the american literary review

We Have a Love-Hate Relationship with Lists

2012-01-20T12:05:00.004-06:00

This is the only time of the year that it's acceptable for us to shove our reading lists in your face without you saying: "how dare you. how dare you tell me what i should be reading. like i don't have lists and lists of my own, piling up like uneaten pancakes. don't you see how many delicious pancakes i have to eat already? get yours out of my face."

Well it's 2012 now, and its time to eat some new lists. Here's some books the ALR staff devoured last year:

Inferno by Eileen Myles - Caitlin Cowan

Owning It All by Bill Kittredge - Ryan Flanagan

The Kids Are All Right by the Welch siblings - Jessica Hindman

Either Way I'm Celebrating by Sommer Browning - Nate Logan

Horse, Flower, Bird by Kate Bernheimer - Kara Dorris

The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia - Tim Boswell

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon - Hillary Stringer

The Facts by Philip Roth - Matt Davis

Songs of Unreason by Jim Harrison - Justin Bigos

The View from the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier - Laura Miller

An Interview with Luke Hankins

2011-12-21T09:44:00.019-06:00

Justin Bigos: Your first book of poems, Weak Devotions, contains a fifteen-part sequence of the same title. The sequence as well as the book contains much conversation with God, often interrogating His motives – even His very authority. What is the human cost of entering this mysterious place of devotion – as God once entered the mystery of “mortal flesh,” “his holiest act”? Is a “weak devotion” the closest we humans come to something holy?

Luke Hankins: Yehuda Amichai writes in his poem “Relativity”:

Someone told me he’s going down to Sinai

because
he wants to be alone with his God:
I warned him.

Indeed.

You ask what the human cost of entering “the mysterious place of devotion” is. In my experience, it is very high. And judging by what poets devoted to God throughout the ages have written, I think they would agree. But I don’t think anyone enters a devout life counting the cost—not even monastics and ascetics (which I certainly have never been). That’s because one can’t imagine or begin to comprehend the actual price until it’s already being exacted. Hopkins, in “Carrion Comfort,” writes:

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me?

The psalmist(s) of Psalm 42 write(s):

Deep calls to deep
in the roar of your waterfalls;
all your waves and breakers
have swept over me.

Some, from a perspective outside of religious or spiritual devotion, would undoubtedly say that the cost is high because the devout are fooling themselves, chasing after shadows and myths and confronting their own neuroses in the dark, working themselves into a frenzy seeking what was never there to begin with. This is certainly not a novel idea for anyone who has ever genuinely sought the divine. (E.g., see R. S. Thomas’ poem “Threshold.” Whom do you meet in the desert? Is it the Maker in whom you see all of your fears and all of your hopes embodied, or is it the Nothing in which you see only a reflection of yourown inexplicable being? And which is more terrifying?

But though the cost of entering this desert is undoubtedly high, you come away changed irrevocably—which may be worth having experienced that “dark night of the soul.” As Andrew Marvell writes:

Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown,
but vainly flapped its tinsel wing.

I grew up in an evangelical, conservative Christian environment, and I clung desperately to that faith for most of my life, through constant cycles of doubt and belief. Weak Devotions, and in particular the title poem, chronicles the doubt and belief that has always been interwoven in my life, and more recently the evolution away from traditional religious beliefs toward—what?—a deeper acknowledgment of mystery and uncertainty. This, for me, was a very traumatic transition, in which I felt thatmy framework for understanding life was torn away, leaving me floating in a void. This spiritual transition coincided with a year-long period of intense and unremitting anxiety, a psychological problem I’ve dealt with since early childhood that suddenly burst out of control, and a mercifully shorter period of depression—a depth I hope to never touch again with so much as my little toe.

I realize that to write poems about this subject risks alienating any readers who have no experience with a religious upbringing or—more to the point—with primal and deep-seated religious beliefs of their own. My hope in this respect is that something like what T. S. Eliot has said about George Herbert’s poetry might prove true of poetry like mine as well (not to in any way compare the quality of my poems with that of Herbert’s!):

"When I claim a place for Herbert among those poets whose work every lover of English poetry should read and every student of English poetry should study, irrespective of religious belief or unbelief, I am not thinking primarily of the exquisite craftsmanship, the extraordinary metrical virtuosity, or the verbal felicities, but of the content of the poems which make up The Temple. These poems form a record of spiritual struggle which should touch the feeling, and enlarge the understanding of those readers also who hold no religious belief and find themselves unmoved by religious emotion." [emphasis mine]

Finally, you ask whether a “weak devotion” is the closest we as humans may come to something holy. My response is that we as humans do not come to what is holy at all. In my (of course subjective) experience, I see the opposite as true: the holy comes to us, and we can never be ready for it. (The holy is always other—etymologically, the word implies that which is whole, complete, inviolate—unlike us.) Our weak devotion is a reaction more than it is an action. In the poem of mine you quote, I do write of entering into mystery, but that is in itself a response to a prompting from outside. Those who enter the desert do not do it of their own volition, but are driven there by the wind of the Spirit. If it were up to us, I think none of us would ever go. We don’t want the terror, the pain, the annihilation of the self. But it seems that the Holy sees fit to drive some to that point—not all, and perhaps not even many. Why this is, I couldn’t say. I happen to believe that the will behind this is beneficent, only because of having come through my small version of the experience. Had you asked me during the most trying periods, you would have been met with silence, or worse. But now, like Marvell, I do in my better moments believe despair to be magnanimous.

JB: Who are some other devotional poets you admire? I see a bit of Donne in your work, but I know you also have kept an eye out for contemporary devotional poets – some of whom I’m guessing will appear in your forthcoming anthology Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets.

LH: Yes, Donne, but even more so George Herbert, who is my hero. I admire the other “Metaphysical Poets” as well. The Old Testament prophets and psalmists have been deeply important for me, as well as The Book of Job and Ecclesiastes, and parts of the Gospels and the Epistles in the New Testament (though some of these are deeply troubling to me as well). I’ve more recently fallen in love with the medieval Persian mystic Rumi, and other Eastern texts like Tao te Ching. Gerard Manley Hopkins has always been a big influence, as you might guess. I’ve recently discovered, thanks to poet and translator Jennifer Grotz, the mid-20th century French poet Patrice de la Tour du Pin, who wrote a long sequence of psalms over his lifetime. Other dead poets whose work in the devotional mode is important to me include, in no particular order, William Cowper, Francis Thompson, Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Czeslaw Milosz, R. S. Thomas, Denise Levertov, Vassar Miller, Thomas Merton, E. E. Cummings, and Yehuda Amichai, among many others. Some of the living poets I admire include Leonard Cohen, Richard Wilbur, Andrew Hudgins, Scott Cairns, Franz Wright, Wendell Berry, Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, Maurice Manning, Morri Creech, Ilya Kaminsky, Philip Metres, Tarfia Faizullah, and Ashley Anna McHugh. But I couldn’t possibly make an exhaustive list. Look for the ones I’ve mentioned and many others in the anthology, which will include poets alive in 1950 and afterward.

JB: For such a serious book, I love when your strange humor arrives, such as in the poem “Portrait of Myself as a Barbarian.” The poem exists in “some barbarous century/ long before the invention/ of eyeglasses,” and the speaker makes his way through the world, laughing, even as the unseen wolves advance. I thought I was the only one with the private fantasy/fear of living in a time without corrective lenses, since my vision is horrible. The poem pleases me with its vulnerability and fortitude, and I wonder if it’s between those two things that humor sometimes appears. So: can we bring humor to the table when having our sit-downs with God?

LH: You mention humor in “our sit-downs with God,” and I immediately think of the character Tevye in the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” What a marvelous example of humor in conversation with the divine! Well, Tevye’s kind of humor requires a nonchalance and self-confidence that I don’t naturally possess. But there are so many kinds of humor, and perhaps the one I most appreciate in poetry arises from the kind of irony we see in Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop,or, more recently, Kay Ryan, in which a grave subject is spoken of in a relatively lighthearted way, which can paradoxically increase the emotional impact of the poem once the serious underpinnings of the humor are recognized. I hope to include more poems with this kind of humor in my next book, which is in progress under the title Ex Nihilo—a very serious, Latin title! Here’s one small example of the kind of humor I’m talking about in one of my newer poems, in its entirety:

On Judgment

In canine mythology,
Sisyphus is the most blessèd of all,
granted an eternal game of fetch.

The humor of a dog’s perspective on mythology, and on the myth of Sisyphus in particular, is obvious. But I hope that the poem also works on a deeper level, in which it comments on the way in which our perspective and our state of mind can make hell of heaven and heaven of hell—the way that what we now view as a curse we might one day learn to see as a blessing.

JB: One of my favorite poems in the book is the villanelle “A Shape with Forty Wings,” which will appear in the next issue of the American Literary Review. I’m curious how long it took you to write this poem. I have tried many villanelles over the years, and I have never written a good one. Do you need to have strong repeating lines right away, or can those come later? (Your terrific repeating lines are: “Love is strange and calls me to stranger things” and “I’ve drawn my life—a shape with forty wings.”)

LH: As with most of my poems, I wrote the initial poem fairly quickly, then over a period of several years came back to it and revised it numerous times. In this case, the refrains came first. I think that it’s helpful to have a meter in mind if you decide to come up with refrain lines first, so that instead of pulling words out of thin air you at least have some sort of framework—a length of utterance, at least—to drop them into. Here, it’s pentameter, but there are no restrictions on which meter is required in a villanelle, though pentameter has historically been a favorite in English-language villanelles.

But there is no right or wrong way to compose a poem, whether free verse or “formal.” We all work on finding what works for us—and of course what worked for us once or a dozen times may not work for the next poem, and we may have to try new strategies. The important thing is to be willing to be flexible, and once you have something on the page, to be able to achieve a level of objectivity in assessing its success or lack thereof.

JB: I know you have spoken and written about this before, including on NPR, but I wonder if you’d be willing to discuss yet one more time the assault you suffered last summer. For readers who don’t know: you were assaulted by four people in July of 2011; the perpetrators called you “faggot” and made fun of the way you were dressed, and they did not attempt to steal your money or car. This was clearly a hate crime. The attack took place in Asheville, North Carolina, a city that prides itself on its liberal – and especially, pro-gay – values. You’ve written a poem (“The Way They Loved Each Other”) about the event, and one of the things I admire about it is that the speaker recognizes a love in the attackers, even if “tribal,” “primal.” But I also admire that you were able to write such a gracious poem so quickly after the event. People sometimes make fun of poetry that seems written as therapy, but what else can a poem like yours do but attempt to heal – both yourself and the world? Are people unfair when they mock the poem of therapy, or is there a difference between therapy and art?

LH: The difficulty with comparing art and therapy is on one level merely a semantic one: we have certain associations with the sterile and history-laden word “therapy” that we are—rightly, I suppose—loath to bring into a conversation about art. Art—indeed, beauty itself—is perennially therapeutic. We might prefer the terms restorative, or calming, or invigorating, or pleasure-inducing, or any number of terms that indicate the very real physiological and psychological effects of the aesthetic experience of objects, sounds, and ideas. But regardless of how we describe it, it’s true that we often change for the better through our aesthetic experiences. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this has been true for me—so much so that the word “therapy” is quite reductive.

Writing the poem about the assault I experienced was primarily an attempt on my part to understand those who had attacked me, and by doing so to understand what seemed to me an inexplicable event. You’re right that the assailants didn’t try to steal anything. They apparently had no motive other than to hurt someone they perceived as different from themselves. And that was the most difficult aspect of the event to deal with. It filled me with inexpressible sorrow and anxiety, not only for myself but also for them. The pain of the fractured bones in my face was intense, but my inability to comprehend why or how these people could have acted this way was by far the more traumatizing aspect. I was sad not only for my experience, but for the lives of the people who had chosen to do this to me. What must their lives be like for this to be how they spent their time? But by making something out of the confusion and pain, I felt that I was able to redeem the experience and instead of dwelling on how it had hurt me or how inexplicable others’ actions were, I attempted to come to an understanding of their actions as human, as not other but as familiar. Joseph Conrad has said something marvelous in his famous “Preface”:

"[The artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts: to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."

Making art is essential to who we are as humans—we are artificers, makers, shapers. And through shaping words or paint or musical notes many of us sense that we are fully engaging with what it means to be human—and we are able to come to a fuller understanding of what it means for others to be human as well—a conviction of what Conrad calls our “solidarity.”

In the Christian tradition, humans are made “in the image of God,” and since God is the great Maker, we as reflections of the divine are also makers. For me this is one of the most beautiful and most essential Christian teachings. We make because we are made. We are made because God loves to make. We are the result of the pleasureful work of the divine. And we sense this most, perhaps, when we are ourselves engaged in the pleasureful work of making art.

Luke Hankins' first book of poems, Weak Devotions, was released by Wipf & Stock Publishers in 2011. He is the editor of an anthology entitled Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, forthcoming from Wipf & Stock in 2012. A chapbook of his translations of French poems by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, I Was Afraid of Vowels...Their Paleness, was published by Q Avenue Press in 2011. He is Senior Editor at Asheville Poetry Review, and he writes about poetry and the arts at his blog, A Way of Happening: http://awayofhappening.blogspot.com.

Sarah Vowell Gives Reading at UNT

2011-12-13T21:31:00.006-06:00

Best-selling author Sarah Vowell visited UNT last month, entertaining hundreds of admirers with her quirky-smirky take on American history. Vowell read from her latest book, Unfamiliar Fishes, an examination of how the year 1898 (when the U.S. became an imperial power, conquering islands in the Caribbean and South Pacific) was as crucial to the formation of the American psyche as the year 1776. As with her previous books, Vowell's wry, sarcastic humor is the real story here. She enlivens seemingly dead material (the history of Hawaiian Imperialism, anyone?) with astute observations of local culture (mayonaise and soy sauce co-exist in harmony) and hilarious tangents on how mainland Americans view Hawaiian culture. But as trivial as the jokes may seem at times, Vowell is always working on a deeper level: Her interest in the U.S. conquest of Hawaii is kairotic: at one point in the book, she subtly connects a palace in Honolulu circa 1898 to another in Baghdad circa 2003. Vowell argues that despite Americans' propensity to believe that we are a nation of isolationists, unsullied by colonial pasts like other world powers, our national identity has been one of conquest for some time.

What I find so refreshing about Sarah Vowell is that she doesn't seem to get caught up in the distinction between memoir and history. Her writing aesthetic implies that history is nothing without a unique living voice to tell it and interpret it. During the Q&A, she often brought up stories from her own life to explain why she finds certain historical figures so interesting. Vowell's body of work implies that history can only be interesting if we see history as a force constantly at work in our own lives. The biographies (and autobiographies) of famous men like Teddy Roosevelt are thus entwined--in subtle, surprising ways-- with our own life stories.

Review: Space in Chains

2011-12-02T12:22:00.014-06:00

Space, in Chains by Laura Kasischke
Copper Canyon Press, 2011
$16.00

Space, in Chains is Laura Kasischke’s eighth book of poetry, and, again, she carries us into a world that is tangible and temporal, devastating and gratifying. As I read this book, I was writing about family, illness, and being bound to place and time. I often wondered, and I’m not alone, how the everyday, the deeply personal can be translated to engage outside readers. And here is one answer—this collection of poetry speaks to the chains around us, visible or not, from the smallest molecule, to the everyday, to the unthinkable loss of a loved one. Kasischke reveals these bindings through extraordinary imagery and inspired syntactic control, knowing the exact moment to reveal or disguise, to accelerate or tap the breaks, creating poetry of poignant beauty and intoxicating truths.

Well-known for her unexpected and evocative imagery, Kasischke’s images feel natural and strange simultaneously, familiar and disturbingly unique, lingering in the reader’s head long after the poem is read. One example is the beginning of the first poem, “O elegant giant,” which reads

“And Jehovah. And Alzheimer. And a diamond of extraordinary size on the
hand of a starving child. The quiet mob in a vacant lot.”

Like in a word association game, somewhere between the conscious and subconscious, seemingly random, familiar but unconnected ideas are brought together, given new meaning, and presented to the reader. Then the reader begins to put the pieces together, reading in awe, hungry for the realization that strange does not equal imprecise, that opposites are not mutually exclusive.

The title poem, “Space in Chains,” is caught somewhere between the urge to live, the struggle to find purpose, and inevitability of death. The poem begins “Things that are beautiful, die.” And a few lines later, “Hamsters, tulips, love, giant squid. To live. I’m not endorsing it.” But the speaker is endorsing love, living, and the ties that bind because at the end of the poem she calls to her little boy whose existence creates a reason to live, “Sweetie, don’t be gone too long.” The poem asks: Is this life worth the worry and sorrow? The answer is yes. This collection speaks not only to the knots that bind us in one place, or the “knot” that is the “mind” or the love of a child but the pleasures that are created by being tethered. These poems also speak to how we grow to love the tether itself, how being bound is a kind of freedom.

So why should you read this book? If you want poetry that speaks like ghosts and haunts the outer rims of your brain and your soul—If you want poetry that is magical and agonizingly real—If you want poems that probe the dark riddles of life, poems of wholeness, fracturing and fusion—If you want poems that ask hard questions and sound like songs, if you grieve and have grieved, love and have loved, searched and are searching, you should read this book. What else can I say? Space, in Chains is a collection of beautifully controlled strangeness and musicality, a collection of large and small punches to the solarplex. Buy it today and feel for yourself.

An Interview with Jynne Dilling Martin

2011-12-01T15:19:00.010-06:00

Justin Bigos: I have just had the pleasure of reading the manuscript of your first book, We Mammals in Hospitable Times. The book does indeed seem to take on the larger animal experience on the planet Earth, and the voice you’ve given us is like the coolest anthropologist ever – brainy, fierce, sexual, and brimming with devilishly detailed observations and insights. Big question: what is it about poetry that provides the ideal space/form for this big mammalian brain activity?

Jynne Martin: I recently saw a portrait of the first zebra to ever arrive in England – George Stubbs painted it in 1763, and the zebra looks so confused, out of place, alone, yet watchful and curious – something burns in those big black dilated zebra eyes. This is often how I feel as I move bodily through the world – this life is so strange to me, holds so much beauty and so much sadness, and I don’t feel I am quite wired to belong here.

Something in the compactness and abruptness and weirdness possible in poetry feels like the right way to say this back to the planet. But I resonate with people saying this in any form, whether it’s Hieronymus Bosch or Chris Marker or the Log Lady from Twin Peaks.

JB: Readers will enjoy – and have enjoyed, in many magazines – your wit and humor. I laughed out loud a few times reading this book (which is rare for someone raised in Connecticut). In your poem “Beauty in Its Various Forms Appeals to You,” you describe the attempt to communicate with the “scowling stag beetle” and how even after developing a “common idiom of clicks,” “it could be months of small talk/ about hedgerows and larvae before sufficient trust was established.” The image is hilarious in part because of the tiny communication machinery you describe, but also because the poem ends so poignantly: “Clock click pause clack pause click: beloved things have been lost.” Do you find yourself drawn to a particular kind of humor? Are there certain poets you find very funny?

JM: Now you’re just trying to flatter a few bottles of Old Crow out of me – I wish I were much funnier than I am on the page. It’s so hard to be funny in poetry – we all put on our serious glasses when we sit to write or read it. IMPORTANT WORD ARRANGEMENTS HAPPENING PEOPLE FOCUS!

My favorite humor is simultaneously hysterically funny and deathly true. It exists on every page of Lydia Davis, in fragments of Stephen Crane’s Black Riders, occasional John Ashbery (especially my favorite collection Can You Hear, Bird?) and in the bodily form of Werner Herzog.

JB: Interesting that you say “occasional” Ashbery. It seems like a lot of people only like a part of him, maybe a book or two. What I like about that position is that it privileges the work over the author, over the oeuvre—which often seems to get too much attention in book reviews. I remember Elizabeth Strout at last year’s AWP conference was asked who her favorite writers were. She said, basically, “I don’t know. I remember the books. I don’t really think too much about the authors.” I found that so refreshing and honest.

JM: Liz Strout is refreshingly honest on all subjects, including her secret love of orange Hostess snack cakes. We should have a separate interview where we fly to Maine then just quote her back and forth.

JB: It’s a deal. I’d like to talk a bit about your titles. They often sound “found”: from fortune cookies, or news headlines, pulp novel chapters, even think tank reports. Did you make most of these up? Do you keep an eye out for titles, even for poems you’ve yet to write?

JM: I love titles, and that’s where almost every poem I write begins. I am shameless, gluttonous, and catholic in all the places I steal from, and my notebooks are filled with dozens of potential titles or parts of titles that I scrawl in ALL CAPS to trigger my brain. Flipping through my current notebook, some I know the source - THOSE WHO SPEAK HAVE NO SECRETS is Beckett; THE DECEASED WILL BE FOUND RIGHTEOUS AFTER HIS HEART IS WEIGHED is from the Egyptian wing of the Met; A FOOLISH ARGUMENT TO REASSURE THE CITIZENS is modified Demosthenes. Other scribbles I can’t account for, e.g. recently IN NIGHT WE ARE TWO PEOPLE and THE SAFEST WAY TO DIE; probably those were summaries of dreams I had, which is another primary title source for me.

JB: That is very cool that you write your titles before your poems, and you write them in CAPS. I may try that. You should meet a fellow here at the University of North Texas by the name of Zach VandeZande. He’s a big fan of CAPS LOCK.

JM: ZACH WILL YOU MARRY ME

JB: I wonder if you’d talk a bit about your experiences in trying to get this book published. I know you’ve been sending it out for a few years now, and even though you’ve gotten close – including being a recent finalist for the National Poetry Series – no one has taken the book. I imagine getting so close is both exciting and frustrating. Can you tell us what this experience has taught you? Do you have any advice for poets sending out their first book manuscripts?

JM: CAPS IS HOW I FEEL INSIDE ALL THE TIME JUSTIN but especially when you ask this question. The manuscript has been a finalist ten times in top contests over the past few years, 98% of the poems have been published individually in wonderful journals like Granta and New England Review, but no actual book yet. Year after year I keep holding out for one of my dream publishers or prizes to come through, which isn’t the fastest road to a book. Jeff Shotts of Graywolf did give it a very generous read about three years ago, which I deeply appreciate, as I think every book he publishes is so thoughtfully and beautifully done. Meantime I just keep writing new poems at my snail pace and pulling the weakest pages out, putting new better ones in, so the manuscript morphs into a new creature year by year.

I will add that one most useful thing I did was attend the Colrain Manuscript Conference run by the tremendous poet Joan Houlihan - you receive actual book-length manuscript feedback, which is very different than individual poem feedback.

JB: I know you are a big fan of Werner Herzog, and maybe because of this – and maybe because so many of the poems share his zoom-lens sense of the world in all its terror and splendor – I heard his voice reading certain lines of these poems. So: what are the chances we can get an audio version of your book with Mr. Herzog reading them?

JM: That is the single highest compliment I can imagine. As for having the chance to hear Werner read even one of my poems aloud, I can only wish my life may unfurl so richly that it may someday be so. For that matter I will accept collect calls from anyone who wants to phone in a bad impersonation.

JB: For the 40th Anniversary issue (Fall 2011) of Ploughshares, Ellen Bryant Voigt introduced your poem “Dropped Things Are Bound to Sink.” It’s one of my favorite poems in the book, and Ellen beautifully observes that your poetry uses “music simultaneously as a principle for order and for wildness.” I imagine you are a crazy reviser, and I wonder if it just this “music” – above (or pulsing underneath) – any other conscious concern that guides you.

JM: It was a great honor to have Ellen Bryant Voigt write that essay, and I can only hope my best poems aspire to her description. And if by “crazy” you mean neurotic, then yes absolutely. Completely crazy. I am especially neurotic about trying not to over-explain an associative thread, trying not to hedge on the weirder moments – I prefer poems to dwell in a mysterious grey robe. To quote my beloved Log Lady, “There is a depression after an answer is given.”

JB: It’s so weird you’ve twice mentioned the Log Lady: I just started my yearly Twin Peaks marathon, and it still baffles me that each episode gives viewers two options: 1. Play with Log Lady Intro and 2. Play without Log Lady Intro. What heathens would skip the Log Lady Intro? As Stephin Merritt would say, “Bad things will happen to them.”

JM: And why isn’t “Play only Log Lady Intros” an option? We need a yearly party where we sit silently in full lotus and watch her intros on a loop all day long. Zach can come and live-blog the event in ALL CAPS.

JB: Thanks so much, Jynne. I know the book will get picked up soon, and the world will be better for it. Good luck.

JM: THANK YOU JUSTIN

CASE IN POINT: BOLOGNA

Microwave bologna:
it swells into a shiny pink hill.
Most things would just die.

© Jynne Dilling Martin 2011.

Jynne Dilling Martin’s poetry has appeared in Granta, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review, New England Review, Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, TriQuarterly, Southern Review, and has been featured on the PBS “Newshour with Jim Lehrer.” She is a Yaddo fellow, and winner of the 2009 Boston Review/92nd Street Y Discovery Prize. She was also a finalist for the 2008 Ruth Lilly Prize, and was selected for the Boston Review Poet’s Sampler by Matthea Harvey.

Review: Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

2011-11-29T11:14:00.004-06:00

“Can you live your whole life at zero? Can you live your entire life in the exact point between comfort and discomfort?”

This question lies at the core of Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. It manifests in the relations between fathers and sons, between time machine repairmen and their managers, between a time traveler and his slightly melancholy time machine, whose pixilated face is forever burned into the time machine’s display, “leaving, frozen into the screen, a kind of history, a sum total of her expressions fixed into a retained outline...the melancholy algorithm of her soul averaged and captured and recorded as a function of time.” Everyone in this novel is somehow lost, frozen in some way or another.

Yu’s novel was first published last year by Pantheon and recently received a paperback release in Random’s Vintage Contemporary line, and for a book that at its core is both hopeful and melancholy it maintains a relatively light tone. The novel is brief, weighing in at less than 250 pages, and if anything could have been much longer. But that is part of the charm. This is a tightly wound narrative, one that doesn’t linger for too long in the world that it creates.

Which is not to say that the world is obscure, that time travel is just a gimmick. It is integral to the telling of this tale. The novel could not exist without taking the metaphor literally. As the narrator travels through his own life, he travels through his memory. This is the nature of time travel here, for “every time a user recalls a memory, he is not only remembering it, but also...literally re-creating the experience.” At its heart, Yu’s novel is about the relationship between a son and a father, and the ways it has gotten off course enough that the father has literally become lost in time. Somehow, the novel manages to straddle the line between monologue and narrative. Yes, it lingers in its digressions, in its explorations of the “rules” of this universe. But if it lags, it lags only for a moment. If the momentum of the piece is hindered in the flashbacks, it is hindered only for a moment, and the lighthearted tone more than makes up for this.

Because the tone is where this work shines. For a novel that begins with an epigraph from Hume, that begins with a description of its narrator’s isolation, that is concerned with grief, regret and loss, the tone is surprisingly light. Page 27 of this text contains a huge chunk of fine print. The narrator’s manager is “an old copy of Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0” who “thinks he’s a real person” and invites the narrator for a beer even after finding out it’s only a program. The book revels in its metatextuality, but not in a way that offends the reader—the narrator has a conversation with what is essentially himself halfway through the book (which is unfortunately better when experienced than when described), and the book that becomes so integral to the plot is How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. This is experimental fiction at its best; irreverent, purposeful, tasteful and poignant all at t he same time. The combination of these traits is difficult to pull off, but somehow Yu manages it. And the success lies in his ability to jump from a conversation with that manager to a scene in which a girl uses a time machine to try to save her dying grandmother, who can’t succeed without fundamentally changing her entire life, the entire universe. It lies in Yu’s ability to weave together a narrative about a father and a son that masquerades as a pure science fiction novel that, at its core, is about a far more human issue—which is something not only the best speculative fiction does, but something that the best writing does.

In which I am looping around to some kind of point about the holidays and being a writer

2011-11-26T23:17:00.002-06:00

Production editor here. I thought I’d take a minute to talk about what it means to me to be a writer while indulging in the melancholy that we’re all allowed a little bit of once the stores all start playing “Santa Baby” on a loop.

____________________________________

Thanksgiving is a tough one for me. I like to think this is true of most writers, but then, I also like to generalize about writers in order to make myself feel better about my own troubles. I do think a kind of emotional homelessness (or is it exile?) is a common trait of people who write fiction, given that we have a tendency to live at least one remove from the world, to have a keening need to make our lives, our arguments, our mistakes worthy of whatever it is we’ve settled on as worth, either there in the moment or after the fact when we’re trying to make meaning out of whatever stuff we’ve got to work with. Plus we’re all kind of dissatisfied with our lives and want them to be better in ways that don’t exist. We all want to be Gurov by the sea.

(As an almost-related aside, I was recently accused of being someone who drives a knife in just for the grace of doing it well [and even now, I’m cleaning up the accusation, making it my own], which is true enough. I do everything that way. It’s all performance with me, it’s all the crafting of words on a page as I go, but it’s not dishonest performance. It’s just that the performance can get in the way. And that’s the trouble as I saw it on my long drive back from Las Cruces today—I put the performance first. But then I got to thinking, and I started to think that maybe it’s more about asserting my own sense of free will and identity, both of which I view as very fragile things [I’ve read theory, after all]. Which just loops back around to performance. So. Whatever.)

For Thanksgiving this year I went to see two of my best friends at New Mexico State. I know I’ll always have a home with them; the trouble is it’s not my home. The same is true of my parents’ home, of my brother and sister’s homes, of the homes of friends, of my own apartment here in Denton. I’ve racked up a surprising amount of people who want to make me welcome, and though I don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, I rarely feel truly, you know, welcome. When I talk to my friends about this kind of thing, they’re all quick to say “Oh, everybody loves you.” Which is true as far as I can tell, but here’s the awful part: it’s something inside of me that keeps me from feeling it. Doesn’t that make it worse? Doesn’t that mean it’s something that I may never escape? The fact is that they’re just looking through the keyhole that I’ve crafted for them into the big brown room of my brain, and so there’s always the assumption that what they love is the performance, the voice, the keyhole, and not the room behind it. I think too much is what, I read too much DF Wallace, I linger too long on what it is to be authentic, and, in a way, I am terrified of a world in which I’m not an incessantly chattering voice.

You know where I feel welcome? In an idea. In a perfect sentence. In that liminal space between thought and instinct that is going on in this very sentence right here as I’m putting it down. Whoosh it comes and there it is. This is what my good friend and teacher Miro Penkov meant when he said that writing poisons your life. It’s touching the ideal, and then you’ve had it for only a second, you’ve been Gurov by the sea, and then what?

What I’ve decided you must do to mitigate this if you’ve chosen this abhorrent way to live (and it is an abhorrent way to live) is to find the people who understand as best they can and dwell among them as best you can. The PhD program here (plus my friends in New Mexico, who are both writers as well) has provided me with that in a way that no other community has. I’ve had conversations here that no other place I’ve been would abide. The people in those other places would just turn up the TV if they heard me and my friends talking. They would scoff at the way we love each other, they would say we are always either too oblique or too direct, too much bullshit or too much earnesty. As for me, I would be nowhere else, with no other people than my fellow writers.

It will mostly be hard. You’ll spend most of your time in your head, trapped there, maybe, which will sometimes make the community I just talked about seem incidental or barely there. You will stay up late and wonder if what you are doing is worthwhile, which is precisely the feeling that makes you realize that it probably is. In truth, most of you (and I am including myself in these odds) will fail in a very real, concrete way. But we’re all going to fail. We’re all failing right now. Language is the very essence of failure. And so what you must do if you’ve chosen this abhorrent way to live is to make it count: fail beautifully.

ALR Student Reading Series Saturday!

2011-11-18T10:40:00.001-06:00

Dr. Fawzia Afzal-Khan on memoir

2011-11-15T14:10:00.005-06:00

On Saturday, November 5th, Dr. Fawzia Afzal-Khan gave a reading and Q&A at UNT. Fawzia was in Denton to give a paper at UNT’s South Asia Peace Conference. She is a University Distinguished Professor of English and the Director of Women and Gender Studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She has published poetry, plays, and books of literary and cultural criticism. Her memoir Lahore with Love Growing up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style was originally published by Syracuse University Press in 2010, and received rave reviews from both magazines and notable individuals such as Nawal el Saadawi, Bapsi Sidhwa, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Mandy Van Deven. Syracuse University Press dropped the book after a “character” threatened a lawsuit that proved inadmissible. But despite this attempted censorship—which Fawzia details on her website and in an appendix to the new edition of her book—her memoir remains in print with Insanity Ink Publications.

Fawzia’s memoir is the story of the past fifty years of Pakistan’s political, cultural, and social transformations. The book is both global and local, personal and political, and, as Carole Stone states in her introduction, it is “both a paean and rebuke to Pakistan, the country of Fawzia’s birth. It is a witness to violence against women, strictures of a patriarchal society, and narrow-minded religion, and dictorial government.” The Pakistan that Fawzia and her girlfriends inhabit is a country continually in flux, struggling to define itself in and against the increasingly homogenizing forces of globalization. The hopes, fears, triumphs, and shifting inter-relationships of this close group of female friends reveals, as Fawzia detailed in an interview, both “nostalgia for that vanished secular past and promise of Pakistan” as well as an acknowledgement of the reality of the country’s present. Yet Fawzia’s life as an international literary figure and activist diverges from the lives of her girlfriends who have remained in Pakistan, causing her to feel that she is constantly on “that rusty see-saw” remembered from childhood, a traveler both at home and abroad.

Fawzia is not the first writer to face controversy in telling the story of her life. Memoir is a genre often fraught with conflicting demands: to tell the truth, but to also acknowledge that memory can never be entirely truthful. To depict, then, these conflicting truths of memory in the most honest manner, but to also render the events of the past in a meaningful way. To give “reality” an unreal and artificial narrative structure necessarily means foregrounding some truths and letting others fall by the wayside.

In the Q&A after the lively reading which included singing, a theatrical dialogue, and “love” poetry, Fawzia discussed the role of the writer in composing memoir, stating that she was surprised and shocked that the offended character protested her depiction in the book—a depiction that Fawzia herself thought was more praise than condemnation. Many of the female characters in Lahore with Love lead lives circumscribed by oppression, struggling to exist in a patriarchal society that places little value in female narratives and voices. Madina, the offended character in what Fawzia calls “the offending chapter,” stands out for being one of the few women in the book who are able to speak without being silenced. Physically and psychologically, Madina stands out, speaks out, and carves a place for herself in the world. Controlling her public image—an image evidently upset by Fawzia’s memoir, although Fawzia told us that no one had been able to identify her character’s real-life counterpart before the scandal—seems in character with the orchestrated dramatizations that Fawzia depicts in the book. But the attempt to squelch Fawzia’s voice—her memoir—does not.

In some respects, all press is good press, and Fawzia’s memoir is now more well-known than ever. Dr. Masood Raja, a professor at UNT and editor and founder of Pakistaniaat, A Journal of Pakistan Studies, published a cluster on Lahore with Love last summer, showcasing an outpouring of support for the book. You can purchase the book directly here or on amazon.com.

An Interview with Carl Phillips

2011-11-07T17:31:00.005-06:00

Justin Bigos: One of my favorite poems in your latest book, Double Shadow, is “The Need for Dreaming,” which you read for us last night at the University of North Texas. The poem asks the question of the usefulness of love, of beauty: “useless? It gets harder to say.” The voice, in this difficulty -- over and over, throughout the book -- finds a way past the question into maybe not an answer, but a better proposition: “I think/ to be useless doesn’t have to mean/ not somehow mattering.” The poem can be read as a defense of poetry itself, but maybe more importantly as a private struggle over the point of living. The sharing of this struggle is a profound gift. This is a huge question, but what do you hope for your readers after they put down your poetry?

Carl Phillips: Partly, I hope that a reader might see that not only is there a private struggle that each of us is going through -- just part of being alive -- but that our struggles aren't always all that different from another person's. I'd like a reader to feel that I've been able to give some sort of language to what maybe the reader has felt but not been able to articulate. Or there's also just the comfort of knowing that you aren't alone in your quest for something like purpose in a life . . .

JB: Another poem you read last night was “Fascination.” The poem ends with the image of a dying fox beneath thick brush. After reading the poem you mentioned that someone had recently asked you where such a world exists -- and you quipped, “In my backyard?” Do we sometimes forget, or not see, the natural world around us, especially in our cities? Even when not in, say, the botanical gardens of St. Louis, are you thinking of foxes, dragonflies, star magnolia, yellow-crested night heron?

CP: I guess many people do, in fact, miss the natural world for the urban one that can seem so much more overwhelming. But it's everywhere. I do live in a city, but I can catch sight of a spider's web in the light of a lamppost at night, and stand for minutes, just staring at it. For me, the natural world is all the more stunning when it surprises us where we hadn't expected it. As for me, I don't know that I'm always thinking about these things, but I'm open to them -- so, when a chicken hawk flies right overhead as I'm walking my dog, I notice it. Which is different from looking for it. I think these things are around for us to see all the time -- we don't have to be looking for them.

JB: Before the reading you mentioned the T’ang Dynasty poets, in particular Li Po and Tu Fu, as early influences. Last year in North Carolina I taught a poetry workshop themed around the parallels between ancient Chinese and Appalachian poetry, and it was amazing to see how strongly the students responded to writers like Tu Fu, Wang Wei, and Li Po. What do you think these particular poets -- even in translation -- have to offer a young writer?

CP: I think they are proof that poetry can be powerful simply by being clear, straightforward, elemental. Because of the clarity, those poems seem to speak with an immediacy that feels very contemporary, which is to say, it immediately includes us as readers. There's also an intimacy to the poems, that also includes us. I return to the T'ang poets almost every night before going to bed -- what's strange about the apparent simplicity is that the poems seem to deliver something new each time . . . For young writers, I think the appeal is that poetry, in the hands of Li Po, Wang Wei, and Tu Fu, seems approachable, not just because of the clarity, but also because so much of it is about being human and flawed: getting drunk, being sad, missing a friend. When I was first shown poetry in school, it was nothing like this -- everything seemed to require translation, even from English, into something I could understand. It made poetry seem intimidating from the start.

JB: It meant so much to have you here with us in Denton. Thank you.

CP: Thank you, Justin -- I had a wonderful visit.

Carl Phillips is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Double Shadow, currently a finalist for the National Book Award. He is a Professor of English and African and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

ALR Reading Series Excerpts

2011-10-31T09:54:00.000-05:00

Shout outs to our wonderful readers, Young George for the wonderful photos, and Simone Lounge for hosting us yet again.

Poetry by Chelsea Wagenaar

"Matins"

This morning’s matins are dream-based, fear-infused,
a first groggy plea not to still be waiting tables,
not to have my teeth break off and spew out of my mouth,
not to be coiled and bound on a precipice, awaiting
the promised superhero. He’s probably been detained—
perhaps stumbling heat-ravaged through the furnace
of lower Texas, or on a South American vacation,
unable to turn his eyes from the glaciers of Patagonia,
cerulean and windswept, terrible. The city of ice
reminds him of another, a city of glass towers
they’d called it, which he’d swooped in to rescue
from gangs and mafias, only to find all the ornithologists
wandering the streets stunned, mute, gathering
the stilled bodies of white-throated sparrows
from the sidewalks. Their shattered anatomies.
A whistle trapped in each throat, the world
that much quieter.
Cold coffee this abandoned morning,
straggling rain, thumbed out sun. Vagrant tongue,
I’ve followed you here, your far-fetched horizons,
your tall tales. Too often you return empty.
O Lord, there are even elegies for the guilted sidewalks,
small laments that throb to be heard, so what
is your reply? Word made feather. Made glacier.
Made flesh—that your eyes are fixed here,
your ears lashed and ragged with the tatters of prayers.

Nonfiction by Courtney Craggett

from "The First Day"

We were travelers, all of us running, running either from or toward – running from a bad economy, family obligations that had become too heavy, religions that were no longer our own; running toward love, adventure, cheaper master’s degrees, cultural enlightenment. And there we found ourselves, bound together in a new culture, in a new language, trying to make sense of everything and find our place in a world that was suddenly much larger than it had ever been before.

There was Caitlin from Boston, never afraid to speak her mind and at first a shock to my Texas-drenched sensibilities. There was Kristin, who said she came to Mexico and felt like she’d found her true nationality. There was Sarah. She wore a brand new engagement ring and was planning for her wedding next summer. There were Cynthia and Nikki, both from Mexico and the US, neither one exactly sure of where she belonged, so both of them here for now. There were others, too – Shannon and Angela and Claritza and Caro and Sebastian. I didn’t know any of them then, but in the year ahead I’d go wedding dress shopping with them, watch three of them get married, attend baby showers for another three, help one down the stairs when she sprained her knee, road trip to Acapulco with a few others, bake cupcakes, make dinners, celebrate holidays, watch movies. But all of that came later.

The air was sharp on that first morning. Back in Texas my family was gearing up for another 105-degree day, but down here, two hours south of Mexico City, the mountains had snow on them and the wind raised goose bumps on my arms. Although my roommate Kay and I had been to the high school a few times, we’d never taken the bus. Up until now school administration had driven us around. Como podemos llegar a La Paz, we asked a few men on the corner of the 31. “How do we get to La Paz?”

Poetry by Mark Wagenaar

excerpt coming soon!

An Interview with Rose McLarney

2011-10-27T22:14:00.022-05:00

Justin Bigos: Rose, there are many things to admire in your forthcoming, first book of poems, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains. The book contains voices, and yet I sense a voice; stories, and yet I sense a story. You have a poem titled “Ars Poetica,” and another titled “Poet,”but there are many poems in this collection that could stand for the whole, the way a leaf of a fern looks like a fern. It’s a big question, but can you talk a bit about how you see these poems speaking to each other? And how did that help you arrange them into the pages of a book?

Rose McLarney: These are my ambitions for The Always Broken Plates of Mountains: A cast of speakers, like a chorus, express the thoughts of people who share a rural background and landscape. The landscape is more than the physical setting in the Appalachian mountains—it’s an atmosphere created by weaving together stories of both personal and larger cultural loss. The poems are not only about romantic love, but perhaps more significantly, about faithfulness to place. Though the perspective in this sequence varies, the poems are united by a characteristic voice. The voices are alike in that they are understated and musical, with tendencies to defer and deflect, as were the voices around me as I grew up. The voices are also united because they speak of love and loss, experiences that are so utterly un-unique that perhaps the only way they can be interesting is to use them as points of commonality.

At least that’s what I hope happens in the book. A significant time for me as a writer was a morning when I was shuffling through my many poems and began to think that they weren’t necessarily redundant because they addressed the same themes, or necessarily at odds because their speakers were different, but that they could work together. Now, reading and writing poems in series and sequences is a kind of acknowledgment that, though poetry can look so concise and definitive, you can’t express a thing well enough all that quickly or easily. Or I can’t. Sequences give me a chance to make the admission that I may never articulate what I want to completely, yet show my continuing best efforts.

Of course, while series allow me to try out different iterations of an idea, they are also limiting. A number of the poems I write just wouldn’t fit in this book. (For instance, some of my greatest pleasures are rather exotic cooking and experimental music and those subjects have no home in The Always Broken Plates of Mountains.) I’m well into working on my second book and, for it, I am trying to write distinctly different poems about another country, another continent, from another point of view, and there will be poems that won’t find company in this collection either.

In answer to your question about how the poems are arranged in the book, they are grouped by and progress through an arc of tones (though nothing as neat as a plot triangle). My intention was for the book to feel as if it resolved—even if the resolution at which it arrives is a message about disappearing, keeping quiet, being still. (Those may be some of the predominant messages I got from mountain culture. I don’t want to romanticize it. Of course, that instruction in humility may have also prepared me to inhabit personas.)

JB: I admire the various qualities of imagery in the book. In your poem “At the Mountain State Fair,” you write, “Rides are lighting up the night,/ shaking people and making them shriek.” The imagery resides in the music of the lines: the long i sounds in the first line, which rises in pitch—suddenly shaken by the long a and sh-sounds and jerky rhythm in the second line. You’ve managed to create the sense of a roller coaster in only two lines. In another poem you write the indelible image of bridesmaids climbing a silo to line “the steel tower/ with fuchsia, powder pink, red, and orange satin.” The image is striking in its colorful juxtaposition. How do poems let you know if they require different qualities of image? Are you mostly listening to the lines or seeing what they summon?

RM: My ideas tend to originate from images. Every night, I make myself write one image from the day in a notebook. The notebook is in no way a journal—you could read it and have absolutely no ideas of the events that had occurred. But the notes give me something to search through for commonalities, and allow me to start poems from a concrete, grounded source.

Only after I’ve got a sense of what I want the poem to say do I let sound drive it. I don’t turn to sound as a source until later because, as much as I am drawn to music, I understand it less and coherence and clarity are big concerns of mine. Yet, sound is essential—and I’m appreciative that you noted it in your analysis—because it is often what lets writing achieve some sort of transcendence, something I didn’t expect, and it is what can save my poems from being overly rational arguments or simplistic equations of image and meaning.

JB: One of the recurring concerns in the book is story. Story is often associated with the South, and your poems both embrace and toy with that association. In your poem, “They Said It Was Too Late,” you write of meeting a man “who told the kind of stories/ I wanted to hear.” In “Jubilation, Then,” the speaker says, “Once, stories . . . were like explosions of elderberries.” And in “Disclaimer,” the speaker mentions a place called “Lover’s Leap,” named for a Cherokee girl who killed herself out of love, but actually is just a place where “a coon hunter” fell over—and lived. The final stanza of the poem: “and you can see why they tell the story/ the way they do,/ and why I prefer their stories.” While the poems embrace story, as it is connected to place, the speakers seem to understand that story is ultimately a fiction, a work of art—and therefore to be savored. How much is your book a defense of story, in the Southern tradition—if it is such, and if there is such—and how much of this is just Rose McLarney being Rose McLarney?

RM: While I value the way poetry can stay in a moment and I have never been particularly interested in what happens—in events, in action, in change, in leaving—I am interested in story in the sense that I am interested in how the manner of telling makes the meaning. We all know that eyewitness accounts are not dependable evidence, that any two people’s memories of events and exchanges differ. So, whether it’s about a region or a relationship, when you choose to tell a story with nostalgia or condescension or another tone, you are making the history it will survive as longer than whatever the actuality was. If you can stand the story-teller role, there’s a way in which what you know well never is really lost.

The poem you mentioned earlier, my “Ars Poetica,” is not literally my story, which should give you an idea of how thoroughly I take advantage of personas. The speaker’s rarely Rose McLarney. I’m not all that fascinating and I worry about being liked too much. That’s why I am constantly espousing the idea to my students that what could really be most liberating in writing poems is not confessing their autobiographical secrets but becoming someone else.

Perhaps even worse than that for my students, if they misapply my writing advice to their personal lives, is my suggestion that there are truths truer than the truth. To elaborate on what any fiction writer knows: While the chalk mine in “Ars Poetica” might have been a couple counties away from the school I attended, or a man’s diction was not quite so refined, if it is the image of that stripped mountain or the summation of his words that best and most economically illustrates what I want the reader to register, isn’t the altered version the more accurate?

All that said, the poems are representative of, emblematic of, and indebted to direct experience of the landscape and culture in which I live.

JB: Just to clarify: I meant Rose McLarney the poet, not the person. And I’m glad you keep bringing up the idea of persona. I think of all poetry as persona, but unless the voice is, say, Malcolm X or a pencil sharpener, it’s easy to sometimes read a poet’s work as autobiographical—especially if that person is sitting right in front of you in workshop and his or her work shows a consistency of voice and subject. I think this is why workshops discourage commenting on content itself, though I think that discouragement can sometimes handicap discussion. As a teacher, do you think strong workshops allow for both discussion of craft and content? Can you truly critique a voice, not just for the way it sings, but also for what it’s singing?

RM: Well you know, just this morning a colleague asked how I approached Czeslaw Milosz in class and I said, “I’m sorry, but when I teach Milosz, I talk about content.” Recalling that, it seems beyond silly to have apologized for looking at what a poem means, especially when talking about a poet whose perspectives on issues such as war were so un-dogmatic, honest, nuanced, and self-effacing . So, yes, viewing content as an unmentionable is a handicap if it makes poets avoid social commentaries even when times demand them, or avoid the risk of writing poems that are otherwise of consequence. (I’m still trying to figure out how to write responses to environmental degradation that are as valid as Rick Bass’s or Ann Pancake’s, among others’.)

The focus on craft in workshops is well intentioned, in that at least it gives readers a vocabulary with which to better communicate their enthusiasm about the particulars of poems, and steers exchanges away from a focus on qualitative judgments about our personal enjoyment of or identification with a piece.

But I suspect that what makes a good writer (in addition to rigor, etc.) is an empathy for and understanding of and surrender to the things you write about, and the people to whom you write. The problem is that that sounds moralistic, and teaching a worldview might not be appropriate and is certainly harder than teaching, for instance, meter and form.

I can’t make students go out and have the direct educational experience of, say, poverty. Or watching livestock closely enough that you can begin to predict how they move, waiting long enough that they no longer think of your presence, and getting up the courage to make the contact—grab the horns. So I teach what I can in a classroom.

An essential part of teaching is trying to give good models of writing to students. I often start classes with the Larry Levis quote, “The best beginning poets I know are also the most literary: what they demonstrate is a love of poetry rather than a love for themselves.” While I myself had no literary background when I began writing, I think broader willingness to turn your attention to the thoughts and efforts of others is essential. Jack Gilbert also expresses this idea in a way that ties in nicely with the phrasing of your question. From his poem “How to Write Poetry”:

There is a wren sitting in the branches
of my spirit and it chooses not to sing.
It is listening to learn its song.
Sits in the Palladin light trying to decide
what it will sing when it is time to sing.

JB: Two of my favorite poems in this book have goats in them. In the poem “In Admiration,” you write a love poem to goats, animals that herd together when in danger, and “let wolf, dog, any other// save them from deciding/ which will be sacrificed.” As if the reader is not already weeping with love for goats, you end the poem with the image of the goats “beside each other,// heads bowed—/ heads with horns// and still, they bow.” The last poem I read that had as beautiful a human love for animals was Maurice Manning’s “Panegyric Against the Consolation of Grief.” I know that you own some goats and other animals, and I think you have some experience farming. Please talk about your goats. It will make me happy.

RM: I don’t deserve to be called a farmer. I used to work for a nonprofit that served Appalachian family farmers so I understand their lot and there was a time when I was making progress towards producing food myself. But just as I was expanding my livestock operations, my teaching and writing opportunities also expanded and I am choosing the white collar route.

I do still have plenty to say about goats, though. I learned about self-sufficiency in general and certain skill sets in particular as I taught myself (mostly from kids’ 4-H books, which were at about my level) how to care for goats, poultry, cattle, zebus, and other livestock; how to recognize symptoms and give injections; how to earn the trust or obedience of nonverbal beings; and so on.

We spent yesterday hand-digging a grave for a goat (rather than composing poems or prepping for classes as we should have been). We dug a hole, we put something we wanted to be rid of in the hole, we filled it back up with the same dirt again, and (in spite of the addition of the mass of the body) all we ended up with was a sunken spot and disturbed grass. Caring for animals, there is often a point when you will no longer get something practical out of them such as a cut of meat. You won’t get something personal such as affection. (Ill animals have off-putting behaviors.) You won’t get something artistic such as unusual, visceral image. (I’ve banned myself from writing anymore about livestock in the new book.) But you are still responsible for the animals, and that’s important. Sometimes, the only thing I get out of animals is larger and harder than a lesson: questions about how I could have ever presumed to be responsible for, to own, to make decisions about, any other life, or considered agriculture—human intervention in the natural world—a virtue. Everything doesn’t have to be turned into a product, a poem, to be significant.

Nevertheless, to bring this back around to poetry, what makes that Maurice Manning poem one of my favorite poems, is that it takes on the challenge of being “against the consolation of grief” and succeeds. It looks to what could be called simpler times and the more basic natures of animals with true tenderness. But it doesn’t force from its examination an unrealistic lesson, on how the “rural scene” can be saved or redeemed, or anything else.

JB: I’m so happy that you also love that poem. I’ve read it many times. There are certain poets (Raymond Carver and Antonio Machado are two more) who amaze me in how they can get away with such direct declaration of emotion. I think most poets of our generation would be unlikely to begin a poem, as Manning does, “Yes, my heart is sore and heavy-laden.” While not all of us are writing the “skittery” poem Tony Hoagland has written about, we do seem to be very suspicious of stated emotion, preferring instead something like “emotional complexity”—a recurring phrase in blurbs and reviews that has always bugged me. Is there something to be said for the powerful, simple emotion in poetry? Don’t we usually tell our students to not wear their hearts on their sleeves (and secretly envy them when they do)?

RM: It’s not just students writing poems that I envy. It’s those animals that butt in anger or bay with desire, people who go more directly through their lives. The most moving words that have been spoken to me personally were not said by writers, but less mincing speakers who just went unabashedly for meaningful expression. (See the compliment in the first line of the book’s title poem, or various lines of dialogue borrowed from physical laborers, woodworkers with their terminologies, backwoodsmen.)

My grandmother’s advice for social situations—“speak softly, leave early”—applies well to poems and how they effectively deliver messages. (The admonition, when dancing, to “leave space for the good Lord between you” may be relevant too.) Though she may have claimed it was advice about how to be modest, I think it’s really about how to be intriguing, charming.

Similarly, the point of subtlety in poems, to my mind, is to ingratiate yourself to the reader so they’ll pay careful attention, rather than to avoid emotion altogether. In workshops, I am always asking writers what’s at stake, and to reveal more of the occasion for poems, rather than to view poems as something in which to veil meaning.

These lines of Louise Gluck’s offer worthwhile thoughts on candor: “It is true there is not enough beauty in the world. / It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. / Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.” However, for me, there is an excess of beauty and the more challenging, very emotional task is to distill and do justice to some bit of that.

JB: I agree that there is an excess of beauty in this world—and it takes something even more than “candor” to praise it. By the way, did your grandmother get that line about speaking softly and leaving early from Flannery O’Connor? That really rings a bell.

RM: That grandmother’s reading material was probably limited to the Bible and women’s magazines. My other grandmother, who was mercifully unconcerned with appearances, did read O’Connor, though. We wrote each other letters all through my childhood and when I look back at my earliest poems and find a surprisingly old voice I imagine it’s because my first writing was an exchange with an old woman. (Lately, people haven’t told me I’m an old soul as much as they used to. I don’t think I’ve tapped into some sort of joie de vivre, but rather, that I’m getting old enough that that’s no longer flattering.)

JB: There is a very palpable acceptance of change—to the land, to industry, and to human relations—in the pages of your book, but there is also a respect for the past and its traditions. How do you reconcile these ideas?

RM: I do respect the past. In an attempt to write poems with a lasting quality, I like to draw imagery from a time when things did not so quickly become dated and disposable. And imagining those who inhabited this land before me—noting the sunken spot in the floor always in front of stoves in old houses, from years of women faithfully standing there, or the silky wood always at the tops of stiles, from years of men pressing their hands there each time they climbed over—both gives me a sense of company and puts me in my place, as one in a succession.

Perhaps even more than I respect the past, I respect the human tendency towards nostalgia. I recognize that a lot of us feel it, and I don’t think it’s a terrible fault. Southern literature is associated with nostalgia, but major figures like Faulkner and O’Connor and Agee were just more direct in indicting the South for causing its own decay by clinging to tradition than a lot of regional writers. I see the inclination to note that things aren’t like they used to be everywhere. It’s here in the Susan Sontag essay, “Unguided Tour,” on the page the creative nonfiction textbook beside my desk has fallen open to. (“I took a trip to see the beautiful things. Change of scenery. Change of heart. And do you know? What? They’re still there. Ah, but they won’t be there for long. I know. That’s why I went. To say goodbye. Whenever I travel, it’s always to say goodbye.”) It’s a theme in the Anthony Goicolea exhibit I saw last week. (The contemporary American-born artist addresses the nostalgia about Cuba his immigrant family taught him by creating mythological family portraits of people and places he has never directly known.)

Going back to what I said before: Many of my poems might seem like love poems to people—and some are, love poems to concepts of people entertained at some point, if not to exact individuals—but they are more deeply about love for a place, and a place in time. I use the love poem because the one who got away or the one you’ll never get over seems to be an idea to which a reader of any background can relate. Right now I am very happy, but sufficiently telling the person I love how I love him still eludes me. That means that inadequacy, or at best, imprecision, remains a major theme of what is purely a love poem, just as it is in a poem that deals with themes of heritage. At times, my poems react against the downtrodden, make-do kind of perspective that is the heritage in quarters of Appalachia I’ve known. Other times, I think having a work ethic and little expectation of ease can help a poet—that’s when I’m sure getting to keep trying to tell it right is a good way to spend my life.

JB: I spent this morning on my concrete balcony in north Texas reading this book, and I thank you for transporting me for a little while to the mountains of southern Appalachia. The book is beautiful, and I am happy that in a few months the world will get to read it.

RM: There’s a long period between when a manuscript is accepted and when it is published, so in a way, my own book is already transporting me back too. I am happy that I can capture and pass on the stories I have had the good fortune to hear, and thankful to the people who let me listen.

This is sounding like an acceptance speech, but I have to say I’m also thankful to writers who have influenced me, regardless of where they are from, and for people who read, teach, and edit poetry who have pleasantly, surprisingly, wanted to listen to me. Fellow writers have provided encouragement and (even though I often find the word over-used and cloying, in this case it seems earned) community closer and kinder than that of a small town.

Three Wishes

To have two long-legged dogs
named Thither and Yon,
loyal to me. A man
who hears when I say, Let me alone,
and lifts me over fences and creeks

anyway. And an understanding
of the moss that lines paths
through the woods, if it
invites me onward, or
to lay down where I already am.

from The Always Broken Plates of Mountains by Rose McLarney.
© 2012 by Rose McLarney. Printed with permission by Four Way Books.

Four Way Books will publish Rose McLarney's book, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, in 2012. She was awarded Alligator Juniper’s 2011 National Poetry Prize and the Joan Beebe Teaching Fellowship in 2010; was a finalist for the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Fellowship this year; and is currently a nominee for the Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in publications including The Kenyon Review, Orion, Painted Bride Quarterly, Provincetown Arts Magazine, and New England Review. McLarney earned her MFA from Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers and teaches writing at the college. She grew up in rural western North Carolina, where she continues to live on an old farm.

ALR Graduate-Student Reading Series 10.21

2011-10-19T10:49:00.002-05:00

Jaimy Gordon and the polyvocal world of Lord of Misrule

2011-10-18T16:33:00.012-05:00

Award-winning author Jaimy Gordon visited UNT last Tuesday. In her Q&A with students and faculty, she described her writing as simultaneously "all about voice" and tightly plotted and carefully structured. She described the writing process as one which uses imagination to create or locate narrative in the raw material of the observable world. This creation comes though on the page via a "massaging" of language, sometimes using "a voice that's trying to replace the real world with its idiosyncratic output" in a technique that Gordon calls "heightened first person." Gordon also stressed grounding a story in the literal world and creating a plot that unfolds towards a central event that connects all of the characters. The story, she said, should function on two levels: a surface story that contains a deeper undertow or undercurrent of thematic depth. Although she draws from folktales, fairy tales, opera, and a host of writers stretching from present day to the seventeenth century, Gordon keeps her own writing in Lord of Misrule, winner of the 2010 National Book Award, solidly planted in the universe of its racetrack setting.

Author Andrei Codrescu, one of the fiction judges for the 2010 National Book Award, states that Jaimy Gordon has "an incredible command of other voices, and a sense of music in language that is unequaled.” Lord of Misrule is praised as “moving and lyrical,” possessing prose that is “moody, poetic, darkly funny,” with language that is “so textured that her pages seem three-dimensional.” In the world of Lord of Misrule, racetrack slang mingles with gangster dialect and the ingredients for “horse goofer dust,” a magical concoction that guarantees a horse to win—but also results in that horse’s destruction. A polyvocal novel, each section of Lord of Misrule shows us another facet of the world of horse racing: owners and trainers, groomers and jockeys, gangster financiers and, of course, the horses themselves, who speak though their intricately described gestures on and off the track.

Lord of Misrule is also a page-turner, masterfully constructed of unexpected reversals of fortune. And as Jaimy Gordon states in an interview with Bret Anthony Johnston, she “believes deeply in plot, or rather in whatever attribute it is of novels that makes a reader need to know what happens in the end.” Horse racing presents an obvious arc: who will win? And in the hands of a lesser writer, a horse race’s outcome might be the central question of the book. But by the time we get to the arrival of the Lord of Misrule, the titular horse, we’ve already been through three races, and a kidnapping, and watched as each voice, gesture, and description, using language high and low, spirals around a tightly constructed core. The Lord of Misrule appears in the final section of the novel, a demon horse brought in to run a fixed race. The melee of Gordon’s close-third perspectives unites to watch him arrive in third person plural: “They were all looking for a van like a Chinese jewel box.” In this van— a vehicle in fact disappointingly ordinary—is the horse, who possesses a head that is “calm, black and poisonous of mien as a slag pile in a coal yard. He had a funny white stripe like a question mark on his forehead.” The horse’s arrival is big news, “they looked at each other and they thought, this is big, and how can we get a piece of it, we’ll take anything, even a hoof paring, sawdust, loose change.” But The Lord of Misrule could care less about their adoration, providing a stark contrast between the stuff of dreams and the more mundane ingredients of hard realities. Upon arriving at the run-down Indian Mound Downs, he throws back this same head and “snorted out dust and rolled his eye at the other cheap horses. His black tail arched and, ugly as Rumpelstiltskin, he let drop great soft nuggets, part gold, part straw, all the way down the ramp.”

Please join us on Thursday, November 3rd for our next visiting writer, poet Carl Phillips, who will participate in a Q&A in LANG 314 at 4 pm and give a reading in the Golden Eagle Suite of the University Union at 8 pm. Phillips' most recent book, Double Shadow (FSG 2011) was just named a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in poetry.

Hey, here's some stuff I read

2011-10-17T09:48:00.000-05:00

I think it's important in a literary landscape that seems sometimes obsessed with its own image as ever-dwindling and unnecessary to talk about and celebrate the success stories. Here's one: Can Harper Perennial Reinvent Publishing

And if you're a fan of David Foster Wallace, Mary Karr, Jeffrey Eugenides, or Jonathan Franzen, or if you are the kind of person for whom lit. gossip is a weird kind of catnip, then you owe it to yourself to read this: Just Kids.

And... that's it. I'm sure Laura will be by later to be a much better blogger than I.

Phillip Lopate on the Genre of Creative Non-Fiction

2011-10-11T12:49:00.007-05:00

Last Wednesday, prolific author Phillip Lopate visited the University of North Texas. He gave a reading and participated in a Q&A with students. Lopate is one of the giants of CNF, editing the anthology The Art of the Personal Essay (Doubleday-Anchor, 1994), which is a required tome in all nonfiction classes. He is equally at home in the genres of fiction and poetry; his three most recent books are Two Marriages (novellas, Other Press, 2008), the nonfiction book Notes on Sontag (Princeton University Press, 2009), and At the End of the Day: Selected Poems (Marsh Hawk Press, 2010). Despite, or perhaps because of, his facility in "writing across genres," Lopate defended CNF as a distinct genre with its own rules and quirks, although arguably one that lacks the kinds of systematized studies or theories that unpack fiction and poetry. Although CNF is older than most give it credit for, it is often viewed as the younger, less sophisticated (though maybe more fun!) sibling of fiction and poetry. Fake memoirs! Real memoirs about trashy subjects! Fake memoirs about trashy reality stars!

Lopate offered an interesting insight about the state of CNF today, namely that it faces pressure to be "more like fiction, " containing dialogue, scenes, and action. He urged against inserting short-story-esque "epiphanies" or the more formal structures of poetry into the CNF form, allowing instead for an essay to follow an "interesting consciousness" as it tries to make sense of the world. In this sense, CNF brings the personal into the writing process, dramatizing the very nature of being and bringing writing back to the point were it was said to veer away from authorial intent.

But when I taught UNT's multi-genre introductory level creative writing class last spring, this fictionalization and depersonalization of experience is exactly how the multi-genre textbook that I used (Heather Sellers' The Practice of Creative Writing) instructed one to transition between CNF and fiction. Tell your students, it said, to place the events of their life into a narrative arc. Lopate didn't say to dispense with narrative arcs altogether (he did say that an essay must contain a sense that we are "getting somewhere"), but above this he championed the meditation on life, what he termed the "drama of consciousness" or thinking itself "enacted" on the page. It's a bold approach that invigorates "telling," that venerates an "amoeba-like structure," and that allows for a new kind of writing process: "working something out on the page that translates into excitement for the reader." CNF, Lopate argues, can combine the "character and story" of fiction with the "leaping from thought to thought" characteristic of poetry. But the result of this combination is a genre of writing all its own, a new way of communicating with the world and a new method for puzzling through the tensions of existence.

Please join us this afternoon (10/11) for a Q&A with our next visting writer, Jaimy Gordon, at 4 pm in room 317 of the Language building. Jaimy will also be reading tonight at 8 pm in the Golden Eagle Suite inside the University Union.

An Interview with Laurie Saurborn Young

2011-10-10T14:18:00.000-05:00

Justin Bigos: First, congratulations on getting your first book, Carnavoria, accepted by H_NGM_N BKS. What was your experience of sending out your MS, and how did you decide to send to H_NGM_N?

Laurie Saurborn Young: Thanks very much, Justin. It was a long slog and a learning experience. I sent it out to well over 150 small-press contests and open reading periods since I graduated from Warren Wilson in 2008. I never got the guts up to query bigger publishers like Copper Canyon or Graywolf. The more I worked with the manuscript, the more it became my own. I was constantly writing and adding and subtracting poems—I learned more firmly that poems and manuscripts are not static entities; that I’ll be making changes until the editor rips it from my hands. And the work became stranger. It’s not conventional, and at times I truly despaired of ever finding an interested audience. Though I got a couple of nibbles early on, as I continued adding new poems and removing others, the nibbles disappeared.

Once I referred to this phase (of not having a book out) as “limbo.” This was at a dinner here in Austin for the poet Harvey Hix, who taught at UT in the Spring of 2010. As I recall it, he said, “That’s a nice way of putting it. It’s more like hell.” A couple more rounds of sending it out into the Vacuum of No Reply and I changed my “limbo” to his “hell.”

Ultimately what I think was most valuable was that I became more certain of my own voice, more confident of my approach. It also taught me how to persevere, and made me certain both of myself as a poet and of my poems. When the rejections came in, I didn’t say, “Oh my God, how can I change this so someone will like it?” There is no way to predict which editor or committee or guest reader will like whose work, so that’s a non-productive, exhaustive line of thinking. Poetry is not about pleasing people (and this is a southerner talking). For me, it’s about finding readers and listeners interested in what the poems are saying—or what they interpret the poems as saying (something over which the poet has little, if any, control).

When Nate Pritts, editor of H_NGM_N BKS and fellow WW alum called me this past spring and asked if the manuscript was still available, I was absolutely thrilled. A couple of weeks earlier I read Matt Hart’s Wolf Face and Alexis Orgera’s How Like Foreign Objects. Honestly, H_NGM_N was the place I truly wanted to be published—but I didn’t hold out any particular hopes, given my pile of rejections. I love the books H_NGM_N publishes, and am extremely thankful to be included in their line up. But then I started right in on my second manuscript. Now it’s out in the world for the time being and I’m working on a third. I like hard deadlines, and I like sending out a manuscript and not knowing what will happen. Hope and feathers, as Dickinson would say. Reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning at an early age definitely helped motivate me, though it took a while for me to build up my confidence. Time passes whether I write or not. I’ve decided I’d rather it pass while I’m engaged in this productive, invigorating, challenging art.

JB: I’m not necessarily attracted to the idea of a singular voice, and yet this collection seems to have one. The voice is obsessive, ravenous, mercurial, and still very much aware that it is a voice. (It says, “Today someone asks how I am and I say// Everything.”) This is the kind of tension that drives a reader crazy—in the best way. Are you interested in “finding your voice”? Do you think the ideal poetic voice is something polyphonous? Would you rather be the Ramones of poetry or the PJ Harvey of poetry?

LY: Already busting out the musical references, Justin? I’m in over my head!

“Finding my voice” was something I was very concerned about several years ago, when I was still laboring under the assumption that it was a set point I could reach. At one point, I wrote my WW advisor at the time, Debra Allbery, “I don’t have a voice!!” And she assured me that I did, when I let things quiet down and stopped reaching in every direction. But it’s a process that unfolds not by aiming, but by writing over time. It’s not always likeable or comfortable.

My background is in psychology, not literature, so I’m prone to making comparisons between human development and the process of writing. When you’re just starting out in your twenties, say, the world has a lot of possibility because you don’t have much of a clue how of things will turn out. “I want to be a judge! A computer scientist! The mother of five children! A pro-surfer!” That’s a confusing decade. My writing was all over the place, very unfocused and timid. “I want to write a novel! I want to be a journalist! I want to write an epic!” As you get older, you make choices and this range of possibilities narrows. I love writing poems and personal essays. I don’t enjoy writing journalistic pieces. Possibility narrows, but then you have a direction in which to productively focus your energies. To an extent, writing’s more flexible than aging—at any point I can decide to start writing sonnets. But I can’t decide to be the runner I was at eighteen.

As to the idea of an ideal poetic voice, perhaps it’s something writers at times strive for, but I don’t believe it exists. The wavering mirage in the desert. Nellie in the lake. I don’t go in for tiers of superiority. I mean, I know what I like. But that doesn’t make my tastes an ideal. Honestly, I just don’t like to be bored—when I’m writing or when I’m reading. Engagement with the text, written or spoken or read, is my ideal. And honesty. If I feel the poem is inauthentic or posing, I immediately lose interest.

A while back I remember talking to a younger male poet and he said he wrote poetry because he believed it would matter. Believed it would exist in the future. It’s the opposite of what compels me—or, rather, frees me—to write. I had to get to a point where I felt no one was listening, in order to really have the space to build myself into poetry, so to speak. I don’t think my “job” is to speak for other people—I would be hesitant to ever do that—so that has some bearing on my use of the singular I. Though I would say that “I” can be an ethereal or global or various word. Everyone has an “I,” whether it’s culturally viewed as separate or communal. And an “I” can be multi-voiced, that polyphonous quality you mention. In Whitman’s “Song of Myself”— that “myself” is the world.

JB: The poems in your book demand a very heightened attention. I’ve been reading Yeats’s Noh-inspired plays, and let’s just say it ain’t Michael Crichton. I think a lot of poets like to shy away from the question of audience, unless they’re pissing and moaning that no one reads their work. Do you think much about audience? Who do you write for?

LY: The thing about audience is that you can never predict who will be listening. It’s out of the poet’s control as to who will read your work. If I’m writing for anyone in particular, I’m writing for people—poets or not—who are willing to listen. Who are interested in language and the imaginative space. I find I can cross between more conservative listeners and more unconventional audiences pretty easily—but it has taken work. I’ve spent time in two MFA programs—Warren Wilson and UMASS Amherst—with very different sensibilities, and I’m very grateful for my varied experience. I like to read to people who are willing to take a gamble and wonder—not what I meant, but what the poem means to them. When I first began giving readings, though, I had a lot of responses along the lines of, “I really enjoyed your poems but I have no idea what you meant.” Those sort of comments had a two-fold effect: at that time, it was more important for me to write the poems I needed to than to be understood. But gradually I began to see that if my goal is to write about the human condition in a new way, I have to have footholds or benches for readers to pause on. Otherwise all the language just tumbles around and effervesces to no accord.

I’ve always been drawn to the way words collide, to the interstitial spaces that open up when I write. It’s like Nabokov and his butterflies, pinning these flitting moments in place. In Speak, Memory, he talks about the quality of synesthesia he and his mother share—the perception that words, letters, numbers have their own colors, tastes, smells. When I write, often the words have some physical characteristics—form, color, sometimes smell. This-world and Not-this-world at the same time. When I write, I feel I’m out on forays into this dual world. And then I come back with these poems—these reports—to share. While I try to be mindful of my manners, I am going to say what the poem needs to say, even if it makes me uncomfortable. Dulling the edges or hiding what I want to say only means I’ll have to write the damn thing again.

I am aware that you can go so far in a direction that few people will want to follow. Some of my work right out of WW grew to be a little too obtuse. Too thick. Again, I come back to psychology and why I write: to figure out the world and to discover a way to exist in the world. A way to explore science and the animal world. As I’ve continued to write, I’ve accrued more confidence. With confidence I’ve allowed more space to enter the poems, in terms of structure and form and also in terms of saying the strange things I am thinking and being able to marry them to the human condition. Places of commonality, if you will. While the poems have a singular voice, I feel they clearly speak about things we all experience in life: love, loss, departure, yearning. I’ve gotten a warm reception from people of all ages and aesthetics. I’m not just writing to 30-year old divorcees or dog owners or daughters or truck drivers or white people or Christians or atheists. Robert Penn Warren has been a major influence, specifically “Audubon”—that marriage of history, the ghostly, the gothic and the natural world. The passage of time. I want to be buried with that book.

JB: I love the poem “Everyone Knew it was Roethke.” Aside from “Oh Roethke!” (and “Oh// Roethke . . .”), my favorite lines are: “. . . Of course I cannot recite every myth of creation// sprung from the greenhouse, but this doesn’t worry you/ as I button your vest. As I steal your linen jacket.” Again, the speaker has her way with the world even as she, of course, does not. I’m really dumbfounded by the sheer theater of these poems. Are you having fun when you write this stuff?

LY: Theater is a good word. I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe poetry is my own shy theater. Oddly, the poem came as a response to a disagreement I had about appropriation in poetry. I’m big on citing sources and culled lines.

Coming from a line of German farmers, fun does not come naturally to me—or at least I work to make it part of my life. I’ve had the obligatory drudge jobs—assembly lines, child care, temp work, office work. Perhaps I’ll have more. When my husband was very ill—was dying— I had to give up an editing job and writing community I loved and come back to Austin. Still I kept writing and still my work continued to go un-noticed. It was either find a way to have fun in the world or hide under the bed. But I was needed in the world, so hiding wasn’t an option. So I became the poet giggling at her computer at the cafe. If it’s all cinderblocks every time I turn on the computer, why the hell do it? The outside world was a very difficult place for several years, and poetry has evolved into a place of safety for me. Not because it’s been easy, but because it’s a space I created on my own.

If I weren’t violently aware of Not Writing when I’m not writing, I wouldn’t do it. I tried for many, many years—about fifteen—to run away from writing. But always there emerged the nagging voice, “You’re not writing.” Eventually I just turned around and met it, head on. It’s a compulsion. I come back to my friends, those words. I think the ability to have fun bespeaks feeling more comfortable with poetry—it took me a long while to feel comfortable pursuing writing as a serious goal. But time passes, and the more you soak in—through writing, reading, listening, talking about poetry—the more comfortable one gets. And I think as we get older we realize we’re not going to have our way with the world. It’s going to have its way with us.

JB: You have a James Franco poem in here (“The Art of James Franco”). James Franco reminds me of “Y2K”: everyone’s talking about him, but I’m not sure why. What made you write this poem?

LY: Call it my concession to the reader. Originally the poem was titled, “The Art of Brendan Fraser.” But do most people remember Brendan? I didn’t want to have to explain who this person was. Franco’s name was everywhere, so in it went. It’s nothing personal, just a name occupying a space. The poem originated as I was driving home and for some reason starting musing upon Fraser’s movie career—how it seems to be arranged into three tiers. There’s the Ultimate Tier (Gods and Monsters); the Middle-and-Happy Ground (The Mummy); and Uh-Oh (Furry Vengeance). When grown actors pretend to dance around with CG animals, it’s generally not a sign of a career on the upswing. I kept thinking about Fraser on the movie set, interacting with invisible characters. That must be incredibly difficult, especially if you were once the erotic-lust-object of Ian McKellen and a mummy-defeating hero scaling the pyramids. So the poem flips around between these movie personas and also what I fictively imagined as Brendan’s home life. The potato appeared unbidden.

I also thought of his career in terms of my own as a poet. I am aiming for the fun of The Mummy combined with the conflict of Gods and Monsters. I’d rather avoid the cheap tricks of Furry Vengeance. Form and structure wise, it was one of the first poems I wrote after I had been in a very word-thick phase, structurally. I wanted more space, to see the sparks instead of cramming them all together. This happened up in Northampton—it’s the Garden of Eden for poets. There’s an immensely supportive arts and writing community in that part of the country.

JB: If I had to pick two poets I see in this collection, I would say Stevens and Koch. Am I close? Who are the poets you adore and why?

LY: Whoa, that’s a lot of male energy! I’d be honored to be linked to either poet, as I respect both greatly and enjoy their work. As far as influencing my own work, I’d say you’re closer on the Stevens count (there was some strange poetry coming from this insurance salesman in a suit, and my comportment is similarly conservative). Koch, I don’t see as much. His energy is very male, very confident. He mingles easily with joy. I can relate to how he moves in language (here I’m thinking of his poem, “Straits”—which is not really a typical Koch poem) but not much to where I feel he’s coming from. The New York School has always mystified me. It seems such a different energy than mine. I find my work very strong and very feminine. Southern Surreal Feminist might be a good description. Dara Wier, at UMASS, encouraged me to embrace the Southern—something I had fled from doing. The social inequality of the world is something that’s always been at the forefront of my mind. How can it not be, when the ERA never even passed? When the Planned Parenthood clinic in Austin was just defunded? I grew up in a very rural and poor part of the country, right in the Bible belt. Although my sister and I never wanted for food or shelter or state college tuition, I think growing up alongside the real poverty of others—classmates, their parents—curtailed any ideas I had about the world as a joyful or easy place. Did you see the movie Winter’s Bone? That was the world I lived alongside, and at times, in. I never dreamt of going to Harvard, for example, because I didn’t know it was an option. This is something I’m just starting to explore in my newer work. Politics and personal history.

I adore Whitman. I have an abiding interest in hospice work and palliative care. Whitman is a place I feel comfortable—he’s not pretending there’s a castle in the sky, or that life will all be worth it. But he gives us the great gift of MAYBE. And that’s where I put my faith. Plus, he just goes on and on. “Outward and onward.” I admire that. I’m always shutting myself up.

Definitely Plath. She’s the first poet I really read, who I have continued to return to over a (oh dear) 20 year period. I just finished Ariel again. Her poetry is water wielding an Exacto knife. When one of my poetry readers here in Austin read my newest poems, she said, “Go read Plath again.” My first semester at Warren Wilson, Alan Williamson re-directed me to her work. It’s strange—when you first begin reading poetry, you don’t know who you’ll return to. I used to read a lot of Sexton, in my early twenties. But she hasn’t stuck with me. At the time I admired her bald ferocity. The first book of poems I bought was Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, when I was seventeen. But I’m not drawn to his work right now.

William’s Spring and All I think has been an influence in terms of space and variation of structure and form. The motion, for example, in IX: "my legs, turning slowly / end over end in the air!" I tend to fall into stanza-ruts and to keep my feet on the ground. Williams creates theatrical stages in his poems so that “play” exists in two forms: as a mechanism for action and as something that occurs when words collide under his power. Basically, I’m drawn to work that I admire, and I try to learn what I can and see if in some way I can apply it to my own writing. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been able to engage emotionally with my work at the outset, but also now can put some distance between the poems and myself. In that space that opens up I find I can more purposefully apply directional forces (i.e., craft) to the work. The poem ceases to be a work of emotion and becomes a piece of art in which emotion is one element. As opposed to the writing of my twenties, which was very emotional and hard to distance myself from in any productive manner.

I do know that poets often love work that seems to have no relation to their own—the creative beast is fed by many sources, not all of them obvious. Contemporarily speaking, I love the work of Ish Klein. I saw her read in Amherst. Theatrical, smart, inventive writing. Inexhaustible. My reading life is very broad: I read poetry but also biography, fiction, art books, photography books . . . Sontag, Hemingway, Andrew Wyeth, Henry Miller, Christina Stead are all on my bookstand at the moment. Oh god, and Charles Wright! His dropped lines have definitely influenced my own.

JB: I’m always interested to see what, if any, epigraphs poets choose for their books. You chose something by H.L. Hix: “Even a wrong course one sometimes ought to pursue/ to its end, till refusal of praise becomes praise.” Beautiful. And fitting. Reminds me of the spirit of Beckett, or something that could have appeared in Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness. How did you decide on this as the epigraph? Did you have others you were considering?

LY: I do love those lines. The epigraph is a souvenir from my WW thesis. I had never heard of Hix until I found one of his books, Shadows of Houses, in Malaprop’s, in Asheville. Immediately the work intrigued me. He’s a formalist and I envy that measured ability. I have a terrible memory for recalling quotes or things I’ve read with any sort of accuracy, so if I like something I have to write it down or it’s lost. This was such a great one that I held onto it. My current ms has an epigraph from Bly’s “Summer, 1960, Minnesota.” I have a chapbook manuscript out that has one by Wright. There’s one by Woolf I’m carting around, but it doesn’t have a home yet. Those lines of Hix’s have waited three long years for the poems that follow to catch up.

JB: Your poems make me want to kiss a grackle, press love letters in a diary of leaves, and beg for baptism by dragonflies in the frozen Cape Fear River. Am I your ideal reader?

LY: YES! If I have any specific hopes for my poems, it’s that they are possibilities for readers to see the world in other ways. I mean, that’s why I read poems. It’s a circular relationship—I’m trying to give back to poetry what I receive from it. The rest of it’s a bit of a mystery.

JB: Thank you, Laurie.

LY: Thanks, Justin. It’s been a real pleasure.

Laurie Saurborn Young is a poet, writer, and photographer, and has worked in factories, in the mental health field, and with hospice organizations. She holds an MFA from the low-residency Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. As well, she has studied in the Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her first book, Carnavoria, will be published by H_NGM_N BKS in 2012. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Insideout

2011-10-03T17:49:00.000-05:00

by M. Sweeney

John stands shaving at the morning mirror, sunlight burning a molten oval in the frosted glass at his side. He slaps too heavy with the razor, distracted, ruing the inexplicable erosion of closeness with his girlfriend, Jeannie, of late. It escapes any logical analysis. None of it should be happening. Yet all of it is happening. He might as well wish his whiskers would grow back in again.

Some odd shuffle in the sunlight and a massive double take–they WERE growing in again. Surely that’s an illusion? No! Each hair stiffening out to right angles, creaking in its follicle, then slipping back into it like spaghetti sucked between lips.

What the blue murdering…?

Then, absurdly he hears the tune, the Finnegan tune, playing in his mind, but too loud, as if echoing in a bucket. It’s playing on a violin, a manic violin…someone sitting on the pan behind the door fiddling away like a lunatic. He boots the door. Nothing.

He went fishing with a pinnegan.

His hands shake as he holds the razor. “Not happening. None of it happening.” The hairs draw back from the razor, every one of them, burrowing under his skin. He tries to brush his teeth but he keeps losing track, has to start over. Begin again. The sun burning in the window.

He grew fat and then grew thin again.

He escapes the bathroom, fear clutching at his windpipe, decides to phone Jeannie. His ear burns from too much sunlight. Or is it the receiver? It seems like he’s called her already. Perhaps many times. His heart lurches, edge of panic. She’s already speaking.

“Yeah, who is it?”

“It’s me Michael. Michael Finnegan.” He stares at the mouthpiece in horror. He didn’t mean to say that. It just sort of…

Crackle on the line. “John? Honey?”

He tries to speak but never gets started. But always gets started. And is already finished.

Then he died and had to begin again,

“John, you don’t sound so good, I’m coming home.”

He tries to reply.

*Click.*

But the words are good. Goood words. There’s hope in the words. Real sunlight, not like the bathroom.

She arrives at the door. It’s still there but fading. Life is returning with her.

“The bathroom” he bleats, pathetically, touches his face. “Just there, round the side, my chin, chinnegan.” Tears press but don’t emerge.

She takes his face in her hands. “John, honey, are you ok?”

Something about her touch grounds him, a lightning rod. He sucks a deep breath.

“Yes…yes. There was something, It came out. But it’s in again now.. In again for good.” Breathing easy now, clearly now. “Look, just promise me we won’t lose track of each other again.”

Book Review Friday

2011-09-30T09:15:00.010-05:00

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

by Danielle Evans
Riverhead, 240 pp., 2010
Reviewed by Jessica Hindman

“Me and Jasmine and Michael were hanging out at Mr. Thompson’s pool” (1). So begins “Virgins,” the first story in Danielle Evans’s Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, a brilliant debut collection that showcases Evan’s stunning ability to unearth racial and sexual complexities with deceptively casual language. In this first sentence, Evans creates a setting that could not seem more blasé: three teenagers “hanging out” by a pool. But under the surface of suburban normalcy, racial and sexual dangers lurk. As the story progresses, we find out that the seemingly simple act of lounging by Mr. Thompson’s pool is in fact a result of complex racial, sexual, and class hierarchies:

Mr. Thompson was retired, but he used to be our elementary school principal, which is how he was the only person in Mount Vernon we knew with a swimming pool in his backyard. We—and everybody else we knew—lived on the south side, where it was mostly apartment buildings, and if you had a house, you were lucky if your backyard was big enough for a plastic kiddie pool. (6)

In other words, Mr. Thompson is offering a favor to the lower-class narrator—Erica—and her friends. And despite their young age, Erica and Jasmine are already wary of male favors:

“We hung out with [Michael] because we figured it was easier to have a boy around than not to…When you were alone, men were always wanting something from you. We even wondered about Mr. Thompson sometimes, or at least we never went swimming at his house without Michael with us.” (6)

Evans is so subtle in establishing the dangers that surround her characters that the reader barely notices as she slowly raises the stakes. When the three teens decide to use their fake IDs to go clubbing in New York City, the danger seems more of the suburban variety (getting caught by their parents) than the late-night-news variety (rape or murder). But as the story progresses, the two types of dangers—the urban and the suburban—become increasingly conflated. At the end of “Virgins,” neither Erica nor Jasmine is still a virgin, but Erica has lost her virginity in a familiar suburban setting, while Jasmine has disappeared to have sex with strangers in the Bronx. The move from the suburban to urban and back, however, is ultimately inconsequential; neither of the girls has encountered sex in a safe, premeditated, or fulfilling way. Here Evans demonstrates the absurdity of presuming that the suburbs offer black teenagers a safer alternative to the city. The girls’ parents are working so many shifts (presumably to afford a suburban existence) that they fail to notice their daughters’ transgressions. And even though no one in the story says so directly, we know implicitly that the sexual stakes for white girls in this suburb are much lower than they are for Crystal and Jasmine.

Indeed, Evans’s writing is at its strongest when she shows how typical suburban high jinks swiftly become more ominous when the characters in question are minorities. The story, “Robert E. Lee Is Dead,” follows the relationship between Geena—a popular cheerleader who gets kicked off the squad for low grades—and her friend Crystal, who has managed to become valedictorian despite the school’s racial prejudice. When Geena asks Crystal to participate in a senior prank, Crystal points out that “White kids do senior pranks. When we try it, they’re called felonies” (220). Crystal ends up participating in the prank anyway, but when the prank gets out of hand and the two girls accidentally set the school football field on fire, Geena insists on taking the blame. The last image of the story is of Crystal running from the scene of the crime:

“I stared at Geena for a long second. Then I took off running, stopping in the middle of the parking lot to take off my heels. I kept running, the asphalt stinging my feet through my panty hose. Halfway up the hill behind the school, I stopped to look back, vaguely recalling Sunday school and Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt. Already I could hear sirens in the distance. I watched Geena sitting on the curb beside the pay phone, fists curled backward into cushions for her chin. She looked small and still and ready. I turned then, shut my eyes, and ran breathlessly toward the dam. I didn’t stop again until I had crossed the bridge and hopped the fence that took me back to Eastdale. On the other side, I stopped to catch my breath, and then kept running, knowing even then that a better person would have turned around.” (229)

At the core of this story, and the entire collection, is a moral question: How can blacks who have attained academic and worldly success live in a world where too many black teenagers literally get left behind on a curb? Evans prose here is stunning in its ability to show the pain of separation that occurs in the suburbs when upwardly mobile black youth leave their less fortunate friends to deal with the all-too-familiar consequences of racial inequality. Indeed, the title of the collection comes from a Donna Kate Rushin poem, which Evans includes as an epigraph to the book. In the poem, Rushin writes, “I’m sick of mediating with your worst self/On behalf of your better selves.” Evans’s stories are masterful portraits of characters who want to become their “better selves,” but who, for many reasons—racism, sexism, guilt about the others who are left behind while they enjoy newfound success—are never quite satisfied with their progress.

Flash Monday

2011-09-26T10:19:00.001-05:00

A Sleeve Made of Hearts

by Zach VandeZande

Her job in those days kept her downtown pretty late, so I got to wandering around out of doors. It started out as sitting on the porch with a beer or two, looking the way a stray animal might, some possum or unwanted cat. The house, it was too big for me to be in it alone, I kept checking for intruders or ghosts, and anyway she was the one who wanted to move out here to the suburbs.

And eventually, yeah, I started walking around, and I started knocking on a few doors, got to asking questions and pretending like I was taking the census. A neighbor would open her door and I would say Excuse me, but do you think that love is just the selfish need to have your jokes laughed at, your bed shared, to have someone know as much as they can of you and still say Okay, yes, I want you to hold on tightly, and I will do the same? Answer on a scale of one to five. Five being strongly agree. So what if I’d had a drink or two? I’d still be professional, I’d still lean in all serious with my pen and my clipboard and wait patiently for them to consider the question. And I’d listen, really listen, to what they had to say.

In this way we got to know each other, the neighbors and me. But she found out about it and got mad, asked me to knock it off. I quoted Walt Whitman back at her—I’d been reading Walt Whitman on the porch sometimes. We secretly thought each other snobs. Different kinds of snobs, but still, it was a rough time.

Suburbs, they’ve got a breaking point to them, and it comes from within, it comes from the dull edge of shame in each resident. That’s the whole point of a homeowner’s association, to keep the chaos out, to keep that awful feeling of shame away. Also black people, probably, depending on the neighborhood. So what if they got involved? So what if I got citations in my mailbox? Quelling the human heart isn’t a noble thing was my thinking. So when she threw in with them, yeah, I took it kinda personal. So maybe my survey questions became a little hostile, maybe I threw up some whiskey on Miss Applebaum’s rose bush, maybe I lit a lawn or two on fire. The point is, and I’m marking it five on a scale of five, the point is I did it in defense of love.

We Drank Until We Fell Over

2011-09-25T15:12:00.003-05:00

Thanks to Simone Lounge for hosting the first ALR Graduate-Student Reading of the semester, and to Cool Beans for hosting the after-party. At least two of us have bruises and no memory of how they were received.

Poetry by Kara Dorris
Excerpt from My Highway of Sure Things

Yesterday, I found the lizards
behind my house doing it again.
“An offense to justice” honoring
a hydrangea bush I killed
last summer with a happy love.

On the back porch in hunter green
plastic containers, full of
Miracle Grow & shame,
sit open-mouth replacements.

Of course for the ground’s sake,
for the sad goldfish I buried underneath
in the toxic memory of bedazzle beads,
I wanted to wait a full year to announce
recovery, to absorb the French fry bits
& salt & blackberry fingers I used
to kill Fish.

But the lizards only have eyes
for each other & don’t believe in stories
with tragic heroes or closing actions.

Fiction by Laura Miller

Excerpt from "Perspective"

My appointment was on the first floor, room 109. The door wasn’t closed, so I stepped inside. It was a recycled space, used by traveling artists, private instructors, psychotherapists. Light from one undressed window freckled the podium and the whiskey bottle beside it. In the corner, a woman perched atop a yoga ball rattled the ice in her Styrofoam cup. She stood and extended a bony hand.

“I’m Dolly,” she said, wobbling a little in her heels. She grabbed my hand and pumped it hard before stepping behind the podium. “Let’s get started, shall we?” Dolly squinted through her rimless frames, tortoise-shell detail on the temple. “Usually we do this with two people,” she said. “But whatever gets your ghost.”

“No, actually,” I said and stepped closer to the podium so not to raise my voice. “I just have a few questions.”

Dolly slouched a little and reached toward me. She curled a lock of my hair around her manicured finger. “Aren’t you a sweet little thing,” she said and released the tress. “Go for it, honey pie.”

I pulled out a notebook from my coat pocket and tried not to notice as Dolly rolled her eyes. “For starters, your credentials…”

Dolly tapped the whiskey bottle with the tip of her purple heel. She puckered her lips as if slurping the answer from the air. Her fingers curled around the edge of the podium. “Pumpkin face, let me tell you about my credentials. My grandfather is an alcoholic. My brother shoots meth in his arm. My mother has been schizophrenic for 10 years. And my ex-husband works on Wall Street. I know a thing or two about dealing with assholes.”

“I see,” I said and knew immediately that it was the wrong thing to say. Dolly stepped out from behind the podium and teetered toward me like some prehistoric bird. She bent at her waist to meet me eye-level.

“Lover, what’s your name?”

“Bella,” I told her, reeling from the finger that moved toward my jaw line.

“Bella, I’m a busy woman. I run sixteen of these joints. Thirty-two people work under me, and I have twelve more appointments today. You want to tell me why you’re here?”

“Well, I came with my mother, but I just don’t understand what exactly it is that you do,” I said and plunged my hand in my coat pocket. My fingernails found the crystal and scratched at its surface.

Dolly stood upright and looked down at me. Her glasses slipped to the end of her nose. “I’ll tell you exactly what I do, sugar plum. I give perspective. People come to me because someone in their life has a twisted point of view. Sometimes people can’t see what’s right in front of them. You get me, Bella? It might be a close friend, a coworker, a boss. Most often, though, it’s a family member. How about that mother of yours. Could she use some perspective?”

Poetry by Nate Logan

Excerpt from "Booty Call Sonnet #32" (for Adam)

Where is the discussion of booty

in the Environmental Prose class?

We're out here pretending

to be graduate students in botany,

while booty flies in the lights

above Tucson. Orange blossoms

get busy in the boats of our nasal canals—

how can we care about plants

at a time like this? The weekend

before the assignment is due,

I'll write about the miles of cacti

and the dry heat. But tonight.

Tonight is not too hot for love.

Tonight is right for dry humping.

An Interview with Landon Godfrey

2011-09-22T14:28:00.012-05:00

Justin Bigos: Rereading your book, Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown, I’m struck again by your formal inventiveness. There are poems in monostiches, couplets, tercets, quatrains, etc; poems in prose; drop-lines and indented stanzas; and poems (the Eva Hesse series) that use columns, boxes, and white space for strong visual effect. How long does it take to recognize the emerging form of your poems?

Landon Godfrey: Minutes, years. I’m looking for ways to combine or layer or isolate verbal elements, and different forms can do that work different ways. Sometimes I start out with the idea of a form and a poem’s innards already mixed together. For a long time the grid structures for two of the Eva Hesse poems sat in a notebook, empty except for the grids themselves; then I filled them in. And I’m a ruthless reviser, so many poems start with formal ideas that change along the way--minutes, years.

JB: The title poem is written in seven stanzas of prose. Without line, you use anaphora and an increasingly elaborate syntax and wordplay to create a commanding voice. When did you know this was your title poem?

LG: It took me a long time. I found the process of ordering poems for a manuscript very difficult. The title poem became the title poem only at the very end of a five-year process, after I scrapped that manuscript and started over completely. I was dejected, and the poem’s strong voice sounded like a beginning, of both the manuscript and of a way to assemble it.

JB: You often use italics (or, say, a title like “Interview: Antique Iron Bed”) to emphasize words as dramatic speech. You are also an actor, and I’m curious if you feel drawn to the idea of persona, or at least the potentially performative qualities of poetry, even just on the page.

LG: I think you’re right about a link between the speech of acting and the speech of some of these poems. And the link certainly has to do with the pleasure (and sometimes pain) of being onstage and those same feelings one might incur saying a poem aloud. It’s scary doing so, but I love to. I love the sensation of having a body and being in the company of other bodies. I even like thinking about it!--which some of my poems work on. It can be sexy, but the feeling can also be similar to how we understand Keats’s negative capability. I crave the frisson of inhabiting someone else’s--or something else’s--feelings and sensations. His or her or its experience of touch or intellect, and emotions, moods, affections.

JB: Your diction is so wonderfully specific and sensuous, and many of your images truly sound unique, in a Joycean kind of way. Some of my favorites: “cementy New York,” “whiskeyish arias,” “tinfoil stars taped to a mirror.” Do you get as delicious a thrill writing this as I do reading it?

LG: Thank you. I do get a delicious thrill sometimes when writing; sometimes things come together in ways both mouthy and ethereal, and I love it when that happens. There’s a bunch of joy in Joycean stuff. (And I often hear Joyce in my head saying things like “pussy pussy plunder pussy.” That’s some joy right there.)

JB: That is some joy! Reminds me of the end of that Amy Hempel short-short, “Housewife,” about a woman who habitually sleeps with her husband and another man on the same day, and ends each day “incanting, ‘French film, French film.’” I’ve usually thought of Hempel, and Lydia Davis, too, as poets rather than storytellers. Are you interested much in the blurring of prose and poetry? Why is your poem “Le Rire”—certainly narrative on the surface—written as prose?

LG: “French film, French film.” I’m going to incant that all day today! I love the strange idea of exploitation in that story, that the housewife is “exploiting” the rest of the day with the act of incantation. We don’t know if she’s exploiting the men per se or if they’re exploiting her; but watch out, Day, you’re being exploited.

“Le Rire” (the title makes me laugh because it sounds like “Le Rear”) is a prose poem because I was reading Henri Bergson’s philosophical essay about the comic, which includes among other things some thoughts on the formal elements of the comic, and I wanted my poem to be a very small essay-ish something on the same subject, a bit of a response to the essay, in which Bergson asks, “Que signifie le rire?” He wonders how so many diverse comedy products generate some kind of essential funny. The essay starts in a lovely way, with his declaration that the small but impertinently defiant problem shies away from philosophical speculation. Something about that beginning, for me, transforms the problem from a thought into a clown, anthropomorphizing it. And then the problem escapes from Bergson’s essay and hides out in my poem for a while. It’s the “impertinent defiance” that really does it for me; it’s so human.

JB: One of the epigraphs to your book is by Walter Benjamin: “The eternal is more like lace trimmings on a dress than an idea.” This reminded me of a Mark Doty poem titled “Regarding Some Recent Criticism of His Work.” His poem ends, “—No such thing,/ the queen said/ as too many sequins.” Then I noticed Doty had blurbed your book. Is Doty a big influence on your work? Are there a couple others you’d like to mention?

LG: I studied with Mark at University of Houston, and I liked very much that he took sequins seriously. But one of the biggest influences Mark had on my work when I had just started writing poems was in his consideration of the poetic line. He answered an interview question about how he figured out some of the line lengths in his work by talking about the number of strong stresses per line, and I found that idea very helpful, the idea of organizing meaning against or with internal stresses. Informed by Marianne Moore in a way, but more opened up and out (Moore opened up and out…).

I’ll also claim Zbigniew Herbert. I love him. His sensibility, his intelligence, his exactingness. It’s good to have unachievable goals, and his whole world is that for me. I’m inspired by the seriousness of many Polish poets. And also the light touch of what sounds to my English&French-speaking ear like a heavy language (I know only a little Polish, enough to order a glass of milk or extra butter or kremowka papieska, which is a brilliant pastry both heavy and light simultaneously).

Ultimately there are too many poets to mention who’ve influenced my work. And artists, playwrights, singers, designers, farmers, physicists, bicycle-riding dogs…

JB: Were you able to visit Poland while at Houston? What was it like? Did you order the bigos?

LG: Yes, during two summers I went to Kraków with Adam Zagajewski, Ed Hirsch, and students in the Creative Writing program. Fabulous. Kraków is wonderful--old and so Polish!--with beautiful spaces. And very lonely, sad spaces, too. I was thrilled to be there, because that’s where many great Polish poets are/were.

Alas, I did not order the bigos. You, sir, are the only Bigos.

JB: One of my favorite poems in the book is “Self-Portrait as Lucian Freud’s Girl with a White Dog.” What do you make of the oddly umbilical sash in that painting? Also, how much money would it take to commission you to write a poem inspired by one of the Leigh Bowery portraits?

LG: Wait, one can make money as a poet?

Justin, what do you make of the oddly umbilical sash in that painting?

JB: I don’t know, but the eye goes right to it after the face, the breast, and the dog face. But the whole time I’m aware it’s there. It doesn’t need to symbolize anything, but it is menacing. Sort of noose-like in its limpness. Kind of gross, really.

LG: I think some of its import in the painting is the geometrical sectioning it does. A number of grid-like structures exist in the painting, depending on which lines one perceives as dominant. So it amuses me that this organic, somewhat disgusting, perhaps even enticing shape/line dangles an inexact map for entering the painting, even as it suggests an exiting of the body and a pairing of two bodies. Like a terrifying version of the “you are here” map at a mall. The sash also takes the place of one of the dog’s signature features, the tail, which is occluded in the painting. The dog’s still a dog, of course, but tailless and sexless, whereas the woman has both sex and tail. But what all this means, I’ve no idea. It’s all very visceral, and I like that.

JB: Your poems make me want to eat a melting candy apple, give my wife a gin-and-tonic kiss, and run in sparkling drag through the Louvre. Am I your ideal reader?

LG: Oh honey, yes you are.

JB: A million thanks, Landon.

LG: A million thanks to you, Justin. French film, French film….

Landon Godfrey was born and raised in Washington, DC, and now lives in Black Mountain, NC. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, including The Southeast Review, Lyric, Chelsea, POOL, and Best New Poets 2008. Landon was recently awarded a North Carolina Arts Council 2011-2012 Artist Fellowship. Her work has been featured as a collaborative project at Broadsided and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown was published in February 2011. In selecting Landon’s book for the Cider Press Review Book Award, David St. John writes, “Never has the sumptuous materiality of language felt more seductive than in Landon Godfrey’s remarkable debut collection, Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown. These exquisite poems are both sensually compelling and intellectually rigorous—a rare feat indeed. The iridescence of this marvelous volume continues to glow long after one has turned out the lights.”

More information about Landon is at www.landongodfrey.com.

Perfect: Enemy Of The Good

2011-09-19T20:34:00.006-05:00

I wanted to pass along Dwight Garner's recent article from the New York Times, which praises novelists who produce a solid book every few years (e.g., Roth, Bellow) and questions those who labor for a decade in an attempt to produce a masterpiece (e.g., Franzen, Eugenides). Of course, Philip Roth serves as a poor example in this case since his novels are both masterful and frequent. Nonetheless, Garner makes a point all writers should remain mindful of: whether you are are putting together a novel or polishing a story you intend to submit to ALR (whose regular submission period opens in two weeks), perfect fiction does not exist. Raymond Carver always received extensive revisions from his editor, Gordon Lish; Balzac rewrote every one of his novels through round after round of proofs; Proust's In Search of Lost Time (a favorite of both myself and Jennifer Egan) is filled with errors and internal contradictions. In other words, your writing doesn't need to be perfect in order to find a publisher, only good. So quit worrying about whether the sky in your story should be "azure" or "cerulean" and start sending your work out, preferably to us.

Flash Monday

2011-09-19T10:28:00.001-05:00

New poetry for today's Flash Monday. Send your submissions to seagremlin@gmail.com -- 800 words or less -- open to all!

Calavera

by Kym Wilson

He waits in a field of marigolds, lush and complicated
Straightening his jacket, smoothing his hair
Thinking of the time he whipped the boy for not looking after his sisters.
Coffee cup in hand, it's been so long since it was filled
By the warmth of drink and kin.
Walking amongst the candles, flickering in the fragrance
Of bread and sugar and blood and earth,
A feast of the living and the dead, together at the table he built
From the roots of a felled family tree.
Hushed words of distant households, quiet hands working to clear ground
Songs sung in voices older than mountains and deeper than wells,
All falling down around him like the ash of his ancestor's bones,
Put his mind at ease, put his name on stone
Wife and only son coming home.

First ALR Student Reading Series 9.16.11

2011-09-15T22:48:00.002-05:00

*Image courtesy of the wonderful Elishia Heiden*

Monday in a Flash

2011-09-12T11:30:00.000-05:00

It's Monday. You have things to do, people to please. Take ten minutes to breathe, relax, and write, goddammit. Today, we are your outlet for fiction, non-fiction, prose poetry... whatever your heart ejaculates in 800 words or less. Submissions are open to all you word wizards out there-- send it my way (seagremlin@gmail.com). Payment is your name in print on the interwebs and a million-trillion gratitudes from God and Buddah and Ganesha and probably some people, too. Start typing!

Without further adieu...

Resignation

by Walker Smart

First and foremost, we’ve decided that we can’t work with you anymore. We thank you for the opportunity you’ve given each of us, but at this time the things that are bad outweigh the things that are right. We feel we’ve been straightforward with you, more or less, about things we think need to be better, and we feel we’ve given you ample time to fix these things, or to outline a strategy of how you plan to improve these things, or at least try to come up with compromises. At this time we feel any attempt made to communicate quickly degrades into a situation where you feel that we are insulting you and your work, when in actuality we all have great respect for the work you’ve done. We talk about it all the time, and lament that you’ve been unable to use your years of experience to repair these grievances we have. We’ve talked in great length, towards the end of many late nights, about all the ways we feel we are misrepresenting ourselves to our clients and regret that we can’t share our many revelations because you would take them as nothing more than base cruelty, and we have no intention of dishing it out when the end result would do nothing more than offend you. We’ve found you to be fragile. We have no ill will towards you as a person, and hope the best for you. We realize this will place you in a difficult situation, you’ve made promises to many people and you can’t fulfill any without us, so as to what you can do next, we have no additional advice for you from this point on.

As for the matter of our contracts, since the current work situation is not what we had in mind and not at all what we had discussed at the time of signing, we feel that they are null and in any case were nothing more than a formality to begin with. We have grown since then, since the time of the signing, and any actions made were from a place of naivety, and we can’t be faulted for our lack of understanding nor should we continue to be punished for it.

In all honesty, as much as we feel we’ve prepared you for this inevitability, things like this must always come as a shock, but please know the sadness we feel is as great, if not more so, than what you must be feeling. The time for talking is over, and we feel it is only through action that the things we need will come to us. Something is broken here, and it hasn’t been fixed, so we have no choice but to go our separate ways, and hope for each of us that when the next, best opportunity comes along, we can all look back on this fondly, as a stepping stone towards our ultimate prosperity in separate ventures. There are wounds that will have to heal first, but eventually we hope we can move past this and be better friends for it in the end.

Read, Write, Speak: ALR Call for Volunteers!

2011-09-06T16:48:00.000-05:00

This fall, the American Literary Review is looking for volunteers of all stripes. Read on for ways that you can participate in the life of our journal. If you’d like to sign up to be a volunteer, please email Managing Editor Hillary Stringer (stringerhas@yahoo.com).

Read:

We are looking for people to sign up to be volunteer readers. Readers will read around 40-45 submissions from the sluice pile (or about three a week) over the course of the semester. At the beginning of the school year, we will train you on how to read and rank these submissions (meetings TBA in the next few weeks). If you’ve worked for a journal before, your input is welcome at these training sessions. More information about the ranking system set-up is below. If you are an official volunteer reader your name will appear as such in the journal.

There are two ways to access manuscripts:

1) Check out the ALR office hours at the bottom of this post. During these times volunteer readers can pick up/return manuscripts (make sure and sign these manuscripts in and out) and journal staff will be in the office to answer any questions that you have about the ranking system. Volunteer readers have a one-week limit on all manuscripts that they check out. Additionally, everyone must initial ALL manuscripts read and ranked.

2) We will host reading parties wherein we will bring manuscripts for everyone to read. These events are also opportunities to discuss the ranking system and to see how and why student editors select and reject submissions.

Additionally, we will be proofreading copies of Fall 2011 issues of the journal in September and the Spring 2012 issue in Nov/Dec. This will be pretty basic stuff, but the more pairs of eyes we can get the better. More info to come about proofreading parties.

You can, of course, participate as much or as little as possible. We welcome any and all reading of manuscripts.

Write:

You can also write book reviews which will be published either in the journal or on the website. We get a ton of desk copies, but feel free to propose your own selections. You can also sign up to be a regular blogger on our blog. Email Laura Miller at seagremlin@gmail.com for more info. We are always looking for posts about books you’re reading, writing you’re doing, your experience working for the journal, or anything else related to the field.

Speak:

We are looking for writers of all genres to sign up for the American Literary Review’s Graduate Student Reading Series. We will have four graduate student readings per semester, plus a back-to-school reading for incoming students in August, and an end of the year reading for those graduating in May. We will have four readers at each reading that takes place during the semester, and a fifteen-minute (max) time limit per reader will be strictly enforced. These readings will take place at local coffee shops and the homes of student and faculty editors. We are also looking for people to host each reading. Hosting duties include acquiring bios for each reader and introducing readers at the event.

ALR’S Graduate Student Reading Series

All readings take place on Friday evenings at 7:30 pm, with four readers per event. To sign up, please email Production Editor Zach VandeZande (zach.vandezande@gmail.com) with your name, email, what genre you intend to read, and which of the following dates you would prefer.

Friday, September 16th
Friday, October 21st
Friday, November 18th
Friday Dec 2nd

If there’s something that you’d like to sign up to do that isn’t currently listed, please email Managing Editor Hillary Stringer (stringerhas@yahoo.com) with your ideas and suggestions. We are always looking for new and exciting opportunities for the journal!

Fall 2011 ALR Office Hours

The American Literary Review Office is located in AUDB 210.

Monday 9 am-1:30 pm; 3-4 pm
Tuesday 11 am-2:30 pm; (+ before and after Miro’s Fiction workshop)
Wednesday 9 am-4 pm; 5 pm-6 pm (+ before and after Bonnie’s CNF workshop)
Thursday 11 am-1:30 pm; 5:30-6:30 pm(+ before and after Fairchild’s Poetry Form and Theory course)
Friday 11 am-1 pm

Ahhh-Choooo! Overspiced Stories in Amanda Davis’ Circling the Drain

2011-08-05T11:23:00.000-05:00

I was on my lunch break, trolling leisurely through the McSweeney’s website, when I unearthed Amanda Davis’ short story “The Fat Ladies Floated in the Sky Like Balloons.” I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to unwrap my mind from those fat ladies. I couldn’t stop thinking about the story. I had to print a physical copy, fold it in half, and tuck it under my seat. I had to physically separate myself from the story so I could at least attempt to finish the day’s work.

Never had I encountered magical realism that left such an impression on me. I was awe-struck by the juxtaposition of imaginative qualities and harsh emotional realities. I craved more of the same intensity and ingenuity when I eagerly ordered Davis’ first (and only) collection of stories, Circling the Drain. What I found was a daring exploration of the conflict between logos and pathos. For the most part. Many of the 15 stories are short—between 1 and 6 pages. Some experiment with fable while others sparsely depict ordinary realities. Only three of the stories combine the supernatural with the natural, creating the immediacy and contrast that I initially found so appealing.

In Fat Ladies, Davis uses fantastic elements to exaggerate the positives and negatives of a failed relationship. The floating fat ladies, exploding flowerpots, and impaled pets represent logical and emotional reasons for ignoring Fred’s reappearance. Yet in the final scene, Eloise cannot bring herself to swing the hatchet a second time: “This probably isn’t such a great idea, I began in my head, but what I said was, Nice day.” The character’s self-awareness and vulnerability give the story a meaty backbone that anchors the fantastic elements and gives them their own weight.

The only other story that comes close to achieving this wonderful paradox of character is “Testimony.” We watch as a family unravels, as a brother cuts out his own tongue and a sister searches for the words that he can no longer speak. We see the brother prying out his own teeth; we see the sister combing the isles of a bookstore. The structure grounds the mystical elements, and in the end, Davis leaves us with a question about the nature of humanity, as she did with Fat Ladies, thrusting the story into its larger context.

While I believe the collection is meant to stand on three legs: “Testimony,” “Circling the Drain,” and “Faith or Tips for the Successful Young Lady,” only “Testimony” achieves the emotional resonance that the others attempt. Davis sometimes relies on shock value (arson, murder, attempted suicide) to propel her stories, and as the result, the characters come off as impulsive and incapable of adapting to the circumstances they have created. All three stories contain spirits, angels, or ghosts that illustrate the characters’ battles with the internal landscape. Each story is divided into numbered sections that skip around in time and space. Yet, rather than anchor the collection, they stand alone in a clump, while the others wriggle and streak in every possible direction.

As the collection’s legs straddle the line between fiction and reality, other stories cut the strings and go spiraling skyward. There’s the entertaining, five-page story about Billy Foo – a local chef who is fed his own ego, “Spice.” There’s “Chase,” the story of a woman who poisons her boyfriend’s magical blue horse. Wonderfully imaginative, simple, and fun, stories like these lift me out of the collection, which largely depicts gritty urban realities. They’re clowns at a funeral – they deserve their own confetti-filled backdrop.

Similarly, hyper-realistic flash-fiction pieces like “Fairy Tale” and “The Very Moment They’re About” refract the collection’s core. They send the reader spinning in a different direction – toward compressed moments in reality. The jarring contrast between these stories and the fantasy-based stories leaves the reader without a clear sense of Davis’ style and muddies the purpose of the collection as a whole.

Davis takes a bold approach. She mixes styles, genres, and themes. Her tales flop from fantasy to magical realism to just plain realism. We understand that her scope is far-reaching – that she’s capable of writing in a variety of genres. Unfortunately, we don’t come away from the collection with an understanding of the stories themselves. We’re pushed and pulled in so many directions that the characters and their stories get lost in the shuffle.

Typically, after an author’s first collection of short stories, we can say that she is a writer to watch. But for Davis, Circling the Drain and her first novel, Wonder When You’ll Miss Me, are all we’ll ever have. Amanda Davis died tragically in a plane crash in 2003, just prior to her book tour. I highly recommend reading her stories. They’ll set your imagination aglow, just as “Fat Ladies Floated in the Sky Like Balloons” did for me. But choose one at a time, and savor the flavor. As Billy Foo knows, if you combine all the spices at once, you may end up over-complicating what would otherwise be a breathtaking dish.

The only negative review of "A Visit From The Goon Squad" ever written

2011-07-28T11:48:00.000-05:00

At first, I thought my title was hyperbolic. (Yes, Egan won the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and, yes, the first three pages of the paperback—as well as the back cover—are filled with praise from seemingly every publication of significance, but what else would you expect? Obviously, no one advertises their negative press.) Then I googled “negative reviews of a visit from the goon squad,” which somehow only turned up more adulation, including a breathless story from The Paris Review by a writer suffering from “Egan Fever.” The only dissenting opinion I could find (besides the one posted on wackymommy.org) came from a reviewer for The A.V. Club, who disparaged rock ‘n’ roll books as a genre before tepidly concluding that Goon Squad is good but not great.

So let me begin by stating that I disagree with everything that’s been written about Egan, even by The A.V. Club—not only is Goon Squad not great, it’s not even good. The novel presents us with a string of flat characters based on clichéd types (a rich, middle aged record executive who feels like a sellout; a woman who steals because she has yet to deal with her traumatic past; a teenage girl who thinks it’s cool to party with an older man, then looks back on her life with regret).

The lack of character development is a direct result of the novel’s gimmicky structure; gimmicky because rather than providing multiple perspectives on the central characters—how do the sections about Dolly or Jules Jones enhance or complicate our understanding of Sasha and Bennie, for example?—or exploring a theme that can only be understood through the experiences of multiple characters—the primary themes of the novel are "compromise" and "regret," which each character experiences in the exact same way: everyone compromises on their dreams or ideals or artistic intentions; and everyone regrets that compromise—Goon Squad's structure serves only to build artificial momentum, pulling the reader along with the promise of a new character and style to discover in the next chapter.

Which brings us to the variations in style. There are subtle shifts between the narrative tone used for Sasha (ch. 1) and Bennie (ch. 2). Then there are the pronounced stylistic shifts into second person (ch. 10), absurdist imitation (ch. 9), idiomatic minimalism (ch. 3), first-person unreliable (ch. 6), and image rich travel writing (ch. 11). And then there are chapters that veer into the familiar territory of great fiction past: the over the top social satire of, say, Tom Wolfe (ch. 8); the Hemingway-esque African safari that reveals the unacknowledged cracks in a relationship (ch. 4); the quiet desperation of a husband and wife in the suburbs that evokes the likes of Cheever or Richard Yates (ch. 7). The critics have praised Egan’s virtuosity, but in reality the author has merely produced an amalgamation of the techniques and voices forged by her predecessors, which she then packages as innovative fiction. But there is nothing innovative about Goon Squad.

The only chapter that could rightfully be called inventive—the power point presentation—is a flop. This narrative device serves no purpose, diminishes the affect of the information it conveys, and stretches our willing suspension of disbelief (a twelve-year-old girl expresses the distress she feels about her family by creating a sophisticated presentation about the subtle tension between her mother, father, and brother? What did she do after that, create a flow chart to plan a conversation with her parents about buying tickets to a Justin Bieber concert?). By botching this chapter, Egan leaves us with a dissatisfying conclusion to the arc of Sasha, one of the two characters that hold everything together. Of course, the laughable final chapter—even the positive reviews have criticized Egan’s lazy, distopian take on the near future—compounds the dissatisfaction. Bennie, the other recurrent character, is equally forgotten in his final appearance in the novel. These clumsy final chapters only succeed in emphasizing that Goon Squad is not a grand epic about the destructive passage of time, but a series of low impact stories that rely on a loose (and ultimately meaningless) level of association to build a semblance of significance.

One final note: Egan’s decision to quote Proust in her epigraph not only signaled her intention to place Goon Squad in conversation with In Search of Lost Time, it also gave readers instruction on how she intended the novel to be approached. A bold move. Obviously, I think the association is ludicrous. For an excellent example of a Proustian reflection on the U.S. in the second half of the twentieth century, read Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (the 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner). Also, just read Swann’s Way.

Shape Shifting: Facing Fantasy in Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You

2011-07-27T16:46:00.005-05:00

In Miranda July’s collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, July’s protagonists live, almost always unsuccessfully, in imagined worlds that not only bleed into, but define, the social and personal interactions of their everyday lives. The result is a compelling, intimate, and experimental work that, much like a carnival’s room of funhouse mirrors, simultaneously entertains and mystifies the reader by both shape-shifting reality and reflecting a strange, distorted fantasy world in its place.

In each of her stories, July first exposes the fantasy worlds that the characters create. For instance, in “Mon Plaisir,” a female narrator introduces herself and her husband by depicting the imagined nature of their seemingly happy marriage.

"We are not people who buy instant cocoa powder, we do not make small talk, we do not buy Hallmark cards or believe in Hallmark rituals such as Valentine’s Day or weddings. In general, we try to stay away from things that are MEANINGLESS, and we favor things that are MEANINGFUL. Our top three favorite meaningful things are: Buddhism, eating right, and the internal landscape."

Likewise, in “The Shared Patio,” a woman imagines her and her neighbor’s shared patio as a place where she can find her identity and connect with others. In the “The Swim Team,” a woman, writing to her ex-boyfriend, details the swimming lessons she gives to elderly townspeople by dipping their faces in small, water-filled Tupperware laid out on the kitchen floor. In “Majesty,” a woman fantasizes about seducing Prince William at a pub near his school. And in “I Kiss a Door,” the narrator dreams of being the proverbially perfect Eleanor, of having Eleanor’s “perfect” father as her own.

However, July shows through these stories that, when fantasy and reality do finally meet, it often occurs in a sort of reverse-epiphanic moment, in which the main characters realize that being extraordinary is a myth like any other. Hopes and wild aspirations are replaced with a gravity, a humbleness, that makes July’s narratives more than simply zany and clever; her true depth as a writer emerges organically from her own outlandish plots in the same way as through her characters’: the more vivid the fictional world is, the harder it comes crashing down.

In “Mon Plaisir,” this shift takes place when the husband and wife are forced to create and maintain marriage as background actors in a movie. They realize, in this scene, that, like the movie couple they have created, their romance is just as fictional.

“Here we were again, eating together in silence.... Carl looked up, we stared across the table at each other. It was plain between us: we should not be together any longer. And cut.”

Additionally, in “Majesty,” when the narrator realizes she will never really meet Prince William, July gives us a haunting description of what, as in all the stories, has become of the narrator’s fantasy world.

“This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else.”

In addition to being unable to escape their imagined worlds, the characters also fail to communicate with each other across the fictional or real borders they have created. The most haunting story of the collection, “The Person,” revolves around an unnamed person who believes there is “a place where every person this person has ever known is waiting to hug this person and bring her into the fold of life” -- a place the narrator finds out, eventually, is unattainable.

“This person mourns the fact that she has ruined her chance to be loved by everyone... the weight of this tragedy seems to bear down upon this person’s chest. And it is a comforting weight, almost human in heft.”

Yet, one of July’s more controversial stories, “The Sister,” while revealing how sexual desire is often defined more by time and place, age, and desperation, than by the fantasies that bring us to those points, simultaneously gives the reader a glimmer -- be it a distorted one -- of hope. In this story, the main character, an elderly man seeking an imaginary younger sexual partner, finds that the realness of his sexuality is more important than accessing it through this “imagined” girl. The poetry of the final scene, in which two older men embark on a sexual relationship, undermines the assumed cultural taboo of the moment and shows how people actually can find ways to connect across the arbitrary moral and ethical (see: fictional) borders we set for ourselves.

“We slept. It was the sleep of one hundred years. And when we woke, it was still night, and Victor reached across me and turned on the lamp. We were two old men. Everything seemed ordinary, even overly ordinary. There was a fly in the room and it buzzed in a way that told us nothing amazing had ever happened in this place.”

Through each of the stories in No one Belongs Here More than You, Miranda July exposes, most importantly, that one who lives in a world of imagination has a reason for escaping the real world. Her characters, in confronting their fears and fantasies -- whether willingly or unwillingly -- also find a purity, a painful joy, in the act of being human. Reality, July seems to be proclaiming again and again, is more evocative than any fantasy can hope to be. This, I believe, is what truly connects all the stories and characters: by facing reality, they face themselves.

How Reading Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help Is Like Swimming in a Public Pool

2011-07-01T18:26:00.008-05:00

I read at swimming pools. And because I’m borderline schizophrenic, I sometimes have trouble differentiating between fictional narratives and reality. Or maybe that’s just one of the many neuroses that accompanies writerhood. Potentially both are true. I read Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help poolside, and I watched the characters walk off the page and into swimming trunks and Spongebob floaties.

There was the wife watching her husband oogle the girl in too-small bikini.

There was the mother clipping a leash to her 13-year-old child.

There was the grandmother coating her leathery skin in coconut oil.

Mostly women, mostly in relationships, and mostly enacting self-destructive behaviors, these pool dwellers made it easy for me to draw swooping parallels. They laughed. The loved. They made ridiculous mistakes. In short, they lived. Like these people, Lorrie Moore’s characters are heartbreakingly honest.

You could work with the woman catering an affair with a married man.

You could babysit the 12-year-old girl exploiting her parents’ divorce for 7up.

You could have lunch with the mother, wife, and cancer victim who commits suicide.

But Lorrie Moore does more than offer you a glimpse into their lives. It’s not only voyeurism that makes these stories so satisfying. It’s not just that you watch their struggles and learn from their mistakes. It’s that you become these characters.

Since the dawn of the creative writing workshop, much has been said about the second-person narrative. Mostly in the form of, don’t do it. It’s gimmicky. It’s confrontational. You can’t pull it off. On the flip side, if you do pull it off, it creates urgency and snap, like a green bean begging to be eaten. The reader and story fuse.

At the swimming pool, as in these stories, I was not just watching the people around me. I was keenly aware of myself as part of the scene. I played a role in the narrative, and was, in fact, that girl in too-small bikini (it's probably time I buy a new one). I swam with them, sometimes barely keeping my head above water. I played with their children. I sunburned.

Lorrie Moore doesn’t offer a ten-step guide to beating depression or reveal the secret to driving your dream car. Instead, she gives us experiences that closely mimic her own. The characters aren’t helping themselves. More often than not they end up fired or dead or in a mental institution. But ironically, I still felt helped.

Because Lorrie Moore is an artist.

She can describe a bleeding wound, and we at once feel pity for the victim and awe for the scribe. We’re marveled by her ability to spin scabs into golden stories, and because we’re human too, we feel as though we may be capable of some such level of greatness.

Despite the strong emotional connection, the collection does indeed have some flaws. The drug-induced haze at the end of “Go Like This” falls flat. The men in the collection are intrusively one-dimensional. The stabbing in “To Fill” doesn’t behoove the character.

Yet, in many ways, these flaws make the collection even more endearing. Reading authors like Chekhov and Steinbeck can wear you down. No matter how hard I try, I will never write their stories. Our experiences are too dissimilar. Lorrie Moore is an accessible writer and watching her experiment on the page excites my imagination, much like watching a swimmer try a new dive. You may end up with a few sore spots, or even a head wound, but that doesn’t keep you from jumping off the diving board.

You will soon be surrounded by lovely ladies and laughter.

2011-05-31T17:02:00.004-05:00

Coworker: Who are your favorite authors?
Me: Easy. Steinbeck, Chekhov, Vonnegut, Updike…
Coworker: Okay but who are your favorite living authors?
Me: Oh, no problem. Saunders, Eggers, Moffett, Bradbury…
Coworker: What about female authors?
Me: Oh snap. Well there’s Woolf, Wharton, Austen… errrrr… Wait, you mean current female authors? Jhumpa Lahiri… uhm… Ann Beattie… Uhhhh… J.K. Rowling?
Coworker: What about … no I guess vampire novels don’t count.
Me: Not unless they’re zombie vampires.

This was me, less than six months ago, attempting to wrangle some female authors from my wrinkled brain matter. I found myself sounding pretty sheepish, and by sheepish I mean curly, smelly, big-toothed. I’ve since taken a few more graduate courses at UNT in which female authors moonlighted, showing their faces once or twice a month before vanishing amongst the stars. Still, I’ve yet to read many stellar female authors, mostly due to my own gross incompetence. All that’s about to change.

I pestered Dr. Barbara Rodman until she agreed to guide me via a summer course on this very topic. I then bribed a few fellow classmates to join forces with me and hatch a plan to take over the world, which of course, will be secondary to our plan to read some lovely ladies of fiction. The preliminary list and tentative dates for meeting are below. If you’d like to join us, add some sweet comments to the post or just find me hanging out in outer space eating some delicious science nuggets.

~~Saturday 11 June~~ Friday 17 June, 6pm - Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

Saturday 25 June - Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Saturday 9 July - Amanda Davis, Circling the Drain

Saturday 23 July - Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen

Meetings at Banter – high noon.

Current participants include: Laura Miller, Adam Kullberg, Hillary Stringer, Matt Davis, Zach VandeZande, and Zach Coleman. Stay tuned for meaty posts chronicling the mind children of our meetings.

My year in the rough

2011-05-20T18:30:00.001-05:00

Well, the end is here. Perhaps, if billboards are to be believed, the end of all things. The good news about going to grad school in Texas is you’re never too far from a gun show, so a couple of us are popping over to Frisco tomorrow morning to see about equipping ourselves for whatever may come. I am thinking of something semi-auto with some kind of bitchin’ under-barrel grenade launcher. Gotta spend that scholarship money on something.

Mostly, though, I’m concerned about stepping out of the job of assistant fiction editor and into the job of production editor. Today I took home the last of the fiction submissions and finished up paring down the stack of second reads to something manageable for Miro and Barb. My good friend Matt Davis is taking over, so I’m not really worried (in fact, I’m sure he’ll do a much better job). The talented and charming Laura Miller has already taken over the blogging, so I’m not really worried there, either (in fact, I’m sure she’ll do a much better job, and I’ll still be doing a little piece here and there). I’m a little worried about my new job, which basically consists of making sure the issue exists twice a year. That I’m able to gain that kind of trust from smart people seems like silliness. Time will tell.

I’m going to miss getting to read all the stories we get, even the bad or ridiculous ones. I’m going to miss finding those gems and getting to shepherd them into print. I’m going to miss seeming a little haggard and weighed-down all the time (having to read a few dozen submissions a week is a great excuse for why your grading isn’t finished). I’m also going to miss, in a small, weird way, the heartbreak of knowing that a story isn’t quite enough, that the writer on the other end of my rejection letter is a lot like me, and that even though I wasn’t able to do what they wanted me to do, we still share the same doubts, fears, and dreams. Maybe it’s not a real or profound connection we share, and maybe I’m just kidding myself to think that we’re all part of a community here, but being on this side of the fence has given me a new perspective on how important storytelling is.

So. That’s that.

Booty Calls, Stiffed Waitresses, and 33 Blackbirds – Final ALR Reading of Spring

2011-05-17T19:20:00.005-05:00

The booty don’t quit, but the semester do. We had our last ALR-sponsored reading of the spring semester on Friday the 13th – despite our collective friggatriskaidekaphobia, the microphones behaved sublimely and the axe-wielders kept their distance. Check out photos and excerpts below, and thanks to the ALR staff for the raucous good times!

Poetry by Nate Logan

"Booty Call Sonnet #14"

How much booty is too much booty?
Philosophers debating this question
say the unexamined booty is not
worth tapping. Poets either get
no booty, or say booty is a metaphor
for a beautiful man or woman
who has zero interest in poets.
In a world where booty, etc.
Can we know booty w/out its opposite, etc.
A good booty is hard to find, etc.
I'm looking for a feather-haired woman
with a knowledge of Chat Roulette.
Even on the Internet I'm sure--
the booty, it don't stop girl.

Fiction by Jessica Tomblin

from The Hostess, "The Painter" chapter

The man smiled at her as if he had a secret, and walked out the front door. Kate ran back to the table and picked up the black checkbook from it first, in order to begin busing and cleaning it for the next couple. As she lifted the book toward her, something fell out. At first she thought it was the check, but then she saw the tent of green. Lainey watched the color go out of Kate’s face, and Kate didn’t have much color to begin with; her white blond hair, in this moment, made her look somewhat like an albino. She threw the book back on the table and walked toward the door with a force that made her appear ghost-like, as if she were floating along at a rapid pace across the concrete floors toward the sidewalk. She held the door open with one arm so that the couple sitting next to the entrance, in the place we called the nook, could clearly see her.

The man, still on the street and walking steadily towards the maroon-colored Lincoln parked at the end of the block, turned with a slight jump at the sound of Kate’s voice.

“Excuse me, is there a problem?” She yelled after him.

“He stood there speechless for a moment before responding by shaking his head side to side as if to indicate that, no there was no problem, and then, not being able to help himself, felt the sides of his mouth turn up slightly on each side so that he was now silently standing there smirking at this ghostly figure standing in the door way.

“A dollar?” she said with no inflection so it sounded more a statement than a question, and so, the man stood again in silence until Kate grew tired of their staring contest and realizing the man had not, as she had hoped in the back of her mind, accidentally forgotten a bill or placed a dollar down, confusing it for a twenty, or even a ten, but had purposefully left her only the dollar tip, on his ninety-dollar tab.

Kate slammed the door and walked back to the table where the dollar lay on the floor beside the chair, still pushed out from where the man had been sitting. She picked it up and headed for the back bar, where Rocky sat drinking Jack and Cokes, oblivious to the scene that has just occurred at the front of house.

“This" she said, "is bullshit."

Poetry by Chris Beard

from "Love Abstract with Flood and Secrets"

There are thirty three holes in the sky
flying west, thirty three blackbirds
I see through to the source of rain,
and she wants birds to just be birds,
the sky to remain intact,
a pocket sealed with sun.

There are twenty five jars
where she keeps my hair,
where the curls wrap around
the bending light forever.

There are numberless hours spent damaging
the asphalt, our whole lives lived in a car,
enduring summer’s drag, drinking
like it is medicine to cure our heavy blood.

There are three years of storms back home
waited out in the basement with a bucket and oar,
water filling the window wells as we pretended to sleep
through the swell, burst, and flood, the disaster growing beneath us
as we floated up through the swampy mud.

ALR Reading Series

2011-05-02T17:42:00.002-05:00

Yet another successful graduate-student reading at Jupiter House. Despite the lack of electronic voice-magnifying machinery (otherwise known as a microphone), our readers expertly delivered stimulating stories and poems that captured the attention of even the non-students in attendance. Check out excerpts below, and stay tuned for details on our next (and final) reading of the semester.

"Hibernation" by Adam Kullberg

“You see what I mean? Just look at this thing,” his father said, kneeling down onto one knee beside it. He stroked the beast’s large, bowling-ball sized head as if the bear was some pet he had picked up the day before. The bear’s paws were as big as the boy’s lower back.

“Where did it come from?” the boy asked.

“Ranger found it a few years back, up near a campground. Biggest one they’ve ever seen around here, I hear.”

The boy leaned down and put a hand into the bear’s mouth, feeling the sharp, gleaming teeth with the ends of his fingertips. They felt warm to the touch. “How did they kill it?” the boy asked.

His father laughed and shook his head. “Kill it? No. This one died of starvation probably, maybe ate something it shouldn’t have. Rangers aren’t allowed to kill anything. Well, unless it’s in self-defense, of course.” He turned to the boy. “But the main rule of being a ranger is you protect the park. You defend it if you have to, you keep it clean, you make sure that no one hurts it. Like it were your child.”

The boy worked his fingers over the bear’s paws, comparing them to his own narrow, short fingers. He had never thought of nature as defenseless before, as something that needed helping. “Is that what you do then?” he asked, “defend it?”

“Of course. With my life, if I have to,” his father said matter-of-factly, “That’s the ranger’s code.”

“Would you ever leave it, though? The park?” the boy asked.

He thought about this for while. “No. I don’t think so.” He said. He leaned down and ran his hand over the fur, and a glazed look, much like bear’s own glossy black stare, came over his face. “It’s your duty to stay.”

"Toadkill" by Karen Kadura

The enemy oozed from the flowerpot and landed with a slick plop, quivering there like Jell-O and still wet from his recent watering. He was a dull, unremarkable grayish-green, and he lay unmoving on the sparse grass, smooth and glistening and immense. He must have been at least the size of both my father's fists together, and overweight besides. Although I knew one wasn't supposed to name anything that one was soon to part with, in that moment I christened him Fatty.

Fatty had a mutinous gleam in the beady little eye that peered out at me from beneath folds of fat, ignoring the dogs as they barked and whined behind the fence. His unwillingness to move struck me as disrespectful, although it may have just been that he lacked the strength in his legs to move his considerable bulk. I wondered how he had even managed to get into the flowerpot in the first place, and as I was thinking this he looked straight at me and blinked, slowly. He was surely mocking me; he had even managed to land with his entire left side facing me--the perfect shot. He seemed lazy, almost uncaring, and his apathy towards the danger he was in angered me. It seemed that he was in control of the situation, and I hated him for that. I raised the gun. "Where should I aim?" I asked Dad.

Poetry by Aubree Blomgren

from "How it Was, and Was Not"

You plus me was hardly larger than you without me, which made it easy for us to share the sleeping bag. / It was musty, / heavy, thick, big enough to hold a lumber jack and his ax. Its fabric was a forest of wild pheasants / in all stages of flight. / Printed to excite and to prepare the young men for sleep, so dreams become a hunt and a hunter / satisfying the instinct / to take home what's shot from the sky. Funny, at first, how we laid as if we'd been shot, and stacked, / in a hunter's bag, / one on top of the other. How I looked from the zipper to the quail, still alive in the quilted sky, / and didn't know / that the boy's sleeping bag tells him what life wants from him.

Our awe-struck audience.

American Literary Review, Reviewed

2011-05-01T14:47:00.000-05:00

This is solid, satisfying reading from accomplished and serious writers and artists cleverly attuned to the world of ideas, emotions, and rich imagery.

Read the full review here.

What's in a Nathan?

2011-03-24T16:06:00.003-05:00

In one of the posts on the Vouched blog under the label “Awful Interviews,” Christopher Newgent asks poet Nate Pritts, “Should I call you Nate or Nathan? Sometimes I introduce myself as Christopher and people call me Chris, and I punch their mouths. I have hard punches.” What follows is an enlightening and extensive answer, most of which I will quote:

My given name is Nathan & when I first started writing poems & stories, I was calling myself Nathan. However, no one called me Nathan in real life – everyone called me Nate, everyone has always called me Nate [… but] the name “Nathan” seemed like it had the right center of gravity, the proper level of careful diction & studious energy. Nathan Pritts wrote poems about the moon, or about deer running through field grass. […] Poems were things that guys named Nathan wrote in their barn or somewhere out on the far reaches of their property while contemplating the majesty of a spotted owl.

But I started to have a sense that it was really difficult to write a poem about a spotted owl if, in fact, you had never seen a spotted owl.

So I started writing poems that were more about me – a guy named Nate […] I started to understand that a poem was a dynamic system that depended on a connection to the vital & coursing elements of my own actual life as it had been lived & as I was currently living it. So Nathan Pritts retired – from writing poems, for sure, & mostly retired from life as well. He’s lying in a hammock on William Duffy’s farm, very happy & smug & knowing & soulful. Nate Pritts is still alive & writing poems that reflect his complete & utter confusion about being alive in language that struggles to pin down exact & emotional statements about a world that is constantly forcing him to THINK rather than FEEL.

So: call me Nate.

Like Nate, my given name is Nathan. But most everyone also calls me Nate. I introduce myself as Nate, Nate is the name I type on academic papers, my Facebook page says Nate, and a popular shirt reads, “I Hate Nate Logan!” Nate is everywhere for me.

But when my poems go out into the world though, I use Nathan. When I've been lucky enough to be introduced at readings, I write Nathan in the bio. When women get mad at me, they say Nathan. What is the difference between Nate and Nathan?

On some level, I agree with Nate's explanation: “'Nathan' seemed like it had the right center of gravity, the proper level of careful diction & studious energy.” Though I have never written poems about the moon or wildlife running through grass, “Nathan” fits like a cozy glove. “Nate” is missing something...something intangible that I can't put my finger on. Do I think that Nate sounds less respectable or reputable? No, not at all. Does “Nate Logan” sound worse/better/about the same as “Nathan Logan?” I don't think it sounds worse, it just sounds different.

Some of Nate's concerns are wrapped up in my own, but at this point in my life, I am happy to keep Nathan around. I don't have anxiety about having to choose between Nathan and Nate, but it is a choice I make, which implies that there are some decisions being made based on criteria, conscious or unconscious. It doesn't seem that Nate had “anxiety” about this either, but based his choice of name on larger concerns.

The question of name is something that I'm going to continue to think about. Maybe I will have an answer as insightful as Nate's someday. But until then, keep an eye open for the “Eight Nate's” or “Nine Nate's” reading. That's where you'll find me, cheering from the Nathan bench.

Review: Christine Sneed's Portraits of a Few of The People I've Made Cry

2011-03-02T14:30:00.002-06:00

At the end of last semester, Miro walked into the ALR office and asked me if I had time to review Christine Sneed’s Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, and I said yes, and I read it that weekend and quite enjoyed it, and then, somewhere between revising stories of my own, getting the ALR issue finalized and proofing it, getting my grading done, and then heading off to the tragicomedy that was my Christmas break… well, let’s just say I’m a terrible human being who can’t be trusted.

So when Miro asked me again to review the book this past week, I of course felt like an ass, which is probably not the feeling Sneed would want her book to prompt in someone who liked it a good deal, but here we are. The book itself, which won the Grace Paley Prize and was published last year, is now a finalist for the LA Times First Fiction Award, and for good reason. The ten stories in this volume have a special knack for getting at the personal politics underpinning adult relationships, particularly ones in which there’s some kind of authority gap (dramatic age differences between lovers factor into several of the stories).

The opener, “Quality of Life,” is one of the more harrowing pieces, a sharp thesis statement of a story that hinges on the kind of personal compromise that happens when a powerful man decides that a woman belongs to him. It’s a story that’s squelching and awful in the best way (think Don Delillo when he starts being mean to his characters), and serves as a cautionary tale to set the tone and remind us of the tension inherent in the stories to come, even as they play out without the kind of clear sense of danger that “Quality of Life” has. Here, Sneed demonstrates a knack for revealing her characters without letting us know she’s revealing them—the mysterious Mr. Fulger makes a point of sticking around to see a would-be thief get his due, saying “I’m sure this isn’t his first offense. He knew what he was doing. But obviously so did I.” A statement like this puts a character into sharp focus, and Sneed makes the most of moments like this one.

The writing is pretty keen throughout, but I’d like to single out the beginning paragraph of “Twelve + Twelve” as one of my favorites of my past year of reading, a bitter little firecracker screed that put me right where I needed to be in the story:

Someone in the alley three stories below my window was calling out to someone else and what he was saying was not very nice. Maybe he did it because we were all stuck in an ugly, listless March, ice visible everywhere and clinging to our lawns like a dense gray scum. We were exhausted and cynical under cloudy skies, our pants cuffs perpetually caked in grit and mud, our car tires spinning and spinning on snow-choked streets. No one I knew was outside digging up the flower beds, and certainly no one was in the mood to offer spare coins to strangers distractedly ransacking their pockets for change to feed the meters. Instead, people were talking heatedly into mobile phones or looking down at their feet as they trudged, these unloved husbands and crash-dieters and stubborn musicians and disbarred lawyers who all huddled in on themselves because among their other hardships, winter hadn’t yet ended and at this near-unendurable point, they just couldn’t look each other in the face.

There’s this great, desperate energy when Sneed gets cracking that I like a lot, and it runs throughout “Twelve + Twelve,” which was perhaps my favorite in the collection.

You’re So Different, concerning a famous director returning home to her high school reunion, is another standout. So too is the title story. I hesitate to say that these stories are all about people realizing their own powerlessness, because that would make it seem like Sneed’s characters don’t have agency (and let me tell you, they do), but they are about what we can’t control, what we have to give up, and how other people define us. One of the frequent conversations we have about stories here at UNT is if the kind of stories you find in literary journals are flat, mechanical, or boring. It’s a real danger, but it comes with a real reward, as the best “literary journal” fiction contains a truth you’re not going to find anywhere else, and Sneed’s book proves that point.

If the stories seem to go a little slack in the back half of the book, it’s only because of what’s come before. The arrangement of a short story collection is always a dicey affair (I personally hold to the “crap sandwich” as the best approach, where the good stuff goes on the outsides), and maybe shuffling the deck a little would benefit the book; regardless, the ten stories in Portraits of a Few People I’ve Made Cry reveal a voice that we should be paying attention to.

What I'm saying is that I spend a lot of time as the assistant fiction editor sorting through the slush pile, and yeah, there are gems, but there's also a lot of chaff (and many, many mixed metaphors). The rest of my time is spent plowing through Tolstoy or Carver or whichever other old hat established writer I haven't gotten around to before now. So coming across a book like this, full of solidly-plotted, well-written stories by an up-and-comer with a clarity of vision that seems rarer and rarer in the contemporary short story… well, it's a nice feeling is all, and if I had my way Sneed's book wouldn't find its way back to Miro; instead, it would slide into a place on my shelf between George Saunders and John Steinbeck, not too far away from Lorrie Moore, Mary Gaitskill, and Alice Munro, deserving its place.

Final Graduate Student Reading!

2010-11-30T13:57:00.003-06:00

Please join us this Friday at Banter Coffee Shop for our final graduate student reading of the semester. If what you crave in the libinal pit of your desire-deprived stomach is nothing less than an evening of white-knuckled thrills, swashbuckling adventure, and heart-pounding eroticism, then let me tell you something factual: ALR wants to satisfy you.

And in addition to our orgasmic casserole of original fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by UNT graduate students, if you show up early then perhaps we'll let you participate in the ALR reading party! Help us proof the new Spring 2011 issue, in which your name shall thus be inkly inscribed forerevermore, and get a line on that pesky, barren joke of a CV whose desolate blankness you've thus far been so painfully ashamed of! The American Literary Review wants you to feel good about yourself and your place in this mad, mad world!

ALR proofreading party - 5:30-7:00

Student Reading Series - 7:00

Andy Briseño - fiction
Emily Allen - poetry
Matthew Davis - fiction

See you there!

Happy Thanksgiving! We brought blankets!

2010-11-25T04:10:00.000-06:00

This Thanksgiving, I'm thankful* for our production editor Tim Boswell, who seemed very weary in the office today. Last week, faced with the fact that the ALR reading for that night was going to be all fiction readers due to a scheduling snafu (he makes the schedule so blame him), and knowing that his slot was right in the middle of that reading when the audience's good will and attention spans would both be waning, he did what any true American hero would do: he wrote a choose-your-own-adventure dinner theater piece called The Crying of a Lot of 49 Year Olds. We all got parts. We got to do voices. Some of us realized halfway through that we, specifically, were probably being mocked, but we were having so much fun that we didn't care. It was pretty great, and I dare each and every one of you to do something half as ridiculous the next time you give a reading. We all take ourselves far too seriously.

*I am also thankful for a day of reading books and playing fallout without feeling terribly guilty afterwards. It's exceedingly rare.

Masters of the Typewriter, Doctors of the Whip

2010-11-15T20:07:00.009-06:00

Elif Batuman's provocative article, "Get a Real Degree," in September's issue of the London Review of Books has produced even more pencil-gnawing in the MFA blogosphere than usual. Batuman's opening premise, "Even within the seemingly homogeneous sphere of the university English department, a schism has opened up between literary scholarship and creative writing," is one that us weirdos in Creative Writing-English PhD programs might immediately shelve in the "no-duh" section of our mental libraries. We are all too familiar with this schismy schism; with one foot in Creative Writing and another foot in the Literature, we try not to think about a full-blown case of departmental war breaking out where the two intersect.

But Batuman goes on to offer a brilliant critique of Mark McGurl's The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. McGurl's book proposes to interpret the rise of the MFA program "not as an occasion for praise or lamentation but as an established fact in need of historical interpretation." Batuman uses McGurl's dry aims as a springboard for her own deliciously unambivalent inquiry into institutionalization's effect on American fiction. While some of Batuman's critiques of program-fiction are stale (making fun of "show-don't tell" is now as ubiquitous as the slogan itself) her fearless dive into the shark-filled waters of the socio-political-grievance-novel is breathtaking to observe, not least because you are waiting for a team of politically correct white men to swim over and club her over the head with accusations of insensitivity or worse.

To get the full brilliance of Batuman's walk through this minefield, you really need to read the article, but for a taste, consider her take on McGurl's dialectic between Raymond Carver and Joyce Carol Oates, which Batuman uses to launch the question of "Who is the real outcast?" What she's really talking about here is program-fiction's preference for the narrative of the outsider. The problem, for Batuman, is that programs often tell their writing students that one can only be an outsider (and therefore fiction writer) by virtue of one's minority class, race, gender, religion, personal history of war or trauma, etc. According to Batuman, the my-life-is-worse-than-yours-contest between fiction writers is like:

"a hot-dog eating contest between a human and a grizzly bear. Is the real outcast the professor's grieving widow alone in the empty house in the college town, or the paranoid Bosnian graduate student threatened with deportation? Which estranged cousin is the real outcast: the German girl who survived Auschwitz and became a successful but caustic solitary anthropology professor; or the American girl who narrowly avoided being murdered by her own father, then became a good wife and mother, but ended up getting cancer?"

Batuman's argues that the real cause of this preference for outsider-narrative is "shame," specifically, the shame of the profession of writing:

"Literary writing is inherently elitist and impractical. It doesn't directly cure disease, combat injustice...Because writing is suspected to be narcissistic and wasteful, it must be 'disciplined' by the program--as McGurl documents with a 1941 promotional photo of Paul Engle, then director of the Iowa workshop, seated at a desk with a typewriter and a large whip."

At this point in Batuman's article, I was thinking, "Enter nonfiction to the rescue!" Nonfiction doesn't cure cancer either, but it can draw the reader's attention toward cancer in a way that fiction cannot. While novels can offer a heightened reality that nonfiction can't always achieve, at the end of the day, real cancer is, well, real. Indeed, Batuman goes on to mention the "gap in quality between American literary fiction and non-fiction today." (Guess which is of better quality!) But as an example, Batuman points to This American Life--nonfiction, sure, but is a radio/TV program really the only example of great nonfiction she can come up with? Batuman is clearly brilliant and a pleasure to read, but I was disappointed when she dropped her line of inquiry right when she got to nonfiction--an obvious antidote to at least some of the problems she has argued inherent in program-fiction. Hey Batuman! Over here, in the nonfiction section! The nonfiction novel is waving at you! The memoir is jumping up and down, trying to get your attention! The Personal Essay just Facebook-friended you! Over in this section, we don't worry about all this false-ventriloquism of the artificial outsider. We declare who we are at the door! I'll be writing a memoir from the perspective of Jessica Hindman, who is many things, but has never been and will never be a pregnant Vietnamese woman (unlike, say, Robert Olen Butler). If I want to know what a pregnant Vietnamese woman's life is like, I'll go find one and ask her. Then I'll transcribe my notes and begin the same narrative craft process that fiction writers undertake, with slightly different rules.

Some would say that the memoir is facing similar problems in terms of privileging outsider narratives (indeed, during a recent Q&A at UNT, Kathryn Harrison said something along these lines) but I still believe nonfiction allows an escape from the smell of shame emanating off the pages of outsider narratives ventriloquized by insiders (Batuman's looking at you, Dave Eggers!). But as Batuman points out, even Eggers began as an outsider (in his trauma memoir), and his fiction increasingly reads like nonfiction.

So why not just write nonfiction? Given the shame that, as Batuman argues, writers feel about their elitism, isn't it better to state it up front as nonfiction requires (see Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - both nonfiction masterpieces concerning black life written by white women who don't/can't disguise their whiteness) rather than smuggle it under the skimpy blanket that fiction writers call "creativity" (see James Franco's debut. You know, James Franco - that total outsider who writes about slavery). Isn't it more interesting to know that even the James Francos of the world understand, or at least want to understand, all this outsideryness? Is there any reason we need to fictionalize these narratives? Personally, I think Mary Karr's voice rings truest in the debate over nonfiction's relationship to fiction: "God is in the truth." If made-up stuff can no longer express truth, then why not give the old truthy-truth a go?

But regardless of whether program-writers deal in fiction or nonfiction, my biggest contention with Batuman's examination of shame in the writing-program world is that I believe this shame is somewhat well-justified. Whether you're a student on Planet MFA or Planet PhD - the classrooms of each are, yes, shamefully lacking a representative number of students of color, students from working-class backgrounds, students from rural areas. For this and many other reasons, we Creative Writing PhDs should heed Batuman's article as a call to arms: We know the typewriter, we know the whip - it would be shameful if we didn't write about both.

On doldrums and telling yourself that a fallow period is good for you and not getting super anxious about how if you don't write something great you will die unremembered and alone

2010-11-01T17:08:00.001-05:00

Lately, I have felt like one of those inbred dogs that fall to pieces too young, their bad hips a mystery to the children they were brought into the home to please. I loll useless in the corner and make up overwrought metaphors is what I’m saying. I hope I’m not alone in this feeling—I hope it is something universal to the writing life, where so much of who you are and who you want to be are squirreled away into words, the value of which are decided far down the line by strangers who don’t really know your pain and how very very special it is.

I know I must have some modicum of talent, given that sometimes I get a nice email from a stranger who’s read my book, and perhaps once in awhile I get stopped on campus by someone who heard me read somewhere, but I never feel sure of it. How do you get there? How do you arrive at the self-assured charging ahead that seems to be a necessity in this crushing business? These questions press down on me more when I don't have something compelling to write about, which, lately, I don't. I am always haunted by the words of Flannery O’Connor (that sassy bitch): “Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” I keep thinking that I will turn some corner or walk into some room and find that all my colleagues and professors are seated around a plate of cookies. Dr. Phil is there, and he tells me I should have a seat, these people want to talk to me about something, about how I’m hurting their lives, about how they have a way that I can get well.

What can I say? I am often a bummer. This post is not meant as a bummer, though. It is meant as a hopeful, timid proclamation of solidarity. I am saying to you, dear reader, dear Imaginary Audience: “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, but I’m doing it.” And you can take that with you as a token that what we do is worth doing, or you can look at this and say, “Well, at least I’m not a walking whiny joke like this dude over here” and get by a little better for it. Either way, I did my best to help.

Upcoming Events, Wonders

2010-10-24T18:50:00.004-05:00

I think somewhere in our talks about blogging there was mention of including local events and happenings. Last night Beard and I went to TEX gallery. I read a story about adulterous priests. One of the readers read prose poems while smearing cake all over herself. It was Kullberg's birthday. Colin Winette was in town. It was awesome.

In light of that, I decided to take up the baton of promoting these other awesome literary events which will soon be happening right here in lil d.

First, Sherman Alexie is reading on Thursday. Plus you can go to an "exclusive" Q&A session with him before the reading. Everyone likes things that are exclusive. I learned that from the movie about the facebook.

Also, there is a really cool series of events called The Narrative Arc that's going to be put on by the New Media department. They are looking for readers for the final event on Friday, November 12th.

Below are all of the details for these events. I hope to see everyone there. Happy fall!

-Hillary

Opportunity to meet writer Sherman Alexie:

We still have spots available at a small pre-lecture discussion this Thursday with writer Sherman Alexie. You must sign up in advance to attend. The event is free.

Details: 5:30 discussion on Thursday, 10/28 in Silver Eagle Suite (must sign up in advance), reading is at 7:30 in same location

This is a wonderful opportunity for creative writers at UNT. If you are interested in attending, send your name and student ID to Professor Foertsch today. http://us.mc654.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=Jacqueline.Foertsch@unt.edu

Asst. Professor in New Media Jenny Vogel is asking for fiction, nonfiction, or poetry students to read for five or ten minutes on Friday November 12 at UNT on the Square. This is an impressive idea to explore the complexities of narrative in multiple forms and a variety of objects.

If you're interested in reading (and adding a useful line on the CV), please email Professor Vogel at jenny.vogel@unt.edu. She's curating the event.

UNT on the Square presents:

THE NARRATIVE ARC

November 1 – November 12
Opening Reception: Tuesday Nov 2, 5-7PM

UNT on the Square, 109 N. Elm St, Denton, TX 76201

Hours: Mon –Wed 9-5; Thurs 9-8, Fri 9-5, Sat 11-3 (closed for lunch from 12-1)

It's a lucky man who can say "when," "before" and "after."
- Robert Musil "Man Without Qualities," 1930

Narratives are based on a sequence of events, no matter how improbable, "as long as it sets off an emotional tick, to which subsequent episode can provide an answering tock." This suggests that narratives not only rely on sequencing or stringing together cause and effect, but also on our perception or misperception of relationships or dependencies within the episodes. How can this understanding of sequences and a continuation of plot through textual strings be translated into images and objects? What kind of structures can replace the words, sentences and paragraphs to experience narration in a visual context?

The moving image, the graphic novel, or digital art might be the most obvious media where both text and image collide, providing a bridge between the two disciplines. But if narratives are also established through our ability to read dependencies between two or more parts, then stories can emerge from spatial relationships, complex layering of material and meaning, or the artistic process itself.

The artists in this exhibition address the questions raised above, while challenging the conventions of visualizing story.

Artists featured in this exhibition:
Patryce Bak, Ofri Cnaani, Ellie Ga, Sven Johne, Ezra Johnson, Selena Kimball, Ellie Krakow, Dave Mishalanie, Joshua Sanchez, Julie West
and UNT New Media Art students.

Events related to the exhibition:

Tuesday, November 2nd, 5-7PM
Opening Reception

Friday, November 5th, 5-9PM-
First Friday Denton Gallery event with live-cinema projections by UNT New Media Art students

Thursday November 11th, 7-9PM
Exhibition artist Ellie Ga will perform The Fortune Tellers, a performative lecture about her experiences on board the Tara, a sailboat drifting in the frozen pack ice in the Arctic Ocean.

Friday November 12th, 5-6:30PM
Reading by UNT Creative Writing students

This Poem Tastes Funny

2010-10-24T16:31:00.003-05:00

Recently, I received a package in the mail from a professor at my MFA program. It's a poster advertising a reading to celebrate 25 years of the Tom McGrath Visiting Writers Series. The reader, looking thoughtful with a stem of glasses on his lips, is Billy Collins.

I laughed when I unrolled the poster. I don't like Billy Collins. I mean, I really don't like Billy Collins. I'm sure every poet in my MFA program knew that I was adamantly against Collins' brand of poetry (I know the professor who sent me the poster knew—he was my thesis chair). If they didn't know, they could read about it—the first section of my thesis is partly devoted to critiquing Collins, particularly his use of humor.

Now, I'm not saying that Collins' is “wrong” in his use of humor or anything like that. My argument revolves around the idea that he really doesn't try as hard as he could. Sure, a reader could interpret one of his poems in x amount of ways, but one, I think, doesn't really have to apply themselves too much to “get it.” In my research for my brief discussion of Collins, I came across an interview where he said that “poetry should be transparent” and that “there's an awful lot of bad poetry...about 87 percent of the poetry in America is not worth reading.” One can assume anything that is not transparent, not easy to get on the first read, not difficult to understand, is not worth reading. Well, that's excluding an awful lot.

What Collins' does not talk about, and what seems to get lost in a lot of discussion about “good” and “bad” poetry, is taste. The literary theory class I'm in pokes at my brain and makes me want to ask, “But, does taste really exist?” And yes, it does. It has to exist. If there were no such thing as taste, Collins would love that 87% of poetry he currently dislikes. If there were no taste, I would like Collins' poetry.

But where does taste come from? How do I know what I like and what I don't? Saying, “I like making the familiar unfamiliar,” is true, but, that seems to be Collins' modus operandi too, though there are different results. Can I just say that my gut tells me what I like? Can I say that growing up in “flyover country” makes my imagination work harder? I don't know. These are questions I can't answer.

I don't know how many poems in the world I'd call “awful,” but I don't think 87% is close. I couldn't even count that number of poems. Collins' taste must be narrow in scope though if 87% are not worth reading. 87% of people who buy poetry from chain bookstores, such as Barnes & Noble and Borders, probably buy Collins' books. He has broken sales records for poetry (I know, this is hard to believe, it's poetry after all). Every time I have been to a chain bookstore, I have seen Collins' name staring at me from a handful of book spines. My professor told me over 400 people came to hear Collins' read. Almost every reading I attended while I was a MFA student, there were around 25 people, maximum. Does this mean I have bad taste? Am I missing something here?

I will give Collins credit though—I am happy that poetry is still being read other than by those of us in the Academy or graduate students in English. One of the things that poetry, or literature for that matter should do, is entertain. Many people are entertained by Collins' poems. That's especially telling today, where electronic media dominates the entertainment landscape.

So, I'm going to put the poster up in my cubicle. I'm not sure what my professor told Collins about me, if anything, or if he read my thesis introduction. Collins was nice enough to sign it though, in what appears as a cheerful scribble. This reminds me that I stole a poem idea from Collins and even got the poem published. I hope it's the most awful poem ever written.

The heartbreaking job of the assistant fiction editor

2010-09-28T01:14:00.004-05:00

What am I doing? I'll tell you what I'm doing. I'm reading stories, whittling down the list of great ones until what's left are the really great ones that will have a shot at being in our latest issue. And I don't want to be doing this, man. I want to be in bed, or writing, or reading a book, or something. I have my postcolonialism class in the morning with Dr. Raja (who, it should be noted, is able to run down a hundred years of Western thought in the space of forty-five minutes while his students sit there, at once aghast and amazed), there's a stack of grading to be done on my desk that has gone rancid from sitting there too long, I haven't been to the gym in a few weeks and am becoming unacceptably fat and sluggish, and--let's face it--Halo isn't going to play itself. But I'm here, reading stories, making ugly decisions I don't want to make.

I wrote a story last semester about a guy who had my job who started writing odd, personal notes back to the submitters. The guy in my story is a navel-gazer, one of those sad sacks that young men from Brooklyn tend to write about, and in writing it I was trying to work my way through the way this impersonal yet personal connection between the guy who is in charge of reading his way through the pile and the person who has sent their little measure of hope to him along with a SASE is in many ways a horrible bummer. My job as arbiter and gatekeeper makes me the enemy. I am the faceless jerk who says, "No, I don't think so." And then, I toss it carelessly into the rejection box. Carelessly! Now, I am up late reading stories that I genuinely like and trying to decide if I genuinely like them enough, weighing them against the other ones, knowing that my decisions will ultimately be this many blows to this many egos.

The upside is that I've read some great things so far, and I'm going to continue reading great things. So many times over the past few weeks, something has come along in a story that has knocked me flat on my ass. Just now, it happened again. Every time this happens, I want to call the number on the cover letter, I want to ring someone up at this late hour and say, "Hey, look, I don't care what happens from here on out, but this one sentence, right here on page 4. Hell, you've done it."

I probably shouldn't do that, though. We have a reputation. We are respectable. I am prone to gush and am not that great at the whole extemporaneous phone conversation thing. The awkward humanist, in love with everybody. And of course, what does a phone call like that mean if your story doesn't end up making it through the next round? What good then is that one sentence, that self-contained gut-punch of a sentence that woke me up and reminded me why I write in the first place? The person on the other end would be right to feel cheated.

And... that's quite a rant, I guess. What I mean is that I love my job, in part because I hate my job. Keep sending me your stories. I'll try my best to like them hard enough.

"Who is speaking?" Recent Debates about Contemporary Literature

2010-08-30T14:47:00.007-05:00

There's been a bit of a furor recently about just who, exactly, is deciding what a work of fiction needs to include in order to be dubbed an "American Masterpiece." First, there was the Huffington Post article that lambasted "The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers."

Interestingly, number 15 is not a writer at all but New York Times Literary critic Michiko Kukatani, who recently gave Johnathan Franzen's new book a rave review, prompted The Atlantic to publish this article, claiming, in so many words, that the NYT neglects female authors and privileges the white, upper-class male writer who lives in Brooklyn (and yes, he is sad).

(The Awl also weighs in, chronicling the response of a few female writers to promote female fiction).

I've taken a particular interest in this latest onslaught of debates on how who is speaking determines who we(the public) are reading because I've also spent the last few days working my way through Ania Loomba's Colonialism/Postcolonialism, and that will get anyone thinking about the politics and power underlying the literary industry in contemporary circles.

On the one hand, certainly not all 15 of the "overrated" authors are white males. Yet this seems to place the "non-white males" on the list in a double bind: they are dismissed both by the NYT and by those who seek to shatter the hold that the NYT and those like them have over what we deem masterpieces of contemporary fiction.

As a sad young literary woman myself, I must confess that I too feel the privileging of the sad young literary men, and not just those who are our contemporaries. This is why Mary Gaitskill is called a "shock" writer and Philip Roth or Charles Bukowski are not, for example.

This is what, I think, makes the Awl article's conclusion particularly sad: if it is, in fact, impossible for someone speaking from the dominant position to speak for someone in the oppressed or subaltern position, then what help is it if the "single story" about non-white, non-sad, non-literary men is immediately dismissed as one that doesn't speak to the collective American reality?

If language speaks us, then limiting our literary output will have an impact on our worldview, and the cycle which privileges certain subjects and perspectives as more "literary" than others will continue. This seems analogous to colonized subjects inability to locate a language or mode of expression in which to speak.

What does everyone else think about this?

Here is one reason it is great to be a creative writer or the kind of person who likes creative writers if you live in Denton

2010-08-26T22:24:00.003-05:00

All through the spring and summer, while the UNT English Department reading series wound down, Tex Gallery picked up the slack. Tex Gallery is an art space that is run by a couple of guys that decided their house would be more fun if people came over to check out readings, jazz and experimental music, and local artists. They also thought it would be fun to start their own review. So they made both of those things happen, and now every month or so they set up a showing and invite everybody they know, which includes a lot of the people in the creative writing department here at UNT.

I've read there a few times, as have several of our other graduate students, and every time I've been super jazzed afterward. Imagine a large living room without any furniture that is packed with people. It's about ninety degrees, and everybody is sweating and sitting on the floor. I'm talking unbearably hot and uncomfortable. But when you get up there to read, things get electric. They came to see you read. That's what they're doing there. It's a pretty great feeling.

The readers are phenomenal, too. Below are Colin Winnette and Michael Inscoe from last week's set list (full disclosure: my reading will probably be uploaded to the texgallery YouTube account later in the week. I encourage you not to look at it).

So yeah, that's one reason it's great to live in Denton. Not only that, there was also the informal summer reading series that our friend Adam put together (Adam, I would probably brag about you if you had a youtube account), and now that the semester's started back up we also have the monthly student reading series again. In fact, we're having one this Saturday at 7:30 at the Jupiter house on University. Readers include Chelsea Woodard, Nathan Logan, Tim Boswell, Jessica Hindman, Jaclyn Thies, and Zach VandeZande (that's me). If you are within driving distance, there are worse things to do with your Saturday.

ALR Summer Book Club: Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

2010-07-08T11:25:00.003-05:00

It's somehow fitting to be writing a blog post about Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned on my 29th birthday, because the stories in this book are about the anger and bitterness that come with being a misfit, and no one is a misfit in society like a 29-year-old balding man in a college town. Plus my generation doesn't really have anything definitive about it, anyway. I was thirteen when Reality Bites came out in theaters, and I was twenty-seven when Twilight came out in theaters; what cultural touchstone am I supposed to hang my hat on? The Matrix? The new Star Wars trilogy? The internet in general? No thanks. I grew up in a time where being jaded wasn't edgy or cool anymore, it was just a natural part of being alive, like breathing or bowel movements. That's why everybody my age loves Bill Murray so much. That's why these stories resonate so well with me. That's why Wells Tower looks like this in most of his pictures:

I talk a lot about the prescience of Don Delillo's White Noise, and I think writers like Tower, Chris Bachelder, Joshua Ferris, and others have grabbed onto what was true about White Noise and carried it out in their fiction (each in different ways, of course). For Wells Tower (god I wish I had a name as cool as Wells Tower), it's about the utter placelessness that modern American culture has given us, both in our familial relationships and our larger role in society.

Take, for example, the opening story, "The Brown Coast." It's a story of a man who is separated from his wife, rebuilding his uncle's house, and filling an aquarium with the things he gets from the sea. I'll spare the details (in part because I read the collection back in April and have a terrible memory), which are rich and telling, but eventually he puts a sea sponge in the tank, which kills everything else in it. The symbolic meaning is clear: this is man's perception of self in the new millennium, a destructive, ugly thing, poisonous by nature, unable to find redemption. This theme runs through a lot of the stories, including "Down Through The Valley," a story of a man driving his daughter and her new stepfather home, "At the Show," an experimental pastiche of what happens when a carnival comes to town, and "Wild America," where a young girl's potentially violent encounter with a young man is supplanted with the embarrassment of being rescued by her dork of a father.

Maybe that paints too bleak of a picture; there's a certain workaday hope running throughout these stories too, particularly in "Executors of Important Energies," "Leopard," "Door in Your Eye," and the hilarious title story, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned." That hope is always tempered and used as a buffer against the reality of the situation, but it's there, and it's human, and it's meaningful to this reader, at least. "Executors of Important Energies" is a good example. It is a story of a son whose father has no memory, a father who calls the cops on his wife several times a week and chooses to invite a slovenly, overweight chess hustler to a nice dinner with the family he no longer really recognizes. The father says of the main character's stepmother, "I don't know who this woman is, and I don't know why she's in my house with me. But I'll be honest with you. I think I'd like to try and fuck her." This sentence, to me, is as heartbreaking as it is funny, and the story unfolds this way, with the father saying unpleasant things and bringing an unpleasant person to dinner until his wife walks out. The hope– the redemption, really– in this story is so small that you may not even see it, but it's there in the closing lines, as the chess hustler drives them around in his piss-soaked car looking for the wife:

          The impact sent swaying the load of junk and bangles hanging from Dwayne's rearview– Mardi Gras beads, feathered gewgaws, sports medallions– and my father watched the swinging mess with all the fascination of an infant watching the mobile over his crib. He reached out and caught hold of a miniature New Mexico license plate. He frowned at the embossed letters reading "Land of Enchantment."
         "What is this?" he asked.
          "It's just some bullshit I picked up on the road," said Dwayne.
          "No, this word here, 'enchantment.' What's that mean, again?"
          "Shit," said Dwayne. "You know what charm is, Roger?"
          "Of course," my father said.
          "It's like that, like charm."
         My father leaned against me, studying the orange Braille. "Land of Charm," he said.

Maybe not everyone would find that to be a hopeful ending, but I do. Yes, it's a confirmation of just how bad off the father is, mentally, but his ability to be moved by something so small and simple becomes uplifting in some understated way.

Tower relishes in good details and well-constructed sentences that reveal a deep understanding of human relationships. Bob Monroe's affair in "The Brown Coast" is discovered because of a footprint on his car windshield that does not match his wife's. In "Retreat," a character would rather eat likely-spoiled meat than admit to being wrong. A sentence I wrote down in my journal, which I stupidly neglected to put a page number with, goes like this: "She would often call just to sigh at me for two hours on the phone, wanting me to applaud her depth of feeling." These are the kinds of things we do, and Tower captures them perfectly.

I've got to give special notice to the title story, which is about middle-aged Vikings who are tired of pillaging. It's a little out of left field, but it fits perfectly with the misfit nature of all of the characters in these stories. The men are ready to settle into an agrarian life, but the newer Vikings won't allow it, and they're excited to keep the tradition of rape and beheading alive while the older Vikings are dragged along to row the ships and grumble. They talk with modern working-class vernacular and are kind of hilariously put-upon by the whole process; while the leader is pulling a villager's lungs out from behind ("Oh lord, is he doing a blood eagle?"), the main characters look at each other, sigh, and decide to find a nice spot in the sun to relax.

The story, as with most of the stories in the collection, has a lot to say about the shift of power that occurs generationally and the strange middle ground of early adulthood, which brings me back to my birthday. I'm 29, well beyond the age of it being acceptable to walk around a party with my own case of beer, but not yet old enough to be excited about a lawnmower purchase. 29 is no-man's-land, and most of the angst of being 29–in life as in these stories–centers around finding ways to make that okay, or finding ways to ignore it. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go play videogames for the next six hours.

Recommended follow-ups if you dig Wells Tower: Don Delillo, White Noise; Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End; Justin Taylor, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever; Justin Cronin, Mary and O'Neill

ALR Summer Book Club: Bret Anthony Johnston’s Corpus Christi

2010-07-01T16:11:00.012-05:00

Misconceptions underlie many of the stories in Bret Anthony Johnston’s collection Corpus Christi. As Minnie herself tells us: “there was no one time when she missed Richard the most—a misconception of those who’d never lost a spouse…She wasn’t angry at him for dying—a misconception of therapists; she was angry she’d survived”(38). Characters often go through a change wherein they realize that their initial view of themselves, others, and the world around them is out of sync with the reality of their situations. In each of his masterful stories, Johnston gives us a sliding scale of perception and misperception, and seems to always know just when to hit us with the truth. As he says in an interview at the close of the collection: “one of the things I’ve tried to explore…might well be called the myth of memory…If our memories play a large part in defining us, what happens if those memories are wrong or are no longer accessible?”(264). He wrote the book, he says, to imagine what these situations might be like.

We see Johnston’s interest in exploring the way that the world and our interactions with it can define us from the very first story, “Waterwalkers,” where, as in many of these stories, a character struggles to put himself together after some manner of devastating loss: “those mundane encounters left him utterly unsure of his identity. No longer a father, no longer a husband”(12). As Sam hides himself away from the world that can no longer figure out how to define the new him—after the tragic death of a son and the subsequent loss of a wife—we can see the power that lies in the way that our past defines us not only for ourselves, but in the eyes of others as well.

As the Sam searches for meaning in all of what’s happened to him, he draws the predicted routes of hurricanes on a large map. Of course, as his ex-wife Nora points out, he’s wrong about the direction that that hurricane will take, but he’s correct in that hurricanes (or, acts of chance or fate) frame the deciding events of his life (meeting Nora, his son Max dying, finding Nora again). The parallel between the precise nature of hurricane in one aspect (produced by exact combinations of the forces of nature) and the random chaos and destruction that they cause is heartbreaking when applied to Sam’s life. We don’t fault him, or ourselves, for trying to map some meaning onto the forces of chance.

Many of Johnston’s stories contain this element of chance meeting: “Outside the Toy Store” and the mash-up at the end of “Corpus Christi” are other examples. Rarely do the characters get what they expect out of these chance encounters; what at first seems like a hopeful coincidence often serves to make the relationship worse off than it was in the first place (as “Outside the Toy Store” depicts a particularly brutal way).

Equally heartbreaking are the repeated mentions of luck in the first story of the three-story cycle of Minnie and her son, Lee, “I See Something You Don’t See.” Only a few pages in we learn that Minnie’s luck has once again run out, resulting in Lee thinking(incorrectly) that only he knows the truth about his mother’s condition. In keeping the truth from her, Lee sees himself as finally refuting the accusation that he is a man “unable to accept kindness”(48).

But as the story cycle as a whole demonstrates over and over again, there are often vital differences between the way that characters see themselves and the way that others see them. Far from being heavy-handed with this message, however, Johnston draws our attention to this fact lightly with the moment that spawns the title of the story itself, as Minnie recalls the rules of the game I see something you don’t see(52). The premise of this game, of course, is to get the other person to uncover what was always already there. The fresh perspective spurred by requesting, literally, that the other look at the world in a different way seems to be the only thing that can keep at bay the myriad number of misconceptions that keep piling up all around. The visual knowledge that we can gain by looking at the world differently comes to us through a verbal clue. Like the layers of meaning in the stories themselves, it is up to the listener to find their own path to the object in question.

The keystone moment, as Miro would say, for the “myth of memory” occurs in the third story, “Buy for Me the Rain,” when Moira says “‘everything happens to me twice,’” and Lee replies, “things rarely happen to me, even once’”(231). Lee’s description of himself, of course, is not true. We see Lee repeat the actions of his father over and over again, from soothing Minnie in that first emergency room visit, to duplicating the way Richard spoke to her, “she saw him gauging what would be best to say, what would be worst. Richard had done this”(58), to similarities in his appearance and motives “He resembled his father, his thin hair and sloped shoulders and even his reticence as he checked the cupboards” (160). Lee repeats his childhood actions as well “as in his youth, he still cut food with a fork rather than a knife”(142), and we never forget that the two are re-enacting, with a dark difference, their roles as mother and son. Minnie eventually forgets Lee’s name in her dementia, but never who he is: “through that long, excruciating fade, there always remained a silky, durable cord of memory that connected them, a child and his mother”(161).

The conclusion Moira come to in this moment, “‘so we’re a good fit’”(231), about the relationship between her and Lee is as untrue as it’s even been. Unlike his mother, Lee knows that “[Moira] would not grow to need him”(231). As a result, like Sam, everything feels “random and unmoored”(238) in the wake of Minnie’s death. The repeated experience of sneaking off with Moira “relived and vexed him”(242), because he expects that Moira will make his life different, more exciting, but also more uncomfortable, the repetition of an encounter whose meaning he has never understood in the first place. Unlike Minnie, Moira withholds the clues that Lee needs to see her clearer. This, of course, is what draws him to her. In contrast, we have some of Lee’s final actions as his mother has slipped into a coma “he took one of the crazy straws that she liked and returned to the den. He smiled in case she could see”(247). And then the Chekhovian realization, as he lies in bed with Moira, that the events of the funeral and that night are “only the beginning”(252). The worst of his troubles, left without someone from whom to withhold a comforting voice in the night, are yet to come.

There are many other themes worth exploring in this collection. “In the Tall Grass,” “Two Liars,” and “Birds of Paradise” (and, in a way, “Anything That Floats”) all depict coming-of-age stories wherein the young protagonists learn a little more about the adult world than they’d maybe like to. Johnston says “what I find inherently interesting about the parent-child relationship is its fragility and its durability”(265).

There’s also this tantalizing quote, from an interview at the close of the collection. Johnston says, answering a question about the violent weather in Corpus Christi, “…and of course there’s no controlling [the weather]. When these characters find themselves in violent or intimate situations, they’re often stripped down to their essences [….] Violence and intimacy, or love, require participants to leave themselves unprotected, to take chances, to gamble with the worst odds for the highest stakes”(264).

But, that’s for someone else to tackle, I’ve bloviated long enough. Looking forward to seeing what everyone has to say, I hope you all enjoyed this collection as much as I did!

-Hillary

ALR Summer Book Club: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies

2010-06-23T14:14:00.009-05:00

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999) is our highlight this week at the ALR blog. Fans of Lahiri’s first published story collection will also want to read her novel The Namesake (2003) and her most recent publication of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth (2008) to follow her map of questions about self and family. A story is a series of sentences, one after another, but it does not follow that perfect sentences make a perfect story. While the smooth, minimalist sentences of Interpreter of Maladies can feel unemotional, the stories gather a pathos that will certainly move readers. Her exploration of the Indian-American experience, especially the effect of immigration on the different generations, provides a study of human nature that transcends age, gender, and nationality: everyone hopes and everyone grieves. The nine stories in this collection model for writers the truth that there is no more compelling subject than human relationships.

In an interview with The Atlantic, Lahiri says that she likes her prose to be plain. She continues: “Even now in my own work, I just want to get it less—get it plainer. When I rework things I try to get it as simple as I can. … My writing tends not to expand but to contract.” The following quote from the title story “Interpreter of Maladies” can be taken as evidence of her success, though plainness and simplicity by no means exclude elegance or emotion. Mr. Kapasi, a tour guide, fantasizes about having a relationship with Mrs. Das, an Indian-American whose family is taking a tour in his cab, and her request for his address to send him some pictures makes him hopeful:

The paper curled as Mr. Kapasi wrote his address in clear, careful letters. … As his mind raced, Mr. Kapasi experienced a mild and pleasant shock. It was similar to a feeling he used to experience long ago when, after months of translating with the aid of a dictionary, he would finally read a passage from a French novel, or an Italian sonnet, and understand the words, one after another, unencumbered by his own efforts. In those moments Mr. Kapasi used to believe that all was right with the world, that all struggles were rewarded, that all of life’s mistakes made sense in the end. The promise that he would hear from Mrs. Das now filled him with the same belief. (56)

This is as smooth as language can get. Mr. Kapasi’s memory of the act of translation, a thematically significant trope, beautifully parallels his trust that he will hear from Mrs. Das again. At first it seems as simple as saying, “This is like that,” but coupled with the fact that Mr. Kapasi no longer remembers several of the languages he once knew, his naiveté here ought to warn him and does warn us readers that all struggles are not rewarded, and that some things will never make sense. By use of simple words, clear verbs, and little decoration, Lahiri describes the dear self-deception that is the source of much of Mr. Kapasi’s behavior.

My favorite story is “A Temporary Matter,” the first in the arrangement. One of the most perfectly constructed stories I have ever read, it describes the slow disintegration of Shukumar and Shoba’s marriage a few months after the stillborn delivery of their first child. That information is delivered on page three with as much sterility as one would find in a hospital: “When he [Shukumar] returned to Boston it was over. The baby had been born dead.” The story’s title is apparent in the first sentence, when the couple receives a notice that due to winter storms, their electricity will be temporarily turned off for one hour every evening for five days. During the outage, over dinner, Shoba initiates a game in which they each tell the other a secret, from a harmless lie to an unfaithful impulse. But the temporary matter gradually becomes, of course, their marriage, and the two secrets that Shukumar and Shoba tell each other at the end of their game are shocking symbols of their grief.

About the symmetry of the narrative structure of “A Temporary Matter,” Shoba and Shukumar are progressing equally on opposite paths, a perfect X. As she spends more time away from the house at her work or the gym, distancing herself from the painful memories and unfulfilled hopes, Shukumar spends more time at home, sometimes not leaving the house for days. In fact, purposefully to avoid Shoba, he moves his desk into the baby’s room, though he does little work on his dissertation. Another reversal is the shopping and cooking, which Shoba had taken great pleasure in, foresightedly buying and preserving food she thought was in excess of their needs, and which she now leaves to Shukumar, who has discovered for himself the small pleasure she left there in the remains of the carefully labeled rice. Dinnertime in the candlelight has become the one time of day when the couple meet to spend time together, but if things continue as they have begun, the routines Shukumar and Shoba have invented for themselves will cease to intersect.

Lahiri’s characterization of the story’s two principle characters—the others are all peripheral, occurring only in Shukumar’s memory except the Bradfords, themselves a picture of what the husband and wife will never be—is built on a slowly amassed pile of significant details. Shukumar’s first description of Shoba has her just home from the gym with the remains of her makeup darkening her eyes, but on the fifth day he reports, “She hadn’t been to the gym tonight. She wore a suit beneath the raincoat. Her makeup had been retouched recently” (20). This litany of facts assumes significance in light of the last confession Shoba makes at dinner, that she will be moving into an apartment. She is ready to make complete her distance from him, absenting herself completely from the house she treats “as if it were a hotel” (6). At first Shukumar interprets her appearance as a return to normalcy, to their previous intimacy, but after she breaks the news it becomes a sign that Shoba has begun planning for the future again, yet one that does not include him.

The notion of the lights going out is a significant metaphor, one of the few that Lahiri indulges herself in. The act of confession becomes easier for the couple in the dark; on the first night Shukumar moves the impromptu candle holder farther down the table, “making it even more difficult for them to see each other” (11). As they communicate more freely and for the first time in months, Shukumar begins looking forward to the evening, thinking all day about what he will say to his wife upon her return from work. He takes more care with the food and himself, even leaving the house to buy candles to facilitate their nightly game. On the fifth day, however, the electricity has been repaired early, and their truth-telling must occur in the light. After Shoba tells him she is leaving him, Shukumar tells her against her wishes “the one thing in her life that she had wanted to be a surprise” (22), the gender of their child, a boy. After these confessions have been received in silence, Shoba turns off the light, and they sit together at the table, crying. In the darkness they become more enlightened, hiding their wounds from the harsh light of day.

Shoba tells Shukumar, “You didn’t have to tell me why you did it” (18), which could be the words of the author herself. Lahiri practices an eloquent restraint from commenting on the morality, decisions, behaviors, or emotions of her characters. Shukumar is drowning in grief, but Lahiri never once mentions the word. Her sentences, clinically correct, only imply the emotional states of the man and woman who did not become parents; even when they cry, she observes the fact like a reporter. Did you find Lahiri’s narrative style appropriate or comforting? Singly, each of these stories carries the lonely reservation of characters walking over strange and foreign ground, missing communications and suffering grief; but together in a collection, that burden might become commonplace through too much familiar treatment. What did you think about “A Temporary Matter” and about the eight other stories? Did you find them too different or too similar? What was your experience reading Interpreter of Maladies?

If you love Jhumpa Lahiri, visit her website or listen to her read and discuss William Trevor’s story “A Day.” If you want to talk more about Interepreter of Maladies, take a look at the reading group guide from Houghton Mifflin or leave a comment.

ALR Summer Book Club: Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (both the original and final manuscripts)

2010-06-17T23:08:00.006-05:00

Although Raymond Carver may compare to the “indie band that has become so popular and influential that it’s no longer cool” (see last week’s post), he still merits two weeks in the American Literary Review Blog spotlight. And why not? This indie band is popular because of talent. Carver did not lip-sync his way into undergraduate textbooks. He knows something about writing—something the rest of us should pay attention to. And so we are. Last week, we looked at Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? This week’s focus is What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (the final book and the manuscript version).

The same kinds of techniques that impressed Zach continue to impress me in this week’s reading. Carver uses minimalism and open-endings to draw in readers. As some of his titles demonstrate, his writing isn’t always the most straight-forward or concise. But it’s accurate and means exactly what Carver wants it to mean (let’s not get into literary theory . . . ). The reader knows exactly what Carver’s talking about and why (until it comes to some of the endings, of course). Carver presents only the necessary facts and does not spend much time describing the woman behind the check-out counter or the green shrub that grows next to the front door. He does nothing of the sort.

Instead, he makes statements such as “in this manner, the issue was decided” (303) from “Popular Mechanics.” This single line tells the reader that a baby dies by landing on a lit stove—a very unpleasant matter that does not require images of burning skin or terrorized screams. The reader can imagine pain and gruesome details well-enough without additional help. Everyone experiences pain, and everyone has the ability to cause pain or to make a mistake. These pains and mistakes become the topic for much of Carver’s writings. He chooses to hone in on the pivotal moments in peoples’ lives—the moments that start a new course. And, most of the time, these changes are not seen as positive from the characters’ points-of-view.

For instance, the story “Gazebo” centers on a husband’s affair that leads to the disintegration of his marriage. The narrator says that he and his wife “fouled” their lives and “were getting ready for a shake-up” (238) even though the husband claims to be the only person in error (along with the maid). The husband cheats, and the two begin to disregard all of their responsibilities and try to make the affair right or disappear. But this is not possible. The man’s actions begin an unstoppable course.

In “Sacks,” a father speaks to his son about how he goes for such a long time without “breaking any rules,” but suddenly cheats on his wife. Even he can’t explain the cause. In neither of these (and in most of) Carver’s stories, the narrators regret the “bad” decisions made. Carver does not celebrate these “rebellious” actions, but shows how all people are capable of acting out of character and that—sometimes—the consequences of said-mistakes change everything in a life. Carver defines those unavoidable human moments of life. Not all pain comes from mistakes, though, and shows up whether we “deserve” it or not. Topics of Carver’s stories also include childhood cancer, growing apart, and old age.

No matter the topic, though, Carver only includes details that matter (as stated earlier). Just as with Tobias Wolff, Carver’s stories challenge me to include only pertinent details (a kind of tricky thing to do). As Mr. Vande Zande pointed out last week, all of Carver’s minimalism and partiality to everyday heartbreaks solidify at the end of his stories. In the “Tell the Women We’re Going,” Carver describes the relationship of lifelong friends (Bill and Jerry) and the aspects of life they’ve shared (and that’s pretty much everything). But something changes at the end. The two men hit on two girls (their ages aren’t given) and the narrator believes that this is a kind of innocent event (as innocent as adultery can be).

Carver shocks the reader in the very last paragraph of the story: “He never knew what Jerry wanted. But it started and ended with a rock. Jerry used the same rock on both girls, first on the girl called Sharon and then on the one that was supposed to be Bill’s” (264). Bill and Jerry did not share this event and Bill is left trying to figure out how it all happened. And so is the reader. The events are clear, but their meaning is not—just as in real life. Meaning in life—and in stories—cannot be forced.

The open-ended stories that Carver uses to gently lead his reader to meaning tend to be stronger in the final version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love? The final version of the manuscript includes a one more story and a different mix of the others. What strikes me most about the changes Carver made to the stories does involve details given and the endings (one the same in some instances). In “Why Don’t You Dance?,” the final version includes this description of the homeowner:

“The man came down the sidewalk with a sack from the market. He had sandwiches, beer, whiskey. He saw the car in the driveway and the girl on the bed. The saw the television set going and the boy on the couch” (225).

This version includes much less detail about the man than the original:

“Max came down the sidewalk with a sack from the market. He had sanwiches, beer, and whiskey. He had continued to drink through the afternoon and had reached a place where now the drinking seemed to begin to sober him. But there were gaps. He had stopped at the bar next to the market, had listened to a song on the jukebox, and somehow it had gotten dark before he recalled the things in his yard” (753).

Carver deleted much of the detail from the first draft of the story. This gives the reader much more independence to find out who Max is and why the furniture is in the yard. The original description makes Max out to be a desperate lonely man “drinking away his sorrows.” While this is still true in the second version, Carver leaves this information out, adding a bit more mystery to the story for the reader—causing the link between both the girl’s and Max’s desperation to be less apparent.

The original version of “Tell the Women We’re Going” includes much more detail—more unclear detail—than does the final version. Earlier, we looked at the concluding paragraph of the final version of this story. Carver quite bluntly inserts a scene where Jerry undoubtedly injures (or kills) two girls with a rock. The original version, though, is much more unclear:

“But Jerry was standing now in front of him, slung loosely in his clothes as though the bones had gone out of him. Bill felt the awful closeness of their two bodies, less than an arm’s length between. Then the head came down on Bill’s shoulder. He raised his hand, and as if the distance now separating them deserved at least this, he began to pat, to stroke the other while his own tears broke” (844).

To me, there seems to be some pronoun confusion here (maybe on purpose)? I am not sure whose bodies are close together . . . Bill’s and Jerry’s and Jerry’s and the girl’s? I am betting the second, but this is merely a guess. This ending also leaves much room for confusion regarding whom all is dead (both the girls or “just” one?) and who is patting whose head? Sometimes I am a dense reader, but I did not feel confused whenever I read the final draft of the story. Instead, I knew who killed who and the ramifications this cost—or what this signified in—Bill and Jerry’s relationship. Carver toned-down the details in order to clarify his main point so that the reader can connect the dots in the proper way. This is one kind of lesson writer’s should take away from Carver.

For the sake of length, I’ll leave it here. Do make sure to read the Selected Essays section of the collection. The essays shed light on Carver’s background and also his writing process. His essays alone deserve two or three blog spotlights.

ALR Summer Book Club: Raymond Carver's Collected Stories (more specifically, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?)

2010-06-10T11:10:00.003-05:00

I have to admit that for a long time I just did not get Raymond Carver. It’s not that I’m unfamiliar with him or anything—I’d read and taught “Cathedral” a dozen times, of course, and I plowed through What We Talk About When We Talk About Love one rough afternoon while having a double whiskey in the tub¹. It’s mostly that I thought he embodied the failings of the modern literary short story, that they are open-ended, obtuse affairs that begin in medias res and end in medias res. Hemingway meets Bukowski with less machismo and less of a desire to make a point. I am not beyond admitting that I am sometimes an idiot. And that’s the case here.

Everyone’s favorite Bulgarian, Miroslav Penkov², compared Raymond Carver to an indie band that has become so popular and influential that it’s no longer cool, and he might be right there. But listen: many of the stories in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please knocked me on my ass. Reading it, I got what Carver was trying to do in a way that I didn’t as an undergrad or even a master’s student.

What it comes down to, in many cases, is tension. The worst thing in the world would be to be in a Raymond Carver story. I’m talking specifically here about “Put Yourself in My Shoes” and “What’s in Alaska?” Both of these stories involve social situations under duress—in “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” a writer and his wife make an unannounced visit to the people living in their old home, and in “What’s in Alaska,” two couples get together to get high³ and eat junk food. In both, what’s marvelous is how the conversation starts fraying at the edges as the story progresses, leaving the reader waiting for something truly awful to happen without quite knowing what it will be or if it’s deserved. In “What’s in Alaska?” that awful thing doesn’t happen, as Carver carefully balances the conversation of four people who are high as hell and both trying and not trying to talk about the fact that there may be an affair going on, but we’re still left with a chilling image, which I’m going to quote here:

Just as he started to turn off the lamp, he thought he saw something in the hall. He kept staring and thought he saw it again, a pair of small eyes. His heart turned. He blinked and kept staring. He leaned over to look for something to throw. He picked up one of his shoes. He sat up straight and held the shoe with both hands. He heard her snoring and set his teeth. He waited. He waited for it to move once more, to make the slightest noise.

This last paragraph has nothing at all to do with the events that came before, but thematically, it’s perfect. It captures the man’s anxiety, the sense that something is wrong and has always been wrong under the surface or just out of view, without giving him any sense of resolution.

I suddenly feel like I need to re-read “Put Yourself in My Shoes” to really get at it, so I’ll just say that it has the same kind of tension as “What’s in Alaska,” only in this case it boils over into an ugly confrontation and a deliciously meta⁴ final line: “He was silent and watched the road. He was at the very end of a story.”

Another thing that Carver does well is capturing that sense that something is wrong without quite letting the reader know what. In a less skilled writer’s hands, this trick would seem like cheating or not being forthright with the reader. “How About This” is a good example of what I’m talking about, but it’s all over this collection. In it, Harry and Emily are returning to Emily’s childhood home to live. It’s a cabin in the woods without electricity or running water, and Emily is afraid that Harry won’t be able to handle it. More than that, she’s concerned about dragging up old memories. The undercurrent is why they’re coming back here at all, and through the course of the story it is revealed that they are largely there because they don’t have the money to be anywhere else. The story ends with her doing cartwheels and handstands (as a child, she’d wanted to be in the circus) while he tries to light a cigarette. Look at these two passages, one close to the end of the story and then the very last passage:

He was pleased he knew himself so well. He would be all right, he decided. He was only thirty-two. Not so old. He was, for the moment, in a spot. He could admit that. After all, he considered, that was life, wasn’t it? He put out the cigaret. In a little while he lit another one.

And then:

He was reaching to light a cigaret with his last match when his hands began to tremble. The match went out, and he stood there holding the empty matchbook and the cigarette, staring at the vast expanse of trees at the end of the bright meadow.

“Harry, we have to love each other,” she said. “We’ll just have to love each other,” she said.

I feel like they speak for themselves; those last lines encapsulate everything that’s wrong with their situation, and what they need to do to make it out. There’s hope, but it’s not a productive, let’s all read The Secret kind of hope—it’s bittersweet, it’s bearing the weight of probable failure, and it’s life-affirming in its honest appraisal. That’s what Carver’s all about⁵.

I’m talking a lot about the way Carver ends stories because that’s where the magic is in his stories. Everything in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please is spring-loaded, and even the stories that don’t have that gut-punch at the end (“Fat,” “They’re Not Your Husband,” “The Collectors,” “Are You a Doctor?”) get wound tighter and tighter in such a way that the lack of release becomes a release in and of itself.

I could go on, but I always feel like talking about stories does them a disservice in a way, especially minimalist stories. I feel like a tourist at the zoo saying, "Did you see? Did you see?" as if that adds to the majesty of what the lion has just done. So I'll leave it at that for now, and we'll see what fruit the comments bear.

For those of you keeping score, next week, Elishia is going to discuss stories from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as well as their manuscript counterparts from Beginners. On June 23rd, Kelly is going to talk about Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies; on June 30th, Hillary is going to talk about Bret Anthony Johnston’s Corpus Christi; and on July 7th, I’m going to be back to discuss Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. There has been talk of keeping this thing going through the end of July, so if you have a recommendation of an author’s first short story collection that you’d like to see us talk about, well, that’s what the comment section is for (I am personally partial to Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help).

___________

1. For my money, a bath and some whiskey will solve pretty much all the troubles of being alive.
2. At least, here at UNT and in the ALR offices. I am sure there are other wonderful Bulgarians over where the Balkan mountains are proud, where the Danube sparkles, where the sun shines over Thrace and blazes over Pirin.
3. By the way, this story is a master’s class in and of itself in writing characters who are high.
4. I do so love the meta
5. See also the absolutely heartbreaking “Jerry and Molly and Sam” and “The Student’s Wife” for more examples of this.

ALR Summer Book Club: Our Story Begins

2010-06-03T03:59:00.013-05:00

Wolff's latest collection features ten new stories, along with twenty-one oldies, and offers readers a quarter century of quality short fiction. His work, though arguably underrepresented in classrooms, remains one of the most unique and engaging examples of contemporary American fiction at its finest. Our Story Begins, like most collections, undoubtedly suffers from weak spots. Taken as a whole, however, Wolff’s stories are absolutely, and often inexplicably, both groundbreaking and transformative. All memorable writers, put simply, must approach the human condition from a perspective worth taking. That is, a perspective that reveals another small piece of the unexplored. Wolff, to be sure, accomplishes this—through technical and philosophical originality—while also giving writers and theorists a case study that demands diligent attention.

So yeah, that’s my two cents as a reviewer. As a writer, I find in Wolff’s fiction much more than this space, or my willingness, will permit me to discuss at length. I’ll confine this post to a few elements of craft and a few elements of criticism that particularly interest me, and hopefully it sets the stage for a more comprehensive conversation.

First, I want to say a few things about Wolff’s beginnings. The first few paragraphs of his stories are usually the most crucial. They provide the details of characterization that allow us to understand and interpret everything that follows. Wolff’s endings often correspond in some way to his beginnings. He often echoes, or makes us remember, something that we may have temporarily put out of our minds. These returns, I think, lend unity to Wolff’s narratives. They also provide the ammunition for the punches he delivers in so many of his stories’ last sentences.

This, on the other hand, is Tobias Funke.

The collection’s leadoff story, “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” provides a good example of this. Mary’s deafness is briefly mentioned in the fifth paragraph, and it nearly disappears until the last sentence when she turns off her hearing aid “so that she would not be distracted again.” This sentence resonates, not only because it illustrates the extent to which Mary’s character has grown, but also because it returns us to that which we may have forgotten. The hearing aid—a simple detail, perhaps an example of Boswell’s “narrative spandrel”—resonates for the story beyond what it might have if Wolff hadn’t deployed it early on. The reason for its resonance, I think, isn’t simply that it returns. Nor is it simply that it gives the protagonist an object upon which to act out her transformation. The crucial point here, I think, is that the object itself undergoes a transformation. No longer is the hearing aid a symbol of weakness; rather, at the end of the story, the hearing aid is a symbol of strength. Mary’s handicap, essentially, becomes her advantage. She embraces her identity, her minority status, effectively enabling herself to stand up to the majority.

The simultaneous transformation—of both an object and a character—offers one way for Wolff to achieve narrative unity and resonance. In other beginnings, Wolff doesn’t rely on a single object. In “Smorgasbord,” for instance, the protagonist introduces the general motif of food long before the prospect of dinner at a buffet arises. He also draws class distinctions between himself and his classmates, and admits his possession of an insatiable appetite, all in the second paragraph. At the end of the story, the loss of his innocence corresponds with his purchase of satiation. Desire, like hunger, can only be satisfied through the possession of the material and monetary wealth that the narrator covets. We know this from page one, but the poignancy of the consequences foreshadowed at the beginning will only hit home in the last paragraph. Essentially, Wolff subtly foreshadows cause to subtly strengthen both cause and effect. The narrator experiences a short term consequence of his subjection to the perverse indoctrination of capitalism when his relationship falls apart; on page 225, though, Wolff also hints at the long term consequences of the narrator's experience: "we recall of our own passions, as if they were no more than a series of sweet frauds we'd fooled ourselves with and then wised up to." Here, the narrator's voice suddenly speaks to us from the distant future, and yet, even this older and "wiser" narrator understands the futility of resisting the army of cultural apparatuses from which he must choose to accept either satisfaction and destruction together, as a package deal, or destruction alone.

Similarly, Wolff might introduce a character’s habit—his tragic flaw, perhaps—in the beginning of a story, which sets up its return and resonance in the end. In the fourth paragraph of “Firelight,” the narrator and his mother exercise the “power of looking” as they shop for unaffordable goods and services. This causes the narrator to worship appearances, and it results in his ultimate unhappiness at the story’s end. To really believe in something rather than its mere appearance, for him, is to “make it vanish.”

Another aspect of Wolff that I admire is his Chekhovian ability to maintain detachment and objectivity without sacrificing feeling or emotion. Wolff’s voice is never cold, nor is it sentimental. A few reasons for this, as far as I can tell: Wolff knows when to dive into a character’s head, and he knows when to stay out; he knows what information to give us, when to give it, and how; and he knows how to withhold commentary and let the action and characters (both major and minor) speak for themselves.

In “Hunters in the Snow” and “The Liar,” Woolf uses narrative detachment in two very different ways to achieve the same effect. Both stories feel distant, and both are deeply invested in their characters, but their degrees and methods of measured detachment are quite different. “Hunters in the Snow” works because Wolff stays out of his characters’ heads for most of the story. He zooms out and watches them slowly destroy each other. To hear their thoughts would be to diminish the effect of their mutual destruction. On the page, a character's thoughts lend them greater self-awareness and greater self-consciousness. If Wolff had brought it to our attention that Tub, Frank, and Kenny were aware of their individual cruelties to one another—or that they were capable of situational circumspection—then we might be more prone to pass judgment on their despicable actions. As it stands, we watch the wintry coldness of each characters' outer tragedy unfold without jumping into the warmth of their inner selves.

“The Liar,” on the other hand, demonstrates Wolff’s unparalleled ability to create perfect first person narrators. This entire story leads us, not to a transformation of the protagonist, but to the revelation of how deeply pathological he is. Rather than a turn, there is a no turning back. Like so many of Wolff’s first person narrators, the genius of the character development in “The Liar” is that the narrator’s acute unreliability is never clear enough to cause readers to give up on him. Wolff gives us just the right amount of information, such that we cannot accuse him of withholding or manipulating. He lets the narrator speak for himself, and it works because, despite his pathological lying, he is ultimately sympathetic toward his mother and utterly self-aware. The simultaneous detachment, drawn from the narrator’s objective, unsentimental recounting of the “facts,” not only makes for a fascinating character, but its juxtaposition with the narrator’s sympathy allows for the sadness of the inner story to shine through without seeming forced, manipulative, or predictable.

“The Other Miller,” my favorite story in the collection, works in a similar way. The point of view is close third person, but it feels like first person. Though some readers may anticipate the ending, this certainly does not diminish the experience of all that leads up to it. Like “The Liar,” this story is a journey into the mind of a character who understands—yet simultaneously rejects—his own situation. The slow, steady reveal of information—Miller’s relationship with his mother—juxtaposed with the action occurring on the surface—Miller’s diabolical plot to escape active duty—provides just the right amount of inner and outer story to make the ultimate revelation of the totality of Miller’s shock a powerful one. Wolff brilliantly stays out of Miller’s head unless it’s to tell us how nervous he is about getting caught impersonating himself. He also creates a convincing story by giving the two minor characters agendas of their own—they aren’t simply set pieces or devices. They drive the story because they are interesting, and their personalities and machinations distract us from the truth of Miller’s mental condition.

I think I’ve gotten long-winded, so I’ll wrap it up. I had hoped to throw some theory in—because there’s much here to be thrown—but alas, I’ll save it. One lagniappe I will add, though, is that Wolff’s stories are all immensely concerned with identity construction. Many of his characters are searching for ways to define themselves by first defining their not-selves. Crisis hits them when they run up against something that they don’t understand. Their first instinct is to fill in the blanks. If a blank clings to its vacancy, however, there arises a confrontation with the unspeakable Other. Besides its potential for theoretical musing, this also provides an interesting template for storytellers: confrontation with Otherness requires that the protagonist explain it away (fundamental misunderstanding) or become it (fundamental self-betrayal). After this choice, the protagonist fights a battle to maintain whatever sense of self in which the choice represents an investment. “Deep Kiss,” for example, follows a character’s perpetual misunderstanding of the other that ultimately results in his inability to define himself. “Desert Breakdown, 1968” follows one character who projects his dreams onto the other and thus causes his own downfall, and another character who accepts Otherness as unspeakable and thus finds the strength for self-preservation. “Next Door” also details two characters’ different approaches to explaining the inexplicable, and the last paragraph hints at the arbitrariness of all such approaches.

Anyway, I’m throwing in the towel now. All in all, amazing collection. I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did, and I’m looking forward to the discussion!

Hubbs out.

ALR Summer Book Club

2010-05-25T01:34:00.003-05:00

Well, it's 1:23 in the morning, and we've all had a full week of lounging on couches, playing too many videogames, feeling that giddy too-light feeling of nothing left to write, nothing left to grade, and no more Paul Yachnin articles to read. Submissions are closed, the backlog is cleared, and the ALR office sits mostly empty. Some of us have already busted out our typewriters and our Lite-Brites so we can write again, because writing is that kind of disease, the kind that gets under your skin after a few days. But all that stuff, it's neither here nor there. Because we're doing a book club.

The books are as follows:
Raymond Carver - Collected Stories
Bret Anthony Johnston - Corpus Christi
Jhumpa Lahiri - Interpreter of Maladies
Wells Tower - Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Tobias Wolff - Our Story Begins

The theme is first short story collections. The books, they're pretty fabulous. This noise starts now*.

*Or in a few days. Whatever.

A Brief Yet Triumphant Introduction

2010-04-28T23:18:00.000-05:00

This is the blog for the staff, volunteers, and friends of the American Literary Review. We'll be posting about our experiences working at ALR, book reviews, essays about craft, pieces of fiction/poetry/nonfiction from both the magazine itself and from our reading series, interviews with authors, and other stuff like that as it comes to us.

Our plan is to start in very shortly with our summer reading list. This started out as a special problems course dealing with first short story collections, but now it's kind of ballooned out of control. We'll be reading Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Bret Anthony Johnston's Corpus Christi, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, Raymond Carver's collected stories, and Tobias Wolff's collected stories. You should read along. They are good books.

I'm Zach. I'm one of the people who works at ALR. I won't write an official intro now, because I'm currently the only one with access, and, well, that just seems gauche.

(I'm using the word gauche a lot lately)