Just returned from a week workshopping with Tom Spanbauer, the Pulitzer nominated author of The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon, among other books.
Tom is an absolute genius, and I don't think I can articulate my gratitude for the experience. Simply, Tom teaches to descend into that place of great pain, hurt, humiliation and find each character's true voice. The workshop was exhausting, an emotional roller coaster.
I'm going to borrow a passage from Tom's website:
"What makes writing dangerous," Tom Spanbauer writes, "is something personal, very small, and quiet. In this class we will be asked to go to parts of ourselves where there is an old silence, where it is secret, where it is dark and sore. One of the goals of the class will be to go to where we've never gone before, writing down what scares the hell out of us. Eventually to the very foundation and structure of how we perceive, and in this investigation, we can challenge old notions of who we are.
"In our investigation to the bone, the first thing we will encounter is voice. How to create it. Saying it wrong, saying it spoken rather than written, saying it raw. By challenging old creative writing workshop language, we will investigate what my teacher called Burnt Tongue. The New York Times, in its review of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, called it Poisoned Lyricism. Character lies in the destruction of the sentence. How a character thinks is how she speaks. The class will be, as Annie Dillard has called it, 'alligator wrestling at the level of the sentence.' By studying sentences, by taking them apart and looking at all their elements, by tuning them to how our particular narrator thinks, and ultimately speaks, we can begin to create a music that is unique."
Tom is a gentle soul with intense passion for the craft. Studying with Tom, what really struck me was his unerring ability to pinpoint the needs of each writer. An incredible author and an incredible human.
Thanks Tom.
