And Then What Happened

Alice Munro: "Save the Reaper"

2012-02-28T14:39:00.002-05:00

Donald Barthelme: "A City of Churches," "The School," and "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning"

2012-02-21T14:24:00.000-05:00

In the laboratory of "The City of Churches," Barthelme plays with open doors and closed structures. Can you imagine a place in which there are no buildings but churches? Laughable. Ridiculous. A "church" is loaded with real world connotations, leading to valid interpretations of the story that will focus on religion and societal organization. But what if we can replace "church" with "building" or "container" or "form" or "structure" and apply it not just to writing fiction but to the whole composition of our lives?

In the handy voice of Mr. Phillips, "Where do you want to live?" The choices are necessarily limited by the imaginations of the architects who have come before; there is nothing but those to inhabit, unless you don't need shelter. (But we need shelter.) Unless you can, like Cecelia--whose name means 'way for the blind' or 'one of shining light'--dream. This will make people uncomfortable. They will reject and want and need and fear and possibly even try to destroy you. Barthelme writes to forge a door on the world we don't imagine but instead inhabit and therefore having to imagine not-inhabiting. To use a different metaphor, he wishes to illuminate the worn path, and he chooses a different route [ha] than Welty. What a challenge, a necessary challenge, necessary if we are to ever see outside our limits.

Would Barthelme agree that each of his stories is a new church? Would he explain, instead, that each is a dream? (But perhaps agree that a dream, once shared, becomes a church?) I don't know. I do know that he doesn't let you inside his dream easily. The doors do not gape like hungry mouths. They do seem to open when you knock, knock, and knock again. It is a struggle to get inside. However (although if he were alive, he might, and I paraphrase here, "regard C. with hatred" for pointing, and thus limiting, like this), I wish to guide your struggle. If you're looking for a way inside "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning," try rereading the heart of the penultimate section of the story, "He Discusses the French Writer, Poulet."

And then go look up Georges Poulet on Wikipedia. Then you're inside a dream.

Richard Yates: "The Best of Everything," "No Pain Whatsoever," and "Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired"

2012-02-12T13:47:00.000-05:00

Richard Yates, illustration by Bill Russell for SF Chronicle

Stewart O'Nan will be at Susquehanna University in six weeks, and you're reading Richard Yates's stories now directly because of O'Nan's admiration. If you want to know more, O'Nan published an expansive article called "The Lost World of Richard Yates." Of course, since O'Nan published that article, Holt released Yates's collected works (2001), and Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio starred in Revolutionary Road (2008), and in 2005, Mark Winegardner asked O'Nan to pick three stories to include in 3x33, and O'Nan chose two published in 1962 and one in 1981.

At this point of the semester, I'm struck by the anti-ephiphanic endings of the first two stories. As O'Nan says, they're "plain and sad and inescapable." There's a sense of present and future failure. I'm caught like a deer-in-headlights before the dirtiness of the characters and their talk and their lives, especially in such quick succession after Flannery O'Connor. As I read, my head fills with Mad Men antics and attitudes, and it doesn't make me feel superior or in the least nostalgic--instead, I get the whiff of today's American culture as well--could I (or you) ever depict our own era with this clarity?

Then I reach this passage and I feel Alison's panic about being just one person in a world without end. Yates, in the character of a ten year old girl, writes: "I'm talking about something else. Because you see there are millions and millions of people in new York--more people than you can possibly imagine, ever--and most of them are doing something that makes a sound. Maybe talking, or playing the radio, maybe closing doors, maybe putting their forks down on their plates if they're having dinner, or dropping their shoes if they're going to bed--and because there are so many of them, all those little sounds add up and come together in a kind of hum. But it's so faint--so very, very faint--that you can't hear it unless you listen very carefully for a long time."

Here's to ending blog posts with an epiphany! Because I'm still addicted, and because this story sinks/rises/deigns (depending on how you look at it) to confer a kind of "knowledge" for one to live with: Richard Yates feels like someone who knows how to listen.

Flannery O'Connor: "Everything That Rises Must Converge"

2012-02-07T20:39:00.001-05:00

From goodreads.com

Dear Flannery,

Your bitter language sends shivers up my spine. Please see my earlier post. I want to take a moment to marvel at the intersection with the subject of Charles Baxter's essay, "Against Epiphanies." Is my obsession with you perhaps related to a middle-class "addiction" to "the loss of innocence, and the arrival of knowingness"? My shiver turns to a shudder. Julian's knowing in the end mirrors my own, and I'm not sure I'm better off for having indulged.

Still Yours,
Catherine

James Baldwin: "Sonny's Blues," "Going to Meet the Man," and "Exodus"

2012-02-01T17:33:00.001-05:00

Dimitri Kasterine: James Baldwin, France, 1979

I'll lift from an entry I wrote two years ago: "Sonny's Blue" is a gift. Becausealongside the narrator here, we stare at it "in the swinging lights of thesubway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face,trapped in the darkness which roar[s] outside."

BecauseSonny writes from jail: "I wish I could be like Mama and say the Lord'swill be done, but I don't know it seems to me that trouble is the one thingthat never does get stopped and I don't know what good it does to blame it onthe Lord."

Becausethe mother says to her less sensitive son: "You may not be able to stopnothing from happening. But you got to let him know you's there."

BecauseSonny says to his brother: "I hear you. But you never hear anything Isay."

BecauseBaldwin writes, "All I know about music is that not many people everreally hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something openswithin, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, arepersonal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music ishearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void andimposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is ofanother order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, forthat same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours."

Finally,because: "He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk ofruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make uslisten. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and howwe may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any othertale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."

Eudora Welty: "No Place for You, My Love" and "Why I Live at the P.O."

2012-01-25T22:03:00.002-05:00

Eudora Welty, super star.

John Cheever: "The Swimmer"

2012-01-18T12:33:00.001-05:00

Did you grow up in the suburbs? "The Swimmer" is the story that crystallizes John Cheever in people's minds as the paragon of suburban writers. Dive in and through and across; and while you're immersed in the story, take time to notice how he sets up a pattern, an expectation, and how he keeps his sentences, creating chaos, so carefully in order.

To fully enjoy "The Swimmer," I suggest you read (or reread) "Goodbye, My Brother," on which students blogged here. The photo here expresses a Cheever who seems to be in an old family vacation spot. In Richard Russo's introduction to Cheever in 3x33 he points out that Neddy Merrill "might be the unnamed narrator of 'Goodbye, My Brother,' a decade or two later." Russo points out that illusion and falsehood are what propel the narrator forward in his journey of shallow pools.

Aimee Bender: "The Rememberer" and "Quiet, Please"

2011-11-27T15:14:00.001-05:00

Have fun with these stories.

Junot Diaz: "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie" and "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"

2011-11-27T15:12:00.001-05:00

To house your creative responses.

David Foster Wallace, "Forever Overhead" and "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, No. 40"

2011-11-20T20:25:00.001-05:00

Nothing I could write would do justice to DFW. Maybe your creative responses to his work will.

George Saunders: "The Barber's Unhappiness" and "I CAN SPEAK!"

2011-11-14T14:49:00.001-05:00

Up for cultural satire, anyone? If so, you're in for a treat.

Stacey Richter: "Beauty Treatment" and "Cavemen in the Hedges"

2011-11-07T15:46:00.003-05:00

Lorrie Moore: "People Like That" and "How to Become a Writer"

2011-11-07T15:44:00.000-05:00

Danielle Evans: BEFORE YOU SUFFOCATE YOUR OWN FOOL SELF

2011-11-03T23:26:00.003-04:00

Danielle Evans will give a reading in Isaacs Auditoriuim, Susquehanna University, on November 7, 2011 at 7:30pm. What do you think she might have read before and during the process of writing stories in Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self? How does she chart new ground in the collection? As she is the youngest writer we'll read this semester, I'm asking you to put yourself in her shoes and ponder the encounters with literature and literary voices that might have influenced her and her craft. Be creative and far-reaching in your answer.

Mary Gaitskill: "Secretary" and "A Romantic Weekend"

2011-10-27T15:19:00.001-04:00

In an interview with Carri Anne Yager, Mary Gaitskill says: "Any time you write a piece of fiction it will be interpreted in ways that you don't intend. It's difficult, it's painful, but it's part of the turf. I would never change my writing based on my advance projection of other people's interpretations. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt." For another pretty good interview, go to Bomb.

Amy Hempel: "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" and "Beg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep"

2011-10-19T11:28:00.003-04:00

Another "minimalist," T. C. Boyle calls Hempel, but I don't agree. Her stories are spare, perhaps, but such richly associative work, banking on so metaphors, doesn't seem stripped to the essentials. Unless indirection = minimalism. See what you think.

Also note: "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" is a story that breaks my "rule" about first paragraphs. How does Hempel get away with it? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

These stories are going to test your synapses.

Jamaica Kincaid: "Poor Visitor" and "Figures in the Distance"

2011-10-13T13:03:00.002-04:00

Remember that these are novel excerpts and find your inspiration in voice, detail, perspective.

Tim O'Brien: "The Things They Carried" and "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong"

2011-10-08T14:24:00.002-04:00

At the 2009 National Book Festival, an interviewer from the NEA asked Tim O'Brien, "Why read?" And he answered: I can't speak for everybody; I can tell you why I do. I have a need to enter other worlds that aren't entirely my own. And by other worlds, I mean other personalities and other mindsets and geographically other places where I might be living there's an otherness that beckons to me that- and the otherness shines light on what I'm living or going through. It is not- you get trapped in your own problems and your own intricacies of your own life so you don't see them beyond them much, as least I have trouble. And a book or a magazine article or any piece of art can shine a kind of light on my own situation and I'm seeing it through another lens. And it might be the lens of a history book or the lens of another novel or poem and there's a little sunlight there, explosion that goes on in my heart where the otherness is attached to my own life in some way or another. Sometimes it's just to draw a tear from my eye and feel that someone is sharing the kind of pain I might be sharing or has gone through it or someone has experienced a job that somehow validates my own joys.

Lydia Davis: "Almost No Memory" and "St. Martin"

2011-10-08T14:24:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking about acquired tastes. When I first encountered the work of Lydia Davis, I felt positively affected by a few things. The word play of stories like "A Mown Lawn" and "Letter to a Funeral Parlor." The audacity of one-line stories such as "Certain Knowledge from Herotodus." The striking poignancy when she writes about aging and death, as found in, for example, "Happy Memories." However, I found just as many thing that distinctly didn't appeal. Longer pieces that rambled, whose inner logic was unclear to me. Stories that felt overly self-indulgent. Stories that, well, didn't seem to have a point.

Have you ever tried a food, or a drink, or an activity that at first didn't appeal to you, but then, upon greater exposure, became the very thing that you craved?

My admiration for Lydia Davis has grown over the years until I now feel a strong desire to read her work. When Davis read last spring at Susquehanna, I heard from more than one student how they found her reading from The Cows intolerable. In contrast, I loved it. Unabashedly. Listening to Davis describe our bovine neighbors felt like a view into a parallel university, one in which the etiquette, logic, and relationships are all alien and yet eerily familiar. When I reread the stories chosen by T.C. Boyle for DoubleTakes, my brain echoes with other of Davis's worlds I've read, and I feel, like the protagonist of "Almost No Memory" that these books truly have a great deal to do with me, thought it is hard for me to understand, and troubles me to try to understand, just how they have to do with me, how much they are of me and how much they are outside me and not of me, as they sit there on the shelf, being what I have read but do not remember reading, being what I have thought but do not now think, or remember thinking...

Tobias Wolff: "Powder" and "Bullet in the Brain"

2011-09-28T09:49:00.000-04:00

At this point of the semester when you're all workshopping your own work, let's hear from Tobias Wolff on how he responds to the question: "Who do you show your work to, and at what stage?" This is from the Paris Review, an interview which you may read the entirety of here.

Wolff: "I don’t talk about my work, and I don’t show it to anybody until I’ve brought it along as far as I am able. I show my work to my wife, Catherine, first. She knows me better than anyone else and has a good instinct for the kind of thing I’m hoping to write, so can see where I failed to get it down. When Ray Carver was alive we sometimes traded manuscripts back and forth, though I have to say that my own stories profited much more from those readings than his; I can’t join the army of those who claim to have written his work or brought it to perfection. And my brother Geoffrey—when we were younger we used to exchange manuscripts and really mark each other’s work up. Then there’s the process of getting things into print. I’ve always had very good experiences with my editors, Gary Fisketjon especially; I find it immensely helpful to be given different ways of looking at something I’ve done. And though she doesn’t edit my manuscripts, Amanda Urban has given me twenty-five years’ worth of advice and encouragement, and done her damnednest to get my work out in the world. I guess the point is, as you go on in this life you become aware of the folly of thinking you did something all by yourself. We’re held up by others all along the way."

Richard Ford: "Rock Springs" and "Great Falls"

2011-09-20T13:54:00.001-04:00

The last line of "Rock Springs" lifts the story from a well-told anecdote, complete with internal anecdotes and meaningful nods, to a story rife with unfinished business because the business is yours. It is upon you to decide what Earl does and whether he is "anybody like you." This story has always struck me for its internal stories and minor characters: Edna and the monkey, Terrel and his grandmother, the cabdriver. The narrator interprets everyone as searching for meaning, and we are likewise involved.

"Great Falls" is a picture of the horror of constant restraint. From the "double row of Russian olive trees" outside the "plain, two-story house" with "no place for the cars," we get the sense of the mother's captivity, which is a metaphor for the whole family's captivity. They cannot escape their confines and end up behaving terribly toward each other, failing to pull together in bleak times.

In both both stories, notice how Ford employs contradictory thoughts and actions to undermine and complicate his characters.

Wideman: "Doc's Story" and "Presents"

2011-09-15T11:47:00.001-04:00

Can stories fix our lives? Can they heal wounds? Can they save us?

Through the heartsick protagonist of "Doc's Story," Wideman raises these questions and refuses to answer. Even in the story-within-the-story of the blind basketball-playing university professor, we hear about both magic and failure. Shooting fouls is a good metaphor for stories and the art of telling stories. If you practice you can "swish," even if you're blind; however, even if you practice and mostly "swish," sometimes you shoot way wide. Is this story's plot like the arc of a basketball? Does it go through the hoop? Does Wideman want it to?

In "Presents" we again see that what goes up must come down. Big Mama serves as the font of truth, prophesying what will happen for her grandson: "He'll rise in the world, sing for kings and queens, but his gift for music will also drag him down to the depths of hell." The boy's acquisition of music is fated to him as kingship was fated to Arthur: "The music's in the box like the sword in the stone." Wideman "presents" us with "a simple story" that should remind you that stories are old and they are necessary and that we recycle them in order to fix our lives. The protagonist's story is "Easy to tell to a stranger at the bar who will buy you a drink. Young boy and old woman. Christmastime. Reading each other's minds. Exchanging gifts of song. His fortune told. The brief, bright time of his music. How far it took him, how quickly gone." The stranger buys him a drink for his story--a pattern as old as the tradition of bards--and then the storyteller, again alone, wishes for salvation.

I write about family, about the sketchy salvation of storytelling. I'm claiming Wideman for my family. I hope he can teach me more about voice.

Oates: "Tick" and "The Abduction"

2011-09-11T14:23:00.003-04:00

Alex Guarco, I hope you enjoy this follow-up to "The Brother." Is Joyce Carol Oates's minimally-punctuated story more or less effective than Coover's? More or less reader-friendly?

"The Tick" grosses me out. But I respect it. Both of these stories remind me of Ernest Hemingway's famous iceberg theory, as expressed in his interview with the Paris Review and quoted by Burroway: "There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show." What Burroway doesn't quote is the rest of the remark: "If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story."

I think that Oates knows what she's omitting from these stories.

Carver: "The Bath" and "A Small, Good Thing"

2011-09-11T13:44:00.002-04:00

In case you skipped T. C. Boyle's introduction (shame on you! go back and read it!), this pairing of stories appears to be a creative writing prof's dreamscape. And it fits perfectly into the topic of this class: Carver appears to have evolved from one story to the next, his aesthetics and personal philosophy manifested so differently in "The Bath," published in 1981, and "A Small, Good Thing," appearing 1983. Can you articulate what is different? For me, I love how the "A Small, Good Thing" is a survival story: "Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this."

To complicate matters, however, in a 2009 interview, Carver's widow Tess Gallagher asserts that "A Small, Good Thing" is actually the earlier version of the story. "The Bath" is in fact a version heavily edited by the famous Gordon Lish--the interviewer writes that "[Carver's] editor and mentor Gordon Lish revised every story, in some cases rewriting or deleting more than half the original text." Tess Gallagher is trying to publish an entirely new version of Carver's 1981 book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love to be titled Beginners.

On other topics, here's a brief and interesting personal essay discussing Carver and the "dirty realists" and comparing Carver with some of his contemporaries (Richard Ford, Richard Bausch, Tobias Wolff, Jayne Anne Phillips).

Coover: "the convention" and "The Brother"

2011-09-08T13:48:00.002-04:00

Robert Coover was born in 1932 and teaches at Brown University. You do the math. This past February, I saw him at AWP give a reading of his stunning story, "Going for a Beer," which you can read in its entirety online. It's as fresh and experimental as anything T. C. Boyle shares in his anthology.

To supplement your reading, I ask you to read this recent article published in the Guardian in which author Hari Kunzru discusses, among other things, Coover and his interest in "the possibility of non-linear narrative architecture." Characterization is important to Coover, but it works in the service of epistemological and ontological goals.

O'Connor: "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "Good Country People"

2011-09-06T13:33:00.002-04:00

Goodness! O'Connor obsesses over it, teases it and twists it. In the end of these two stories she leaves us with a murderer and a seducer teaching hard-won lessons to women who'd believed they had it all figured out.

All writers have obsessions. O'Connor bring her characters to life through their appearance, action, dialogue, and thought; and every bit of direct characterization is in service to her obsessions with morality. One of my favorite passages from "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" sneaks in under the radar as one of the Grandmother's bits of unwanted advice. Think about this: she "cautioned Bailey that the speed limit was fifty-five miles an hour and that the patrolmen hid themselves behind billboards and small clumps of trees and sped out after you before you had a chance to slow down." Oh, sneaky rulekeepers! How dare they hide in order to catch you misbehaving. Watch out for the judges who hide among you! If you're sure you can get away with it, speed on!

When the Misfit is there to catch Grandmother misbehaving, she reforms. O'Connor seems to be asking whether threat is the only way to salvation.

In "Good Country People," nasty Hulga maintains her position of intellectual superiority up until she is brought to mortification. Will this moment ironically save her from herself? Why does the story start and end with Mrs. Freeman? Maybe it shows the unreliability of the narrator.... This will lead us to a discussion of direct characterization versus authorial interpretation, as explored in the next chapter of Burroway. At the beginning the narrator tells us: "Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings." By the end, the narrator has faded and we get Mrs. Freeman herself: "Some can't be that simple," she said. "I know I never could." Whom do we believe?

If all writers have obsessions, what are yours?

Cheever: "Goodbye, My Brother" and "The Five-Forty-Eight"

2011-08-31T11:52:00.004-04:00

These two stories by Cheever pull me into deep waters. It's not the purification experience of swimming that the "Goodbye, My Brother" narrator believes in. Rather, these waters are like the ocean that long ago drowned the father of that story, the waters that always drown our fathers because they are the whole of our backstory--they are where the past exists.

In "Goodbye, My Brother," we find Cheever referencing old myths and old bloodlines, traditions and the way our readings and reinventions of traditions might help or harm us--on this point, I find find the story to be steadfast in its ambivalence.

In "The Five-Forty-Eight," the crazy victimizer, Miss Dent, is also the victimized. She too draws on the past, quoting Job from the bible, a man who suffered greatly and was not perfect. In the end perhaps Miss Dent succeeds in getting through to the blind and somewhat cruel Blake. Cheever leaves this up to interpretation.

The title had me curious, so I searched for "5:48" on the internet. The result: Matthew 5:48 is part of the Sermon on the Mount and is "the final verse of the final antithesis, and a summary of Jesus' earlier teachings." (This is from wikipedia; go look up more about it if you wish; it involves the conundrum of perfection.)

Miss Dent quotes Job to Blake: 'Where shall wisdom be found?' it says. 'Where is the place of understanding? The depth saith it is not in me: the sea saith it its not with me. Destruction and death say we have heard the force with our ears.'

Keep this idea in mind when reading Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."

P.S. This posting is a mini-lecture, not an model for the comments I'd like from you. For that, stick to the syllabus's instructions of writing about technique/elements and how Cheever might influence your writing.

Flowers Grow Out of My Head

2011-08-28T22:48:00.000-04:00

My brother George and I used to sing this funky Pointer Sisters song in the seventies. The counting grounds you while the melody magics you up. Throw in a pinball machine and you've got a vision of life itself. Stability, art, and chance.

This is how I feel about origin and originality. My answer is twelve.

Animator Abbey Luck has remade the video with music by Perrin Cloutier of the band Beirut. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Letters to Alison Dubai

2011-05-03T13:19:00.000-04:00

Last night, my son Emerson and I both had great dreams. In Emerson’s dream, he and his uncle were walking through a forest picking crayons off the trees.

In my dream, I sat in the back of a red pickup truck with a dozen or more people who were younger than me, maybe college students. We were watching an empty train track. It was early summer and the air was filled with anticipation, like we were getting ready for a Kill the Cat Press chapbook launch. (Or the end of classes, or even graduation.) In the distance we heard the noise of something approaching, and then there it was, a train, a long and loud train pulling into view and finally slowing to a halt. We jumped up to see what was inside, and on the backs of the train cars we saw large bright objects the train was delivering. Odd containers like kayaks and red and yellow dog houses and big suitcases and giant turtle shells that looked as light as balloons. Young people started to appear everywhere, climbing the train to unpack the shells and the boats and the houses. Everyone was excited about the train’s arrival. Everyone looked for her or his own container to take home.

I relate these two dreams because I wish to ask the author of the new chapbook Letters to Alison Dubai:did you dream these dreams last night too?

Elizabeth Deanna Morris is a dreamweaver. She is a dreamcatcher. In her poetry-prose, she storytells and creates a real and unreal fabric, warping language over our heads and woofing it into our eyes and ears. In Liz's gorgeous and innovative compilation, she picks the crayons off the trees and puts them to good use, drawing in our minds and our hearts. In an alternate reality, you and I are sitting together in the bed of a red pickup truck. We’re watching a train come toward us on the tracks. In a moment, it will arrive, full of containers ready for us to grab and fill…

(Modified from Kill the Cat Press Launch, May 2, 2011

The Exquisite Failure of the Jack Bank

2011-04-28T09:27:00.000-04:00

Last night, Glen Retief read from his excellent debut memoir, The Jack Bank. The title derives from the author's experience of physical abuse at a white South African boarding school. G.R.'s performance for the university crowd struck a chord. This beautiful man, somehow real while standing high on a stage--impossible, yet!--he was simultaneously thoughtful, earnest, and artistically deliberate. The audience roared as he read a coming-of-age story set in a metaphoric castle not unlike college castles all across America. He described how he found community as a white man living in a primarily black dormitory hall; how his friend Aubrey accepted him and found him "...interesting, man"; how the author continued to hide his homosexuality in this new context and friendship; and how the two friends set out on a drunken knights' mission that ended in failure.

My colleague's performance leads to this It's Dark in There Tenet #1: Failure is the only path toward creating something worthwhile.

Pink Pig

2011-04-27T13:36:00.000-04:00

Just reread Selah Saterstrom's book The Pink Institution, thanks to the Susquehanna University Lit Club.

When I was little, I delighted in the short i, in its two different sounds. There's the short i of Pit and Pin and Pill. Then there's the short i in Pink and Pig. The difference is so slight that I would slip into it, saying pig and pink over and over again, wondering at that slight upturn of my lips.

Now S.S. finds a way to play with the beauty and the horror of this slippage. In a cover she designed, she presents a southern life, minus the Peculiar Institution, as the Pink Institution. Hanging upside down. Bleeding out. Catching breath.

"Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin

2009-11-29T19:56:00.000-05:00

Because alongside the narrator here, we stare at it "in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roar[s] outside."

Because Sonny writes from jail: "I wish I could be like Mama and say the Lord's will be done, but I don't know it seems to me that trouble is the one thing that never does get stopped and I don't know what good it does to blame it on the Lord."

Because the mother says to her less sensitive son: "You may not be able to stop nothing from happening. But you got to let him know you's there."

Because Sonny says to his brother: "I hear you. But you never hear anything I say."

Because Baldwin writes, "All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours."

Finally, because: "He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."

"Goodbye and Good Luck" by Grace Paley

2009-11-22T13:23:00.000-05:00

"The Apocalypse Commentary of Bob Paisner" by Rick Moody

2009-11-18T10:59:00.001-05:00

Are you young? Are you under a lot of pressure? Do you occasionally addle your mind with drugs? The Book of Relevations is the place for you. Bob Paisner lays it out. Take notes.

We play with form. We formally play.

This is our story for Friday.

P.S. "So: youth is apocalypse."

"Xuela" by Jamaica Kincaid

2009-11-10T15:30:00.000-05:00

"Xuela" is a novel excerpt and reads like one. The pacing is quite different than that of a short story. We will discuss this, but we'll also look at the voice of the narrator, which is fairly unusual. We'll touch on distance vs. intimacy. And absence of dialogue. And preponderance of summary. And, and, I dunno. Up to you.

"Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot" by Robert Olen Butler

2009-11-04T16:38:00.001-05:00

This story is great--gimmicky maybe, full of double meanings--but great. The voice, plaintive and dumb and profound, gets me.

Let's focus somewhat on point of view. Think about unreliable narrators. Think about form and distance. Butler brings us in close. How?

For your own writing, reread the section on consistency: Burroway insists that "you make your own rules, but having made them, you must stick to them" (310-311) (ignore the dang chart on page 310).

"City of Churches" by Barthelme

2009-10-29T16:56:00.001-04:00

"No Pain Whatsoever" by Richard Yates

2009-10-21T16:49:00.000-04:00

This uncomfortable story features a the third-person limited narration focused on poor Myra, occasionally using her voice. The story starts with the immediate tension of Jack's unwanted touch. We see a linear narrative that makes conventional use of scenes and summary.

What further to discuss? There's the radio, perhaps, and how it functions in both settings. Or the crumpled and misshapen chests of the TB patients as compared to the ending image of Jack groping Myra's chest. There's plot and structure, I don't know, I'd like to hear from you: what will you steal/borrow/learn from Richard Yates?

"How to Become a Writer" by Lorrie Moore

2009-10-14T20:30:00.001-04:00

This story is a midsemester ha-ha. Then again, maybe Francie is serious. Whatever, it is a timely reading in the face of the most recent Burroway assignment.

I strongly suggest reading Loore's other two stories in 3x33, "You're Ugly Too" and "People Like That Are the Only People Here," originally subtitled "Canonical Babblings in Peed Onc."

"Wilderness Tips" by Margaret Atwood

2009-10-07T15:35:00.001-04:00

Let's talk about time.

"Water Liars" by Barry Hannah

2009-09-29T13:47:00.000-04:00

Enjoy this tricky story. Nice Christian imagery for you to digest, since you were interested in the devil with Oates's story. Some other stuff, too. Remember with this entry to consider about the Burroway lessons on "fictional place."

"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" by Joyce Carol Oates

2009-09-22T13:28:00.001-04:00

This is one of the creepier stories we'll read.

Joyce Carol Oates is known for this story. She is also known for being a seriously prolific writer. Michael Dirda, in a NY Review of Books review, writes, "Joyce Carol Oates still bothers people--in all kinds of ways. For more than forty-five years she has been steadily producing novels, short stories, essays, poems, plays. Between the beginning of 2000 and the end of 2005 she published nineteen books. She has written over seven hundred short stories, more than Maupassant, Kipling, and Chekhov combined."

She is said to write from 8 until 1 every day, plus several hours in the evening.

"Rock Springs" by Richard Ford

2009-09-18T09:03:00.000-04:00

Oops. Sorry this is too late to actually help us for class.

"Ysrael" by Junot Diaz

2009-09-09T20:47:00.001-04:00

Remember to read all the stories by a given author. Read them especially well if something in the first story you read strikes you as fresh, impressive, or pleasantly mysterious.

One of your jobs this semester is to form your own "literary family."

"Hunters in the Snow" by Tobias Wolff

2009-09-07T20:58:00.000-04:00

Read it and weep. Wednesday's discussion leaders are Andrew and Scott.

"The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien

2009-09-03T09:54:00.001-04:00

Here, Followers (this cracks me up):

Read all of O'Brien's stories in 3X33. Then, excluding Scott and Kyle, who will lead discussion tomorrow, write 2 paragraphs of comments on "The Things They Carried." Use the story as a way to focus on one or two of the elements of fiction we've just read about Burroway. A refresher:

significant detail (Burroway, pages 26-31)

how authors write about emotion (31-32)

filtering (32-33)

active voice (33-35)

prose rhythm (36-38)

mechanics (38-39)

P.S. To comment, click on the Comments link at the bottom of this post.

P.P.S. Emerson quote of the day: "How can I talk when my body feels like crying?"

Don't Talk to Them and Don't Touch Them

2009-08-31T09:46:00.000-04:00

First day of class is here. My son Emerson has given me some mixed advice on my behavior upon meeting you.

Your job is this: register as a Follower of this blog and attempt to comment. Thus I will know you are with me. You are also welcome to start your own associated Blog and set up a link here.

Almost Ready

2009-08-26T15:41:00.000-04:00

After a picnic complete with a giant blown-up bouncing cage on Seibert Green, my feet are wet here at Susquehanna University. Now to meet you, my students, on Monday. Will you trim your bangs with garden shears? Will you paint windmills on barn walls? Will you trudge into the room, or snake, or march?

Semester Wind-Up

2009-08-16T21:38:00.000-04:00

One week before orientation, it is time to start planning the fiction workshop blog. This is my first Blogger entry. How does this work?