By: Olivia Picklesimer
I recently attended my second Spring Literature Festival at Ohio University and, just like last time, I was motivated to say the least. With the variety of authors that come to share their wisdom and talent with us, I’ve always found at least two that inspire me or that I just really connect with their work. This year it was the authors Rita Dove and Debra Marquart.
I most enjoyed Rita Dove’s lecture on her craft, the way that she works. She titled her lecture “Romancing the Stone” and gave several different analogies for interpreting it. She felt that it most reminded her of the Arthurian legend, advising us that if the fit isn’t right, it’s just not going to work. Instead, she told us to find the right stone, and then find the right way to romance it. Other pieces of advice that she had to offer were to write during your peak time, when you felt more energetic and inspired, and to find a way to work with your pitfalls or flaws. Finally, she insisted that we must believe that writing is so important that nothing else matters.
As for Debra Marquart, I most enjoyed her reading. Her first piece was an excerpt from her memoir The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere. Very detailed and descriptive, it was easy to envision the scenes of her life on the family farm. She also treated us to a more recent piece that hadn’t been published yet in which she describes her life as the other woman and how the tables eventually turned and she was cheated on herself. This was one of those pieces that I really connected with.
As I mused on what I had taken away from this year’s Lit Fest, I realized that, while admire both of these ladies as well as a host of many other authors, an emerging writer ultimately must find their own way. The way that one author works, for example Rita Dove working through the night and sleeping when the sun comes up, may not work for all writers. As she said in her lecture, write when it feels good to you.
This is definitely not to say that we can’t learn from them. Why else would we attend literature festivals and conferences? These people are older, wiser, and have been doing this a lot longer than we have; however, we shouldn’t take their advice and set it in stone, otherwise we’ll end up trying to romance the unromanceable stone. Use the knowledge and experiences that they have shared to find your own writing style and hone your own special craft for writing. Who knows, maybe in the future we’ll be returning to Ohio University’s Literature Festival, not as part of the audience, but as a revered author who has been asked to share their knowledge with a new crop of emerging writers.