Have you signed up to be a DIY MFA Radio Insider yet? This is an exciting new monthly newsletter especially for our podcast listeners. Every month, you’ll get an email from our podcast producer with recaps of the most recent episodes, a curated Listening List of episodes on a particular theme, and other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! The theme for March is Magic, and you can become an insider by signing up with your email at diymfa.com/insiders.

In this episode Brian Leung and I discuss:

• How to turn a real life event into a novel, especially when you are close to the event.
• Bringing out the emotional truth of a story and remaining true to the characters.
• Why it can be tricky to write first person narratives and how to make them sound distinct.

Plus, his #1 tip for writers.

About Brian Leung

Brian Leung is the author of the novels Lost Men, Take Me Home, and Ivy vs Dogg: With a Cast of Thousands!. His short-story collection, World Famous Love Acts, won the Asian American Literary Award and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Born and raised in San Diego County, he is a Professor of Creative Writing at Purdue University as well as Core faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts. All I Should Not Tell was published by C&R Press in Spring, 2022.

You can find them on his website, or follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

You can also check out Brian’s article on DIY MFA, #5onFri: Five Tips for Finding the Kind Genius Writer in Your Mad Genius Writer.

All I Should Not Tell

In All I Should Not Tell, Conner Grayson, fourteen, wants nothing more than to see, Cudge, his intensely abusive step-father destroyed. He considers it a blessing for himself and his younger, too-innocent, brother, Sammy, when the man disappears, though he’s convinced that his mother has done something unspeakable to her husband. With Cudge gone, there’s no threat of exposing Conner’s deepest secret, his love for Mark, another boy in Orgull, a fictional river town outside of Louisville. But almost immediately, Mark disappears as well.  Flash forward two decades. Conner remains tortured about his past, including the apparent suicides of his biological father and his brother. But, he has found a certain level of happiness with the family he’s built with his wife, Lamb, as well as his boyfriend, James. It’s complicated. When Cudge’s octogenarian father shows up from California to investigate Cudge’s long ago disappearance, Conner spirals into a series of unwise decisions culminating in discoveries about his past that may destroy his current family. It might be there’s only one person who can pull him from the wreckage.

You can order Brian Leung’s book, All I Should Not Tell, via this C&R Link.

Link to Episode 402

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 402: Writing About Difficult Subjects with a Distinct First Person Voice – Interview with Brian Leung appeared first on DIY MFA.

But first, I am excited to announce the launch of DIY MFA Radio Insiders program, a monthly newsletter, especially for our podcast listeners.

Each month, you’ll get an email from our podcast producer with recaps of the most recent episodes, a curated Listening List of episodes on a particular theme, and other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! The theme for January is Debut Authors, and you can become an insider by signing up with your email at diymfa.com/insiders. 

In this episode Ashanti Anderson and I discuss:

• How being an overthinker influences her poetry and the messages she wants to share.
• Why setting clear boundaries helps her guide the conversation around her writing.
• When she turns to prose poetry and why she thinks it defies hard and fast craft rules.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Ashanti Anderson 

Ashanti Anderson (she/her) is a Black Queer Disabled poet, screenwriter, and playwright. Her debut short poetry collection, Black Under, is the winner of the Spring 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition at Black Lawrence Press. Her poems have appeared in World Literature Today, POETRY magazine, and elsewhere in print and on the web.

You can find her on her website or follow her on Twitter.

Black Under

The poem from which Black Under derives its title opens with a resounding declaration: “I am black and black underneath.” These words are an anthem that reverberates throughout Ashanti Anderson’s debut short collection. We feel them as we navigate her poems’ linguistic risks and shifts and trumpets, as we straddle scales that tip us toward trauma’s still-bloody knife in one turn then into cutting wit and shrewd humor in the next. We hear them amplified through Anderson’s dynamic voice, which sings of anguish and atrocities and also of discovery and beauty.

Black Under layers outward perception with internal truth to offer an almost-telescopic examination of the redundancies—and incongruences—of marginalization and hypervisibility. Anderson torques the contradictions of oppression, giving her speakers the breathing room to discover their own agency. In these pages, declarations are reclamations, and joy is not an aspiration but a birthright.

For the poet, these historically resonant questions of Black power and pain can be explored through the subjects’ consciousness of a constant gaze. “Black culture means being the creative and artistic zeitgeist of America, and often-times, popular culture around the world,” Anderson says. “We are trend-setters and our dialect, apparel, mannerisms, behaviors, and attitudes are routinely adopted by others. In my sole opinion, a big part of the Black experience is ‘putting on,’ i.e. carrying yourself in a way that makes you look and feel immortal… being constantly aware of your impending death encourages you to find freedom in expression.”

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!

Link to Episode 391

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 391: The Medium and the Message: How Poetry Communicates a Deeper Truth – Interview with Ashanti Anderson appeared first on DIY MFA.

I’ve wanted to express myself for as long as I can remember. … No, that’s not it either.

I’ve wanted.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

I want.

Yeah, right there.

Writing is another form of digging all the way to the truth.

Pursuing any subject of study, trade, or art form with an orientation towards bettering self and community, improving social structures, and transforming modes of interaction between individuals, does the exact same thing: it acts as an excavation tool to a plane of existence beyond the simply visible.

When writers, artists, businessmen and women, housewives, students, professionals, retired seniors pursue a passion relentlessly, it leads to grasping of the deeper layers – of the psyche, history, nature, market forces, and familial turbulences – that possess the obscure roots of what we see manifested through our eyes.

Let’s try again:

I have wanted to get at truth for as long as I can remember. … Nah, too ambitious. You kept running away.

I have been blind and deaf and angry and overflown, like wine in glass, with resentment. True, but this isn’t about writing.

Oh but it is, because until you realize that you’re not the problem, you’re not the writer’s block, you keep lashing yourself – a form of self-punishment for perceived self-failure.

Anyone who writes (or practices any form of art or branch of science) has to be comfortable with failure if they’re trying to get to the truth – their experiential truth (I’m sensitive), a natural truth (people are born, people die), or scientific ones, like e=mc².

The moment the ego takes charge: pushes its spectacles up the nose and crosses its arms across the chest, writer’s block is inevitable. Judgment, though necessary to navigate life, is also the enemy of creativity who is thick friends with imperfection; whereas play, also friends with creativity, is the enemy of perfection.

Here goes:

I have wanted to play and but have been pushed toward perfection for as long as I can remember – a woman is kind, generous, sincere, puts others before herself, never gets angry, never talks back, anticipates needs of others before her own and is designed to successfully navigate complex relationship matrices without batting an eyelid. She is a healer, a counsellor, a cook, a cleaner, a laundromat, a financially savvy working professional outside of these jobs, and a self-actualizing bit of human species (‘coz she must have hobbies too). This woman can be modest in social settings and the damnest cur in bed.

Funny thing is, nowadays tech companies make machines that are advertised as having traits mentioned above. Not one android fulfils all the above criteria, though the dominant desire visible from the marketing seems to be to ultimately pack it all-in-one. You should check some of them out. Go on; invoke GG (the God Google), search for home bots, companion bots, healthcare bots and recruitment bots.

We’ll try this one last time:

I lost the art of playing and began writing to regain it. A few years later, goaded by perfection, I decided to go all in, threw my safety nets down the Grand Canyon (metaphorically, of course) and emulated what writers in the early decades of the twentieth century had done. I self-exiled. Now, they did it because they had no choice. I did it out of ambition and arrogance. And one fine day I found myself starving spiritually, nearly physically disfigured, blind and deaf with anger, and frothy with resentment. And I thought, did it go like this for T. S. Eliot? Did Oscar Wilde disintegrate to bits like this in jail? No wonder Virginia Woolf decided to kill herself. And that gorgeous poet put her head in the oven.

Writers are human beings after all, possessing a life force oriented towards community, stability and creation just like other people.

Wasn’t it a symptom of how badly we’re teaching the skill of the writing arts, creating this sharp dichotomy between imitation and originality, if we’re eulogising people’s lives going to shit, despite which they created such enduring works of art? Despite. The pain.

Imagine how it could be if we could build communities that assuage the pain so that creation need not cost emotional, psychological or physical lives.

So that growth, instead of rejection, may be the norm; and acceptance need not come at the cost of having to be so utterly perfect – in submission formats and writing, or in life.

DIY Your Writing

Nowadays I write to get at the truth of how things can be if we all come together and give each other a chance. Part of this was to give myself a chance, therefore the writing and self-publishing of 101 Stories in 101 Words. I picked one writing example that I have loved for more than a decade and decided to pay homage, hence the constraint of writing a tale in 101 words. 101 of them because the repetition appeals to the part of me that dwells within rhythms.

Writing this book was a chance I was able to give myself after four years of being part of the DIY MFA community and taking DIY MFA 101, after writing a decade of messy half-drafts for Nanowrimo, and years of participating in Story-A-Day.

The 101 course was crucial to developing a mind-set of growth and seeing failure as a learning opportunity rather than something that paralysed me. The community of people taking the course together, meeting for critique calls, discussing specific roadblocks, solutions and sharing milestones was essential to sustaining a writing practice. Even being a silent part of discussions about individual challenges and therefore, distinct clarifications did wonders for me.

Be kinder to yourself, expand the opportunities to play, the chances to build creatively and be part of supportive communities geared towards growth and expression, not despite the pain, but because of it.

So when are you giving yourself a chance?

Neha Mediratta is a writer based in Mumbai though she enjoys gallivanting around the globe virtually and in real life. Her decade-plus career spans multiple kinds of writing, editing and physical manifestation of unwieldy, avant-garde or truly ancient ideas, but writing poetry and coming up with entertaining fiction remains her first love.

The post DIY Writing: Are you giving yourself a chance? appeared first on DIY MFA.