Patrick’s response to recent NYT Sunday Magazine article

Steve Almond’s Riff: “Why Talk Therapy Is on the Wane and Writing Workshops Are on the Rise,” roused two divergent feelings in me. On a whole, as a teacher of writing workshops, I absolutely agree that writing in a workshop can be enormously therapeutic— if creative growth, discipline, playfulness, and a more secure sense of one’s abilities are therapeutic.

However, I would never-ever urge a student to take a workshop for therapeutic reasons. Isn’t there a Fire-your-therapist, stop-your-meds, forget-your-program, and just head for your nearest writers’ workshop implication in this riff?  While that might be good business for me, Readers, Don’t Do It! Take a writing workshop if you like to write, sure, but don’t expect therapy.

Are writers really questing after “more-forgiving versions of themselves” by re-writing their lives?  Is the writing a transparent window that reveals the writer?  Boy, I hate this notion. I think it’s great if writing gives us a stethoscope on the inner murmurings we can’t otherwise heed. But can we draw a bright line between writer and writing? I’d like my teaching and my workshop to focus as exclusively as possible on aligning the writer with her/his unique imaginings and expressions—the play of writing — and I leave it in the writer’s power, not the teacher’s job, to cross the bright line of emotional connections.

Possibly the therapeutic benefits really come, not when the neurotic self is laid bare in the writing, but in the liberation of the imagination in a disciplined, loving, and accepting environment. While some recapitulating of the past and self will come up, the reason talk therapy has waned is because—rather than rehearse the habits of thinking of oneself as victimized and frustrated—we get more out of creating new habits of mind and new social contexts, creative writing is a habit of mind and empowerment comes from a positive and safe environment. When we write in well run workshops, we actually change our neurological wiring to perform creative, social and intellectual play, and we do it in a supportive process that finds and rewards success after success. That’s gotta be good for you. And good for the relatively few who have a hankering to write and sign up for a workshop.

Patrick once said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Creativity comes from a willingness to make a mess.” This has impacted me the most. To me it means it’s ok to turn in a crappy draft because each stroke of the shit pen will ultimately unlock your creativity and turn you into a better writer. I practice Transcendental Meditation and within the practice we talk about clearing out webs of badness to let in light;  I see making a creative mess in a similar way;  the more mess I make, the more room I’m making for some real beauty to spill out. Hope that makes sense!

Write Yourself Free’s workshops have equipped me with a toolbox of techniques to conquer my writing demons.

Here are a few examples:

The Rules

Before: I second-guessed every word and agonized over grammar and writing rules. I’d spend twenty minutes on one sentence and at the end of an hour, have three new sentences and no recollection of the story ideas dancing in my head when I first sat down!

Now: I write forward for 30 minute stretches. No looking back or stopping. Also, Patrick had me write down each “rule” that concerned me; I did this and continue to; getting each one out of my mind and on actual paper has helped tremendously.

Validation

Before: I worried no one would like my writing. I’d change story ideas and rethink characters in the spirit of making the overall story more likeable (publishable? probably). This essentially stopped my pen; there was little forward momentum.

Now: I write for me. I write for the characters – I let their experience tell the story. It’s easier to do this given the tone Patrick sets in the workshop; I have a safe place to bring drafts.

Self-Doubt

Before: I constantly worried that I’d never finish a story and that I wouldn’t be able to pull off a story arc and worried that  the ending would suck (if there even was one).

Now: I write outside the story (a lot); this is the most liberating technique Patrick taught me. This gets me through tough dialogue, turning points, understanding perspective, everything. Plus – Prime/Define/Complicate/Reveal. This runs through my head constantly;  it’s so straight-forward and logical. It’s like a compass for me. I check it from time to time to stay on course.

Characters = Strangers

Before: I didn’t feel close to my characters. I honestly had no idea how they’d act in some cases. This pissed me off as I was the one who created them in the first place, even if they were one dimensional and terminal.

Now: Writing outside the story is amazing. I get to know my characters by putting them in situations (not part of the story) and seeing them through the eyes of other characters (some part of the story, some not). But also, drawing on my understanding of human perception (characters as goal seekers like us), as Patrick discusses  often. The line between a real person and a character used to be pretty heavy and dark for me – now, not so much.

Revision is a Four Letter Word

Before: I feared revision. The “R” word loomed in the back of every drafting session.

Now: Just knowing I’m not alone in the process has taken this one off my worry list. Plus, Patrick provides a three or four-step model to follow which again is logical an simple to understand; it’s takes this mammoth thing and breaks it down into manageable parts.

I’m writing this to give an overview to the classes. Our classes are not like any other workshops I know of (and I’ve workshopped around a bit). My methods based on what scientists, PhDs, and other smarties know about how the human brain works. Cognition is the big word for brain-working. When I was teaching English and workshopping around, I found a fair amount of confusion and a whole passel of advice and “wisdom,” yet nobody could give reasons for much of anything. The cognitive model gives reasons and it helps writers get better control and experience more fun in writing.

“Is this any good” is the question that drives many other workshops. While Write Yourself Free method will improve your writing—we’ll take what’s good and make it better— I believe that more important is your sense of fun, creativity and control. The process of writing must be a pleasurable, even powerful exercise for you. You will have more pleasure if you know what you’re doing. You will know your writings good without having to ask.

Knowing what’s good begins with knowing what you’re doing. For this class, there are four aspects of the writing process I’d like you to think about to deepen your understanding.

Projects and practice

Drafting

Revising

Models and Paradigms

Projects and practice—

Writers need projects.

If you know what you want, you’re likely to get it, so define what you want to work on, yes, write it out.

If you’re just starting you might write: “I want to write four very short stories” or “I want to write some episodes from my memoir.” Choose a project you can complete in the 8 weeks of our session..

Note: “Becoming a published writer” or “getting better” are not projects; the former won’t happen in 8 weeks, the latter will, but only if you know what “better” means.

Practice your writing.

Don’t wait for inspiration. Practice means “not perfect,” but you will improve only with practice.

Please write regularly (practice for each workshop). You will need to bring four pages in every week (or fewer for poets, more for playwrights or screenwriters): bring about 6-8 minutes to read, no longer or I may have to stop you.

Short, frequent writing practice is best: several times a week for brief periods of time (15 minutes is fine): if you make the time short, you’ll stay interested; if you do it several times, you will learn faster. Writing four pages in the parking lot before class is practicing how little you respect your writing.

Also Practice thinking:

Read good books,

Learn new words,

Pay attention to tiny beautiful parts of life (use the beautiful as a place to look when you aware that you’re angry or critical). We’re talking mindfulness, here: good writing is usually an expression of mindfulness because it expresses discrete, specific perceptions: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, kinesthetic positioning.

The final bit of thinking practice is to regard the written words as text— products of a frolicsome imagination (not declarations about the author’s life).

This means that you—the writer— never explain your text nor apologize for it. What you write is imaginary play.

Also, you—the reader/listener—listen for what the text says (don’t bother your pretty head with the author’s intention or experience).

This practice will help you focus on the power of the words themselves; at the same time it de-activates moralizing, complaining, explaining, and negative criticizing.

Drafting—

First drafts are important, but not always immortal literature. Play!

Drafting is like pumping iron: over time, you will develop wonderful writing muscles, a gorgeous intellectual physique, and a glowing imagination by going through the mess, and play, and risk of drafting.

What do I mean, “drafting”? Drafting is writing to discover what your imagination has for you. “You” in this sense, are that consciousness awareness of self who is reading this—and a very meager bit of brain cells you are, too. This self is fussy and critical.

“Your imagination” however, is all the other brain cells that involve what Freud called the Unconscious. The trick in drafting is to get “you” to take a nap while your imagination comes out from the Unconscious to play.

And it’s free play when the imagination gets loose. You’re conscious enough to write, but you let anything weird or awful or great or perverse jump onto the page. You want your imagination to get out ahead of the critical you.

We will play with:

fast writing, without figuring out every word before you write it down (what a bore!);

driving your character’s goals or problems (make it difficult);

pre-writing that get the critical “you” a bit more nap-some while exciting the imagination;

allowing yourself to write trash, or vomit, or drivel, or just terrible bollocks. It’s OK.

Your draft can be messy, full of cliches, inconsistent, and simpleminded. Fine. It’s far more important to have many crummy words than three perfect words. Many crummy words are currently on sale in bookstores as books; three perfect words always mean the same thing: “I am dead.”

I advise writers to draft out complete stories (or episodes) without revising.

Keep your protagonist going for the goal, solving the problem; do not fret about the exact right word or perfect sentences (perfect is death). Teach yourself to write in story cycles.

Revision—

Part One: Oftentimes, drafting reveals some great ideas that the writers themselves don’t know are in the text. In class, we’ll try to point them out, so you feel like doing more.

Before you come to class, you may wish to buff up what you’re going to read. This is a part of revision. OK, give it a shot.

However, after each class, I urge you to spend a little time (a half hour) installing any changes you’ve taken away from discussion. Often, I (Patrick) will make some specific suggestions. Plug them in. Please, within 24 hours, before you forget. This minor revision will solidify lessons.

But for the most part, keep your story moving forward; please, don’t begin your writing practice by revising everything you’ve already written. Waste of time.

Part Two: However, there will come a time when your story has a shape, an ending, and you want to polish it up a bit.

Revision is a different kind of play from drafting: it’s still imaginative, but where drafting was just kicking a ball around the house and enjoying busting windows, scaring the cat, and knocking over the Thanksgiving turkey and the gravy boat, revision is more like playing a game of soccer (or “football” as they say in every other part of the world); you need to control the ball between the lines and shoot it into the goal.

Revision may be the best time to refer to the models and paradigms (see below and other document), but you want to divide your revision process into parts.

Work on big things first (is this a good story? Are the causes and effects clear? Is it conflict driven? Do the characters have intricate inner logics?).

Then, and then grind down to smaller things (does each episode begin late and end early? Do episodes all have a prime, define, conflict, reveal structure? Does your root story carry each episode?)

And finally work on sentences. (Most revisors work on sentences first: a waste of time.)

That’s all there is to revision, but you may find some work requires a good deal of revision. Annie Proulx revised “Brokeback Mountain” sixty times before her sense of truth let it go.

Models and Paradigms—

Stories are based on the way our consciousness has developed and how it functions: each of us has learned that s/he is the first person narrator of our her/his own life. We think of ourselves as protagonists, we live in settings, and we understand people as characters. We are goal-seeking, problem-solving beings who developed our understanding of the world with our basic six senses and a limited but flexible repertoire of emotions.

If you understand these things and apply them to writing, then you have a toolbox of a few concepts to help you write better. These tools come in four main categories:

Embodied Writing

The essential story sequence: Prime > Define > Conflict > Reveal

The parts of story: Setting, Character, Action, Point of view, Pattern

The Ongoing Root Story and The Branching Digressive Story

These four are the fundamental tool categories from which this writing method comes from. There are other aspects of story which we could and do study; humor, intimate storytelling, genre, dialog, fantasy, magical realism, unreliable narrator, and so forth, but everything is based in these easy to learn modes.

If you’re writing poetry or plays or nonfiction, don’t worry; the story model is the foundation of human thinking; everything else comes from it.

So, for now, think about Projects and Practice and what you’ll be drafting. The rest will follow. This is a workshop, not a contest. Bring your toys and we’ll have some fun.

I’ll append a handout that explains, again in brief, the models and paradigms. This is what makes Write Yourself Free effective, but again, no memorization necessary.

Cheers,

Patrick

©The Editing Company 2012

Pam Muir grew up in rural Chester County, Pennsylvania, where she spent many hours in front of her parents’ old manual Royal, pounding out poems and stories.  Writing developed into a true love; she doesn’t remember a time when there wasn’t a character whispering in her ear.  Pam went on to earn a B.A. in English, and spent the years following working for Investment Banks in New York City, all the while daydreaming about writing full time.  In 2010, after a lot of number crunching and planning (she’d like to thank the California wine producers for helping to take the edge off the process!), Pam decided to pursue those dreams and traded in her Wall Street Blackberry for a pen and notepad.  She is happily working on short stories as well as a romance novel.  Pam lives in Fairfield, CT with her husband Martin.

From her short story, “Personal Day.”

Family Rest Cemetery was so inviting this time of year, the trees bursting with orange, red, and gold leaves, and the single women or couples swapping the dirty white summertime plastic lilies and daisies for winter chrysanthemums. The crisp air, the vibrant sun, the brilliant trees, invigorating. It reminded Bob of his parents’ funeral all those years ago. Such a nice shiny day that was, too.                                                                                              

He turned and moved in closer to the big crowd, men and women, a few children, a baby who didn’t cry, but all the adults in black or grey, heads downcast. Bob Foster clasped his hands and filtered through the crowd—sometimes shimmying sideways to protect his eye from a rough shoulder pad or his ribs from a boney elbow— until he arrived at the best place. Graveside. Money. Bob figured the dead man had plenty of it, given the coffin, the huge crowd, and the long procession of expensive cars complete with official police escort. Boy, was Bob thankful; if it hadn’t been for the flashing lights, he might not have noticed from his booth in the diner. Bob loved a good funeral.

Charles  wrote his first short story at the age of 14 about a secret society of wealthy, unscrupulous  panhandlers.  He has had a passion for writing ever since, studying English Literature at the collegiate and graduate levels.  His literary heros include Hemingway, Vonnegut, Woolf and Graham Greene.

Charles opted against the starving artist route, choosing to leverage his penchant for fiction as a marketing executive for large CPG corporations.  In 2008, Charles finally acknowledged his true passion and left marketing behind in favor of writing full time. In addition to his short stories, Charles has written a screenplay and is currently at work on his second novel. HIs work has appeared in Venȕ Magazine. He resides in Westport, CT. He is a grateful husband and father to two sons and a stepson.

Here is a paragraph from his new story, Progress Not Perfect:

Big Jim nodded. She’d said her name was Jennifer. She was a familiar type, wearing those shiny blue high heels and those skintight jeans that came up high and choked the meat of her calves like the back end of a scumbag. These ones always had them sweetly curved calves, smooth and sexy, ready to pump them high heels along. The calves was always the be-all and end-all on these bitches. From there, things gave way to the hard living they done. A roll of belly peeked out from under her top. The little hoop she had stuck in her navel when she was a tight young teen now hung sad and low. Her leopard print raincoat hung down off her shoulders, and a few strands of bleached hair swept past her bony blades as she skipped her eyes from one side of the circle to the other.

Here is the opening from Much Ado About Rinaldo in Venű Magazine.

It was too damn hot to be sitting at Nina’s table, which was one of those hip, modern jobs, slick and hard and crammed into her shoebox apartment. “There’s plenty more pie,” Mary said. She turned to my plate and then to me. “Babe, yours is all melted.”

“I couldn’t eat another bite,” I said. I reached for the bottle of Gordon’s stuffed in the Formica wine cooler. I topped off my Tom Collins and held up the bottle, “Anyone?”

“Just a dash,” Mary said.

“We need more ice.” Nina rose from the table. She took two short steps into the kitchenette. I poured for Mary. The bottle chilled my clutch.

Renaldo sat across from me looking downright turgid in his tropical linen button-down. He ladled another scoop of cherry pie à la mode onto his spoon. His toned bicep flexed as he hurried spoon to mouth. A bloody pink dollop trailed down his chiseled chin.

“What pie, Mary, what pie,” he repeated.

Mary smiled and pointed to her chin. She reached forward with the edge of her napkin. “You’ve got a—”

Renaldo poked his chin out. A Tupperware bowl descended with a polycarbonate clatter, a couple of cubes popping out onto the table, forming drop-sized pools instantaneously. And Nina beat Mary to it! She swiped him clean with her finger, tossing her tangle of blonde hair aside and sucking the goo with a smack of her lips.

Gabi Coatsworth of the Write Connextion Blog asked Patrick  to share some writing tips with her readership.

I recently asked Patrick McCord for some writing tips for those of us hoping to get our 50,00 word novel written this November. Do let me know which ones you find helpful.  I personally am fond of tip number 4. It worked for Hemingway, and it seems to be working for me. Patrick certainly has the credentials. He describes himself as a fugitive from Hollywood, where he learned that his talents were more analytical than presentational. He’s an award-winning poet, published short story author, and he has sold teleplays and a screenplay. As a college professor, he has specialized in story- and identity-cognition in film and literature.  He is currently Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of The Editing Company and is developing the Write Yourself Free(SM) Writing Manual.
The Editing Company and the Write Yourself Free(SM) workshops are housed in a 19th Century carriage house in the center of Westport, CT that features a dedicated Writers’ Room. Patrick and his partner Tish Fried  have launched The Editing Company Publishing. Their first book, Resurrecting Democracy, is available on Amazon.com.

1. Writing is a habit. Don’t wait for inspiration; the need for inspiration is a myth.  If you have a habit of writing 4 or 5 times a week, you will finish your projects. If you wait for inspiration, you’ll have a few inspired beginnings, never finished. All you need is 15 minutes of writing a day to keep your story cooking on the stove of your pre-conscious imagination. But if you wait for once-a-week inspiration, you’ll find the story-stew has gone cold and moldy. To create habit, make a schedule and stick to it.

2. Writing is play. So play, already. Make a mess. Fretting about punctuation, about the phrasing of a perfect sentence, or about what your audience thinks— these considerations hogtie your imagination. You’re just begging for writer’s block. In order to get to your best drafting self you have to dare to write something awful. The Jungian psychologists say, “Write the Shadow!” Don’t be nice; get crazy. Fun writing can be naughty, terrible, unreal, psychedelic, depraved, or, yes, poorly phrased, or, gasp! unpunctuated. Don’t get it right, get it writ.

3. If you want your story to move, write characters’ perceptions as they goal-seek. Readers connect with a perceptually rich, motivated character.  Readers turn off to involved explanation. Get your imagination into the character’s body, and let the words connect to your characters’ nervous system. What does your character want and how is s/he going to get it? That’s what drives the story!  What does if feel like to be in conflict when a goal is frustrated? Get characters acting, talking, and moving; don’t bother explaining.

4. Hemingway’s Insight: stop writing when you know what happens next; end your writing session before you exhaust your ideas. Linguistic research shows that conversations that are left unconcluded stay in mind longer than those that have closure. If you want to keep your story simmering in the back of your mind, stop when you have a really good idea. Knowing what you want to write next will leave you eager to sit  down the next day and get writing instead of cleaning the house, emailing or texting, etc.

5. Your first draft is a discovery draft, so write fast. As you write your first draft, don’t waste time re-reading what you wrote the day before; you’re wasting time. Characters evolve as they seek goals; writers evolve by finishing stories. Use each writing session to teach yourself to tell stories, not to revise pathologically. And write fast. Revise later.

Here’s our Nathalie. Nathalie Hazan has been in our workshop for over a year. She wowed us with a story at our last Writers’ Read party and then blew us away with what she created at our three day Writers’ Revival. Last Spring she asked us to edit a story with her and voila! Venu Magazine loved it. You can find it in their current issue on page. 88.

Some background: Nathalie was born in Casablanca, Morocco, and as a young child immigrated with her family to the US where she spoke French, celebrated Jewish holidays, and ate Middle Eastern cuisine in a tiny Queens apartment she shared with her parents and two younger siblings.  Nathalie attended Bronx High School of Science and then went on to Cornell University.  Her love for creative writing began at the age of five, when she began writing a series of journals exploring her fascination with identity. Nathalie has written a novel, Beguiling Rose and is currently working on her second, Punchbowl Drive. She lives in Westport, Ct with her husband, two children, and two dogs.

Here is the first paragraph from, “A Trojan Horse.”

Hadn’t she eaten enough organic fruit during her pregnancy? Had her husband mutated his chromosomes by texting and talking at the same time?  Had stress rotted the very last of her 30-something eggs?  Or had it been the belly machine she’d worn everyday around her waist guaranteed to produce a “Buddha baby” which had thumped

too hard into Jakey’s developing ears?  What if her son’s inability to sit still was as uncontrollable as her husband’s and she’d been cursed by a pattern of taking care of inattentive, moody men for the rest of her life?   Her son’s pediatrician, an ex-triathelete with a crew cut, and four sons of his own, was fond of telling her, “Criselda, boys are a different species.”  After many nights spent burying herself online in medical research, C. decided that she and Jakey deserved each other somehow; that he must be her karma for her lifelong desire to fit in.

Rick Meyerowitz is joining Maira Kalman, Thursday, March 31st, 7:30pm at the Westport Public Library. Introduced to us by local designer/illustrator, Jeff Seaver, we are thrilled the creative team agreed to leave NYC and venture out to the burbs. (Please see previous blog on Kalman.) Rick has been on book tour promoting his latest, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead.  Here is an excerpt from the New York Times.

By BILL SCHEFT, December 3, 2010

“Look no further than this impressive volume for that which begat “Saturday Night Live”; “The Simpsons” and their spawn; all of late night; The Onion; and two generations who have no idea they’ve been so thoroughly influenced. As Michael Gross, former design director of the magazine, observes, “Being at National Lampoon was like being at Sun Records.” The author, the longtime Lampoon contributor Rick Meyerowitz, is breathlessly thorough. He chronicles the magazine’s history from its lurching beginnings in 1970 as the brainchild of Henry Beard, Rob Hoffman and Doug Kenney, who “drew to them like-minded, almost equally brilliant writers and artists who all wanted to change the world — or blow it up, or both,” to its flinching end in the early ’90s. Meyerowitz intersperses what he’s culled with fully formed personal anecdotes about National Lampoon’s founders and prolific major players, and with stories of the behavior behind the page (like the remark that the legendary Tony Hendra “can drink the table under the table”).” The author, the longtime Lampoon contributor Rick Meyerowitz, is breathlessly thorough. He chronicles the magazine’s history from its lurching beginnings in 1970 as the brainchild of Henry Beard, Rob Hoffman and Doug Kenney, who “drew to them like-minded, almost equally brilliant writers and artists who all wanted to change the world — or blow it up, or both,” to its flinching end in the early ’90s. Meyerowitz intersperses what he’s culled with fully formed personal anecdotes about National Lampoon’s founders and prolific major players, and with stories of the behavior behind the page (like the remark that the legendary Tony Hendra “can drink the table under the table”).

Rick’s Bio: 

Rick was the most prolific contributor of illustrated articles for the once hilarious, now hilariously defunct National Lampoon Magazine. He wrote and drew for the magazine for 15 years. He painted the poster for their movie Animal House, and created the Lampoon’s trademark visual, The Mona Gorilla, which some say is the best Mona Lisa parody ever.

His own books include Nose Masks, Volumes One and Two (Workman Publishing); Dodosaurs – The Dinosaurs That Didn’t Make It (Harmony Books); and Elvis the Bulldozer (Random House). Because he believes a good idea can have more than one life, Rick recently did Return of the Nose Masks (Workman).

Rick adapted and illustrated two Rabbit Ears Videos for children; Paul Bunyan, narrated by Jonathan Winters, and Rip Van Winkle, narrated by Angelica Huston. Simon and Schuster has published book versions.

Rick and his friend Maira Kalman created the most talked about New Yorker cover of recent years, “New Yorkistan.” It appeared on December 10, 2001. Later that week the New York Times wrote: “when their cover came out, a dark cloud seemed to lift.” Rick and Maira continue to work together on other projects and hope to lift many dark clouds.

The National Lampoon Years:

“I met Henry Beard, Doug Kenney and Rob Hoffman, the founders of the National Lampoon Magazine, in the autumn of 1969. Doug, Henry and I began working together before the first issue was published in April of 1970. I had two pieces in that issue, and I remained a frequent contributor to the magazine until December 1988 when finally accepted that the magazine had descended even below the level I wanted to work at. Larry “Ratso” Sloman, the last real editor of the Lampoon, asked me to do one more piece for the February 1991 issue. I couldn’t resist Ratso’s call to action. My very last Lampoon piece was called “Operation Desert Sales.” It arrived on newsstands the same week Gulf War One arrived in Iraq.

The Lampoon was an amazing place to work. Competition was fierce. It had the feel of a rogue enterprise. You could feel the energy in the air, and I swear you could hear the synapses of some of the funniest minds of that generation firing like broadsides from a pirate ship. It was exhilarating to visit the offices or attend the monthly editorial meeting with such a crew. Aside from Doug and Henry, a typical group might consist of Christopher Cerf, George Trow, Michael O’Donogue, Sean Kelly, Tony Hendra, Gerry Sussman, John Weidman, Danny Abelson, Ellis Weiner, the art director Michael Gross, and artists/contributors such as myself and Bruce McCall.

If it had been organized in advance, Henry or Doug, or Henry and Doug would lead the meeting at a huge oval table. If it hadn’t been organized, if it was, as often happened, disorganized, the meeting would take place on the run from office to office, and look like a crowd of drunken guests at a barbecue having a yelling contest. It was a comedy slam/insult fest/humor Olympics that energized everyone who played a part in it. With the arrival of Saturday Night Live in 1975 and the departure of Doug and Henry the same year, the Lampoon began to lose its grip on its audience. Animal House, which appeared in 1978, seems in retrospect, to be its last great contribution to our culture. Many of the Lampoon’s contributors and editors went on to do great work, but the sad truth was the magazine had become something you might read instead of something you had to read.”

I got to know Rick Meyerowitz , of National Lampoon fame, and currently on book tour promoting Drunk, Stoned, Brilliant, Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great, through local brilliant illustrator/designer, Jeff Seaver. Rick volunteered to come out Westport and do a talk here at The Writers’ Room. Of course I was excited and then he suggested he bring his girlfriend. I got more excited. His girlfriend is Maira Kalman. (More on Rick in Part II). So now we are taking this talk to the Westport Public Library on Thursday, March 31st at 7:30pm. There is no reserved seating, so please come early. There is a piece on Maira in today’s New York Times about her current show at the Jewish Museum. “Ms. Kalman’s typically wry, gently satiric take on the delights and discomfitures of metropolitan life is the subject of the three-decade career survey “Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World)” at the Jewish Museum. NYT 3/18/11 Ken Johnson

Maira is one of my favorite writers/illustrators. Her book The Principles of Uncertainty, and all time favorite. A creative, intelligent contemplation of the challenges of life with pictures!

You can get a good idea of her creative range by going to her blog on the NYT – And The Pursuit of Happiness. That is also the name of her current book; a book based upon the blog. She talks about her new found love affair with the founding fathers – a unique take on American history.

When I lived in the City, and was involved with the graphic design world, I was very aware of Maira and Tibor Kalman, M&Co (they designed for Talking Heads for goodness sake).  When I had a child, I fell in   love with her children’s books. She is funny and that is something we parents all appreciate. Her books are wildly imaginative and there is just so much to look at. My son and I would pour over them for hours. They create a wonderful alternative universe that a child can dive right into. Max the dog is a poet (of course) and he naturally must travel to Paris for his art where he must (of course) fall in love with a french poodle! In Sayonara, Mrs. Kackleman siblings take off by themselves to explore Japan and it is all told from the pov of the older sister telling her younger brother a bedtime story. Perfect.

Most of us are familiar with Maira from her New Yorker cartoons and covers especially New Yorkistan. We are hanging the shower curtain version in our window.

More on New Yorkistan from the NYT “Ms. Kalman’s best-known work, made in collaboration with the illustrator Rick Meyerowitz, is “New Yorkistan,” a map of New York City with neighborhoods identified by comical Central Asian-sounding coinages like “Bronxistan,” “Khandibar,” “Kvetchnya” and “Khakis,” a southern Connecticut suburb. Created shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the map became a popular symbol.

Rick Meyerowitz was co-creator of the New Yorkistan illustration. The subject of my next blog.

Check out NYT cover article Lusty Tales and Hot Sales: Romanced E-Books Thrive. Apparently we all have our dirty little secrets. That’s right  — it is easier to hide your reading proclivities from your partner on an e-reader. So even if you are a teeny bit embarrassed by your tastes — and let’s face it have you looked at romance books lately? Most of them are porn — hey you can get your sex scene ideas from them.! And, many romance readers read two to four books a week! So romance books are the bursting the purple of e-books sales. “B&N is courting romance readers more aggressively than ever…has captured more than 25 percent of the market.”  It’s a growing market. Why not free your sexy self and give it a try.