I had a bit of a secret. Poorly kept. The situation was delicate, touch and go. I conjure up an image of my teenage self sprawled out on a lawn, at some outdoor concert, half conscious. Don’t know what this bird flew into, but shit don’t look good. The world was spinning faster and faster. Try and keep up. High-school in New England. A mean, beat down, beaten up, mill town south of Boston. Cramped tenements. Chain link fences. Small bore gangs of Irish, Poles, Portuguese. A lost American city. Lost American boys.

Croke was tall, lanky, dispirited. A lad in a brown leather jacket and jeans, with shoulder length, dirty blond hair. I can’t remember Croke being much of a threat to anyone but himself. Croke loomed large at school and on the street. Mainly because he had a monster heroin habit. More than once, I saw Croke being dragged down the hall, his arms around the shoulders of two burly teachers, his feet dragging behind him. Eyes rolling around in his head. They struggled to get him out of the building, down the stairs and stuffed into a cab. Next day they would do it all again.

Dope was easy to get. Like buying a bag of chips. Like whistling at a pretty girl. Dope was language. Fuck you, it said. The men’s bathroom in high-school was part of the franchise. Mom’s sandwich baggies filled with Tuinal, Seconal, Quaaludes, heroin, speed. The cost was low — lunch money low. You could get anything you wanted at Tadeusz Kosciuszko Square five minutes from my house. The Square. At the Square, you could buy your way into your own imprisonment beneath a statue of a Polish hero of the War of Independence. The irony was lost on us. We weren’t interested in independence. Ours was a more noble conflict — obliterate the self. That stealth army spreading a miracle of warmth across your tender groin, courtesy of Adolph von Baeyer, inventor of the barbituate. Just take me out, Adolph. Across from the Square was Joe Gow’s, where you could get a greasy chow mein sandwich in wax paper and a coke for two-fifty, when you resurfaced and got hungry.

Killer Cabral. I don’t know if Killer had killed anyone when I knew him, but the chances are good, or got around to it in due time. I have one memory of Killer. I’ve got my mother’s car for the night. I’m seventeen. Killer is in the back seat — this is an eight-cylinder Oldsmobile Cutlass, maroon. A machine. I’ve disconnected the odometer. Killer is small. In a black leather jacket. His street rep is fearsome. Killer Cabral is in my car. He’s cooking junk in a spoon. He’s got his works out. Rolls up a sleeve. Ties off, finds a vein. Pushes the needle in. Tilts his head back for a second, eyes closing… Come to daddy.…that’s it. Then, Killer is out. Into the night. Hey, Killer Cabral was in my car last night. No way. Way.

For a while, my best friend was Fat Larsch. Toothpick thin. Stringy blond hair. We were tight for three years. Concerts, camping, ski trips, open-faced turkey sandwiches and mashed potatoes at the counter at Rockland Diner. Quarts of Bud. All the shit that kids do. Add weed, downers, and the occasional speed. I never once set foot inside his house. Some kind of weird trouble was going down in that darkened third-floor apartment. Finally, Fat Larsch went for the needle. He died of an overdose. By then, he’d become a respiratory technician at the local hospital. St. Anne’s. I never went to the funeral. I never went for the needle. That was a line I wouldn’t cross.

I woke up in the Emergency Room. Tied it off. All the people who were part of the old world, over. I passed them on the street. I did not meet their eyes. I did not speak. No hellos, no how you doing. I don’t see you.

{ photograph by richard pelletier }

This low-heeled boy had a dream — a wanting. It was so bonkers, so outlandish, and freakish, and buried so deep, it would take over four decades to dig it out. Wanted that mother so hard, had to wrap that fragile thing in blankets and shame and lies and foolish loves and silence.

Touch and go.

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World-famous, there’s-nothing-else-like-it-anywhere Dark Angels writing workshop lands on east coast of America in 2017

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]ow goes it? Is your writing everything you want it to be? Could you do with a shot of inspiration? A double shot of joie de vivre? A triple shot of ‘I never knew I could write like that?’ Is there a wee bit of room for improvement? For a potentially life-changing experience?

I want to introduce you to some of the work I do and the people I do it with. I’m reaching your way for a couple of reasons. You’re a good writer. You’re interested in words and stories. For you, business, life, and art are not all that far apart. No silos. And, you like to connect. Which means you are, ahem, the target audience.

first, the back story…

A few years ago, I went on a few writing workshops. The first was in Spain, outside of Seville. The next one was at Oxford. During which we had dinner with Philip Pullman. So, these weren’t just any writing workshops. These were Dark Angels workshops. Twelve years in, over 300 people have rolled through the Angelic writing machine. People talked. So I went on this workshop, they’d say. And they’d get all glassy eyed. The thing was a phenomenon.

Then, in 2015, I was invited to join the firm, as it were, as a tutor. Or, as we are officially known, Associate Partner. The three original founders of the company, John Simmons, Stuart Delves, Jamie Jauncey, felt the need for reinforcements. So nine additional writers, including yours truly, were, you know, onboarded. We are now 12. (Being asked to join that crew was sweet. I cried.) Here we all are at Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre.

The tagline for Dark Angels is Creative Writing in Business. We run our workshops in Spain, England, Ireland, Scotland, possibly New Zealand and this year, the US. Our focus is on business writing, although all kinds of writers have come. Our ship has three captains: London-based novelist and copywriter John Simmons; Edinburgh-based copywriter, poet and playwright, Stuart Delves; and copywriter, musician, and novelist Jamie Jauncey. You will not find three kinder, more talented writer-humans if you tried.

We stand for the power of words and writing, and for personal connection, kindness and fellowship.

When you hear the concept of ‘brand voice’ or ‘tone of voice’ in marketing communications, that’s John Simmons idea. (Many people are saying that the notion of voice in business writing was in the air in the 90s and Alan Siegel of Siegel + Gale also came up with voice as a concept at around the same time. We accept this version of history.)

I discovered John’s books in 2006 and got very excited. Long story short — I got to know him, became a friend of his and his family, have stayed with him in London, and now I’m part of the company. He and his family are lovely and brilliant people.

The whole Dark Angels thing is virtually unknown in America. (Hence, this.) At least I think it is. As far as I can tell, I’m quite possibly the only American who has been to a DA workshop in those 12 years.

The workshops usually are residential affairs between three and four or five nights. (We’ve recently added a Taster Day option.) We spend a lot of time writing. We have our recipe book filled with writing exercises — sonnets and six-word stories and all kinds of fascinating, challenging and imaginative ways of wrestling with story, with words, with language, with writing. Ours is not a ‘how to’ kind of workshop. It’s more a matter of creating a safe, intelligent space to fucking write. We help guide writers as they strike out into different territory. And this is truly different for a writer’s workshop: no critiques. We’ll offer some thoughts about the value of what we’ve asked you to do and we’ll ask you to tell us about it. A simple ‘how was it, trying to write that sonnet, tell us about it.’

The combination of our writing exercises, some collaborations, our conversations about books, writing, music, art, our dinners together, our wine, etc. — the whole wonderful smorgasbord of writers talking, thinking things out and writing, has a powerful effect on people who attend. Folks find new confidence; they get emotional, they get reinvigorated. They find their voice. Imaginations get stoked and stimulated. Lots of people have said the experience changed their lives. I’m one.

The curious and interesting thing is how we tie our creative writing exercises back to business. There are real pearls of wisdom to take back to work.

So Dark Angels is going to come to America this year in early October. We’ll be in Dartmouth, MA, right next to New Bedford in Melville territory. We’ll be in this house in the photo below. John Simmons and I are running this one together. Reader, it is catered.

So I’d like to invite you to come. Or, if you think someone on your team at HubSpot, or MarketingSherpa, or Slack, or WebMD could benefit from an immersion experience that will likely excite them and boost their confidence in their writing…We’re aiming for 6–9 people. But no more than 10 I don’t think.

Many Dark Angels writers are freelancers. Many are in-house writers from places like —

Arts Council of Wales, Bang & Olufsen, Barclays, The BBC, BP, British Airways, Carlsberg Breweries, Clore Leadership Programme, Corporate Culture, Elmwood, The Environment Council, Granada Media, Innocent, Interbrand, Lever Faberge, Mazars, National Library of Wales, O2, Penguin Books, QI, Royal Society of Arts, Scottish Arts Council, Sotheby’s Europe, Swiss Reinsurance, Three.

The crew in Scotland…

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to know more, visit the website.

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Once upon a time in a long-forgotten place, I fell in love. This was a life-changing, head-over-heels-kind-of-love, and the subject of my swoon was Robert Frank’s seminal book of black and white photographs, The Americans.

At the time, I was an aspiring photographer, and Frank’s pictures blew the top off my head and showed me what photography could be. The Americans had the same effect on tens of thousands of other photographers at all skill levels, and it reverberated among artists, writers and other observers of the American scene. Such is its power that 50 years later we are still talking about and showing the Americans.

Frank’s pictures were idiosyncratic, brutally honest, dark, foreboding and furtive. Those pictures absolutely killed. Robert Frank’s take on America was almost exactly the opposite of the country’s prevailing vision of itself – more Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac than Eisenhower. It was a beat generation document but a whole lot more. The Americans upset a lot of people of course, given the less than rose colored tint it portrayed. “A sad poem for sick people” was one comment.

In the recent New Yorker write-up on the Frank show at the Met, Anthony Lane remarks on how Frank shot over 760 rolls of film on three trips around the U.S. on a Guggenheim grant. He developed his film, made his contact sheets, and set about printing a group of selected images. He printed one thousand work prints (a work print refers to a quickly made image that a photographer will consider over time and then later print to exacting specifications) of this place called America. That a Swiss born Jew in 1955 would conceive of somehow capturing the soul of these United States in a group of photographs is quite an astonishing proposition, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Here is what’s amazing. Robert Frank shot thousands upon thousands of photographs – 27,000+ in all. It’s not unusual for a documentary, street-shooting, photo-journalist type of photographer to shoot vast amounts of film – it’s the nature of the beast.

What’s incredible is the discipline and vision it took for Robert Frank to cull through his work and edit it down to only 83 (!) pictures. In the shooting, he collected the raw data. But like the filmmaker that he would soon become, it was in the editing room where the miracle occurred.

Through careful (and brutal) editing, and his sequencing, he told his unique story, changed the course of contemporary photography, influenced legions of photographers who followed him, and, reflected back to us an image of ourselves wholly unexpected, uncomfortable, unsettling, true.

So any of us who write for a living, (or do other kinds of creative work) one of the lessons of Frank’s achievement is this: Great work involves culling, murdering your darlings – letting go of all your favorite, nifty little phrases and word choices and give the reader the heart and soul of the story.

Murder your darlings, if you have not yet heard the phrase, is attributed to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch who taught writing at Oxford.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it with every person you have ever met. Comments are welcome and commenter persons are automatically entered into a drawing for a super big prize.

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