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Writers@Work: Use Prompts to Shape Your Writing

An Interview with Marjorie Pagel

by Rochelle Melander

Tell us about your new book, Pastiche.

Pastiche came together in bits and pieces – poems and short essays meant to be shared with other writers. I have a longstanding practice of signing up for classes and workshops, and there’s something about an immediate deadline along with an expectant audience that sweeps me into action. During the pandemic, when we spent more time in isolation from others, I discovered online writing groups who met on Zoom and self-paced classes, also online, which I could access from home.

In my introductory remarks to the reader, I quote Fredrik Bachman who dedicated Anxious People “To the voices in my head, the most remarkable of my friends.” The selections from Pastiche are just like that. When you read from this collection, it’s like journeying along with some of my thoughts and recollections.

The first piece in Pastiche is titled “Remnants”; here I remember all the remnants of fabric my mother left behind when she died, just as I will leave behind all these bits and pieces of unpublished writing, most of it never shared with an audience. To me, this is what Pastiche is about – a variegated collection of prose and poetry. My publisher, Christi Craig of Hidden Timber Books, selected the pieces she thought best fit together and helped me polish them to near-perfection.

It was also Christi’s idea to invite a mutual friend and local artist, Jean Berens, to provide pencil drawings for some of the stories. My grandson, Matthew Pasersky, created his artistic vision of Pastiche for the cover.

Many of your pieces are short narrative nonfiction pieces about your family. What advice do you have for people who want to write about their lives but don’t necessarily have a whole memoir in them?

First of all, I’d advise them not to feel restricted by words like memoir. If you’re writing little stories from your life, that’s memoir enough for most of us. Just start writing these stories to share with family and friends, one memory at a time. Maybe someday you’ll end up writing a full-length memoir, but for goodness sake, don’t set out to write an autobiography in chronological order. That’s not what memoir is about.

Second, I’d tell them listen to those voices in your head and let them out – quickly. Don’t stop to edit and polish sentence by sentence. I do most of my writing at the keyboard because I type fast and don’t even look at the monitor my first draft. Just get the words out. Polish them later.

Then find yourself some readers – for years I’ve participated in roundtable groups at Red Oak Writing and its predecessor, Red Bird Studio. I’ve also joined many workshops and attended writing retreats. Locally, I’ve signed up for classes offered by Rochelle Melander and Christi Craig; since the pandemic, I’ve discovered Laurie Wagner (Wild Writers) in California, Maya Stein in Maine, and the Her Story Project in New York. There have also been poetry workshops with Ellen Kort, Margaret Rozga, and Marilyn Taylor, among others. I love the built-in audience, and I learn so much from the other writers in these classes.

Also, I thrive on prompts. Give me a word or a phrase, a quotation or a question, and I’m off and running to find out what I think. Several of the selections in Pastiche were born of prompts: “It’s in Our Blood, You Know,” “In Jean’s Garden,”“No Uncommon Thing.”

For me, writing is a practice of discovery: I get to know myself better, to know what I think and believe. It’s also a way for me to seek answers to questions and problems; I write to encourage myself.

How did you choose and arrange the pieces for this collection?

My first “edition” of Pastiche for Christmas 2022 was a self-published e-book for my children, Ericka and Matthew. It was a kind of patchwork, hodgepodge of what I considered my best writing since my last published work, Where I’m From, in 2018.

When Christi Craig offered to publish Pastiche for a wider audience, she seemed to know which pieces would fit and which to omit. She also saw the thread of continuity in which she ordered the pieces. So I take little or no credit for the final product. It was Christi’s vision which brought it all together.

What is your writing practice like? How do you stay productive?

I write almost every day. I used to call my daily writing MP’s MPs – Marjorie Pagel’s Morning Pages. I would mine those for revising what I wanted to share in my writing groups. Now I put my freewriting in a file called “Where the Words Go.” Several times a week I do “Wild Writing” with Laurie Wagner; that’s a free-flowing, 15-minute response to a chosen poem. One of the most recent practices I tried was Maya Stein’s 100 Words challenge: she would give us a single word prompt every day for a month, and we were to respond however we wished, but limited to 100 words. It taught me how to fine-tune my writing to its essence. In October I took the poem-a-day challenge from Ella Peary of Authors Publish: she gave us a prompt each day and our challenge was to create the first draft of a poem. In November, Writer’s Digest is offering the same kind of challenge.

In January I’ll participate in the Woodland Pattern poetry marathon. I’ve also signed up for a poetry class taught by Margaret Rozga, offered by Wisconsin Writers Association. I’m on a waiting list for the Wednesday afternoon roundtable group offered by Red Oak Writers. I’m also a member of two local poetry groups which meet monthly.

For me, writing never gets boring. I never run out of things I want to write about, and I can almost always find an audience willing to read what I’ve written.

What are you reading now?

I’m reading Close Call, a short story collection by Kim Suhr, Ladies Lunch and other stories by Lore Segal, and Unlocking the Heart by James Crews. One of my reading groups will soon discuss the classic, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, so I’d best check that out of the library tomorrow!

For many years as a stay-at-home mom, Marjorie Pagel worked for Community Newspapers, where she wrote hundreds of news articles and feature stories. It was there she learned to pare down her writing, making every word count; it was also where she developed the discipline of meeting deadlines two or three times every week. She then returned to college, earning her master’s degree in English from UWM. Afterward she taught college-level writing at several area colleges, ending her career at Concordia University. Since retiring, she has had more time to devote to writing. She and her husband, Jerry, live in Franklin, Wisconsin. They have two adult children and three grandchildren.

In 2017 Marjorie published her first book, The Romance of Anna Smith and other stories; the following year she published Where I’m From: poems and stories. Six of her one-act plays have been produced locally.

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