Spring Grotto Classes

We’ve just announced our Spring classes at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and it’s quite a menu this season. I’ll be teaching an all-levels memoir intensive and an intermediate/advanced memoir workshop–info below. To see the full lineup of Grotto Classes covering everything from film criticism to food writing to fiction and much more, go to www.sfgrotto.org/classes.

Fact Is Not Truth–Memoir and the Art of Honesty
Instructor: Rachel Howard
Contact: rachel.howard@gmail.com
Number of sessions: 3, with optional 4th session for workshop critique
Meeting times: Monday evenings, 6:30-9:30, May 2-16. Optional workshop session 6:30-9:30, Monday, May 23
Course fee: $195; optional critique session $75

Description: You want to tell your story and you want to tell the truth. But how does truth differ from mere fact in memoir? And how do we find and give form to the deeper truths that compel readers to compulsively turn pages?

Memoir poses a contract with the reader: “This really happened.” Whether your story is outrageous or ordinary, riveting memoir need not depart from facts. But it must dig beneath them to unearth a deeper emotional honesty.

In this class, we’ll use Vivian Gornick’s craft book The Situation and the Story to help examine the personal story you’re trying to tell, and how you can best tell it. We’ll look at excerpts from memoirs by writers such as Jo Ann Beard, Alexandra Fuller, and Susan J. Miller, and do lots of in-class writing which we will share and discuss. We’ll explore how memoirists use fiction techniques to transport the reader beyond surface factuality, and we’ll find the truth that can drive your personal story. Each student receives private feedback on his or her writing between classes, and individualized writing assignments. Plenty of time reserved for practical Q and A. Ethical quandaries–”What will my family think if they read this?”–welcome.

In the optional fourth session, participants submit up to 20 pages of their memoirs-in-progress for in-depth group discussion and a detailed letter of personal critique.

*Please note: This class is for students already at work on a memoir, as well as those just starting out. It serves as an introductory class for students interested in continuing on to Intermediate/Advanced memoir workshops.

Instructor Bio: Rachel Howard is the author of the memoir The Lost Night: A Daughter’s Search for the Truth of Her Father’s Murder, one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of 2005. Her personal essays have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and O, the Oprah Magazine. Her advice is quoted extensively in The Autobiographer’s Handbook: The 826 National Guide to Writing Your Memoir. She received her MFA from Warren Wilson College.

Memoir II: Intermediate/Advanced Workshop
Instructor: Rachel Howard
Contact: rachel.howard@gmail.com
Number of sessions: 8
Meeting Times: Tuesday evenings, 7 pm to 9:30 pm; April 12-June 7 (no meeting May 31)
Course Fee: $475

Description: This combination seminar and workshop provides ongoing craft discussion, support, and critique for committed memoir writers. During the first half of each class we’ll examine published memoirs, with an eye to guide and inspire your own writing. What is your story really about, and how can your evolving understanding power the writing process? How can you keep opening up parts of your story that feel too hot to touch? We’ll balance an awareness of the emotional process behind memoir writing with the practical study of technique, talking about building tone and style, finding lines of tension, and thinking about theme to discover new layers of meaning that can shape your larger work. Weekly writing assignments (returned with weekly private instructor feedback) will keep you experimenting and producing new pages.

Then we’ll turn to your workshop submissions, aiming to reflect back to the writer what has been communicated, and to describe further opportunities we see. We’ll point to strengths, and offer ideas for substantive revision in a thoughtful environment. Every writer will have the opportunity to submit to workshop twice during our eight weeks together. Ultimately this class will help you gain greater perspective on your work by listening to others. But my deeper goal is to help you build a strong personal writing sensibility by encouraging you–amidst the flurry of feedback–to listen foremost to yourself.

*Please note: This class requires completion of an earlier Grotto memoir class, or instructor consideration of a writing sample, to ensure correct placement.

Instructor Bio: Rachel Howard is the author of the memoir The Lost Night: A Daughter’s Search for the Truth of Her Father’s Murder, one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of 2005. Her personal essays have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and O, the Oprah Magazine. Her advice is quoted extensively in The Autobiographer’s Handbook: The 826 National Guide to Writing Your Memoir. She received her MFA from Warren Wilson College.

Remembering Victor Martinez

Friday was an emotional day at the Grotto, as we received news that our friend and role model Victor Martinez had died in the early morning hours, from cancer.

Victor was the author of a fiercely beautiful novel, Parrot in the Oven, which won the National Book Award for young adult literature. He also wrote two not-yet published novels, and many poems of uncompromising honesty and passion.

Victor’s friend Francisco X. Alarcon has posted a remembrance of Victor here.

In the last year of Victor’s life, Writers’ Grotto member Elizabeth Bernstein coordinated a rota of Grotto writers to drive Victor to medical appointments. For all of us who participated, it was a privilege to have time alone with Victor during the driving and the waiting in hospital rooms, just to hear his wisdom on writing and life. During one of these hospital trips, I told Victor how much I looked up to him as a “real” writer, and he was horrified, protesting that he hardly made any money from writing, and didn’t care about publishing, and I said yes, exactly, that’s what I meant–the way he stayed true to the work for its own sake.

Elizabeth circulated within the Grotto some of Victor’s thoughts on how writing changes you, how “just the working itself has value, I think.” I’m so tempted to share more of Victor’s candid correspondence, but I know those emails were intended for an audience of friends, and despite their eloquence, I know Victor often made apologies for the writing in his emails. But I hope his words will keep emerging, and that more and more people will read them. He lived in truth.

The Grotto has posted a photo and a tribute to Victor here.

UPDATE: Victor’s obituary in the LA Times.

Class Note: Bluets

The latest edition of Grotto Class Notes is set to be emailed soon, with our Grotto teachers’ usual tidbits of advice and reading recommendations. Our amazing Grotto Classes czar Janis Cooke Newman asked me to pitch in a note for the newsletter:

“Note three: What we’re reading now
From Rachel Howard (Fact Is Not Truth Memoir Intensive, Mondays, beginning May 9; and Intermediate/Advanced Memoir Workshop, beginning Tuesdays beginning April 12)

I love what I call “mosaic writing”—memoirs or essays broken down into tiny “tiles” that can be moved around and juxtaposed to create a larger design. I’m always excited when I find another strong example of this technique to show students whose prose leans towards the qualities of poetry, and who may not be interested in a more conventional “through-written” structure. So I was thrilled to recently discover Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (Wave Books). It’s an intense and shockingly personal philosophical meditation on the color blue, the nature of longing and pain, the bitterness of a toxic love affair, and the struggle to re-embrace meaning—all delivered in potent three-to-ten sentence “propositions.” Here’s a sampling:

35. Does the world look bluer from blue eyes? Probably not, but I choose to think so (self-aggrandizement).

37. Are you sure—one would like to ask—that it cannot love you back?

If you’re interested in exquisite writing that erases the lines between poetry, essay, and memoir, you’ll love Bluets.”

The full Class Notes email will be packed with advice from fellow Grotto teacher Gerard Jones and others; sign up for it here.

Jess Curtis/Gravity

I reviewed Jess Curtis/Gravity’s premiere of “Dances for Non/Fictional Bodies” for Dance Magazine:

For the better part of a decade, Jess Curtis has been on a self-styled trajectory, presenting himself as an artist equally interested in theorizing about performance and practicing it. Jerome Bel is clearly his hero.

Sometimes—as in his deceptively simple nude duet The Symmetry Project, which his company Gravity performed in 2009 at San Francisco’s CounterPULSE—Curtis’s heady ideas distill into provocative images that open a true conversation with the audience. And other times—as in Dances for Non/Fictional Bodies, co-commissioned by YBCA and Germany’s Fabrik Potsdam—the ideas don’t make the leap from his brain to the stage.

Dances for Non/Fictional Bodies arrived with copious program notes, including an adulatory review of an earlier work-in-progress written by Keith Hennessy, Curtis’ former collaborator in such companies as Contraband, CORE, and Cirque Batard. The piece’s thematic concerns are also expounded upon, sprawlingly, in a note from the show’s dramaturge, Guillermo Gomez-Peña: The body as “center of our symbolic universe,” the body as “true site for creation and materia prima,” the body as “a tiny model for humankind” and “a metaphor for the larger sociopolitical body.” This thematic diffusion has produced a flat piece.

The two-hour show’s episodes were shuffled in different order on different nights. Maria Francesca Scaroni donned a fat suit and roller skates and scrawled phrases like “I appreciate Spinoza” on a blackboard. Bridge Markland, in black leather gloves, posed a naked Curtis to match the posture of a female mannequin, then shoved his genitalia between his legs. Jörg Müller performed a striptease to reveal a sock with monstrous blue phalanges on his penis. Most memorably, Curtis used a walker to reach a toilet placed within the audience, then held a headstand with his head inside and sang a karaoke rendition of “Light My Fire.”

Click here to keep reading.

Giselle: Yuan Yuan Tan and Sarah Van Patten

I reviewed two casts of San Francisco Ballet’s Giselle for the San Francisco Classical Voice:

“Giselle might have seemed merely an ordinary start to the San Francisco Ballet’s 78th season — a nice, now-familiar staging of this Romantic-era warhorse by Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson, a chance to glimpse new and newly promoted dancers in familiar roles — were it not for the sharply contrasting talents of two of the world’s most interesting ballerinas. Yuan Yuan Tan is Chinese, in her mid-30s, and so willowy as to be otherworldly, almost not human. Sarah Van Patten is American, in her mid-20s, a sensuous woman whose gift is to make every role she takes on flesh and blood.

The steady chance to compare these two outstanding artists — I shouldn’t cast this as a rivalry, though the idea is tempting — is as surprising a development in S.F. Ballet history as it is an enriching one. It all crystallized last year when the two dancers alternated in the lead of John Neumeier’s European Expressionist ballet The Little Mermaid (which repeats this season); both gave revelatory, breakthrough performances, but to see the always elegant Tan deform herself as the grotesque, titular sea creature proved more shocking than watching the always committed Van Patten flail with ungainly abandon. Then, this past weekend, the two were cast back-to-back as Giselle. Tan, for more than a decade one of the company’s biggest box office draws, had Saturday’s opening night. But Van Patten’s following is growing, and her debut in the iconic role sold out a Sunday matinee.

To be sure, Tan’s well-developed interpretation of steps burned into many balletomanes’ memories has plentiful pluses. She gives a spectacular second act, when the dead Giselle, transformed into a ghost of white gossamer, must defend her penitent Prince Albrecht from the vengeful forest Wilis.

The choreography of this act lends itself to contemporary extremes, and Tan works them, emphasizing 12 o’clock arabesque penchée (lifted leg straight to the sky in what dancers call the “ironing board” position), along with unfurling arms. ”

Click here to keep reading.

Rennie Harris Puremovement at Stanford

The Chronicle asked me to do a short Q and A.

“Rennie Harris changed attitudes in the dance world when his “Rome and Jewels,” a 2000 adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” proved that hip-hop could be presented as artistically ambitious concert dance. Harris followed up with the enrapturing 2003 “Facing Mekka,” which – instead of a story line – focused attention on fiercely beautiful female dancers. More recently, Harris has pushed beyond the commercialization of hip-hop with his tour de force “100 Naked Locks.”

This week Harris brings his company, Puremovement, to Stanford, where he’s serving this winter term as visiting artist at Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts. We spoke to Harris by phone from Philadelphia, where he’s made dances – on the streets and in the studio – for more than two decades.

Q: With “Romeo and Jewels” were you consciously thinking about making hip-hop “work” as concert dance?

A: I almost think it wasn’t intentional – it was an aftereffect of creating the work. “Rome and Jewels” was more a product of hip-hop culture. It confirmed you could make an evening-length work with hip-hop. But “Facing Mekka” was more choreographically challenging. It works because you’ve got so many layers of music: live music, recorded music, text.

Q: Do hip-hop choreographers still have to think about how to frame their work for the concert hall, or are we past that?

A: Sadly, hip-hop has gone in a different direction. When I did “Rome and Jewels,” other crews were coming up doing hip-hop as concert dance. Then TV came in, shows like “America’s Best Dance Crew,” and this killed the concert movement. To each generation his own, but – now a whole generation of kids who were teenagers when I did “Rome and Jewels” don’t know anything about our work.

The real innovation is happening everywhere else but in the U.S. Like all these crazy cats in Korea, for instance – they do a lot of popping. They’re the next level of taking it to the theater, past their street culture. You see, unlike dancers in the U.S., they have three layers. Here the street culture of hip-hop already is our culture. There, they’re forced into the process of pulling it into the theater because it is not their native culture.”

Keep reading here.

“Dirty Secret,” by Jessie Sholl

Nearly a decade ago, when I first moved to San Francisco and wanted to write a book (and had only the first inklings that I would write a memoir), I joined my first writing group. The three of us, all in our early to mid-twenties, went full-on literary-wannabe and met in North Beach at the old Beat haunt bar Vesuvio’s, right across from City Lights Books.

Jessie Sholl was writing moving short stories then about a sensitive girl with a confounding absent mother. Now she’s got a new memoir just out, Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother’s Compulsive Hoarding. I’ll be attending Jessie’s reading at the El Cerrito Barnes and Noble next Monday (wish I could also attend her reading at the Book Passage Ferry Building store in SF on Tuesday) and can’t wait to get the book. Here are some reviews:

“Sholl explores the psychological reasons why being merely a pack rat can erupt into full-blown hoarding. By the end you’re sympathetic to both mother and daughter and understand how a parent’s obsession can become a child’s.”
– People magazine, 3.5 stars (out of 4).

“Addictive.”
– Redbook magazine

“Suspenseful and novel-like, Dirty Secret is a wonderful, respectful introduction to the world of a hoarder and the tribulations suffered by both the individual who hoards and their family members.”
– Fugen Neziroglu, Ph.D. author of Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding: Why You Save and How You Can Stop

“Affecting and illuminating.”
– Kirkus Reviews

“[Sholl] offers a compelling and compassionate perspective on an illness suffered by an estimated six million Americans that has only recently been explored through reality television programs.”
– Booklist

And here’s Jessie’s site.

The third member of our group, a wonderful writer named Adrianne Bee, has also been working on a memoir, and from what I have read in draft form, it is gorgeous. One day all three of us Vesuvio-haunting aspirants will have memoirs out in the world. Amazing.

‘Black Swan’ Hype

I’ve been silently watching the ‘Black Swan’ acclaim in befuddlement, and so was happy to receive this email from SF Chronicle reader James Pendergast, who shares an insightful review by his stepson Kurt Ackridge. (I requested permission from both James and Kurt to reprint.):

“Dear Ms. Howard,

May I ask your opinion of “Black Swan”? I was a little surprised that Mick LaSalle included it in his top ten movies list, considering all the flaws he perceived in it.

Having formerly been married to a woman who was invited to join the Paris Opera Ballet when she was a teenager, and who had a cousin with the San Francisco Ballet, I received the impression that there are very few freak-outs in the ballet world, perhaps because the dancers love what they are doing; they are extremely dedicated and disciplined; some regard dance as their spiritual practice; and all the exercise may help to promote stability.

I no longer know any ballerinas whose opinion I could solicit, and since I have found your reviews quite estimable, it occurred to me to request your reaction.

My stepson, who loves both ballet and movies, sent me his review of the film:

I saw Mick LaSalle’s review of “Black Swan” and then went to see it today. His comments, I thought, were good but it was a bit of an understatement to say that it could have been done better by someone like Jane Campion, say. Natalie Portman can act, how she can act, I discovered. It’s just too bad, the script was cliched, sophomoric, predictable, and implausible to say the least.
I would say it’s a very well done bad movie. It starts off as a reasonably serious film about real people and then merges into a kind of psycho-drama which turns out to be less of a movie about dance than about a very disturbed little girl trapped in a woman’s body, and then, finally, it morphs, unexpectedly into an almost campy horror movie, where neither the protagonist nor the audience can tell the difference between fantasy and reality for a while. This kind of ambiguity about what the film is trying to be turns it into a kind of joke, ultimately.

Too bad. Everyone is good in it. But, the director, editors, and scriptwriter(s) all seem to see the characters in it as caricatures, while the actors do the best the can with what they have to work with. If those making the film had been interested in making a movie about real people, as LaSalle hints, what a film this could have been. But, without huge changes in the script this would not have been possible. ”

My response to James and Kurt:

“Hi James, and thanks for your nice words about my reviews.  I think your stepson could have a good career in criticism ahead of him, not only because I happen to agree with him, but because he is so precise about the wrong turns this film takes.  I thought “Black Swan” was a joke.  As your stepson says, it starts out serious and turns completely campy.  I saw the film alone in a full Berkeley theater on a Saturday night.  At all the most dramatic moments, the whole audience was laughing, and I with them, because the scenarios were so over-the-top.  Yet when the lights went up, everyone became serious again, turned to their dates and said things like, “Very thought-provoking, wasn’t it?”  I wanted to turn to the strangers and say, we did just sit in the dark together laughing for two hours, right?

Your impressions of dancers’ discipline and mental soundness are in sync with my own knowledge of real dancers’ lives.  I also think the ballet world’s reality is so fascinating that I prefer great documentaries about it.  I’m thinking especially of Frederick Weisman’s recent “La Danse,” to me more psychologically (and additionally, sociologically) absorbing than anything in “Black Swan.” “

With great respect to Mick LaSalle, thanks James and Kurt for making me feel less lonely than I did in that Berkeley movie theater, when the lights went up and the laughter turned to fake hushed reverence.

UPDATE: See further thoughts from Kurt under comments below.

And: Janice Berman nails it (in colorful language, full warning). Then concludes:

The astounding thing is how complicit the dance community has been in its own exploitation and trashing via “The Black Swan,” now trumpeted as a best-picture Oscar contender. But maybe not. Maybe the aforementioned excesses committed by but more often against dancers in the name of ballet have now come home to roost and we have a rising choreographer like Benjamin Millepied taking part in this charade that has nothing to do with the art form, and ballerinas like Wendy Whelan extolling the film’s virtues, and Natalie Portman (also nominated, for best actress), who professes a love for dance, doing tremendous violence not only to the art of ballet but to her own considerable gifts.

Apollo’s Angels

I reviewed Jennifer Homans’ new history of ballet for the San Francisco Chronicle:

“Jennifer Homans begins and ends her weighty new cultural history of ballet with a provocative old claim: Ballet is dead. Let’s set aside the obvious question of why anyone would invest 10 years of research and 643 pages in a moribund art; let’s set aside, too, Homans’ withering tone and spurious framing (we’ll get to that). Forget the possibility that this death-knell sounding might be merely a shrewd publicity maneuver (Homans seems too earnest). Ignore, for now, the panicky reactions – pro and con – that the slim epilogue to “Apollo’s Angels” is sure to provoke. Predictable controversies should not be allowed to obscure the tremendous achievement of this book.

Because “Apollo’s Angels” is an important addition to the literature on ballet: intellectually rigorous, beautifully written, brilliantly structured. Homans, a former professional ballet dancer with a doctorate in modern European history, rarely strays from the cultural historian’s detached and deeply contextualizing perspective.”

Click to read more.

UPDATE: The New York Times profiles Homans. And opens up a reader discussion about her provocative epilogue.

Mark Morris’ “Socrates”

I wrote about the Mark Morris Dance Group for San Francisco Classical Voice yesterday:

“Last week marked the first return of the Mark Morris Dance Group to UC Berkeley since Robert Cole’s retirement and Matías Tarnopolsky’s start as director of Cal Performances; Friday at Zellerbach Hall, it was good to see that not much has changed. The choreographer best known for illuminating complex scores and the dancers known for making virtuosity out of unaffected humanity were both doing just that — yet, in unexpected ways, Morris may have raised the bar.

The program included one dance to silence, one in which the piano player was a ghostly absence, and a West Coast premiere taking on Satie’s Socrate, one of that composer’s oddest and most resolutely unmelodic works. The sum effect was of a soothing, purifying tonic. You walked out of the theater with a clear head and an open heart.

Socrate was performed in the piano and tenor arrangement, with beautiful clarity and calm by pianist Colin Fowler and tenor Michael Kelly. Morris clearly designed this treatment to give these musicians, and the music, equality of attention. This seemed wise, given the score’s ethos of dignified self-effacement, not to mention the amount of context for the audience to take in.

Above the stage, the text from Plato’s Phaedrus appeared in supertitles, and below, the calibrated simplicity of the dancing allowed watchers to lift their eyes to the words at regular intervals without missing something crucial in the choreography. The movement was made up mostly of repetitive skips, prances, and lunges that brought to mind some of the most affecting sections of Morris’ classic L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il Moderato. Yet despite the surface plainness, a deeper formal scheme emerged, subtly reconciling opposites into a solemn spiritual and logical harmony.”

Keep reading here.