Washington Square on air is the audio town square for the Washington Square Review.

Lansing Community College's literary journal.

Writers, readers, scholars, publishing professionals, citizens of the world, gather here and chat about all things writing.

Hey there.

This is Melissa Ford Lucken, editor for the Washington Square Review.

But I'm here today as faculty person professor of creative writing and I'm talking with Chuck Parker.

Hey, Chuck.

Hey, Melissa.

Good to see you again.

It's good to see you.

I've seen you in class a couple times and happy to see you here in the recording studio.

Tell us a little bit about your history.

How did you come here to lcc?

Well, I was going stir crazy during the pandemic.

I only live a few blocks away from the main campus here and I saw an opportunity to start taking online classes during the pandemic.

There was some extra funding available and I had the time.

I started out in the building construction program, which I just finished this past spring.

But what got me into your creative writing classes was about 2021, winter 2021, I got the itch to write a novel and two months later I realized that I have no idea how to do.

And so I started poking around trying to find where I might find writing a novel class.

And lo and behold, there's one at lcc.

So I started pursuing both programs, the creative writing program and the construction program at the same time.

The construction's pretty different than the writing.

Well, yeah, it is totally different.

Yeah, I felt like I needed some hands on stuff to do.

I really felt trapped inside my house during the lockdown and there was a lot that I wanted to do to my house but didn't necessarily have the skills to do.

So I thought, you know, I'm going to ramp up on some skills while I've got the time.

So you took the construction classes more for the knowledge that you gained and less for a career move?

Oh yeah, I've got an established career already, so yeah, I work for the Joint Genome Institute at Berkeley lab full time remote.

That's quite different from construction or creative writing.

It is, it is.

But that's part of what made it so interesting to me was that it was new and different and I felt like I needed quite a bit of change during those couple of years where there was just nothing to do anywhere.

Right.

So talk a little bit about your regular day job.

Yeah, so I'm a software developer.

I do a lot of data integration, relational databases.

I spend quite a bit of time on zoom calls because like I said, I'm remote and I have to check in with the rest of my team on a regular basis.

What's a relational database?

Oh, well, you know what a spreadsheet is?

Yep.

Okay, so this is a relational database is.

Think of it as a ton of spreadsheets that are all linked together on specific columns and have values that are coded to very specific, precise things.

Yeah.

And that helps you develop the software.

Yes, it keeps all the data organized.

Okay.

The reason that I'm interested in that is because, having had you in class, I know that you're very systematic in your research and in the way that you approach storytelling.

And so I was curious to figure out where that part of your brain came from.

And that sounds like that's probably where that came from.

Yeah.

You have a fairly hefty science background.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So I got a degree in computer science from Michigan State University back in the late 90s, and I went back to MSU in the mid 2000s to get a degree in genomics and molecular genetics.

And so the kind of the intersection between those two fields is where I'm working right now.

Okay, so the software that you're working on has to do with genetics?

Yep.

Yeah.

I work for the Joint Genome Institute, which is a user facility for the Department of Energy, where they take biological samples, sequence the entire genome.

They've got a full staff of scientists that are prepared to handle the analysis for the end users.

And then it's handed over and publications come out the other side and hopefully some interesting new scientific advances.

Where did the samples come from?

Well, from all over the world, really.

So it's kind of like a.

A grant funding agency.

There are these projects that get funded based on merit, and most of the samples are coming from universities in the United States, but it really is open worldwide.

Okay, that's pretty interesting.

So that's very quite.

It's very different from the construction.

So there you are in the pandemic lockdown, feeling itchy and wanting something to do.

So you sign up for construction classes.

How did those go when you first got there?

Well, I took all the online classes I could first, and that was fine.

You're reading building codes and taking exams and doing a little bit of online discussion.

Were there any.

How did they do the hands on stuff?

Well, I didn't get to that until the lockdowns were lifted.

Okay.

And so the very first semester that I came back came onto campus was when they started offering those in person classes again.

I'm not sure exactly the extent that they were disrupted, but I know that they were Trying to minimize that, because the hands on stuff really is the most critical part of that curriculum.

And how did that go?

I was a little nervous, but, you know, I've swung a hammer before and just not in front of a group of people to do something in front of, so.

But yeah, I really got into it and the classes were absolutely fantastic.

And the deeper I got into the program, the more I liked it.

Okay.

The instructors are amazing, very helpful.

They make sure that everyone gets a chance to participate in every part of the program.

So very cool.

And listeners will wonder, did you get your house projects done?

Oh, oh, no.

Did you get any of them done?

I did get a few done, yeah.

As a matter of fact, just this past week, I installed a pair of French doors in my office to keep the cats out.

Okay.

All right, nice.

It's not perfect, but that's all right.

It'll get the job done.

So how did you get the idea to write a novel?

Ah, well, see, so I remember looking for a very specific genre that apparently doesn't exist.

It's intersection between historical fiction, medieval fantasy, and horror.

And I'm sure that there are novels out there like that.

I just had a hard time finding one.

And I finally found something, and it's the only thing that fit by description.

So I downloaded it on my nook and it was awful.

I think it's the worst thing I've ever read in my life.

And I was like, you know what?

I can do better than that.

Okay, we'll let the title of that one remain a mystery.

You know, I totally forgot what it.

Was when you say it was awful.

What was awful about it?

Oh, there was zero character development.

The plot was ambiguous all the way through to the end.

I had no idea what the book was really about.

Okay.

There was no actual conflict.

I felt like I was just wandering around in someone's makeshift world.

The world building was actually not that.

Great either, because that's what I was wondering about.

Like I said, I know you're a very meticulous researcher and historical facts are really important to you.

And so I was wondering, when you were reading that, did that kind of click in the back of your mind to make you want to start doing some research?

Because it seems like that's a part of the process that you do enjoy.

It really is.

Where I started, though, was with character sketches, thinking of a couple of characters interacting in a particular scene.

That was something that I thought was cool.

And I would get that documented and then I would do a few more.

But when it came to actually integrating all of those into a plot, I was completely lost as to how to do that.

And that's exactly when I started looking for the novel class.

Okay, talk a little bit about a couple of your characters.

Ah, yeah.

So the main character in this novel, his name is Johannes Rolfs.

The novel's set in the mid-1300s, just before the bubonic plague hits England.

He is a farmer turned academic by a twist of fate, with an interaction with a Florentine banker when he's trying to sell his.

His livestock.

And it turned out, though, that that was not the most interesting character to me as the.

As the writing developed, there were a few other important characters that stepped in, including, and this one's my favorite, a elderly Templar monk who is kind of a role model, but has his own dark past.

And I'm actually more interested in exploring that dark past than I am in exploring the actions of what is the main character.

And so I'm kind of at a crossroads now about whether I want to amplify this other character in the book.

And I think maybe the answer is yes.

You always just go with your intuition.

Go where the story leads you.

Okay, so then you started taking the writing the novel class.

And how did that go?

Oh, it was fantastic.

It was intimidating at first.

Like, I remember the first day I walked in, like, this is not going to go well.

Why did you think that?

I don't know.

It was just that feeling that I had, wandering into something brand new and feeling like I was so unprepared.

Okay.

Yeah, but it was.

There is no real preparation for writing a novel, though, by the way.

Well, I guess not.

I guess not.

But the thing is, by the second week, I really felt like it was going to be all right.

Okay.

And it was these development projects that you had explained to us that these were going to be, like, the main, like, the core of the class.

These three projects that we would work on to develop specific aspects, and we were able to define our own project.

So it really took away a lot of the pressure because I thought that.

I guess my expectations were that going in, we would have a lot of, like, formal writing assignments and we would be given a topic and have to, you know, do something.

But we were able to.

You gave us the ability to work on our own projects.

Yes.

Write your own novel.

And that was fantastic.

It was exactly what I needed, exactly at the right time.

Great.

So the projects you designed yourself, tell us about one of those.

Well, the first one I did had a lot to do with getting my content organized.

I had been working in a Google Doc, and there was a lot of chapter content in there, but the character sketches were also in there.

Random ideas and thoughts were in there.

Links to Wikipedia.

It was a mess.

It was essentially a document full of footnotes and historical dates and times and places.

And so my very first development project was to separate out my manuscript, to extract the manuscript from all that historical content.

And so what I ended up with was the manuscript without any links or footnotes, organized into chapters and what I was calling the companion guide, which was a list of.

Well, it wasn't a list.

How do I explain this?

There were a lot of.

It was a hierarchical document with the character sketches in one part of it, the settings in another part, timelines in another section, and then my random plot ideas, all with their own little subsections.

Keeping that completely separate from the manuscript gave me a lot more freedom to work on things without losing track of where I was.

Talk a little bit about the plotting process.

Yeah, the plotting process was difficult for me because I had a lot of disconnected events that I needed to find a way to bring together.

And so it was a slow development.

But I remember towards the end of class, when we were writing our finalizing our synopsis, that assignment forced me to really look at everything all at once and to put together a clear beginning to end sequence of events.

And what happened was about half of the plot, half of the ideas that I had for scenes fit, and the other half did not.

So I set that other half aside, and I see that as content for a sequel.

Mm.

Yep.

That can be very hard when you have a bunch of content that you're committed to.

You wrote it, you love it.

And to have to set it aside and pull it out, that's tough.

But it's.

It's like cleaning out a closet.

The stuff that's left is the stuff that you really need and want.

Exactly.

That's.

That's exactly how I feel about it.

Now.

The first couple of times was tough, but it's not like I'm deleting it.

I'm just moving it.

You don't have to take it to Goodwill.

You get to keep it.

And if I remember correctly, you changed the story start point of the manuscript, Is that correct?

Several times.

Okay.

Yes.

How did you know when it was time to move that start point?

When there was more that had to be explained about the main character's past than could be put into a single scene, Like a conversation between the character and another character, it got to a point where it was filling up more than a chapter.

And so why don't I just move.

That chapter, show it instead of tell it?

Here's chapter negative one.

Yeah.

And now I'm up to, like, chapter negative five.

Yeah.

And have you changed what you perceive to.

You haven't completed writing the whole manuscript yet, is that correct?

Not yet.

I am about a third the way there.

I feel like I'm a third the way there.

It's hard to measure sometimes.

I felt like I was half done a few months ago, and now I feel like I'm less than half done.

Okay, talk a little bit about the history, the background, the enveloping action that's taking place during the story.

Right.

So it turns out that this Templar monk's big secret is that he's unleashed a dark entity in the ruins of this monastery, where a group of mendicant monks, these are wandering monks, have formed kind of this loose collective.

And the Templar monk is trying desperately to find a way of putting the genie back in the bottle, so to speak, when this interloper, who is not a monk, ends up on the doorsteps of the monastery, very sick with carrying a message for the prior of this monastery.

And so he gets caught up in this action, and as an academic, he refuses to believe that there's something supernatural going on.

And so he's forced to confront his.

What he knows to be the way the world works, with some things that are beyond his capacity for understanding.

And if I remember correctly, didn't you move the setting a little bit?

Little bit.

It was originally supposed to be in Scotland, in a place with just an awful climate, very remote.

But the historical events that I wanted to incorporate took place between, like, around the English Channel, between France and England.

This is the time.

This is the setup for the Hundred Years War.

There was a lot of political maneuvering going on.

The Church, the Catholic Church, was based in Avignon, France, at the time, not in Rome.

And there was just a lot of stuff going on in the background.

I wanted to retain the authenticity of those historical events.

It gives it a much richer backdrop.

Too, and keeps me from drawing outside.

The lines and from a craft perspective.

When you have people that are focused in one location and there's something tight and tense and intriguing in that location, and then they're.

The outside is also, you know, a tense and conflicting area, then it increases the tension both ways.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So that's also really notable that you are fluid enough to relocate your setting and move your start line back a couple times.

Because that's.

To me, that's one of the most important things as a writer, is to be able to rethink and reimagine and rethink and not get so committed to the first thing.

Because it's hard to, like we said, you know, move stuff around, toss it.

It's very messy, and it's very scary when you start moving things around again because you don't know how it's going to turn out.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And I resisted it.

But the way I feel now is that I'm not necessarily writing the story.

The story is kind of writing itself, and I have to follow.

Yeah.

For sure.

So talk about the research that you did.

It is nonstop.

It's actually the primary amount of time that I put in to this.

It's not the actual writing, but the research.

I spend so much time going down these rabbit holes on Wikipedia and trying to figure out, okay, what does a meal look like?

What does a regular meal look like for these people at this time?

Is it all online research for you?

Mostly.

I bought a couple of books that are compilations of.

There's one that's based on.

It's all about medieval food.

There's another one called the Medieval Household in England.

Okay.

Yeah.

So things like that catch my attention, and when I see it, I buy it.

Yeah.

Books of clothing, maybe.

Yes.

The clothing is actually really tricky because these.

I'm working with some very specific orders of monks and also a convent as well, Dominican convent.

And I can't look at contemporary clothing for inspiration.

I mean, I can use it for inspiration, but that doesn't mean it's authentic.

And so digging back and trying to figure out exactly what that stuff looked like, what all these little parts of the clothing were called.

Fabric.

What it's made out of.

Right.

Yeah.

How it might move when someone's walking.

Yeah, yeah.

All of that.

Where do you document all of your research?

Oh, that goes into the companion guide.

Okay.

Which recently.

So in the more recent class of yours that I took, Creative Writing 2, my very last development project was taking the companion guide and the manuscript and importing both of those into Scrivener, which has been much easier to organize.

So much easier.

Okay.

In what way?

Once again, I have everything in one application.

I'm not going back and forth between two separate documents.

But the hierarchical nature of Scrivener, it matches exactly how I was working with a companion guide, so it made things much easier to organize.

I still have all my footnotes and all my links to Wikipedia.

They're like Your little treasures?

Yes.

What other writing have you done in the past year?

Other reading and writing.

And writing.

Well, let's see here.

So think on that.

I've been doing a lot of technical writing lately.

The entire last month has been focused on grant writing for work.

And the next couple of weeks, I'm going to have to do some creative nonfiction for writing my performance review.

Okay.

And I mean that like, literally.

The prose class I took with Lance this past semester really did a lot to prepare me for talking about myself, because I don't like to talk about myself.

All right, well, talk about that class a little bit.

Oh, that class.

Yeah.

That's another one where I walked in not knowing what to expect.

And, yeah, like I said, I guess I have a hard time writing about myself.

Especially difficult things from my past or even childhood, even fun stuff from childhood.

For some reason, I've always been hesitant to write anything like that.

And so this class was kind of gradually like cracking the lid on all of that.

I guess I never really knew how to write about myself in a way that would put together a coherent narrative.

And be informative for someone else.

Like, how do you talk about yourself with a plot that's engaging?

Right.

And I know that one of the things that's included in that class is truth and how much truth is necessary to be present in the essay.

And where can you bend the truth?

What did you make of that?

I loved it.

Okay.

That's the key to the whole thing.

All right.

Talk more.

What do you mean, that's the whole key?

Well, my first attempts at writing about myself were far too literal and truthful and self deprecating.

Okay.

That I, you know, I'd read it after the fact.

I'd be like, oh, I don't.

I don't think I.

Okay, so you don't want anyone else to read that.

So maybe that's where the creativity part comes in.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

All right, that's interesting.

What about poetry?

I love poetry.

I have written some poetry, but it's tough.

It's almost torture to do it sometimes.

I wrote, what, six or seven poems for this creative writing class this past semester, and I thought they turned out really good, but, man, I stress out so much when I'm writing it because I feel like there are, I don't want to say rules.

There are some rules.

I mean, if you're going for a specific meter or rhyming pattern, but to get a feeling into poetry in a way where it's going to be conveyed as intended to the Reader.

That's the piece that I stress out about the most.

Yeah, writing poetry is tough.

I do like some of the stuff I came up with, but, man, it's daunting.

It's daunting.

That's what I'm trying to get.

I think it's interesting that the poems are so short.

But your other work, you know, all the research and the companion guide and all the chapters and all that, that's quite long and you don't make the same face.

Yeah, well, editing.

Editing down copy in a manuscript is easy.

I love editing.

Editing a five or six line poem is like you move one word, change the ending of one phrase, and it just falls apart.

Yeah.

So that's very stressful.

Well, think about what writing you're going to do next.

Other than your creative nonfiction.

What's your next steps with your novel?

Next steps with a novel is cranking out a couple of very specific chapters that I thought I had written, but it turns out I've just thought about it so much that I know exactly how it's going to go.

So this should be pretty easy.

Okay.

This past month has been kind of a nice breather.

I think I needed a break from thinking about it, and now I'm definitely ready to step back in.

Okay.

All right.

Man.

Some of those scenes are just so vivid that I feel like I've already read it.

Yep.

I can relate to that.

And I look around for it.

I'm like, I haven't written that yet.

So if people want to stay in touch with you and watch your writerly journey, where can they find you online?

Yeah, so you can find me under my pen name, which is valisandralisandra.com.

i've got a WordPress site up and I'll be posting announcements there.

I've got a couple of social media that are linked from there, but that's the.

That's the main place to go to.

All right, well, we'll be sure to include that in the show notes.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot for joining us.

Yeah, this has been fun.

Awesome.

Thanks for stopping by the audio town square of the Washington Square Review.

Until next time, this has been the Washington Square on air from Lansing News College.

To find out more about a writers community and literary journal, visit lcc.

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