Writing in Upheaval: connecting the larger world & its issues with our fine craft of writing

Why I'm on Substack / Classes & Workshops / The suspect category of the "Unspeakable" / Short unpublished excerpt from novel History Artist (Recording coming...)

February 11, 2025

Welcome back to Writing in Upheaval: connecting the larger world & its issues with our fine craft of writing.

Writing in Upheaval addresses our writing, its practice, context, & the underlying issues of craft that times of great upheaval bring forward.

What am I doing here on Substack?

This writer of novels, short fiction, poetry, and nonfiction on radical writing craft, teaches writing classes in these forms, and in creative nonfiction/memoir, plays, and hybrid forms; and consults with writers individually. I’ve done this work for a long time from many places, with writers in many places, nationally and globally.

I want to explain why I am here on Substack. Substack is not another social media platform. It is a place for writers. A place for writers across the genres, with something of value to say. I welcome this. I’ll be looking around to subscribe to writers whose work I value.

Another simple explanation for being here is that I want to let you know about my in-depth classes, my break-through workshops, my radical approaches to writing and the creative process. I can get news out more quickly and efficiently here than in most other ways. For an overworked writer, one driven by my own writing projects as well as my love for teaching, my belief in the liberatory power of writing—individually and collectively—getting news out and classes going quickly is central for me.

Please support me in this by accepting this usually weekly newsletter. Of course, I am looking for paid subscribers, and will at some point figure out specifics as to what might go behind that mysterious, annoying, and necessary paywall. But I really do want to let you know what is coming up in classes and workshops; a way to check in with my fiction and poetry; and some thoughts on the craft of writing in this world (or in the many worlds that somehow exist, contradict, and battle each other—the craft, dear writers, of Writing in Upheaval.

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Work on your writing with me:

A quick note on the upcoming Custom-Made Story class; and monthly Standalone/Write Together Workshop.

Classes: Custom-Made Story

[full information here: https://anyaachtenberg.substack.com/p/classes

Each cycle of Custom-Made Story classes is different—truly custom-made, each course going in depth to address the particular craft needs of the participants individually and as a group; each responsive to the issues brought up by the manuscripts we workshop and the remarkable discussions we have about this art we treasure, the art of story and where it takes us.

Each course as well extends a full welcome to hybrid forms—long a tradition though apparently all the rage now—from this (groundbreaking, it’s been said) teacher with awards and distinctions in fiction and poetry and many years of working with memoir and creative nonfiction as well…

… This is an economical way for you to get deep and varied critique for your work; expansive and useful approaches to non-formulaic story craft and story structuring; and stimulating ways to open your creativity and associative powers in language and content.

Those who have participated specifically in Custom-Made Story classes know that these intensive in-person and written critiques are central to help your work evolve, deepen, and fulfill your intentions in a custom-made way…

Custom-Made Story is currently enrolling its next group of writers. The 10-week session is scheduled to start in February. The cost is $650.

Don’t delay: Please email aachtenberg at gmail.com to reserve your spot now, with “Substack Workshop Info” in the subject line

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Monthly Standalone/Write Together Workshops across the genres:

Full descriptions, information for all Standalone/Write Together Workshops here: https://anyaachtenberg.substack.com/p/workshops

Each single-event workshop, open to all separately (or in bundles)—and as a perk of paid subscription, is meant to help each writer make leaps in their work by focusing in surprising ways on a rich craft concept or approach, and, providing surprising and generative suggestions for writing explorations for in-class and post-workshop writing. Sundays, not too early! More soon.

1. Working into Story through Simultaneity: a tool both reality-based and magically-fueled! —Where logic, imagination, reality, and magic—meet. Useful across the genres! Encompasses the work of juxtaposition; of simultaneity not merely as a key element for building tension, but a path into the deep truths of connectedness and causality. Works with the expansion of our associative maps, and the incorporation of context often ignored but crucial for story truth. Sunday, March 2nd.

2. Say it! Digalo!: Jumping the chasm between what we see and what we say—a multi-genre writing workshop to generate new work about the hard-to-say; the overwhelming tangle of the tragic, the threatening, the uncertain…Sunday, March 30.

3. The Wandering Narrator’s Tour of Narration: the thorniest element of story— Nothing 1, 2, 3 about it!—but rather a vast and continually developing array of narrative choices and kinds of narrators. Makes an understanding of narration accessible and generative…Sunday, April 20.

4. Writing Place and Placelessness: Reframe the static instruction to write from a sense of place—expand creativity, context, tension and truth in your writing. Connect issues of place to full development of characterization, and, of course, to narration. Reframe the writing of place and placelessness in a world long in diaspora and at war…Date, TBD.

Don’t delay: Please email aachtenberg at gmail.com for information and registration for these Standalone/Write Together Workshops, with “Substack Standalone Workshop Info” in the subject line.

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Anya on Craft

Part of the purpose of all that I do as writer and teacher is to assist in the liberation of the voices of writers, my own included. Children’s voices are liberated in play, at least when they are allowed by circumstances and regulations to make noise; when they are given a space in which to feel joy, or learn how to take that space. How can it be that many of us, grown up, gifted with an uncountable collection of words, and a perhaps infinite number of ways of combining them, are often pushed back. Silenced.

We know there are many reasons for the silences living within us, and taking us by the throat.

There are times we must be silent, to survive. There are times we must speak up to continue to exist, or to defend each other. For now, in this February which is one more month of a long long overwhelm for many of us, I want to quickly mention a category that is usually associated with silence, and I want to ask why.

This is the category of the unspeakable.

What is the unspeakable?

What is the price we pay for the existence of that category of language?

Who does it serve, that some things “must not be said”?

Who is being “protected” by some social agreement that some things must not be spoken.

Even though they are being done.

Can it be other than the perpetrators of terrible crimes who are protected by the category of “the unspeakable”? [We can certainly come up with an enormous list of perpetrators and crimes…]

Didn’t we long ago learn that silence kills…?

It is certainly true that some things are so horrific that it is difficult to find metaphors to which to compare these acts.

Can metaphor sometimes be dispensed with altogether? Are only the less talented among us sometimes making poems out of the literal realities?

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, in his poem “I’m Explaining a Few Things”—a poem that spoke of the bloody Spanish Civil War, its mass slaughter of the people by the fascists. People might accuse Neruda of various things, but not of a lack of talent.

A couple of lines from this poem suggest the power of the literal in the face of brutal acts—

“and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood,” says Neruda.

This poem of the Spanish Civil War, “Explico algunas cosas”, which is filled with all manner of leaps of poetic language, affirms the superior power of expression of the literal, in the face of horrors that might be called—unspeakable.

“Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:

from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.

And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!

Pablo Neruda

I ask, Is our language ultimately too “clean” as in cleansed, distanced, adorned…for what we face, for what the targeted face?

How do we un-cleanse our language?

How do we lift whatever hands may be over our mouths, pushing us to choke down “the unspeakable”, rather than to say it?

What liberates your voice?

And what is the power of your liberated voice?

How can this writer be in solidarity with writers, with speakers, for whom a liberated voice might call down very real repression and suffering?

What are we facing in our different positions in relation to our freedom, or lack of it, in speaking up, in writing, in addressing, even, the unspeakable?

It is in part a response to this very question that this Standalone Workshop developed—Say it! Digalo!: Jumping the chasm between what we see and what we say.

It blossomed after I wrote a particular poem about accelerating climate catastrophes, which I could only call, “Say it.”

And I do.

AA

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Fiction (and Poetry) by Anya Achtenberg

…some published & some excerpted from unpublished works—including from the manuscripts of the novel, History Artist, & the poetry collection, Watch the Rising.

I want to share this piece from History Artist, a novel long-in-progress and close to completion, with an ensemble of characters connected to three genocides and their aftermaths, and centered around a young Cambodian woman born with the U.S. bombing of Cambodia. It’s a long story…so I’ll just let you know here that what is below is in the voice of an African Gray parrot, a complete surprise to me in the writing. His origin unknown, he is either from Cambodia, kept in Pol Pot’s chambers—or, from the Bronx, but, in any case, taken home from a pet store by the playwright Lawrence, a veteran of the American War in Southeast Asia, who had crashed in Cambodia, before coming home. AA

AG Parrot’s Note

Let’s get something straight.

Do not insist on calling me names that please you, instead of reflect the breadth of my experience, and the gravitas of my bearing. Polly and such, unacceptable.

Pardon my attitude, my outbursts, my—what you might call—rudeness; pardon my confrontational stance. Listen. My heart, actually, is full of love.

But, you might wonder, why do you need me, anyway? Why do you need a damn parrot squawking through history?

Surely, it’s a truth that we have been, not just squawking, but speaking. That we have spoken what they’ve taught us, but, maybe, and you need to give this a bit of air to breathe, that maybe we also speak what is within us—what no one taught us, what we were born with— what the sonic hum of the world, recording in sound waves the deepest desires of the planet and all its inhabitants—African greys important among them, of course—holds and speaks in its waters, its jungles, mountains and deserts, its hamlets and cities, hermits and masses.

The damage to the voice of being told what to say is incalculable. That stranglehold the bloody Rouge had on the voice continues to throb in people’s chests, terrified heartbeats drowning out articulation that seeks another rhythm beyond the pounding of fear and fearful memory; beyond the great forgetting.

We parrots can only do so much. We’ve been undercover; the very term “parrot”—our being, our nounhood—made into a verb of submission and imitation, of servile repetition of our masters, of our incarcerators.

Now, expect us to keep speaking. Louder than you like. Call it squawk but each time you cut down a tree whose time has not come, this Gray will scream bloody murder. You may think it’s nothing, that I’m nothing. But beaks multiplied—thousands, millions—and we’ll drag the operator out of the bulldozer. Squawks multiplying and we’ll own the bulldozers; we’ll raze your bloody ideologies, your political speeches, your have-a-drink lullabyes. We’ll smash your munitions. We’ll tell you what to toast to. What whispers to make love to.

We’ll name ourselves. We’ll call you cracker and we won’t want you. We’ll call you, done. We’ll tell you what to call us, not the other way around.

We’ll tell stories. We’ll make dialogue. We’ll fly, baby. Zero carbon footprint, but we’ll still fly.

Let’s see you get along without us. But, for now, just try to shut me up.

© Anya Achtenberg, from my unpublished manuscript of the novel History Artist

Contact: aachtenberg at gmail.com