Patricia Weaver Francisco
Patricia Weaver Francisco is the author of Telling: A Memoir of Rape and Recovery (HarperCollins, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003) which won the Minnesota Book Award and a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction. She is also the author of a novel, Cold Feet (Simon & Schuster, 1988), a collection of lyric essays, Village Without Mirrors (with photographer Timothy Francisco, Milkweed Editions, 1989), and two produced plays, Sign of a Child and Lunacy, the latter of which was first published by The Dramatic Publishing Company in 1985, and continues to be produced in nonprofit theaters throughout the country. She has received grants from the Bush Foundation (in both nonfiction and fiction), the National Endowment for the Arts (in nonfiction), the Playwrights' Center, and The Loft Literary Center. Her short fiction and essays have been published in Salon, Utne Reader, Milkweed Chronicle, Great River Review, Artpaper, and Hungry Mind Review. She is a member of the faculty of the M.FA. program at Hamline University, and has taught for the University of Minnesota in the M..FA. program and at the University of Minnesota-Duluth's Summer Writing Workshop. Since the publication of Telling, Francisco has traveled the country, speaking about sexual violence to professional and college audiences. She maintains a website for conversation about of sexual violence: www.tellingofrape.com. She will be teaching Keeping The Channel Open, a workshop in the Creative Process at the Split Rock Arts Program, July 20-25, 2008.

How and why did you become a writer?
I began to write as a child because I was unable to make myself heard in a noisy and competitive family. That impulse became amplified by an intense curiosity and an affinity for storytelling also passed along to me by my family. Almost immediately, I felt at home in the world of words. I read like crazy to get through adolescence, and kept going in a mad dash to read everything wonderful and strange. I started writing and never stopped.

I've had remarkable teachers. I live within a thriving community of writers who sustain and inspire me. Writing gives shape to my experience, my hours of loving and disappointment, my dreamy and demanding curiosity, my need to ask the impertinent question. I am drawn in all my work to the intersection of the personal and the political, and to writing's potential to make the invisible visible. I know that art changes lives. I am in serious awe and service to that power. Writing enriches and is enriched by all the ways of living that I love.

In which literary forms do you most often work?
I've moved among forms all my writing life, following the material that demands my present attention. My first book was a novel, and I am at work on another novel. In between I've written plays and two books of nonfiction: a book of lyric essays and a memoir. I anticipate my next book will be nonfiction. As a result of this migratory pattern, I'm particularly interested in work that blends and breaks formal boundaries.

Who are some of your favorite writers?
Virginia Woolf, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, Evan Boland, Michael Cunningham, Tim O'Brien, Mark Doty, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Grace Paley, Willa Cather, Vladimir Nabokov, Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, Eva Figes, Jack Kerouac, Lucille Clifton, Marilynne Robinson, Anne Carson, Ali Smith.

How would you define a successful work of literature?
A perplexing co-existence of resonance and mystery. A catalyst for wonder and empathy. A visitation of trickster energy, changing everything. The company of the book becomes as treasured as the company of an intimate. You long to return to it, and each time, you discover it has re-written itself.

What are the most rewarding parts of the writing process for you? What are the most difficult?
I love to revise, to find the elegant or crazy structure that makes music out of the chaos and difficulty of an early draft. I struggle with generation, am slow to begin, to commit, knowing I will be engaged to this still-silent impulse for a very long time. Then I malinger in the middle, happy as a girl afloat on a raft on a summer afternoon. I am thrilled by the discovery of formal solutions, the arrival of the precise phrase, and by synchronicity: the whole world seems to belong to me when I'm writing. I am fascinated by the process itself. Many times, in my own work or in working with others, the solution to a problem resides in an aspect of process.

In which parts of the world have you lived?
I grew up in Detroit, went to college in Ann Arbor, and have lived in Minneapolis all of my adult life. My heart belongs to bodies of water, to the Great Lakes—Michigan, Superior, and Huron—and to the lakes, rivers, and oceans that hold the islands I'm drawn to: Madeline, Mallard, Captiva, Mackinac.

Which literary forms do you prefer to work on with clients?
Teaching is a primary preoccupation for me, as important to who I am and how I make sense of literature's value in the world as the writing that I do. I am engaged by both fiction and creative nonfiction and have a background in literary journalism. I believe that writing is a transformative process, whether the raw material of imagination and experience is transmuted into nonfiction or translated into fiction. I frequently work with writers whose subjects fall into what Kathryn Rhett has termed the Memoir of Crisis, the literature of trauma and transformation. I consider this my deepest work as a teacher, to accompany others in the process of creating art from the contradictions of demanding human experience.

I am most familiar, as a fiction writer, with the problems and opportunities of the novel, but work easily with short stories as a critical reader. I love essays, particularly the infinite formal possibilities of the personal essay. As a teacher, I am always alert to aspects of process, the potential for new material, forms or levels of exploration to emerge through a consideration of how one works.

How much and what kinds of background or experience would you expect your clients to have?
After twenty years of teaching, I've decided that I cannot in any way predict which writers will persist long enough to engage their voice, their urgent material, their form. I find that aspect of teaching exciting. As a result, I'm open to working with anyone who feels drawn to work with me.

Do you have some ground rules that you would expect clients to follow?
I would expect clients to be respectful of our working relationship in terms of communication, commitments, listening to one another. A writing mentorship can be a beautiful meeting of sensibilities with the opportunity for growth and the energy of affirmation as its reward. I would simply ask that writers take this opportunity seriously and to heart.

What advice would you offer prospective clients as they consider choosing a mentor?
Follow your instincts.