November 2019 – KickstART Farmington

The Creative Life in Our Cities: A Conversation with Dorene O’Brien

We have many talented artists and creatives living and working in our Farmington/Farmington Hills community and our weekly interview series, sponsored by City Life Realty, will introduce you to some of them.

Today we feature writer Dorene O’Brien.

When did you first start writing?

I started writing when I was in middle school, mostly bad poems that I gave to people as gifts. As a teen I wrote a very bad novel called Lost, which pretty much summed up the way I felt as I navigated that scary, liminal space between childhood and adulthood. I finally started taking myself seriously as a writer when a mentor in college convinced me that I was not a fraud. I had been taking classes toward a journalism degree and with his encouragement adding an English major, a move that changed my life. I’ve since published three books with a fourth on the way.

Did you receive formal training in writing? If so, where and what did you enjoy about the experience?

I double majored in English and journalism at Wayne State University, then earned a Masters in English with a creative writing concentration. What I loved most was the writing workshop environment, working with peers and a mentor to deconstruct stories, taking them down to their bones to determine how they worked or where they stopped working. I cannot overstate how useful an exercise and experience that was. Writers must work in equal measure with their hearts and their heads, and this is the most useful takeaway from the writing workshop. I’ve conducted my own workshops for decades at Wayne State and at the College for Creative Studies using that same approach.

Are you a member of any local or regional arts groups?

I am a member of Detroit Working Writers and the Detroit Writers Guild. Community is imperative when you’re an artist as the government and business certainly don’t typically support us. I am thankful for peers who pick me up when I fall, who offer sage advice and who constantly inspire me with their own work. I don’t know if I could have remained in the writing business were it not for the knowledge that we are all in this worthwhile endeavor together and that this solitary toiling is not a singular experience.

Can you describe something you’ve created that is particularly meaningful to you?

I wrote a story called “Little Birds” that won the Mark Twain Award for Short Fiction, which was particularly meaningful to me as the first adult novel I read and that has been a lasting influence on me as a writer and a person is Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My latest story collection, What It Might Feel Like to Hope, is also special as the book offers, albeit in muted form, hope when we as a country most need it. The book won a gold medal this year in the Independent Publishers Book Awards and I am very proud of that.

I don’t know if I could have remained in the writing business were it not for the knowledge that we are all in this worthwhile endeavor together and that this solitary toiling is not a singular experience.

What advice or suggestions do you have for younger writers?

Be patient with your ideas, investing the time and effort they need to grow and thrive. New writers have a surplus of concepts so that when one does not flow effortlessly into a story, they ditch it and move on to the next. I encourage them to consider the work required to mold a nebulous thought into a world replete with characters, setting, conflict and resolution that must converge to deliver a message and a full experience to readers. I also encourage them to be kinder to themselves, to quit beating themselves up when the work on the page does not look like the narrative they had envisioned. Thinking and writing are very different things—thoughts arc and snap in our heads, often concurrently, whereas every story is linear, delivered one word at a time. I tell them that I would be shocked if the mental plan and story were the same because evolution occurs naturally in the creation and that this is a good and necessary thing.

Where has your writing appeared?

My stories have appeared in the Baltimore Review, Madison Review, Best of Carve Magazine, Short Story Review, Southern Humanities Review, Detroit Noir, Montreal Review, Passages North, Connecticut Review, Republic of Letters, Cimarron Review and others. I have won the Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award, the New Millennium Writings Fiction Prize, the Wind Fiction Prize and the international Bridport Prize.

I am also an NEA, a Vermont Studio Center and a Hemingway-Pfeiffer creative writing fellow. My work has been nominated for three Pushcart prizes and has been published in special Kindle editions. Voices of the Lost and Found, my first fiction collection, won the USA Best Book Award for Short Fiction. My fiction chapbook, Ovenbirds and Other Stories, won the Wordrunner Chapbook Prize in 2018. My second full-length collection, What It Might Feel Like to Hope, released in 2019, was a finalist for the American Fiction Award and won a 2019 gold medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards (IPPY). My next book, A Coterie of Uncommon Women,will be released by Baobab Press in 2021. I am currently writing a literary/Sci-Fi hybrid novel.

Learn more about Dorene O’Brien and her work here.

(Are you an artist or creative living in Farmington/Hills? We’d like to feature you and your work here, too. Download our questionnaire and return it to info@kickstartfarmington.org.)

The Creative Life in Our Cities: A Conversation with Joy Gaines-Friedler

Today we feature writer and poet Joy Gaines-Friedler.

When did you first start writing?

As a kid I was always writing in diaries, but I didn’t start writing poems until I began studying them in college. It took a teacher to show me how to read a poem, to show me the art of poetry: the music of the line, the use of language to create images and how those images create story. Once I saw what poets could do, I never stopped reading poetry. I read it every day. Every single day. If you can write down three things you saw today – a squirrel that made it across the road; a large man who gently lifted a two-year-old boy from a car seat in a large black pickup truck, then took his small hand and walked together into Starbucks; clouds chasing the moon over a dilapidated barn – you can write a poem. And, you can make meaning from those observations. Because every one of these things makes you feel something, provokes an emotion.

Did you receive formal training in writing? If so, where and what did you enjoy about the experience?

Poetry is no longer about lofty abstract ideas, but rather ideas realized through images (like paintings) and the observations of the speaker in the poem. As the great modernist poet William Carlos Williams once said: No ideas but in things. I spent my life allowing art to soothe and comfort me. I laid on the floor listening to music. I bought sketch books and soft pencils and copied the album covers. Later, I fell in love with photography, beginning with a primitive Brownie camera, then those weird Instamatic cameras with film cartridges, then a Pentax 35mm. At twenty-one I traveled cross country with a band. The band broke up in California. I stayed there and enrolled in photography school. I spent the next twenty years as a professional photographer.

If you can write down three things you saw today … you can write a poem. And, you can make meaning from those observations. Because every one of these things makes you feel something, provokes an emotion.

But, it wasn’t until I went to college at age 42, Oakland Community College, where Professors Ed Hara, Peter Stine, the wonderful Thomas Lynch of Lynch Funeral Homes, an accomplished and well known poet and essayist, David James, and, later, many others, including U.S. Poets Laureate Natasha Trethewey, and Philip Levine, whom I had the privilege to study literature and creative writing with, that I was given a tool to say something meaningful, to offer my voice to the conversation that is always in discussion about what it means to be human.

I went on to get three and a half degrees: Associate in Liberal Arts, Bachelor in English with a minor in History, a Masters I didn’t quite complete in American Literature, and a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing, I received from Ashland University in Ohio. In between, I attended over 40 writing conferences, retreats, and workshops allowing me to work with some of the most well-known poets and teachers of poetry in the country. Do you need these degrees to be an accomplished poet? Not necessarily, but one must, I think, read closely, study, attend readings, go to workshops, have a writing community in order not to miss out on recognizing the craft that goes into writing a successful poem.

Where has your writing appeared and what programs or events have you participated in?

My work has won or been nominated for many awards, including two Pushcart nominations. My work is published in over 100 magazines or journals, both print and online. I have three books of poetry published, the latest Capture Theory, is a 2018 Independent Press Book of The Year Finalist. I teach Memoir and Poetry for non-profits in Detroit and all over the Detroit area, as well as the west coast of the state. That work has taken me to The Lapeer Correctional Facility where I taught poetry to male “lifers,” to Freedom House Detroit where I worked with West African refugees seeking asylum. I work or have worked with young adults “at risk,” in Farmington, women in safe houses in Pontiac, at literary events, libraries, and as a visiting writer at universities, including Wayne State, Michigan State, and others.

What advice or suggestions do you have for younger writers?

Reading/writing a poem takes only a pen and paper. Go to Kensington Park, or downtown Farmington, jot down things you see. Let those things be meaningful to you. Let them be metaphor for more. Make a poem out of those images & the sound of language:

Touch

by Joy Gaines-Friedler

 A chickadee lands in your hand
 its body a buoy.
  
 It grips your finger.
 You don’t hold it. It holds you.
  
 It is a kiss, both hard & soft,
 both lip & bone.
  
 On your way about your life,
 at the mailbox or a stop light,
  
 your body remembers
 those feathers. That touch. & others.

Learn more about Joy and her work.

(Are you an artist or creative living in Farmington/Hills? We’d like to feature you and your work here, too. Download our questionnaire and return it to info@kickstartfarmington.org.)

Opening Reception for Exhibition “Collected Works of Eana Agopian”

Join us at the KickstART Gallery at 33304 Grand River Ave on Friday, November 15th, from 6:00 – 8:00 pm for the opening of our first exhibition, Collected Works of Eana Agopian.

The artist will join us on the 15th for a discussion of her work and participate in a brief Q & A.

Learn more here.

The exhibition runs from November 2nd through December 7th.