Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

by Stephanie Trott

What is the story we are trying to tell our reader about the world, whether it’s real or made up? It can’t be one-sided, even if we are keeping things from them; there needs to be polarity as well as complexity, shades within brightness. Where is the depth of your work? Is there one theme that is overwhelmingly present as you review and consider what it is you’re trying to say with your collection? Can you write into the opposite of it, then the midpoint?

Maggie Smith

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Like . . . a lot. One of them, NPR’s “Life Kit,” recently featured poet Maggie Smith and welcomed a fantastic conversation on storytelling, poetry, and thinking about one’s audience. For Smith, that’s often her children. They’re listening, often quite literally at her table, and what she says matters to them.

Now imagine you’re seated at a table, ready to enjoy a meal with people you don’t quite know well. But they look interesting, and you all know the host, and the meal that’s been prepared looks divine. The tablecloth is crisp, the music is low, the lighting is soft. You trust your host, even if you’ve never been to one of their dinner parties, and as the meal continues you start to feel full and happy and warm—not only from the food you’re eating but from the conversations you’re having. All of this is the careful crafting of the host. And in your collection, that’s you.

One way to think about your collection is which writers you want to be in conversation with. Who is speaking now, and who do you want to listen to? If your book could say just one thing, what would it be? Would it add to something that’s already been voiced, or would it present a completely new perspective? Both are valuable, and neither is better. We’ll spend a little time on this in our final session together, so come ready to throw some spaghetti at the wall.

As we often hear in workshops, the writer needs to know much more about what they’re showing on the page than what actually appears. We write a first draft—and usually it’s pretty good!—but then we start to wonder what might happen if we changed something here, something there. We let someone read it, we consider their feedback. Only we know when our own work is done, when it’s ready to send out into the world with our name attached. 

Maybe you’re making something that right now is just for you. It’s nourishing, satisfying, suited to your own hunger, your own needs. It doesn’t have to be as big as a full-length collection or even a chapbook. Small notes to yourself—you know, the ones you save as email drafts or scribble on the back of receipt slips—are an act of creation and collection, be they checklists or stray thoughts or observations on what’s in front of you. 

If you find yourself here, poet and editor Anna Lena Phillips Bell has some smart words of support, which she originally offered in an interview with the Sewanee Review:

A lot of my poems act as notes to self: I’m trying to send a message to my daily self from the part of me that knows better or more. Those ones are less about place and more in place: I ask myself to carry the note around, and hope it will be useful wherever I’m headed.

Another important question: what tone do you want your collection to have? Is it loud and fast, slow and steady? Are you serving something hot and ready, or do you want your reader to sit down and have a drink, an appetizer, and some space before the main course? If your friend is going through a rough time, do you make them something hot or cold, comforting or challenging? How do you want them to feel when they’re finished?

The Seattle bookstore Oh Hello Again organizes books by emotion, which is another way you might think about who your collection is in conversation with or who you’re writing for. Owner Kari Ferguson sums up her rationale: “I want a person to come in and look around and say, ‘What do I need right now? What kind of book would help me in my life based on what I’m going through, or how I’m feeling?’” 

If you’ve gotten this far and you’re thinking “okay, but I still don’t know that my collection fits into one easily identifiable theme,” that’s also a fine place to be. Randon Billings Noble defends themelessness in the essay collection over at Brevity, where she writes:

I came to describe Be with Me Always as a collection of familiar essays loosely themed around hauntedness—not through conventional ghost stories but by considering the way certain people or places from our pasts cling to our imaginations. In a way, all good essays are about the things that haunt us, that get under our skin and into our minds and won’t leave until we have at least in some small way embraced or understood them.

You may even want to converse with someone who’s been to a few dinner parties, so to speak, and eventually you might want to consult with someone who helps make them happen. In this metaphor, that’s an external reader, an editor, or an agent. Think of them as the guests you invite to your practice meal, the one where you’re showing your best stuff but want to know what’s not quite right. Darling Axe has some thoughts on revision from an agent’s point of view, and if you’re not quite ready for guests, LitReactor’s Storyville has some tried and true tips on putting together a short story collection that can easily be adapted for poetry and creative nonfiction.

In keeping with our dinner party theme, here are some parting words from the inimitable Julia Child:

“When you flip anything, you just have to have the courage of your convictions, particularly if it’s sort of a loose mass like this.” [Flips potato pancake and spills it onto the stove] “Well, that didn’t go very well. See, when I flipped it, I didn’t have the courage to do it the way I should’ve. But you can always pick it up, and if you’re alone in the kitchen, who is going to see? But the only way you learn how to flip things is just to flip them.”

So: flip your stories, dear ones. Marinate your poems, flambé your essays. Make a mess, clean it up, start over where you have to. Churn your collection into what you want it to be, taking the above points into consideration but remembering all the while that you are the one in charge. And when you’re ready to plate up and serve your finest, be sure to save us a seat.