by Charlotte Pearse
Christina Fisanick, a multi-genre writer and associate professor of English at California University of Pennsylvania, spoke to a Zoom room full of eager writers on a beautiful Friday afternoon early last semester. “What I’ve found,” said the author, “is that there’s nothing, nothing that all successful writers do that is the same. Nothing, except write. That’s it.”
This kindred bond — the act of putting words on a page — is the fiber that forms the writing community you’ll find at the Writer's Café. Every few Fridays from 3:30 until 5:30 p.m. the Writing Center hosts a writing workshop where established writers talk about their work and lead students and campus community members through a series of writing exercises.
While students are welcome to visit the Writing Center for personalized help with their own work, these events are special because attendees receive writing tips from all kinds of published writers, from poets to nonfiction writers to fiction storytellers. Within each session, attendees are encouraged to participate in various writing exercises that explore new ideas and narratives, and then share what they wrote. For instance, last month the writer Neema Avashia led participants through list-making exercises.
The supportive and inspirational writing atmosphere can be perfectly illustrated by one Café session from last February titled “Mining the Past: Personal and Public Histories as Catalysts for Fiction and Memoir.” It was hosted over Zoom by Damian Dressick, author of 40 Patchtown and Fables of the Deconstruction, and Christina Fisanick, author of Digital Storytelling as Public History and The Optimistic Food Addict.
Fisanick spoke about the ideas of invention and reinvention, since both creating and revising are intrinsic parts of the writing process. She spoke about these ideas specifically in regard to creating a story from a memory, as according to Fisanick, “memory is fallible.”
“If you’re writing, and you want to be sincere, and you want to get to an emotional truth, that’s what matters,” Fisanick said. “It doesn't matter that you can’t remember if your Aunt Marjorie was wearing a red polka-dotted dress on the fourth of July or a blue one… what matters is what you’re trying to express.”
Fisanick also shared exercises to help with writer’s block and walked attendees through an exercise in writing from memory.
“What matters is that you’re writing. It doesn’t matter where you’re doing it, when you’re doing it, but that you’re doing it.”
“I think that newbie writers feel overwhelmed by what they think of as expectations for the writing life,” Fisanick said, when asked what advice she would give to aspiring writers. “What matters is that you’re writing. It doesn’t matter where you’re doing it, when you’re doing it, but that you’re doing it.”
Dressick focused on flash fiction, one of his main interests and the genre of much of his own work. According to him, due to the short length required in a piece of flash fiction by definition, it can be easier to pay attention to and understand every specific detail of your work.
“People are fundamentally aural and oral beings. Even today we say we tell stories,” Dressick said. “Anybody can read this in the bathroom; they can read this on the subway; they can read a whole short story at a stoplight.”
This brevity will, in turn, help the writer know what to change. “If you have friends you want to torture by making them read your work, but you don’t want to torture them so much that they stop doing it, flash fiction is the way to go,” Dressick said.
In Dressick’s exercise, he encouraged students to focus on specific senses in order to take a memory from the past and turn it into a piece of flash fiction. The accessibility of flash fiction, Dressick said, is one of the things that makes it so powerful, and using a memory and “mining the past” can contribute to making a specific piece even more so.
“To be a writer, there’s one thing you have to do — write.”
That’s the beauty of the written word and the beauty of a Writer’s Café. The simple tools for writing are within our reach, and our senses and memories are simply awaiting their chance to find their way to the page. To illustrate his point, Dressick quoted Lewis “Buddy” Nordan, a professor of his when he was a student at Pitt: “To be a writer,” Nordan told him, “there’s one thing you have to do — write.” This is exactly what Pitt students should come to the Writer’s Café expecting to do.
The next Writer’s Cafe is on December 2nd, hosted by the staff of Sampsonia Way Magazine, in a session titled “Glass Half-Full: Articulating Joy."
Special thanks to Kari Villanueva for designing and editing!
Addtional edits provided by Tricia Caucci.
