A crowd of second-year English students and aspiring writers filled the Carol L. Ellis Auditorium at SRJC’s Petaluma campus for an inspiring reading, lecture and Q&A from Santa Rosa author Joan Frank.
“She loves literature, she talks about it in ways I have never heard anybody talk about it,” said longtime friend and SRJC English professor Barbara McClure of Frank in her introduction. “She is a warm soul, she is open, she’s witty, she’s a delight to be around and you can’t ‘friend’ her on Facebook.”
Frank has just finished her fifth work of fiction, “Make it Stay,” which is highly recommended and has received advanced praise by other authors, as well as deemed “masterful,” by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Frank teased the audience with the introduction and first section of the novel. Her words moved the audience as they readied their ideas and thoughts for Q&A. “Something very terrible happens to Michael (a main character) that will change his life and those around him forever,” Frank said after reading a tasteful first passage from “Make it Stay.”
“Things get livelier,” were the words that left the audience eager to know more. Before the audience could pick her brain about becoming a writer and about “Make it Stay,” Frank indulged the crowd with life experiences that have influenced her writing.
The contemporary writer left college early, crossed the Atlantic Ocean to Senegal and joined the Peace Corps in “hunger for experience in life that I felt was powerful, solid, touchable, real, as opposed to abstraction which I had learned early and too well,” said Frank.
She later spent 12 years in Hawaii where she wrote personal essays for a weekly tabloid. After moving to the Bay Area in the early 1980s she began writing for magazines. Frank felt essay writing was too “clever” and a “trap,” missing a deep dimension in writing.
She took an extension class at UC Berkeley and was introduced to “Finding Your Writer’s Voice,” written by her instructor Thaisa Frank and author Dorothy Wall. Joan Frank took a risk and expanded her writing horizons out of essays and on to short stories and novels.
“Literature is an essential part of art,” said Frank, “and art is our way of talking to ourselves.”
In response to a student’s question, Frank shared with the audience how she came up with story ideas. She learned to recognize a possibility for a story when she felt a disturbance in her stomach, like indigestion, from situations, events and encounters, then took note of those disturbances and experiences. Sometimes a character was created or just an image came to her so she began writing.
She would fool around and write a line and keep that line for a while. When the time felt right, she would try to tease another line out of the last. “Like cotton candy or wool. Then you can tease more sentences and possible things can start to happen in your story or with your character,” Frank said.
Frank encourages writers to get comfortable, dream freely and make a mess because no one is around to judge you until you let someone see your writing. “And when you let someone see it (your writing piece), only choose someone you trust who won’t chop your hands off.” Let them give you gentle words about it because “your imagination and your dreams are fragile until they get a momentum or volume to sample their own.”
The metaphoric words of advice and wisdom from Frank sparked the imagination of many aspiring writers in the room who flooded the aisles to shake Frank’s hand, get her contact information and ask more questions at the end of the lecture.
Frank has received an abundance of awards, literary honors, nominations and grants for her works of fiction.
In her past, Frank taught creative writing at San Francisco State University. She writes literary fiction reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle Book review and continues to teach privately.
