Tennessee Williams Festival: Finale - STELLA Shouting Contest & Happy Birthday to Tennessee!

The Tennessee Williams Festival ended with the STELLA shouting contest. Shouting contestants met at Jackson Square to shout for Stella, who was standing on a balcony. Women could participate by shouting for Stanley, but I didn't hear any women this year. At Jackson Square I couldn't get into a position that would allow me to see the participants - I could only hear them. Each contestant shouted STELLA three times, ever louder.

Five contestants were chosen as finalists. The final round of the STELLA shouting contest took place on the mainstage of Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre in the 600 block of St. Peter Street. Sitting in a theater seat, I could easily see the five finalists. As in the preliminary round at Jackson Square, each contestant gave three increasingly louder shouts for Stella.

Third place went to a French Quarter mime, dressed and body-painted all in gold, who elaborately mimed shouting for Stella without making any noise. After all, he was a mime.

Second place went to the first ever duo to enter the STELLA shouting contest: a tall guy and a short guy. The tall guy yelled, "Stel-," and the short guy yelled, "-la." They did this twice. For the third shout, they dropped to their knees and in unison shouted, "STEEEEEEEELLAAAAAAAA!"

First place went to a guy who truly did shout loudly, dropping to his knees and tearing his shirt on the final shout.

Each winner won an array of prizes. I don't know what the prizes were because I couldn't keep up with the long recital of prizes as they were being announced!

After the STELLA shouting contest, we went out to the courtyard to celebrate Tennessee Williams' 99th birthday with birthday cake.

And that's it till next year, which will be Tennessee's 100th birthday and the Festival's 25th anniversary!

Tennessee Williams Festival: Breakfast Book Club - To Kill A Mockingbird

My favorite event of the whole Tennessee Williams Festival was the Breakfast Book Club on Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, held at Muriel's Jackson Square Restaurant. The discussion was led by Barton Palmer, author of To Kill a Mockingbird: From Page to Screen. I was very impressed with Barton Palmer and bought his book.

Breakfast consisted of breakfast pastries and breads with coffee, tea, or juice. Below are some highlights of the discussion. To Kill a Mockingbird is extremely rich, so this hardly scratches the surface of what can be said.

THE CATHOLIC LEGION OF DECENCY. The Catholic Legion of Decency was an organization of Catholic lay people who were concerned about the growing amount of violence, sex, and immorality in movies. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the Legion of Decency rated movies as A (okay for all ages), B (okay for adults only), and C (not okay for anyone). I remember the Legion of Decency ratings quite well. My mother strictly consulted these ratings for any movie we wanted to see and allowed us to watch only A movies.

Anyway, everyone expected To Kill a Mockingbird to receive an A rating, but in fact it received a B. This wouldn't do. Gregory Peck had put a great deal of money into the movie and really needed it to succeed.

Well, it turns out that the Legion of Decency was bothered by the scene near the end of the movie where Atticus Finch asks his eight-year-old daughter, Scout, to agree with the decision that he and Sheriff Heck Tate have made not to let anyone know of Boo Radley's role in the killing of the dangerous Bob Ewell but to state that Bob Ewell fell on his own knife and died. Although this is not true, it does seem the right thing to do to avoid hurting innocent people. Nonetheless, the Legion of Decency felt that asking Scout to agree to this story suggested that it is okay to ask a child to lie. Hence, the B rating.

To get an A rating, the movie was actually changed. Instead of showing Scout agreeing to her father and Sheriff Heck Tate's false story, the movie was changed to show Atticus and Scout talking together without any sound, so that the audience doesn't hear what they are saying. I don't remember this about the movie. I'll have to notice this the next time I watch it.

In the end, To Kill a Mockingbird, with the changed scene, received an A rating, and Gregory Peck made the money he needed to make from the film.

THE EDITOR'S CHANGES. When Harper Lee first approached her editor with To Kill a Mockingbird, she intended the novel to be only what is now Part I - a portrait of life in small-town Alabama. The editor said that the book needed a moving drama, so Harper Lee wrote Part II about the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man, for the rape of Mayella Ewell, a white woman. Lee even managed to bring Boo Radley into Part II at the end.

GRADUALISM. Atticus Finch and others in Maycomb, Alabama, like Judge Taylor and Miss Maudie, espoused a view of gradualism with regard to the injustice of racial discrimination. Gradualism means working for gradual change toward full rights for black citizens and trusting that this will come to pass over time.

Atticus also believes that, despite the racism in the larger society, the most important thing for an individual to do is to treat black people well himself or herself. When Atticus explains this view to his twelve-year-old son, Jem, his son doesn't seem satisfied. For Jem, doing the right thing as an individual probably won't be enough. Jem will probably feel the need to work more publicly for social change.

It was also pointed out that Atticus bows to tradition during Tom Robinson's trial by not cross-examining Mayella Ewell, as she is a white woman. Cross-examination would have laid bare the many holes in Mayella's and her father's stories (which seem fairly obvious anyway), but Atticus doesn't do this.

SEX AND RACE. One reason that To Kill a Mockingbird is so powerful is that Harper Lee had the courage to go straight to the heart of racial prejudice - sex. Tom Robinson is accused of having had sex with a white woman. This was something that prejudiced white people simply couldn't abide. The idea of a black man having sex with a white woman - and producing mixed-race children - was an abomination to them.

The odd thing is that sex between the races was happening all the time. White men frequently had sex with black women. Some had sex with their slaves. Some had black, or octaroon, mistresses whom they supported in style. There was a lot of mixed-race sex going on - and it was producing mixed-race children. But when powerful white men did this with the black women of their desire, no one complained - as along as these white men didn't actually marry the black women. Mixed-race marriage was forbidden by law. But mixed-race rape of one's slave was not, nor was having a mixed-race relationship with a mistress.

So there were contradictory views and practices about mixed-race sex. If you ask me, mixed-race marriage is a good thing. It breaks down the us-versus-them mentality by making blacks and whites part of one family where everyone is us.

Tennessee Williams Festival: Carville LA - Leprosy Treatment Center

I especially enjoyed this panel presentation at the Tennessee Williams Festival - "Kept In, Kept Out: The Haunting Secrets of Carville, Louisiana." The three panelists had each written about the leprosy treatment center and home at Carville, and I had read each of their books.

• Marcia Gaudet, author of Carville: Remembering Leprosy in America. Marcia is a professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She writes from the point of view of an outside researcher.
• Jose P. Rodriguez, Jr., author of Squint: My Journey with Leprosy. Jose had leprosy and was a resident of the treatment center at Carville for seven or eight years. He is now a social worker in Houston and takes every opportunity to educate people about leprosy.
• Neil White, author of In the Sanctuary of Outcasts. Neil is a publisher in Oxford, Mississippi. He was at Carville as a federal prisoner in the early 1990s, when the federal government operated a minimum security prison on the Carville grounds. Neil White's crime was kiting checks, an illegal way of trying to help his business grow.

I learned so much from reading the three books and attending this presentation. Below, I will try to give highlights of what I learned.

LEPROSY. Many people have an unreasonable fear of leprosy. These fears are unfounded. Leprosy is only very minimally contagious. Most people have a natural immunity to it. In fact, medical personnel and others who serve leprosy patients do not get leprosy. There have only been one or two exceptions to this over the years. If left untreated, leprosy will damage nerve endings so that a person no longer feels pain and will cause bones of the fingers and toes and nose to retract. However, leprosy is easily treated now with drugs on an outpatient basis. People who receive treatment experience no disfigurement and actually become free of the disease.

I would ask anyone who fears leprosy to compare its contagiousness with that of the bubonic plague during the Middle Ages. If someone in the village contracted bubonic plague, soon nearly the whole village had bubonic plague, and in the end, half or three-quarters or all but a handful of the villagers would be dead. You never hear of this with leprosy. When one person in the village got leprosy, you never hear of it spreading to the whole village. There has never been an epidemic of leprosy as there often was of bubonic plague.

HANSEN'S DISEASE. This is the preferred term for leprosy. It uses the name of the Norwegian doctor Gerhard Armauer Hansen, who isolated the bacterium that causes leprosy. It was thought that using the term Hansen's disease would eliminate or decrease the stigma attached to the term leprosy. However, as Neil White points out, this backfired because people felt that the term Hansen's disease was being used to mislead them. People often reacted like this: This person is trying to fool us by saying he has Hansen's disease. What he really has is the dreaded leprosy.

THE L-WORD. The L-word is leper. It is very hurtful for a person with leprosy, or Hansen's disease, to be called a leper. The word leper has a whole overlay of negative associations. It identifies a person as being the disease: instead of having leprosy, one is a leper. The term leper is associated with being unclean, with being cast out as unfit for society, with being the lowest of untouchables, with humiliating physical disfigurement, with contagion, and even with moral depravity.

If I learned one thing from the three books and the presentation it is this: Never, never refer to a person with leprosy as a leper. Not everyone at the presentation heard this clearly enough, though. During the question and answer period after the panel's presentation, one audience member raised her hand and asked a question about living in the leper colony. This is equivalent to asking an African-American about living in a nigger neighborhood.

BLAME. People with leprosy often feel blamed for their illness. I think it is Marcia Gaudet who, in her book, mentions a man in the early 1900s who was "charged" with leprosy, taken into custody, and sent to Carville. Charged with leprosy?

It was certainly easy to feel that one was being punished for having leprosy. One was taken away from one's family and forced to live isolated from the rest of society at Carville. In some cases, the resident at Carville was never again contacted by his or her family, who considered their family member with leprosy to be as good as dead.

Perhaps because of the harsh treatment prescribed for persons with leprosy in the Bible and because of the severe physical disfigurement in advanced untreated cases, leprosy has somehow been associated with moral depravity. After all, does not the Bible seem to punish those with leprosy? And might not their bodily disfigurement mirror a deformity of soul?

Jose Ramirez saw this in the devastation of his parents at his diagnosis of leprosy. Both Jose's mother and his father came to Jose separately to beg his forgiveness, with tears, for the unknown evil they had done to cause God to punish them through Jose, their son. Many years later, Jose's father died still believing that his sin had caused his son's illness. It took a special blessing from the Pope to convince Jose's mother, in her old age, that she had done nothing to cause leprosy in Jose.

THE HOLE IN THE WALL. The residents at Carville sometimes left the leprosy center, temporarily or permanently, through the hole in the wall. There was an actual hole under the fence surrounding Carville, allowing the Carville residents to escape. Sometimes they crawled under the fence and walked over to a hut on the levee for an evening card game - just to be outside the grounds. Sometimes they had a friend or family member pick them up by the hole and drive to a nearby town for an evening out. And sometimes they went through the hole and lived outside for a long time.

It seems that the administrators of Carville knew about the hole in the wall but closed their eyes to it, perhaps seeing it as a healthy escape valve for the residents.

ARMADILLO. The armadillo is a special animal for those with leprosy. The nine-banded armadillo is the only animal known to be susceptible to the disease. Therefore, the armadillo has been used in research for the treatment of leprosy. Those with leprosy honor the armadillo. The armadillo's image is imprinted on the doubloons that were thrown in Carville's annual Mardi Gras parade.

LIFE AT CARVILLE. Isolated from the rest of society, residents at Carville created a society of their own. They had sports teams and special interest groups of all sorts. There was an extensive library. The residents published their own newspaper, the Star. Every Mardi Gras, there was an elaborate parade put on by gorgeously costumed residents as well as a masked ball.

When Jose Ramirez arrived at Carville at age twenty, some of the older residents took him under their wing and served as surrogate parents.

The Daughters of Charity served the residents with great love and kindness, and a compassionate priest was assigned to the church at Carville.

Nonetheless, especially in the earlier part of the twentieth century, some of the rules at Carville caused suffering for the residents. For example, when a woman gave birth to a child at Carville, the child was taken from the mother and given up for adoption. The mother had no say-so in this.

Jose Ramirez points out that the need for social services wasn't recognized at Carville. Residents often arrived at Carville in a traumatized state. They had just received a dreaded diagnosis and had been removed abruptly from their familiar surroundings and deposited at a leprosy center. No help was offered for the psychological aspects of dealing with these painful changes.

THE PRISON. In the early 1990s, a minimum security federal prison operated at Carville. With the possibility of outpatient drug treatment for leprosy, no new residents were coming to the leprosy center and the number of residents was decreasing. The government decided to open a federal prison on the grounds. This is how Neil White came to be there as a prison inmate for kiting checks.

At first, Neil was incensed to learn that he would serve his prison term at a leprosy center. He thought, I deserve to serve time for the wrong I did, but being imprisoned on the same grounds where people have leprosy is inhumane. No way do I deserve to be exposed to people with this hideous disease.

But then Neil got to know the residents with leprosy, largely because he was often assigned work duty in their dining room. He was very impressed with their kindness, their acceptance of their situation, their interesting personalities, their aliveness. He began to see the presence of the prison from their point of view. He thought, Who is being exposed to whom here? What an insult it must have been for the residents of the leprosy center to be told that they would have to share their grounds with criminals like us.

MUSEUM. Today the National Hansen's Disease Museum is housed at Carville. I intend to visit it.

Tennessee Williams Festival: Treme

At the Tennessee Williams Festival, I attended a panel discussion titled "All that Jazz . . . And Beyond: The Making of Treme." The panelists consisted of the creators and writers of the new HBO television series Treme, which will begin airing in April.

• David Simon, co-creator of the series
• Eric Overmyer, co-creator of the series
• David Mills, writer for the series
• Tom Piazza, writer for the series and author of two post-Hurricane Katrina books - Why New Orleans Matters and City of Refuge
• Lolis Elie, writer for the series and former columnist for the Times-Picayune

What struck me about this presentation was the high level of collaboration required when writing for a television series. The writers come together to contribute ideas and hash things out. A writer is assigned a specific episode, but it can happen that some (or much) of what he writes for that episode may need to be replaced with something someone else has written for a different episode. Clearly, the writers need to be flexible and to give up any attachment to their own work.

Writing for a television series is also quite immediate. Early episodes are airing while later episodes are still being filmed (and even perhaps being written). What actually happens on the set during earlier episodes may need to inform later episodes.

As I think about collaboration for a television series, I think of all the many levels of collaboration beyond the writers. One important but perhaps overlooked area of collaboration is collaboration with residents of the neighborhood where scenes are being filmed. We recently saw an instructive example of this in a March 22 article in the Times-Picayune, "Treme Crew Disrupts Uptown Area." The uptown area in question is not far from where I live - but far enough that I'm not within the disrupted area. I've seen the filming going on while out riding my bike, though.

Anyway, according to the Times-Picayune article, the owner of the home on the uptown river corner of Lowerline and Garfield Streets has allowed the Treme crew to use his home for filming several uptown scenes. He has been handsomely compensated for this, though the actual amount of money he received is not public knowledge. Meanwhile, the neighbors, who are not compensated, have to put up with reduced parking space, increased noise, and swarms of people all over their normally quiet block for a period of about ten days. Some don't like it. This is clearly an area of collaboration that television series producers have to consider.

NOTE: David Mills died suddenly of a brain aneurysm on March 30, 2010, two days after participating in this panel discussion and twelve days before the airing of the first episode of Treme on HBO. I believe that he will be watching over the Treme series from the spirit world. May he shine as a bright spirit in his new home.

Tennessee Williams Festival: Plays

I attended five dramatic performances at the Tennessee Williams Festival. These took place at Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre in the 600 block of St. Peter Street, either on the mainstage or the Muriel's Cabaret stage. Below I give a description of each performance.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS IN HIS OWN WORDS. This was actually a reading of three of Tennessee's essays published in the newspaper prior to the opening of his plays to whet people's appetite for the play itself. In these essays, Tennessee explains what events led him to write each play and reflects briefly on the play itself without giving away the plot. We heard the three essays that introduced The Night of the Iguana, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Orpheus Descending.

AMERICAN BLUES: TWO ONE-ACTS BY TENNESSEE. These were performed by the Cripple Creek Theater Company.

• Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen. A man and a woman, lovers, are in a bedroom listening to each other talk about their lives, their thoughts, their feelings. They seem to be at the end of their rope financially and emotionally, but they are listening to each other. This play is given to long monologues. The woman particularly has an animated monologue in which she speaks of her yearning to fly away - and the man actually grabs her as she seems ready to take off into flight.
• This Property is Condemned. Two young teenagers, Willie (female) and Tom (male) are talking as they wander around the railroad tracks behind their town. They seem more like children than teenagers. As their conversation unfolds, it becomes clear that their families are in desperate financial straits due to the Great Depression and that Willie supports herself through prostitution, about which she speaks very innocently.

RELATIVE MADNESS. This play by New Orleanian Phyllis Clemons was presented as a staged reading. It takes place in the kitchen of Tennessee Williams' play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, as the family is preparing for Big Daddy's funeral. The women of the family banter about family matters, reveal and resolve small jealousies, and deal with Blanche Dubois when she shows up in their play from A Streetcar Named Desire. The play is very funny.

VOODOO VOWS. This play by Tommie Sorrell, a 2009 graduate of Southeastern Louisiana University, is about two sisters (Merle and Zoie) on the morning of the younger sister's (Zoie's) wedding. As the sisters talk and dress for the wedding, they find themselves remembering dark secrets from their childhoods and spilling out their feelings of guilt over "submitting" to their father's sexual abuse and of not protecting each other from it. This leads to Merle's expressing her fears about the character of Zoie's husband-to-be, Bob. As Zoie listens to Merle and expresses her own feelings, she too begins to have doubts about this marriage. The gay hairdresser, Ramon, provides some very fine comic relief.

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA. This was the featured Tennessee Williams play of the festival. It was performed by students of the Department of Film, Theatre, and Communication Arts of the University of New Orleans. They gave an excellent performance. Having previously seen the movie (directed by John Huston) but not the play, I noticed two things as I watched the performance. First, I missed the wonderful interactions among the busload of women faculty on tour from the Baptist Female College, who are given far greater scope in the movie. Second, I was enthralled with the boisterous German family, who appear not at all in the movie but who in the play march across the veranda of the Costa Verde Hotel at exactly the moments when one could use some comic relief.

Tennessee Williams Festival: Master Classes

One of the neat things about the Tennessee Williams Festival is that the events were held in different locations around the French Quarter. The Master Classes were held in the Historic New Orleans Collection in the 500 block of Royal Street. The Historic New Orleans Collection is a museum, a research center, and a publisher. One of its publications is the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, devoted to scholarship on Tennessee and his works. The Historic New Orleans Collection also has an extensive collection of portraits - we were in one of the portrait rooms for the Master Classes. The work and holdings of the Historic New Orleans Collection are extensive, and it is worth a visit, as is its website:

http://www.hnoc.org

I attended five Master Classes at the Tennessee Williams Festival. Below I give a summary of and highlights from each.

ERIC OVERMYER: ON STAGE, ON SCREEN. Eric Overmyer is both a playwright (On the Verge, In a Pig's Valise, Native Speech) and a television writer (Homicide: Life on the Street, Law and Order, The Wire). He is currently writing for the new HBO series Treme, about life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Overmyer spoke mostly about writing for television. He said that most bad television writing comes from the tendency to over-explain with dialogue rather than to trust the acting.

JOHN DUFRESNE: WRITE A FIRST DRAFT OF YOUR NOVEL IN SIX MONTHS. John Dufresne is a novelist and short story writer. He teaches writing at Florida International University in Miami. He has also written Is Life Like This? A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months. Dufresne's Master Class drew upon this book.

Dufresne said that, by following his plan, you will have a first draft of a novel in six months - not a finished product. He said that everything important happens in revision, but you can't revise until you have something in black on white to revise. The first draft brings into the world people and their lives that weren't here before.

Ideally, Dufresne's plan calls for dedicating three hours a day to writing, seven days a week, for twenty-six weeks. By keeping a notebook in which you write every day, Dufresne said, you confirm to yourself that you are a writer. You also raise your antennae because everything around you will be attracted to your novel and you want to pick up those signals.

Dufresne stressed the importance of solitude. He warned us not to answer the telephone or the doorbell while writing. "Remember," he said, "how Coleridge answered a knock on his door - and there went 'Kubla Khan.'"

Dufresne's plan for writing a first draft of a novel in six months is very detailed. You spend the first two weeks on writing about yourself. Dufresne's list of what to write is extensive: pre-school years, earliest memory, first grade (including a seating chart of the classroom), smells and the memories they evoke, all your toys, all your childhood meals, everything you ever lost, all your jobs, your regrets, your first love, your death scene, your obituary, and ever so much more.

You then spend the next two weeks writing in equal detail about your characters. You also need to know the items in your characters' refrigerator, the contents of their medicine cabinet, the appointments on their calendar, the mail on their side table, the stuff in their junk drawer, the clothes in their closet. And you need to know ever so much more about them.

Dufresne's plan continues with place, theme, point of view, plot. The time allotted to the Master Class was up long before Dufresne had finished taking us through his plan.

It strikes me that it would be worthwhile to work through Dufresne's book even if you never intend to write a novel. You would certainly get to know yourself very, very well.

JOSEPH BOYDEN: THE ART OF REVISING. Joseph Boyden is a Canadian of mixed European and Native Canadian Indian descent. His novel Three Day Road is about the experience of three Native Canadian Indians fighting in World War I. Boyden teaches writing in the MFA program of the University of New Orleans.

Boyden said that a fiction writer's goal is to get the reader to suspend disbelief. I like the way Boyden expressed this in his handout titled "Notes on Some of Our Communal Tools": "We need to slip the reader into a world that we've created that is so believable, she forgets not only that she's reading fiction, but that she's reading at all."

Boyden presented many ideas for revising a work of fiction so that it produces this complete suspension of disbelief. He stressed the importance of one's choice of narrator and of the point of view from which the story is told. He also stressed the importance of hearing your work read aloud - either by someone else or by yourself. He said that it is vital to have trusted friends who will read your writing and tell you honestly what is not working.

JILL McCORKLE: SHORT FICTION WRITING. Jill McCorkle is a short story writer and novelist. She teaches writing at North Carolina State University. She spoke about writing short stories. Four points especially impressed me in McCorkle's Master Class.

First, McCorkle stressed the importance of emotional truth. She said that a good short story has the same emotional truth as a child's drawing. Whoever is figuratively looking over your shoulder and censoring your work has got to go. As you are writing your first draft, McCorkle said, you want to let the truth spill onto the page. There is great freedom in not editing yourself before the story is even there. This allows the subconscious to speak through the writing. None of us knows as much as our subconscious does, McCorkle said.

Second, McCorkle stressed the importance of putting a draft away for a time to let it sit. During this time, she said, your brain is at work making connections and preparing for the next steps.

Third, McCorkle advised a constant listening for the story in the midst of the goings on of life. It is important, she said, to keep a drawerful of anecdotes. For example, McCorkle said that she once overheard a woman say, "The humility has been just awful lately." Things that you overhear or see can become part of your writing.

Fourth, McCorkle said that her short stories take shape when she begins with a concrete image, never with an idea.

BEV MARSHALL: LIVING AS A WRITER. Marshall has written three novels: Walking Through Shadows, Right as Rain, and Hot Fudge Sundae Blues. She teaches writing at Southeastern Louisiana University. Her presentation dealt with all aspects of a writer's life.

Marshall said that a writer must possess or develop these skills:

• Be technologically savvy and have a Web presence.
• Act as one's own salesperson.
• Maintain a good-looking appearance for public events.
• Keep up a high energy level for heavy-duty book tours.
• Know math and accounting.
• Work with a legal assistant to understand contracts.

Marshall then gave many practical suggestions about what a writer needs.

Curiosity. A writer is curious about the world and the people in it. She wants to know what, when, where, how, why.

Empathy. A writer has empathy for her characters. She loves them. If she doesn't, then the reader certainly won't care about them. Marshall advocates getting to know one's characters thoroughly. Marshall's own notebooks are filled with columns and columns of information about each character. Sometimes, if Marshall is having trouble hearing a character, she has that character write a letter to her beginning "Here is what you don't know about me and what I want to tell you . . ." Marshall also sees herself in every character. She sees herself in each character's best and worst and the whole range between.

Newness. Marshall said that editors reject books that are too familiar. A writer needs to find something fresh and different.

Time. A book needs time to rest, to stay home, to simmer. The longer a book rests, Marshall said, the better you can revise, and writing is really revising. Editors will reject a book sent to them before the book is ready.

Journals. Marshall has four journals or notebooks.

• Emotional dumpster journal, to spill her feelings out onto the page and let them pass through and out of her
• Notebook of random notes and quotes about writing itself
• Working journal for writing projects
• Pocket journal to capture thoughts and things noticed in the moment

Special place. Marshall advocates dedicating a special place for writing, a place that is not shared with others.

Proofreading critics. There is no substitute for a pair of fresh eyes to pick up errors, inconsistencies, and awkward phrasing.

Playfulness. Marshall reminded us that Joseph Campbell said that work should be play.

Inspiration. A writer should know what inspires her and bring more of it into her life, whether it be poetry, music, the outdoors, exercise, a luxurious bath, or any of the many other possibilities.

Reward. A writer should always reward herself after a period of work. Marshall said that an alcoholic drink can be a reward but should never be used to jump-start one's work.

Patience. A writer would do best to avoid becoming angry with her work or her characters. This doesn't help the writing process. Instead, when the writing seems not to be working, it is best to trust that tomorrow will come and things will turn around. I also think that it is well to see the very condition of being stuck as part of the process, as something that the writer needs to go through to get to the finished product.

Reading. A writer is a bibliophile, constantly reading.

Perseverance. Marshall advocates seeing rejection as an opportunity to try again.

Priority. A writer makes her writing time sacred. Writing is writing - it is not thinking about writing or planning to write but actually writing. There will never be a "good" time to write. The time must be set aside and dedicated to writing. The writer then needs to say no to everything else regarding that time.

Courage. A writer faces fears. What the characters say may frighten the writer, but this is exactly what the writer most needs to write. When we write through our fears, we do something valuable for ourselves and our readers.

Bridge. Marshall said, "We bring light to each other through the sharing of our stories. Books become a bridge between the banks of our differences."

Tennessee Williams Festival: Sex and the City - Prostitution

At the Tennessee Williams Festival, I attended a panel discussion titled "Sex and the City: The Oldest Profession in the City That Care Forgot." The moderator was Emily Toth, author of eleven books, many of them about women's lives. The panelists were three historians.

• Alecia P. Long, author of The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865-1922
• Judith K. Schafer, author of Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women
• Christine Wiltz, author of The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

Below are highlights from the presentation as well as my own thoughts.

NORMA WALLACE. Norma Wallace is the subject of Christine Wiltz's book The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld. Norma is a legendary figure who ran a house of prostitution in the French Quarter from the 1920s to the 1960s. She is purported to have run a high-class establishment and to have treated her girls well. She was a very savvy and assertive businesswoman. I think I would like to read this book.

SEX SURVEY. Alecia Long teaches history and sexuality at Louisiana State University (LSU). She mentioned that a survey of women students at LSU had been conducted to find out for what reasons women students at LSU have sex. Among the reasons given was "To be polite."

As I think about this response, it seems possible that these women students felt compelled by a code of politeness to have sex in certain situations - situations in which the code dictated that refusal would be rude. It was important to these women students to be polite, so they had sex. They may not have really wanted to have sex.

This reminds me of a conversation years ago in which a friend told me that she had had sex for a reason very similar to "To be polite." My friend had been impressed with the dictum that, if a couple is on a date and the man becomes aroused, then it is only "fair" (polite?) that the woman allow the man to relieve his arousal by having intercourse with her; otherwise, she is being extremely "unfair" (rude?) to the man. My friend said that she felt unhappy about having had sex for this reason. She felt pressured by the code of fairness (or politeness) to have sex when she didn't want to. Perhaps she wanted to kiss, but then - Oops, now he's aroused, so I have to complete the sex act.

I would certainly want to find out more about those women students at LSU who had sex "to be polite." Does this survey indicate a need to break a code of politeness that compels a woman into unwanted sex? In a case of sex "to be polite," a woman does give her consent, so it can't be said that the man has forced her. Yet she was perhaps forced - by the code she has internalized.

SEXUAL MORALITY. This is a real bug-a-boo. In many ways, sexual morality seems to come from a comfortable middle-class mentality. It's easy to be moral when you can afford it.

I believe that the best context for sex is within a committed life-long monogamous relationship, such as marriage. Sex strengthens the love and trust bonds of the couple over the years. And yet . . .

And yet . . . I am aware that some people have a heightened sexuality that is hard to contain within a marriage. Some people feel sex as a fierce physical drive that needs to be fulfilled rather than as an intimate bonding act for a committed couple. Some people seem to thrive on a variety of sexual partners. Some people groove on three-somes. Some people groove on orgies.

It is easy for one who is deeply fulfilled within a marriage to point a condemning finger at those with other sexual practices. But if one is deeply fulfilled within a marriage, one doesn't experience the feelings of a person who seems to need more sex or more varied sex. If someone says that he or she finds orgies deeply satisfying, I just don't feel that I can respond that this is a perversion. Why is it a perversion? Because traditional morality forbids it and because I don't feel a need for it? One can make a case for immorality when someone is hurting another person, but when willing participants engage in mutually fulfilling sex acts, that argument disappears.

And yet . . . Those in power have often arranged society so that women have had very few options for making money. When a woman in such a society finds herself alone with children to support, she needs work that pays. Sometimes she turns as a last resort to prostitution to feed her children. This is not as far removed from us as we might think.

An audience member at the "Sex and the City" presentation told us about a woman she was aware of who had turned to prostitution after some financial reversals because this woman simply couldn't find work that paid enough to meet the needs of her children. One might say that there are always other options. I think that maybe sometimes for some women there really aren't. Of if there are, the woman in question can't see them.

And yet . . . There are women who are victims of sex slave trafficking. This exists even here in the United States. The panelist Alecia Long said that this often happens to Eastern European women who are tricked into accepting work positions abroad - and find themselves "working" as sex slaves. Not knowing the language, not having any friends or acquaintances, not having any financial resources, these women are truly trapped.

OVERALL. This was a valuable discussion. Even though I don't engage in sex, I certainly find the topic fascinating, important, and worthwhile.