Nail in the Tree, Atlas Hour, and Psalm

Ana Maria Spagna’s words invite the reader to embrace the intrigue of the wider world. Her poems are not pretty for pretty’s sake, nor do they distract the reader from things often considered ugly. Love, wonder, and the wild are sacred but also sometimes dirty and dead. Is it dirt or is it soil? To some, it is dirt if it is smeared on your face, but soil if we are planting in it. Spagna’s poems impress upon us this: it is always dirt and it is always soil. She takes the world and pokes at it with a trailside stick – forcing us to pay attention, to gaze, to engage with each object of her noticing.

–Mara Panich, author of Blood is Not the Water

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The post Episode 364: How Writing Is Like Walking a Tightrope – Interview with Ana Maria Spagna appeared first on DIY MFA.

Make no mistake, this kind of writing is rife with pitfalls. We often get too didactic, too preachy, and no reader likes to be told what to do. Other times, we end up preaching to the choir, only persuading those who already agree with us. (Now, there’s a legitimate argument that this, too, serves a purpose in validating your reader’s perspective, or outrage, and spurring them to action.) A related problem is when our focus is too limited, tied to one culture, subculture, place, or time period. (Like when I was a high-schooler writing endless op-eds about eliminating home room.)

None of this to say writing for change is a bad idea. Where we would be without books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring that changed people’s minds about pesticide use or Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that spurred people to protest for racial justice?

That’s one thing I want to emphasize: never forget our first job is to write well and true, to make art, to move reader’s and maybe change lives

Another is this: All change, arguably, comes from stories. Stories move us  

Here’s one more: Good writing for change should also be about change.

Change happens in the action of the story: change in the world, in the character or the narrator.

Change also happens in perception: the narrator’s, the character’s … and the reader’s!

Let’s look at five particular ways to approach writing for change:

1. Bear witness for yourself 

Many years ago when I was assigned my first class teaching memoir writing online, I was shocked by how many stories I read about abuse, emotional and physical.  Perhaps ten of the fifteen students wrote about it. I thought “What are the chances?” Then I taught another class, then another, each one had about the same number of hard stories. Finally I realized: This is the world in live in. 

Memoirists often ask: Does the world need another story about X?  The answer is YES. I needed to read that many stories to recognize how widespread abuse is in our culture. Ditto for disability, for racism, for misogyny. So many hard subjects are swept under the proverbial carpet. The first step to changing any problem is recognizing it exists!  This is what writers of autobiography or memoir or creative nonfiction can do!

In “Black in Middle America” Roxane Gay simply describes her experiences as a black woman in mostly-white communities, the way she can never escape feeling out of place. She bears witness to effects of racism that are more subtle than those of overt discrimination.

2. Bear witness for others 

Writers of creative nonfiction can also write about something that has happened or is happening to others. This can be in the form of investigative journalism or it can take a more lyric form. In “Dawn and Mary” Brian Doyle bears witness to the heroism of two women by packing their stories into 750 words, using only their first names, using the tools of poetry: repetition, refrain, sound to pack a punch. One pitfall of bearing witness for others is when you become condescending or when you appropriate a story the subject could writer for themselves. In “Dawn and Mary” Doyle eloquently gives voice to these women who are no longer alive to tell their own stories.  

3. Use myth or allegory … and turn up the volume!

You can use a mythical figure or an allegory to expose a person or a dynamic without pointing a finger directly. (Animal Farm by George Orwell is a classic allegory of how socialism can go awry.) Native American writers Robin Wall Kimmerer uses the figure of “The Windigo” to decry the behavior of many Americans, and one in particular, without naming names. It arguably allows her to be even more scathing than she would/could be otherwise, to “turn up the volume” on her voice. 

4. Write a letter … to the future

The epistolary form can be means of creating intimacy. In “Dear Soon-to-be-Sprout” Elizabeth Rush uses it, unexpectedly, as a call to arms for collective action to combat climate change. The letter form personalizes her urgency, but also reaches out to the reader. She addresses most of her letter to “you,” her unborn daughter, but she slyly also slips in an occasional “we” as in this sentence. “I want to say to you, little seed, change is that only thing that is true, and it starts when we join one and one to make more than two.” And just that, the reader is implicated and invited, too. 

5. Try a “found essay”  

I mentioned earlier the danger of appropriating someone else’s story or voice. One solution is to quote them, as in “Transgender Day of Remembrance” take snippets of other texts and put them together. (How long did it take you while reading to realize this was the case?) This technique is most often used in poetry, in what are called “found” poems, but Torrey Peters takes it a step farther in creating this rightly harrowing “found essay.” 

PROMPT Option 1: Write a letter

List three experiences you have lived that others may not share (perhaps you were raised rural or in a nontraditional family, maybe you have a disability or identify as L.G.B.T.Q) 

Choose one and write a letter to a child-to-be about this experience and what you hope will change for him/her/them

OR Write a letter to your former self reassuring him/her/them of all that has changed

PROMPT Option 2: Bearing Witness

Write about someone acting heroically, big or small, at some risk to himself, someone you know about or someone you’ve heard about recently in the style of “Dawn and Mary”

OR Try a “found essay” with bits and pieces of news articles or testimonials that speak to the experiences of an underrepresented group in the style of “Transgender Day of Remembrance”

Ana Maria Spagna is the author of several books including Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going, Reclaimers, stories of elder women reclaiming sacred land and water, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus, winner of the River Teeth literary nonfiction prize, 100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (as We Know It) a humor-infused exploration of how to live more lightly on the planet, and two previous essay collections, Potluck and Now Go Home. Her first novel for young people, The Luckiest Scar on Earth, about a 14 year-old snowboarder and her activist father, appeared in 2017. Ana Maria’s work has been recognized by the Society for Environmental Journalists, Nautilus Book Awards, and as a four-time finalist for the Washington State Book Award. You can find her at www.anamariaspagna.com and on Twitter @amspagna

The post #5onFri: Five Approaches to Writing for Change appeared first on DIY MFA.