The Largest Possible Audience

Revisit some prophetic words from the great Edward R Murrow, which are featured in M. Allen Cunningham's Q&A, arriving in paperback and ebook in January 2021. 

(For best viewing results, enlarge the video to full-screen.)

 

Cunningham Presents PERPETUA'S KIN at Powell's Books - FULL AUDIO

 

Listen to "M. Allen Cunningham Presents PERPETUA'S KIN at Powell's Books" on Spreaker.

During this event at the fabled Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, Cunningham discusses his fourth novel PERPETUA'S KIN. A sweeping story of five generations in one American family, PERPETUA'S KIN spans much of North America, from the 1820s in Iowa to the American south during the Civil War to World War II San Francisco. In a structured presentation, Cunningham describes the story's origins, his research, the themes and characters, the influence of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and why this novel was 11 years in the making. He also reads short selections from the book. The event includes an audience Q&A. It was recorded on a rainy night in November 2018.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m-allen-cunningham-presents-perpetuas-kin-at-powells-books/id1479000289?i=1000488106800

What Would Leonard Cohen Do?

 

WHAT WOULD LEONARD COHEN DO? If you’re a hardworking creative soul striving to continue doing the work of the expressive imagination, striving to honor an authentic vision that resists the forces of market optimization, you could do a lot worse than immerse yourself in Leonard Cohen’s corpus and give that question your consideration.

Mentioned in this episode: Leonard Cohen; Cohen's "Hallelujah"; Songs of Leonard Cohen; Cohen's 1963 debut novel The Favorite Game; CBC Television; Cohen's novel Beautiful Losers; Cohen's performance style; Bob Dylan; Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat"; Zen; Mount Baldy; Leonard Cohen world tour; skipping at age 78; Cohen's album You Want It Darker; Cohen's album Thanks for the Dance; Feist; Beck; Damien Rice.

https://anchor.fm/in-the-atelier/episodes/What-Would-Leonard-Cohen-Do-ei8gdg/a-a2vdsfe

Cunningham Talks Thoreau in the Room Where Thoreau Was Born

 

VIDEO: The Poet & the Sculptor / Rilke & Rodin

In this video excerpt from a talk I recently gave to a class of brilliant young writers, I describe the interdisciplinary relationship between Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin (a relationship depicted in Lost Son, my novel about Rilke). 

What can creative writers learn from what Rilke learned from Rodin?

The talk includes my own translation of Rilke's great poem "The Panther" (also found below).

 

The Panther

Rainer Maria Rilke

(transl. M. Allen Cunningham)

His gaze, from the passing bars,

has grown so weary that it can hold nothing more.

To him there are a thousand bars

and beyond the thousand bars no world at all.

The soft drop of his dread sleek steps,

conscribed to a tight circle,

is like a dance of stamina around a center

in which a greater will stands stunned.

Yet sometimes the curtain of the pupil stirs,

opens itself soundlessly -- then an image gets inside,

passes through the silent tension of the limbs

and -- snared in the heart, ceases to be.

NEW AUDIO: Cunningham's essay "Variations on a Beginning"

Listen to "Variations on a Beginning" on Spreaker.

 

Cunningham's autobiographical essay, with musical accompaniment and slightly abridged.

"Variations on a Beginning" was originally published in complete form in The Timberline Review, Issue No. 3 (summer/fall 2016). You can read the full essay HERE.

Secure Your Copy of Cunningham's New Book

My new book Q&A will appear in print (and ebook) from Regal House Publishing in January 2021, and you can pre-order it now.

What's it about? Among other things: reality television, TV politics, the triumph of incoherence, and deception via screens. Sound familiar?

(My favorite designer Nathan Shields created that kick-ass cover, by the way. It's a custom linocut.)

Prime Passages: Thoreau by Henry Seidel Canby (1939)

For Henry David Thoreau's 203rd birthday, 12 July 2020: some choice excerpts from Canby's brilliant 1939 biography -- reminders about the growth and plight of genius.

"Overflowing with thoughts, he yet looked around for more, because he was living so intensely that his own thoughts choked his utterance. This description will do for any young writer. Thoreau's advantage lay in his resolve to find out what he was living before he made a book about it--to be, as he said to Emerson, first the idea itself.
[...]
"When a deep excitement of the mind finds a favorable environment, as it did in this Concord which was, indeed, a power plant of idealistic energy stepping up the spiritual voltage of the nineteenth century, an authentic moment in the history of civilization often follows.
[...]
"The two conditioning factors for writing anywhere, any time, are the quality of the imagination and the nature of the market. Later comes the fork of the road -- one way toward the competent and salable, the other toward the excellent and possibly unsalable. The completely successful [person] of letters is not [they] who writes for nothing, but rather the writer who learns how to do what [they] want -- and how to make readers pay for it. The predestined commercial writer is seldom a frustrated [person] of letters. [Their] success in cash returns is due to a different set of qualities. Every author writes for money, for money represents an audience, and no creative mind writes for itself alone. The question is, how high a price will [they] pay for the money [they] get. That became Thoreau's problem; but at first his concern was with what he had to say, and to whom and how he could say it. When this was solved, the question of how he was to get paid enough to allow him to go on writing followed, and in solving that in his own original fashion he broke out of obscurity into fame.
[...]
"The great world had no need of him, and he in his turn found that, for him, the greater world was Concord. And so, having been an author without pay, and having learned how to place an occasional manuscript with insufficient pay, he came home [from a brief residence away at Staten Island] to take up from a new angle his problem of how to live and how to stay alive while living. He had learned that in order to do what he wanted in writing he would have to publish himself. And this inevitably led him to Walden Pond.
[...]
"The failure of [Thoreau's first book] 'The Week' when it was first published, must be charged to the failure of the audience to whom he finally addressed it, much as, I think far more than, to its own defects in composition.
[...]
"These ecstasies in prose, those hours of observation, this hard labor with the pen and hard study of science and travel, now, rather than Latin, Greek, and the Hindu classics, this daily filling up of reservoirs, and nightly refining of waters, all this was Thoreau's real business of living while he was by trade the surveyor of Concord. Surveyor indeed, but not only of lot lines and corners!
[...]
"Thoreau lectures in Boston [1852] on his life at Walden, but to a handful only of people; the clerks at the other end of the reading-room would not put down their newspapers to listen, even when urged by [Bronson] Alcott."

From Thoreau by Henry Seidel Canby, 1939.
p.105
p.106
p.130
p.149
p.273
p.321
p.358

Thoreau's Leaves: The Thoreau Podcast

Have you heard my new podcast, Thoreau's Leaves? I started Thoreau's Leaves partly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, out of a wish to share with listeners, in a uniquely atmospheric and meditative form, the consolations and inspirations I find in my regular explorations of Thoreau's journal. Thoreau knew how to stay at home, and he was so adept at finding the universe in his own backyard. This is an exemplary practice that we all, staying at home as we are and ought to be, can benefit from right now, but it has an enduring relevance beyond these times as well. As a portrait of consciousness, of a mind awake and alert to the natural world, Thoreau's journal is unparalleled.

Don your earphones, close your eyes, and see if you can muse again.

For Mrs. Dalloway Day

Virginia Woolf's magnificent Mrs. Dalloway was self-published 95 years ago today (May 14th) by Woolf's own Hogarth Press. Almost a century after its appearance this novel remains a profoundly strange and inspiring literary work -- still in many ways much bolder and more innovative than so many of our contemporary novels. 

In honor of the anniversary, I'm sharing my lecture on Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway given recently to my creative writing students at Portland State University. If you're a writer working against the grain of the times, you might find something here.


Listen to "M. Allen Cunningham Lectures on Mrs. Dalloway for Creative Writers" on Spreaker.

Introducing In the Atelier, the New Podcast Hosted by M. Allen Cunningham

Episode 1: In the Absence of Yes

Thoughts on a subject all too familiar to every writer: rejection. Believing in the worth of what you've produced is no easy thing. And deserving work is all too often passed over in sluice tides of manila envelopes. All that matters is what you're committed to. 
----
In the Atelier, a new weekly podcast premiering January 2020, is a place for occasional thoughts on literature, writing, and the life of the imagination. Each artfully crafted episode brings you reflections and real talk about subjects like the nature of creativity, the highs and lows of making art, inspiring works of literature and cinema, and the value and valor of staying true to your own creative vision. Produced by the award-winning literary press Atelier26 Books and hosted by author, publisher, and teacher M. Allen Cunningham.

Eager to hear more? Get exclusive early access to seven episodes with a tax-deductible donation to the Atelier26 Books 2020 Campaign.

Mentioned in this episode: Wallace Stegner; New York Times; Henry James; Andre Dubus; Gustave Flaubert

Music in this episode: "Door Knob" by Egon Stone; "Petrolchimica2" by Bottega Baltazar; "Rising Up" by OFRIN; "Seventh March" by C3NC (All music used by courtesy of the artists through a licensing agreement with Artlist)

Prime Passage, Audio Version: The Artist of Kouroo by Henry David Thoreau

From Walden, Thoreau's original fable about the reaches and depths of time in art.

Listen to "The Artist of Kouroo" on Spreaker.

Prime Passage, Audio Version: The Waves by Virginia Woolf

A reading from Woolf's inimitable work. "I need not speak, but I listen. I am marvelously on the alert." Includes musical accompaniment from Bach's Cello Suite No. 6.

Listen to "M. Allen Cunningham" on Spreaker.

Prime Passage, Audio Version: Three Paragraphs from Annie Dillard's An American Childhood

Listen to "Three Paragraphs by Annie Dillard" on Spreaker.

New Audio: Right Click

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Listen to "Right Click" on Spreaker.

Prime Passage: "I am marvelously on the alert," from The Waves by Virginia Woolf

"They want a plot, do they? They want a reason? It is not enough for them, this ordinary scene. It is not enough to wait for the thing to be said as if it were written; to see the sentence lay its dab of clay precisely on the right place, making character; to perceive, suddenly, some group in outline against the sky. Yet if they want violence, I have seen death and murder and suicide all in one room. One comes in, one goes out. There are sobs on the staircase. I have heard threads broken and knots tied and the quiet stitching of white cambric going on and on on the knees of a woman. Why ask, like Louis, for a reason, or fly like Rhoda to some far grove and part the leaves of the laurels and look for statues? They say that one must beat one's wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines; the sun falls sheer into pools that are fledged with willows. (Here it is November; the poor hold out matchboxes in wind-bitten fingers.) They say truth is to be found there entire, and virtue, that shuffles along here, down blind alleys, is to be had there perfect. Rhoda flies with her neck outstretched and blind fanatic eyes, past us. Louis, now so opulent, goes to his attic window among the blistered roofs and gazes where she has vanished, but must sit down in his office among the typewriters and the telephone and work it all out for our instruction, for our regeneration, and the reform of an unborn world.

"But now in this room, which I enter without knocking, things are said as if they had been written. I go to the bookcase. If I choose, I read half a page of anything. I need not speak. But I listen. I am marvelously on the alert. Certainly, one cannot read this poem without effort. The page is often corrupt and mud-stained, and torn and stuck together with faded leaves, with scraps of verbena or geranium. To read this poem one must have myriad eyes, like one of those lamps that turn on slabs of racing water at midnight in the Atlantic, when perhaps only a spray of seaweed pricks the surface, or suddenly the waves gape and up shoulders a monster. One must put aside antipathies and jealousies and not interrupt. One must have patience and infinite care and let the light sound, whether of spiders' delicate feet on a leaf or the chuckle of water in some irrelevant drainpipe, unfold too. Nothing is to be rejected in fear or horror. The poet who has written this page (what I read with people talking) has withdrawn. There are no commas or semicolons. The lines do not run in convenient lengths. Much is sheer nonsense. One must be skeptical, but throw caution to the winds and when the door opens accept absolutely. Also sometimes weep; also cut away ruthlessly with a slice of the blade soot, bark, hard accretions of all sorts. And so (while they talk) let down one's net deeper and deeper and gently draw in and bring to the surface what he said and she said and make poetry." -p.131-2
Virginia Woolf self-published The Waves through The Hogarth Press, 1931

M. Allen Cunningham's New Book Q&A: First Teaser

Q&A will appear from Regal House Publishing, fall 2020.

New Interview in Poets & Writers

The current issue of Poets & Writers (Sept/Oct 2019) features my extensive interview with Ben George, Senior Editor at Little, Brown and Company.

Our wide-ranging conversation touches on the day-to-day experiences of a New York editor, the role of luck in publishing, the value of mentors, what it's like to spend an hour discussing a single paragraph, the plight of "midlist" writers, and lots more.

"In any editing experience you have to make the art the most important consideration, even as you keep the artist’s personal feelings in mind while you’re doing that. This is why I feel so privileged. As the editor, I’m being invited into the workshop, where there’s sawdust on the floor and half-finished things. It’s a delicate space for the writer. You’re being trusted, and you need to acquit yourself well." -Ben George 

Read the complete uncut version of the interview online HERE.

Tell Yourself the Ages Are Listening

Artists and writers: At some point, or several points, you’re going to receive the message that your work is insignificant, that your commitment to the work is futile, that you and what you represent as an artist do not matter.

At some point, or several points, you’re going to wonder what use there is in continuing to do and share your work. 

It’s unlikely that you will escape this unpleasantness. But when it arrives, remember that almost nobody escapes it — that you’ve come to a new threshold, and this one also you can cross as you’ve crossed other thresholds before it.

Take the upleasantness as a sign of your progress, of the strength of your commitment to the work. Take it as a reminder of how far you’ve gone, and as a renewal. 

Face the deafening silence, let outright rejection wash over you. Then say to yourself, if you can, "Art is freedom, beginnings are beautiful, rebeginnings even more so," and honor your practice by showing up even when nobody else will — especially then.

You’re strong of heart, with fire in your belly, and you’re endowed with gifts and disciplined in the daily work, the lifelong work, of honing these gifts.

From the start you knew this work would be one of the hardest things you could choose to do. Stand back and realize: there’s no surprise in this turn of events. Don’t look around for those more “lucky” than you. 

Don’t review your prior hours and days in terms of “waste.” And don’t think in terms of “arrival,” only in terms of the work at hand. Not “accomplishments,” only beginnings. 

Give yourself, if necessary, to posterity, or to your ancestors. Tell yourself the ages are listening. Do what you have to do to reorient yourself.

Then: notice the light in your window, the shape of the words inside you or already there on the paper, the instructions coming through the music even on your thousandth listen.

Ready now, enclosed in frightful privacy, get to work again, if not for yourself then for those of us you may never meet. We’re full of faith in you and we are waiting.

Prime Passage: "Good Sentences Are Why We Read" by Joe Moran

Among teachers and critics and in the community of writers, we need more advocates for attunement to the sonic properties of prose. Joe Moran's recent essay on sentence-making consoles me (and probably also the underrated writers I most admire). I immediately printed it out for use with my creative writing students. Here's a prime passage, but follow the link at the end to read the whole.

"When the writer has a tin ear for the sound of a sentence then the reader knows, just as when she hears flat or pitchy singing, that something is wrong, even if she can’t quite say why.

I can let a book fall open and tell, just from reading a few sentences, if I will like it. However compelling the subject of a book might be, I find it hard to carry on reading if its sentences are boring. I should be more forgiving, since I have written my share of boring sentences. I am not. Neither are you, even if you don’t know it yet. You think you are looking past this sentence into what it is saying—about life, love, the existence of angels, the design of the injection-molded polypropylene stacking chair, whatever it is— but no. You think you care what this is about, but really you care how it sounds. You are reading it for its sentences." 

Read the whole wonderful thing at Lit Hub