The Art of Storytelling

Building Character: Regifting Rosenblat...

Dear Everyone:

Below are a list of corrections I would like to make regarding a series of events, starting with...

OPENING SCENE:

MAN sees WOMAN.  Woman sees man.  There's a fence between.  She reaches through, hands him an apple.  The sign above should read EDEN but instead says BUCHENWALD or AUSCHWITZ. The place doesn't matter.  Names are interchangeable.  So are people.

Besides, "we can always revise the screenplay to reflect recent revelations," the producer says.

He forgets to mention facts.

CUT TO:

ROSENBLAT, 79, and WIFE, authors, originators of the story-tale-myth-legend Angel at the Fence.  Sitting on a sofa, smiling, complacent.

ROSENBLAT:

                           I just wanted to make people happy,
                           What's so wrong with that?

(Author's note: Last part added for dramatic purposes only).

WIFE:

                          (Smiling, nodding) My husband is a
                          good man, we never wanted to hurt
                          anybody.

In the window behind Rosenblat and Wife stands Rosenblat's SISTER-IN-LAW (they're all characters in his life). She's holding a sign: KOOK,THIEF, LIAR with an arrow pointing to him.  There's a casket beside her.

(Author's note: if, only for dramatic emphasis, you choose to have Rosenblat's BROTHER rise from said casket and castigate him, I will not stop you--though I will again stress, through subsequent Oprah interviews, if necessary, that this most emphatically did NOT happen).

Sincerely,

The Truth

Craft Matters: Words on Thought...

Just a few insights from my days in the academic trenches...

 
Literary Alchemy

Out of

crap:

gold.

 

Hidebound

Tense body,

narrow mind.

TAOS Welcomes Contributing Author: Maria R. Burgio...

For my first piece, I would like to introduce myself so readers will appreciate my position on society and child/family mental health.  I’m an NYU graduate, with a degree in human development, which deals with the development of humans from the prenatal period to every stage of life thereafter.  From there, I went on to study nonfiction and fiction writing at USC, where I worked with such notables as, Kenneth Turan (LA Film Critic), Shelly Lowenkopf (teacher extraordinaire), Janet Finch, Noel Finch, Gay Talese (who blew my mind in fiction class!), and others.My thesis, Is My Child Normal?, became a parenting guide that should soon reach bookstores on the West and East coasts. Having worked with children from every walk of life in my private practice and at a psychiatric center, I have a broad psychological-sociological world view about childrens’ importance as it’s related to the structure of society.

Being born and reared in Sicily, Italy and then living in a working class Sicilian neighborhood in Brooklyn, I can see the cultural differences between an old European culture and a modern (21st century) American one. How children fit into the lives of parents, teachers, and neighborhoods varies greatly: for instance, in my native country, children and family are the center of life, as is eating together every day. Every business and school closes at noon, at which time everyone quits work/school and goes home, usually to the mother’s house or to another matriarch's. During the two- hour long, five-course meal, we tell stories and laugh about ourselves and our lives. We comfort, cajole, admire, love, and yell at those we eat with everyday. The children are the focus of all this; they are made the center of the conversation. 

Generally speaking, Sicilians are focused on being together as a family: the family is life, jobs are secondary. This is not always so in America, where competition for money and material things like cars, televisions (now with flat screens of varying resolution), computer toys, telephones, and cell phones (which have progressed into time-consuming strangulating communication devices) conspire to keep us mentally busy and emotionally isolated. And American children have bought into all of it.

The problem is magnified by the complexity of our lives, which include constant thrill seeking, buying sprees and instability in the home--all of which take attention away from the children and instead focus it on advancement and the resulting materially-driven lifestyle.  Instead of family, children become tax exemptions, or one more thing to deal with after a hard day’s work.

So I ask, do American parents really know their children? Some, definitely, do not: starlets, for example, have popularized the idea of getting pregnant and having a child out of wedlock, which is a far cry from the family-centered traditions in many other parts of the world. And although the saying, “children are our future" is often espoused, how we spend our time and money shows that we don't always care about our children or our future. In fact, the saying itself is nothing more than a cliché, both overused and ignored. 

Instead of cliches and sayings, come and share your stories, both good and bad, of what makes a family.  And let us together figure out how we can better provide for our children and our future.

About the Author:

Maria Burgio was born in Sicily, Italy, raised in Brooklyn, New York, and practiced at her upstate New York clinic for twelve years. She also had a private practice in Los Angeles for four years. Dr. Burgio earned a Ph.D. in applied developmental psychology from New York University.  She specialized in neuropsychology, child psychology, and psychopharmacology, while teaching at various universities including UCLA School of Medicine, Utica College of Syracuse University and New York University. Dr. Burgio is a graduate of the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California. Through her non-fiction writing, Dr. Burgio helps parents and society identify what is abnormal in children's behavior and what can be done to help.

Wanderlust: Alexis Degan on Couches...

I do not own a couch. Instead, there is a full-sized mattress and box spring set up in my living room with a coffee table and the TV in front of it. This causes my mother no end of concern. It is the physical manifestation of a larger ideological issue. Her baby girl is living 3,000 miles from home, working at a factory, dating a boy whom she doesn't plan to marry, and is generally not the woman everyone thought she would become. My mother wants to buy me a couch for Christmas, and I seriously considered it. I did not want a couch, but I thought “If it is so important to Mom, why not just get one?”

The answer is that couches are difficult to move. On a practical scale, I will only be living in this apartment for another six months. Why haul a large, clumsy piece of furniture up three flights of narrow stairs only to have to drag it back down in a very brief time span?  On a much larger scale, owning a brand new, expensive couch makes it impossible to pack all of your shit into a car and skip town. This latter issue is the one that concerns me more than anything. And I think that might be another reason my mother wants me to have one. If she can't get me to stick around at home, at least she can pin me to one location so she doesn't have to worry about her daughter being a transient on top of everything else.

Of course, I am somewhat of a transient. I have never lived in the same apartment for more than a year. I have trouble sitting still for more than a few months. And while I've lived in the Boulder, Colorado area for almost three years now (a different town each year), I'd like to keep the option of moving to, say, San Francisco this summer when my lease is up. Couches are the enemy of all of us geographical-commitment-phobes. One does not merely abandon a brand new, nice sofa on the side of the road like some half-broken table handed down through generations of roommates. One has to either break the rules of minimalist moving and rent a U-Haul to tow the thing behind you as you make your getaway, or rent a storage unit for future recovery. But this ties you to the very location you're fleeing, and I'm not one for looking back.

About the author:

Alexis Degan is a graduate of Ithaca College's Writing and English departments.  She currently lives in Denver, Colorado, where she works as a batch operator at the The Learning Tree's factory.

Creating Value: Unfair Use...

My Nominee for the Gitmo Playlist

In a rather fascinating effort to prove that theft is only a crime if you're not the government, U.S. military authorities invoked the Bible as a defense for their use of musicians' work to torture Guantanamo Bay prisoners.  While some of the musicians, including Stevie Benton of Drowning Pool, whose "Bodies" is no. 6 on the Gitmo Playlist, are pleased to see their songs used as a means of preventing terrorists attacks, others, including Christopher Cerf (who wrote for Sesame Street), are horrified that their work is being appropriated for uses far beyond their intended purpose. 

Of course, some selections are debatable in that respect: hearing "I Love You," aka the Barney Theme, on infinite loop is probably enough to send any sane adult into paroxysms of head-banging. 

The real issue, though, centers not only on who owns the music, but who controls how it is used.  Had the U.S. Government gone through the appropriate channels and purchased the necessary licenses, it would stand to reason that as a viable consumer, the government could do with the music as it pleased.  Instead, military interrogators acted of their own accord and once again proved that their ingenuity is not limited to the realm of the purely legal.

Which leads me to wonder: can our government expropriate our creativity?  And if so, does that constitute fair use--a notion so sacred that our government enshrined it in US copyright law?

Personal Narrative: Wanderlust...

Every community has its folklore, its origin stories, its myths.  So I've decided to use the Personal Narratives as a way for us to get into the habit of telling stories about the things that matter to us. 

For the first round, I've picked a theme that we can all connect to on a basic level:

Wanderlust, or How I Ended up Somewhere Other than Where I Intended to Be. 

I'm sure that all of us have, at some point, had both the expectation that we are going in one direction and the realization that we are actually headed elsewhere.  The how we got there and the how we got back are usually fantastic stories in and of themselves; even moreso when we consider the reasons why.

For the sake of brevity (as well as wit), I suggest aiming for no more than 500 words, although you're welcome to do more, if you like.  Photos, art, music, poetry, and videos will also be accepted.

So tell away, and most importantly, have fun. 

-J

P.S.  Yes, that is Björk in the video, and yes, I picked it largely because it is that weird.