Right place, write time> Limestone writers’ conference offers northern exposure

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The sounds ringing through these halls normally concern the objective worlds of math and science. But this weekend, language and writing reigned supreme.

For its recent writers conference, the Maine School of Science and Mathematics welcomed Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Galway Kinnell and novelist-screenwriter Richard Russo. Event organizer John Corrigan explained he had been attempting to get both writers up to Limestone for a couple of years, but teaching schedules had kept them unavailable until now.

The much-published Kinnell, most recently the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University, is a longtime writing instructor. He was a MacArthur Fellow from 1984 to 1989, and won the Pulitzer in 1983 and the National Book Award in 1982.

Russo is the author of “Mohawk,” “The Risk Pool,” “Nobody’s Fool” and “Straight Man.” He is co-author of the screenplay for “Nobody’s Fool” and “Twilight” with Robert Benton. He’s a former Guggenheim Fellow and has won New England Book and National Magazine awards.

The school’s students prepared for the weekend, made possible through funding by the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, by reading works by Kinnell and Russo. The enthusiasm among students was palpable.

“To me, this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” said Jonathan Bond, a senior from North Berwick. “It’s a great honor and privilege to meet with them and discuss questions I have. This gives me inspiration for my writing.”

Ashley Reid, a senior from Brooklin, loves writing, and has taken “eight or nine English classes.”

“This is the chance of a lifetime, to have an incredible novelist and poet here in the same weekend,” she added. “Listening to a poet read out loud brings new life to a poem. Listening to how an author got started is really useful.”

There were two parts to the conference. On Friday night, each visitor read from his works. Each also fielded questions from students and other participants in separate classroom sessions.

On Friday night in the school’s auditorium, Russo led off the reading with his bittersweet story “The Whore’s Child,” which told the tale of Sister Ursula, the oldest member of the narrator’s advanced fiction class. Russo got laughs in all the right places, and received sustained applause at the end.

Kinnell, leafing through a pile of books, read a selection of poems from throughout his distinguished career, and also gained extended applause. Among the highlights were “Oatmeal,” “The Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson” and “The Burying Beetle.”

The two authors then took seats behind card tables, to sign their works for lengthy lines of admirers.

Kinnell, a Vermont resident, presided over the first question-and-answer session Friday afternoon. The multitiered classroom held an overflow crowd, with students sitting in the aisles, on heating units, or on extra chairs brought in for the event. His hearing in decline, Kinnell, garbed in a tweed coat, sport shirt and slacks, would repeat each question to make sure everyone had heard it before answering.

In keeping with the spirit of Kinnell’s poems, the questions were both esoteric and based in reality.

Reading an anthology of poems by flashlight in bed at night inspired him to become a poet.

“I found that the things that mattered to me most were being talked about there,” he said. “I developed a great allegiance to poetry.”

John Keats was his first major influence.

“I loved the work of Keats above all others, because of the musicality of it, although the emotions were a little bit sappy. It took me a long time to get out of that Keatsian-Poeish melancholy, to write more realistically. It held me back in the limited world of romantic dreams.”

Although Kinnell uses free verse, he still writes in lines.

“What makes a line a line has to do with the relations of the sounds in it,” he said. “Sometimes it happens by itself, and sometimes I have to work at it.”

Kinnell said he could write anywhere with a chair and a flat surface.

“I like to write alone, or in the presence of quite a number of people, so that no one notices me,” he said. “A cafe is a perfect place to write, or in my study.”

How does Kinnell write?

“When you write, you fall into a little bit of a trance, and write things you didn’t know you knew,” he said. “It’s not poetry if I’m saying what I already know.”

Kinnell, who estimated that only one of 30 poems he writes actually gets published, continues refining after the poem is in print.

“I can see flaws in it that I couldn’t when it was such a part of me,” he said. “I’ll continue to change words and lines in the galleys. As publication approaches, my perception of what’s wrong increases.”

Kinnell, who pulled samples of favorite poems from his head, urged students to memorize poetry.

“If you aspire to write poetry, it’s even better to memorize poems,” he said. “You learn a lot about how this poem is constructed, and it helps you in constructing a poem of your own.”

Afterward, Kinnell was pleased with the session.

“I like the freshness of their questions,” he said. “What they were asking about were living issues, things that matter to them.”

On Saturday morning, Russo, casual in a navy sweat shirt and jeans, held court in front of another overflow crowd. Most of the questions dealt with specifics about his work, especially “Nobody’s Fool,” which was made into a 1994 movie starring Paul Newman. But the students came up with some general writing questions as well.

Russo, a Camden resident, said his characters come from “reading, personal experiences, overheard dialogue. I’m not sure characters ever get made up entirely. Almost always, there’s a real person or more than one that have instigated my writing about a particular character.”

He said he’s a writer who takes a long while to write a book, so he has to have characters whose company he enjoys. But still he knows the difference between fiction and reality.

“There’s a very romantic notion that you get so involved in something that you become part of it,” said Russo, whose novel “Empire Falls” will be out next spring. “That’s just a step away from the nuthouse. I do identify with all my characters tremendously. I’m very involved, but not to the point where reality blends with fiction.”

When Russo is done with a book, he moves on.

“I’m so glad to be rid of it by then,” he said. “I’ll have another project that’s been percolating for a while, and I’m much more interested in that anyway. That’s a sign of good mental health.”

“Nobody’s Fool” is the only of Russo’s novels to be made into a movie, although both “Mohawk” and “The Risk Pool” had been optioned.

“There aren’t many good movies made from books,” Russo said. “I figure I had the best of both worlds. I got the money, then the movie never got made.”

Russo has made his peace with movies, somewhat, thanks to his collaboration with Benton.

“He told me, ‘My primary duty isn’t to make a movie of your book. My primary duty is to make a good movie,”‘ he recalled.

The former Colby College professor had two suggestions for budding writers: Read voraciously and write for a set period of time every day, so that it becomes a habit.

Last, he told students to pay attention to what’s happening around them.

“Life is just bizarre, and it continues to stun and amaze me,” he said. “If we’ve got our eyes opened, there are just the weirdest things going on all the time.”

Both authors emphasized that the humanities are essential even for those focusing on math and science.

“Stories and poems help our minds to develop in ways science and math don’t,” Russo said. “Ideally, what you’d like is people whose minds are open to as many different kinds of learning as possible, who can adopt to changing times with changing skills.”

Kinnell added, “The process of articulating their inner experience will help them in life afterward, in part by being able to articulate what’s inside them and also by realizing that their feelings are important and taking them seriously. The practice of poetry, even by an amateur, has a favorably leavening effect on society.”