how Millions of Suns authors Sharon Fagan McDermott and M. C. Benner Dixon seek inspiration
attention as a route to inspiration, plus following and rebelling against prompts
Today I’m excited to share another entry in the new tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question.
Today’s newsletter features writers Sharon Fagan McDermott and Christine M. C. Benner Dixon, who wrote the beautiful new book Millions of Suns: On Writing and Life. Sharon and Christine are both devoted teachers as well as writers, and their experience and warmth come across so clearly in the book. It would be a great gift for anyone who needs a little encouragement in their writing practice. (Even if that person is you!)
I’d love your suggestions of other writers and artists to feature in this series, so feel free to email me with ideas. You can just hit “reply” to this newsletter.
Today’s newsletter is a really special one for me, because I’m excited to feature Millions of Suns, a new book on writing, that was co-written by one of my beloved poetry teachers, Sharon Fagan McDermott. I took a poetry workshop with Sharon my second semester in college, and after my best friend Heather and I talked her into mentoring us for a summer fellowship, we named her our honorary Poetry Mom. She even read a poem at my wedding!
And Millions of Suns is a really special book on writing. Chapters consider topics like memory, imagery, surprise, metaphor, structure, and revision, and each chapter includes a pair of essays written by Sharon and Christine, followed by a set of prompts. I really loved the paired essay structure, which felt like getting to sit in on a chat between two smart friends and then being invited in to the conversation via the prompts. Whether you’re an experienced writer or newer to a creative practice, I think you’ll find perspectives and approaches that will open up something new in your writing. (I’ll be teaching the essays on imagery in one of my classes, an upper-level interdisciplinary course on attention, this spring, and I’m really looking forward to using that chapter with students who aren’t necessarily creative writers.)
And if you want to get a little more of a sense of the book, Lit Hub published an excerpt recently, Christine’s piece on creating persuasive metaphors, in which she writes
Keeping a collection of all these strange, fragmentary, and countless metaphors has given me a visceral understanding of the figurative power of language, how it binds ideas together more than it draws distinctions between them—at least this is so in the languages that I know best. In English, every word, almost, is an efficient little vehicle pointed outward at some piece of the wide and literal world.
Below, you’ll find two perspectives on seeking inspiration, plus an exercise designed to help you tap in to your own creative process.
Sharon, on finding inspiration
I’m inclined to find inspiration everywhere. Tickseed and a dropped set of keys. Wind that freezes the hairs in my nose. My mother’s voice over the distance that spirals me all the way back to childhood, Overbrook Drive, our kitchen sink, where Mom is singing “Red, Red Robin”: “Get Up, get up you sleepyhead / get up, get up get outta bed / Cheer up, cheer up the sun is read / Live. Love. Laugh and be happy!” elbow deep in suds and dirty dishes. And as I take the dripping plates from her hand and dry them on my towel, I try to match my girlish soprano voice to the belt and bravado of Mom’s sultry one. I am eight years old. Writing in locked diaries, loving the darling little key that holds my voice in privacy. I have always been drawn to the physical world of tables and pussy willows and socks. And growing up with music always playing in the house (or someone singing) sensitized me to listen for sound everywhere. I could feel a reverberation deep inside when I tuned into the music of a winter morning (the cardinal’s cheet-cheet, the skid of tires on a slick road). Inspiration was as close as my backyard in suburban New Jersey. Life in the present held enough wonders and curiosities for me—tar bubbles on a hot August street, the varicolored twine inside telephone cables that the nice telephone-line men would hand to my friends and I to twist into rainbow rings and bracelets, the rush of wind while roller-skating around Cypress Drive. What challenged me was not the lack of what to write about, but the challenge of not being able to control which image or smell or soundscape would haunt me until I crafted it into a poem or song.
Christine, on prompts and other ways to enter the house of writing
I propose writing as a house that a person looks to enter. Perhaps the person wants to live there, perhaps they mean to plunder it. Motivations may vary. The point is: we want in. And so the writer takes stock of the options. Aside from the front door, there’s the basement hatch, the window behind that overgrown rhododendron, the sliding door in the back with the broken latch. Fetch a ladder, and you can crawl in through the balcony. There are some people (the same ones who grow nostalgic for the five-paragraph theme) who only ever use the front door to get into the house. They always send their card ahead of them, and they ring the bell and wait to be let in. They think themselves very proper and demand all other entrances as indecorous or shameful.
“Writing is serious,” they say, swirling an amber drink philosophically. “There is a right way and a wrong way to write.” They lean forward in their leather chair and give you a patronizing look. “Did you know there are seven basic plots that comprise all of the world’s stories? That’s it! Just seven!” They jump to their feet. “Inciting incident! Rising action! Climax! Falling action! Resolution! Denouement!” They have reached a kind of frenzy. “There is a proper way to do things, damnit!”
These people are nincompoops. They aren’t entirely wrong. The so-called proper paths can get you inside, but journaling can get you in the house, too. Fan fiction can get you in the house. Imitation can get you in the house. Writing on a dare can get you in the house. The relative dignity of the entrance is irrelevant. If it gets you in the house, you’re in. And you never have to leave if you don’t want to.
We all have our favorite points of entry, of course. I respond well to writing prompts. Limitation does me good, and I’ve seen it do wonders for other writers, too. When I teach creative writing, I start by talking about the creative power of constraint. A prompt–whether it provides constraint through a certain form or a specific topic–whether it provides constraint through a certain form or a specific topic–helps to clear away some of the infinite possibilities of what could be written. Prompts give you a frame, and you can either build on it or push against it, depending on your mood. “Write about the weather.” This is a discrete and concrete task. Sometimes, I do as I’m told–I write about the stormy night the sump pump failed and my father and I watched water burble up from the basement drain. Other times, I bend the rules as far as I can. With a perverse little enjoyment of my own rebellion, I hammer out a scene with no weather at all: still air, a hazy sky, and a long, unbroken landscape of hours upon hours. I find a woman on her porch on this weatherless day, and I follow her around until something happens.
If you’d like to try it out . . .
What are you waiting for? Inspiration can be literally anything that calls to you. Where I see sycamores, you note Victorian architecture or crumbling stoops. Someone else might note the athletic bodies jogging past them. And yet another might be thinking hard about the Black Lives Matter protest they just took part in. Inspiration may come in the musical way the sleet rhythmically hits the metal of parked cars. Or the angry words you just traded with a distant brother. Slow down. Pay attention. Train yourself to note what calls out to you. Literally: keep a little notebook with you to jot down notes or record on your phone. Snap photos. Gather all the inspiration to you like the messy, beautiful bouquet it is. Then, waste time, take a break; allow your brain to daydream and wonder. Inspiration abounds. Go write.
M. Christine Benner Dixon, Ph.D., lives, writes, and grows things in Pittsburgh, PA. She is quick to make a pun and slow to cut her grass. Christine works as a freelance editor and writing coach. Her debut novel, The Height of Land, is the 2022 Orison Fiction Prize winner and will be released by Orison Books. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Reckoning, Flash Fiction Online, Funicular, Fusion Fragment, Appalachian Review, and elsewhere. Christine is the interim Executive Director for Write Pittsburgh, a nonprofit organization that offers writing workshops for teens and adults in and around Pittsburgh and online. You can read more at bennerdixon.com, and you can find on twitter and instagram.
Sharon Fagan McDermott is a poet, musician, and a teacher of literature at a private school in Pittsburgh, PA. She has four collections of poetry published, including the chapbooks Voluptuous, Alley Scatting (Parallel Press), and Bitter Acoustic (winner of the 2011 Jacar Press chapbook competition) and her full manuscript, Life Without Furniture, published by Jacar Press in 2018. Millions of Suns is Fagan McDermott’s first book of essays and is part of the University of Michigan Press’ “Writers on Writing” series. Additionally, she has just completed a new poetry manuscript, entitled Smoke and Sparrow, for which she is currently seeking a publisher. You can read more at sharonfaganmcdermott.com, and you can find her on instagram.
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