pandora's box

byatt, link, hoffman, orringer, gustafsson, hill

    I went a little crazy and literary in ordering my last batch of books for my spring quarter. Now, I'm getting real. With requirements to show up for baseball parties and tryouts, choir concerts in the gym, elementary school commemoration and half-day sugar fests at my son's school - I'm feeling the need for some girl power in my reading preferences and annotations. With the exception of Gustafsson who is really, for me, as good as any female writer - this could be another blog altogether - but just go with me for now - I have a line up that I hope will help me hit it out of the park:

A.S. Byatt's Little Black Book of Stories (which I've read, but am salivating, knowing I'll have seconds)

Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen

Alice Hoffman's Blackbird House

Julie Orringer's collection which contains "The Smoothest Way is Full of Stones"

Lars Gustafsson's Tale of a Dog (I've already read Stories of Happy People and Death of a Beekeeper -  phenomenal)

Ingrid Hill's Ursula Under (the only one I'm worried about timing-wise. It's over 500 pp. I may have to  wait til later on this one.)

I've already annotated one and I still have to annotate Kundera. I'm reading Isak Dinesen's Winter Tales while I wait for my female authors to encourage me with what they've done.

For another woman full of authorial power and mind-blowing artistry, read Kellie Wells' collection Compression Scars and her novel Skin.

I'll let you know when UPS arrives with reinforcements.

among the broken

    For my final couple of weeks of my spring quarter, I have some minor changes to make on my creative thesis. My title for my thesis is "Among the Broken." I love Conrad Aiken's "Among the Lost People." Love may be a strange word to use in referring to my feelings about this collection, but I identify with its weirdness and its intensity and admire its moments of pure virtuosity. I liked the idea of lost or broken people as a common theme for the characters of my stories. It is not a unique idea. I think we are all broken in some way, and you have certainly witnessed that in me on this blog. But I liked it as a stated idea and a thematic tie for the particular characters I have tried to elucidate and give voice to.

     Furthermore, for me, Aiken's short story "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" was an introduction into the very strange world of fictional possibilities, into extreme descriptions of psychic horror. Finding a way to hijack a part of Aiken's title for my own purposes satisfied something I recognized early, but consummated late: my passion for writing. In that Freshman comp class in which we read "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," a wonderfully subversive piece I thought at the time - yet the piece, I knew, was sad at the same time in that irresistible  Plathlike way -  I wrote my first truly creative, very freshman story. After that freshman attempt, I wouldn't write again, creatively, truly, and in a sustained dedicated way until I had married, attended seminary - where I thought I was supposed to be a pastor - and had a child. Except for auditing a class with an accomplished author with whom I still correspond 'til this day, I did about everything but write fiction for about fourteen years.

I can't stop

     Oh, I was so dignified five days ago. Kundera had whipped me up into an icy independence, a stay against the machine and its tendency to produce in us graphomanic, ego projecting cogs. The graphomania he was describing had to do with the goal to be published without strongly desiring to contribute to an artistic form. He was not discussing blogs in particular and Art of the Novel was written before they became a phenomenon, but I would be willing to bet he'd have a few choice words for them.

    In the absence of direct reference to Kundera's opinions about these things, I was applying what he was saying about books to what I am sometimes guilty of in my blog: keeping my name out there while I'm obscure and untried ("literary aggression"), graphomania (need I say more; the girl likes to talk), risking biographical interpretation of works (I would be so glad if anyone read and interpreted me in any way they liked; pick a lense, interpret through, read works).

    People who have to write have to write and this may include blogs sometimes. Maybe I do have this super big ego and I just can't find anyone to listen to me, but like a lot of people, I suspect, a blog, as corny as it sounds, is an every man's chance to create someone something (this, I suspect, is not very  Kundera-like). Sure, we have a limited list of formats to chose from a certain number of affordable bells and whistles. But I can still write whatever I want and people can read or not read, and  maybe they find something of themselves in me and just the thought of that is somehow a comfort.

    I can never be totally myself with you, but I don't have to be so alone either. And when you live in suburbia among hard working nice people, but with people who are too hard working and nice to worry with things like how to construct a narrative or what Calvino meant, really by the impossibility of a finished work of art, a novel, it is nice to know I have a place to go where someone might read and understand, might be in the process of reading and understanding themselves and might be vaguely interested.

    Come back, readers, I missed you. Dan Wickett has not removed me from "literary blogs" at Emerging Writers Network and thank goodness I waited to email him to tell me to take me off his list, that I am an artiste with little time for the pedestrian. Ha! Truth be told? I am incredibly, achingly ordinary with ordinary problems. Sometimes I show my rebellion from that in that my house is a complete disaster, although it probably could be tidied in a day. I am in profound need of returning to a regular exercise routine post-grad, or almost post-grad. Making dinner is something I really should be worrying about right now. I've had a recent bout with insomnia, which makes days tougher. I can still get through them, but they're hard. I struggle as a mother and a wife and as an on-again, off-again churchgoer. The movie heroine I most identify? Why, the champion for every girl: Bridget Jones, of course. Yank though I am, she makes me grateful for movies.

    Further confessions:  I love people who can't love me. I don't always show love toward people who need such demonstrations from me. I'm baffled by world events and local news alike - and here in Florida, people get eaten by ten foot alligators and even bigger sharks and that scares me, although what scares me more is how mean people are to each other. I have a weight problem. I've been going to therapy, but recently I quit. I had a great singing voice and I miss that, the singing, the participating in singing, but I also have developed some performance anxiety so the very thing I love to do and am good at doing can sometimes be a torture.  I find comfort and solace in books. I love the feeling of the next story idea coming along, its inception, the research involved, the writing. This is what makes me love being a writer, that and some really cool people you meet along the way.

    I thank you for letting me share a piece of me and I hope I haven't lost many of you for good. I have faith you'll come back to me eventually. Nothing's over til it's over. And this fat lady hasn't sung yet. You thought she had, but she was just warming up backstage, seeing how Dido's "Thy hand Belinda," for example, might sound and quite frankly, in her ears, it's just a little too melodramatic and well, final.

this may be the end

    Everything has an ending, even blogs, even friendships. Sometimes certain relationships sustain us through a period of time and then, naturally, they dissolve when circumstances change. Kundera has really hit me hard here at the end of my grad school career, has hit me in a good way, I think, has caused me to question my modus operandi.

    There are historical and cultural reasons for this author to value privacy as greatly as he does, but there are artistic reasons as well, and Kundera makes his case. Let me provide some critical concepts and their definitions from his chapter "Sixty-three words": (italics will be mine)

    "Pseudonym: I dream of a world where writers will be required by law to keep their identities secret and to use pseudonyms. Three advantages: a drastic reduction of graphomania; decreased aggressiveness in literary life; the disappearance of biographical interpretation of works." (p. 148)

    "Graphomania: 'Not a mania to write letters, personal diaries or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one's close relations) but a mania to write books (to have a public of unknown readers)' (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). The mania not to create a form but to impose one's self on others. The most grotesque version of the will to power." (p. 130)

    Blogging, I think, is often a form of graphomania, even though this is not what Kundera had in mind when he wrote this. My concern is that for an aspiring writer, or even "author," the focus of non-novel writing is away from creating and onto something else.

    In the final chapter - "Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe" - Kundera makes an effective  argument to stay clear of most public, non-artistically driven activity. This is all I need to hear:

    "It is with profound emotion that I receive today the prize that bears the name of Jerusalem and the mark of that great cosmopolitan Jewish spirit. It is as a novelist that I accept it. I say novelist, not writer. The novelist is one who, according to Flaubert, seeks to disappear behind his work. To disappear behind his work, that is, to renounce the role of public figure. This is not easy these days, when anything of the slightest importance must step into the intolerable glare of the mass media, which, contrary to Flaubert's precept, cause the work to disappear behind the image of its author. In such a situation, which no one can entirely escape, Flaubert's remark seems to me a kind of warning: in lending himself to the role of public figure, the novelist endangers his work; it risks being considered as a mere appendage to his actions, his declarations, to his statements of position." (pp 157-58)

    OK, head to the library or the bookstore for this book. This will be my final, but most important recommendation.

    I think Kundera's work may save me. It has been a reminder that the world tends to crush the individual and individual expression. Furthermore, in the literary world, even, we are tempted to survive by being aggressive rather than thoughtful, listening to "the wisdom of the novel." This permission to refuse to be a part of any activity approaching self-promotion is freeing.

    "Pandora's Box" has enabled me to reach this point and these conclusions, and I thank you readers for being there because I know you are, even though you don't comment. The little graph showing the number of hits has helped me realize that someone is reading somewhere. But I have other things to write. Actually, I have things to author.

    In a couple of days I will shut 'er down. Happy trails.

   

   

oops already I have a problem

    In thinking about how I might blog Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, I came across this Kundera sentiment:

    "The distinctive feature of the true novelist: he does not like to talk about himself. 'I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers, and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life,' said Nabokov. Italo Calvino warned: no one should expect a single true word from him about his own life..." (p. 146)

    A blog couldn't be any more opposite this sentiment, unless, of course, I've told you not a "single true word." I think talking about the self in all honesty is an impossibility, but I aim for something like it, or at least, the side I want you to see. It is the manufactured self that I present to you. (The novel is also  a manufactured construct of reality.) For Kundera and others, the work is to take precedence over the self or else the work will die: "The moment Kafka draws more attention than Joseph K, the process of Kafka's posthumous dying begins."

    What I believe, however, about the self, and privacy and presenting the self to the world has to do with Kundera's own definition of "Mystification." In this definition, mystification is "the active form of refusing to take the world seriously."  I find great delight in this definition and stance  which I will spell out more for you in a moment, but as it applies to the self, my own variation would be "refusing to take the self seriously." My greatest irritation are with people who take themselves too seriously, although maybe I am like this as well and hence can recognize it in others.

    I would think the lightness with which one takes oneself especially over against one's work would mitigate against a damaging eclipse of the work. He's certainly talking about the pressures on "famous" literary giants, and yet, I wonder if a bit of this could be applied to the average writer as well. People ask me about what I do and I tell them. I often talk about my stories. I do not take myself seriously. If it's a story, it'll still be there in the morning. It's just writing. It is more than that, yes, for the "serious writer," but it is only that for the human being in the world.

   

for my next lit crit trick

    I annotated Calvino for my MFA requirement, after first burdening you with random thoughts and favorite passages, attempts to summarize, near amateur opining. I do not mind. I would rather read books that are almost beyond my reach than those that bore me to tears. And the kind of blog readers I'm seeking are the ones who like this process as well or who, for whatever reason, like to see someone struggle and flail about openly.

    Somehow, I've always believed in struggle for its own sake. (My concerned mother: "I don't know why you put so much pressure on yourself.") Struggle is where I live. I guess I have hopes of self-improvement or expanded brain capacity. Or maybe I am just a little bit sadomasochistic. See, a really academic person wouldn't admit all this, wouldn't be so personal. Again, I don't mind. I have my own goals.

    Presently, I am reading Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel. Just so you know, this sudden rash of reading is something I'm undertaking to complete the spring quarter of my second MFA year. I thought I'd share this experience to help keep me motivated to do what must be done: Ten books in two weeks. Some, I've read before but will read again. Most, I have not read.

    Because of the time crunch, I have chosen works that are not long, but challenging nonetheless.  The Art of the Novel is indicative of the kind of work that speaks, literally, a world into one hundred sixty five pages. And because I have not read most of the works referenced, I will have to extrapolate what I can, which will be plenty, as annotation material. I also intend to make a reading list from its pages. This is an aspiring writer's book, or a book for those intensely passionate about the history, future and realm of the novel.

   

   

Italo Calvino's If on a winter night a traveler, a reprise

    Now that I've taken you through my processing of this novel, and I have lead you through a jungle of details and insights and excerpted passages, I want to step back and offer one of two reductive pieces of summary insights.

    This novel is a succession of novels within a novel. The first level is the novel which tells the tale of the Reader who eventually encounters Ludmilla, another reader, both reading to arrive at that novel that has not been written. Within this overarching frame are the novels created by Silas Flannery to confuse Ludmilla and keep her always in this process of reading and searching. He seeks to ensnare and disillusion her by confusing her, but because of her curiosity and ability to find truth whatever the story offering, he does not defeat her. The good guys, in other words, "win."

      As a piece of metafiction, the Reader is involved in making choices in the action of the story. At the ending, as the scope pulls back to the first overarching level of the novel, the Reader makes choices in his own life. Metafiction, it seems,  presents the possibilities of choice, and in reality, it is the author who is making  choices and choosing to reveal  to the reader  what, exactly, he's  doing back there behind that curtain as he seemingly allows a Reader or one of the characters pull a lever, push a button. It's a wonderful way, I think, to play.

    Maybe, though, metafiction is a way for the author to make it extra clear just who is in control of all of this storytelling stuff. By allowing the Reader or the characters to seemingly have some "role," it becomes clear to the reader what his function is. He can choose to not fulfill his function anymore, and stop reading, or he can chose to stay and read - but when it comes down to it, his choices are, in fact, quite limited.

    This is why some movies based on metafictional ideas are really just too depressing for me to watch, or just too obvious to be enjoyable. I don't want to watch a movie that extends illusory choices to its characters, or presents an illusory relationship between the character and its creator. This kind of theme plays better on the page, and Calvino makes every possible use of the form to be interesting, relevant, mind-blowing. He is a master beyond compare.

Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler part 4

    Well, I must wrap it up. I have so many books to read. In the words of our good author Calvino, these books I must read fall under the category of "the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment," and at the moment, I am working on my Master's degree.

    I have hardly done Calvino justice. I have wanted so badly to say all he said or all I think he said about writing, books, reading, but instead I have found myself focused on plot - and I have read only one Calvino book so far. I have been caught up in the tracking the bare bones' structure and in admiring a  few masterful strokes of metafictional genius along the way.

    Chapter eight reveals that the bulk of the work of If on a winter's night a traveler is actually the work of the writer genius Silas Flannery, a creation of Calvino, of course. It was Flannery, not Calvino, who created confusion with all these crazy cut off pieces and scraps of stories. He blazed a trail of confusion in order to win the patronage and dependence of Ludmilla, the love interest of the "Reader."

      For Ludmilla:

     "Reading means stripping herself of every purpose, every foregone conclusion, to be ready to catch a voice that makes itself heard when you least expect it, a voice that comes from beyond the author, beyond the conventions of writing: from the unsaid, from what the world has not yet said of itself and does not have words to say."  (p. 239)

    Flannery believes only in the "void," the "world [that] exists only as artifice, pretense, misunderstanding, falsehood." Ludmilla, in the end, wins out over Flannery. Says Director General Arkadian Porphyrich to the "Reader": "It was her always curious, always insatiable reading that managed to uncover truths hidden in the most barefaced fake, and falsity with attenuating circumstances in words claiming to be the most truthful." (p. 239)

    The ending is consistent with this metafiction. When the Reader becomes aware that his journey is not in the book but in his life, and that all stories can end in only two ways - "the continuity of life or the inevitability of death" - he makes a decision.  But dear Reader, I'll never tell you what he chooses. You'll have to read for yourself.

   

Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler part 3

    At last, in the second chapter, the supposed "novel," or perhaps, more precisely the reader's experience of the novel, or better yet, the author's description of the reader's experience of this particular novel, we have an "I." Who is this "I?" Is this, at last, the narrator? Here is how he describes himself:

    "I have landed in this station tonight for the first time in my life, entering and leaving this bar, moving from the odor of the platform to the odor of wet sawdust in the toilets, all mixed in a single odor which is that of waiting, the odor of telephone booths when all you can do is reclaim your tokens because the number called has shown no signs of life.

    "I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or rather: that man is called 'I' and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only 'station' and beyond it there exists nothing except the unanswered signal of a telephone ringing in a dark room of a distant city." (p. 11)

    Metafictional elements present themselves in the author running through a list of narrative choices and addressing the reader's concerns and thoughts, acknowledging that the reader is still likely trying to decide if this is the kind of "novel" he wants to read. He warns the reader of a possible authorial manipulative "trap" that lures him to read more of this novel: the withholding of information about the station, the time in place, the narrator, the author himself. In these ways and so many ways, reading is implicitly defined as a communication between the author and the reader and at any time, the reader may make a break and follow his own whim. But the narrator warns that the vaguer the author is at first, the more powerful the lure to find out more and the more dangerously ensnared the reader becomes.

   

Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler part 2

    The "metafictional" aspects of If on a winter's night a traveler are an inherent part of both the "Reader" sections and the "novel" sections. In the "Reader" sections, the author addresses himself directly to the reader and in the sections which tell a story, the "Reader's" experience is firsthand experience of the world of the novel. Events are narrated by the author, who has supposedly stepped away so the "Reader" can enter into this reading experience, but all is filtered through this consciousness that sees all, tells all, even what the reader is experiencing as the world of fiction and "reality" of the text itself blend:

    "The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph. In the odor of the station there is a passing whiff of station cafe odor. There is someone looking through the befogged glass, he opens the glass door of the bar, everything is misty, inside too, as if seen by nearsighted eyes, or eyes irritated by coal dust. The pages of the book are clouded like the windows of an old train, the cloud of smoke rests on the sentences." (ital. mine, p. 10)

    The interesting "as if seen by nearsighted eyes, or eyes irritated by coal dust" raises the question of who possesses these eyes, from whose "perspective" are we to read this scene: The one who looks through the befogged glass? The reader? The author? Are they all one in the same?

I'll be back, some of this may be "relevant." Some of it just plain fun...

Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler

    Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler is a fun romp into the world that surrounds literature, seeks to sustain literature, destroys and thwarts literature. It asks the questions: What is reading? What is writing? What is the reader's relationship to the writer and vise versa; how do they effect one another? What are readers' relationships to one another?  What are readerly expectations of novels? What results when these expectations are thwarted? What are novels? What is the nature of storytelling, its essential elements?

    There are "factors" which support the publishing machine, more or less seriously conceived, presented here in no particular order: extraterrestrial channeling of particularly vulnerable, frustrated authors; computers generating texts; ghostwriters picking up the slack of flagging authors;  the creative work of scribes; sources of inspiration, such as the Father of stories, a native American who inspires all stories. And there are "factors" which thwart or delay the publishing machine, also possibly equally ridiculous and extreme, or perhaps not ridiculous and extreme depending upon readerly and writerly experience: fickle, moody authors; unorganized publishers; corporate aspirations for brand recognition; political coups; censorship, faked translations. There are conditions that can potentially hinder the reader's pleasure: botched texts; personal knowledge of the author; academics; speed reading mechanisms; involvement in the "production side" of bookmaking; inadequate library holdings.

     As for the author, he is fully cognizant that his life is not the "lived life," but that he works laboriously regardless, that he is a cog indispensable to those who read. He works for the pleasure of that woman sitting in the lounge chair whom he can see with his spy glass. He watches her read and he tells himself he writes for her.

    The author has few pretenses, it seems. He speaks directly to the reader in extensive asides, at first instructing him to become comfortable and sit back and read and then, sending the "Reader" out into the world to find the novel that has stopped abruptly and apparently for no good reason other than a flaw in the publication process. The "Reader" never finds this initial novel, but becomes distracted by another novel he begins reading in the course of searching. Once more, he is frustrated with an incomplete volume he holds in his hands, a frustration that sends him on adventures to publishers, academic institutions, foreign countries. Each "Reader/adventure" chapter ends with a portion of a "novel" that the "Reader" is reading. Each of the novels have their own cultural provenance and style and are related in that the novel as an object leads to another novel as an object in the next "adventure" portion.

    I must stop here, Reader, I am sorry. A television from the other room is invading my concentration and preventing the completion of this blog entry, my attempted appreciation of an object of wonder.  And I need to look back, too, because some of what I said may have been an inaccurate summary, due to a splotchy memory, occasionally distracted reading, adventures of my own. I might re-read portions of this book which might be helpful in clarifying the author's meaning and the book's structure (I know I am leaving something out), or which might be helpful in creating new impressions I can bring to you. As the third reader in the library said:

     "At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment." (p. 255)

    I'll be back...

i heart italo calvino

If on a winter's night a traveler:

   "'The novels that attract me most,' Ludmilla said, 'are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.'
    I do not understand whether she has said this to explain what attracts her in my novels, or whether it is what she would like to find in my novels and does not...
    'With my spyglass I can observe a woman who is reading on a terrace in the valley,' I told her. 'I wonder if the books she reads are calming or upsetting.'
    'How does the woman seem to you? Calm or upset?'
    'Calm.'
    'Then she reads upsetting books.'"

(pp 192-93)

happy mother's day?

On this Mother's Day of my fortieth year, my ninth year of being a mother, I let my husband and son go off to church without me. I could tell this was a tough on them, particularly as I've been low on church attendance over the past year. I don't know what to do. I've always struggled with going to church. I just wish there wasn't the sense of fear that somehow I'm putting myself in jeopardy with my choices. Am I?

Growing up, I lived in a religiously conservative household. My father was a successful minister, a wonderful orator, and as a family, we were involved in various aspects of the church. I have since found churches I can go to, more or less, on my own volition. But they tend to be places steeped in liturgy of some sort, a fairly lengthy historical tradition, an intellectual - though conservative - address from the pulpit. I feel I am being unsupportive of my husband and son, who love the church we're going to - I use "we" loosely. There's lots of rock music, love for Jesus, a dynamic pastor.

I'm a stick in the mud, I suppose, and I find myself literally stuck, feeling alternately guilty and disingenuous, depending upon whether I'm at home or at church on any given Sunday. Also, going to the church of my chosing makes me feel like a disloyal mother and wife, and I've heard it can be hard on a family, to be split in this way. This seems to be what I'm leaning toward, though. So many things in my life are leading to more independence, despite pain. I just don't want to stretch the line to the breaking point.

The "Blond" is Published

I did it, kids. And, in the spirit of my earlier blog post "one blond's rash vow," I became a blond again yesterday. My story "Deborah" is about a librarian turned street prophet. Relief is a journal offering edgier works on Christian themes and does not define its boundaries too closely, thus its success among writers and readers of many permutations of faith or doubt, as the case may be. Many of my friends have deservedly been published in its pages: Chad Gusler, Stacy Barton, Nancy Nordenson, Matthew Henry - a Pushcart nominee. Check it out!

The Steinway

After a long interim of revising, re-envisioning and writing stories for my MFA thesis in creative writing, I have returned, somewhat, to the blogging world, though much work remains. I think it appropriate, however, to share the current incarnation of a story I've discussed previously on this blog. I have discussed it in the context of having trust in one's voice and belief that, with practice, writing can be honed, much as a musical piece on the piano. I gave up piano long before my sister did. I gave it up about in the third grade. But I have since taken to writing stories, and have not given up, have practiced for fifteen years, and have kept "practicing" for the sense of fulfillment I get in creating worlds from words. Maybe this sounds too lofty, but for this introvert, it's the only way I know to be and the only way to look at what I'm doing. It describes the life to which I'm adapting myself.

Other fun stuff I did this year involved switching mentors and my request for a particular mentor had to do with the shift I felt coming about in my fiction: toward magical/fabulistic elements. I did this not to catch a trend, but because this is the way I started fifteen years ago. When I started, I was experimenting with what was fun to do. After I went to seminary, I think, I became more of a "realist" in my approach to just about everything. These days, though, especially with my current mentor, I find it refreshing to pursue what was so satisfying for me during my beginning efforts. In my reading also for the year, I have discovered so many examples of what is possible and am relieved that I might be able to find my way eventually. I am looking forward to sharing some works I have read and interacting with them more deeply on this site.

The Steinway - the story I am showing here - is very much a work of realism, but of course, because it's my baby, I think it has its own merits. It has changed in many ways since the last time I posted it, so feel free to read and comment.

Other stories I have written this year include a story about Chinese immigrants who struggle to find themselves in relation to each other and the context of their history and in the context of American culture. It is a three part story. Each section concerns itself with a different point of view character and when I wrote it and conducted my initial research, I became excited about the prospect of its expansion, for it has that feel to it. I am considering this idea with fear and trembling, however, with current prospects for on-site research being just about nil.

I also wrote a satirical piece about the eighteenth century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft visiting a 21st century Nevada whorehouse. I ended up writing it from the point of view of the madam. I would love it if that found a home somewhere. I wrote it in response to our over-the-top sexualized culture in which women are still objects by their own choosing and by the exploitation of others.

I have done and learned more this year and have more that I want to share with you. For now, enjoy The Steinway and thanks for checking in with me over these many months, even though I have not posted in an age. Let me hear from you. I'd love it.

Off to my reading and my annotating. 

Cheers,

Meg

navigating mentorship

If you've been reading, you know that I am in an mfa program and that I am writing short stories, some of which appear here. The story in progress Hidden Things (working title) received some great feedback during my residency this summer, including the criticism that my story lacked action, particularly in the beginning. Maybe this is common in early drafts, or the early drafts of beginning writers. I tend to do a lot of mulling in my head first and it comes out on paper (witness the first few pp of The Steinway. Lots of narrative summary, hardly any scene.) I still think this is OK. I think anything early on is OK.

What I learned years ago when I first tried my hand at writing stories is that if you can't be easy with yourself out of the starting gate, you may be doomed, or you're just simply dooming yourself. Why not go for it and give yourself every advantage of believing that what you have to say is valuable and what you come up with will eventually be a complete and pretty well-told story. Those of you who know me know I tend to waver in my self-confidence sometimes but I think I'm getting it together. I think I'm learning that it's not a matter of talent/no talent, but practice. And to practice, one needs to have the confidence in oneself that some level of mastery is possible. One has the inner resources to make it so and this is a little about what the better sections of The Steinway is about.

Sharing the work in progress Hidden Things with my mentor before it was was finished has dampened forward momentum. I think the problem lies in my really not having a firm grip on where I wanted to start when I handed it in, in not grounding it in scene, in bringing in, perhaps, too many characters and different locales. My mentor has given lots of direction which I agree with in theory but which are hard to apply because the story is still in its infancy. And, there's still a part of me that's not wanting to start where she wants me to start. I'm now thinking some characters are interesting for me, such as the friend and the boy named after a fish, whereas my mentor thinks I could start much later in the story, where the narrator talks to her mother-in-law in a come to Jesus scene (I mean this as a metaphor).

When I was walking the dog this morning, a time for all good thoughts to seep through, I felt it important to decide where and how I was going to find my energy to write the story. It may not be the story my mentor wants to see, but it must be written. Something must be done. I may not be ready for the kind of story she is suggesting, and she had some great ideas for me. But it is reasonable to assert, I think, that one is not always ready for anything, although one can always hope to be. And it is reasonable to assert too that imaginative visions are hard to transfer one person to another, though there is still something about the mentoring relationship that is incredibly useful. I know there is a lot to appropriate from someone's greater knowledge of technique, and this is the way toward more efficient practice.

saying no to the forced bloom

How long it takes to learn to write: A long time. I feel that part of the trick of doing this, of pulling this off somehow is telling myself I have a long time. This is not so I can loaf. It is so I don't panic. And it's so I don't send out drafts too early, and it's so I do my best. What works against this, I think, is a culture of instant gratification. I fall into this sometimes by believing young writers (young in the craft, and many times young in age) that I am to be sending out work constantly, even work that I myself suspect could be better. These friends of mine sometimes complain I'm being a perfectionist. Maybe.

I just wonder if more of us don't give ourselves the chance to learn something, really learn something, and be satisfied, not just fed by the gratification of seeing one's name somewhere. The real satisfaction of something well done just for the sake of doing something well is very seldom found in a literary subculture that celebrates young writers (I'm talking age now), "hot" writers, young "geniuses." Not to mention the publish or perish of academia. For late bloomers, such as myself, or for people who feel outside of trends because of age, conservatism, writing style or whatever, the task of writing in such a climate can feel daunting. I know because I have talked to people who feel daunted.

The stories you find on this site are very much in their immature stages. I don't know how much I can share of my stories on a blog. A friend of mine told me she had to sign a disclosure agreement stating that her essay had not appeared anywhere else - including on-line sources. The stories I submitted recently to a journal will not be featured here unless they get rejected and I decide not to use them elsewhere.

However, there is something about sharing the process that is fun, something about it that almost feels worth it. You get to see how slowly I bloom, you get to share in the ups and downs and pain with me, and you get to see just how long it takes one lady to establish her craft. Maybe you're establishing your craft too.  Let's have patience, shall we? 

trying again and again

I have made some minor changes to my short story The Steinway, but it won't be long before more drastic measures are necessary. Sometimes, I think, it's just good to write a story to find pieces you want to keep and what needs to go and what you absolutely don't want to do in your work. Most of the pieces I write under duress tend to have an aspect of high drama in them, and well, sort of stereotyped characters.This fits the bill. But, in terms of getting a draft out, I don't think it hurts having a deadline, even at the risk of producing material that may eventually have to go. The stereotyped characters in The Steinway are kind of obvious: the dramatic Italian piano teacher as well as the jerk/jock/lawyer/bully/antagonist - and I mean the male antagonist and not necessarily the wife who I guess you could also say is an antagonist, as well as a lawyer, jerk and bully, although I have softened her somewhat from the first draft.

Whether it is possible to successfully write from a male point of view as a woman is debatable, I suppose. Whether I have pulled this off in any way, shape or form is up for grabs. A writing teacher, a man, and not my current teacher, has said my protagonist does not act like a man. I think my protagonist narrator is an emasculated man, and these do exist, but he also, I think, becomes a free man, in a sense, or I want him to become this.

Perhaps the next step in revision involves toning down the piano teacher and finding a more subtle, Americanized version, or maybe I don't need the involvement of a teacher at all. Or maybe it's the teacher who becomes the interest for the protagonist. Maybe this won't become a story about sordid relationships between neighbors but about one sordid relationship - teacher/student. Uggh. I don't know. Maybe this really needs to be stripped down from its current version to make it more about the protagonist's relationship with the sister that is still alive and living in their childhood home. Maybe it has nothing to do, really, with the narrator's marriage. One thing I do like, however, about the current version, is that the piano becomes a metaphor for a woman, and learning how to play is learning to make love. It makes sense that by the time the narrator finally learns how to play, his marriage is over.

pent up little woman

What is it in me that resists the pillow, resists rest from the striving. I once stayed up for almost three months. The Bell Jar has nothing on me. My therapist says it is my mother. I have lost her diary and her pictures but she lives on.  There is wildness barely contained in this little neighborhood.  There is wildness and it seethes beneath the sod, the sidewalks. When lightning strikes, it releases an electrical charge.* The bolt can kill a man. And I must, somehow, be groomed for carpool by 8.

* From Sky-fire.tv, Q & A

What are the electrical currents within a lightning discharge?        
They are highly variable…but high!. The average lightning stroke has a peak current on the order of 30,000 amps. But some discharges, especially those that are totally within the cloud, are only several thousand amps. On the other hand, superbolts do occur, occasionally reaching 300,000 amps or more. The electrical potentials involved in lightning discharges can range up to 200 million volts. [italics mine]

one novice's response to Four Quartets

Download ts_elliot1.doc

one blond's rash vow

Those of you who know me know I tend to run on high emotion, so why change now. I say ramp it up. There might be  price to pay later, but I don't think like that. Here's the deal: I've got some serious root issues and for those of you blonds out there who've ever let highlighting appointments lapse, you know what I'm talking about. I think roots are more in than ever, but it probably can only be pulled off intentionally, not through neglect.

Me, I'm waiting to get published before I'll highlight. That's right. You heard it. Take no prisoners. I could go brunette this year. What do you think?

getting back

Well, I've really been back about a week and a half, but you know how it is. I never opened my laptop the whole time I was gone, never needed to. All the best things can be done longhand, anyway, and well, I hardly had time for the long-hand, except to scribble notes furiously or pore over the occasional writing exercise.  It was nice to spend some time in my little cell of a room at St. John's college. I loved the view of pinion trees and red earth and one early morning I heard coyotes crying. Most of the time was craziness and fun. Because many of my friends were graduating this residency, I didn't want to miss time with them. I wanted to capture it all in that way you think you can, you hope to.

My work is laid out for me. It is a mountain. I climbed some of it while I was away, but not enough. How I will surmount it remains to be seen, but my second week out, my son is back in school, and I've had some time to survey what needs to be done: In the next month, the revision of four annotations and the writing of five. This is no small feat in that the works are long, but lovely, but long. If I read a book a week, I will be all right, but the climb must be steady.

On top of that, I hope to revise what I've shown to you, my story in progress, which my mentor saw and commented on. Ideally, I would do these two things at the same time - write my story and read the classics and critique them - but it is very hard to switch between these two modes in a single day or even week or month: reading/critique and creating. When the pressure is lower, I would normally be in one mode or the other. Usually when I'm obsessed with a story, I want to bring it to some sort of closure for each draft. Not that I'm not reading at all during those times. I usually just read less until I'm finished for the time being. Then I take a break from writing, like for a week, and read something ambitious.

I see that some of you continue to visit even though I haven't posted for a while. Thank you for that kind of faith. I'm going to try to have faith too, that I will do all this somehow, and that the stories you see here now will not be the stories that I finish with upon graduation. A girl's gotta have faith somehow. Wishing you well in what it is that requires faith.

almost outta here

I'm packing, something I hate. I'm getting ready for the mfa residency. It's 11:45 at night. It actually looks like I have what I need, most of it anyway, and I don't want to think about it too much. I didn't even take stuff off the hangers from the dry cleaners, just laid the clothes out in the suitcase.

I've tried to procrastinate because I hate packing, even though I want to go. I emailed as many people as I can and a few faithful have written in return. Too many of my friends are responsible people who go to bed at respectable hours. Even if I weren't packing for a trip, I'd be up, but then most surely I'd be reading something delicious or prowling the net.

I will have some internet access on the St. John's campus where our residency will take place in Santa fe. I don't know if I'll be able to blog a bit, but I may try.

I got a nice email from my mentor saying she was excited to work with me. She may have sent everyone a nice note like that, but she said she was looking forward to working with me on the story, in particular, so I'll tell myself there's something thrilling about it for her whether this is "true" or not. I tell you, writing can be so frickin' lonely that it's nice to hear this, no matter what, even if you're paying the program and the program's paying someone to be nice to you. I don't think people think about this when they critique stories and talk about them. I'm guilty of this too - of being cool sometimes and too picky - but I'm trying to learn to be more grateful and cheerful. (I hope.)

More later. I'll be fried for the opening reception. I'm so excited to see old friends I can hardly stand it. The plane ride will be too long.

leaving for residency; thoughts about stories

I'm printing out lots of copies of my story-in-progress to discuss with my mentor and workshop. I leave for Santa fe on Thursday.

It will be interesting to see what kind of feedback I get and I look forward to a different perspective. I have the feeling, though, that what I've got so far are notes for a future draft, at least as far as the beginning is concerned. So little is told in scene. It's pretty common, I guess for beginning writers to get a chatty, but I wonder if this helps the writer figure out what a story is about.

I used to think that a story is something you had to nail from the beginning to the end and you had to nail it all practically at once - tone, scene, characterization, pacing, etc. I would write at a frantic pace while it was in my mind, to get it all down. It may be that I need to go back to frantic-pace-writing to survive this next year. It was a technique that served me, more or less my first year of school. But I would like to learn another way.

I hope I have done the right thing by submitting Hidden Things rather than The Steinway. I don't think The Steinway is finished either even though it doesn't say "in progress." I've had  a friend that I respect tell me it doesn't deliver. There is a big buildup for most of the story and then it just trails off. I can accept this. I'm not so sure I know what it's about yet and my friend certainly doesn't seem to think it's about adultery, which is what it builds to eventually. I may know what it means in my mind and haven't come to terms with it or I don't know how to express it. The language, also, is elevated, so I'm wondering if I'm having difficulty because of that. I sense that the narrator's voice is a reflection of his emotional restriction and so, I feel, there may be limits to the story, although these may be my own limits.

One thing I've recently confirmed with a long-term mentor is that it never hurts to hold onto a story for a long time. She said many writers tend to be so impatient to get their stories out. I see that tendency in myself, but I am coming to terms with how difficult it is to figure out what a story is really about. I am also beginning to understand from experience how it is possible to make a work better through revision, lots and lots of revision - re-envisioning. Because of this, I've grown a little more patient. I just hope for smarts too.

home movies

I am so much more quiet than I used to be, so much more out of view. Who was that young woman with painted lips and dark nails who held a baby in her arms, tipped him to the ground, sang a song about a bird. How much more I said then. How I laughed, though my laugh was tight my voice high, constricted. It looked like that Mama knew what she was and knew, when she had done tipping her son with the birdie song and having him sing his abcs for the camera, she would sit out on the porch with her gin and watch the birds balance on a wire. Did I know then or do I know better now. I am less beautiful now but am I less well off. Is the phrase "the gift of age" a lie. Do I have someone to be angry with or do I fade away. Should I fade or should I fight, and if I were to fight would I be a clown. If I fade would  I be beautiful or mererly sad. Does it really matter, did it ever.

Robertson Davies' Fifth Business

Davies' Fifth Business, a novel/memoir, is an engaging story of a man's quest to be expiated from his part in endangering the life of a woman in his Canadian village. Dunstable ("Dunny") Ramsay ducks a snowball thrown by Percy Boyd Staunton. The snowball hits the back of the head of the young Baptist minister's wife, Mary Dempster, who is pregnant. Her subsequent fall induces premature labor and, according to the beliefs of many, makes her "simple."

Dunny's mother, a stern Presbyterian woman, helps bring the infant to health, creating a nest for the tiny child in a sort of incubator warmed by bricks and a kettle of steam and feeding it with the aid of a glass fountain pen dropper. Ironically she controls her own son and family with a fist of iron so harsh that it scars Dunny for life. In his adult years, he relates to women as sexual objects, saints, demons, and as women bent on controlling men ("mothers"), but hardly ever as people with both strengths and faults, with the complexities of average flesh and blood.

When the preemie Paul Demster is brought to relative health and Mrs. Ramsay returns to service in her home and the wider community, Dunny is enlisted to help the Dempsters, to help around the house, to make sure nothing happens to Paul, to keep an eye on his mother, whom Mrs. Ramsay does not trust. An unusual attraction takes place between Dunny and Mary, and though there is nothing untoward, it could be that she fulfills for him something missing in his home. He also comes to take care of Paul and teaches him magic tricks with cards and coins which Paul masters easily, surpassing and astonishing his teacher.

Several incidents intervene to separate Dunny from the Dempsters, including Rev. Dempster's discovery that Paul has been playing with cards, an anathema to the Reverend, whose Baptist tradition forbids it. Another incident involves a sexual encounter between Mary and a "tramp." Despite this, and his mother's threat that he should stay away from the Dempsters, Dunny calls on Mary during a crucial moment: Under his watch, his brother, who is ill, seems to have died. Dunny believes he witnesses a miracle when Mary prays over his brother Willie, who "comes back to life." The village doctor has his doubts, but Dunny will not be swayed. He believes he has indeed witnessed a miracle and begins his lifelong quest to prove that Mary is a saint.

What is so satisfying about this book is that it is a history of a life, however fantastically imagined and however fantastically told. It doesn't seem to go too far beyond the bounds of what may conceivably happen to one person at one point in time, and to a group of people, actually, who grew up together. It also doesn't go too far beyond the bounds of what one soul's quest could look like over the course of a lifetime, and how this quest changes at various points, especially in middle age and beyond.

As long as you are willing to suspend some disbelief, you can enjoy this story. Here's where you have to hold on loosely: Is it really believable that Dunny would just "happen" to run into the grown-up Paul when he did, as many times as he did? Is it really possible that out of one small Canadian village would rise up "the greatest magician in the world" and the lieutenant govenor of Ontario? Not impossible, but Davies deals in superlatives - the richest "boy" becomes lieut gov, the most humble kid of the village becomes "the greatest magician in the world." And on the large theatre in the last scene, these larger than life characters, including the fifth business, Dunny, who "knows the hero's birth, or comes to the assistance of the heroine when she things all is lost, or keeps the hermitess in her cell, or may even be the cause of someone's death" - will all play a part. (p. 214)

Sometimes the insights of some characters when they speak in dialogue and reflect back to Dunny aspects of his life that he has told them somewhere off-scene strike me as a little too perceptive and too other-concerned to be real. They read like a really good therapy session or a penetrating pastoral counseling session. I am thinking here especially of Liesl's take on his life during their conversation in the hotel room or the Jesuit priest's insights on his deathbed. But what we have here are the insights of  the devil and a really smart Jesuit priest, respectively, so maybe I don't have a point after all. I also found it unbelievable that the "tramp" who couples with Mary would then, cleaned up and reformed and all, just happen to appear at Dunny's school and speak about the mission he runs for "tramps."  I'm not saying that  in a small town and on a small planet, this never happens.  I think I prickle at the "neatness" of the story. I wouldn't mind if there were a few more frayed ends, but there I go, being picky and sour.

What Davies has done is portrayed Providence itself and its outworkings in a life and a village. If you can believe in Providence, you can believe these things, or at least imagine them, and believe all things will have their final purpose in the One who has ordained them.

What made me sad, though, the frayed end, which may have been an understated understood, is that the one living "saint" for whom Dunny professed admiration was locked away in an insane asylum, partly by Dunny's own hand. Dunny justifies his actions somewhere along in the narrative but I think it interesting that, just like the saints he studies, saint-worship is "safe" when the  people behind the facade and the glory are "locked away" in pages of a book or public asylums  where their humanity and frailty will not be a hindrance to  our worship. Mary paid with her life  so that Dunny could continue this worship.

The format of the work as a novel that is a memoir and letter written to explain or justify one's position, worth, actions, reminds me of Knot of Vipers by Francois Mauriac in which a dying man justifies his stinginess by portraying his family as opportunistic thieves. The memoir writing takes place in real time, which means the content of the memoir and the views of the memoir writer changes as he interacts with them and reports on up-to-date conversations he's had with them.

Fifth Business is almost all memoir, written at one point in time, on the occasion of the memoir writer's retirement. It is a letter to the headmaster, his former boss, in which he protests the patronizing write-up of his retirement ceremony and presents an argument for his character and dignity and the relative worthlessnes and rotten character of the man who made his boss headmaster. In the end, it turns out to be mostly memoir with some asides to the recipient.

Unlike Knot of Vipers, the memoirist of Fifth Business does not report real time interaction with others. I wonder what this would have been like just to have this as a fictional memoir, without all the asides, which I found distracting. I was also half-expecting a final scene with the recipient of this memoir/letter given how many times he is directly addressed.

the last sin eater

I want to tell you about a film I saw last weekend called The Last Sin Eater, a release from FoxFaith films. It concerns a Welsh settlement in Appalachia (1850s) which practices a Celtic tradition of appointing one member of a village to become "the sin eater." This sin eater drinks bread and wine placed on the body of one who has just died and thus absolves them of their sins. This sin eater is "vile" in his community because he is full of the evil he has taken on. Villagers are forbidden to even look into his eyes and thus he leads a lonely existence, apart from them, away from the village, entering only when he hears the sound of the passing bell.

Apart from a few minor things which the modern viewer is hip to - the too-clean look of the bonnet of the granny in the first scene, for instance, the melodrama of a couple of scenes - I thought this was an incredibly stunning film, and so refreshing in its lack of our culture's nihilism and preference for irony, violence, black comedy, etc. It is straight up great story telling with a powerful metaphor and a great cast. I enjoyed watching the special features when it was over and hearing what the actors said about the movie and their excitement over the script and pleasure in participating in a project that has value.

Watch this if you can. There is some violence but compared to most movies that are out today, it is a "safe" family movie, although I think parents should watch it with their kids. One reviewer said it would likely be too slow for kids and I would say for younger kids, this would most likely be the case and/or kids accustomed to being entertained by mostly high action movies.

You can find plenty of reviewers who trash it - just about anyone who will hate something with a Christian theme, and yes, it's not perfect, aesthetically, I grant you that. But it's approaching the quality of mainstream filmaking. For all the trash talk, see Rotten Tomatoes. But allow me to direct you to a few diamonds in the rough, such as Jackson Kendrick of the Q Network Film Desk.

writing fools, nonwriting drunks

Excerpt from Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned. (Scene at Richard Caramel's. Most of the novel is set in NYC. Richard, a friend of Anthony Patch, is a writer and an object of scorn in literary circles. Dialogue b/w Richard and Anthony):

"I've gathered quite a few books," [Richard Caramel] said suddenly.

"So I see." [Anthony]

"I've made an exhaustive collection of good American stuff, old and new. I don't mean the usual Longfellow-Whittier thing - in fact, most of it's modern."

He stepped to one of the walls and, seeing that it was expected of him, Anthony rose and followed.

"Look!"

Under a printed tag Americana he displayed six long rows of books, beautifully bound and, obviously, carefully chosen.

"And here are the contemporary novelists."

Then Anthony saw the joker. Wedged in between Mark Twain and Dreiser were eight strange and inappropriate volumes, the works of Richard Caramel - "The Demon Lover," true enough...but also seven others that were execrably awful, without sincerity or grace.

Unwillingly Anthony glanced at Dick's face and caught a slight uncertainty there.

"I've put my own books in, of course," said Richard Caramel hastily, "though one or two of them are uneven - I'm afraid I wrote a little too fast when I had that magazine contract. But I don't believe in false modesty. Of course some of the critics haven't paid so much attention to me since I've been established - but, after all, it's not the critics that count. They're just sheep."

For the first time in so long that he could scarcely remember, Anthony felt a touch of the old pleasant contempt for his friend. Richard Caramel continued:

"My publishers, you know, have been advertising me as the Thackery of America - because of my New York novel."

"Yes," Anthony managed to muster, "I suppose there's a good deal in what you say."

He knew that his contempt was unreasonable. He knew that he would have changed places with Dick unhesitatingly. He himself had tried his best to write with his tongue in his cheek. Ah, well, then - can a man disparage his life-work so readily?...

- And that night while Richard Caramel was hard at toil, with great hittings of the wrong keys and screwings up of his weary, unmatched eyes, laboring over his trash far into those cheerless hours wehn the fire dies down, and the head is swimming from the effect of prolongued concentration - Anthony, abominably drunk, was sprawled across the back seat of the taxi on his way to the flat on Claremont Avenue.

[Excuse me for excerpting at length like that. This is a passage one writer quotes at length and hopes like hell she's not destined for either fate. But I thought the entire scene, the last paragraph in particular, was marvelous. Some don't like this work of Fitzgerald's. I do, but I'm especially glad I read all 400 plus pages to get to this.]

toxic innocence

Sleep is an exercise in trust that eludes me. My pills give me the toxic ride I need to slip into oblivion, so natural to a child. The unsleep comes with watchfulness. The watchfulness comes from knowing there are things to watch, a necessity in it. As I grew, so did the unsleep, or was it with me all the time, did its seed imbed itself in me from birth? There are stories of my playing in the middle of the night, just up and wanting to play. After my son passed infancy, all-night performances were put to rest, at an age where I, as a child, was just beginning.

My opthamologist says I may have glaucoma, she is watching it. There is damage in my eye that comes from some anomaly, from the genes or from a blunt force trauma to the head. She looks at me inquiringly. "I am adopted," I manage to say, and rather than getting easier to say, this is getting harder. I used to think it made me special somehow, now I think it just makes me ignorant, hopelessly so. There is no one I can ask about family histories, genetic diseases, though I know enough and can guess enough to be intrepid.

The woman who gave birth to me took a piece of rope and hanged herself from the rafter of her Georgetown apartment. When my doctor said "blunt force trauma" it resonated with me that I would carry a legacy of violence in my eyes. And it made me angry that I carried this with me still, the unsleep and the damaged eyes. Sins of the fathers, sins of the mothers - I appreciate these phrases more, know what they mean now in every way.

I take my pills to wash away their sins, to restore a toxic innocence, maybe the only kind available to adults short of sainthood. I do it in protest of their death, their violence. I hug my son and cry for the child I was, that I see in him. I ask forgiveness for what I may have given to him, through my impatience, my unlove, my genes. I do my best and pray God will cover the rest.

oblivion

I have made it through the early afternoon that wanted to take my life. Sometimes I almost forget to hold on long enough. It is too late to change your mind when it's after hours and too late to fail. And if I've failed in the blinding light, oblivion will come to make me forget, if not to take away my sins.

the fat police

For those of you who check in from time to time, you know how I get on a tear every now and then and must follow it through to its conclusion so I can go on living. There is one person who is very dear to my heart, well a couple, who have my best interests at heart, and God bless 'em, they're great.

But one in particular must mention my weight every time she sees me, must mention diets she's heard of or that have worked for others, etc. I am no stranger to the dieting world. I started dieting before I needed to diet, which may have lead to the very problem I have today.

But I must say, there's a large part of me that's sick to death of the whole topic. It depresses me more than being overweight, which doesn't depress me that much except when a few insist on talking about it over and over. Why do we insist on talking about it over and over? I mean short of contracting heart disease and diabetes and, OK, maybe developing cancer, we talk about it like there's nothing else to talk about.

Pulease. Don't we have more to talk about? Isn't there something more to say?

Whew.

a nite off from storytelling

OK, so my son's with grandma. What do I do? Do I: a) demand my several hours to continue spinning a tale; or b) live already and go out with my husband? Ding, ding, ding, ding ding! You know the winning answer, and what I've chosen.

For those of you writers who are following me and this, my progress, I have some questions for you where relationships are concerned. These are from Eric Maisel's Living the Writer's Life (penetrating and accurate enough to be depressing.) This is supposed to be a humorous "quiz." No "right" answers:

1. Do you think that you are:
    a. The most important person in the world?
    b. The only person in the world?
    c. Too big to be bothered with relating?
    d. Too busy to be bothered with relating?
    e. Constitutionally unfit to relate?

2. Do you think that, since you are a writer, people ought to:
    a. Treat you like a god?
    b. Treat you like a treasure?
    c. Understand and cater to your needs and whims?
    d. Pay you for daydreaming?
    e. Love you for your potential?

3. When your mate says, "You love your ideas and your characters more than you love me!" do you:
    a. Exclaim: "Why, that's just what Anna Dostoevsky said about her husband!"
    b. Agree, then duck for cover?
    c. Agree, but try to explain yourself?
    d. Disagree, run right over, and hug him/her?
    e. Pout for about three weeks?

(There is a "right" answer to #3 and we all know what it is. My default mode is set at "e," however.)

Lovin' the readers. Love my husband more. Y'all come back now.

Meg

stories in progress

I think I've almost gotten over myself. I think I have smaller level of anxiety than I did before about posting imperfect stories and so I am contemplating, still merely contemplating, mind you, the possibility of posting my current story/stories in progress. Not only has my anxiety lessened as I've progressed on this thing, but I've gotten real - I mean really gotten real:  Only very generous, curious people, or people with really a lot of time on their hands, or people hoping I'll link up with their blog, or just mystery people out there in the realm of this blogging, googling planet ever go to "stories" and read a story of mine. I mean, really. Not even my husband falls into any of those categories, not even some of my very best friends. And yet it doesn't seem to matter, really.

temporary measures

I am broken from the day I was born, since the day I was born, I break. I fell upon the cracked earth when I slid from the womb and cried for want of slaking, and nothing has satisfied since.

Self-pitying, you say, self-serving.

It is about time to speak up for the dying self and its requirement to be served, pitied, and to demand in a straight line.

Pity: the inferior, imperious nurse compared to Love, but she is all I can afford. She wets my lips with vinegar and pokes me in the rib with her dutiful finger to see if I am gaining.

When I can do better, I will ask who would love me, if there are any takers. I will don my best and wait at the orphanage. I will keep faith and I will not die. I will have, at least, that much.

novel in stories - the ongoing saga

A couple of days ago, I made a public apology for my labeling Silent Retreats a novel-in-stories. Since then, I have found an interview of Phil conducted by Nancy Zafris, editor of Kenyon Review, in which Phil refers to Silent Retreats as a novel-in-stories. What I’m taking from this is that Phil is using the term loosely. Perhaps I will ask Phil myself one day. But what it showed me that I was not completely delusional in my casting his work into this mold. (And by the way, I recommend Zafris’ book of short stories The People I Know. I picked it up this spring at AWP. Subtle, really great dialogue. It was a treat to meet Nancy too, after hearing about her from a couple of people published in KR.)

So here’s the relevant excerpt (Phil also addresses the backstory question I discussed in my original post on novel-in-stories):

NZ: Interconnected stories, hmm. Is that harder or easier than a stand-alone story? It would seem you would always be needing to “explain” yourself or add back story.

PD: I don’t think much about what’s harder or easier. I’ve found I can avoid a need for back story and constant explanations by employing the power of varying points of view and by making the stories complementary instead of purely sequential. Like petals on a tulip – which one’s first? But of course every novel-in-stories needs a good psychologist trying to get by in a rough, rough world. And a priest. And a compelling woman. And an attempted murder and a fire and a secret back-staircase. And a compelling woman.

Correction re: Deaver's Silent Retreats not novel in stories

In a previous post, I discussed the form of novel in stories and used Phil Deaver's collection Silent Retreats to illustrate. I have since done my research and learned from an interview that he does not consider his collection a novel in stories, but a collection of stand alone stories which have characters and situations in common. I guess, to further refine my definition of novel in stories, I would need to add that the stand alone stories of a collection need to have rising and falling action as a part of their ordering to be considered a novel in stories. The sequencing of stories would be especially important to this form, much more so, of course, than a collection.

My apologies.

blogging and delusions of perfectibility

Perfectible: adj. Capable of becoming perfect or being made perfect: perfectible prose.

I'll have to admit this blogging thing is taking a toll. I may have to hire a blogging editor or find a drug, but it's hard to rest, sometimes, when I know I have prose out there being seen that may not be perfect. What I have done throughout my long and varied school career is perfect my writing until the last minute. With blogging though, there is no "last minute." In every minute, there is a possibility of making the material in my blog more perfect.

There may be glitches here that you find to be less than perfect, but to my eyes at present and the brain cells still available to me after child-rearing and too much television, I'm getting pretty damn close, at least with the prose. I'm very shaky with the poetry, but I'm pushing myself. I'm putting myself out there anyway and testing myself for what I can stand.

Check in again tomorrow. By then, there'll likely be another more perfect version of this post. If not, I've gotten help.

a raid on the inarticulate

From T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets:

"So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years -
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deterioriating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to
            conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot
           hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under
        conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."

(East Coker, V)

offering

Let us lie down, one beside another, and I will close the gap of fallen hope with my mouth.

I will touch you and the scar which held the disappointed hour will be healed.

I offer my body as the sacrifice for the unholiness of my unlove.

Take it, with all of you, and may you be consumed. Upon the alter I leave myself.

May imperfections burn away; may we look no longer for the dividing line;

But seize the hour when we are are skin and body and breath.

criticizing our children

Last year I made the very terrible mistake of publicly commenting on my child's hair and how it needed a good combing. This was in front of my child's new first grade teacher and my child on orientation day. Pandora is not always a good mother, and struggles to be a good mother to a sensitive boy. He starting tearing up and I had to take him to that bathroom kids' classrooms have, you know, with the Stop/Go sign and the little potty. He got over it but I was reminded that my son was a growing kid who does not take well to public critique from his mother in any form. Like mother, like child.

I wonder about the same thing with my stories. Is it appropriate for me to tell you what I still don't exactly like about them? Sometimes, I don't know, I'm dying to, especially the ones still "in progress." I know they're not "perfect" stories. I feel I know what their weaknesses are and I hope they mature. I really hope the best for them, but I feel in some sense that their inadequacies are also mine.

My Confessions piece may be a bit maudlin and dramatic. It uses a lot of quotes from Augustine. But these things are precisely what I like about it. When I take these things out in an effort to appear more "mature" and controlled (I guess I really don't know what mature is yet; my therapist is working with me on that one), I don't like it as much. I like lots of feeling, and weirdness, which is why I love a man imagining talking to Augustine or hearing words from the great Confessions.

So child, what is different about you is what I like. What is "imperfect" in you may be the very thing which bonds me to you the most.

"real me"

I got into a tiff with someone yesterday who didn't believe I was truly representing myself on the internet in terms of my pictures. In fact, I've gotten into that a couple of times with people, or had the suggestion that I have only chosen "choice" pictures. Of course I have. Would I really want anyone to read my writing notebooks? Do I really want anyone want to see the flabby sentences, the unclear complexion of my rough prose, my saggy, tired dialogue? But you know what, because Pandora's feisty, I'm not going down without some kind of fight. So here, here's a small taste of what you wanted - and you know who you are. Here are pictures of me after I spent 10 hours yesterday driving my son up to camp and then spent that same 10 hours driving back down. I put on my makeup at about 6 this morning and it's 11 p.m. now. So yes, get a good look, and oh, all the cellulite is not visible and I am, to my chagrin, much overweight, and look how big my hands are. But you know, you're never seeing my notebooks.

reading/writing: novel-in-stories

    I've just joined an on-line book discussion concerning itself with the novel-in-stories genre. I am an avid short story reader, but I've only recently had my first taste of the possibilities of the benefit of reading novels written in stories, or reading stories with recurring characters. Phillip Deaver, a friend and Flannery winner wrote Silent Retreats, a book of loosely connected short stories. He continues to write stories that include the characters that appeared in this early collection. Other characters have been added, but it is nice to see familiar faces.
    This causes me to wonder what kind of stories and characters lend themselves to this kind of longevity. I would imagine that the author would have to be of a particular temperament, for he or she has to have compassion and insight and patience enough to live with his or her characters over a long stretch of time. It isn't just that the characters have to be likable, it's that the author has the challenge of fully rendering his or characters, making them fully human, and therefore worthy of our complete examination and attention.
    I am assuming that a definition of the novel-in-stories genre consists of stories that can stand on their own as stories, but that are interrelated by some common elements, and I wonder if the most common element is character or characters.
     For the author working out the relationships between the stories, it can get complicated. He or she must decide what characters each character knows and how he or she knows them. He or she must decide how to include back story of previous events from other stories both without overloading the narrative and without confusing the reader, especially if the reader hasn't read any of the other stories. I'm sure there are other aspects to this approach that are challenging, but one thing I do hear from people who like to read in this genre or who appreciate recurring characters in various stories is that they really get to know the characters and feel connected to them.
    I guess it helps if the characters that recur are characters we want to know, characters with whom we want to hang out. I can think of quite a few fictional characters who were interesting in passing, but it didn't tear at me terribly when it was time to say good-bye. Does this have to do with the character, or does it have to do with the author's rendering?

Another Thing about Rwanda...

The people are so intimate with one another that you'll see groups of them walking around holding hands. They don't have television to keep them apart from each other. Lunches and dinners take at least two hours each. Our pastor said they had a kind of innocence which he feared would be harmed by encroachment of our culture.

I'm reading a novel now called Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls by Lucy Corin. She has something germane to say about innocence:

"I worry about innocence. I worry every time I find myself imagining someone as innocent, or as ever having been innocent. No one mentions innocence unless they mean to point out how something isn't anymore. To point to something and call it innocent is to suggest that it won't be for long, or that it's so stupid nothing will ever get through, no matter how awful. No one says innocent unless they mean doomed." (p. 109)

Everyone who's a human must read Everyday Psychokillers... How's that for an endorsement? I will talk about it more later, but only enough for you to see the wisdom of owning your own copy.

Indivisible unto Myself

I'm not that girl you wanted: Little Miss Texas, cutie pie, hunkie dory, sassafras prissy.

I don't make it all right for you to say what you've done to me has made me strong.

Step into me. My hate can be my love if you can leave off certain lusts.

But I can see you w