POETRY : Novelist, playwright Ford to read from both published and in-progress works
Posted on Sunday, March 26, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/nwat/Living/38902/
Capturing the reader’s
attention and
holding it, transporting the reader to another world while entertaining and instructing, this is the essence of award-winning writing, whether it’s a poem, a short story, a play or a novel. In Robert Ford’s debut novel, "The Student Conductor" (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003), we come to know the world of conducting through characters who are intriguing, intelligent, erotic, intense and complex with emotion. In one of the book’s scenes, Ford’s protagonist, the aspiring (and once failed) conductor Cooper Barrow hikes through the woods to rendezvous with his love interest, an East German defector and oboist named Petra. Rather than taking the tram, Barrow makes a snap decision to hike through the hills of the Black Forest. Soon, he’s noticing the cold more than he thought he would and begins to jog. In the meantime, he’s reviewing scores in his head and then breaks out in song. When he trips and falls to the ground, he begins to worry about the time and realizes he’s left his watch behind. Now, he’s cursing himself and his choices, and he’s frantically trying to warm his hands while hoping he makes it on time. It’s a masterful passage that let me live vicariously through Cooper. And living vicariously through words is one of my favorite pastimes. Fortunately, Ford lives right here among us in Fayetteville and has agreed to be the featured reader Tuesday at the monthly meeting of the Ozark Poets and Writers Collective. The son of an Air Force father and an English-born mother, Ford, 48, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he lived for the first year of his life. The family soon moved to the United States and Ford’s formative years were spent primarily in Michigan and New Jersey. His professional accomplishments include a Stanley Drama Award for his first play, "Tierra del Fuego," which was produced in Fayetteville in 1994, when Ford was invited to participate in the Mount Sequoyah New Play Retreat. While there, he worked with University of Arkansas playwright and director Kent Brown. He also met David Mark Cohen, who would become Ford’s playwriting mentor when he attended the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writing where he was a James A. Michener Fellow. He also met wife Amy Herzberg at the Mount Sequoyah retreat; she played the lead in "Tierra del Fuego." The Mount Sequoyah experience was pivotal for Ford. Within the year, he and Herzberg had struck up a friendship that became a long-distance relationship. While she lived in Fayetteville and taught drama at the UA, Ford honed his craft in Austin. About the time he earned his master’s of fine arts degree in 1997, he turned his attention from playwriting and screenwriting to novel writing and wrote the bulk of "The Student Conductor." " The [Michener] Center required you to submit work in a primary and secondary area of concentration. My primary area was playwriting and my secondary area was screenwriting, "Ford said." While there, I learned that the school really encourages this kind of cross-pollination. I took a fiction writing class taught by an accomplished playwright and fiction writer, William Hauptmann. The way he taught the class really clicked with me. He was very specific about how to write scenes, and the experience kind of jump-started me. "
One of the first scenes Ford wrote for that class — Cooper’s hike through the woods to meet Petra — remains in his novel.
" I really enjoyed writing fiction in that class, "Ford recalled." It was liberating. Pretty soon, Bill said, ‘You should drop everything else you are working on and work on this.’ "
So Ford did, and received a post graduate fellowship to write for a year. After a move to Fayetteville, five years and four drafts," The Student Conductor" was finished. If you haven’t read the novel, I highly recommend it. You might wonder how Ford knows so much about classical music and conducting. As some folks say, you write what you know. Ford, who plays the flute, attended the Manhattan School of Music for two years and earned his master of music degree from Yale School of Music. Some people get all the talent! And that’s not all. He also has a master of fine arts degree in acting from Rutgers, and he’s worked as an actor and director in New York.
These days, he’s busy with a play titled "The Fall of the House" that’s based on the life and death of Edgar Allan Poe and his mother. We will likely hear some excerpts on Tuesday. "One of the fun things with this play is there are certain gaps in our knowledge about Poe and there are certainly things we don’t know about Poe’s mother," Ford said. Ford is also currently working on two novels, from which he may also read an excerpt or two. "I’ve been working on both of these for the last couple of years, and I’m ready to focus in and get a draft done on one of them in the next six months or so," he said. When asked about his favorite writers he mentioned Ian McEwan, author of "Atonement," and John Fowles, whom he calls a "big early influence" on his writing. As for playwriting, he’s a fan of Tom Stoppard and English playwrights Timberlake Wertenbaker and Caryl Churchill. His advice for fellow writers is practical. "One is to get to the writing on a daily basis. I just have to start. Don’t edit yourself. Just get going. That’s something I struggle with every day. The other thing is get with other writers and talk about writing and talk about the problems that you are having writing. And find people whose writing you like and have them read your stuff. Try to make what is an extremely lonesome job social. Find a social component. It really helps to keep you going … and then, never be satisfied." To follow this advice, one doesn’t have to travel far. In fact, you can study with Ford right here in Fayetteville where he teaches classes at the Fayetteville Public Library and serves as artistic director of the Arkansas Playwrights Workshop. To find out more about the creative writing classes he teaches at FPL, visit www. faylib. org and click on the Writer’s Center link.
• • • Admission to Tuesday’s reading is free. The event begins at about 7 p.m. at OPWC’s new home, the downstairs special events room at U.S. Pizza, 202 W. Dickson St. in Fayetteville. There will be an open mic session before and after Ford’s reading, so please bring a few poems to share with the crowd. Donations will also be taken to help fund future readings. Audience members can also win a book donated by the University of Arkansas Press. The Ozark Poets and Writers Collective is a forum for creators who work in words. For more information, visit http: // www.uark. edu/ALADDIN/opwc/index. html.