Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 26, 1993 TAG: 9309300289
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
And now, for the statistical bombs:
The average income for a writer in America is $5,000 a year - and that's with the John Grishams and Tom Clancys factored in.
Fewer than 500 people in the entire country actually earn a living writing serious fiction and poetry.
The average poetry book in the United States today sells 600 copies.
"Do you know what celluloid collars are?" asks Richard Dillard, Hollins College English professor and chair of its well-known writing program. "They were these crisp little things that hooked onto the collar button, from back when men's shirts didn't have collars."
As Dillard's friend, writer George Garrett, once said, "We're both skilled in something nobody wants. It's like someone who makes celluloid collars."
Long gone are the days of the Faulkners and the Hemingways, when local people like retired sci-fi writer Nelson Bond could earn a living practicing their trade.
"We're mostly all amateurs now," says Dillard, who writes poetry and fiction when he's not teaching. "Writing is no longer a vocation, it's an avocation.
"Everyone's still trying at it, but they're dreaming a world of a dream that doesn't exist any more."
For a city of Roanoke's size, "it's incredible the number of artists that come here to work," says Rebekah Woodie, a teacher and writer. "A lot of them have other kinds of jobs, but they're still at their computers at home, hacking out things and getting published.
"They may not be getting paid much, but they're trying.
So why all the writers?
Hollins College is part of it, attracting not only writing faculty who publish books, but an encouraging atmosphere for writing students as well. As Woodie says, "You could keep busy just going to readings at Hollins. And I think people like me drag non-writers there, so it gets bigger and more accessible."
Another influence is the growing number of writing workshops in the community - small, informal groups of writers who meet to critique each other's work. Continuing education departments at Hollins, Roanoke College and Virginia Western Community College also sponsor creative-writing workshops for adults in the community.
And the group Artemis, which produces an annual journal for writers and artists, is a good outlet for regional writers trying to get published.
Even the Iroquois Club has gotten in on the activity, sponsoring monthly Poetry Slam competitions, where dozens of poets take turns at the mike reading their latest works. The atmosphere here is anything goes - from pure camp to angst to attention-getting performance art.
One time a woman took off her top during the reading of a poem. "It fit into the poem," organizer Maria Kusznir explains.
Another time a woman put one walkie-talkie in front of the mike, and then read her poem from another walkie-talkie in the bathroom. "It sounded like she was from outer space," Kusznir adds.
At a recent poetry slam, subject matter ranged from sex to masturbation to suicide and masturbation. One woman read an ode to Iroquois owner Shirley Thomas, describing her as "a goddess in blue jeans. . . who took Bo Didley to Kmart."
Siobhan Lowe-Matuk, the Floyd County writer who won that evening's competition, gave a heartfelt reading on the topic of love and gender. A line about breastfeeding her baby described "the symphony of your swallows" and "the orchestra of your suckles."
"I hear a lot of derogatory things said about poetry slams - that it's this new-wave, vomit-on-yourself phenomenon - and really it isn't," Lowe-Matuk says. "I want to get beyond the angst and the spewing and the drunkenness. I go for more spiritual things, like breastfeeding and home birth."
Dillard says poetry slams stem from the idea that "All poets wanna be rock 'n' roll singers, and all rock 'n' roll singers wanna be poets."
Good or bad, they will affect the kind of poetry that's being written, he adds, making it simpler and more accessible - because it's meant to be read out loud. "The poetry scene is more alive now than if it was slim volumes you read in your library over a glass of port,'' he says, although the audiences have become smaller and more regional in scope.
Liz Jones, a member of the group sponsoring the Oct. 2 Blue Ridge Writers Conference featuring writer Ellen Gilchrist, says such conferences provide a stimulus to area writers who need encouragement and contact with other writers - particularly writers who aren't affiliated with area colleges.
There are a lot of individuals in the region - like Joan Shroeder, Donald McCaig, Monty Leitch, Paxton Davis, Sharon McCrumb - who are getting published, Jones says. "We also have a number of people doing genre writing and nonfiction. All this needs to be supported."
A number of writers try it for a couple of years, then give up if they don't get published. "If you're trying to hold down a full-time job and trying to get published on the side, after a while you simply wear out," says free-lance writing teacher Judy Ayyildiz, who's written two books of published poetry.
"Rejection can be really bittersweet," she adds. "If you look at a rejected work and still think it's OK, turn around and submit it again. I've had work rejected by one press and taken by another."
Joan Shroeder, an award-winning nonfiction writer, got her big break recently when she hooked up with an agent at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts writing colony in Sweet Briar. The agent sold her first novel to Putnam - in two weeks.
The novel, which is set in a small Western Virginia community and features the work of Patsy Cline "many times in many guises," is due out next May.
Shroeder said she was lucky to study under novelist Donald McCaig at a community college in Clifton Forge, as well as novelist Jeanne Larsen at Hollins College. "Jeanne watched me struggle to start the novel and finally said, `Why don't you just write it?'''
"There are people here writing, and people here writing seriously," Schroeder says. "Some make money and some of us dream of doing it. . . . The lucky ones are the ones that overlap the two categories."
by CNB