Writing About Lives

When I was a graduate student in the Writing Division at Columbia University I began www.writingaboutlives.com as a way to create an Internet presence. Newspapers were long behind me, and I craved a way to periodically get my voice out there. In this 21st century digital landscape it’s incumbent upon writers to keep some connection to the larger world . How else will people find us. Thank goodness for Cupcake Brown linking me to her website and mentioning my name in her book. I’ve gotten more traffic from that than anything else. Because of that connection, clients for book proposals found me.

As I reflect on it now, Writing About Lives was what I loved doing most as a newspaper writer, crafting features and personal columns every few years. I especially enjoyed writing first person columns, thus my interest in personal essays germinated. Earlier this year at The Association of Writers’ and Writing Programs, the umbrella organization for collegiate creative writing programs, held its conference in Chicago. Although I did not attend it, I saw a link online for a session called “A Writer in the World.” The name deeply resonated. More and more I’ve come to think of myself as a writer who teaches rather than a teacher who writes.  The reverse was true for a long time.  I was also captivated by the fact that “the world,” is part of the name.  Born in the South with Midwestern roots, I’ve come to accept myself as a global writer.  My career and education have allowed me to call Tulsa, Salt Lake City, Southern California, and New York City, home, at certain points in my adult life.  A nomad.  A traveler.  A spiritual seeker.  My educational and work experience has provided with a diverse racial, cultural, geographical, topographical experience of America.  Rural towns.  Urban inner cities.  Plains.  Mountains.  Beaches.  Manhattan. All of that has helped to inform “A Writer in the World.”

The new blog will allow me to write things that are dear to me and that won’t go into my manuscript, Sanctified: A Memoir. Travel. Spirituality. Cultural Observations. The Writing Life. Anything that inspires me will land here.

The link for Writing About Lives will stay active  but eventually that content will migrate to this website. Over the next few months I’ll be slowly fine-tuning this website as much as I can. Then I’ll hand it off to far more tech savvy hands to polish my efforts and a create a catch all space under www.samuelautman.com for what I expect could be raised visibility. Later this week I’m flying to San Francisco to participate on the official book launch for The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays coming out under Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing. I’ll be reading a brief excerpt from “A Dash of Pepper in the Snow,” and talking about my life as an intercultural person.

Here’s to a great big world out there to experience. The best is yet to come.

http://awriterintheworld.com/

Thanks for reading.

Samuel

A very generous professor in Columbia’s MFA program told me she thought I had something with this “black guy in Utah story.” Armed with her belief in the idea, I spent a month in the summer of 2006, ten years after I had left The Salt Lake Tribune, and researched and wrote on my time as a young journalist in Utah. The first draft was eviscerated in workshop.  I dropped it as a book idea but pursued it as “A Dash of Pepper in the Snow,” over the years. For years I submitted this essay to literary magazines and contests with no result. An editor I trusted dismissed the idea as a list of gripes. In the summer of 2009 I sent it to a little-known creative writing competition called Soul-Making Literary Contest in San Francisco, really almost as a last ditch effort. It won second place in the intercultural category, selected by Tara Masih. I flew to the west coast and gave a reading at the San Francisco Public Library. A bunch of my friends showed up. That was in the spring of 2010.

Almost two years later, thanks to the tireless efforts and faith of  Tara Masih, who convinced a publishing house to run with a collection of essays from relatively unknown writers from various cultural backgrounds. The Chalk Circle: Prizewinning Intercultural Essays will come out next summer with Wyyatt-MacKenzie Publishing. I’ve published a lot of work in newspapers, magazines and online. This becomes my first full chapter post-newspapers.

Cheers!

This is my reading from the Spring of 2010 at the San Francisco Public Library:

This has Youtube footage of my section of the reading held at the San Francisco Public Library. There were almost 40 readers that day. We were each allotted 4 minutes. I guess I went over. Again, thanks to Rowena, Jennifer, Philip, Lane, Orlando, Dan and Cupcake for all showing up to support me. It turned out to be an incredibly special day.

“A good memoir does more than dredge up secrets from the writer’s past. A
good memoir filters a life through resonant narrative, and in doing so must
achieve a balance between language and candor. It was not the subject matter
of my memoirs that I hoped would be startling, but rather language’s
capacity to name what was nameless, to define what had once been vague and
chaotic. The chief privilege of writing a memoir was the opportunity to go
back and make sense of events that left me dumbstruck, mired in confusion,
unarmed with the luminous power of words.”

~ From Bernard Cooper’s essay “Marketing Memory.”

In the summer of 1997, when I was working for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I went to Arkansas to visit my relatives for our annual Fourth of July family reunion in Grady. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, but as I drove away I got the distinct feeling that I needed to write about these people and this place. It was a deep and abiding feeling that has never left me.

Five years later when I resigned from newspapers, my first instinct was to write about them. I remember sitting in the living room at a friend’s house early one morning. I pulled out a pad of paper and started writing long hang about my mother’s “sanctified” sister and her twelve children. It was only five or six pages. I felt so overwhelmed by it because it meant so much to me and I wanted to do it justice.

I’m convinced those raw, awkwardly constructed pages are what got me into Columbia’s MFA program. I always thought I would write about later in life but the story seems to want to come forth now. At school there were hints of my mother’s sister Freddie Mae saying this or that. Finally I gave her her own essay “The Last Sanctified Lady.” Each time I’ve written about her in workshop, people can’t seem to get enough.

Last night was the final reading for the 2007 Columbia MFA Thesis group. I read a 3 page condensed version of the piece. I’m there worst judge of my own material. I stumbled a few times. The glare of the lights made it impossible to see the audience. I was nervous and felt I’d botched it completely. The crowd, however, had a different experience. They roared at one point when I was reading in the voice of how she stood up and testified in church on Sundays. Afterward I must have have 30 people come up and tell me how much they enjoyed it.

As a journalist I’ve written about world famous people who’ve earned millions of dollars and touched the world with their art or community activists who’ve have compelling narratives. It seems that the stuff that’s in your gut or instinct or intuition that seems to touch people the most.

What’s so remarkable about the writing division at Columbia is how the faculty encourages our unique voices. Everyone who read over the last three nights is in such a different place as a writer than two short years ago. I simply cannot believe my Columbia experience is over. But then again, since it has led me back to where my heart was all along but more capable, then I am just getting started.

I am very pleased to announce that my essay “The Last Sancitified Lady,” got honorable mention in the University of New Orleans Study Abroad Writing Contest in the nonfiction category. Had I won I would have spent July taking creative writing classes in Madrid and living in the dormitory for free. I attended the UNO program in Madrid in the summer of 2004 and it was fantastic. My participation in that program paved the way for me to get into Columbia’s MFA program.

Although I did not win, an honorable mention shows me that my material has improved dramatically and caught the editors’ attention, something that NEVER happened before in contests. And hopefully that means I’m on the right path.

Congratulations to all the winners. If you want to read more about it go to http://lowres.uno.edu/contest.cfm

Cheers!

One of the most thrilling experiences I had at Columbia was interning at a literary agency two days a week. I opened a lot of mail, made a lot of copies and read a LOT of submissions. The biggest mistake nonfiction writers make is attempting to pitch a collection of essays as if they are a single memoir with a through line. Fiction writers want to sell short stories as novels. Seems really tempting to us coming out of MFA programs, but the agents and the publishing houses are interested in complete cohesive manuscripts – not patchwork quilts.

I was driving alone one spring night on U.S. 40, a rural Indiana road between Indianapolis and Greencastle, when a 212 number registered on my cell phone. I picked it up.

“Hello.”

“Hello, is this Samuel Autman?” said the voice on other end of the phone with a British accent.

“Yes, this is Samuel Autman.”

“Samuel. This is —— —— and we’d like to offer you a slot in our nonfiction program here at Columbia if you’re still interested.”

This essay is about how one professor can change a student’s life.

I had applied to MFA programs at Columbia, Sarah Lawrence, Long Island University at South Hampton, The Art Institute of Chicago and the University of San Francisco. Columbia was my first choice. Of course I told the man I’d be happy to accept the slot.

“I just have one more question for you,” he said. “In your application you wrote about a family. Are those people real? You dazzled the committee members with the piece.”

I had submitted a writing sample about my extended family in Grady, Ark., where I spent summers with my Aunt Freddie Mae and her twelve kids, and many more relatives. Not knowing any of the
rules of creative writing, I just wrote what my gut told me, uninhibited.

“Yes, that’s nonfiction. Those are my relatives.”

“Someone on the committee said “of course that’s fiction.’ ”

That was my first interaction with Michael Scammell.

By the time I finally arrived into New York and at Columbia he was on a yearlong sabbatical. I had heard all of these stories how rough he was on students in his nonfiction workshops. In that year I struggled in both of my workshops. Still stuck in newspaper mode, which had so carefully globbed ont my brain like guck, I struggled to conjure the kind of texts that dazzled anybody. My confidence bottomed out. I came dangerously close to not returning in the next year. The only reason I didn’t drop out was I didn’t want to regret what could have been. One professor’s note burst into flames of praise about something I had written about my father. Off and on all summer I expanded that piece which I would submit for my first piece in Scammell’s thesis workshop the following fall.

On the first day of thesis workshop I arrived thirty minutes late, thinking it started at 2:30 instead of 2 p.m. He seemed pleasant enough, but the unknown intimidated me. Because my last name starts with an “A,” I was in the first batch of people to be workshopped. I submitted “Father in Fragments.”

The following week the students in the workshop went around the room and made comments. More of this. More of that. People pretty much like it. No fireworks either way. Scammell sat in silence, reserving his remarks for the end.

When the last person finished talking, Scammell looked at me, he looked that essay and he looked at the class and said: “I was absolutely blown away by this essay. In my entire eleven years here at Columbia this is one of the best essays I’ve read here.”

I went numb.

He praised for the piece’s boldness, lyricism. Went on and on for about ten minutes in this vein. The last words he spoke were “this is a stunning debut. I can’t wait to see what you do next.”

In that moment, all of the self doubts and regrets about my first year experience disintegrated. Euphoria and joy flooded my heart – someone at Columbia could see what I was reaching for in my prose. From that moment until now, my perceptions of myself and Columbia were completely transformed. Though not every piece of writing I wrote for his workshop lived up to that piece, he always would say: “I look forward to the day when you write another piece just like the one you wrote about your father.”

As a result of his nudging, I have continued to write about my family of origin and intermediate family members based in the Deep South. And almost every time I trod out these characters – either in fiction or nonfiction, literary lightning seems to strike.

And that is the power that a professor has to change a student’s life.

Thanks so much Michael.

Much of my time in New York has been me sitting, reading and writing, trying to get my essays to work. Last night we had the annual reading for Our Word, a student group that supports writers of color in Columbia University’s MFA program.

I was the second on the program. Nearly 100 of my fellow students, professors, and my mother in from St. Louis, all gathered in Philosophy Hall to hear seven students read. I nervously walked to the podium and adjusted the microphone. While my Utah narratives have not quite worked in workshop, I really honed in and polished a piece about some of the difficulties I experienced as a black man living in Salt Lake City. Time and space seemed to stand still as I read. For five minutes I stood there reading, not knowing whether or not the crowd was with me. It felt like they could be. When I got to the last line of my six pages, I bowed, said thank you and it happened. Every writing failure I’ve endured in my two years melted when the crowd erupted into an explosive applause. It was the best feeling I’ve had in years, a crowning moment. Nothing else mattered – the debts incurred, the fears that an MFA in creative writing was a waste of time or that I was too old all vanished with the crowd’s response. It was indeed overwhelming.

At least a dozen people came up to congratulate me on the piece and how engaging it was.

I am so grateful to have been a part of Our Word, one of the only such groups for students of color at any MFA program in the United Staes.

Most of all, I was glad to have shared this moment with my mother.