Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin

Staff

With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Make It Scream, Make It Burn by Leslie Jamison and The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

“Elsie was with Gaspard, her live-in renal-failure patient, when her ex-husband called to inform her that his girlfriend, Olivia, had been kidnapped in Port-au-Prince.” Everything Inside (Knopf, August 2019) by Edwidge Danticat. Thirteenth book, third story collection. Agent: Nicole Aragi. Editor: Robin Desser. Publicist: Gabrielle Brooks.

“I can’t say which ghost / not because I am being coy / and not because the ghost / is being coy.” Cyborg Detective (BOA Editions, September 2019) by Jillian Weise. Third book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Peter Conners. Publicist: Ron Martin-Dent.

“But that afternoon there was an orchestra playing.” Red at the Bone (Riverhead Books, September 2019) by Jacqueline Woodson. Twenty-second book, novel. Agent: Kathleen Nishimoto. Editor: Sarah McGrath. Publicists: Jynne Dilling Martin and Claire McGinnis.

“December 7, 1992. Whidbey Island, Puget Sound. The World Wars were over.” Make It Scream, Make It Burn (Little, Brown, September 2019) by Leslie Jamison. Fourth book, second essay collection. Agent: Jin Auh. Editor: Ben George. Publicists: Elizabeth Garriga and Michael Taeckens.  

“I was swimming / with the taste of apple / in my mouth / a shred of appleskin / between my teeth I guess” Dunce (Wave Books, September 2019) by Mary Ruefle. Seventeenth book, fourteenth poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Joshua Beckman. Publicist: Ryo Yamaguchi.

“In order to have a second marriage you can believe in you may have to fail at your first marriage.” The Long Accomplishment: A Memoir of Hope and Struggle in Matrimony (Henry Holt, August 2019) by Rick Moody. Twelfth book, second memoir. Agent: Melanie Jackson. Editor: Barbara Jones. Publicist: Marian Brown. 

“And I could only have seen her there on the stone bridge, a dancer wreathed in ghostly blue, because that was the way they would have taken her back when I was young, back when the Virginia earth was still red as brick and red with life, and though there were other bridges spanning the river Goose, they would have bound her and brought her across this one, because this was the bridge that fed into the turnpike that twisted its way through the green hills and down the valley before bending in one direction, and that direction was south.” The Water Dancer (One World, September 2019) by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Fourth book, first novel. Agent: Gloria Loomis. Editor: Chris Jackson. Publicist: Gregory Kubie.  

“they’ll arrive at the house / in the poem where the man, / who is the father, who is / the husband, who is the body / in the earth— / but we haven’t / gotten there yet” Erou (Four Way Books, September 2019) by Maya Phillips. First book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Ryan Murphy. Publicist: Clarissa Long.

“In the beginning the internet seemed good.” Trick Mirror (Random House, August 2019) by Jia Tolentino. First book, essay collection. Agent: Amy Williams. Editor: Ben Greenberg. Publicist: Dhara Parikh.

“From the first evening in spring to the last vigils of autumn, he sits on the little worm-eaten hobnailed bench, his body hunched, beneath the window whose jambs frame the night and the stone wall in a small theatre of shadows.” Animalia (Grove Press, September 2019) by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, translated from the French by Frank Wynne. Fourth book, novel. Agent: Anne-Solange Noble. Editor: Peter Blackstock. Publicist: Kait Astrella.  

“Birds don’t lie / they are never lost / above the earth / they never think / I stole this form / or blue is the best” Father’s Day (Copper Canyon Press, September 2019) by Matthew Zapruder. Sixth book, fifth poetry collection. Agent: Bill Clegg. Editor: Michael Wiegers. Publicist: Laura Buccieri.

“God is from Cross River, everyone knows that.” The World Doesn’t Require You (Liveright, August 2019) by Rion Amilcar Scott. Second book, story collection. Agent: Monika Woods. Editor: Gina Iaquinta. Publicist: Cordelia Calvert.

September/October 2019
In Print and Online

/ Aug 13, 2019 / Comments Off on Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin

Reviewers & Critics: Daniel Mendelsohn of the New York Review of Books

Michael Taeckens

One of the most prominent and liveliest contemporary critics in the United States, Daniel Mendelsohn began contributing reviews, op-eds, and essays to a variety of publications, including Out, the New York Times, the Nation, and the Village Voice, while still a graduate student at Princeton University, where he received his doctorate in classics in 1994. Over the years he has written for an array of publications, including the New Yorker; the New York Times Book Review and Harper’s, in both of which he had regular columns; and New York magazine, where he was the weekly book critic. In February Mendelsohn was named editor-at-large of the New York Review of Books (NYRB) and director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. Among his many awards is the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. 

Mendelsohn’s books include the memoir An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (Knopf, 2017), an NPR Best Book of the Year; the internationally best-selling Holocaust family saga The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (Harper, 2006), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award; and The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (Knopf, 1999), a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. He is also the author of three collections of essays—Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, forthcoming in October from New York Review Books; Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays From the Classics to Pop Culture (New York Review Books, 2012); and How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (Harper, 2008)—and his translation, with commentary, of the complete poems of Constantine Cavafy, published by Knopf in 2009, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. He is currently at work on a new translation of the Odyssey for the University of Chicago Press and teaches literature at Bard College.

What was your path to becoming a literary critic?
I’d always dreamed of being a critic—at least since the 1970s when I was a teenager and first started reading the New Yorker seriously. I was enthralled by the critics in that magazine during that era—enthralled by the idea that everything was potentially the object of critical exegesis, from the poems of James Merrill, as reviewed by Helen Vendler, to cabaret performances by Julie Wilson, reviewed by Whitney Balliett. In graduate school, while I was toiling away at my dissertation, I’d relax by writing reviews of books for the weekly literary paper there; when I finished my degree I abandoned the academic track and moved to the city and started writing and reviewing full time for pretty much anyone who would take my pieces—at that time, in the early to mid 1990s, lots of gay magazines that would fold just before they paid you. Within a year or so I had pieces in the Nation and Village Voice, and from there I moved to the New York Times Book Review, then under the sterling leadership of Chip McGrath, which was my first regular platform, and for which I wrote many pieces between 1996 and around 2006. That was what really launched me. In 2000 Bob Silvers asked me to do a piece, and that was the beginning of my close relationship with the New York Review of Books.

Do you think literary criticism can be taught, and do you think it should be taught in MFA programs? 
I don’t think any kind of writing can be “taught.” Either you’re a writer or you’re not, and it doesn’t matter what kind of writing we’re talking about—fiction, criticism, whatever. I do think that people who are gifted can be helped along, their craft refined and improved, by good teachers; so in that sense, sure, let criticism be taught in MFA programs. I myself never studied writing; I just read a lot. You start by imitating the people you like, and soon you develop your own voice. 

What advice do you give to young students who want to become professional critics?
Do your homework. You can’t sit down to review something unless you’ve really immersed yourself in every available resource: You have to read—or watch, or whatever—everything the author or creator has done, you have to do research, you have to have a solid background before you even dream of approaching the work you’re supposed to be reviewing. This is time-consuming, obviously, but it’s the only way to get good results. I suppose I get this from my training as a scholar: I still vividly remember a professor of mine at UVA saying—apropos of a paper I was about to write about the Odyssey, as it happens—“Well, you can’t write anything until you’ve read everything.” That’s my advice. Criticism is serious business, and if you take it seriously, editors will respond.

Is there ever anything from the publishing side that raises your interest in a book or author—a sizeable advance, notable blurbs, your relationship with an editor or publicist? 
No. I’d be very suspicious of a critic who had “relationships” with editors or, God forbid, publicists. What has that got to do with the activity of criticism? The buzz, the hype, the cloud of excitement that eager editors and publicists want to create around a book or play or movie are precisely what the critic should be seeing through, should be resisting. So why would a responsible critic be in bed with those people? 

Ugh. That said, it often happens—certainly it does with some of my pieces—that you’re looking at a new book or movie or whatever as a sign of some kind of larger cultural phenomenon, and in that case it’s legitimate to cite some of the “surround”—the sales, the public reaction, and so forth. I wrote an analysis years ago of Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones, which was such a phenomenon—they couldn’t print the books fast enough—that it seemed important to mention the sales, the overwhelming public appetite for the story that she was telling. But that’s the only time, I think, that a critic should pay attention to that stuff. 

How conscientious are you about diversity—gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.— when choosing which books to review? 
I don’t think critics can or should be ruled by those concerns. You can only write well about what interests you, what resonates for you intellectually and aesthetically, and you should only please yourself. That said, I think publications should be sensitive to issues of diversity and balance—of writers, of subjects. That’s appropriate. But critics have to be free to write about the subjects that really animate them.

Tell us a little bit about your editor-at-large role at the New York Review of Books. Do you choose what to write about?  
My new role at the NYRB doesn’t impinge on my editorial relationship with the magazine at all. Since I started writing for Bob Silvers in 2000, it’s been give-and-take: They’ll think of something that might be right for me, or I’ll have an idea about something that I’d like to do. And that’s how it has worked with the other publications I’ve written for over the years: the New Yorker, the New York Times Books Review, a few others. I very much enjoy when editors suggest things that would never have occurred to me as good subjects—it takes you out of yourself and makes you stretch, which is healthy, whether it’s Bob Silvers insisting that Mel Brooks was a good subject to my editor at Town and Country asking me for a piece about adultery and the novel. Fun!

My role at the Review as editor-at-large has to do with what you might call “outreach.” We have the greatest pool of intellectual, journalistic, and critical talent in the world, and until now that talent has basically had only one outlet: the magazine and website. Given my long relationship with the magazine, and the fact that I’m out in the world quite a lot as an author and lecturer and have a pretty good sense of how these things work, Rea and Patrick Hederman thought that I’d be useful in helping to create new ways of bringing the Review and my fellow contributors to a larger public. So I’m working on creating a few series of public discussions, to start this fall, that will bring our contributors on stage for conversations with people in various fields. One series, in partnership with the David Zwirner Gallery, will be about contemporary art, literature, and how they intersect with issues of power—critics, audiences, collectors, governments. Another, in partnership with NYU, will focus on the idea of what “classics” in literature are: how they get canonized—and uncanonized—how authors and works go in and out of fashion. We’re also talking to Monticello and the Frick about collaborations, and we’re dreaming up new ways to reach out to colleges, community colleges, and universities. And we’re starting a podcast! So it’s a busy and exciting time in which we’ll build on the Review’s strengths to get out into the world more in a very strong way.

In your forthcoming book, Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, you state that “any call to eliminate negative reviewing is to infringe catastrophically on the larger project of criticism.” How do you think negative reviews contribute overall to the cultural dialogue?
A culture that only cheerleads and celebrates is a vapid culture—a culture of marketing, not thinking. With respect to literature, such marketing is, as I mentioned earlier, properly the province of publishers and publicists—and that’s fine. All writers benefit from publishers’ marketing and advertising: I have myself. No shame in that. But precisely because the culture as a whole is so overwhelmingly commercial, it’s vital that professional, public, literary, and cultural criticism remain independent. Negative criticism is, in part, what fights against the commercial, or the merely stupid, or vulgar; it is a form of resistance, a reminder that we must think for ourselves and not have our judgments coopted by advertising and the ephemeral. 

Having said that, I would stress urgently that there is a right way to do negative criticism: It has to be reasoned, it cannot be ad hominem, and so forth. Indeed, I’d say that now, with the explosion of vituperative discourse that is the hallmark of much Internet culture, doing proper, measured negative criticism importantly models how not to like something. In an era in which so many exchanges—literary ones, too—devolve into snark and name-calling, we need good negative criticism perhaps more than ever.

In an interview with Laura Miller you stated, “I would say you get more out of reading reviews you disagree with because it forces you to sharpen your own thoughts.” Can you expound upon this?
This is precisely what I mean by the importance of negative criticism—not just negative in the sense of “disapproving,” but negative in the sense of “opposite,” “resistant to what most people think.” I think when I was talking to Laura we were speaking of reviews of one’s own books, and I certainly continue to think that reading a review that is original, that resists the common take, can provoke an author to real insight into his or her own book. When you write, you’re in your own head: It’s all you. I can’t imagine any serious writers really think about pleasing their readers: You write to please yourself, to scratch an itch, to answer a question that burns for you. So a negative or resistant review acts in much the way that a good editor will act: It forces you to see another way of looking at your material, and that’s very salutary, I think.

Have you ever changed your mind about a book that you praised or panned years earlier? Has a work of criticism ever changed your opinion of a writer’s work?
I don’t think I’ve changed my mind in the sense of “Gosh, I was totally wrong about that.” But I’ve been writing as a critic for thirty years now, and as you get older your general aesthetic can shift; things you used to love don’t excite you anymore, or things that once left you cold start to make sense to you. I once wrote a Bookends column about this for Pamela Paul at the New York Times: I used the example of Catcher in the Rye, which when I reread it for the first time since I was a teenager I found totally unbearable.

As for a review that changed my mind: Not really. But shrewd reviews can make you consider things differently. As many people know, I had very strong objections to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, but when I read an interesting piece in the New Yorker by Elif Batuman about how the novel had captivated her, I could suddenly see how an intelligent person might get caught up in the book. I still loathe the novel, but because of Elif’s essay I suppose I’m much more tolerant now of people who liked it than I was two years ago.

You’ve published multiple books of your own. How did it feel to be operating from the other side, having your own literary work assessed by fellow critics? Has that experience instilled any sense of empathy with authors whose works you choose to review—or does identifying with the subjects of your critical work lead to a slippery slope?
I like to joke that my training as a classics scholar did me a great service, since I always write about works as if their authors have been dead for two thousand years—their feelings, their hopes and dreams, their biographies and secrets, simply aren’t an issue. All kidding aside, I don’t really think about authors and their feelings when I write reviews, and I’d hope that people reviewing my books aren’t worried about my feelings in evaluating my work. Indeed, I must say the question of empathy seems to me to be grossly misplaced. Obviously, one would never want to write—or be the recipient of—anything that was cruelly personal, and even the harshest criticism of a work should be grounded in the text, demonstrable, and measured—the criticism should serve the argument. The author of the work under review should, therefore, never feel that it’s personal, even if it’s very hard. What I do feel for is literature—or film, or theater, or dance, or art. That’s what I’m passionate about, and my passion for a genre is what guides my evaluation of people’s works in that genre. I feel protective of writing, not writers.

For that reason, I always feel that even if a review of a book of mine is harsh, if it’s motivated by a genuine critical impulse, it is legitimate and has to be accepted. Nobody likes getting bad reviews, but it’s part of life as a creative person: Not everyone is going to like your stuff. And since you can always tell when a review is personal, those are pretty easy to discount. The only thing a writer wants is an intelligent review, not a “good” review.

Has social media been helpful at all in your role as a critic?
No. I’ve certainly had interesting and sometimes feisty conversations with people on social media and have even befriended a number of people there; and it’s often fascinating to see how “ordinary,” in the technical sense, readers and audiences are reacting to something in the culture. But the fact is that, in the end, you can only listen to yourself. Social media for me is an often fun distraction from real work, and that’s pretty much it.

Who do you think are some of our finest literary critics working today?
Critics, not just literary, whom I trust these days include Madeleine Schwartz, Christian Lorentzen, and Vinson Cunningham. 

What books that you aren’t reviewing are you most looking forward to reading in the near future?
What with everything else I have going on—my own writing, the NYRB, the Robert Silvers Foundation, and Bard—I have relatively little time for “pleasure” reading: The summer is when I try to catch up. Right now I’m dying to get to Brenda Wineapple’s book about Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, The Overstory by Richard Powers, and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls—although I do wish her editor had forced her to think of a title a bit less Hannibal Lector-ish. I think her Regeneration Trilogy is one of the great works of the twentieth century; how could I not want to read her take on the Iliad? 

 

Michael Taeckens has worked in the publishing business since 1995. He is a cofounder of Broadside: Expert Literary PR (broadsidepr.com).

 

September/October 2019

Reviewers & Critics: The Complete Series

by

Michael Taeckens

8.14.19

In Print and Online

Launched in late 2014, Reviewers & Critics is a regular series of interviews with the professional writers, readers, and thinkers whose job is to start conversations about contemporary literature. Whether they do this work in newspapers or magazines, on blogs or Twitter—and whether you agree with their opinions or not—good book reviewers and critics provide a cultural service that is arguably more important than ever. As more brick-and-mortar bookstores close and the landscape of book publishing shifts and adjusts—to say nothing of the shrinking real estate for traditional reviews—reviewers and critics continue to write and talk about books using whatever medium is available. This series is an attempt to see more clearly the people behind the bylines and Twitter handles and to better understand the role they play in literary culture.

Daniel Mendelsohn of the New York Review of Books
8.14.19
One of the most prominent and liveliest critics in the United States discusses whether or not literary criticism can be taught, the value of negative criticism, and more.

Maureen Corrigan of NPR’s Fresh Air
2.13.19
In this continuing series, a book critic discusses the unique challenges of reviewing for radio and how she picks the books that make it on the air.

Laurie Hertzel of the Star Tribune
10.10.18
In this continuing series, a book critic discusses Minnesota’s thriving literary community and the importance of reviewing small-press titles.

Sam Sacks of the Wall Street Journal
8.15.18
In this continuing series, a book reviewer discusses the art of literary criticism—from the value of negative reviews to critics he admires.

Laila Lalami of the Nation
4.11.18
An author and book reviewer discusses both sides of the writer-critic divide.

Leigh Haber of O, the Oprah Magazine
12.13.17
The books editor at O, the Oprah Magazine discusses how she got her start in the literary world, the selection criteria behind Oprah’s Book Club picks, and her favorite books of the year.

Kevin Nguyen of GQ
8.16.17
The digital deputy editor of GQ discusses his Best Books of the Month feature and the state of diversity in publishing. 

Parul Sehgal of the New York Times Book Review
4.12.17
Parul Sehgal discusses her path to literary criticism, her passion for international literature, and today’s finest reviewers.

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Miller

Laura Miller of Slate
2.15.17
Laura Miller discusses how she chooses books, the effect of the Internet on literary criticism, and her belief that reading is as profoundly creative as writing.

Steph Burt
8.17.16
Steph Burt, acclaimed critic, poet, and Harvard professor, talks about their path to becoming a poetry critic, working as both a poet and a critic, and how the internet has greatly expanded the conversations surrounding poetry and poetics.

Carolyn Kellogg of the Los Angeles Times
6.14.16
Los Angeles Times book editor Carolyn Kellogg talks MFAs, publishing optimism, and how she’s revolutionizing her new position in the shifting landscape of book reviews.

Pamela Paul of the New York Times Book Review
4.13.16
New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul shares her insights on the ethical and practical challenges of being the head of the last of the stand-alone newspaper book review sections. 

Michael Schaub
12.15.15
The latest installment of Reviewers & Critics features Michael Schaub, an incisive—and hilarious—literary critic and former Bookslut contributor.

Isaac Fitzgerald of BuzzFeed Books
by Michael Taeckens
8.19.15
Isaac Fitzgerald, editor of BuzzFeed Books, talks about the growth of the site’s book review section, what a typical day in the BuzzFeed office looks like, and how the Internet has changed the discourse around books.

Jennifer Day of the Chicago Tribune
6.17.15
Jennifer Day, the editor of the Chicago Tribune’s Sunday books section, Printer’s Row Journal, discusses her commitment to assembling the best literary criticism on both the local and national level.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post
4.15.15
Ron Charles of the Washington Post and the Totally Hip Video Book Review series gives his insights on the ethical and practical challenges of being a book critic for a major newspaper.

Roxane Gay
2.10.15
The second installment of Reviewers & Critics features longtime book critic and culture essayist Roxane Gay, a true powerhouse in literary circles.

Dwight Garner of the New York Times
12.15.14
In the inaugural installment of our new feature, Reviewers & Critics, New York Times book reviewer Dwight Garner talks about his experience as a critic—the required credentials (or lack thereof), how to cut through the hype, the role of negative reviews, and more.

Reviewers & Critics: Sam Sacks of the Wall Street Journal

by

Michael Taeckens

September/October 2018
8.15.18

In Print and Online

Sam Sacks grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, studied literature at Tufts University, and received his MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona in Tucson. In 2005 he moved to New York City and worked for years at various bookstores, including the Strand and Housing Works Bookstore, where he still can be found every Saturday volunteering. In 2007 he cofounded the online literary journal Open Letters Monthly, which he edited for ten years, and today he is an editor at its sister site, Open Letters Review. He started writing the Fiction Chronicle column for the Wall Street Journal when the paper inaugurated the weekend Books section in September 2010. His criticism has appeared in Harper’s, the London Review of Books, the New Republic, Commentary, the Weekly Standard, Prospect, Music and Literature, and the New Yorker’s Page-Turner.

What path led to you becoming a literary critic?
I’m the product of the vanishing, much-lamented free city weekly. After college, on the encouragement of a friend, I wrote a book review that was published in Pittsburgh’s secondary alternative newspaper Pittsburgh Pulp. As I moved around in the years that followed, I kept writing reviews for beer money at places like Flagpole magazine in Athens, Georgia, the Tucson Weekly, the Las Vegas Weekly, and the New York Press. Around the time that this kind of outlet started drying up for me I cofounded, with Steve Donoghue and John Cotter, an online literary journal, Open Letters Monthly. This wasn’t quite the earliest Wild West days of online book blogging and reviewing, but it was early enough that it was still possible to throw together a site without any money and get it taken seriously on the strength of the writing alone. It’s here that I started writing much longer criticism, with the added motivation of wanting to make the site a success. After a few years I had built up a pretty extensive body of work and started to get paying gigs, and through some ridiculous good fortune, the gigs turned into viable full-time employment.

You review fiction exclusively. Is this by choice?
Fiction is what I love most and understand best, but the exclusivity is more a reflection of my role at the Wall Street Journal, which is to write a column reviewing the week’s new and noteworthy literary fiction. If I had unlimited time—and some allowance to learn on the job—I would happily review criticism, literary biography, travel writing, nature writing, essays, poetry, and who knows what else.

You’ve reviewed quite a lot of fiction in translation and novels and short stories published by small presses. Is this the kind of work you personally prefer?
I sometimes wish I could wave a magic wand and erase these kinds of distinctions from readers’ minds, my own included. I know that categories are necessary for marketing purposes and that readers can find them useful, but it dismays me that translated and small-press fiction gets balkanized into highbrow genres aimed at narrowly selected audiences. If I review more of these books than some critics, it’s only because I do my best to treat them as though they’re no different from more mainstream books. Which they’re not, in the important ways. Good books are good books and are for everyone.

How many review copies do you receive per week, and of those how many are you able to review?
I’m not quite sure because they’re all sent to the Wall Street Journal. There the editors set apart the fiction for me, and I go in once a week to sort through the new arrivals and organize them by month of publication. The publication calendar I made for July, which is a somewhat light month, had fifty-three titles. Then I fill a tote bag with books I’ll want to read or read into—I generally bring home ten to fifteen books every week. On average I’ll end up reviewing three of them.

How many books do you read each week for work?
Same amount—usually three books a week.

Is there anything from the publishing side that raises your interest in a particular book or author—the size of the advance, notable blurbs, your relationship with an editor or publicist?
I do my best not to think about extra-literary things like that because they tend to make me irritable, which is not a good frame of mind to have going into a book. Blurbs particularly annoy me because of the way they parody actual reviews, though I realize I should lighten up. Naturally I pay attention when publishers really get behind a book. But personal recommendations are the most helpful. Publicists and editors are first and foremost book lovers, and it’s hard not to want to share in their excitement when they get genuinely enthused about something they’re bringing out. This also makes the din of prepublication acclaim more manageable, because an honest publicist can play the “genuinely enthused” card only so many times.

Have you ever changed your mind about a book that you praised or panned years earlier?
Not that I can think of. But this is really just because I rarely have time to reread contemporary novels I’ve already reviewed.

Has a work of criticism ever changed your opinion of a writer’s work?
Yes and no. Nothing can take the place of a direct encounter with a book. But if criticism doesn’t lead me to change my own judgment, it wonderfully broadens my understanding and appreciation of what a writer is doing. Take Philip Roth, a writer about whom everyone has an opinion. I have never enjoyed his books, and when I read them I have great difficulty seeing past what I think are massive limitations: the self-pity, the blaming, the absence of doubt or introspection. But because of the wonderful criticism I have read of him—by Wyatt Mason, D. G. Myers, Claire Messud, Laura Tanenbaum, and countless others who aren’t immediately coming to mind—I have a deepened respect for his importance to the canon: for the liberating power of his anger, for his willingness to change his style, for the uncompromising nature of his view of life, and so on. This is, incidentally, why literature is so enriching—we experience it subjectively and objectively all at once. Every book is both personal and communal, so the possibilities of interpretation are endless.

What is your opinion about the value of negative reviews?
Negative reviews are healthy, stimulating, completely necessary. In my view there are fairly stringent moral prohibitions against judging people in life, but art is where one can love and hate at passionate extremes. When I have regrets about my own reviewing, it’s usually when I’ve shied away from negativity into some featureless middle ground. I should say that the best negative reviews are not simply hatchet jobs but pieces that use a book’s weaknesses or transgressions to illustrate a larger idea.

If you could change one thing about the book-reviewing process or the world of literary criticism, what would it be?
I wish reviewing paid more. This isn’t a passive-aggressive complaint about my own lot, by the way. As mentioned I’m exceptionally fortunate to make a living as a critic. Most people can’t. God bless the exceptions, but most outlets don’t pay enough to justify the work and time that goes into a long, involved work of criticism, meaning that countless important pieces have gone unwritten for lack of fitting compensation.

Social media—is it helpful or a hindrance?
I’m only on Twitter, and I use it only to procrastinate, unfortunately. I admire people who make it work for them.

Which book critics, past or present, do you particularly admire?
It’s more fun to stick to the present. The most important thing for a critic is to have a regular berth somewhere, and, notwithstanding my earlier lament about money, there are more really good placements than is widely recognized. I make a point to read everything by Lidija Haas at Harper’s, Christian Lorentzen at New York, Andrew Ferguson at the Weekly Standard, Sarah Nicole Prickett at Bookforum, Barton Swaim on political books for the Wall Street Journal, the two recent hires, Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai, at the New York Times, Katherine A. Powers at the Barnes and Noble Review, and, maybe my favorite, Colm Tóibín at the London Review of Books.

What books that you aren’t reviewing are you most looking forward to reading in the near future?
I let the serendipity of used bookstore browsing decide most of my non-work reading, so I’m not sure. But I do have two books on my phone that I’m slowly reading during the interstices of the day: The Mixer by Michael Cox, a history of soccer tactics in the English Premier League, and The Novel: A Biography by Michael Schmidt. I’m up to the chapter on Fanny Burney. It’s delightful.

 

Michael Taeckens has worked in the publishing business since 1995. He is a cofounder of Broadside: Expert Literary PR (broadsidepr.com).

Sam Sacks

Reviewers & Critics: Laila Lalami of the Nation

by

Michael Taeckens

May/June 2018
4.11.18

In Print and Online

Laila Lalami is well known for her extraordinary fiction; she is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (Algonquin Books, 2005), Secret Son (Algonquin Books, 2009), and The Moor’s Account (Pantheon, 2014), the most recent of which appeared on the longlist for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and was named a finalist for that year’s Pulitzer Prize. But she is equally well known for her sagacious literary criticism and writings on politics and culture. Over the past thirteen years she has written book reviews for a wide array of outlets, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe. Lalami reviewed fiction and nonfiction for the Nation from 2005 to 2016, at which point she started writing the Between the Lines column for the magazine. Since 2016 she’s also been a critic-at-large—along with nine other writers, including Alexander Chee, Marlon James, and Viet Thanh Nguyen—for the Los Angeles Times, where she writes mostly about the literary life. Lalami, who was born in Rabat, Morocco, and educated there as well as in Great Britain and the United States, is likewise highly regarded because of her popular literary blog, Moorish Girl, which she launched in 2001 and, after the publication of Secret Son, folded into her website, lailalalami.com. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of California in Riverside. You can follow her on Twitter, @LailaLalami.

You got your start writing for the Oregonian in 2005, reviewing books by Reza Aslan, Luis Alberto Urrea, Salman Rushdie, and Zadie Smith. What path led you to literary criticism, and how did that relationship with the Oregonian begin?
At the time I had just moved to Portland from Los Angeles and was working on my first collection of short stories. It was a lonely time in my life—I knew perhaps two or three people in the entire city—so the book section of the Oregonian became a kind of conversation I missed having about books. I also had a literary blog where I wrote about stories or novels I was reading, and that helped me broaden my reading interests. I think I was drawn to criticism because it gave me an opportunity to articulate what I thought about a piece of writing—what it tried to do, whether it succeeded, and, if so, how it succeeded. But the only way to find out if I could do it was to give it a try. So I wrote to Jeff Baker, who was the book review editor for the Oregonian, and asked if he might be interested in having me write about a book I’d just finished. It was slated to be published the following month, so it was already assigned, but he looked up some of my writing on the blog and asked me if I was interested in Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter. Before that review came out we were already talking about doing a piece on Reza Aslan’s No god but God. Some weeks later Adam Shatz, who at that time was the literary editor of the Nation, asked me if I would be interested in reviewing for the magazine. This gave me the opportunity to write longer pieces on the work of Tahar Ben Jelloun, J. M. Coetzee, Joan Scott, and Percival Everett, among many others.

You’ve also published many essays and opinion pieces over the years—including multiple pieces for the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, and the Los Angeles Times. How does your literary criticism inform your political and cultural analysis, and vice versa?
When I write literary criticism, I try to be open to the premise of the work, to discover what the intention was, and whether that intention was fulfilled in the text. I examine the choices that have been made, in terms of characterization or point of view or tone, and whether these choices were effective. I think of it as a journey of exploration into another writer’s mind. But the essays I’ve been writing for the New York Times Magazine involve turning the appraising gaze inward. Often I use my own experiences to explain or inform how I view a particular subject, whether it be the building of a wall along the border with Mexico or the Trump administration’s executive order on immigration. I’m also now a columnist for the Nation, and that of course means building an argument while also advocating for a particular position or a given policy. But what all these forms of writing have in common, for me, is the imperative to place the subject within a very clear context for the reader and to be intellectually honest about it.

What sorts of things influence you when deciding whether or not to review a book?
Three things: time, contribution, ethics. I have to balance my writing and my teaching with all of my other commitments, so typically the first question for me is whether I have the time to read and think about the book thoroughly. The second question I ask myself is whether I have anything useful to contribute to the conversation about it. Would I be a good reader for this particular book? And the third question is: Can I be fair about it? I don’t do reviews if there’s an ethical conflict with the author, if we’re friends or colleagues.

You review both fiction and nonfiction. Do you have a preference for one over the other?
No. I really enjoy doing both because they’re so different and make me grow as a reader and as a person. When I review nonfiction I tend to do a lot of background research, which takes up a lot of time. With fiction I don’t need to do much research for the review, but I usually end up reading related things, like other books by the same writer.

Do you have a favorite book review you’ve written?
That is a tough question! I enjoyed writing about Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton for the Nation. The review I heard the most about from readers—and still do, ten years later!—was a piece I did on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji’s books, also for the Nation.

When you’re reviewing a new book from an author with previous books to his or her name, do you read the author’s backlist as well?
Oh yes. This is what I meant earlier when I said that I try to place the book in a clear context. I take note of the book’s literary antecedents, by which I mean works that might have informed it or influenced it. I also read the author’s previous books, to see how they might relate to the one under consideration.

You’ve reviewed graphic memoirs by Alison Bechdel, Marjane Satrapi, and Riad Sattouf. Can you reflect on the differences between reviewing this increasingly popular literary genre—work that is just as much visual as textual—and work that is entirely textual?
Comic books and graphic novels were a huge part of my life when I was growing up, so I’ve always had a soft spot for them. My husband has a significant comic book collection, so they’re always around the house. Still, I fear I am more limited in this genre because I don’t have visual arts training, and I try not to take on an assignment unless I’m really drawn to the subject matter.

Having published three works of fiction, you must know well the hopes and anxieties authors have about book reviews. How does it feel to be operating from the other side, as a critic?
It’s not easy. But I also know that the act of reading is by its nature biased: Each reader brings his or her own literary background and personal experiences to the act of interpretation. When I work on a review I try to keep in mind that my first responsibility is to readers: It’s my job to tell them about the book, what it has to say about the world, and how well I think it does this.

The literary industry and the literary media landscape have changed considerably since you began publishing. The detrimental effects are well chronicled; are there any changes you’ve noticed that you find positive?
It seems to me the entire landscape changes every five years. But I think one positive development is that the barriers for entry are a lot smaller now than they used to be. The literary conversation takes place mostly online, but anyone can set up social media accounts and instantly connect to other readers, writers, and critics. It’s never been easier to research agents or literary magazines or story contests than at the present moment. Unfortunately this hasn’t had much of an impact yet on the well-documented inequities in the publishing business. We need change there, too.

If you could change one thing about the book-reviewing process or the world of book criticism, what would it be?
I would love to see more effort and rigor in criticism of books by writers of color. There is a tendency, among certain critics, to treat writing by white writers as literature and writing by writers of color as ethnology. A lot of space is devoted to the scrupulous tallying of cultural detail and relatively little to literary choices made by the writer. I also wish that American critics would try to read a bit more world literature and literature in translation.

You’re active and quite popular on social media. How useful do you find it as a critic and as a writer?
As a writer I’ve found it to be a disturbingly effective procrastination tool. Never is the temptation to tweet stronger for me than when I’m on my second cup of coffee and it’s time to start working on my manuscript. A few years ago I bought software that blocks the Internet for up to eight hours, and I really don’t know what I would do without it. As a critic, though, I think social media can be quite dangerous. A place with so many opinions makes it hard to maintain independent thinking.

Which book critics, past or present, do you particularly admire?
So many. I came across the work of Edward Said and Chinua Achebe when I was in graduate school, and their criticism was at once a revelation and an inspiration for me. I’ve also learned a lot from Ngugı wa Thiong’o and James Baldwin. I still return to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark because she’s so incredibly perceptive. Among the younger critics, I often read Parul Sehgal, Michael Gorra, and Pankaj Mishra.

What books that you aren’t reviewing are you most looking forward to reading in the near future?
I’m really excited about Zadie Smith’s new collection of essays, Feel Free. I really loved her previous book of essays. In fiction I’m looking forward to Denis Johnson’s The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage, and Lauren Groff’s Florida.

 

Michael Taeckens has worked in the publishing business since 1995. He is a cofounder of Broadside: Expert Literary PR (broadsidepr.com).

Reviewers & Critics: Leigh Haber of O, the Oprah Magazine

by

Michael Taeckens

January/February 2018
12.13.17

In Print and Online

Leigh Haber is the books editor at O, the Oprah Magazine, a position she has held for more than five years. She graduated from George Washington University with a degree in international affairs, and after getting a job as a copy aide at the Washington Post Book World, she worked for many years in book publishing, first in publicity and later as an editor—at Jeremy Tarcher, Ballantine Books, Avon, Bantam Books, Berkley Books, Harcourt Brace, Scribner, Hyperion, and Rodale—before turning to work as a freelance editor and start-up consultant. At O, the Oprah Magazine, Haber is responsible for putting together the Reading Room section of the magazine, and is always on the lookout for books to feature or excerpt elsewhere in the magazine. She also works with Oprah Winfrey and the rest of the staff to identify new candidates for Oprah’s Book Club. She can be followed on Twitter, @leighhaber.

You got your start in the literary world as a copy aide at the Washington Post Book World in the late 1970s. What was it like working there? Did it make you want to forge a path within the publishing world?
I arrived there not realizing there was an industry behind the books I loved reading—I’d never thought about it before. It was soon after Watergate, so the Post was a glamorous and iconic place, filled with characters. My first boss there was William McPherson, who’d just won the Pulitzer for criticism. He passed away last year, sadly, but that was a universe I am lucky to have glimpsed up close, and, yes, it did lead me to publishing.

You later worked in publicity for several years at Ballantine and Avon, and after that, in editorial for many years at Scribner, Hyperion, and Rodale and as a freelancer. How does your former experience as a publicist and editor inform your role today?
I am so steeped in the book world—it helps me stay on top of what’s coming out when, especially given that we work so far in advance, when there are no indicators of the reception a book will receive. Many of my book publishing colleagues—authors, editors, publishers, agents, publicists, media colleagues—I’ve known them for decades, which helps inform everything I do at O. But I like to try to approach the job itself as a reader, plain and simple. Do I love the book? Will our readers? And are we helping them to discover new talent or writers they’ve never read before, especially women writers? Are we finding books that will challenge or delight them? That’s our mission.

Who are some of the notable authors you worked with—and what are some notable projects you worked on—before you started at O?
When I was a publicity director I flew all over the place with a range of authors I now realize is absolutely astonishing, though at the time, being a mother of two boys, I was just trying to keep it all together.  I worked with Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Umberto Eco, Charles Simic—and also Jimmy Buffett and Helen Hayes, to name a few who really stand out.  I also worked on a tour with Mickey Mantle, which thrilled my dad.  At Avon Books they were publishing lots of writers who were just gaining a literary reputation, including James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, and John Edgar Wideman. But there I also worked with Rosemary Rogers.  Those were incredibly fun days.

As an editor, I’m probably proudest of having acquired and edited Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. But there are so many other writers I am honored to have worked with: Steve Martin, Jacqueline Novogratz, Jonathan Ames, Richard Hell, Tess Gallagher, Lou Reed, Glen David Gold, the Kitchen Sisters, Terry Gross, Bill Maher, the authors of The Intellectual Devotional, Scott Simon, Aasif Mandvi, Peter Jennings…

The literary coverage at O is quite expansive and varied. You oversee book reviews, book lists, excerpts, and original essays—anything else? How has your job evolved over the five years you’ve been there?
When I walked into this job more than five years ago, I’d never been a magazine editor. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, but my editors did. From them I’ve learned an entirely new skill. And I’m still learning. On the first day of my job I was told I needed to send some books to Oprah for book club consideration. I was frankly terrified. But then I read Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis and I just felt it was a book Oprah would embrace. We’ve had six picks since then, and it’s always a thrill to know we are helping the authors to grow their audiences. Oprah’s passion for books is at the core of my job and always at the top of my mind. I consider it a privilege to assist her in bringing an entirely new dimension to a writer’s career. As far as Reading Room is concerned, I love that the support is there to be feminist, to be globalist, to be diverse, to cover poetry and literary fiction and emerging writers along with the established. And, yes, now I’m also helping to find essayists and contributors to the themed packages we do. How has it evolved? I will always recall this position as one that has to be occupied with a weird combination of humility and a kind of hubris. As to the hubris, I have to choose a few books to cover from the many worthy candidates, which means I have to trust my taste. Humility because I am always aware how lucky I am to be working on this platform, as a part of the incredible legacy Oprah has earned.

Walk me through what a typical week in the office is like for you.
We receive hundreds of books per week—probably two hundred a day. Sometimes it feels as if every day is Christmas, and other days I feel as if I’m drowning in books. And some of the books we receive make me wonder—is there really an audience for a topic this narrow and obscure? But every day I’m combing through the mail, opening packages, and trying to get a sense of the landscape. Most of the time my eyes are bigger than my stomach, and I bring home a bag bursting with books—I still read from the physical galleys. I have a beanbag chair in my office, and there are days when I am sitting in it, looking from my window overlooking Central Park from the 36th floor of the Hearst Building and thinking, “They’re paying me to read?”

I love envisioning the section every month with my editors and my partner in the art department, Jill Armus. There’s a lot of back-and-forth in terms of finding contributing writers, editing, revising, fitting, fact-checking, and so on. My favorite moment is when I see the section come together on page. The hardest times are when I’m working on the mammoth July Summer Reading package—eighteen pages instead of four. It’s tough trying to do something different and to get it right, but it’s exciting, too.

But it’s not all about books. We have a lot of conversations about a wide range of topics. Gayle King’s assistant is obsessed with Beyoncé. I’ve had to learn about her. You pretty much can’t survive in the O office without being a passionate pet lover, whether dogs or cats. You have to be willing to discuss your sex life, your therapist, how long you wear your favorite bra before washing it. It’s all fair game.

How many books do you typically receive per week—and of those, how many are you able to write about each month? 
I would estimate we receive five hundred to seven hundred books a week. Of those, we can typically cover about fifteen a month. 

Other than your interest in a particular author, what sorts of things, if any, influence you when choosing which titles to include—blurbs, prepub reviews, large advances, social media buzz? What about your relationships with publicists and editors—do those ever hold any sway?
I don’t view blurbs as helpful. They seem very quid pro quo to me. Raves in prepubs do sometimes alert me to books I need to take seriously. Advances don’t matter to me, and while I very much value my relationships with publicists, editors, and authors, it’s all about the read.

How conscientious are you about diversity—gender, race, sexual orientation, etcetera—when choosing what to include? And do you try to pay attention to books published outside of the Big Five publishers?
When I first started at O, I made a conscious effort to make the section and its contributors “diverse.” But I have to say that now happens organically. And all things being equal, if there’s a choice between a great book by a man and a great book by a woman, the woman wins.

O has been particularly inclusive of poetry over the years. Is poetry a special love of yours? Has it ever been difficult persuading editors to allow space for it?
I am not a poetry maven. I admire it, and I love reading it at times, but I don’t consider myself an expert by any means. I think it enriches our culture, and the section, so I go to others who know more about it than I do to teach me. My favorite was getting Bill Murray, who is a huge poetry fan, to tell us about five poems he loves—in person, at the Carlyle Hotel.

How many freelancers do you work with? Are there certain things you look for in a reviewer?
It’s just myself and an assistant on staff, so we do lean on freelancers. And while I have three or so regulars, I also like to have fun pairing a book with a reviewer. My favorite match-up was asking Mary Roach to review Ian McEwan’s novel in which the narrator was an unborn fetus. And I like to intermix big names with young new voices.

Is social media at all helpful to you in your role as a book editor?
I should use it more than I do in terms of promoting the Reading Room section, and I do try and follow what others are doing. Because Oprah.com is a separate entity, and O doesn’t have an online version, it’s hard to fully spread the word about how robust the section is.

What is the status of Oprah’s Book Club, and how does Oprah go about choosing which books to pick?
The book club is alive and well when we find the right book. The way it goes is that when I read for the section, I am always also thinking about what Oprah might like, either for the book club, or for some other purpose—film, movie, or just for pleasure. I send her books, and if something profoundly resonates, she will likely call me to tell me so. Then we talk about whether it could be a selection. We’d love for there to be picks on a more frequent basis, but that’s hard because the book has to be right and the timing for Oprah has to be right too. And of course, others are always sending books to Oprah—she’s not just hearing from me.

How have you seen the publishing world and the media landscape change over the past five years?
It seems indies and physical books are back. That’s cause for celebration. But print newspapers and magazines are, of course, facing challenging times, which means we have to keep innovating.

A frequent complaint in literary circles is that negative reviews take up space that could otherwise be used reviewing better books. Where do you stand on the value of publishing negative reviews?
I was told when I came to the magazine that we should pick books we think are worthy of coverage and share them with our readers. If we don’t like or love a book, we just won’t cover it. There are just too many good books to celebrate to devote space to the ones we don’t like.

Of those publications that still devote space to literary criticism, which are your favorites? Are there any book critics whose work you particularly enjoy? 
I’m really going to miss Michiko Kakutani and Jennifer Senior. We also lost Bob Minzesheimer to brain cancer last year. And as everyone knows, the day of the standalone newspaper book review section, except for the New York Times Book Review, is gone. But I’m looking forward to seeing what emerges, because I do think books are as important and as vital as ever, and there are lots of wonderful voices out there writing about them.

Name three books you’ve read in the past year that really knocked your socks off.
It still amazes me that the right book in the right moment can blow your mind. I just reread Night by Elie Wiesel, as there is a new edition with a foreword by President Obama. All I can say is that it’s as heartbreaking and beautiful now as it was when I first read it years ago. Future Home of the Living God, the latest from Louise Erdrich, absolutely floored me. It felt as urgent as a punch to the gut. The Hate U Give made me hopeful. Angie Thomas channeled her righteous anger into something incredibly brave and new, and she’s giving young people all over the country the sense that, yes, someone feels as I do.

 

Michael Taeckens has worked in the publishing business since 1995. He is a cofounder of Broadside: Expert Literary PR.

Reviewers & Critics: Kevin Nguyen of GQ

by

Michael Taeckens

September/October 2017
8.16.17

In Print and Online

Kevin Nguyen is the digital deputy editor of GQ, where he writes about books, music, and popular media. He grew up outside of Boston in the 1990s and attended the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. Since moving to New York City five years ago, he has run the Best Books of the Month feature at Amazon and was editorial director at Oyster, “the Netflix for books,” then Google Play Books after the tech giant acquired Oyster in 2015. He can be followed on Twitter, @knguyen.

At GQ you mostly work on reported features, but you also compile a Best Books of the Month feature. How many books do you receive each month, and of those how many are typically included in your roundups?
I went on vacation last week and returned to four mail crates of unopened galleys. So I’m getting something in the vicinity of fifty to seventy-five books a week. And honestly, I wish publishers wouldn’t send me things unsolicited. Most of those books are never going to be touched, and eventually they are shipped off to Housing Works for donation. In a given month I’ll try roughly twenty books. From those I’ll finish about half, maybe slightly more. And then I’ll pick about half of those—so it’s somewhere between four and six books each month. It really depends on how strong that month is.

In an ideal world, I would just request those books and not receive any mail. It feels like such a waste, but once you’re on those distribution lists, there’s no getting off them.

It’s funny. If I died today, the books would keep coming to the office, and I think about the poor person who would get stuck dealing with several thousand pounds of galleys each month. Which is why I plan to never die.

What sorts of things, if any, influence you when choosing which titles to include: blurbs, pre-pub reviews, large advances, social media buzz? What about your relationships with publicists and editors—do those ever hold any sway?
I keep a very long spreadsheet of books that are coming out, based on a combination of catalogs, publicist and editor pitches, Kirkus, previews from places like the Millions, and of course, word of mouth. Twitter can be a good signal, but its taste is fairly narrow.

I do read a lot of stuff blind, too. My equivalent of digging through the slush pile is browsing through everything available as a digital galley on Edelweiss.

Blurbs mean nothing. Same with big advances. Honestly, by the time the galley rolls around I’ve forgotten what I read about it in Publishers Lunch. I’ve been doing this for [checks watch], oh, Jesus, nearly seven years now. But I’ve got a system that works.

How conscientious are you about diversity—gender, race, sexual orientation, and so on—when choosing what to include? And do you try to pay attention to books published outside of the Big Five publishers?
Most people won’t cop to this, but I pay pretty close attention to making sure my list is inclusive. That spreadsheet I was talking about has a column that denotes if an author is a woman or a person of color, so I can make sure that there’s never a month when I am reading only white dudes. It feels weird—I am literally checking boxes—but it’s also a way to keep me honest.

On the upside, usually what I gravitate toward in terms of stories tends to be inherently diverse. You read enough and you see that a lot of books by white authors suffer from a kind of maddening sameness—thankfully you can identify this from the first fifty or so pages, if not sooner. Publishing has made slow strides forward in putting out books by people of color. Big lead titles are more diverse than ever.

And, of course, that spreadsheet also lists publishers. I make sure to read across the Big Five and indies each month. It’s probably the most useful column I have. Penguin Random House controls over 50 percent of trade publishing, and you could easily make the mistake of reviewing exclusively their books.

You’ve also edited some excellent literary features at GQ—Kima Jones’s interview with Colson Whitehead and Alex Shephard’s piece on Jonathan Safran Foer, to name just two examples. What goes into these features? Are you conceiving of them? Do you have much leeway when it comes to assigning literary coverage at GQ?
Both of those stories were my idea. Since we’re not a book-specific outfit, we have to find a story deeper than “this is a new book.” It has to speak to a broader audience, and that restraint had led to better pieces, in my opinion. 

Kima and Alex did a great job with both, even though they were very different. Kima went deep with Colson Whitehead, and we were confident that the strength and reception of The Underground Railroad would justify going to such an intense place with the interview. For the Foer piece, it was a profile because we knew he was in an interesting inflection point in his career. Plus he surrendered some weird quotes about Natalie Portman. Love him or hate him, the guy is worth reading about. 

You’ve written eloquently about the overwhelming whiteness in the U.S. literary culture and publishing industry. What critical steps do you think need to be made to diversify the literary ecosphere? In your recent Millions article you pointed out one bright spot of 2016: the momentous National Book Awards ceremony, so much of which was due to the National Book Foundation’s executive director, Lisa Lucas. Have you seen any other positive changes over the past couple of years?
As I mentioned earlier, publishing is a behemoth that is trudging along slowly in the direction of progress. But it still has a long way to go. Publishers used to excuse themselves by saying that the data showed books by people of color didn’t sell—a disingenuous claim. Well, in the past three years, we’ve seen some tremendously successful fiction by authors of color. So now editors and agents can’t say that anymore. Progress marches forward, and even the most reluctant figures have no choice but to be dragged along. I hope that in the next five or ten years, literary events will become spaces that are less oppressively white. I think we can get there.

You’ve had an interesting career path in the literary industry, with a notable stretch at the editorial side of Amazon, where you ran the Best Books of the Month feature. What was it like behind the scenes there? Did you and your team have full editorial control over which books you picked each month?
Amazon is bizarre, man! But the editorial team was—and still is—great. Real readers, with full editorial freedom. There was never any pressure to include or exclude anything, at least not in my time there. Remember that summer when Amazon was refusing to stock books from Hachette? It was one of the reasons I left the company. But one of the last Best of the Month lists I put together included Edan Lepucki’s California, a Hachette title we couldn’t even sell. Nobody at Amazon gave us a hard time about that, even when Stephen Colbert made that book a symbol against Amazon’s vicious business tactics. I don’t think Amazon is good for the world, but that editorial team is a bright spot in a bleak machine.

After Amazon you worked for two years at Oyster, an e-book streaming service billed as the “Netflix of books,” which was bought and later closed by Google Play. At Oyster you launched the Oyster Review, a remarkable online literary magazine that included reviews, interviews, essays, and book lists and featured an impressive roster of writers and critics. What went into creating and running that magazine?
A lot! Oh, man, but what a fun time. Basically, Oyster attempted to capture the indie bookstore feel and taste and personality in the digital space, as opposed to the big-box retail approach of Amazon. We hoped both could coexist, just like they do in brick-and-mortar.

The Oyster Review was the place where we’d establish our literary identity. Every great indie bookstore has one. And online, what you do instead of shelves and author events is publish reviews and essays and comics. I edited and art-directed the whole thing. And most people didn’t see this because it was in the Oyster app, but there was a whole mobile experience that had to be designed for too. So from conception to construction to day-to-day editing and production, I had a hand in all of it. And I loved doing it.

Obviously, it didn’t totally work out. But Google acquired the company, and one of the big selling points to them outside the engineering was the Oyster Review and all the fine editorial work we’d done. I’m very proud of that. I mean, has a tech company ever acquired a literary magazine before? It might be the first and last time that ever happens.

In addition to reviewing books and writing about literary culture, you’ve written widely about TV, movies, and gaming. Have your interests in fields outside of literature influenced and informed your literary criticism and vice versa?
Oh, definitely. You can tell the reviewers who do only books. There’s a strange stilted myopia there. I think the best writers have broader interests and can talk intelligently about other mediums.

Of those publications that still devote space to literary criticism, which are your favorites? Are there any book critics whose work you particularly enjoy?
Bookforum is probably the most complete publication out there. It has a strong perspective and tone and taste. Plus, the reviews are damn good. I wish they’d do a little more online so more people could see it.

I keep waiting for someone to start the Pitchfork of books, but every new book-related site that launches ends up feeling so flat and overly positive. Oh, and too damn white.

Name three books you’ve read in the past year that really knocked your socks off.
White Tears by Hari Kunzru by a mile. What a tremendous, smart, weird book. I tore through The Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann in a couple of days. And Ottessa Moshfegh’s short stories in Homesick for Another World have stayed with me in strange and surprising ways.

 

Michael Taeckens has worked in publishing since 1995. He is a literary publicist and cofounder of Broadside PR. 

Reviewers & Critics: Dwight Garner of the New York Times

by

Michael Taeckens

January/February 2015
1.15.15

In Print and Online

Dwight Garner is one of the most beloved book critics writing today. His New York Times reviews, whether positive, negative, or mixed, are always entertaining—not an adjective most would use to describe book criticism. Language comes alive in his reviews; one gets the sense that he’s playing with words and having fun along the way.

Raised in West Virginia and Naples, Florida, Garner started writing for alternative weeklies such as the Village Voice and the Boston Phoenix after graduating from Middlebury College. In 1995 he became the founding books editor of Salon, where he worked for three years, followed by a decade as senior editor at the New York Times Book Review. He has been a daily book critic for the New York Times since 2008. The author of an art book, Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements (Ecco, 2009), he is currently working on a biography of James Agee. You can follow him on Twitter, @DwightGarner.

With Goodreads, Amazon, and countless blogs, it seems like everyone’s a book critic these days. What credentials do critics have that make them critics? And what was your own path to becoming a professional book critic?
No credentials are required to write criticism: Either your voice has authority or it doesn’t. Either it has style and wit or it doesn’t. Thank God there’s no grad program, no Columbia School of Criticism. Nearly all the best critics are to some degree autodidacts. Their universities are coffee shops and tables covered with books.

I grew up in a house that didn’t have many books in it, beyond the Bible and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, at any rate, and where culture wasn’t particularly valued. I loved reading critics—book critics, movie critics, rock critics—from the time I was young. They gave me someone to talk to, in my mind, about the things I cared about. I’m the kind of reader who’s always flipped first to the “back of the book” of magazines, or to the arts pages of any newspaper. I worked in a record store during high school and wrote rock reviews for the school newspaper. This makes me sound almost cool; I was not almost cool. I was also the editor of my college paper. But I prefered writing book reviews, which I also did. Writing book criticism seemed to me then, and seems to me now, a chance to talk about everything that matters—the whole world, really.

You can’t trust Amazon reviews; I’m less certain about Goodreads, which I don’t know enough about. I’ve found it to be a terrific resource for certain kinds of information. Good writing is good writing wherever it appears, definitely including blogs. The more voices the merrier.

Facebook and Twitter have been a terrific boost to authors and publishers. Has social media aided your role as a critic?
I forget who it was who said that Facebook is a smart service for simple people while Twitter is a simple service for smart people. Ouch, right? But true enough. Twitter is companionable if you follow the right people, and you can dip into real-time conversations about books. You can see what people are saying; you can glean links to reviews. If people I respect are talking about a book, and it’s not on my radar, I’ll put it on my radar. I’ve reviewed books because I’ve seen interesting people talking about them.

Does buzz—a big advance or an author’s name—influence you?
Buzz matters and it doesn’t matter. Occasionally you might weigh in on a book because you have something to add about something everyone is talking about, perhaps to deflate the hype. Book critics envy movie critics only in that movie critics write weekly about things people are talking about and are likely to see.

Are you able to select which books you review or are they assigned to you? If you have a relationship with a publicist or editor, does it tip the balance?
At the Times we pick our own books. The daily books editor, Rachel Saltz, is a mensch, though, and is great at suggesting things. I review six or seven books a month; my schedule is two reviews one week, one the next. It’s about [equivalent to] the schedule of a major-league pitcher. Two or three of those books I know almost on contact that I want to review, because I’m interested in the author or I’m interested in the topic. After that, it gets headache-making. I sit down once a week or so with a big pile of galleys and poke around in them, looking for signs of life.

Relationships with publicists and editors (I don’t have many of those) don’t matter, either—a book is worthwhile or it isn’t, and the good ones know that. Having said that, a really good editor or publicist will know that very rare occasion to send up the bat signal, to indicate that a genuinely extraordinary book is on the horizon. Alas, even the bat signal, three times out of five, turns out to be hype.

Given the inordinate amount of review copies you must receive daily—just how many do you receive on an average day?—it seems like an e-reader would possibly help lighten the load. But the allure of physical books—even with galleys—is so hard to resist, isn’t it?
I get twenty-five to thirty books a day, and they really pile up on the porch. Last summer an elderly woman heard our three dogs barking—the windows were open, and we were out—and she saw the huge, sloppy pile of mail out front. She knocked on our neighbor’s door and asked, “Do you think the person who lives there is dead?”

I read e-books sometimes, mostly on my phone, but I don’t like to review from them. I write all over my books, I really mark the shit out of them, and I’m not confident that the notes I take on, say, a Kindle, will be recoverable in ten years. They’ll vanish, like the e-mail messages or the photos you meant to save from the laptop you owned three laptops back. So give me the dead-tree edition. I suspect I’ll always feel this way. Oddly, I do prefer to read magazines now on my phone or laptop. I find it easier on the eyes.

Have you ever changed your mind about a book that you praised or panned years earlier?
I deeply regret one or two reviews I’ve written. I was too hard, once, on a writer with a first book out; I still mope about my arrogance. These are the kind of reviews I’ve heard described as, “You know that thing you’ve never heard of? It sucks.” I regret a few raves, too—times when I’ve gotten carried away. I want readers to trust what I have to say on an intergalactic level but also on a bank-card level. Books aren’t cheap. I don’t want thousands of people walking around thinking they’d like to dun me for $26.95.

When you’re reviewing a new book from an author with previous books to his or her name, do you read the author’s backlist as well?
Very nearly always. It matters especially with fiction. I recently read the first three volumes of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle in just a few days. Each is five hundred pages or so. It felt like I was back in college, cramming for an exam. But those are beautiful books, and I feel lucky to have been able to submerge myself in them. It was like having a lovely fever.

Negative reviews: Do they have a purpose and a place? When a review is mostly a summary with nary a positive or negative opinion in sight, is that essentially a kind version of a negative review?
I hate summary reviews, unless the critic is very knowlegable about the topic and is sort of touring it for you. It’s among my goals as a critic to rarely if ever write one. You can’t trust a critic who doesn’t write negative reviews. Most books simply aren’t that good. I try to find things to admire even in books I don’t like, and I try not to be punitive and to have a sense of humor. But what’s a critic for if not to think clearly, make fine discriminations, and speak plainly?

There’s been a lot of talk within book-critic circles about the VIDA Count and calls for more racial and cultural diversity. Do you take this into consideration when deciding what books to review?
I try not to think about it. I try to pluck the books I most want to review, and hope that my interests are not so unlike everyone else’s that the mix will be a genuine mix. But it’s always in the back of the mind. It matters.

If you could change one thing about the book-reviewing process or the world of book criticism, what would it be?
I wish more young novelists wrote criticism, or at least kept a hand in. Some do, but fewer than in generations past. Doing so used to be part of being in the guild. I discovered a lot of novelists through their criticism. Now everyone plays nice, at least in print, and it gets dull.

What books that you aren’t reviewing are you most looking forward to reading in the near future?
The notion of reading for pleasure versus reading for work doesn’t have much meaning for me—it’s always both. But when I’m off duty, I most often find myself poking around in cookbooks. I thought my wife and I owned a lot of them; we have eight hundred or so. Then I met Nathan Myhrvold, who has fifteen thousand! I guess if you’re that wealthy it’s easier to be a collector.

I also like to read poetry and things like old collections of rock writing. Robert Christgau’s record guides from the seventies, eighties, and nineties are devilishly funny, and I find all kinds of things I want to listen to in them. I’ve heard that Christgau is writing a memoir. There’s a book I’m looking forward to. Put me down for that.

Michael Taeckens has worked in the publishing business since 1995, most recently at Graywolf Press and Algonquin Books. His website is michaeltaeckenspr.com. 

Reviewers & Critics: Isaac Fitzgerald of BuzzFeed Books

by

Michael Taeckens

September/October 2015
8.19.15

In Print and Online

In late 2013 Isaac Fitzgerald was selected to lead BuzzFeed’s new Books section, which has seen tremendous growth under his leadership. Doubtless one of the reasons BuzzFeed solicited Fitzgerald was for his excellent work as the managing editor at the Rumpus, where over a period of four years he published essays by many contemporary writers, including former Reviewers & Critics subject Roxane Gay.

These days Fitzgerald is a familiar figure in the New York City literary-events scene, having interviewed and moderated panels with a number of debut and established authors alike. This past spring, for instance, he led a discussion with authors Stephen King and his son Owen, and Peter Straub and his daughter, Emma, at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York. Fitzgerald has written for the Bold Italic, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and is the cofounder of Pen & Ink and coeditor of Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them.

You were recruited to lead BuzzFeed Books a couple of years ago. Around that time you mentioned in an interview with Poynter that you were establishing a positive-only book-review policy, which caused a flurry of reactions from, among others, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Gawker, and NPR. Do you still stand by your decision?
Most definitely. Since I was brought on in December 2013, my goal has been to be the friend who’s always grabbing your shirtsleeve and saying, “Hey, this is what you should read next.”

The books conversation on the Internet is huge—that’s a wonderful thing! In that line you mentioned from my conversation with Poynter, all I was saying was that my little corner of the books Internet was going to be a fun and positive place. Which I’m proud to say is what we’ve accomplished.

I’m always thinking of larger audiences, of course, but in some ways it’s a really personal project. I think about the dirtbag kid I was, growing up poor in rural Massachusetts. If it weren’t for my parents, who love literature, I don’t know how I would have gotten into books. We weren’t supposed to love books—they didn’t seem cool, interesting, or relevant to our lives—and books weren’t supposed to love us. The world of books felt distant, something that was for other people. Not us.

So I got lucky. I got to fall in love with books. But I just as easily could have not, so it’s important to me that I use my tools and resources to make BuzzFeed Books great, not only for writers and critics, but for all the readers who might have been left out before. To use the wide reach and sense of connection enabled by the Internet to foster a love of books.

I wonder if part of the negative response to your “positive-only” intention was led by people thinking you were primarily going to feature reviews of books. But you’re featuring books in a variety of ways other than reviews. Was that your plan from the beginning?
The craziest thing about the whole experience was that it all happened before I had even shown up for my first day at work. There wasn’t really a plan yet. When I first showed up at BuzzFeed, it became abundantly clear that I had heaps to learn from my coworkers. Then, and even more so now, it was a totally staggering Avengers-team of a cohort—all these people with incredible skills in their wide-ranging areas of expertise. Design! Editorial! Tech! Video! There were so many possibilities for BuzzFeed Books, a wild array of options I hadn’t considered or had available to me before.

What it comes down to is that we’ve got myriad ways to talk about and have fun with books at our disposal. We do run reviews every week in our newsletter, written by different members of the BuzzFeed staff, recommending new books, but there are also essays, quizzes, lists, and videos. Every morning when I wake up, my hope is to get a reader who previously didn’t know about a certain book or author connected to something he or she is going to love.

What are the different ways in which you cover books? Have any particular series been especially popular during your tenure?
Our personal essays—usually by writers who have recently had a book come out or have one forthcoming—have a massive readership. Our aforementioned newsletter, which comes out twice a week—and once a week contains a review of a new book—has a subscription base of over 175,000 people. Our recommendation lists are at the core of what we do, whether it’s the best books of the year, the most exciting books of the summer, or just the sixty-five books you need to read in your twenties. These lists reach hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of people.

One of the things I love about working at BuzzFeed is the emphasis on experimentation. I started playing around with Vine and gave #6SecondBookReviews a shot. You might think six-second videos and books wouldn’t make the best bedfellows, but our account now has over 1,600 followers, and some of the Vines have close to 100,000 loops, which isn’t half-bad for short clips of me holding out books, talking like an auctioneer, and (once in a while) running into a wall.

I’m particularly impressed by many of the literary essays you’ve published. Who are some of the authors you’ve showcased, and how often do you run these kinds of first-person pieces?
We’ve published essays from writers such as Roxane Gay, Lev Grossman, Mat Johnson, T. C. Boyle, James Hannaham, Jami Attenberg, Nell Zink, and many others plus excerpts from Chuck Klosterman, Judd Apatow, and more. I try to run at least one essay a week, and they pair nicely with the fantastic essays that Doree Shafrir and Kat Stoeffel are publishing in the BuzzFeed Ideas section.

What is a typical day in the office like for you?
I read for work on the train, until I get into the office. I eat yogurt-covered pretzels. I read pitches and edit essays. I eat yogurt-covered pretzels. I work on posts and help my coworkers with their book-related content. I eat yogurt-covered pretzels. I read on the train ride home and then when I get home, I eat more yogurt-covered pretzels that I brought home from work. While my diet probably isn’t all that desirable, the amount that I get to read certainly is.

BuzzFeed has branched out well beyond “listicles” in recent years, including expansion into serious international journalism. How has BuzzFeed’s expansion changed things for the Books section? Has it expanded your audience?
I’m always stunned by how much BuzzFeed News is accomplishing. The investigative unit, led by Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Schoofs, leaves me in awe, as does our foreign desk, led by Miriam Elder. All boats rise. The bigger the site gets—not just News, but also Video, and the Life section—the more potential Books content has to reach readers.

I’m also very excited about Saeed Jones becoming our new literary editor. Saeed and I were friends before BuzzFeed—he helped me get the job when he was heading up the LGBT section—and working with him has been an incredible experience. The fact that he’s going to start publishing literary fiction on the site starting in spring 2016, not to mention the generous emerging-writers fellowship he’ll be heading up, isn’t just good news for BuzzFeed—it’s good news for the writing world in general. And that really shows that BuzzFeed is invested, not only in the world of books, but also in the literary world as a whole.

How much traffic does BuzzFeed Books get per month?
We don’t share traffic information for specific sections, but I can tell you that BuzzFeed Books has seen significant traffic increase since we launched, and it continues to grow.

How many books do you get a day? How many are you able to cover?
We receive anywhere from thirty to fifty books a day. We have a BuzzFeed Books library that everyone on staff is encouraged to browse. If they find any book interesting, they can cover it, whether it’s in the form of a recommendation, as part of a roundup or list of books, or even in a personal essay. Because of the amount of content we get to publish, we’re able to touch on numerous books. If a book really has my attention, I’ll usually try to get an essay from the author, because once I get obsessive about a book all I want is more writing about anything from that same brain.

What sorts of things influence you when deciding to select a book for coverage? Do blurbs, prepublication reviews, large advances matter at all? How about relationships with publicists and editors?
All of that definitely helps, and it should. It’s all information coming from well-informed, passionate people who have made books a huge part of their lives. But what it comes down to is that I’m really lucky to have the freedom to cover what I want. I never feel like I have to cover a book for any reason beyond that which is between its two covers. So the most important thing is that it’s a good book.

Do you cover books of all genres?
It pleases me so much that not only do we have the freedom to cover all sorts of books, we also have the staff to do so. The best thing about working at BuzzFeed is how many ridiculously smart book-lovers work here. While my background is in contemporary literary fiction, we have other members on staff who are huge fans of science fiction, fantasy, children’s books, and young adult fiction. And everyone gets to contribute; although I’m the books editor and Jarry Lee is staff writer, anyone at BuzzFeed can cover a book that they enjoyed.

We also have an internal book club. We’re currently reading Mia Alvar’s short story collection In the Country, which is fantastic. We also have authors come visit us at BuzzFeed HQ, where we have a conversation attended by staff members, but also do fun posts and cartoon drawings of the authors. We’ve had Margaret Atwood give us advice on surviving a zombie apocalypse, dating tips from Chuck Palahniuk, as well as visits from Judy Blume, Issa Rae, Meg Cabot, and Renata Adler.

Everything comes into BuzzFeed Books from different pipelines—which allows readers with all kinds of interests to find something that’s right for them.

BuzzFeed Books is particularly adept at featuring and promoting a diversity of writers—diversity of race, sexuality, gender. Do you see what you’re doing as a corrective to an imbalance in the publishing world?
From where I’m sitting, there have always been diverse storytellers, so diversity in coverage comes naturally as long as you pay attention and focus on seeking out the best work. As an editor, when you cast the net wide and keep striving to reach and hear from more people, you’re just doing your job.

What do you think BuzzFeed offers that other literary sites don’t?
I don’t like to play the comparison game, so here’s the way I see it: For a long time, the literary world—and coverage of the literary world—was a very fancy cocktail party, with champagne and tuxedos, and it was very hard to get into. What the Internet has allowed is not for everyone to storm that party and tear it apart—in fact, that party, and the forms of discourse it has developed, are incredibly important. It’s about building around that party, so that all kinds of voices can be heard and so many styles of book coverage and discourse can happen. So while I’m maybe playing Frisbee over here, there might be beer pong over there, and a fish fry across the way. The other thing that’s nice is that as the Internet progresses it’s becoming easier to go from one party to another, so someone in a tuxedo might step across the way to the fish fry.

For me, it’s not about what we have that other places don’t, or vice versa. It’s about the ways in which we all contribute to the conversation about books. Which is really why we’re all here, right? No one in this business is here to get rich. We’re here because we really, deeply, truly love and care about books. How that’s expressed will vary for different people and outlets, but it is all love.

You’ve interviewed a number of authors—Joyce Carol Oates, Junot Díaz, and Emily St. John Mandel, to name a few—for live events. Is this part of your official role at Buzzfeed? Who else will you be interviewing in the near future?
I love interviewing writers—basically, I’m loud and curious and I show up on time, which event organizers really seem to like. Interviews aren’t in my job description, but when I first got to New York, the Strand offered me the opportunity to do a conversation with Joyce Carol Oates. And recently, I interviewed former BuzzFeed writer Anna North, whose book Life and Death of Sophie Stark is fantastic, and moderated a panel featuring Stephen King, Owen King, Peter Straub, and Emma Straub. All of which BuzzFeed has been very supportive of.

I’ve been doing live events and book discussions since back in my Rumpus days. Doing and supporting live book events is incredibly important to me, as just another great way to expand the conversation around books. When it comes right down to it, whether online or in person, my favorite thing to do is talk about books.

Where do you see the future of book coverage in ten years?
Hopefully the cocktail party is bigger than ever, with more voices from different socioeconomic backgrounds, more diverse voices, more international voices. I think with the growing worldwide audience, not to mention incredible translations from presses like Graywolf and Melville House, we’re only going to find that as book lovers we find strength in one another, too, and that group is only going to continue to grow.

Are there any books coming out in 2016 that you’re especially looking forward to?
Another fun thing about my job is that I’m usually planning for the next week, or the next month, or if I’m really good, the next season. I’d be lying to you if I said I had a Google Calendar with all of the 2016 releases already marked out. So instead of talking about books on the horizon that I’m excited for but really haven’t had a chance to read yet, I want to leave you with a couple of the books that have really lit me up this year: The Sellout by Paul Beatty; A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara; Get in Trouble by Kelly Link; and The Invasion of the Tearling, the second book of a killer science fiction–fantasy trilogy that began with The Queen of the Tearling, by Erika Johansen.

One book I can name that I’m excited about in 2016 is All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders. It comes out in January, which might barely be 2016, but in Internet time that feels aeons away.

Michael Taeckens has worked in the publishing business since 1995. He is a cofounder of Broadside: Expert Literary PR (broadsidepr.com).

Reviewers & Critics: Carolyn Kellogg of the Los Angeles Times

by

Michael Taeckens

July/August 2016
6.14.16

In Print and Online

In January Carolyn Kellogg was named book editor of the Los Angeles Times. She’d been leading the newspaper’s online book coverage since 2008, when she launched the books blog Jacket Copy, and had joined the staff full-time in 2010, the same year she received a Times Editorial Award for feature blogging.

Kellogg grew up in Rhode Island and attended the University of Southern California. Her first job in new media was at Disney Interactive in the 1990s, and in the years since then she’s had many professional roles, including managing editor of the music-festival website Woodstock
.com, editor of LAist.com, and web editor for the public-radio show Marketplace. As an early book blogger, in 2005 she launched Pinky’s Paperhaus—a podcast in which she talked to writers about music—which she shut down while she was in graduate school. Kellogg, who earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Pittsburgh, has retained a sense of the literary playfulness that marked those early projects: On Twitter (@paperhaus), she has attracted more than thirty-four thousand followers.

How has your job changed since your promotion to book editor earlier this year?
Almost entirely. I previously wrote daily for our blog and weekly book reviews and features. Now I assign and edit all our coverage for print and online. While I occasionally have a chance to write, overseeing our coverage is keeping me busy. I’m interested in bringing new voices into our pages, interesting thinkers, people you may not have heard of yet but who have a strong point of view. I consider that one of the great opportunities of my new position.

When Los Angeles Times editor Davan Maharaj announced your promotion, he stated that your role “will go beyond the printed word to explore ideas, film, art and society.” Are you reviewing other art forms as well, or is this all through the lens of literature?
In March we announced a lineup of ten critics at large, who will be engaging with books and ideas and culture in our pages: Rebecca Carroll, Alexander Chee, Rigoberto González, Marlon James, David Kipen, Laila Lalami, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Adriana E. Ramírez, John Scalzi, and Susan Straight—fantastic writers all, and I am delighted to be working with them.

There’s almost a default belief that people with MFAs in creative writing will either pursue jobs as teachers of creative writing or become acquisitions editors at publishing houses. How do you think your MFA degree has informed your role as a book critic and book review editor, and what advice would you give to current MFA students who want to pursue a similar path?
I think the idea that an MFA will result in a job teaching creative writing has been, or needs to be, recalibrated. There are simply many more MFAs awarded every year than there are creative writing jobs. Getting an MFA in creative writing is delightful, but it’s going to take a killer book or two before you’re sharing the faculty lounge at Princeton with Joyce Carol Oates. The best career advice I can give is to stay flexible: When I was in grad school and teaching comp and freelancing—copyediting—I wrote my first book review for the Los Angeles Times. If you really want to be a critic, you should feel comfortable expressing your opinions, join the National Book Critics Circle and use its resources, read widely, and pitch, pitch, pitch.

My MFA gave me the tools to see and understand craft. I can read an outstanding novel like Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and observe how its switchbacks of humor, politics, pop culture, and inverted satire are operating even at the sentence level. Or pick up a robin’s-egg-blue galley from a writer whose prior novel was a gothic pastiche and see that she’s accomplished something totally genius with structure. This was, of course, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. And then there’s the downside—spotting the novel with fifty pages of jewel-like prose, polished to death in workshop, that fails to maintain that level of attention and concentration throughout.

You were recently interviewed on WNYC’s On the Media about “why the publishing industry isn’t in peril.” Music to everyone’s ears! What makes you feel optimistic about the future of the industry?
One of the things we talked about in that interview was adult coloring books, which really helped drive print book sales in 2015. They’re billed as a respite for grown-ups who are seeking the calm of coloring when turning away from staring at computer and phone screens. But another big sales driver were memoirs by YouTube stars, which sold to tweens—an entirely different demographic, seeking a connection to these stars that’s different from their frank, engaging videos. As long as people are turning to books from different age groups, for divergent reasons, publishing has reason to be optimistic.

The L.A. Times Festival of Books is one of the premier literary festivals in the country. How involved with it have you been over the years?
The woman in charge of programming the festival is Maret Orliss; she and her team do an amazing job. Over the years she has invited me to help select authors, organize panels, and come up with panel names; this year she went easy on me because of my new responsibilities. My biggest task in 2016 was doing two on-stage interviews, with Susan Orlean and Buzz Aldrin.

You’ve interviewed many luminaries over the years—President Jimmy Carter, Molly Ringwald, James Ellroy, Elizabeth Gilbert, LeVar Burton, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nick Hornby, Alison Bechdel, Tavis Smiley, Anne Rice, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Marlon James, among others. Who will you be interviewing this year?
My time is really taken up with assigning and editing these days, but nevertheless I’ll be interviewing Colm Tóibín about James Baldwin tomorrow night on stage, and I’m supposed to talk on the phone with Don DeLillo about Zero K.

You launched the newspaper’s influential books blog, Jacket Copy, in 2008. How has the blog grown and changed over the years? Is there a tonal difference between Jacket Copy and the newspaper’s books section?
In 2008, I was brought on as a freelancer by then-book editor David L. Ulin to launch Jacket Copy, so I’ve been with it since it took its first shaky steps. One of my first posts was about One Story versus Ninth Letter, two fantastic but very different literary journals, and I can see us writing a similar post today. The biggest divergence between Jacket Copy and the book section happened in 2010, when David moved into the role of book critic and a new book editor was hired whose longest tenure at the paper had been as editor of our Obituaries section. His tastes ran more to the severe than the cheerful blogging I’d been used to, like the annotated, color-coded, 61 Essential Post-Modern Reads.

How important do you think social media is in your role as an editor and critic?
I love Twitter. I am terrible at Facebook. The former, for me, is like a watercooler, around which many bookish people have gathered. I follow comedians like Patton Oswalt, international reporters like Borzou Daragahi, and the artist Jennifer Dalton so I have windows into other worlds, and I am grateful to people who think I might have something interesting to share from mine. If I feel like I’m being too boring…I try to post a picture of a bookshelf or a cat. Particularly a cat; it is the Internet, after all.

On average, how many books do you get per week—and how many of those are you able to assign for review? How many reviews do you feature on Sundays and how many during the week?
The L.A. Times gets hundreds of books every week. In print we have three or four pages dedicated to books coverage on Sunday, which is a mix of reviews, essay, and feature stories. We run book reviews and features during the week but not on a preset schedule. Our online coverage is constant and wide-ranging, limited only by our capacity.

What sorts of things influence you when assigning a book for review—an author’s name, the size of the advance, prepub reviews, blurbs? What about your relationships with editors and publicists—do those ever help a book get reviewed?

This is an interesting question, because it implies that if a book just has a secret weapon it will be reviewed. Of the things you mention, I don’t care a whit about the size of the advance, but the rest may factor into the decision to assign a book. More important, however, is the prose, and if it’s nonfiction, the subject. There is no secret, external weapon: In the end, a book stands on its merits.

Do you keep diversity—gender, race, sexual orientation, et cetera—in mind when assigning reviews?
I keep it in mind in regards to all our coverage.

Are you able to dedicate much attention to poetry, genre books, and/or children’s books?
Poetry fairly regularly, while I think children’s books are harder to get a handle on critically. I’m not sure where the genre lines are anymore; I think our coverage crosses them.

How many freelancers do you work with? Are there certain things you look for in a freelance reviewer? Do you pick up many reviews from the wire?
As of this writing, I have worked with about a hundred freelancers. A strong voice, a cogent pitch, and an ability to file on time are my favorite things. Our reviews go out on the wire, but we don’t take reviews from the wire.

Are there any book critics whose work you particularly relish?
Kathryn Schulz, now at the New Yorker; Dwight Garner and Parul Sehgal at the New York Times; and my former colleague David L. Ulin, wherever his writing appears.

What books that you aren’t reviewing yourself are you most looking forward to reading this year?
My prior regular reviewing responsibilities and my recently concluded tenure on the board of the National Book Critics Circle used to dominate my reading. Recently I started Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer, which is fantastic; I have Jean Stein’s West of Eden in my to-read pile; and I’ll probably blend stuff I’ve missed—Anna Karenina!— with new books, like Idra Novey’s Ways to Disappear.

Michael Taeckens has worked in the publishing business since 1995. He is a cofounder of Broadside: Expert Literary PR.

 

Reviewers & Critics: Parul Sehgal of the New York Times Book Review

by

Michael Taeckens

May/June 2017
4.12.17

In Print and Online

Parul Sehgal is a senior editor and columnist at the New York Times Book Review. Previously she was books editor at NPR and a senior editor at Publishers Weekly. She grew up in Washington, D.C., Delhi, Manila, Budapest, and Montreal, where she studied political science at McGill University, and moved to New York City in 2005 to study fiction in the MFA program at Columbia University. In 2010 she was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. Her TED talk on literature, titled “An Ode to Envy,” has been viewed more than two million times since it was posted in the summer of 2013.

What was your path to becoming a literary critic?
Random and inevitable. I’ve written a bit about how books were a highly controlled substance in my childhood home. My mother had a marvelous, idiosyncratic library—lots of André Gide, Jean Genet, and Oscar Wilde, lots of philosophy, and lots of Jackie Collins. But she was terribly strict, and the library was off-limits to us. Naturally my sister and I became the most frantic little book thieves; I must have spent the first decade of my life with a novel—and usually something massively inappropriate like Judy Blume’s Wifey or Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge—stuffed in the waistband of my pants. Reading was an illicit, compulsive, and very private activity for me; discovering criticism—in the Washington Post Book World—opened up a whole world. I suddenly had interlocutors. It was thrilling.

More prosaically—and to the point—I needed a job after graduate school, and Publishers Weekly was hiring. From there I started freelancing for a number of places: Bookforum, Slate, the New York Times Book Review. I just got addicted to the form, its constraints and possibilities. Book reviews remind me of that great Zoë Heller line about kissing: It’s about trying to be creative in a limited space.

Has your background in creative writing informed your work as a literary critic? Do you think literary criticism as a practical pursuit can be taught, and do you think it should be in MFA programs? 
It has given me a huge admiration for fiction writing. It’s lonely and difficult work, and I think having attempted it helps me treat books with care and respect. I found MFA workshops enormously helpful too, but not for the expected reasons. I don’t think they made me a better writer, but I learned how a certain class of people talked about literature. There was a whole depressing vocabulary: about reader “investment,” about how certain effects were “achieved” or endings “earned.” Has anyone written about when and why so much finance jargon has migrated into fiction classrooms? As for whether criticism should be taught, why not? Good criticism can refresh our responses. Last year I taught a class on criticism at Columbia that was largely devoted to unlearning boring, clichéd, or, worse, fashionable ways of thinking about books. And given how difficult the world is for young writers, why shouldn’t myriad kinds of practical writing be taught in these programs—book reviewing, grant writing, copyediting? 

Talk a little bit about your role at the New York Times Book Review—what kinds of books do you oversee, and within those categories, how many books do you look through on a weekly basis? 
I live in the shadow of wobbly stacks of books…who knows how many? I shudder to count. I handle a variety of topics: some fiction, lots of nonfiction—science, technology, philosophy, psychology, nature, and religion. 

Other than your interest in a particular author, what sorts of things influence you when selecting a book for coverage? Do relationships with editors and/or publicists help? What about blurbs and pre-publication reviews?
I look at everything—blurbs, trade publications—but it really comes down to sitting with the book and reading those first few pages or chapters, waiting for a voice and argument to emerge. I don’t think relationships in publishing do much to influence my thinking, but there are a few editors I really admire, who have interesting minds and interesting taste: Fiona McCrae and Jeff Shotts at Graywolf, Eric Chinski at FSG, Ed Park at Penguin Press. I’m always curious to see what they’re up to. 

You write Roving Eye, a brilliant New York Times Book Review column devoted to international literature. What was the genesis of this column? Considering that international literature by and large gets such short shrift in U.S. culture, do you see this column as a corrective of sorts?
Thank you! All credit to the editor, Pamela Paul, who’s a champion of international literature. I think the column is partly a corrective—but that sounds so dry and dutiful, no? I like to think of it as a way for readers to discover not only books in translation but books that are exploring some terrain or technique we might not have encountered—as with the Lebanese writer Rabee Jaber, who is so much more sophisticated on terrorism and political violence than any American writer I’ve read, or the French writer Virginie Despentes, who has created a genre of her own—queer, punk, feminist, screwball noir. 

You also write for the New York Times Magazine—several essays for the First Words column on language, and in late 2015 you profiled the wonderful Mary Gaitskill—and you’ve written critical work for other publications, including Bookforum, where you’ve written about Zadie Smith, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, Lorrie Moore, and Anne Carson. Will we be seeing more of this kind of work from you? 
I hope so. I have wonderful editors at Bookforum and the New York Times Magazine—the great Michael Miller and Sasha Weiss—who let me, and on occasion push me, to veer off course and try something new. I’m very lucky in this way. And I love author profiles and essays on language not least because I’m always looking for ways to smuggle in book criticism where people don’t expect it. Book reviewing can get a bad rap as glorified book reports, when it really is this amazing instrument, this vocabulary of pleasure.

In an interview with the Columbia Daily Spectator, you mentioned that when you’re reviewing a book you read it twice, and then “The third time, I kind of dip in and out of it as I’m actually writing the review…and often as I’m writing, my opinion of the book radically changes.” I find this fascinating. Is this system unique to you, or is it somewhat prevalent among book critics? And do you find it at all frustrating—or perhaps rewarding—when your opinion about a book changes during the process of writing?
I suspect most reviewers experience this to some degree. It’s what makes it interesting, the process of self-interrogation: Why does that character please me? Why does she feel so real? What makes someone seem “real” in fiction anyway—and just what kind of achievement is it? It’s a conversation with the self, with one’s own tastes and biases—or it is for me at any rate. There’s something Cezanne said that I think about a lot, something like, “I know what I am looking at, but what am I seeing?” That’s what reviewing feels like to me. It’s very much to “re-view,” to see again, to try to see farther and see deeper.

Social media: helpful or a hindrance? 
Neither—an occasional pleasure. I’m not really on social media; I’m only on Twitter and that only nominally. I’m too secretive and long-winded and erratic in my habits—but how I love to eavesdrop. 

In your NBCC speech you said, “A review is someone performing thinking, and our finest reviewers are, to my mind, no less remarkable than our finest athletes: What do they do but exercise their precision, subtlety, and stamina for our enjoyment?” Aside from your esteemed colleagues at the New York Times, who do you think are some of our finest reviewers working today? 
Kathryn Schulz is almost upsettingly good, isn’t she? Who else can move so effortlessly between science and literary fiction? She has the range. And I think she’s one of the few white writers I know who consistently and interestingly thinks about race. Kevin Young is a genius. I think Dayna Tortorici is an extremely fine and precise thinker, and I wish she’d review more. The Irish critic Mark O’Connell can’t write a boring sentence. I love Steph Burt’s mission to find and defend the new. And then, of course, there’s James Wood. I’ll never forget reading him on how Orwell possibly cribbed a detail from Tolstoy—a man about to be executed adjusting a blindfold that was tied too tightly. I was unspeakably envious. To be on such intimate terms with these books—what could be better?  

 

Michael Taeckens has worked in publishing since 1995. He is a literary publicist and cofounder of Broadside PR (broadsidepr.com).

Parul Sehgal (Credit: David Surowiecki)

Reviewers & Critics: Laura Miller of Slate

by

Michael Taeckens

March/April 2017
2.15.17

In Print and Online

Laura Miller, a journalist and critic living in New York City, is a books and culture columnist for Slate. In 1995 she cofounded Salon, one of the first online-only magazines, where she worked as an editor and staff writer for twenty years. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, and the New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the “Last Word” column in 2003 and 2004. She is the author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia (Little, Brown, 2008) and editor of The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors (Penguin, 2000) and Literary Wonderlands: A Journey Through the Greatest Fictional Worlds Ever Created (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2016).

 

What was it like writing about books for a web publication in the 1990s, when print criticism still completely dominated the scene? Did you have a particular mission in mind for literary coverage when you launched Salon?
It was a great time to be writing and editing pieces about books because the idea of an Internet magazine was totally new. There were no rules. But there were also no guidelines. We had to make things up as we went along, and from square one, which is an experience hard to convey now, when everyone is used to getting journalism online. I spent a lot of time just drawing rectangles on legal pads trying to conceptualize how to publish a “magazine” that had no material substance. But that scrambling was very much outweighed by the thrill of doing more or less exactly what we wanted. With no metrics, no conventional wisdom about what “worked” online, we had a very rare freedom. I also worked with amazing people. Dwight Garner edited our books coverage back then, and every November we’d go on these epic reading binges to come up with a year-end top-ten list between the two of us.

The main thing we aimed to do was to bring a more elastic, less stuffy style to bear on literary criticism and journalism, a more informal voice. That voice is now ubiquitous on the Internet, so it’s also hard to convey just how refreshing it felt. We often used reviewers, Stephanie Zacharek and Charles Taylor in particular, who were primarily film critics of the Pauline Kael school—although they were very knowledgeable about books. If we had a mission, it was to bring that kind of lively, vernacular approach to book criticism and journalism.

Did Salon’s books coverage change in style or volume during your two decades there?
Enormously. We went from running a book review every day to running a couple of books pieces per day along with the review during the dot-com boom, to, near the end of my tenure, a definite press from above not to cover books at all unless they offered a “red meat” political angle. That’s one of the reasons I left Salon—its divestment from substantive literary coverage.

Now, at Slate, do you purposefully seek books from presses outside the Big Five?
At Slate I’m fortunate enough to work closely with a great editor, Dan Kois, and we kick a bunch of ideas around every month or so. The focus is more on what will make an interesting “column,” which is technically what I write for Slate, although it sort of alternates between reviews and essays. As a journalist, your concern is for your readers—and editors/bosses—with providing them with interesting, arresting, trenchant writing. It’s nice if that also means bringing attention to a smaller press offering, but that’s not a priority. No respectable literary journalist considers helping out authors or publishers to be a central purpose. That would be a big mistake. A publication commands a significant audience because it prioritizes running pieces that are interesting and meaningful to that audience. Once you start to put someone else’s needs ahead of your readership, they tend to evaporate. Readers are really good at detecting ulterior motives.

In an interview with the National Book Critics Circle, you said, “I’m under the impression that most literary critics are primarily interested in writing, and while I find that subject fascinating, I am probably more interested in reading.” I find this rather intriguing, and think it’s a chief reason your writing on literary culture is so distinctive. Can you elaborate on your statement here?
We live in a time when everyone wants to write and seemingly no one “has time” to read. Everyone wants to speak and increasingly few people want to listen. People sometimes scoff when I make this observation and claim that aspiring writers read more than anyone else, but that is not my experience. I’m constantly meeting people who, when they learn what I do, always want to talk about the book they plan to write despite the fact that they seem to find no books worth reading. We fetishize the idea of being a writer in a variety of ways, most of them narcissistic. So when I meet a big reader who professes no desire to write, I think of them as a beautiful, almost mythical creature, like a unicorn, to be celebrated.

I also believe that reading is a profoundly creative act, that every act of reading is a collaboration between author and reader. I don’t understand why more people aren’t interested in this alchemy. It’s such an act of grace to give someone else ten or fifteen hours out of your own irreplaceable life, and allow their voice, thoughts, and imaginings into your head. I can’t respect any writer who isn’t abjectly grateful for the faith, generosity, and trust in that. I think there’s an unspoken, maybe even unconscious contempt for reading as merely “passive” in many people who obsess about writers and writing. Discussion of writers and writing generally bores me. But I’m always interested in why people read and why they like what they like. That’s far more likely to surprise and enlighten me than someone fretting about daily word counts and agonizing over their process.

Another hallmark of your critical writing is your interest in and attention to a vast array of authors—from Haruki Murakami, Rachel Kushner, Helen Oyeyemi, and Colson Whitehead to George R. R. Martin, Tana French, Neil Gaiman, and Elmore Leonard. How do you choose which authors to write about and which books to review?
I can’t say! I follow my nose, I guess. I’m generally looking for something that interests me because that’s the only means I have for inferring what might interest my readers, which is always the first goal. Genre is a complicated issue because it can be both an unfair stigma and an identifier of books that are reliably formulaic in an uninteresting way. But as a rule I find that it’s pretty easy to ignore genre divisions. They’re a marketing tool for publishers and readers with specific tastes, but it doesn’t serve a critic to believe in them unquestioningly.

How conscientious are you about diversity—gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.—when choosing what to write about?
As a duty, not much—and really, what writer wants to be read out of someone’s sense of obligation or desire to look good to others? But it would be very boring to constantly read and write about the same sorts of books with the same sorts of people in them, so variety is something I seek out.

Is there anything from the publishing side that raises your interest in a particular book or author—the size of the advance, notable blurbs, your relationship with an editor or publicist?
There are some editors with distinct tastes worth following (or avoiding), and a handful of publicists I trust to tip me off that something might really appeal to me. But mostly I tune out the marketing because it’s just not a reliable indicator of a book’s merit. Blurbs are hopeless: They’re mostly the result of favor trading. I do pay attention to trade reviews, and within the business of covering and publishing books there’s an extensive grapevine that I try to tap into frequently. Those are impartial takes. One thing I’d say to smaller publishers is, if they get starred trade reviews it would be worth it to send an email saying, “Would you like to see a copy?” If it’s not a press I work with a lot or have in my rolodex, making it easier to act on advance reviews is helpful. There are weeks when I just don’t have time to hunt down the contact information online.

You also write about a fair amount of nonfiction as well. Do you believe that reviewing a work of fiction is a markedly different art from reviewing a work of nonfiction?
Of course. Fiction is a work of art conjured out of whole cloth. It may be based on real world events and people, but it has no obligation to them. Nonfiction has a relationship to the truth that also needs to be considered. On a journalistic level, readers are typically more interested in nonfiction reviews. A review of a novel is interesting to the extent that you’ve read or intend to read the book, but you can learn something from a review of a nonfiction book even if you never read the book itself. People like learning stuff.

In August 2012 you wrote a Salon article, “The Case for Positive Book Reviews.” Where do you stand on the value of negative reviews?
I don’t think that a harsh (or even a merely unenthusiastic) review of an obscure book has much meaning in a world where the vast majority of books go almost entirely unnoticed. “Guess what. A book you’ve never heard of isn’t much good” is not an appealing premise for most readers. On the other hand, when a book has some stature in the world, it’s another matter; knocking down the unjustly prominent is part of a critic’s mandate. It’s just that hardly any books are prominent. Readers often really enjoy savage or derisive reviews. There’s a great, pent-up feeling of resentment out there on the part of readers who feel that they are constantly being sold—by reviewers and publishers—on books that are bad or just far less good than the praise they get. It’s kind of dumb, because what’s going on is usually just a disparity in taste, but we persist in the desire to believe that there are objective, consensus standards of good and bad. There aren’t. I’m not very keen on gratifying the anger people inflict on themselves as a result of embracing that belief at the expense of some poor author who has no responsibility for this.

Have you ever changed your mind about a book that you praised or panned years earlier? Has a work of criticism ever changed your opinion of a writer’s work?
I have to be constantly reading new books, so I rarely get the opportunity to revisit anything. Sometimes I bail on a book if the first chapter or two don’t grab me, and then later the enthusiasm of others makes me wonder if I should have persisted. But by the time I’ve read and written about a book, my opinion is pretty solid.

What advice do you give to young students who aim to become professional critics?
My advice to people who want to be professional critics is not to. It wouldn’t be responsible to encourage young people to pursue a career path that is so economically unfeasible. It’s a nice sideline, but the only deliberate path I can think of to recommend is journalism school. There you can at least learn an assortment of skills by which you might—might—someday make a living as a writer. But it would be smarter to have a reliable day job that pays the bills and gets you out into the world and then write reviews on the side.

How many books do you typically receive per week—and of those, how many are you able to write about each month?
I get maybe seventy-five to a hundred books per week. It depends on the week. I write about three or four new books per month, since sometimes the topics of my column aren’t specific new books but an essay about a cultural topic or author/book from the past.

In an interview with Daniel Mendelsohn you stated that Twitter is “an absurd place to look for literary criticism.” Outside of that, has social media been helpful at all in your role as a literary critic?
I follow many people whose opinions and taste I value, so if they’re enthusing about a forthcoming book, I want to know that. This is especially true of big readers who are not writers—booksellers, bloggers, vloggers, etc.—and who operate outside of book/publishing enclaves. I like to know what all kinds of people are reading and what they think of it, especially if they’re the sort of people who pay real money for the books they read. I don’t follow publishers and I take all recommendations from published authors with a huge grain of salt because, as with blurbs, that part of Twitter is full of disingenuous logrolling.

What books that you aren’t reviewing are you most looking forward to reading in the near future?
I’m a big audiobook fan, so I fill in the gaps of my work-related reading with listening. I really don’t need to be doing any more sitting down, thanks very much. The titles tend to be a mix of classics—as much Trollope as I can get—and new fiction that for one reason or another I didn’t end up reviewing, like Nathan Hill’s The Nix and Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees. I’m addicted to Audible’s daily deals for members, which offers all kinds of titles for five dollars or less. That’s where all my impulse buying goes, and I’ll probably never have time to listen to everything I’ve bought from them. 

 

Michael Taeckens has worked in the publishing business since 1995. He is a cofounder of Broadside: Expert Literary PR (broadsidepr.com).

Reviewers & Critics: Kevin Nguyen of GQ

by

Michael Taeckens

September/October 2017
8.16.17

In Print and Online

Kevin Nguyen is the digital deputy editor of GQ, where he writes about books, music, and popular media. He grew up outside of Boston in the 1990s and attended the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. Since moving to New York City five years ago, he has run the Best Books of the Month feature at Amazon and was editorial director at Oyster, “the Netflix for books,” then Google Play Books after the tech giant acquired Oyster in 2015. He can be followed on Twitter, @knguyen.

At GQ you mostly work on reported features, but you also compile a Best Books of the Month feature. How many books do you receive each month, and of those how many are typically included in your roundups?
I went on vacation last week and returned to four mail crates of unopened galleys. So I’m getting something in the vicinity of fifty to seventy-five books a week. And honestly, I wish publishers wouldn’t send me things unsolicited. Most of those books are never going to be touched, and eventually they are shipped off to Housing Works for donation. In a given month I’ll try roughly twenty books. From those I’ll finish about half, maybe slightly more. And then I’ll pick about half of those—so it’s somewhere between four and six books each month. It really depends on how strong that month is.

In an ideal world, I would just request those books and not receive any mail. It feels like such a waste, but once you’re on those distribution lists, there’s no getting off them.

It’s funny. If I died today, the books would keep coming to the office, and I think about the poor person who would get stuck dealing with several thousand pounds of galleys each month. Which is why I plan to never die.

What sorts of things, if any, influence you when choosing which titles to include: blurbs, pre-pub reviews, large advances, social media buzz? What about your relationships with publicists and editors—do those ever hold any sway?
I keep a very long spreadsheet of books that are coming out, based on a combination of catalogs, publicist and editor pitches, Kirkus, previews from places like the Millions, and of course, word of mouth. Twitter can be a good signal, but its taste is fairly narrow.

I do read a lot of stuff blind, too. My equivalent of digging through the slush pile is browsing through everything available as a digital galley on Edelweiss.

Blurbs mean nothing. Same with big advances. Honestly, by the time the galley rolls around I’ve forgotten what I read about it in Publishers Lunch. I’ve been doing this for [checks watch], oh, Jesus, nearly seven years now. But I’ve got a system that works.

How conscientious are you about diversity—gender, race, sexual orientation, and so on—when choosing what to include? And do you try to pay attention to books published outside of the Big Five publishers?
Most people won’t cop to this, but I pay pretty close attention to making sure my list is inclusive. That spreadsheet I was talking about has a column that denotes if an author is a woman or a person of color, so I can make sure that there’s never a month when I am reading only white dudes. It feels weird—I am literally checking boxes—but it’s also a way to keep me honest.

On the upside, usually what I gravitate toward in terms of stories tends to be inherently diverse. You read enough and you see that a lot of books by white authors suffer from a kind of maddening sameness—thankfully you can identify this from the first fifty or so pages, if not sooner. Publishing has made slow strides forward in putting out books by people of color. Big lead titles are more diverse than ever.

And, of course, that spreadsheet also lists publishers. I make sure to read across the Big Five and indies each month. It’s probably the most useful column I have. Penguin Random House controls over 50 percent of trade publishing, and you could easily make the mistake of reviewing exclusively their books.

You’ve also edited some excellent literary features at GQ—Kima Jones’s interview with Colson Whitehead and Alex Shephard’s piece on Jonathan Safran Foer, to name just two examples. What goes into these features? Are you conceiving of them? Do you have much leeway when it comes to assigning literary coverage at GQ?
Both of those stories were my idea. Since we’re not a book-specific outfit, we have to find a story deeper than “this is a new book.” It has to speak to a broader audience, and that restraint had led to better pieces, in my opinion. 

Kima and Alex did a great job with both, even though they were very different. Kima went deep with Colson Whitehead, and we were confident that the strength and reception of The Underground Railroad would justify going to such an intense place with the interview. For the Foer piece, it was a profile because we knew he was in an interesting inflection point in his career. Plus he surrendered some weird quotes about Natalie Portman. Love him or hate him, the guy is worth reading about. 

You’ve written eloquently about the overwhelming whiteness in the U.S. literary culture and publishing industry. What critical steps do you think need to be made to diversify the literary ecosphere? In your recent Millions article you pointed out one bright spot of 2016: the momentous National Book Awards ceremony, so much of which was due to the National Book Foundation’s executive director, Lisa Lucas. Have you seen any other positive changes over the past couple of years?
As I mentioned earlier, publishing is a behemoth that is trudging along slowly in the direction of progress. But it still has a long way to go. Publishers used to excuse themselves by saying that the data showed books by people of color didn’t sell—a disingenuous claim. Well, in the past three years, we’ve seen some tremendously successful fiction by authors of color. So now editors and agents can’t say that anymore. Progress marches forward, and even the most reluctant figures have no choice but to be dragged along. I hope that in the next five or ten years, literary events will become spaces that are less oppressively white. I think we can get there.

You’ve had an interesting career path in the literary industry, with a notable stretch at the editorial side of Amazon, where you ran the Best Books of the Month feature. What was it like behind the scenes there? Did you and your team have full editorial control over which books you picked each month?
Amazon is bizarre, man! But the editorial team was—and still is—great. Real readers, with full editorial freedom. There was never any pressure to include or exclude anything, at least not in my time there. Remember that summer when Amazon was refusing to stock books from Hachette? It was one of the reasons I left the company. But one of the last Best of the Month lists I put together included Edan Lepucki’s California, a Hachette title we couldn’t even sell. Nobody at Amazon gave us a hard time about that, even when Stephen Colbert made that book a symbol against Amazon’s vicious business tactics. I don’t think Amazon is good for the world, but that editorial team is a bright spot in a bleak machine.

After Amazon you worked for two years at Oyster, an e-book streaming service billed as the “Netflix of books,” which was bought and later closed by Google Play. At Oyster you launched the Oyster Review, a remarkable online literary magazine that included reviews, interviews, essays, and book lists and featured an impressive roster of writers and critics. What went into creating and running that magazine?
A lot! Oh, man, but what a fun time. Basically, Oyster attempted to capture the indie bookstore feel and taste and personality in the digital space, as opposed to the big-box retail approach of Amazon. We hoped both could coexist, just like they do in brick-and-mortar.

The Oyster Review was the place where we’d establish our literary identity. Every great indie bookstore has one. And online, what you do instead of shelves and author events is publish reviews and essays and comics. I edited and art-directed the whole thing. And most people didn’t see this because it was in the Oyster app, but there was a whole mobile experience that had to be designed for too. So from conception to construction to day-to-day editing and production, I had a hand in all of it. And I loved doing it.

Obviously, it didn’t totally work out. But Google acquired the company, and one of the big selling points to them outside the engineering was the Oyster Review and all the fine editorial work we’d done. I’m very proud of that. I mean, has a tech company ever acquired a literary magazine before? It might be the first and last time that ever happens.

In addition to reviewing books and writing about literary culture, you’ve written widely about TV, movies, and gaming. Have your interests in fields outside of literature influenced and informed your literary criticism and vice versa?
Oh, definitely. You can tell the reviewers who do only books. There’s a strange stilted myopia there. I think the best writers have broader interests and can talk intelligently about other mediums.

Of those publications that still devote space to literary criticism, which are your favorites? Are there any book critics whose work you particularly enjoy?
Bookforum is probably the most complete publication out there. It has a strong perspective and tone and taste. Plus, the reviews are damn good. I wish they’d do a little more online so more people could see it.

I keep waiting for someone to start the Pitchfork of books, but every new book-related site that launches ends up feeling so flat and overly positive. Oh, and too damn white.

Name three books you’ve read in the past year that really knocked your socks off.
White Tears by Hari Kunzru by a mile. What a tremendous, smart, weird book. I tore through The Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann in a couple of days. And Ottessa Moshfegh’s short stories in Homesick for Another World have stayed with me in strange and surprising ways.

 

Michael Taeckens has worked in publishing since 1995. He is a literary publicist and cofounder of Broadside PR. 

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Reviewers & Critics: Parul Sehgal of the New York Times Book Review

by

Michael Taeckens

May/June 2017
4.12.17

In Print and Online

Parul Sehgal is a senior editor and columnist at the New York Times Book Review. Previously she was books editor at NPR and a senior editor at Publishers Weekly. She grew up in Washington, D.C., Delhi, Manila, Budapest, and Montreal, where she studied political science at McGill University, and moved to New York City in 2005 to study fiction in the MFA program at Columbia University. In 2010 she was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. Her TED talk on literature, titled “An Ode to Envy,” has been viewed more than two million times since it was posted in the summer of 2013.

What was your path to becoming a literary critic?
Random and inevitable. I’ve written a bit about how books were a highly controlled substance in my childhood home. My mother had a marvelous, idiosyncratic library—lots of André Gide, Jean Genet, and Oscar Wilde, lots of philosophy, and lots of Jackie Collins. But she was terribly strict, and the library was off-limits to us. Naturally my sister and I became the most frantic little book thieves; I must have spent the first decade of my life with a novel—and usually something massively inappropriate like Judy Blume’s Wifey or Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge—stuffed in the waistband of my pants. Reading was an illicit, compulsive, and very private activity for me; discovering criticism—in the Washington Post Book World—opened up a whole world. I suddenly had interlocutors. It was thrilling.

More prosaically—and to the point—I needed a job after graduate school, and Publishers Weekly was hiring. From there I started freelancing for a number of places: Bookforum, Slate, the New York Times Book Review. I just got addicted to the form, its constraints and possibilities. Book reviews remind me of that great Zoë Heller line about kissing: It’s about trying to be creative in a limited space.

Has your background in creative writing informed your work as a literary critic? Do you think literary criticism as a practical pursuit can be taught, and do you think it should be in MFA programs? 
It has given me a huge admiration for fiction writing. It’s lonely and difficult work, and I think having attempted it helps me treat books with care and respect. I found MFA workshops enormously helpful too, but not for the expected reasons. I don’t think they made me a better writer, but I learned how a certain class of people talked about literature. There was a whole depressing vocabulary: about reader “investment,” about how certain effects were “achieved” or endings “earned.” Has anyone written about when and why so much finance jargon has migrated into fiction classrooms? As for whether criticism should be taught, why not? Good criticism can refresh our responses. Last year I taught a class on criticism at Columbia that was largely devoted to unlearning boring, clichéd, or, worse, fashionable ways of thinking about books. And given how difficult the world is for young writers, why shouldn’t myriad kinds of practical writing be taught in these programs—book reviewing, grant writing, copyediting? 

Talk a little bit about your role at the New York Times Book Review—what kinds of books do you oversee, and within those categories, how many books do you look through on a weekly basis? 
I live in the shadow of wobbly stacks of books…who knows how many? I shudder to count. I handle a variety of topics: some fiction, lots of nonfiction—science, technology, philosophy, psychology, nature, and religion. 

Other than your interest in a particular author, what sorts of things influence you when selecting a book for coverage? Do relationships with editors and/or publicists help? What about blurbs and pre-publication reviews?
I look at everything—blurbs, trade publications—but it really comes down to sitting with the book and reading those first few pages or chapters, waiting for a voice and argument to emerge. I don’t think relationships in publishing do much to influence my thinking, but there are a few editors I really admire, who have interesting minds and interesting taste: Fiona McCrae and Jeff Shotts at Graywolf, Eric Chinski at FSG, Ed Park at Penguin Press. I’m always curious to see what they’re up to. 

You write Roving Eye, a brilliant New York Times Book Review column devoted to international literature. What was the genesis of this column? Considering that international literature by and large gets such short shrift in U.S. culture, do you see this column as a corrective of sorts?
Thank you! All credit to the editor, Pamela Paul, who’s a champion of international literature. I think the column is partly a corrective—but that sounds so dry and dutiful, no? I like to think of it as a way for readers to discover not only books in translation but books that are exploring some terrain or technique we might not have encountered—as with the Lebanese writer Rabee Jaber, who is so much more sophisticated on terrorism and political violence than any American writer I’ve read, or the French writer Virginie Despentes, who has created a genre of her own—queer, punk, feminist, screwball noir. 

You also write for the New York Times Magazine—several essays for the First Words column on language, and in late 2015 you profiled the wonderful Mary Gaitskill—and you’ve written critical work for other publications, including Bookforum, where you’ve written about Zadie Smith, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, Lorrie Moore, and Anne Carson. Will we be seeing more of this kind of work from you? 
I hope so. I have wonderful editors at Bookforum and the New York Times Magazine—the great Michael Miller and Sasha Weiss—who let me, and on occasion push me, to veer off course and try something new. I’m very lucky in this way. And I love author profiles and essays on language not least because I’m always looking for ways to smuggle in book criticism where people don’t expect it. Book reviewing can get a bad rap as glorified book reports, when it really is this amazing instrument, this vocabulary of pleasure.

In an interview with the Columbia Daily Spectator, you mentioned that when you’re reviewing a book you read it twice, and then “The third time, I kind of dip in and out of it as I’m actually writing the review…and often as I’m writing, my opinion of the book radically changes.” I find this fascinating. Is this system unique to you, or is it somewhat prevalent among book critics? And do you find it at all frustrating—or perhaps rewarding—when your opinion about a book changes during the process of writing?
I suspect most reviewers experience this to some degree. It’s what makes it interesting, the process of self-interrogation: Why does that character please me? Why does she feel so real? What makes someone seem “real” in fiction anyway—and just what kind of achievement is it? It’s a conversation with the self, with one’s own tastes and biases—or it is for me at any rate. There’s something Cezanne said that I think about a lot, something like, “I know what I am looking at, but what am I seeing?” That’s what reviewing feels like to me. It’s very much to “re-view,” to see again, to try to see farther and see deeper.

Social media: helpful or a hindrance? 
Neither—an occasional pleasure. I’m not really on social media; I’m only on Twitter and that only nominally. I’m too secretive and long-winded and erratic in my habits—but how I love to eavesdrop. 

In your NBCC speech you said, “A review is someone performing thinking, and our finest reviewers are, to my mind, no less remarkable than our finest athletes: What do they do but exercise their precision, subtlety, and stamina for our enjoyment?” Aside from your esteemed colleagues at the New York Times, who do you think are some of our finest reviewers working today? 
Kathryn Schulz is almost upsettingly good, isn’t she? Who else can move so effortlessly between science and literary fiction? She has the range. And I think she’s one of the few white writers I know who consistently and interestingly thinks about race. Kevin Young is a genius. I think Dayna Tortorici is an extremely fine and precise thinker, and I wish she’d review more. The Irish critic Mark O’Connell can’t write a boring sentence. I love Steph Burt’s mission to find and defend the new. And then, of course, there’s James Wood. I’ll never forget reading him on how Orwell possibly cribbed a detail from Tolstoy—a man about to be executed adjusting a blindfold that was tied too tightly. I was unspeakably envious. To be on such intimate terms with these books—what could be better?  

 

Michael Taeckens has worked in publishing since 1995. He is a literary publicist and cofounder of Broadside PR (broadsidepr.com).

Parul Sehgal (Credit: David Surowiecki)

Reviewers & Critics: Parul Sehgal of the New York Times Book Review

by

Michael Taeckens

May/June 2017
4.12.17

In Print and Online

Parul Sehgal is a senior editor and columnist at the New York Times Book Review. Previously she was books editor at NPR and a senior editor at Publishers Weekly. She grew up in Washington, D.C., Delhi, Manila, Budapest, and Montreal, where she studied political science at McGill University, and moved to New York City in 2005 to study fiction in the MFA program at Columbia University. In 2010 she was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. Her TED talk on literature, titled “An Ode to Envy,” has been viewed more than two million times since it was posted in the summer of 2013.

What was your path to becoming a literary critic?
Random and inevitable. I’ve written a bit about how books were a highly controlled substance in my childhood home. My mother had a marvelous, idiosyncratic library—lots of André Gide, Jean Genet, and Oscar Wilde, lots of philosophy, and lots of Jackie Collins. But she was terribly strict, and the library was off-limits to us. Naturally my sister and I became the most frantic little book thieves; I must have spent the first decade of my life with a novel—and usually something massively inappropriate like Judy Blume’s Wifey or Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge—stuffed in the waistband of my pants. Reading was an illicit, compulsive, and very private activity for me; discovering criticism—in the Washington Post Book World—opened up a whole world. I suddenly had interlocutors. It was thrilling.

More prosaically—and to the point—I needed a job after graduate school, and Publishers Weekly was hiring. From there I started freelancing for a number of places: Bookforum, Slate, the New York Times Book Review. I just got addicted to the form, its constraints and possibilities. Book reviews remind me of that great Zoë Heller line about kissing: It’s about trying to be creative in a limited space.

Has your background in creative writing informed your work as a literary critic? Do you think literary criticism as a practical pursuit can be taught, and do you think it should be in MFA programs? 
It has given me a huge admiration for fiction writing. It’s lonely and difficult work, and I think having attempted it helps me treat books with care and respect. I found MFA workshops enormously helpful too, but not for the expected reasons. I don’t think they made me a better writer, but I learned how a certain class of people talked about literature. There was a whole depressing vocabulary: about reader “investment,” about how certain effects were “achieved” or endings “earned.” Has anyone written about when and why so much finance jargon has migrated into fiction classrooms? As for whether criticism should be taught, why not? Good criticism can refresh our responses. Last year I taught a class on criticism at Columbia that was largely devoted to unlearning boring, clichéd, or, worse, fashionable ways of thinking about books. And given how difficult the world is for young writers, why shouldn’t myriad kinds of practical writing be taught in these programs—book reviewing, grant writing, copyediting? 

Talk a little bit about your role at the New York Times Book Review—what kinds of books do you oversee, and within those categories, how many books do you look through on a weekly basis? 
I live in the shadow of wobbly stacks of books…who knows how many? I shudder to count. I handle a variety of topics: some fiction, lots of nonfiction—science, technology, philosophy, psychology, nature, and religion. 

Other than your interest in a particular author, what sorts of things influence you when selecting a book for coverage? Do relationships with editors and/or publicists help? What about blurbs and pre-publication reviews?
I look at everything—blurbs, trade publications—but it really comes down to sitting with the book and reading those first few pages or chapters, waiting for a voice and argument to emerge. I don’t think relationships in publishing do much to influence my thinking, but there are a few editors I really admire, who have interesting minds and interesting taste: Fiona McCrae and Jeff Shotts at Graywolf, Eric Chinski at FSG, Ed Park at Penguin Press. I’m always curious to see what they’re up to. 

You write Roving Eye, a brilliant New York Times Book Review column devoted to international literature. What was the genesis of this column? Considering that international literature by and large gets such short shrift in U.S. culture, do you see this column as a corrective of sorts?
Thank you! All credit to the editor, Pamela Paul, who’s a champion of international literature. I think the column is partly a corrective—but that sounds so dry and dutiful, no? I like to think of it as a way for readers to discover not only books in translation but books that are exploring some terrain or technique we might not have encountered—as with the Lebanese writer Rabee Jaber, who is so much more sophisticated on terrorism and political violence than any American writer I’ve read, or the French writer Virginie Despentes, who has created a genre of her own—queer, punk, feminist, screwball noir. 

You also write for the New York Times Magazine—several essays for the First Words column on language, and in late 2015 you profiled the wonderful Mary Gaitskill—and you’ve written critical work for other publications, including Bookforum, where you’ve written about Zadie Smith, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, Lorrie Moore, and Anne Carson. Will we be seeing more of this kind of work from you? 
I hope so. I have wonderful editors at Bookforum and the New York Times Magazine—the great Michael Miller and Sasha Weiss—who let me, and on occasion push me, to veer off course and try something new. I’m very lucky in this way. And I love author profiles and essays on language not least because I’m always looking for ways to smuggle in book criticism where people don’t expect it. Book reviewing can get a bad rap as glorified book reports, when it really is this amazing instrument, this vocabulary of pleasure.

In an interview with the Columbia Daily Spectator, you mentioned that when you’re reviewing a book you read it twice, and then “The third time, I kind of dip in and out of it as I’m actually writing the review…and often as I’m writing, my opinion of the book radically changes.” I find this fascinating. Is this system unique to you, or is it somewhat prevalent among book critics? And do you find it at all frustrating—or perhaps rewarding—when your opinion about a book changes during the process of writing?
I suspect most reviewers experience this to some degree. It’s what makes it interesting, the process of self-interrogation: Why does that character please me? Why does she feel so real? What makes someone seem “real” in fiction anyway—and just what kind of achievement is it? It’s a conversation with the self, with one’s own tastes and biases—or it is for me at any rate. There’s something Cezanne said that I think about a lot, something like, “I know what I am looking at, but what am I seeing?” That’s what reviewing feels like to me. It’s very much to “re-view,” to see again, to try to see farther and see deeper.

Social media: helpful or a hindrance? 
Neither—an occasional pleasure. I’m not really on social media; I’m only on Twitter and that only nominally. I’m too secretive and long-winded and erratic in my habits—but how I love to eavesdrop. 

In your NBCC speech you said, “A review is someone performing thinking, and our finest reviewers are, to my mind, no less remarkable than our finest athletes: What do they do but exercise their precision, subtlety, and stamina for our enjoyment?” Aside from your esteemed colleagues at the New York Times, who do you think are some of our finest reviewers working today? 
Kathryn Schulz is almost upsettingly good, isn’t she? Who else can move so effortlessly between science and literary fiction? She has the range. And I think she’s one of the few white writers I know who consistently and interestingly thinks about race. Kevin Young is a genius. I think Dayna Tortorici is an extremely fine and precise thinker, and I wish she’d review more. The Irish critic Mark O’Connell can’t write a boring sentence. I love Steph Burt’s mission to find and defend the new. And then, of course, there’s James Wood. I’ll never forget reading him on how Orwell possibly cribbed a detail from Tolstoy—a man about to be executed adjusting a blindfold that was tied too tightly. I was unspeakably envious. To be on such intimate terms with these books—what could be better?  

 

Michael Taeckens has worked in publishing since 1995. He is a literary publicist and cofounder of Broadside PR (broadsidepr.com).

Parul Sehgal (Credit: David Surowiecki)

Reviewers & Critics: Kevin Nguyen of GQ

by

Michael Taeckens

September/October 2017
8.16.17

In Print and Online

Kevin Nguyen is the digital deputy editor of GQ, where he writes about books, music, and popular media. He grew up outside of Boston in the 1990s and attended the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. Since moving to New York City five years ago, he has run the Best Books of the Month feature at Amazon and was editorial director at Oyster, “the Netflix for books,” then Google Play Books after the tech giant acquired Oyster in 2015. He can be followed on Twitter, @knguyen.

At GQ you mostly work on reported features, but you also compile a Best Books of the Month feature. How many books do you receive each month, and of those how many are typically included in your roundups?
I went on vacation last week and returned to four mail crates of unopened galleys. So I’m getting something in the vicinity of fifty to seventy-five books a week. And honestly, I wish publishers wouldn’t send me things unsolicited. Most of those books are never going to be touched, and eventually they are shipped off to Housing Works for donation. In a given month I’ll try roughly twenty books. From those I’ll finish about half, maybe slightly more. And then I’ll pick about half of those—so it’s somewhere between four and six books each month. It really depends on how strong that month is.

In an ideal world, I would just request those books and not receive any mail. It feels like such a waste, but once you’re on those distribution lists, there’s no getting off them.

It’s funny. If I died today, the books would keep coming to the office, and I think about the poor person who would get stuck dealing with several thousand pounds of galleys each month. Which is why I plan to never die.

What sorts of things, if any, influence you when choosing which titles to include: blurbs, pre-pub reviews, large advances, social media buzz? What about your relationships with publicists and editors—do those ever hold any sway?
I keep a very long spreadsheet of books that are coming out, based on a combination of catalogs, publicist and editor pitches, Kirkus, previews from places like the Millions, and of course, word of mouth. Twitter can be a good signal, but its taste is fairly narrow.

I do read a lot of stuff blind, too. My equivalent of digging through the slush pile is browsing through everything available as a digital galley on Edelweiss.

Blurbs mean nothing. Same with big advances. Honestly, by the time the galley rolls around I’ve forgotten what I read about it in Publishers Lunch. I’ve been doing this for [checks watch], oh, Jesus, nearly seven years now. But I’ve got a system that works.

How conscientious are you about diversity—gender, race, sexual orientation, and so on—when choosing what to include? And do you try to pay attention to books published outside of the Big Five publishers?
Most people won’t cop to this, but I pay pretty close attention to making sure my list is inclusive. That spreadsheet I was talking about has a column that denotes if an author is a woman or a person of color, so I can make sure that there’s never a month when I am reading only white dudes. It feels weird—I am literally checking boxes—but it’s also a way to keep me honest.

On the upside, usually what I gravitate toward in terms of stories tends to be inherently diverse. You read enough and you see that a lot of books by white authors suffer from a kind of maddening sameness—thankfully you can identify this from the first fifty or so pages, if not sooner. Publishing has made slow strides forward in putting out books by people of color. Big lead titles are more diverse than ever.

And, of course, that spreadsheet also lists publishers. I make sure to read across the Big Five and indies each month. It’s probably the most useful column I have. Penguin Random House controls over 50 percent of trade publishing, and you could easily make the mistake of reviewing exclusively their books.

You’ve also edited some excellent literary features at GQ—Kima Jones’s interview with Colson Whitehead and Alex Shephard’s piece on Jonathan Safran Foer, to name just two examples. What goes into these features? Are you conceiving of them? Do you have much leeway when it comes to assigning literary coverage at GQ?
Both of those stories were my idea. Since we’re not a book-specific outfit, we have to find a story deeper than “this is a new book.” It has to speak to a broader audience, and that restraint had led to better pieces, in my opinion. 

Kima and Alex did a great job with both, even though they were very different. Kima went deep with Colson Whitehead, and we were confident that the strength and reception of The Underground Railroad would justify going to such an intense place with the interview. For the Foer piece, it was a profile because we knew he was in an interesting inflection point in his career. Plus he surrendered some weird quotes about Natalie Portman. Love him or hate him, the guy is worth reading about. 

You’ve written eloquently about the overwhelming whiteness in the U.S. literary culture and publishing industry. What critical steps do you think need to be made to diversify the literary ecosphere? In your recent Millions article you pointed out one bright spot of 2016: the momentous National Book Awards ceremony, so much of which was due to the National Book Foundation’s executive director, Lisa Lucas. Have you seen any other positive changes over the past couple of years?
As I mentioned earlier, publishing is a behemoth that is trudging along slowly in the direction of progress. But it still has a long way to go. Publishers used to excuse themselves by saying that the data showed books by people of color didn’t sell—a disingenuous claim. Well, in the past three years, we’ve seen some tremendously successful fiction by authors of color. So now editors and agents can’t say that anymore. Progress marches forward, and even the most reluctant figures have no choice but to be dragged along. I hope that in the next five or ten years, literary events will become spaces that are less oppressively white. I think we can get there.

You’ve had an interesting career path in the literary industry, with a notable stretch at the editorial side of Amazon, where you ran the Best Books of the Month feature. What was it like behind the scenes there? Did you and your team have full editorial control over which books you picked each month?
Amazon is bizarre, man! But the editorial team was—and still is—great. Real readers, with full editorial freedom. There was never any pressure to include or exclude anything, at least not in my time there. Remember that summer when Amazon was refusing to stock books from Hachette? It was one of the reasons I left the company. But one of the last Best of the Month lists I put together included Edan Lepucki’s California, a Hachette title we couldn’t even sell. Nobody at Amazon gave us a hard time about that, even when Stephen Colbert made that book a symbol against Amazon’s vicious business tactics. I don’t think Amazon is good for the world, but that editorial team is a bright spot in a bleak machine.

After Amazon you worked for two years at Oyster, an e-book streaming service billed as the “Netflix of books,” which was bought and later closed by Google Play. At Oyster you launched the Oyster Review, a remarkable online literary magazine that included reviews, interviews, essays, and book lists and featured an impressive roster of writers and critics. What went into creating and running that magazine?
A lot! Oh, man, but what a fun time. Basically, Oyster attempted to capture the indie bookstore feel and taste and personality in the digital space, as opposed to the big-box retail approach of Amazon. We hoped both could coexist, just like they do in brick-and-mortar.

The Oyster Review was the place where we’d establish our literary identity. Every great indie bookstore has one. And online, what you do instead of shelves and author events is publish reviews and essays and comics. I edited and art-directed the whole thing. And most people didn’t see this because it was in the Oyster app, but there was a whole mobile experience that had to be designed for too. So from conception to construction to day-to-day editing and production, I had a hand in all of it. And I loved doing it.

Obviously, it didn’t totally work out. But Google acquired the company, and one of the big selling points to them outside the engineering was the Oyster Review and all the fine editorial work we’d done. I’m very proud of that. I mean, has a tech company ever acquired a literary magazine before? It might be the first and last time that ever happens.

In addition to reviewing books and writing about literary culture, you’ve written widely about TV, movies, and gaming. Have your interests in fields outside of literature influenced and informed your literary criticism and vice versa?
Oh, definitely. You can tell the reviewers who do only books. There’s a strange stilted myopia there. I think the best writers have broader interests and can talk intelligently about other mediums.

Of those publications that still devote space to literary criticism, which are your favorites? Are there any book critics whose work you particularly enjoy?
Bookforum is probably the most complete publication out there. It has a strong perspective and tone and taste. Plus, the reviews are damn good. I wish they’d do a little more online so more people could see it.

I keep waiting for someone to start the Pitchfork of books, but every new book-related site that launches ends up feeling so flat and overly positive. Oh, and too damn white.

Name three books you’ve read in the past year that really knocked your socks off.
White Tears by Hari Kunzru by a mile. What a tremendous, smart, weird book. I tore through The Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann in a couple of days. And Ottessa Moshfegh’s short stories in Homesick for Another World have stayed with me in strange and surprising ways.

 

Michael Taeckens has worked in publishing since 1995. He is a literary publicist and cofounder of Broadside PR. 

Reviewers & Critics: Dwight Garner of the New York Times
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Reviewers & Critics: Carolyn Kellogg of the Los Angeles Times

Reviewers & Critics: Laila Lalami of the Nation

by

Michael Taeckens

May/June 2018
4.11.18

In Print and Online

Laila Lalami is well known for her extraordinary fiction; she is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (Algonquin Books, 2005), Secret Son (Algonquin Books, 2009), and The Moor’s Account (Pantheon, 2014), the most recent of which appeared on the longlist for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and was named a finalist for that year’s Pulitzer Prize. But she is equally well known for her sagacious literary criticism and writings on politics and culture. Over the past thirteen years she has written book reviews for a wide array of outlets, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe. Lalami reviewed fiction and nonfiction for the Nation from 2005 to 2016, at which point she started writing the Between the Lines column for the magazine. Since 2016 she’s also been a critic-at-large—along with nine other writers, including Alexander Chee, Marlon James, and Viet Thanh Nguyen—for the Los Angeles Times, where she writes mostly about the literary life. Lalami, who was born in Rabat, Morocco, and educated there as well as in Great Britain and the United States, is likewise highly regarded because of her popular literary blog, Moorish Girl, which she launched in 2001 and, after the publication of Secret Son, folded into her website, lailalalami.com. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of California in Riverside. You can follow her on Twitter, @LailaLalami.

You got your start writing for the Oregonian in 2005, reviewing books by Reza Aslan, Luis Alberto Urrea, Salman Rushdie, and Zadie Smith. What path led you to literary criticism, and how did that relationship with the Oregonian begin?
At the time I had just moved to Portland from Los Angeles and was working on my first collection of short stories. It was a lonely time in my life—I knew perhaps two or three people in the entire city—so the book section of the Oregonian became a kind of conversation I missed having about books. I also had a literary blog where I wrote about stories or novels I was reading, and that helped me broaden my reading interests. I think I was drawn to criticism because it gave me an opportunity to articulate what I thought about a piece of writing—what it tried to do, whether it succeeded, and, if so, how it succeeded. But the only way to find out if I could do it was to give it a try. So I wrote to Jeff Baker, who was the book review editor for the Oregonian, and asked if he might be interested in having me write about a book I’d just finished. It was slated to be published the following month, so it was already assigned, but he looked up some of my writing on the blog and asked me if I was interested in Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter. Before that review came out we were already talking about doing a piece on Reza Aslan’s No god but God. Some weeks later Adam Shatz, who at that time was the literary editor of the Nation, asked me if I would be interested in reviewing for the magazine. This gave me the opportunity to write longer pieces on the work of Tahar Ben Jelloun, J. M. Coetzee, Joan Scott, and Percival Everett, among many others.

You’ve also published many essays and opinion pieces over the years—including multiple pieces for the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, and the Los Angeles Times. How does your literary criticism inform your political and cultural analysis, and vice versa?
When I write literary criticism, I try to be open to the premise of the work, to discover what the intention was, and whether that intention was fulfilled in the text. I examine the choices that have been made, in terms of characterization or point of view or tone, and whether these choices were effective. I think of it as a journey of exploration into another writer’s mind. But the essays I’ve been writing for the New York Times Magazine involve turning the appraising gaze inward. Often I use my own experiences to explain or inform how I view a particular subject, whether it be the building of a wall along the border with Mexico or the Trump administration’s executive order on immigration. I’m also now a columnist for the Nation, and that of course means building an argument while also advocating for a particular position or a given policy. But what all these forms of writing have in common, for me, is the imperative to place the subject within a very clear context for the reader and to be intellectually honest about it.

What sorts of things influence you when deciding whether or not to review a book?
Three things: time, contribution, ethics. I have to balance my writing and my teaching with all of my other commitments, so typically the first question for me is whether I have the time to read and think about the book thoroughly. The second question I ask myself is whether I have anything useful to contribute to the conversation about it. Would I be a good reader for this particular book? And the third question is: Can I be fair about it? I don’t do reviews if there’s an ethical conflict with the author, if we’re friends or colleagues.

You review both fiction and nonfiction. Do you have a preference for one over the other?
No. I really enjoy doing both because they’re so different and make me grow as a reader and as a person. When I review nonfiction I tend to do a lot of background research, which takes up a lot of time. With fiction I don’t need to do much research for the review, but I usually end up reading related things, like other books by the same writer.

Do you have a favorite book review you’ve written?
That is a tough question! I enjoyed writing about Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton for the Nation. The review I heard the most about from readers—and still do, ten years later!—was a piece I did on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji’s books, also for the Nation.

When you’re reviewing a new book from an author with previous books to his or her name, do you read the author’s backlist as well?
Oh yes. This is what I meant earlier when I said that I try to place the book in a clear context. I take note of the book’s literary antecedents, by which I mean works that might have informed it or influenced it. I also read the author’s previous books, to see how they might relate to the one under consideration.

You’ve reviewed graphic memoirs by Alison Bechdel, Marjane Satrapi, and Riad Sattouf. Can you reflect on the differences between reviewing this increasingly popular literary genre—work that is just as much visual as textual—and work that is entirely textual?
Comic books and graphic novels were a huge part of my life when I was growing up, so I’ve always had a soft spot for them. My husband has a significant comic book collection, so they’re always around the house. Still, I fear I am more limited in this genre because I don’t have visual arts training, and I try not to take on an assignment unless I’m really drawn to the subject matter.

Having published three works of fiction, you must know well the hopes and anxieties authors have about book reviews. How does it feel to be operating from the other side, as a critic?
It’s not easy. But I also know that the act of reading is by its nature biased: Each reader brings his or her own literary background and personal experiences to the act of interpretation. When I work on a review I try to keep in mind that my first responsibility is to readers: It’s my job to tell them about the book, what it has to say about the world, and how well I think it does this.

The literary industry and the literary media landscape have changed considerably since you began publishing. The detrimental effects are well chronicled; are there any changes you’ve noticed that you find positive?
It seems to me the entire landscape changes every five years. But I think one positive development is that the barriers for entry are a lot smaller now than they used to be. The literary conversation takes place mostly online, but anyone can set up social media accounts and instantly connect to other readers, writers, and critics. It’s never been easier to research agents or literary magazines or story contests than at the present moment. Unfortunately this hasn’t had much of an impact yet on the well-documented inequities in the publishing business. We need change there, too.

If you could change one thing about the book-reviewing process or the world of book criticism, what would it be?
I would love to see more effort and rigor in criticism of books by writers of color. There is a tendency, among certain critics, to treat writing by white writers as literature and writing by writers of color as ethnology. A lot of space is devoted to the scrupulous tallying of cultural detail and relatively little to literary choices made by the writer. I also wish that American critics would try to read a bit more world literature and literature in translation.

You’re active and quite popular on social media. How useful do you find it as a critic and as a writer?
As a writer I’ve found it to be a disturbingly effective procrastination tool. Never is the temptation to tweet stronger for me than when I’m on my second cup of coffee and it’s time to start working on my manuscript. A few years ago I bought software that blocks the Internet for up to eight hours, and I really don’t know what I would do without it. As a critic, though, I think social media can be quite dangerous. A place with so many opinions makes it hard to maintain independent thinking.

Which book critics, past or present, do you particularly admire?
So many. I came across the work of Edward Said and Chinua Achebe when I was in graduate school, and their criticism was at once a revelation and an inspiration for me. I’ve also learned a lot from Ngugı wa Thiong’o and James Baldwin. I still return to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark because she’s so incredibly perceptive. Among the younger critics, I often read Parul Sehgal, Michael Gorra, and Pankaj Mishra.

What books that you aren’t reviewing are you most looking forward to reading in the near future?
I’m really excited about Zadie Smith’s new collection of essays, Feel Free. I really loved her previous book of essays. In fiction I’m looking forward to Denis Johnson’s The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage, and Lauren Groff’s Florida.

 

Michael Taeckens has worked in the publishing business since 1995. He is a cofounder of Broadside: Expert Literary PR (broadsidepr.com).

Reviewers & Critics: Leigh Haber of O, the Oprah Magazine
Reviewers & Critics: Kevin Nguyen of GQ
Reviewers & Critics: Parul Sehgal of the New York Times Book Review

Reviewers & Critics: Parul Sehgal of the New York Times Book Review

by

Michael Taeckens

May/June 2017
4.12.17

In Print and Online

Parul Sehgal is a senior editor and columnist at the New York Times Book Review. Previously she was books editor at NPR and a senior editor at Publishers Weekly. She grew up in Washington, D.C., Delhi, Manila, Budapest, and Montreal, where she studied political science at McGill University, and moved to New York City in 2005 to study fiction in the MFA program at Columbia University. In 2010 she was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. Her TED talk on literature, titled “An Ode to Envy,” has been viewed more than two million times since it was posted in the summer of 2013.

What was your path to becoming a literary critic?
Random and inevitable. I’ve written a bit about how books were a highly controlled substance in my childhood home. My mother had a marvelous, idiosyncratic library—lots of André Gide, Jean Genet, and Oscar Wilde, lots of philosophy, and lots of Jackie Collins. But she was terribly strict, and the library was off-limits to us. Naturally my sister and I became the most frantic little book thieves; I must have spent the first decade of my life with a novel—and usually something massively inappropriate like Judy Blume’s Wifey or Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge—stuffed in the waistband of my pants. Reading was an illicit, compulsive, and very private activity for me; discovering criticism—in the Washington Post Book World—opened up a whole world. I suddenly had interlocutors. It was thrilling.

More prosaically—and to the point—I needed a job after graduate school, and Publishers Weekly was hiring. From there I started freelancing for a number of places: Bookforum, Slate, the New York Times Book Review. I just got addicted to the form, its constraints and possibilities. Book reviews remind me of that great Zoë Heller line about kissing: It’s about trying to be creative in a limited space.

Has your background in creative writing informed your work as a literary critic? Do you think literary criticism as a practical pursuit can be taught, and do you think it should be in MFA programs? 
It has given me a huge admiration for fiction writing. It’s lonely and difficult work, and I think having attempted it helps me treat books with care and respect. I found MFA workshops enormously helpful too, but not for the expected reasons. I don’t think they made me a better writer, but I learned how a certain class of people talked about literature. There was a whole depressing vocabulary: about reader “investment,” about how certain effects were “achieved” or endings “earned.” Has anyone written about when and why so much finance jargon has migrated into fiction classrooms? As for whether criticism should be taught, why not? Good criticism can refresh our responses. Last year I taught a class on criticism at Columbia that was largely devoted to unlearning boring, clichéd, or, worse, fashionable ways of thinking about books. And given how difficult the world is for young writers, why shouldn’t myriad kinds of practical writing be taught in these programs—book reviewing, grant writing, copyediting? 

Talk a little bit about your role at the New York Times Book Review—what kinds of books do you oversee, and within those categories, how many books do you look through on a weekly basis? 
I live in the shadow of wobbly stacks of books…who knows how many? I shudder to count. I handle a variety of topics: some fiction, lots of nonfiction—science, technology, philosophy, psychology, nature, and religion. 

Other than your interest in a particular author, what sorts of things influence you when selecting a book for coverage? Do relationships with editors and/or publicists help? What about blurbs and pre-publication reviews?
I look at everything—blurbs, trade publications—but it really comes down to sitting with the book and reading those first few pages or chapters, waiting for a voice and argument to emerge. I don’t think relationships in publishing do much to influence my thinking, but there are a few editors I really admire, who have interesting minds and interesting taste: Fiona McCrae and Jeff Shotts at Graywolf, Eric Chinski at FSG, Ed Park at Penguin Press. I’m always curious to see what they’re up to. 

You write Roving Eye, a brilliant New York Times Book Review column devoted to international literature. What was the genesis of this column? Considering that international literature by and large gets such short shrift in U.S. culture, do you see this column as a corrective of sorts?
Thank you! All credit to the editor, Pamela Paul, who’s a champion of international literature. I think the column is partly a corrective—but that sounds so dry and dutiful, no? I like to think of it as a way for readers to discover not only books in translation but books that are exploring some terrain or technique we might not have encountered—as with the Lebanese writer Rabee Jaber, who is so much more sophisticated on terrorism and political violence than any American writer I’ve read, or the French writer Virginie Despentes, who has created a genre of her own—queer, punk, feminist, screwball noir. 

You also write for the New York Times Magazine—several essays for the First Words column on language, and in late 2015 you profiled the wonderful Mary Gaitskill—and you’ve written critical work for other publications, including Bookforum, where you’ve written about Zadie Smith, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, Lorrie Moore, and Anne Carson. Will we be seeing more of this kind of work from you? 
I hope so. I have wonderful editors at Bookforum and the New York Times Magazine—the great Michael Miller and Sasha Weiss—who let me, and on occasion push me, to veer off course and try something new. I’m very lucky in this way. And I love author profiles and essays on language not least because I’m always looking for ways to smuggle in book criticism where people don’t expect it. Book reviewing can get a bad rap as glorified book reports, when it really is this amazing instrument, this vocabulary of pleasure.

In an interview with the Columbia Daily Spectator, you mentioned that when you’re reviewing a book you read it twice, and then “The third time, I kind of dip in and out of it as I’m actually writing the review…and often as I’m writing, my opinion of the book radically changes.” I find this fascinating. Is this system unique to you, or is it somewhat prevalent among book critics? And do you find it at all frustrating—or perhaps rewarding—when your opinion about a book changes during the process of writing?
I suspect most reviewers experience this to some degree. It’s what makes it interesting, the process of self-interrogation: Why does that character please me? Why does she feel so real? What makes someone seem “real” in fiction anyway—and just what kind of achievement is it? It’s a conversation with the self, with one’s own tastes and biases—or it is for me at any rate. There’s something Cezanne said that I think about a lot, something like, “I know what I am looking at, but what am I seeing?” That’s what reviewing feels like to me. It’s very much to “re-view,” to see again, to try to see farther and see deeper.

Social media: helpful or a hindrance? 
Neither—an occasional pleasure. I’m not really on social media; I’m only on Twitter and that only nominally. I’m too secretive and long-winded and erratic in my habits—but how I love to eavesdrop. 

In your NBCC speech you said, “A review is someone performing thinking, and our finest reviewers are, to my mind, no less remarkable than our finest athletes: What do they do but exercise their precision, subtlety, and stamina for our enjoyment?” Aside from your esteemed colleagues at the New York Times, who do you think are some of our finest reviewers working today? 
Kathryn Schulz is almost upsettingly good, isn’t she? Who else can move so effortlessly between science and literary fiction? She has the range. And I think she’s one of the few white writers I know who consistently and interestingly thinks about race. Kevin Young is a genius. I think Dayna Tortorici is an extremely fine and precise thinker, and I wish she’d review more. The Irish critic Mark O’Connell can’t write a boring sentence. I love Steph Burt’s mission to find and defend the new. And then, of course, there’s James Wood. I’ll never forget reading him on how Orwell possibly cribbed a detail from Tolstoy—a man about to be executed adjusting a blindfold that was tied too tightly. I was unspeakably envious. To be on such intimate terms with these books—what could be better?  

 

Michael Taeckens has worked in publishing since 1995. He is a literary publicist and cofounder of Broadside PR (broadsidepr.com).

Parul Sehgal (Credit: David Surowiecki)

Reviewers & Critics: Laura Miller of Slate

by

Michael Taeckens

March/April 2017
2.15.17

In Print and Online

Laura Miller, a journalist and critic living in New York City, is a books and culture columnist for Slate. In 1995 she cofounded Salon, one of the first online-only magazines, where she worked as an editor and staff writer for twenty years. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, and the New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the “Last Word” column in 2003 and 2004. She is the author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia (Little, Brown, 2008) and editor of The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors (Penguin, 2000) and Literary Wonderlands: A Journey Through the Greatest Fictional Worlds Ever Created (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2016).

 

What was it like writing about books for a web publication in the 1990s, when print criticism still completely dominated the scene? Did you have a particular mission in mind for literary coverage when you launched Salon?
It was a great time to be writing and editing pieces about books because the idea of an Internet magazine was totally new. There were no rules. But there were also no guidelines. We had to make things up as we went along, and from square one, which is an experience hard to convey now, when everyone is used to getting journalism online. I spent a lot of time just drawing rectangles on legal pads trying to conceptualize how to publish a “magazine” that had no material substance. But that scrambling was very much outweighed by the thrill of doing more or less exactly what we wanted. With no metrics, no conventional wisdom about what “worked” online, we had a very rare freedom. I also worked with amazing people. Dwight Garner edited our books coverage back then, and every November we’d go on these epic reading binges to come up with a year-end top-ten list between the two of us.

The main thing we aimed to do was to bring a more elastic, less stuffy style to bear on literary criticism and journalism, a more informal voice. That voice is now ubiquitous on the Internet, so it’s also hard to convey just how refreshing it felt. We often used reviewers, Stephanie Zacharek and Charles Taylor in particular, who were primarily film critics of the Pauline Kael school—although they were very knowledgeable about books. If we had a mission, it was to bring that kind of lively, vernacular approach to book criticism and journalism.

Did Salon’s books coverage change in style or volume during your two decades there?
Enormously. We went from running a book review every day to running a couple of books pieces per day along with the review during the dot-com boom, to, near the end of my tenure, a definite press from above not to cover books at all unless they offered a “red meat” political angle. That’s one of the reasons I left Salon—its divestment from substantive literary coverage.

Now, at Slate, do you purposefully seek books from presses outside the Big Five?
At Slate I’m fortunate enough to work closely with a great editor, Dan Kois, and we kick a bunch of ideas around every month or so. The focus is more on what will make an interesting “column,” which is technically what I write for Slate, although it sort of alternates between reviews and essays. As a journalist, your concern is for your readers—and editors/bosses—with providing them with interesting, arresting, trenchant writing. It’s nice if that also means bringing attention to a smaller press offering, but that’s not a priority. No respectable literary journalist considers helping out authors or publishers to be a central purpose. That would be a big mistake. A publication commands a significant audience because it prioritizes running pieces that are interesting and meaningful to that audience. Once you start to put someone else’s needs ahead of your readership, they tend to evaporate. Readers are really good at detecting ulterior motives.

In an interview with the National Book Critics Circle, you said, “I’m under the impression that most literary critics are primarily interested in writing, and while I find that subject fascinating, I am probably more interested in reading.” I find this rather intriguing, and think it’s a chief reason your writing on literary culture is so distinctive. Can you elaborate on your statement here?
We live in a time when everyone wants to write and seemingly no one “has time” to read. Everyone wants to speak and increasingly few people want to listen. People sometimes scoff when I make this observation and claim that aspiring writers read more than anyone else, but that is not my experience. I’m constantly meeting people who, when they learn what I do, always want to talk about the book they plan to write despite the fact that they seem to find no books worth reading. We fetishize the idea of being a writer in a variety of ways, most of them narcissistic. So when I meet a big reader who professes no desire to write, I think of them as a beautiful, almost mythical creature, like a unicorn, to be celebrated.

I also believe that reading is a profoundly creative act, that every act of reading is a collaboration between author and reader. I don’t understand why more people aren’t interested in this alchemy. It’s such an act of grace to give someone else ten or fifteen hours out of your own irreplaceable life, and allow their voice, thoughts, and imaginings into your head. I can’t respect any writer who isn’t abjectly grateful for the faith, generosity, and trust in that. I think there’s an unspoken, maybe even unconscious contempt for reading as merely “passive” in many people who obsess about writers and writing. Discussion of writers and writing generally bores me. But I’m always interested in why people read and why they like what they like. That’s far more likely to surprise and enlighten me than someone fretting about daily word counts and agonizing over their process.

Another hallmark of your critical writing is your interest in and attention to a vast array of authors—from Haruki Murakami, Rachel Kushner, Helen Oyeyemi, and Colson Whitehead to George R. R. Martin, Tana French, Neil Gaiman, and Elmore Leonard. How do you choose which authors to write about and which books to review?
I can’t say! I follow my nose, I guess. I’m generally looking for something that interests me because that’s the only means I have for inferring what might interest my readers, which is always the first goal. Genre is a complicated issue because it can be both an unfair stigma and an identifier of books that are reliably formulaic in an uninteresting way. But as a rule I find that it’s pretty easy to ignore genre divisions. They’re a marketing tool for publishers and readers with specific tastes, but it doesn’t serve a critic to believe in them unquestioningly.

How conscientious are you about diversity—gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.—when choosing what to write about?
As a duty, not much—and really, what writer wants to be read out of someone’s sense of obligation or desire to look good to others? But it would be very boring to constantly read and write about the same sorts of books with the same sorts of people in them, so variety is something I seek out.

Is there anything from the publishing side that raises your interest in a particular book or author—the size of the advance, notable blurbs, your relationship with an editor or publicist?
There are some editors with distinct tastes worth following (or avoiding), and a handful of publicists I trust to tip me off that something might really appeal to me. But mostly I tune out the marketing because it’s just not a reliable indicator of a book’s merit. Blurbs are hopeless: They’re mostly the result of favor trading. I do pay attention to trade reviews, and within the business of covering and publishing books there’s an extensive grapevine that I try to tap into frequently. Those are impartial takes. One thing I’d say to smaller publishers is, if they get starred trade reviews it would be worth it to send an email saying, “Would you like to see a copy?” If it’s not a press I work with a lot or have in my rolodex, making it easier to act on advance reviews is helpful. There are weeks when I just don’t have time to hunt down the contact information online.

You also write about a fair amount of nonfiction as well. Do you believe that reviewing a work of fiction is a markedly different art from reviewing a work of nonfiction?
Of course. Fiction is a work of art conjured out of whole cloth. It may be based on real world events and people, but it has no obligation to them. Nonfiction has a relationship to the truth that also needs to be considered. On a journalistic level, readers are typically more interested in nonfiction reviews. A review of a novel is interesting to the extent that you’ve read or intend to read the book, but you can learn something from a review of a nonfiction book even if you never read the book itself. People like learning stuff.

In August 2012 you wrote a Salon article, “The Case for Positive Book Reviews.” Where do you stand on the value of negative reviews?
I don’t think that a harsh (or even a merely unenthusiastic) review of an obscure book has much meaning in a world where the vast majority of books go almost entirely unnoticed. “Guess what. A book you’ve never heard of isn’t much good” is not an appealing premise for most readers. On the other hand, when a book has some stature in the world, it’s another matter; knocking down the unjustly prominent is part of a critic’s mandate. It’s just that hardly any books are prominent. Readers often really enjoy savage or derisive reviews. There’s a great, pent-up feeling of resentment out there on the part of readers who feel that they are constantly being sold—by reviewers and publishers—on books that are bad or just far less good than the praise they get. It’s kind of dumb, because what’s going on is usually just a disparity in taste, but we persist in the desire to believe that there are objective, consensus standards of good and bad. There aren’t. I’m not very keen on gratifying the anger people inflict on themselves as a result of embracing that belief at the expense of some poor author who has no responsibility for this.

Have you ever changed your mind about a book that you praised or panned years earlier? Has a work of criticism ever changed your opinion of a writer’s work?
I have to be constantly reading new books, so I rarely get the opportunity to revisit anything. Sometimes I bail on a book if the first chapter or two don’t grab me, and then later the enthusiasm of others makes me wonder if I should have persisted. But by the time I’ve read and written about a book, my opinion is pretty solid.

What advice do you give to young students who aim to become professional critics?
My advice to people who want to be professional critics is not to. It wouldn’t be responsible to encourage young people to pursue a career path that is so economically unfeasible. It’s a nice sideline, but the only deliberate path I can think of to recommend is journalism school. There you can at least learn an assortment of skills by which you might—might—someday make a living as a writer. But it would be smarter to have a reliable day job that pays the bills and gets you out into the world and then write reviews on the side.

How many books do you typically receive per week—and of those, how many are you able to write about each month?
I get maybe seventy-five to a hundred books per week. It depends on the week. I write about three or four new books per month, since sometimes the topics of my column aren’t specific new books but an essay about a cultural topic or author/book from the past.

In an interview with Daniel Mendelsohn you stated that Twitter is “an absurd place to look for literary criticism.” Outside of that, has social media been helpful at all in your role as a literary critic?
I follow many people whose opinions and taste I value, so if they’re enthusing about a forthcoming book, I want to know that. This is especially true of big readers who are not writers—booksellers, bloggers, vloggers, etc.—and who operate outside of book/publishing enclaves. I like to know what all kinds of people are reading and what they think of it, especially if they’re the sort of people who pay real money for the books they read. I don’t follow publishers and I take all recommendations from published authors with a huge grain of salt because, as with blurbs, that part of Twitter is full of disingenuous logrolling.

What books that you aren’t reviewing are you most looking forward to reading in the near future?
I’m a big audiobook fan, so I fill in the gaps of my work-related reading with listening. I really don’t need to be doing any more sitting down, thanks very much. The titles tend to be a mix of classics—as much Trollope as I can get—and new fiction that for one reason or another I didn’t end up reviewing, like Nathan Hill’s The Nix and Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees. I’m addicted to Audible’s daily deals for members, which offers all kinds of titles for five dollars or less. That’s where all my impulse buying goes, and I’ll probably never have time to listen to everything I’ve bought from them. 

 

Michael Taeckens has worked in the publishing business since 1995. He is a cofounder of Broadside: Expert Literary PR (broadsidepr.com).

In Print and Online

Daniel Mendelsohn of the New York Review of Books. (Credit: Matt Mendelsohn)

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Manuel Muñoz Directs Arizona MFA

Jessica Kashiwabara

This fall Manuel Muñoz will become the new director of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona in Tucson, succeeding writer Ander Monson. Established in 1972, the fully funded program recently switched to a three-year model and offers degrees in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, as well as opportunities to work with small presses, literary journals, and arts organizations. With more than ten years of experience on the faculty, Muñoz has a clear vision of how to create a collaborative and inclusive community at the program, which counts Francisco Cantú, Jos Charles, Antonya Nelson, Alberto Ríos, Agha Shahid Ali, Richard Siken, and David Foster Wallace among its graduates. Muñoz received an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University and has published a novel, What You See in the Dark (Algonquin Books, 2011), and two story collections. A few months before the start of his position, Muñoz discussed his new role and offered advice for prospective students.

What is an overlooked benefit of attending an MFA program?
Community connections—both within a supportive program and in the larger region in which it is situated—are crucial to how we shape ourselves as artists. Solitude at the desk is necessary, but collaboration is just as essential.

MFA programs have been criticized as spaces that are not safe or helpful for writers of color. How can programs create spaces that honor diversity of race and background?
In the past few years we’ve made strides in speaking about these issues as a program, rather than leaving it to the autonomy of the individual workshop. That’s the major difference between my MFA experience twenty years ago and the expectations now. As someone who is both queer and brown, I don’t know if safe is a word I will ever be comfortable using, but inclusivity, empathetic responsiveness, and deep engagement are all goals that we aim for. Every year a new cohort comes in, and it is our responsibility to set the expectations for the community we hope to create. This is hard work. Yet creating—and maintaining—spaces for all writers can’t always fall on faculty of color or queer professors or women. When it does, the resources need to be there. This year the directorship stipend was cut in half, which puts a damper on the pride of being one of the few writers of color to lead an MFA program. As more underrepresented groups enter the academy and assume administrative duties, university leadership will have to honor their stated goals in diversity hiring and retention efforts and commit the resources. Budgetary restrictions are real and dire at many universities, that’s true. But so is the importance of visibility when underrepresented writers see themselves reflected in leadership roles and that those faculty are respected by the institutions that ask them to do this work.

Why is full funding so important?
It alleviates some of the competitiveness or feelings of favoritism that can distract from the work. More important, it sends a strong message about a university’s values regarding literary activity and the place of writing, reading, and thinking in our larger culture. We need to find ways to ensure that students are not crushed by the staggering debt that is affecting this generation. 

The University of Arizona program must be a big part of the Tucson literary community. Do you want the program to focus on nurturing writers from the region or do you want to bring in students from all over?
Both! Writers from the Southwest certainly see how important it is to delve into history, current events, and environmental studies, but curiosity leads all of us to explore. We see undergraduates go to the coasts, and we get applicants from all over the country who are drawn to the special nature of the desert. We’ve also seen a strong interest from international students, who see Arizona as a unique window into U.S. culture and life.

How does the program’s location impact the focus or social awareness of your students? Does the city of Tucson influence your students’ work?
It’s been important for the University of Arizona to acknowledge that it is located on the original homelands of the Indigenous peoples of this area. It dispels the notion that the university or even the city itself is the center—we’re not. For some writers, that appreciation does change the dynamic of their work. Whether it’s an interest in border politics or queer archives, they soon discover that they are stepping midstream into work already in progress. The awareness that one is a contributor, not an originator, is humbling and important.

There are a number of journals and presses affiliated with the university, as well as the Poetry Center and the Institute of the Environment and more. Why is it important to make these kinds of publications and spaces available to graduate students?
Our students learn a lot from seeing how writing is shepherded into the world: how journals are produced, how editorial work relies on curiosity and networking, and how creative projects can by “read” by the university as important engines for grant writing and research activity. The Poetry Center provides students with direct access to understanding how a national treasure promotes literary access and outreach. The fantastic panoply of literary journals—from Ander Monson’s superbly designed DIAGRAM to Kate Bernheimer’s deeply rich Fairy Tale Review—inspires not only editorial participation but an opportunity for students to benefit from the curatorial expertise of these faculty. The students are eager to act on their knowledge for their own projects and the results are inspiring: witness the online literary project Territory, which program alums Nick Greer and Thomas Mira y Lopez started a few years ago.  

Any advice for MFA applicants?
In their artistic statements, many applicants comment on the time they need to write. That is certainly valuable, but our best writers have been the ones who can articulate how they are ready to transform and grow once they get here, rather than stick rigidly to their initial understandings. Can you take measure of all the resources available and find which will inspire a spirit of imagination and collaboration? Does a program provide a supportive atmosphere for you to experiment and try new things? One recent grad, Raquel Gutiérrez, came in with the poetry cohort, but has exited with “Brown Neon,” a nonfiction manuscript that has just been acquired by Coffee House Press. The project was informed by this terrain, by ongoing questions of artistic engagement, and by the urgent politics of the day. It’s a wonderful example of a writer who continues to work in one genre, but is inspired to read, explore, and create deeply in another.

What is a frequent mistake you see applicants making? 
I see two missteps frequently. The first is assuming that you can only work with someone who is in close aesthetic alignment.  I might be a “fuddy-duddy realist,” as I often call myself, but I read widely and with curiosity and engagement. I’ve worked with all manner of aesthetic approaches, and it’s fun to learn along with my students. All good faculty members are like this. They’re ready to help you in your development. They’re not seeking mirrors of themselves. Second, it’s easy to spot a statement that is written as what the applicant thinks we “might want to hear.” Authenticity comes from a writer’s genuine excitement in thinking about how they might proceed once they’ve considered place, resources, and faculty: They’ve got a plan and are not afraid to dream a little bit in their statements about why this particular program can make it come true.

Is there an element of the job of director of a creative writing program that gets overlooked? 
Though I am new to the position, I can see the ongoing need to communicate how vital the creative arts are to the health and integrity of a university. There is always dialogue about how we create and keep space open for creative endeavor to be an integral part in what the university calls “research.” Creativity and the arts must always be part of a shared mission, especially as a land-grant university and a Hispanic-Serving Institution. 

What are you excited about? What keeps you interested in the future of creative writing programs? 
I get most excited when I can speak about how our creative writing program has always been part of innovative campus and community dialogues, from medical humanities to ecological awareness. Our students keep showing us new ways in which creative writing is a natural foundation to innovative thinking, advocacy, and leadership.

 

Jessica Kashiwabara is the senior web editor of Poets & Writers, Inc.

September/October 2019

Tucson, Arizona

by

Ander Monson

6.28.16

Online Only

Ander Monson is the author of a number of paraphernalia including a website, a decoder wheel, several chapbooks, as well as six books, most recently Letter to a Future Lover (Graywolf Press, 2015). He lives in Tucson where he directs the MFA program at the University of Arizona and is the editor of the journal DIAGRAM, Essay Daily, and the New Michigan Press.

Hailing from the far northern part of Michigan (four hours farther north than so-called Northern Michigan), I was initially skeptical about Tucson and the flat, dry desert Southwest. Wasn’t it, you know, pretty much Phoenix—lawns and pools and Ikeas? The answer, as you’ll quickly see, is a resounding no. I moved here in 2008 for a job at the University of Arizona (UA), sight unseen except for a two-day whirlwind interview and tour, abbreviated due to yet another blizzard and series of canceled flights in my home state and the hell hub of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. I’d lived with my family in Saudi Arabia for a couple years just before the first Iraq War and the desert there is a very different sort of desert than the Sonoran Desert that surrounds Tucson and extends into northern Sonora, Mexico. As Tucsonans will tell you, the area around Tucson isn’t technically desert at all: It’s semiarid. It gets about twelve inches of rain a year, is bordered on all sides by mountains, and is surprisingly green. Spend a week here and you’ll learn to love the ocotillo, the iconic saguaro, and the palo verde, Arizona’s alien-skinned state tree.

I found—and you’ll find—that Tucson is a lovely, and in many ways, still-undiscovered city, particularly spectacular at night, since the International Dark-Sky Association recommends limiting the number of streetlights to prevent light pollution in order to allow the astronomers at nearby observatories to do their work. And whether you’re here for the University of Arizona, one of the major hubs of literary culture in this city, or not, Tucson offers rich soil (metaphorically speaking, obviously; though there’s enough agriculture in the county—think Pima cotton, which is harvested from Tucson’s Pima County and other nearby counties—to make it a literal reference) for readers and writers of all sorts.

Public Habitats for Books
Despite the closing of independent bookstores, the digitizing of all media, and the ritual bemoaning of this by writers and readers, I’ve found reassurance by reading and writing in many of Tucson’s diverse libraries that physical books still serve a purpose. I often scour old books for odd and lovely schematics to reprint in the online magazine I run, DIAGRAM—which features reprinted and original diagrams along with original prose, poetry, and images. In doing so, I’ve also stumbled upon books I would have never discovered otherwise, and found objects and marginalia and images tucked into books that remind me books have histories; they’re made objects. From my time spent in libraries, I’ve finished a collection of essays written in response to these objects and texts, which I’ve tucked back where I found them as notes to future readers.

While the University of Arizona Main Library (1510 East University Boulevard) is certainly the best place to run across odd marginalia and old books—it houses a peculiar collection of so-called scientific texts on metaphysics, telekinesis, mediums, and the spirit world, and you can watch part of UA football games from the back side of the fifth floor that overlooks the stadium—there are more specialized branches on campus I’d encourage you to seek out. Special Collections (1510 East University Boulevard) houses the Art of the Book, one of the largest collections of artists books in the country, and includes limited editions by small presses, miniature books, special volumes created by notable binders, and pop-up books. For the possibility of discovering treasures such as books like the collected London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, I’m most partial to the Science-Engineering Library (744 North Highland Avenue) for its Spartan grandeur, the old engineering texts, and, amusingly, the intensely text-messaging students dutifully ignoring most of the books. The Center for Creative Photography (1030 North Olive Road), cofounded in 1975 by Ansel Adams and former university president John P. Schaefer, has world-class research archives and exhibitions and is the “largest institution in the world devoted to documenting the history of North American photography.” Here one can survey the complete archives of Adams, Edward Weston, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Frederick Sommer, W. Eugene Smith, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and Garry Winogrand. It’s all housed in a fantastic building with enough space to get your head into the space for words.

A more esoteric experience can be had at the Peggy J. Slusser Memorial Philatelic Library. At 920 North First Avenue just north of University Boulevard, is a still-operating post office that houses Civil War memorabilia and western, particularly Arizona-related, postal history. Libraries like this are notable for their oddity and specificity. Their archives are far from digitized, so you’ll have to come in to browse. This is a good thing, particularly for the essayist (or any writer looking for interesting material), as you’re more likely to stumble on the thing you really need on the shelf or in the box next to the thing you thought you wanted. Googling is fine in a pinch, but it lacks the pleasure of peripheral discovery. While you’re there ask librarian Lisa Hodgkins about the history of camel mail in the Southwest, started by Jefferson Davis in 1855, and discontinued shortly after.

The Pima County Public Library system operates twenty branches in the metro area, but the one to go to, in Tucson’s increasingly happening downtown, is the Joel D. Valdez Mail Library (101 North Stone Avenue), particularly for its unique offering: a Seed Library that contains many varieties of vegetable plant seeds available for check out (and presumably to plant). Librarians ask you to donate seeds from the plants you grow, returning the book, so to speak. Because of its downtown location, this branch also collects the best weirdos—perfect for observation. It’s energizing to write in spaces like this, filled with live readers reading.

Commercial Habitats
When it comes to independent bookstores that carry new books, Antigone Books (411 North Fourth Avenue) is one of the few in town. A fairly small but busy store, the solar-powered, self-described “zany bookstore with a feminist slant” Antigone once hosted the Other Voices Women’s Reading Series, where I saw Alison Hawthorne Deming, Kathe Lison, Cybele Knowles, Fenton Johnson, Chris Cokinos, and many more read. Antigone also hosts book groups, and readings and author signings by touring and local authors, who usually but not exclusively have some local connection.

Across the street and two blocks south is the Book Stop (214 North Fourth Avenue), a used and antiquarian bookstore with a knowledgeable staff and an esoteric selection. It’s worth a visit for books containing strange and amusing marginalia. For instance, I found a copy of Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island with an epic inscription from one ex-lover to another. It stretched pages, detailing the drugs they took, the “friend with the nocturnal monkey-like animal,” and the spectacular metaphysical, metatextual sex they had, only to end in a sad but knowing acknowledgment that they would never see each other again. This, dear reader, is the sort of history that you won’t get buying e-books on your Kindle Fire.

The king of used books (and vinyl, CDs, video games, musical equipment, and really anything else that’s used and related to media) in Tucson is the most excellent Bookmans Entertainment Exchange, with three locations (6230 East Speedway Boulevard, 3733 West Ina Road, 1930 East Grant Road). Each has its own flavor. The Grant location is popular with students and features unusual wares, for instance rock collections; the Ina location is more upscale, since it’s closer to the Catalina Foothills, a ritzy area on the north side of Tucson; the Speedway location has the best selection of vinyl and board games, plus you can stop in next door to the local gem Beyond Bread and sandwich your day away. Though none of the locations host readings or signings, they do serve up coffee, a huge selection of books, and Wi-Fi—as do all the bigger bookstores, but this local chain is making book buying, selling, and browsing an experience again. The crowd knows this, which is why the parking lot is always mobbed. When was the last time you saw that at a bookstore?

Breeding Grounds for Books
Tucson is the home to a number of nationally known literary journals and presses that form the backbone of Tucson’s literary culture, including the increasingly influential Letter Machine Editions, a nonprofit publisher of prose and poetry founded in 2007 by Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson the Volta­, an online poetry, poetics, and epic interview emporium; the Destroyer, edited by Drew Krewer and Maureen McHugh; and Fairy Tale Review and its accompanying press, edited by Kate Bernheimer.

My own magazine of lit, oddness, and esoterica, DIAGRAM, published by New Michigan Press, is in its sixteenth year and continues to publish six issues a year. Though primarily online, one might find us in print at times too. New Michigan also publishes a chapbook series and DIAGRAM anthologies, and, with other local presses and magazines like Spork and Kore, participates in readings and events such as the Lit Press Fest for Teens that takes place at the University of Arizona Poetry Center each spring, featuring readings and workshops for teens and adults on DIY publishing, book binding, and letterpress printing.

Terrain.org, the oldest literary magazine online, founded in 1997 and edited by Simmons Buntin, is a “journal of the built and natural environments” that publishes great work (particularly nonfiction), both lyric and technical, loosely organized around the ways in which we live in and with our environments, with an emphasis on the desert Southwest. Terrain hosts readings and conversations, typically at the UA Poetry Center, and workshops.

The flagship literary journal of Tucson, Sonora Review, is one of the oldest student-edited journals in America. Founded in 1980 as a biannual print journal, it’s still produced twice a year by students in UA’s MFA Program. A well-known special issue paid tribute to Arizona alum and former Sonora Review editor David Foster Wallace, and covers feature work from the extensive local art scene. Sonora Review curates a reading series with established authors such as Sean Lovelace and Mark Neely and upcoming talents at bars like Club Congress, sponsors literary events that raise awareness about border issues, and facilitates workshops in area schools.

Spork, a now-legendary literary magazine and press, run by Drew Burk, Andrew Shuta, Richard Siken, and a rotating cast of other editors who include poet Jake Levine and fiction writer Joel Smith, sponsors one-off readings at Club Congress and elsewhere that have featured authors such as fiction writers Colin Winnette and Amelia Gray. Their new storefront (2229 East Broadway Boulevard) carries Spork Press books and titles from other small presses, doubles as their production facility, and hosts readings and live music.

Trickhouse.org is an awesomely messy art/writing/performance project founded by Noah Saterstrom that hosts an occasional reading/performance series, usually held at Casa Libre en La Solana, almost always pairing artists or performers with writers.

Unfairly, I always forget about the University of Arizona Press (1510 East University Boulevard), housed in the Main Library, when thinking of all the great literature being made and published in this city. Because the press primarily publishes academic and regional books, it’s easy to overlook their Southwest-themed poetry and prose series. It too hosts readings in the city and nationally. In fact, the press hosted poet Julie Paegle at a killer reading at the Small Press Lit Fest in 2011. I’ve since devoured her poetry collection torch song tango choir—a revelation and a reminder that UA Press deserves more of my attention.

If one of Tucson’s literary hearts is located at the University of Arizona (particularly in the UA Poetry Center—more to come on that later), the other might be POG, “a collective of poets, literary critics, and practitioners of other art forms” that runs many of the non-University poetry readings in Tucson. Recent events featured Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, Julie Carr, and Fred at the Conrad Wilde Gallery (101 West Sixth Street #121), a performance space where many of the readings are held, or at Club Congress (311 East Congress Street), arguably the best bar in Tucson (and one of the classic American bars, as many national publications will remind you), where I saw poet Lisa Robertson a couple years ago. Club Congress is a rock club located in Hotel Congress, built in 1919 and largely unchanged since then, it’s a reminder of the history of Tucson’s Wild West. (If you’re interested in this stuff, check out Old Tucson Studios west of the city, where many classic westerns were filmed.) Congress also hosts the best list of smaller indie rock shows in the city: Okkervil River, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, the Kills, just to name a few who’ve performed over the last few years. 

I like to drink at Congress (the bartenders there make most excellent cocktails and know their beer) and watch a show or a reading, but recently I’ve started attending the hypercompetitive Geeks Who Drink trivia nights there, and in spite of assembling a dream team of knowledgeable literati including Cybele Knowles, Jamison Crabtree, and Joshua Marie Wilkinson, we’ve only managed to win one so far, won in an impressive lightning round performance by Laura Owen.

Kore Press (240 North Court Avenue), led by Lisa Bowden, is another contender for Tucson’s literary heart, or at least one powerful ventricle. Devoted to publishing the work of women since 1993, Kore holds readings and performances throughout the city, including the Big Read project, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, which presented the work of Emily Dickinson in readings and performances at the UA Poetry Center, Pima Community College Center for the Arts, Tucson High Magnet School auditorium, Club Congress, and elsewhere. They also head up Grrrls Literary Activism Project, which encourages community involvement “through art activism, editorials, video and radio broadcasts, public readings, city council meetings, interviewing officials, journalists, artists, and more” through a series of workshops, internships, and much more. Did I mention they also publish some kickass writing? They do.

An Interlude
Before I get to the UA Poetry Center, which deserves and will receive its own paragraph, how about a break? With all the literary action—and I haven’t even touched on the mountains and the spectacular bike trails; Tucson has the most miles of bike trails, paths, and lanes per capita in the nation—you need to take breaks in Tucson. I recommend the chopped salad with a cup of Mexican organic blend, which inexplicably I cannot replicate at home, at Ike’s Place (100 North Stone Avenue #111), the local coffee chain. Coffee is essential for my process, maybe too for yours, as is the anonymity offered by such public spaces.

Given that we all start with the blank white page, I find myself craving input, like the conversations I overhear at the Cartel Coffee Lab (2516 North Campbell Avenue and downtown at 210 East Broadway), full-on hipstered up with a limited menu of varietals, Wi-Fi, indie rock, and dialogue straight out of the television show Portlandia. It’s worth noting that many of my writer-friends, however, write in the more mellow atmosphere at Raging Sage Coffee Roasters (2458 North Campbell Avenue). They always recommend the scones, which though I have historically scoffed at because a scone is a terrible pastry, I finally tried last year and was blown away. So I also now recommend the scones.

Edward Abbey, Joseph Wood Krutch, and many of the authors associated with this sunburnt, unpretentious patch of Southwest would surely recommend you skip the coffee and head out of the city for a hike or a ramble. I say have the coffee and take on a trail run (hiking in less than half the time!), maybe to Seven Falls up in Sabino Canyon (technically Bear Canyon, but the easiest entrance point is through Sabino; it’s about a seven to eight mile round-trip from the entrance). Mountains are in every direction, so you can have your pick depending on how wuss or butch you imagine yourself to be. Mountains and desert lead to silence, self-reckoning, and sometimes to self-erasure, all of which are crucial for writing. Drink a lot of water and bring plenty more. Wear a hat and sunblock. This place will drain you if you’re not careful.

Fauna
Many writers live in Tucson all or part of the year. Lydia Millet, author of Sweet Lamb of Heaven (Norton, 2016), haunts coffee shops and racquet clubs, but is not picky where she writes. You might find Kate Bernheimer, founder and editor of the Fairy Tale Review and author of How a Mother Weaned Her Girl From Fairy Tales (Coffee House Press, 2014) at the Red Garter Bar & Grill (3143 East Speedway Boulevard) or at Time Market (444 East University Boulevard). Joy Williams, author of The Visiting Privilege (Knopf, 2015), lives here part of the year in the foothills but would not appreciate your pilgrimage or intrusion to her property. Nature writer Gary Paul Nabhan and poets Luci Tapahonso and Jane Miller reside here too. You might well find my colleagues Beth Alvarado, Susan Briante, Chris Cokinos, Barbara Cully, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Elizabeth Evans, Julie Iromuanya, Fenton Johnson, Farid Matuk, Manuel Muñoz, Boyer Rickel, Aurelie Sheehan, and Joshua Marie Wilkinson haunting the Modern Languages building on the UA campus at night. I keep crossing paths with Sherwin Bitsui, author of Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), in airports coming to or going away from Tucson. Also in the area are recent Yale Younger Poets Katherine Larson and Eduardo C. Corral (well, Corral hails from not far away in Casa Grande, but we would like to claim him as our own) and past Yale Younger Poet Richard Siken. Half the bars here are stocked with Yale Youngers, who would be happy to regale you with tales of squalor and glory. Leslie Marmon Silko, author of Garden in the Dunes (Simon & Schuster, 2000) and winner of the 1991 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, lives close too, as does the journalist Charles Bowden, at least part-time. I’ve run into Rick Moody a couple times at El Charro Café (311 North Court Avenue) and Casa Libre en La Solana, though he’s only an occasional visitor, not a resident. This is to say nothing of the younger phalanx of perhaps less-well known writers whose names, by the time you read this, may spark your interest more quickly than this laundry list.

The Big Yearly Rituals
The Tucson Poetry Festival, directed by Teré Fowler-Chapman, is a thirty-five-year-old celebration that has kept performance at the forefront of the art form by combining top-notch, cutting-edge writers (recent festivals included Eduardo C. Corral, Karyna McGlynn, Patricia Smith, Claudia Rankine, Xavier Cavazos, and your correspondent) with themes that encourage the poets to engage with the moment and create as they celebrate. The organizers have always included events that enact poetry in real-time, from improvisational concerts to theatrical collaborations. The festival is also the scene of Tucson’s annual Team Selection slam, which determines the group of slam poets who will represent Tucson at the national competition, and an effort is made every year to include at least one voice from this recent development in American poetry.

For those more interested in performance/slam work, you might try Words on the Avenue, also directed by Teré Fowler-Chapman, which runs a reading series on the last Sunday of every month at Caffé Passé (415 North Fourth Avenue), which has a devoted following. Their plan is “simple: to unify the writing world by creating a space where all genres can coexist. We have freestyles, slam poets, nonfiction/fiction writers, storytellers, and more.” It’s worth your time. 

For the seriously bookish visitor (which you, reader, doubtlessly are), the Tucson Festival of Books, held in March, is probably the ideal time for a literary visit to the city to experience workshops, readings, and panels of every sort held on the UA’s campus during students’ spring break. Though the festival is only three years old, it’s among the largest literary festivals in the country, with over a hundred thousand attendees and over four hundred fifty participating authors. Notable authors participating in recent years include Jim Harrison and J. A. Jance and many, many others. It’s the fourth-biggest book festival in the country. Hundreds of exhibitors, including many of the presses and journals mentioned above, have booths selling publications and books, lead workshops for adults and children, and sell local, delicious food. I go to see the names that I love, particularly poets and smaller press authors with lower profiles. You can wait in line to see the big names, too, but my strategy is to lay low and try to catch up to one or more of them at bars or restaurants after the events.

Feeding and Watering
In trying to catch up with those authors, I’d start with Club Congress, or perhaps Pasco (820 East University Boulevard), within walking distance from the campus, which serves sustainable, locally grown and ranched food and offers homemade herbal-infused cocktails. Being an Upper Michigan boy at heart, I prefer the less-esoteric, but still upscale and delicious, Wilko (943 East University Boulevard), just west of the university’s main drag, which has its own small library, if you’re looking for reading material while you people watch (I also set up shop here sometimes to write). It has good beer on tap and a craft-cocktail menu established by the same knowledgeable hipsters who did up the great 47 Scott (47 North Scott Avenue), which serves comfort food. I can speak for the BLT + T & A (the T and A being turkey and avocado) and the Sonoran Bratwurst, a play on local delicacy the Sonoran Hot Dog (featured on national food and cooking shows many times over), which is a hot dog typically wrapped in bacon, deep-fried, covered in beans, tomatoes, crema, and god knows what else. They are really, really good. But if you’d like to try a Sonoran Hot Dog, you’d best head down to one of the El Guero Canelo locations (2480 North Oracle Road, 5802 East 22nd Street, or 5201 South Twelfth Street), or just buy them at the taco carts that dot the Tucson streets, particularly in summer evenings. While eating, wipe your hands, and then take some notes on Tucson’s own cultural mix: We’re so close to the border that I think a lot about what it means to be right up against the margin of a country, and against the margin of another, in a sort of intermediary state. Like my homeland in Upper Michigan up against the Canadian border, the writer visiting the city would be well advised to allow herself to seep in the different languages heard here, particularly on Tucson’s south side, and the different sorts of conversational rhythms, and think for a moment about the upsides of immigration reform: More cultural input equals more interesting thinking equals more interesting writing. Perhaps this mix of influences has led to the upswell of all these interesting poetry and prose writers that live in or pass through Tucson—after all it’s a lot easier to write from the margin.

The tragedy of the January 8, 2011, shootings are still alive in the minds of Tucsonans, particularly true of the patrons of local favorite bar the Shanty (401 East Ninth Street), where Gabrielle Giffords was and is a regular, just a block south of the Book Stop. Mentioned in the Economist as the site of meetings for the Baja Arizona separatist movement (some left-leaning and libertarian southern Arizonans want to secede from the state), it’s also the oldest continually licensed bar in Arizona. The Daily Show once filmed an unaired segment in the excellent and overgrown patio—a New Orleans–style space, hidden away, conducive to reflection and observation, or perhaps a quiet, slightly drunken revision. Writers pool here, too, perhaps because it was a regular haunt of Tucson’s dear poet Steve Orlen, who died in 2010. Drink a toast to him. Owner and bartender Bill Nugent runs a great bar with an extensive international bottled beer list—I’d recommend any of the St. Bernardus Trappist brews from Belgium (amazingly, the Shanty usually serves at least three varieties)—but he only has six or so on tap at any given time, and doesn’t serve food. So don’t drink too hard while revising. Or maybe: Do.

A margarita and a book by the pool is a good decision in the summer months. Or stop in at my favorite bar in Tucson, 1702 (1702 East Speedway Boulevard). While it doesn’t perhaps have a lot of official literary merit (aside from being a watering hole for quite a few writers), the beer selection (just shy of fifty) on tap is easily the best in the city, and the best I’ve seen in the state. It specializes in Belgians and big American microbrews, and 1702 has started brewing and pouring its own beers, too, which is a very welcome addition to the still young brewing scene in Arizona. You will likely find me there sampling one of their many Belgians and increasingly aggressive American IPAs.

Everything Revolves Around the Poetry Center
A visit to Tucson must include the University of Arizona Poetry Center (1508 East Helen Street), one of the largest poetry centers in the country. Directed by Tyler Meier, it is certainly the center of the literary culture in the city, and though associated with the university, it has a lively schedule of programs, ranging from workshops and classes and discussion groups to poetry programs for children, open to everyone. Founded in 1960, the institution features a research archive of over seventy thousand items, including forty-seven thousand volumes of poetry and twenty-eight thousand issues of journals and periodicals. The reading series is robust, to say the least, with several readings a month, usually drawing audiences of more than two hundred. I could name names, but you can just think of your own list of best-known poets in the world, and you can bet that many, if not most, of them have appeared in the Poetry Center’s reading series. The center also maintains an impressive audiovisual library. Trying to lay hands on Charles Baxter’s very rare early poetry collections Chameleon and The South Dakota Guidebook for an essay I was working on, I was pleased to find them in the Poetry Center library. I should not have been surprised, since the collection is epic and renowned, and open to anyone interested. These convergences happen all the time and make me happy to be a writer in Tucson.

The Poetry Center also offers a residency each summer to a poet. And, as Joseph Wood Krutch wrote, Tucson is most itself in the summer, when the snowbirds are gone and the students have departed. You’re left to negotiate with the sheer blistering fact of the sun (and thankfully of Tucson’s fifth season, the rainy, volatile monsoon, which provides a break from the heat and also offers arguably the best lightning in the country in July and August each year).

Aiding and Abetting Writers and Writing
Casa Libre en La Solana (228 North Fourth Avenue), offers a semiannual writing residency—past writers-in-residence include Camille Dungy, Jena Osman, Rick Moody, Frederic Tuten—and fiction and poetry workshops, and also prides itself as being Tucson’s event base, hosting some of the best readings in town, including the UA’s MFA student reading series on many Friday nights, the Fair Weather Reading Series (for emerging visiting or local writers), and Trickhouse Live, “an art and performance series that brings together people working with words, images, sounds, videos and a variety of performances” curated by editors at the journal Trickhouse.org.

I left the Pima Community College Writers’ Workshop (in May each year) off the previous edition of this guide, and regretted it, since it’s the best weekend workshop in town, and featured essayists Nicole Walker and Nancy Mairs and Tiphanie Yanique last time around, and we’re sorry we missed it. Check with the director, Meg Files, for this year’s lineup. It’s a great feature of the city that there is so much happening in any given month that I’m sure to have left something off, or something new sprang up without our noticing. Let me know and I’ll add it in for the next time around.

One could wander Tucson’s streets forever finding more great lit-related sites, groups, journals, and events, but I’ll end by wandering into the Book Art Collective and the Letterpress Lab (1035 North Mabel Street) to witness the printing and making of books. Though located at the University of Arizona, the lab has public access and offers five Vandercooks (Universal 1, Universal 1AB, SP-15, No. 2, and 219), a Pilot Press, and a Chandler Price 8 x 12 OS onsite along with a mass of type. If you know what those presses are, you’re probably salivating. If not, you should come by to experience literature literally in the making. You haven’t appreciated what it is to print a poem until you’ve had to painstakingly handset your own type and decide, “Oh, well, do I really need prognosticate when I could use foretell or augur’s shorter glory? Maybe I do, actually, for the line, but maybe not.” The collective also brings in notable makers of artist books, printers, and binders to lecture and hold workshops. In the age of the digitizing, e-booking, and Twitterization of everything, getting your hands dirty with the making of words, poems, stories, essays, and books feels suddenly very important, very timely, and very Tucson.

Degrees of Diversity: Talking Race and the MFA

by

Sonya Larson

September/October 2015
8.19.15

In Print and Online

It is no secret that MFA programs across the country have a way to go to ensure that their workshops are filled with racially and ethnically diverse faculty and students. Junot Díaz’s account of being a lone writer of color in his MFA program at Cornell University, “MFA vs. POC,” which appeared on the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog in April 2014, drew a flood of stories from writers who face similar frustration. The recent deaths of unarmed African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina; Ferguson, Missouri; New York City; Sanford, Florida; and in communities throughout the United States have stirred in many writers an urgent desire to examine the ways in which a racialized culture informs our art—in the way we write, read, and respond to racial complexities observed in the world. 

MFA programs are uniquely positioned to address such topics. But for many the path forward—if pursued at all—remains murky, contested, and fraught. In “The Student of Color in the Typical MFA Program,” published this past April in Gulf Coast, David Mura writes, “The divide between the way whites and people of color see the social reality around them is always there in our society…. Creative writing involves the very description of that reality, and so the gulf between the vision of whites and people of color is very present right there on the page. And so, conflict ensues.”

One program currently exploring these questions is the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, near Asheville, North Carolina. Founded in 1971 by poet Ellen Bryant Voigt, the country’s first low-residency program is known for its rigorous standards of textual examination and artistic integrity. Its pedagogical model, by now well refined, is nonetheless exercising its flexibility to welcome a more direct conversation among faculty and students about the intersection of culture and craft.

“The MFA landscape has altered considerably over the forty years of our existence,” says director Debra Allbery. “Our strategies must necessarily shift too—as literature changes, and as the culture changes.”

Voigt agrees. “We’ve certainly seen an increased urgency among individual student writers to locate themselves and their work within the evolving culture,” she says. For some, that urgency comes from self-identification with a particular ethnic or racial heritage. Others want to explore race as a means, as Voigt says, “to expand imaginative empathy without encroachment or appropriation.”

The program seeks to explore these questions the way it explores nearly all questions that arise for the writer: through rigorous study of craft. “Craft provides the language and tools through which we identify, articulate, and address all challenges we face in our poetry and fiction,” says Allbery. “As our program becomes more diverse, we’ve also been addressing these questions, during the residency when the community gathers, in multiple formats.”

During the program’s residency this past July, Warren Wilson MFA faculty members Lan Samantha Chang, David Haynes, A. Van Jordan, Monica Youn, and C. Dale Young presented “Shadowboxing: A Faculty Panel on the Intersections of Culture and Craft.” Chang, who is also the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; Haynes, the director of the creating writing program at Southern Methodist University in Dallas; Jordan, who teaches at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey; Youn, who teaches at Princeton University; and Young, who currently administers his own medical practice and practices medicine full-time, discussed their personal struggles regarding writing and identity, as well as the role of literary institutions in addressing (or perpetuating) these problems.

For many students, the mere occasion of the faculty panel sends a powerful message. “Knowing that we have the institutional support to engage with these thorny questions makes me feel that there is more possibility for dialogue, vulnerability, risk, and learning,” says poet and Warren Wilson student Sarah Pemberton Strong.

Fiction student Chantal Aida Gordon agrees. “The lack of diversity we see in MFA programs and in what gets published—and the often flat, cliché treatment of characters of color in contemporary literature—are truly scandalizing,” she says. “Student and faculty panels like the ones at Warren Wilson are a step in the right direction. But we have a long way to go.”

In a separate discussion led by students, writers were asked to speak frankly about their concerns, anxiety, or guilt. “I worry that my ignorance will get in the way of my intent to do no harm,” wrote one student in an anonymous prompt. Another wrote, “I worry that I don’t know how to write about my own people.” The message was clear. No one—faculty or students, white writers or writers of color—is immune to these struggles.

Meanwhile, recruiting more faculty and students of color to the program remains “a high priority,” says Allbery, who admits that that reality has been slow in coming. A reception sponsored by the Warren Wilson MFA program at the 2015 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Minneapolis specifically sought prospective students of color (a reception it plans to repeat at the 2016 conference in Los Angeles), and the program’s Holden Fund for Diversity has recently expanded to offer more grants for admitted students of color who demonstrate financial need.

What advice does Allbery have for other programs wanting to address these questions? “Listen,” she says. “An MFA program is a living thing, and a constantly adaptive organism. We invite feedback from our students. We respond. Mutual respect and aligned aims fuel every conversation. An MFA program dedicated to its students’ development has to keep channels of communication open.”

With practice, many in the program hope that these conversations will become easier—both to engage in as a community and to apply to one’s own work. In the meantime, many welcome the necessary difficulty. “I want more conversations like this,” one student wrote following the panel. “I want discussions to be honest and truthful and hard.”

Shadowboxing: A Faculty Panel on the Intersections of Culture and Craft

What follows is a curated selection of the most salient topics of the discussion, organized by the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, which took place on the campus near Asheville, North Carolina, on Friday, July 3, 2015.

POC in the MFA: Responding to Junot Díaz’s post

C. Dale Young: Nothing that Junot says in his post is remotely new to a writer of color—it is not, sadly, revolutionary; it is not shocking. For me, reading it, one thing that struck very close to home was how many things he brought up to which I could so easily say, “Well, yeah, of course.” And yet I had so many white friends who seemed completely shocked and flabbergasted by the article. I never read a writer of color in graduate school. And even now, when I open an anthology, I rarely ever find a Latino writer or an Asian American writer or an African American writer.

[The article] reinforced for a lot of writers of color this sensation that we live in two worlds: a world that we know, and a world where people have no concept of the actual things that we see all the time. It became very clear to me that the world writers of color live in is unseen.

Lan Samantha Chang: I think Junot and I are in almost the exact same generation. When we were kids, there weren’t many people of color in MFA programs. When I asked about it in my own program, someone said to me, “Oh, I don’t count these things.” But I counted.

A. Van Jordan: [As] you’re reading as a student you’re constantly trying to identify yourself…in terms of race, or just simply through experience…. If you don’t see yourself in the literature, you think, “Why am I here? Why am I trying to do this?” If you don’t see someone who’s had the same experience—whether it’s being an affluent African American, or from a poor rural Appalachian white community—you still want to see yourself.

Grappling With Craft and Culture

David Haynes: For me, it’s moments like Ferguson. People are being shot down in the street. I would describe what I do—for a long, long time—is write these comedies of manners that expose the foibles of daily lives of ordinary African Americans. Do I continue doing that when people are being shot down in the street?

Monica Youn: There’s this sense that if I mention kimchi in my poem, all of a sudden, I’m an ethnic writer. I myself have been trying to resist the impulse to “whitewash” my work. Do I take kimchi off the table? It’s hard for me to divorce form from subject matter, or at least image. The idea that there’s a refuge from politics in the poem is strange.

I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to “write Asian American.” If I don’t include markers, does it mean that I’m “writing white”? How do I write about Asian characters without specific markers? If I don’t do that, am I “writing white”?

Young: I get shoved into lots of boxes. I come from a very not-odd background if you’re from Latin America or the Caribbean: I’m part Indian (South Asian), part Chinese, and I’m also Hispanic. My mother’s English—as white as you can get. It’s hard for me to be against white people or reactive to anything, because then I’d feel reactive to some part of myself. There can be a sense that I’m not Asian enough, I’m not Latino enough.

This doesn’t come up much when I’m in the process of writing, when I’m actually drafting, but where it comes back up is in the revising. Do I want to highlight that, do I want to revise that?

Haynes: For me, it’s the “black enough” question. For the very first story I published, the editor…called me up on the phone and said, “I really like this story…but before I accept it I need to ask about your culture.” It was pretty clear in the conversation that if I gave the wrong answer, he wasn’t going to publish it. Because the characters in the story were African American, I think that if it [had been] written by a white writer, he wouldn’t have published it.

Everybody has an identity—we all have to think about it. But there’s this imposed voice up here, outside of me, that I have no control over, that’s doing this additional defining. How do I interact with it? Do I ignore it? Do I engage it? How do you do that and still get the work done?

Historical Origins of the “Identity vs. Text” Debate

Haynes: The whole idea of being cautious and careful about who you speak for, and not trespassing on other people’s cultural territories, comes out of [historical] changes in cultural anthropology. Simultaneously there were the influences of Marxist analysis in terms of capital and control of cultural products, in terms of who owns what story, and also the profits and cultural capital, and the idea that “since that belongs to that community, I can’t have a part of it. That’s their cultural capital, and it’s hands-off.”

These ideas became very deeply entrenched in literary studies. [Over] here we have writers who say it’s all about text and what’s on the page only. And writers over here saying that it’s all about identity and experience. That conversation has never been reconciled. So we see that tension present in how work is reviewed and discussed—“This isn’t poetry, it’s identity politics.” Or, “If I’m going to be taken seriously as a poet or a fiction writer, I’ve got to abandon identity and focus on other things.”

The “Closed Loop” of Publishing, Hiring, and Teaching

Young: In order to get a book published, you either have to embrace your diversity aspect or you have to go the complete opposite and write white. And then, once you publish, you must continue to publish the same kinds of books, over and over. So you can see how this ties in to the academic world. You need books to get hired, but if the same kinds of books are being published, then there can form a kind of closed loop.

Haynes: The issue for African American fiction writers is not the first book—it’s the second book. Because the first book, often, even if it’s well received, it rarely becomes a big best-seller. And that’s probably true of a lot of writers—it’s an impediment for literary fiction and, in particular, writers of color.

Writers of color often publish into a critical vacuum, meaning that the reviewers and the scholars have not been responding to the work. And in academia…you do not get promoted in African American Studies by writing about contemporary literature. And actually, you don’t get promoted in literary studies at all by writing about contemporary literature of any kind.

That’s a problem in terms of the ongoing development of the writer, because there’s no conversation being had about the aesthetic, about where the work is going. When that conversation becomes closed inside a community…it can be successful, but it can also become insular.

Navigating Identity In the Workshop

Young: There’s a word that I absolutely despise: universal. That almost invariably means “the majority culture.” It doesn’t mean “universal,” as in everyone. What it means is, “make it more like this, in order to be universal.” 

It’s a setup for students of color, who are also told to be authentic…you’re being told to be authentic, but if the detail you include is too specific, it’s not “universal.” So that sets up a weird binary that’s not useful.  If for me to be universal I have to be white, I can never be universal.

Haynes: [Let’s say] I’m the workshop leader, and I have a student who’s bringing very specific cultural material to the table. And the conversation comes up: “Well, I don’t understand what that means, so there needs to be a sentence in this story to explain it or to translate that.” Is it the institution’s job to have instructors in place who can help that student of color navigate that, or is that a personal problem?

The “given” response is, “Well, you’ve got to make that ‘accessible’ to ‘everybody.’” But should the institution be prepared to instead say, “Let’s talk about these broader issues of translation”? And if you do it, how to do it?

If the institution isn’t prepared to help that student navigate these questions of translation, the institution has not only failed that student but also all the other students in the program who they are supposedly preparing to go out and teach other students.

Jordan: I would want the institution to create a safe space for students to talk about whatever their subject is in their poem or story, and for them to be able to express their identity. Lorraine Hansberry talks about “the universality of specificity.” She’s saying that you don’t have to be poor, black, and on the South Side of Chicago in 1959 to experience what’s happening in Raisin in the Sun. When I read Chekhov, Joyce, Faulkner—people who have a very specific cultural identity in their work—that’s “the other” to me. [I’m] reading it through this lens of “the other,” but we’re considering it from the standpoint that it’s valid. That’s what’s important—that when [a student] brings work to the workshop, and it has that cultural identity within it, it still has to be seen as valid.  

Rage and Fear in Challenging Institutions

Haynes: One of the striking things about Junot’s post was the level of rage. The rage is about the difficulty of institutional change. Institutions—and particularly academic institutions—are by their nature conservative entities.

Youn: I think there is a space for rage in the wider culture that doesn’t necessarily translate into the academic culture. No one wants to be the “angry ethnic person.” It’s not going to help you get jobs and it’s not going to help you make friends. It takes writers with international stature or tenure in order to have the privilege to exert rage.

Haynes: My inner response to last summer’s student meeting was, “Be careful. Don’t get yourselves in trouble.”

Chang: Which is interesting, because there’s a huge emphasis on collegiality in academia. It’s a mentoring instinct. I’ve always felt that MFA programs are the opportunity to make representation more diverse. It’s a time in the life and artistic development of writers when these ideas are especially important. [The students] are sort of “fighting against the father,” and they’re going to “kill the father.” So it’s a great time to start these conversations. If it’s going to change, it’s going to change here.

Sonya Larson is a writer whose short fiction has appeared most recently in West Branch, Del Sol Review, the Red Mountain Review, and the Hub. She is at work on a novel about Chinese families living in the swamps of 1930s Mississippi. She is assistant director of the Muse and the Marketplace conference and is studying fiction at Warren Wilson College.

 

 

 

The Boat We Are Building: A New MFA Program Makes Diversity Its Mission

by

Rigoberto González

September/October 2018
9.12.18

In Print and Online

Two years ago, Gary Dop was about to enter his tenure year as a professor of English at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia. His debut poetry collection, Father, Child, Water, had recently been published by Red Hen Press and would help him secure a comfortable future as an academic. Dop grew up in a conservative military family, bouncing from Tennessee to Germany to Texas, and his goal to provide a different kind of upbringing and stability for his three daughters was now close to reality. It helped that he enjoyed teaching and had fallen in love with the natural landscape of the region—the college sits along the James River, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And yet he felt incomplete. If he was going to stay in this location for years to come, he realized he needed to continue to enrich it by inviting an entire writing community to join him. So he decided to build a low-residency MFA program. 

The product of a low-residency graduate writing program himself (he received his MFA at the University of Nebraska in Omaha), Dop appreciated the flexibility that the low-residency model allowed—a community that came together in the spirit of mentorship but then dispersed, the writers pursuing their own individual, independent  journeys. Dop joined forces with Laura-Gray Street, the English department chair at Randolph, who  holds a degree from Warren Wilson College’s low-residency MFA program near Asheville, North Carolina. Street and Dop held initial conversations with Randolph president Bradley W. Bateman to get the new program off the ground.  

“We’re at a small college, so we were able to have all those conversations within a few days,” Dop says. “At every turn the idea was met with enthusiasm and support.” 

In many ways it made sense that Randolph College should spearhead Virginia’s first and only low-residency MFA program. Founded in 1891 as Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, the institution, with its hundred-acre campus, boasts Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck as a notable alumna. In 1906 it became the first women’s college to be admitted to the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Southern States, and in 1916 it became the first women’s college south of the Potomac River to receive a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. The college became coeducational in 2006 and was renamed a year later, though it has sustained its commitment to women and has been home to a strong undergraduate creative writing curriculum since the 1980s.

The Randolph MFA in Creative Writing—which held its first residency in July—is yet another watershed moment for the college, which has nearly doubled its graduate student population with the inauguration of the new program. But simply creating yet another low-residency MFA program (there are sixty-four included in this year’s MFA Index on page 94) was not enough for its creators. This one had to be different. 

“We wanted to put together a program that educates students for the current landscape of literature,” Dop says. “This begins with faculty who are shaping literary culture and challenging us to be a program willing to take risks and remain relevant to the social and political climates.” 

“We had an extraordinary opportunity with this new program, at this college, in this city,” Street adds, “to bring together an energetic and diverse faculty in a way never seen before.” 

To begin recruiting faculty, Dop sought the advice of a distinguished advisory board, which includes Jeff Shotts, the executive editor of Graywolf Press, as well as writers Julie Schumacher, Eduardo C. Corral, Erika Meitner, Stephanie Burt, and Gregory Pardlo, who was the Emerging Writer in Residence at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in 2003. The advisory board made informed recommendations according to Dop’s wish list. In addition to faculty members who represented significant social diversity and literary excellence, he asked his advisers to consider one other stipulation: “Is this person kind?”

“This might seem like an odd question,” Dop says, “but when faculty spend ten days, twice a year, with students and you’re asking them to help shape the environment of a new program, you really want people who have a generous spirit.” So Dop and his colleagues did more than read each candidate’s work and assess résumés; they also scoured interviews, online and in print, and spoke to people who could provide meaningful insights into each candidate’s character. The reputation of the new program would be buoyed by the reputations of its faculty. 

And indeed the inaugural faculty is composed of early-career writers who are already reshaping the literary landscape. The impressive list includes poets Kaveh Akbar, Layli Long Soldier, and Phillip B. Williams; novelists and nonfiction writers Kaitlyn Greenidge, Mira Jacob, and Wayétu Moore; poet and novelist Erika L. Sánchez; and nonfiction writer Aviya Kushner. Street credits Camille T. Dungy, who held various faculty and administrative positions at Randolph College from 1999 to 2006, for demonstrating the level of creative energy that writers still early in their career were capable of bringing to a program. While she worked at Randolph, Dungy—who is now the author of four books of poetry and an essay collection, Guidebook to Relative Strangers (Norton, 2017)—was a Cave Canem fellow and had yet to release her first book. But through her planning of literary events and programming, she invited then-emerging writers such as Terrance Hayes, Tyehimba Jess, Tayari Jones, and A. Van Jordan to the college, impressing upon the department the benefits of a varied and inclusive literary education. 

“Camille brought a range of outstanding up-and-coming writers to the college,” Street says. “I feel this new MFA is Camille’s legacy or certainly a tribute to her presence and ongoing influence.”

That legacy can be clearly seen in the MFA program’s faculty—whose faces, when gathered together, make for a powerful image, providing an immediate understanding of Randolph College’s dedication to diversity. Williams, who is on the poetry faculty, is unequivocal about the new program’s mission. 

“We will be diverse in race, gender, sexuality, religion, and aesthetic interests,” he says, “and that diversity will be the foundational stone from which we build each other up in letters and in camaraderie.”

Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia. (Credit: Randolph College)

Other faculty members duly note the strategic selection of young, notable  literary figures. “The opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a singular new program, to be among this faculty, to help build something truly original with students who are as excited as I am—it’s a profound honor, a major occasion for gratitude,” says Akbar, who is also on the poetry faculty.  

“I’m so lucky to work with so many writers that I admire,” adds Sánchez, who will be teaching both fiction and poetry. “I expect that together we will foster a dynamic, compassionate, and rigorous writing community.” 

For Kushner, who is teaching fiction and nonfiction, joining the Randolph College faculty is also a bit personal. “I grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home in a Yiddish-speaking town in New York,” she says. “I often write about the experience of living between languages and crossing borders of faith, language, and culture. Low-residency programs offer essential access to writers who might otherwise not be able to earn an MFA, and increasing access is a key element of increasing diversity.” 

Dop understands that the culture and energy of a community has to take place organically, but he is also committed to guiding the tone of the program. He hopes to accomplish this through a series of talks, readings, and conversations about the complicated and troubling social and political climates that artists currently inhabit. “One of our panel discussions will be about the mental health of the artist,” he says. LuAnn Keener-Mikenas, a therapist and poet on staff at Randolph’s counseling center, will participate. 

“A writing program should not only invest in teaching students how to write better, but it must also provide guidance for the artist’s life, including and especially the mental and emotional health of artists,” Dop says. “It is a hollow reward to have a student who becomes an award-winning writer but feels alone and unable to find emotional and relational health. We can’t expect that we’ll be the source of a student’s holistic health, but we can expect that we’ll regularly create conversations within our community about belonging and psychological health and the way in which our program can do better to provide a safe space for all our students.”  

Dop doesn’t believe that creating a safe space means building a protective and insular bubble around the MFA community. On the contrary, it means coming to terms with one’s place in multiple environments, some of which are hostile. For such complexity of experience, Dop points out that the college’s location, in Lynchburg, might serve an asset. “Historically and presently, Virginia has been a space of conflict, embodying the worst and best of human choices,” he says. “Virginia knows democracy and genocide, slavery and freedom, racism and compassion, war and art. As we come together as writers, we won’t neglect what is still a very real part of life in the South. This is something our students can artfully engage with, if they so wish.”

Dop’s hope is that a diverse faculty will attract a diverse group of students and that a faculty of writers whose work is socially conscious will draw a particular type of student. “We want to welcome writers who are seeking to contribute meaningfully to our world,” Dop says. So far the applicant pool has yielded positive results, and the inaugural class of fourteen graduate students—among them poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers from throughout the United States—marks a promising beginning. Dop hopes the number of students will eventually grow to a robust community of forty-five to sixty writers across all three genres at each residency. “We can’t control all of the variables for who decides to attend Randolph,” Dop says. “But we can choose faculty who will signal the presence of a safe and productive environment for all writers—we want to be a community where all writers, including writers of color and LGBTQ writers, can thrive.”

Among the inaugural class is Jason Mendez, a nonfiction writer and interdisciplinary theater artist from the Bronx, New York. He was pleasantly surprised to find an MFA program with the kind of faculty he was looking for. “As a Puerto Rican writer, I need a community that I can fully trust with my work. I felt Randolph College’s faculty could resonate with my lived experiences and help me share my stories more creatively and effectively,” he says. 

For Amelia Harrington, a Georgia native raised in Virginia who is also a musician and a graduate of Randolph College’s undergraduate program, the new MFA program is exciting. “I want to be a part of its becoming,” she says. “I want to know and love and support the other writers who were chosen for this adventuresome undertaking.” As for Joseph Capehart, a Liberian American poet living in Brooklyn, New York, his interactions with both the faculty and administration have thus far been encouraging. “Their commitment to us promises to extend beyond the two-year program and into our futures as professionals and people,” he says. 

Apart from the obvious desire to mentor students who will go on to publish regularly and receive critical acclaim, Dop hopes this program will be known for nurturing literary citizenship. “I hope our faculty and students think of our program as belonging to them,” he says, “as one of the central communities of their lives.” 

Only time will tell whether the new program at Randolph College will live up to its creators’ hopes. If it succeeds it has the potential to offer a concrete solution to the perennial problem posed at institutions and academic conferences about achieving and sustaining diversity in the MFA classroom. What’s more, it could become a model for other programs—one that creates and sustains a community of writers that is truly representative of the myriad identities and voices of the United States. 

With the program’s inaugural year just under way, Dop is eager to assess the challenges and opportunities that present themselves and believes he can best serve the program by being its custodian. 

“I like that word,” he says. “It implies guardian, curator, caretaker of a vision to empower these talented, amazing writers to teach and write. I’ve learned enough now to know that belonging begins within and eventually grows to become a gift we give each other. I belong to this new community in as much as I care for myself and our students and faculty. What a joy this will be.” 

Part of that ongoing joy will be in selecting visiting writers to accompany the regular faculty during each residency (students attend five ten-day residencies, each held on the Lynchburg campus in the summer and winter throughout the two-year program, in addition to one-on-one faculty mentorship). Guest writers for upcoming residencies include advisory board members Stephanie Burt and Gregory Pardlo, as well as poet Tiana Clark, novelist and essayist Alexander Chee, novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn, and poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib. 

“It’s a thrilling time,” Dop says. “There’s a line at the end of Kaveh’s book that closes the last poem, and I’ve held on to it as it relates to our new program: ‘The boat [we are] building / will never be done.’ We’re just getting started!” 

 

Rigoberto González is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Clockwise from far upper left: faculty members Kaitlyn Greenidge, Erika L. Sánchez, Kaveh Akbar, Mira Jacob, Layli Long Soldier, Philip B. Williams, and Wayétu Moore. (Credit: Sánchez: Robyn Lindemann; Williams: Rachel Eliza Griffiths; Akbar: Marlon James; Jacob: In Kim)

In Print and Online

Manuel Muñoz  (Credit: Patri Hadad)

/ Aug 13, 2019 / Comments Off on Manuel Muñoz Directs Arizona MFA

Looking for Alaska

Looking for Alaska (Dutton Books, 2005), John Green’s debut young adult novel based on his own experiences at a boarding school, has been adapted into a television miniseries for Hulu. Created by Josh Schwartz, the teen drama stars Kristine Froseth, Charlie Plummer, Uriah Shelton, and Sofia Vassilieva.

Tags: 
Looking for Alaska | Dutton Books | 2005 | 2019 | John Green | trailer | television adaptation | television series | young adult
/ Aug 13, 2019 / Comments Off on Looking for Alaska

Hot Spots in Detroit

Poetry
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction
Cross-Genre

Exploring events in Detroit has been exciting this summer. There are a number of lesser-known venues in the city that have recently started hosting literary events. For those looking for a space to write or build community, the Room Project in the North End has been a go-to location for me. A membership includes use of the workspace, library, and podcast equipment. They also have an event space that hosts artist talks, readings, and writing workshops.

For a change of scenery and an interactive experience, Signal-Return in Eastern Market has hands-on workshops in their letterpress print shop as well as a range of public programming including exhibitions, book release parties, and the Motor Signal Reading Series cohosted by Literary Detroit. The series pairs a local writer with a traveling writer in a double-feature reading that includes an intermission activity with the audience.

Visiting these locations has been a pleasant learning opportunity on how to help build up the literary community across the city. Shout-out to other spots I’ve visited that I encourage all to check out: Artist Village Detroit, Book Suey, the Commons on Mack Avenue, and the Corner Ballpark.

Search the Literary Places and Reading Venues databases for spots to visit near you!

Justin Rogers is the literary outreach coordinator for Poets & Writers in Detroit. Contact him at Detroit@pw.org or on Twitter, @Detroitpworg.
LOC: 
Detroit
/ Aug 12, 2019 / Comments Off on Hot Spots in Detroit

Craft Capsule: Looking Elsewhere

Kimberly King Parsons

This is no. 41 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I should have been writing. Instead, I was on Netflix, scrolling through new releases, hiding from my novel and my children, who were being occupied by a ridiculously expensive babysitter in the next room. I was burnt out, stuck, and I chose a documentary on modern dance, something I know absolutely nothing about, because I liked the serene expression on one of the dancer’s faces on the cover. I thought maybe the film would be a relaxing break, that I could watch bodies glide across the screen without having to think too much.

Everyone else probably knows this already, but it turns out modern dance is not like ballet. In the opening scene of the documentary, choreographer Ohad Naharin teaches a young dancer how to fall. “Stop,” he says. “Stop. You’re guarding yourself. You need to lose control.” She makes the attempt three, four, five times, hitting the floor over and over. It’s painful to watch, but Naharin is right. The dancer is tentative, holding something back. “Are you stressed?” he asks her. “No,” she says. “So do it again,” he says. This time, the dancer seems to lose consciousness while she’s still standing. There is no hesitation, the fall utterly convincing as she collapses, her body slamming into the floor full force. It’s so beautiful, it makes me gasp. It makes me want to write.

One of my mentors talks about being “open for business.” For him that means being ready at the page, actively composing for a set amount of time each day. I’m not sure if it’s a matter of discipline or personality or what, but I’ve never been able to work like that for very long. I try to touch my projects regularly, but I’m more likely to write in fits and starts.

Later in that same modern dance documentary, a bit of mesmerizing choreography will teach me something crucial about the pacing of my novel. I’ve stared at a Pollock in a museum and realized I’d left something important out of a short story. A single gesture from Bela Tarr’s devastating movie Satantango once helped me understand the origin of a character’s rage. But I’ve also learned things from less likely places. I’ve figured out how to structure a story based on a common chord progression from a ’90s pop song. I’ve stolen a critical line of dialogue from a tampon commercial. It’s not that everything in life is inspiring—I personally find social media to be a wasteland—but it’s been surprising to see what seeps in and informs the work. For me, being open for business is about being deep in a project even when I haven’t opened the document for a week. It’s about noticing stuff, listening and synthesizing, realizing that the best lessons sometimes take place far from the page.

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection published by Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: The Art of Brutal Editing

by

Kimberly King Parsons

8.5.19

Online Only

This is no. 40 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Like a lot of writers, last November my friend Chad and I participated in a kind of modified National Novel Writing Month. We knew there was no way we would actually write a novel in a month; in fact, we’d already been writing our novels for years. But we decided to stick to a goal of 2,000 words a day, just to see if we could do it. Some days we ended up with a little less, and some days a little more, but on November 30, we each had close to 50,000 new words. By the first of December I’d deleted more than half of mine, but that’s okay—they were the wrong words.

Stripped down, slender novels are my very favorite kind. Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Andrés Barba’s Such Small Hands, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter—these books have a compression and intensity I find wildly appealing. Jenny Offill’s beautiful short novel Department of Speculation was borne of the ashes of something much longer. She’d been bogged down by a big project for years when a friend suggested she pull out her favorite ideas, lines, and images and start over with those scraps. Katherine Faw Morris’s brilliant Young Gods started out at 100,000 words but was published at just over 20,000. In a 2014 interview in Hobart, she talks about this brutal editing, something she did alone, before she had an agent or editor: “I was pretty sure that with every word I cut, I was making it more and more unsellable, but also that I was making it better. I was finally getting the feeling I wanted, which to me is the most important thing. This numb, cold, almost dead feeling: that’s what I wanted.” The sparse, “unsellable” version of her book sold immediately. 

My 2,000-words-a-day experiment wasn’t a failure—it’s just that I’ve learned it takes a lot of ridiculousness to get to what’s relevant, at least when I’m working on a novel. When I write short stories, I move from sentence to sentence, each one like a bead on a necklace. The smaller scale allows me to hold the entire piece in my hands at once, to see the arc in a matter of weeks or months, to only put down what is essential. For me, this isn’t possible with a novel. It’s taken years for me to realize what my book is even about, years to feel out the full story. I’m not even 100-percent certain I can see it all now—it’s still surprising to me every day. I’ll add in digressions or side plots and realize much later that they don’t matter. When I go back and read old sections, I find things I have no memory of writing. Sometimes, present-me is impressed by past-me. Good job, I’ll think. This thread has been there all along! Other times I think past-me must have been drunk or asleep or that she’s messing with me on purpose. Goodbye, ten-page monologue on Tupperware, I’ll say. Goodbye, bitter side character based on a Subway sandwich artist I slept with in 2002. It doesn’t make me feel anxious to hit delete. With every paragraph, page, scene, or chapter I cut, I feel happier with what I’ve done, more confident about what I’ve chosen to keep.

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: In Praise of Writing in Longhand

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.29.19

Online Only

This is no. 39 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

This sounds made up, but in my high school you could substitute a typing class for gym. As a bookish, lazy teenager, this was perfect for me. The class was called Fundamentals of Keyboarding, and we spent all semester doing home-key practices and speed drills. Near the end of each session the teacher would hand us some random page of text—it might be instructions for building a birdhouse or a page of a novel—and it was our job to type it, print it, and staple it to the original. I wasn’t great at a lot of things in high school, but I turned out to be a terrifically fast typist who rarely made mistakes; I loved holding the papers up to the light, seeing my words perfectly overlap with those on the handout. 

As an exercise in my first fiction workshop, the professor asked us to type a short story by our favorite writer. The idea was to feel the words come through our fingers, to pound out the rhythm of those admirable sentences ourselves. I still find typing immensely satisfying—it’s relaxing, almost a form of meditation. I like the mechanics of it, the way each letter translates to a physical movement, to a clicking sound, to a shape on the screen. I also have terrible handwriting. It’s barely legible and embarrassing, like someone has dared me to use my non-dominant hand. 

When I’m writing fiction, I’m typing on my laptop into a document, using the features meant to make things easy: cut, copy and paste, backspace. It’s convenient, it’s fast, and it’s the preferred method for most of the writers I know. I do a lot of pre-work in my head, by sound, so by the time I sit down to write, I have at least a few sentences ready. In the completely new sections, I’ll get into a flow, typing as fast as I can think, then doubling back and reading each sentence aloud. I’m constantly making changes as I go: correcting errors, substituting or cutting words, shifting whole sections around on the page.

But every once in a while I’ll get stuck, hung up on some fundamental, propulsive element of the story, like I’ve reached the end of the thread. Maybe I’m insecure about what comes next, paralyzed by doubt. Or maybe there’s a problem with a sentence I can’t work out on the screen, something tangled about the rhythm or syntax. As much as I hate it, the best thing I can do in this situation is pull the problem out of the computer and write it down.

All the usual disadvantages of writing in longhand become advantages: It’s slow, it requires more mechanical effort, the words must come in order with no easy erasures. I also have rules for myself: no crossing things out or moving/inserting words. If what I’ve written is wrong, I have to skip a line and write it again. If I realize halfway through a paragraph that a sentence belongs at some earlier point, I start the whole section over. When I’m writing things down, I press too hard and my hand cramps, so I have to take frequent breaks. This slow-building repetition lets me see the work differently. Writing in longhand is also uniquely tactile—there’s the feeling of the pen in my grip, my hand drifting across the page. I’m forcing my brain and body to connect with the story in a new way. 

Once I solve the problem, I’m eager to open the document on my computer. I’ll type in the revised section and move on, fast at the keyboard, back to the easy rhythm and familiar feel, until, inevitably, I come to the next snag. 

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: Oblique Strategies

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.15.19

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This is no. 37 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was getting my MFA in fiction, one of my favorite professors asked us to write a story using only single syllable words. At first this sounded awful—how could we possibly pull this off? It wasn’t easy, but very quickly it became a kind of game to me, an obstruction that brought out odd new rhythms. When we came back to class and read our stories aloud, it was a revelation. Every single student had done something striking and compelling. The sentences were strange and clipped, everyday phrases made fascinating. One student had something like “he who taught us of the past” to stand in for history professor. In my story, instead of an electrician playing checkers, “the lights guy played reds and blacks.” The formal constraint forced us to go beyond the easy, obvious choices. My professor stressed that this was a starting point, something to unlock us; there was no need to stick to these rules in subsequent drafts. Later, when I was revising, I found that because the work didn’t sound like me, I could brutally edit it. Now, more than ten years later, if something isn’t working in a story or chapter, I sometimes fall back on the one-syllable trick.

The weirdest approaches to process are the ones I find most helpful—the ones that have stayed with me the longest. There was the professor who encouraged his classes to narrate problematic scenes from the perspective of inanimate objects, animals, or the dead. A friend of mine takes the articles out of any story or chapter that’s giving him problems. He usually puts most of them back, but something about the extraction lets him see the work differently. There was another professor who forbade us from using adverbs, or giving characters first names, or starting any sentence with a pronoun—I loved his bizarre rules, even when I decided to break them.

When I’m writing I sometimes consult this strange little deck of cards called Oblique Strategies. Originally created in 1975 by painter Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno—yes, that Brian Eno, immensely talented musician, producer, and co-conspirator of the late David Bowie—each card has a single directive printed on it, a “strategy” for your creative process. These prompts are meant to assist with removing blocks, but the Zen-like aphorisms are more abstract than prescriptive (i.e., “Start at the end,” or “Emphasize the flaws,” or really strange ones like “Remember a time when you hid from something as a child.”) 

The deck my partner and I have at home is the updated 2001 edition, with a bizarre product description: “These cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, and sometimes they were formulated. They can be used when dilemma occurs in a working situation…The card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear.” These mysterious abstractions are part of the charm. There’s now a version of the strategies available for free online, although I still prefer the physicality of shuffling through a deck. Two cards I selected at random just now read: “Disconnect from desire,” and “Go slowly all the way round the outside.” It all sounds a bit wacky, and that’s exactly the point. I find the further I lean into the weird, the easier is it for me to get back to work.

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: “Unlikable” Characters

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.25.18

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This is no. 36 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

As writers we all have specific goals when creating our fictional worlds. Some writers value plot, others value humor. Some prioritize beautiful sentences or abstract ruminations about the state of society. When I write, my goal is to construct characters full of depth and complexity. I don’t need readers to agree with my characters, but to understand the why behind their actions. 

When I created Haemi Lee, the female protagonist of my novel, If You Leave Me, I focused on developing this complexity so that my readers would know her intimately. At the beginning of the novel, Haemi is a sixteen-year-old refugee during the Korean War, and by the last pages she is a thirty-two-year-old mother in 1967. By covering a wide swath of time, I want readers to watch Haemi survive, mature, fall in love, make mistakes, become a mother, and grapple with the difficulties of life in post-war South Korea. I want Haemi to feel as real as possible, which meant that she would have to be imperfect, flawed. As I wrote, I considered how she would behave as a daughter, sister, wife, mother, and lover. I considered her temperament. Growing up without means in a conservative time, there would be strict social and gendered guidelines placed on Haemi. I wanted her to bristle against those rules. The problem, I discovered, was that an imperfect female protagonist is often labeled unlikable. 

The first time I heard Haemi described this way was in workshop. I was surprised. It was a gendered remark, and I hadn’t been expecting it at the graduate school level. When did we ever question the likability of male characters? Complicating matters further, when did we question the likability of female characters when they were written by male writers? I simmered in silence as my classmates discussed Haemi Lee. (As the student being workshopped, I wasn’t allowed to speak.) Jisoo and Kyunghwan, my two male protagonists, were not always likable and yet the focus remained on Haemi. Why did she need to be likable when her male counterparts were not? Why were we concerned with the likability of women anyway? Who among us are always likable?

This conversation led me to consider the trope of the “unlikable female character.” I prickled at the phrase, the silly term that asserts female characters are valued for their docility and amiability. I decided that I couldn’t let other readers’ apprehensions about Haemi’s likability soften her. Haemi pushes against the social expectations of her time by not hiding her feelings, by wanting an education, and by speaking freely of the difficulties of motherhood. Haemi is giving and selfish, kind and callous. She is concerned with the welfare of everyone around her while also deeply concerned with her own happiness. If I succeeded in my writing goals, my readers will not always like Haemi, but they will feel deeply for her. They will want to guide her, argue with her, and root for her. 

When writing, our concern should not be a character’s likability, regardless of gender. As the writer, our focus should be on making the character feel true. When my students hesitate at revealing their character’s flaws, I encourage them to dig into the messy, ugly parts. Flaws are what make fiction interesting and realistic. Though we may not love our flaws, they are crucial for characters. When a student worries about the likability of their female characters in particular, this is what I tell them: We need more unlikable female protagonists to deepen the way we consider women in our society. Literature teaches us. Literature makes us question and broaden our understanding of the world. If “unlikable female” means a realistic, imperfect, complex woman, then we need to write as many of these characters as we can.

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, and Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from the Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: Multiple Narrators

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.18.18

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This is no. 35 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Before I became a writer, I was first an insatiable reader. From Curious George to Little Women to The Lover, I can mark the trajectory of my development as a writer against my reading choices. A particularly memorable turning point happened when I was eight years old. While at the library, I came across a chapter book called Morning Girl. The cover showed a young girl with dark brown hair and bare shoulders swimming in the open sea, and I picked it up because of the striking image. As I began reading, I fell for Morning Girl’s lush, bright voice as she described her fondness for waking early and searching the beach for seashells. I felt keenly for Morning Girl when her parents favored her younger brother. I had a younger sister, and I understood the mean yellow streaks of jealousy. 

The shock came when I turned to the next chapter. At the top of the page was the name Star Boy. This chapter, I realized as I read, was narrated not by the titular girl, but her younger brother. I remember the confusion I felt and how quickly it was replaced with giddy wonder. Up until that moment, I hadn’t known that a book could have multiple narrators. Morning Girl tore writing open for me: For the first time I recognized that writers were in control of how the story was told and that the possibilities were endless.

I’ve gravitated toward novels with multiple narrators ever since, so when I started writing If You Leave Me, I knew I wanted to try this format. However, I needed to make sure having multiple perspectives would serve my goals. My central character was Haemi Lee, a sixteen-year-old refugee in Busan at the start of my novel. Did I really need the voices of her best friend Kyunghwan, her suitor Jisoo, her younger brother Hyunki, and eventually, her eldest daughter Solee? Thankfully, yes. After some examination, I realized that having multiple narrators allowed me to show the secrets characters were hiding not only from each other, but also from themselves. By alternating these voices, I was able to investigate how one event could be interpreted in various ways, depending on the character’s temperament and circumstance. For example, Haemi, Kyunghwan, and Jisoo all hungered in Busan during the Korean War, and yet their resulting traumas are each unique due to differences in class, gender, and family expectations. 

If You Leave Me spans sixteen years, from 1951 to 1967. Multiple perspectives also gave me the best means of capturing the landscape of Korea during this tumultuous time. Through my five alternating narrators, I was able to write about an ROK soldier in the Korean War; a college student in Seoul in the years afterward, when dictators ruled the nation; a factory worker forced to meet with a matchmaker; a mother yearning to escape her rural community; and a young daughter growing up in post-war Korea, when the vestiges of violence took on new forms.   

When my students say they want to write a novel with multiple perspectives, I’m secretly elated. However, I always remind them of the potential pitfalls. More voices may make your story feel fragmented, which can lead to readers preferring one character over another. In order to avoid this, it’s important to value each perspective equally. If you as the writer dislike one of your characters, the reader will feel that animosity in your words. The solution? Know your characters deeply on and off the page—know their desires, tics, fears, sexual preferences, favorite foods, secret dreams, worst habits. Develop them until you know them as intimately as a friend, in all of their complexities. In the end, I hope having multiple narrators in If You Leave Me enriches the reading experience. Haemi Lee’s voice is the center, but the four characters around her provide a lens not only into the larger history of Korea, but into Haemi’s complex, difficult temperament.

In my final Craft Capsule next week, I will talk more about Haemi and the necessity of “unlikable” female protagonists. 

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from the Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: Who Are You?

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.4.18

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This is no. 33 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

“When did you start writing?” Writers are often asked this question, and I’m always curious about the story behind the answers, the paths we take to find our vocations. As a child of immigrants, Korean was my first language. When I began elementary school, I found myself mentally switching between my mother tongue and English, trying to match vocabulary words across language lines. I soon found myself gravitating toward writing; with a pencil in my hand, I could take my time and express myself more clearly. In the first grade, I wrote about butterflies hatching for my beloved teacher, Ms. Benz. The next year, I wrote about a girl with short black hair who wanted to get her ears pierced, but whose Korean parents refused. I presented the story to my mother and father, hopeful and full of glee at my cunning. (Reader, they fell for it and let me pierce my ears.) “I’ve written ever since I was a child,” I say in answer to that question. But when did I find the stories I wanted to tell? That was a more recent discovery.  

As a sophomore in college, I took my first formal writing workshop. Somehow, over the course of my teenage years, my writing had changed. I no longer wrote stories that were rooted in my desires and questions about the world. Instead, I created characters without clear identities—their race, appearance, and backgrounds were murky, undefined. These young adults frolicked and fought on misty hills, drunk with mulberry-stained lips. I was trying to shy away from what I thought was expected of me. I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as the Korean American workshopper who could only write about “Asian” issues. But I sensed that something was wrong with my characters: They were vague, flat, lifeless. “Who is this girl?” a classmate asked. “Don’t be afraid to write about what you know,” my teacher said. 

At first I resisted these suggestions, digging deeper into my no-name characters without a clear sense of home. That is, until the summer break between my sophomore and junior year. One June evening I had dinner with my parents. Over a meal of galbi-tang, rice, wine, and ice cream, my parents recounted their childhoods. My father described catching grasshoppers from his neighbors’ field, of cooking them on a skillet over an open flame. My mother told me of staining her fingers orange with bong seon hwa flowers, which I loved to do during my summer visits to Korea as well.  

The next morning, I found myself still mulling over my parents’ stories. I imagined my father as a child, his lithe body running through high grass in search of those plump green insects. I loved that the act of staining fingers with flower petals, which my sister and I did every summer in Korea, was not only a family tradition, but a Korean one. These stories stayed with me all summer and through the fall, when my undergraduate classes resumed. This time in my fiction workshop, I wrote with greater purpose and clarity. I developed characters with a culture and history behind them. Better, I thought.

The more I wrote, the more I sought my family. When I began my graduate studies, I turned to my maternal grandmother. A fierce matriarch and gifted storyteller, my grandmother shared her life with me—she lived under Japanese occupation, survived the Korean War, and forged a life for her daughters in the years afterward. I absorbed these anecdotes, sometimes taking notes and sometimes just listening. 

When I began If You Leave Me, my debut novel, I knew I wanted to write about the Korean War. More important, I knew I wanted the main character to be a Korean woman who was strong, willful, intelligent, stubborn, and full of contradictions. I wanted a female protagonist that readers would love one moment and argue with the next, someone who felt as complex as our best friends and lovers do. I created Haemi Lee, a teenaged refugee living in Busan during the war. I rooted her story in my grandmother’s experiences, but I added my own desires and questions and fears until Haemi became a character of her own. 

It took me a few wayward years, but I eventually realized that writing about my culture does not confine me as a writer. Instead, my history provides a pool of memory for me to draw inspiration from. Now, when I teach creative writing, I emphasize this process for my students. I encourage them to value every part of their identities.

“Who are you?” I ask. “Tell me what you know.”

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: Tao Te Ching

by

Simon Van Booy

6.13.18

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This is no. 30 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

The biggest little book in China is called the Tao Te Ching. One of its most famous sayings is Wu Wei, 無爲, literally, doing nothing or non-doing.

Whereas some people have used this to imbue passivity or laziness with spiritual significance, I think it has something to do with wholeheartedness.

The child at play does not stop to ask herself, “Am I playing?” She is not aware of time, nor constrained by it. Imagine you get so deep into writing, that you forget you are writing. The story just flows from you, through you, and out into the world.

How can you get to that place? Where the act of writing is so much of part of you, it’s effortless. A process of instinct rather than thought—

The first step is to give up the idea you will ever fail, or ever succeed. Prepare to serve only the needs of the story. Then move your hands, breathe.  

Have faith.  

Laugh.  

Cry.

Sleep.

Dream.

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

by

Simon Van Booy

6.6.18

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This is no. 29 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Having a writing practice is like rowing out to sea in a small boat with a typewriter and sandwiches, hoping for the arrival of some strange bird in the sky. 

After a few hours you tell yourself, “It’s only been a few hours.”  

But when days pass with not even a feather, you wonder, “Am I in the right place? I should have brought binoculars.” You keep looking though—searching the empty sky for some sign, some intervention, a tangible indication that you’re good enough to write, educated enough, wild enough, rich enough, poor enough, sober enough, drunk enough, mystical enough, existential enough.  

Months pass. You’ve been rowing out to the same deep water for weeks and weeks. You’ve lost track of days. Seasons have changed. Where your hands once bled on the oars, there are calluses. You’ve survived heaving seas, blistering heat, and torrential downpours. 

At this point most people toss their typewriters over the side of the boat, and row for the safety of land. Without the bird, they say, nothing is possible.

But you remain in the boat, listening to yourself breathe, a film of salt on your skin. You sit down and pick up the typewriter, rest it on your sore legs, and start to imagine the story you once dreamed of writing. You don’t care about the bird anymore, the words are enough, the sentences are ropes you can use to pull yourself through the narrative.

Then suddenly you look up, there’s a dazzling light, like some mystical, winged creature with blazing eyes.  

As writers, we don’t wait for inspiration. Inspiration waits for us.

Don’t ever forget that.

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: Find Your Metaphor

by

Sandra Beasley

4.4.17

This is the seventh in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

A friend of mine, a poet, was trying to figure out what bothered him about a draft of my poem. “A poem should be like a wall,” he told me. “You build it brick by brick.” He pointed out that, in his opinion, key bricks were missing.

I didn’t share his vision, but I admired that he had one. I’ve come to value developing a metaphorical model for your genre. A model can help you identify your goals, name your struggles, and proceed toward success.

Perhaps you follow the lead of “stanza,” the Italian word for “room.” You come to think of each poem as a house. How do the rooms differ in function, size, and occupancy? Where does your central drama take place? What comprises your roof?

Perhaps you come to think of your essay as a harp. Each researched fact glimmers, an available string in a golden frame. But you can’t play them all at once. Only in choosing which notes to highlight, and how to sequence them, can you create music.

Personally, I always think of memoir as an egg. I’m protective of the inspiring memory, smooth and undisturbed in its surface. But I have to be prepared to break the egg. I have to make the idea messy before I can make a satisfying meal.

Perhaps your novel is a shark. Perhaps your villanelle is a waltz. Perhaps your short story is a baseball game. Don’t adopt my metaphors. Find one of your own.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.21.17

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This is the first in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

As a project for school, my thirteen-year-old son, Will, spent several days carrying an egg around. His task was simple: Keep the egg from breaking.

The experiment was intended to show what it’s like to have a baby, to approximate the feeling of constant vigilance that never leaves you once you have a child. Ultimately, of course, it was supposed to make hormone-addled adolescents think twice before doing something stupid.

As a mother of three, though, I wasn’t convinced. A baby is nothing like an egg, unless it’s an egg that cries, wets itself, sucks on you constantly, and wakes you up four times a night. But as my son described the feeling of carrying his egg—he named it “Pablito”—I realized that it did remind me of something. “It’s always there,” Will said. “You can’t forget it or take it for granted. You feel protective and anxious all the time.”

Carrying an egg around is like writing a novel. No matter what else you’re doing, the fact of the novel is in the back of your mind. If you go too long without attending to it, you get nervous. It is always with you, a weight solid and yet fragile, in constant danger of being crushed. Like the egg, the weight of a book-in-progress is both literal and metaphorical. Within the accumulating pages, as inside the delicate eggshell, are the raw ingredients for something greater. Keeping it intact requires patience, time, attention—and, most of all, commitment. This concept applies to any stage of the process: The egg is both the idea that you nurture long before you begin to write, and the writing itself, which must be fostered and sustained.

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.7.17

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This is the third in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Jackson Pollock’s reply to an interviewer’s question about how he composed his paintings of “accidental” splatterings has stuck with me. “I don’t use the accident,” he said. “I deny the accident.”

The sheer bravado of this is thrilling, and as a writer I find it to be a useful way to think about my work-in-progress. When I’m putting words on the page it’s easy to second guess, to question the often-unconscious choices I make as I go: the trajectories of characters’ lives, shifts in direction and focus, minor characters who gain traction as the story moves forward. The editor in my head starts whispering: You’re going in the wrong direction. Why are you spending so much time on that character? You need to focus, get back to the story you originally envisioned, stick to the plan.

Over time I’ve learned to trust my impulses. Whatever else they may be, these unanticipated detours are fresh and surprising; they keep me interested, and often end up adding depth to the work. Not always, of course—sometimes an accident is just an accident. But believing that these splatterings on my own canvas are there for a reason, as part of a larger process of conception, gives me the audacity to experiment.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.28.17

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This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The problem of beginning…

The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.

On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season….

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.28.17

Online Only

This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The problem of beginning…

The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.

On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season….

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.28.17

Online Only

This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The problem of beginning…

The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.

On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season….

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Tolstoy’s Short Chapters

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.28.17

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This is the sixth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Anna Karenina is more than eight hundred pages long. So why does it feel shorter than many three-hundred-page books?

As I read this novel recently I noticed that Tolstoy cuts his long scenes into short chapters, usually no more than two or three pages. This makes sense, considering it was published in serial installments, from 1873 to 1877, in the Russian Messenger. Tolstoy often ends a chapter in a moment of suspense—a door opens, a provocative question is asked, a contentious group sits down to dinner, characters who’ve been circling each other finally begin to talk—which propels the reader forward into the next chapter.

The psychological effect of these short chapters is that this huge book is easy to get through. Reading in bed late at night (as I tend to do), I’m tempted to put it down, but then I riffle ahead to find that the next chapter is only three pages long. And I really want to find out who’s behind that door.

Three pages. I can do that—as a reader and as a writer. 

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: Visual Prompts

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.21.17

Online Only

This is the fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

For many writers, visual and tactile stimulation is an important component of the creative process. William Faulkner used to map his stories on the wall in his study. If you visit Rowan Oak, his home in Oxford, Mississippi, you can still see the notes for his 1954 novel, A Fable, in his precise, small handwriting. Edwidge Danticat has said that she has an evolving bulletin board in her workspace where she tacks up collages of photos of Haiti and images from magazines.

I, too, have a new board for each book I write. When I’m starting work on a novel I gather scraps like a magpie. My Orphan Train board was covered with postcards from the New York Tenement Museum depicting the interior of an immigrant Irish family’s cramped apartment, a black and white photograph of a young couple at Coney Island in the 1920s, a map of the village of Kinvara in Ireland. I hung a hand-carved Celtic cross on a green ribbon and a stone shamrock on a red ribbon from Galway; a Native American dreamcatcher from Maine; a silver train pin from a New York Train Riders’ reunion in Little Falls, Minnesota. I tacked up note cards: “Food in Ireland 1900s” was one (“wheatmeal, hung beef, tongue, barley”). Another listed ideas I wanted to explore (“links between misplaced and abandoned people with little in common”).

For A Piece of the World, I included a print of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World; photos I took, inside and out, of Christina’s home in Cushing, Maine; some Emily Dickinson poems (“This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me”); and postcards of other paintings Wyeth did at the Olson house, including Wind From the Sea and Christina Olson (both of which make appearances in my novel). I photocopied sketches Wyeth made for his portrait of Christina. I even included a small handful of grasses I’d plucked from the field Christina sat in.

I find these idea boards fun to assemble and inspiring as I work. My mantra, always: Find inspiration where you can.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

An outline of A Fable on the wall of William Faulkner’s study at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi. (Credit: Joe Bonomo)

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

Craft Capsule: Making Conversation

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.14.17

Online Only

This is the fourth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Dialogue is hard to get right. It should sound like natural speech, but in fact it’s nothing like it. I like to send my creative writing students out to cafés and parks with notebooks to transcribe bits of overheard conversations. Then I ask them to type up these transcripts and turn them into dialogue between characters. Inevitably their written dialogue bears little resemblance to the overheard conversations. When you write dialogue you must eliminate niceties and unnecessary patter, and cut to the core of the exchange—unless the patter is crucial to the story, conveying a dissembling, depressed, incoherent, or boring personality. At the same time, it should sound natural, like something someone would actually say. The writer George Garrett called this dovetailing—trimming for verisimilitude and impact.

In direct and indirect speech, your characters should constantly be saying “no” to each other. Most of us (myself included) tend to avoid conflict in our real lives, but conflict is crucial in fiction. It keeps the story interesting.

Richard Price, in his novel Lush Life, allows his characters to talk and talk and talk. Price maintains a delicate balancing act; his characters’ words matter. What they say changes the direction of the story. But he never burdens his dialogue with exposition or forces it to convey plot points that don’t come up naturally. In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway writes, “In order to engage us emotionally in a disagreement, the characters must have an emotional stake in the outcome.” Price’s characters are nothing if not emotionally invested.

Price’s dialogue is vital to the story because it moves the action forward. He constantly puts his characters in conflict with one another. Their conversations are full of surprises—self-revelation, inadvertent admissions, hearsay, evidence—and kinetic energy; they crackle with life. Real life.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

Craft Capsule: Making Conversation

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.14.17

Online Only

This is the fourth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Dialogue is hard to get right. It should sound like natural speech, but in fact it’s nothing like it. I like to send my creative writing students out to cafés and parks with notebooks to transcribe bits of overheard conversations. Then I ask them to type up these transcripts and turn them into dialogue between characters. Inevitably their written dialogue bears little resemblance to the overheard conversations. When you write dialogue you must eliminate niceties and unnecessary patter, and cut to the core of the exchange—unless the patter is crucial to the story, conveying a dissembling, depressed, incoherent, or boring personality. At the same time, it should sound natural, like something someone would actually say. The writer George Garrett called this dovetailing—trimming for verisimilitude and impact.

In direct and indirect speech, your characters should constantly be saying “no” to each other. Most of us (myself included) tend to avoid conflict in our real lives, but conflict is crucial in fiction. It keeps the story interesting.

Richard Price, in his novel Lush Life, allows his characters to talk and talk and talk. Price maintains a delicate balancing act; his characters’ words matter. What they say changes the direction of the story. But he never burdens his dialogue with exposition or forces it to convey plot points that don’t come up naturally. In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway writes, “In order to engage us emotionally in a disagreement, the characters must have an emotional stake in the outcome.” Price’s characters are nothing if not emotionally invested.

Price’s dialogue is vital to the story because it moves the action forward. He constantly puts his characters in conflict with one another. Their conversations are full of surprises—self-revelation, inadvertent admissions, hearsay, evidence—and kinetic energy; they crackle with life. Real life.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”

by

Sandra Beasley

4.11.17

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This is the eighth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Beware the indeterminate “it,” I often say, when fine-tuning a draft.

But that word is so convenient. “It” carries the football from the previous sentence. Whatever “it” you just defined, you’re sticking with it for another ten yards, right?

Except that you’re fumbling the play. Too often, relying on “it” dissipates your language’s energy. Circle every “it” that leads off a sentence. Revising to avoid these instances will force your verbs into action, and clarify your intent.

This is not a hard-and-fast rule. Sometimes an indeterminate “it” will remain, one that has earned its place on the field. The pronoun can be strategic—signifying not just gender neutrality but an absence of comprehension or known name, a fumbling toward meaning, the building of suspense.

In the right hands, “It” can be a potent force. Just ask Stephen King.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.7.17

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This is the third in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Jackson Pollock’s reply to an interviewer’s question about how he composed his paintings of “accidental” splatterings has stuck with me. “I don’t use the accident,” he said. “I deny the accident.”

The sheer bravado of this is thrilling, and as a writer I find it to be a useful way to think about my work-in-progress. When I’m putting words on the page it’s easy to second guess, to question the often-unconscious choices I make as I go: the trajectories of characters’ lives, shifts in direction and focus, minor characters who gain traction as the story moves forward. The editor in my head starts whispering: You’re going in the wrong direction. Why are you spending so much time on that character? You need to focus, get back to the story you originally envisioned, stick to the plan.

Over time I’ve learned to trust my impulses. Whatever else they may be, these unanticipated detours are fresh and surprising; they keep me interested, and often end up adding depth to the work. Not always, of course—sometimes an accident is just an accident. But believing that these splatterings on my own canvas are there for a reason, as part of a larger process of conception, gives me the audacity to experiment.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense

Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

by

Simon Van Booy

6.6.18

Online Only

This is no. 29 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Having a writing practice is like rowing out to sea in a small boat with a typewriter and sandwiches, hoping for the arrival of some strange bird in the sky. 

After a few hours you tell yourself, “It’s only been a few hours.”  

But when days pass with not even a feather, you wonder, “Am I in the right place? I should have brought binoculars.” You keep looking though—searching the empty sky for some sign, some intervention, a tangible indication that you’re good enough to write, educated enough, wild enough, rich enough, poor enough, sober enough, drunk enough, mystical enough, existential enough.  

Months pass. You’ve been rowing out to the same deep water for weeks and weeks. You’ve lost track of days. Seasons have changed. Where your hands once bled on the oars, there are calluses. You’ve survived heaving seas, blistering heat, and torrential downpours. 

At this point most people toss their typewriters over the side of the boat, and row for the safety of land. Without the bird, they say, nothing is possible.

But you remain in the boat, listening to yourself breathe, a film of salt on your skin. You sit down and pick up the typewriter, rest it on your sore legs, and start to imagine the story you once dreamed of writing. You don’t care about the bird anymore, the words are enough, the sentences are ropes you can use to pull yourself through the narrative.

Then suddenly you look up, there’s a dazzling light, like some mystical, winged creature with blazing eyes.  

As writers, we don’t wait for inspiration. Inspiration waits for us.

Don’t ever forget that.

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: Find Your Metaphor
Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”

Craft Capsule: A Form of Salvation

by

Simon Van Booy

6.20.18

Online Only

This is no. 31 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When you start thinking creatively, it’s like releasing a live animal—a new species of mischief that cannot be contained to just one area of your life. Creativity is not like a machine that can be switched on and off. And therefore it does not end when you stand up from your desk after a few solid hours of work.

Ever wondered why you feel the urge to roller skate through a shopping mall listening to Abba? Leave strange notes on the doorsteps of strangers? Eat apples standing up in the bath, naked, with the window open?

Now you know. Creativity is a form of salvation.  

If we could limit creativity to just one area of our lives—how would we ever manage to convince ourselves to climb back in the rocket, and blast off again and again and again, to those distant galaxies of unwritten narrative? 

And stop worrying about getting published. You write because you’re obsessed with telling a story in a way that no one else can. Focus on that. Only that. Everything else will take care of itself.  And, please, for my sake—don’t ever think buying a plastic skeleton from a medical supply store then holding it up to the window when people walk past is a waste of time.  

Being a writer means opening your whole life to creativity. It is a commitment to overpowering fear with imagination and compassion for yourself, as well as others. As a person who writes you’ll be a better mother, son, best friend, aunt, cousin, coach, or bank teller. Because learning to write is learning to see, and striving to see beyond is perhaps the only hope for our species.

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky
Craft Capsule: Tao Te Ching

Craft Capsule: Find Your Voice

by

Simon Van Booy

6.27.18

This is no. 32 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Would you agree that for the past forty years, automobiles have been evolving in such a way as they now all look alike? As though created from the same, basic mold? One of the most important things you can do for yourself as a writer is to find your voice. I don’t mean tone, which is another way of referring to how writing makes you feel. The tone of this piece for Poets & Writers is very different from the tone of my latest novel, or the tone of the philosophy books I edited several years ago.  

I’m talking about voice. My voice can be squeezed into a 19th century corset for one novel, or spewed from the bowels of a werewolf for another, but it’s essentially the same underneath.  

When I realized after writing a couple of early novels, that I hadn’t found my voice—that there was even something called a voice—I was devastated.  

Had my years of labor all been for nothing? If my goal was to be published then yes. A total waste of time. But if my aim was to grow as an artist and as a person, then I had reason to be proud of myself.  

Anyway, to spare you the same kind of pain, I’ve devised an exercise that will hopefully lead you closer than you’ve ever been to the fiery core of your own, utterly unique, narrative style.  

1. Pick five books (or poems) you love, and five books (or poems) you dislike intensely, for a total of ten works.

2. Read the first page (or poem) several times, then rewrite it in such a way that you think, in your opinion, it’s better. Sometimes this means changing the order of words, or cutting them, or adding to them, or changing the tone completely. Don’t worry about offending anyone, no one knows you’re doing this except me, and I won’t tell.

3. This exercise, if done properly should take a fair amount of time. Once you’ve completed it, you’ll start to get a sense of who you are as a writer, and how your writing voice differs from the voices of others. Rewriting sections from writers you love is perhaps the most fruitful, because instead of emulating—you’re forced to be different. We each love certain writers for our own reasons. Rewriting their work will illuminate the subtle differences between your voice and theirs. 

4. Once you find your voice, it will almost certainly evolve over time, the way we evolve naturally as artists. Look at the early work of Van Gogh, compared to his later work. Dubliners vs. Finnegans Wake.  Early Beethoven sounds a little like Hayden—while late Beethoven is characteristic of the sound we associate with him. The core will always remain. Your voice is a gift to the world, so find it, nurture it, develop it, work it like a machine, give it the freedom of a vine—but above all, share it. 

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: A Form of Salvation
Craft Capsule: Tao Te Ching
Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

Craft Capsule: The Art of Research

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.11.18

Online Only

This is no. 34 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I began writing If You Leave Me, my forthcoming debut novel, I settled upon the premise quickly. Inspired by my family’s history, I knew I would open with Haemi Lee, a sixteen-year-old refugee living in Busan during the Korean War. Though the story was rooted in truth, I was eager to let my imagination take over. Scenes came to me fully formed: Haemi on a hill overlooking the makeshift shacks of her village; Hyunki, her sickly younger brother, walking to the market alone; a network of aunties whispering about the front lines, fear prickling their voices raw. Through Haemi and the characters around her, I wanted to explore how years of devastating loss and violence could warp a person’s psyche, body, and view of the world.

How would I write about 1950s South Korea, when I was born in Queens, New York, in 1987? I wanted to represent this period accurately, so I began intensive research. In the library, I took dutiful notes about that critical day on June 25, 1950, when the North invaded the South. I learned about the political climate that had catalyzed the start of the war. I jotted down the different weapons each army used, the timeline of events. As I gathered these facts, I started to see a change in my writing. I was more specific, surer about the world that Haemi, Hyunki, her best friend Kyunghwan, and her suitor Jisoo were surviving in. 

In my graduate school workshops, I was pleased to find that my research created a strong foundation for my novel. The dates and facts were clear. However, a new problem arose. In my critiques I saw the same question asked in various forms: What does this refugee village look like? What is Haemi wearing? What materials are the makeshift shacks made of? Though my readers were not confused about the circumstances of the war, I wasn’t yet conveying what it felt like to live in this tumultuous time. 

On my next trip to Korea I interviewed my maternal grandmother, who had been a teenage refugee during the Korean War. With a notebook in my lap, I asked her when she fled her home, what she ate on the journey south, what she wore, where she lived, and more. Back in America, I returned to the library. This time, I read ROK soldiers’ memoirs so that I could develop Jisoo’s and Kyunghwan’s experiences. I pored over photographs of civilian refugees, of the markets that formed during the years-long stalemate, and of the shacks constructed from corrugated tin, cardboard, and plywood. My sentences became richer, laden with sensory details. I lingered over descriptions of food, clothing, the buildings in Seoul, the fields in the rural outskirts of South Korea. In workshop I was able to anticipate my classmates’ questions about the physical world. The novel was coming together, I thought. I had finally done enough.  

Or had I? The more I wrote, the more I became curious about Haemi’s psychology. I wanted to explore the way violence, gender expectations, poverty, and family circumstances shaped Haemi’s life in the years after the armistice. In order to do so, I needed to develop her interiority so that readers would empathize with her. I returned to the library, eager to read memoirs written by Korean women who had come of age in the 1950s. However, I found none. Where were all the women? The answer both frustrated and fueled me. They had not been valued during this period of history, and thus, their voices had not been preserved. 

What happens when there is no research to guide your way? Determined to continue, I got creative. I read studies about the history of social and gender hierarchy in South Korea; I watched movies and documentaries; I examined the linguistics of trauma and depression in the Korean language; I returned to my grandmother for her opinions on mental health. I also turned to fiction, reading novels about women living through conflict in other countries. Finally, I considered what would happen to me if I had experienced the trauma of Japanese colonialism, Korean independence, and war before the age of twenty. I imagined how my frustrations would manifest in the domestic sphere. I empathized until I knew Haemi completely.   

Over my journey of writing If You Leave Me, my research took many forms. From reference texts and history books to films and novels to my grandmother’s own experiences, the process was more diverse than I’d expected. My favorite part though, was ending where I began—with my writerly impulse to imagine, to create characters, to tell a story.    

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: Who Are You?

Craft Capsule: The Art of Research

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.11.18

Online Only

This is no. 34 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I began writing If You Leave Me, my forthcoming debut novel, I settled upon the premise quickly. Inspired by my family’s history, I knew I would open with Haemi Lee, a sixteen-year-old refugee living in Busan during the Korean War. Though the story was rooted in truth, I was eager to let my imagination take over. Scenes came to me fully formed: Haemi on a hill overlooking the makeshift shacks of her village; Hyunki, her sickly younger brother, walking to the market alone; a network of aunties whispering about the front lines, fear prickling their voices raw. Through Haemi and the characters around her, I wanted to explore how years of devastating loss and violence could warp a person’s psyche, body, and view of the world.

How would I write about 1950s South Korea, when I was born in Queens, New York, in 1987? I wanted to represent this period accurately, so I began intensive research. In the library, I took dutiful notes about that critical day on June 25, 1950, when the North invaded the South. I learned about the political climate that had catalyzed the start of the war. I jotted down the different weapons each army used, the timeline of events. As I gathered these facts, I started to see a change in my writing. I was more specific, surer about the world that Haemi, Hyunki, her best friend Kyunghwan, and her suitor Jisoo were surviving in. 

In my graduate school workshops, I was pleased to find that my research created a strong foundation for my novel. The dates and facts were clear. However, a new problem arose. In my critiques I saw the same question asked in various forms: What does this refugee village look like? What is Haemi wearing? What materials are the makeshift shacks made of? Though my readers were not confused about the circumstances of the war, I wasn’t yet conveying what it felt like to live in this tumultuous time. 

On my next trip to Korea I interviewed my maternal grandmother, who had been a teenage refugee during the Korean War. With a notebook in my lap, I asked her when she fled her home, what she ate on the journey south, what she wore, where she lived, and more. Back in America, I returned to the library. This time, I read ROK soldiers’ memoirs so that I could develop Jisoo’s and Kyunghwan’s experiences. I pored over photographs of civilian refugees, of the markets that formed during the years-long stalemate, and of the shacks constructed from corrugated tin, cardboard, and plywood. My sentences became richer, laden with sensory details. I lingered over descriptions of food, clothing, the buildings in Seoul, the fields in the rural outskirts of South Korea. In workshop I was able to anticipate my classmates’ questions about the physical world. The novel was coming together, I thought. I had finally done enough.  

Or had I? The more I wrote, the more I became curious about Haemi’s psychology. I wanted to explore the way violence, gender expectations, poverty, and family circumstances shaped Haemi’s life in the years after the armistice. In order to do so, I needed to develop her interiority so that readers would empathize with her. I returned to the library, eager to read memoirs written by Korean women who had come of age in the 1950s. However, I found none. Where were all the women? The answer both frustrated and fueled me. They had not been valued during this period of history, and thus, their voices had not been preserved. 

What happens when there is no research to guide your way? Determined to continue, I got creative. I read studies about the history of social and gender hierarchy in South Korea; I watched movies and documentaries; I examined the linguistics of trauma and depression in the Korean language; I returned to my grandmother for her opinions on mental health. I also turned to fiction, reading novels about women living through conflict in other countries. Finally, I considered what would happen to me if I had experienced the trauma of Japanese colonialism, Korean independence, and war before the age of twenty. I imagined how my frustrations would manifest in the domestic sphere. I empathized until I knew Haemi completely.   

Over my journey of writing If You Leave Me, my research took many forms. From reference texts and history books to films and novels to my grandmother’s own experiences, the process was more diverse than I’d expected. My favorite part though, was ending where I began—with my writerly impulse to imagine, to create characters, to tell a story.    

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: Who Are You?

Craft Capsule: Who Are You?

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.4.18

Online Only

This is no. 33 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

“When did you start writing?” Writers are often asked this question, and I’m always curious about the story behind the answers, the paths we take to find our vocations. As a child of immigrants, Korean was my first language. When I began elementary school, I found myself mentally switching between my mother tongue and English, trying to match vocabulary words across language lines. I soon found myself gravitating toward writing; with a pencil in my hand, I could take my time and express myself more clearly. In the first grade, I wrote about butterflies hatching for my beloved teacher, Ms. Benz. The next year, I wrote about a girl with short black hair who wanted to get her ears pierced, but whose Korean parents refused. I presented the story to my mother and father, hopeful and full of glee at my cunning. (Reader, they fell for it and let me pierce my ears.) “I’ve written ever since I was a child,” I say in answer to that question. But when did I find the stories I wanted to tell? That was a more recent discovery.  

As a sophomore in college, I took my first formal writing workshop. Somehow, over the course of my teenage years, my writing had changed. I no longer wrote stories that were rooted in my desires and questions about the world. Instead, I created characters without clear identities—their race, appearance, and backgrounds were murky, undefined. These young adults frolicked and fought on misty hills, drunk with mulberry-stained lips. I was trying to shy away from what I thought was expected of me. I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as the Korean American workshopper who could only write about “Asian” issues. But I sensed that something was wrong with my characters: They were vague, flat, lifeless. “Who is this girl?” a classmate asked. “Don’t be afraid to write about what you know,” my teacher said. 

At first I resisted these suggestions, digging deeper into my no-name characters without a clear sense of home. That is, until the summer break between my sophomore and junior year. One June evening I had dinner with my parents. Over a meal of galbi-tang, rice, wine, and ice cream, my parents recounted their childhoods. My father described catching grasshoppers from his neighbors’ field, of cooking them on a skillet over an open flame. My mother told me of staining her fingers orange with bong seon hwa flowers, which I loved to do during my summer visits to Korea as well.  

The next morning, I found myself still mulling over my parents’ stories. I imagined my father as a child, his lithe body running through high grass in search of those plump green insects. I loved that the act of staining fingers with flower petals, which my sister and I did every summer in Korea, was not only a family tradition, but a Korean one. These stories stayed with me all summer and through the fall, when my undergraduate classes resumed. This time in my fiction workshop, I wrote with greater purpose and clarity. I developed characters with a culture and history behind them. Better, I thought.

The more I wrote, the more I sought my family. When I began my graduate studies, I turned to my maternal grandmother. A fierce matriarch and gifted storyteller, my grandmother shared her life with me—she lived under Japanese occupation, survived the Korean War, and forged a life for her daughters in the years afterward. I absorbed these anecdotes, sometimes taking notes and sometimes just listening. 

When I began If You Leave Me, my debut novel, I knew I wanted to write about the Korean War. More important, I knew I wanted the main character to be a Korean woman who was strong, willful, intelligent, stubborn, and full of contradictions. I wanted a female protagonist that readers would love one moment and argue with the next, someone who felt as complex as our best friends and lovers do. I created Haemi Lee, a teenaged refugee living in Busan during the war. I rooted her story in my grandmother’s experiences, but I added my own desires and questions and fears until Haemi became a character of her own. 

It took me a few wayward years, but I eventually realized that writing about my culture does not confine me as a writer. Instead, my history provides a pool of memory for me to draw inspiration from. Now, when I teach creative writing, I emphasize this process for my students. I encourage them to value every part of their identities.

“Who are you?” I ask. “Tell me what you know.”

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: Tao Te Ching
Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky
Craft Capsule: A Form of Salvation
Craft Capsule: Find Your Voice

The Darkness Within: In Praise of the Unlikable

by

Steve Almond

January/February 2018
12.13.17

In Print and Online

Last summer I wrote a review of Who Is Rich? (Random House, 2017) by Matthew Klam. The novel is narrated by a man named Rich Fischer, a self-loathing husband and father who conducts an anguished and antic affair with an equally unhappy infidel.

Shortly after I turned in my review, I heard the book discussed on the radio. The segment opened on an odd note. “Rich is a hard man to like,” the host began. I sat back in astonishment—the notion hadn’t even occurred to me. But a quick survey of prepublication reviews revealed that this was, in fact, the consensus view: Rich was whiny, selfish, unsympathetic.

These complaints, it should be noted, weren’t generally directed at his adultery, about which he is so racked with guilt that he attempts to kill himself twice. No, his central offense is that he articulates the miseries of monogamy and parenthood with such tender precision. He’s hard to like, in other words, because he makes the reader feel uncomfortable.

And yet when I survey the books that inspired me to quit journalism and take up fiction two decades ago, every single one features protagonists who are “hard to like” in the exact same way: Birds of America by Lorrie Moore, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, Airships by Barry Hannah, Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, the stories of Flannery O’Connor.

My predilection for destructive and discomfiting characters arose, in part, from my years as an investigative reporter, which I spent tracking con men and corrupt cops, shady developers and sexual deviants.

In my reporting, the central danger was detection by the authorities. In literature, the danger was self-revelation. The question was why people messed up their lives and, when they got going, the lives of those around them.

This question began with the characters, but it extended to the reader. Spending time with folks who were morally flawed and ruthlessly candid, who had thrown all manner of caution to the wind, was thrilling specifically because they enacted my own repressed urges. I didn’t just want to rubberneck their misdeeds. I felt implicated by them.

As I turned all this over in my mind, I began to realize why I’d found the scolding critiques of Rich Fischer so vexing. They weren’t just sanctimonious or shallow. There was something cowardly in them, a mind-set that positioned fiction as a place we go to have our virtues affirmed rather than having the confused and wounded parts of ourselves exposed.

***

A lot of ink has been spilled over the past few years on this question of likability, as well as an adjoining anxiety: how important it is that characters be “relatable.” One of the flash points of this debate emerged from the critical reception of Claire Messud’s fierce novel The Woman Upstairs (Knopf, 2013), whose narrator, Nora Eldridge, spends much of the book railing against the forms of feminine duty she has internalized.

When an interviewer for Publishers Weekly observed that she “wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora” because of her “unbearably grim” outlook, Messud’s reply lit up the Internet. “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that?” she demanded. Messud went on to cite a dozen famously repellent male characters who are rarely, if ever, subjected to such a litmus test. “If you’re reading to find friends,” she concluded, “you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?’”

Messud was hailed for confronting what we might call the fallacy of likability, and the ways in which female authors are expected to cleave to this notion.

One of the most fascinating reactions came from novelist Jennifer Weiner. In an essay published by Slate she noted, rightly, that many readers come to fiction hoping to spend time with characters they admire. And she argued that the creators and consumers of such characters shouldn’t be looked down upon.

But Weiner’s defense of likability was undermined by her own resentments. Likable, she insisted, was a code word “employed by literary authors to tell their best-selling brethren that their work sucks.” Her response was to tell Messud that her work sucked.

“There’s no payoff,” Weiner wrote of The Woman Upstairs, “just a 300-page immersion in the acid bath of Nora’s misery, her jealousy, her lack of compassion, her towering sense of entitlement.” Weiner felt Messud had willfully crafted a character to whom no one can relate.

The irony was that Nora elicited such vehement reactions precisely because readers related to her too much. They felt implicated, both by her impotent rage and the despair lurking beneath her grievances. “Above all, in my anger, I was sad,” she confesses. “Isn’t that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying—valiantly, fruitlessly—to eradicate.”

What I’m getting at here is that the debate about likability ultimately boils down to sensibility. Nora Eldridge’s view of the world, and her place in it, is too dark and intense for some readers. When they pick up a book, they want to be transported to a sunnier precinct, or a more exotic one, with a friendlier companion. They seek a refuge from the anguish of their inner life.

There’s no right or wrong in any of this. It’s a function of what sort of experience we’re after as writers and readers.

***

There’s another unspoken factor in all this: the market. If you’re an unpublished writer seeking representation, and you submit a manuscript with an abrasive protagonist, chances are you’re going to hear from agents concerned about likability. The whole reason Lolita was originally published in France, and nearly three years later in the United States, is that Humbert Humbert’s panting hebephilia was abhorrent to American editors.

Cultural and literary standards evolve, of course. But financial anxieties are forever. Which is why agents and editors remain wary of characters they fear readers will find off-putting. In a world where reading books is itself a marginal activity, one performed in defiance of the perpetual racket of digital distraction, why risk losing sales?

I spent weeks, for instance, arguing with my editor about the section of my memoir, Candyfreak (Algonquin Books, 2004), in which I developed the irrational conviction that I had testicular cancer during a barnstorming tour of U.S. candy bar factories. My editor argued, quite sensibly, that this disclosure made me a lot less likable as a guide. What’s more, it dampened the giddy mood that prevailed elsewhere and guaranteed the book would never be adopted in school curriculums.

The reason I insisted on its inclusion was that I saw my self-diagnosis as an integral part of the story, a symptom of the depression that had reignited my childhood obsession with candy.

I don’t mean to imply that highlighting the repellent traits of a character is some shortcut to literary depth. That’s as foolish as the notion that scenes of graphic violence or sex will magically yield drama.

Some years ago I began a novel about a shameless right-wing demagogue who decides to run for president (I know). The response I got from readers was that my leading man, while fun to hang out with for a little while, was ultimately oppressive. It wasn’t that my leading man had the manners and conscience of a shark but that he had no subtext, no dreams or fears animating his outsize appetites. Nor did he hew to the path of so many unlikable protagonists, the Emma Woodhouses and Ebenezer Scrooges, who are forced to confront their flaws and wind up redeemed in the bargain. My man was self-regarding without being self-aware.

Such a figure might plausibly thrive in the world of politics (again, I know). On the page, he quickly degenerated into caricature. 

***

But what about those characters who refuse to evolve or offer up much in the way of vulnerability? I am thinking here of our most famous villains: Milton’s Satan, Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden. These figures, though not technically protagonists, dominate their given worlds.

They do so because they’re willing to violate moral norms and thus wind up driving the action of the story. They’re also fearless in apprehending the nature of the world around them, even if they deny us access to their own inner lives. Most vitally, they embrace the transgressive aspects of their selfhood, the ones we anxiously inhibit so as to appear more likable.

Consider Melville’s Captain Ahab as he stands upon the deck of the Pequod, roaring out the true nature of his mission. “If man will strike, strike through the mask. How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me,” he tells his crew. “I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and…I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

Tell us how you really feel, Ahab.

The reason readers like me gravitate toward characters like Ahab is that, not very deep down, we know ourselves to be equally charged with wrath, besieged by private doubts and grudges, and thus enthralled by those who dare to speak truth in a world overrun by personal forms of marketing.

The rise of Internet culture has only magnified the allure of such figures. Most social media platforms revolve around an elaborate effort to generate “likes” by presenting an airbrushed version of our lives and values. What grants trolls their magnetic power—whether they lurk online or in the White House—is the unacknowledged force of our own suppression.

Moral perfection is admirable, after all, but deadly dull in a literary character. I think here about the figure of Jesus Christ as we encounter him in the New Testament. He says and does all the right things. But he only comes alive as a character in those rarely cited verses when his revolutionary ire and human needs come into view.

The most shocking moment in the Gospels takes place a few days before his appointed end. On the way to Jerusalem, he stops in Bethany, where a woman lovingly anoints his head with perfumed oil.

The act angers some of those who witness it, including Judas Iscariot, who asks Jesus whether the expensive oil could have been put to better use if it was sold and the money given to the poor. “The poor you will always have,” Jesus replies. “But you will not always have me.”

It’s a moment of sensual indulgence and unvarnished pride that’s astonishingly out of character for Jesus. By my reckoning, he’s never more likable. 

***

I don’t expect this piece will do much to settle the question of likability. It’s one of those disputes into which writers will continue to pour their opinions and anxieties.

And that’s probably a good thing, if you think about it. Because we happen to be living in a historical moment ruled by unlikable characters. Take a look at our political and popular culture, at the angry voices emanating from our screens, at the seething violence in our discourse.

As writers, it can feel pointless to engage in literary endeavors when the world around us feels so combustible, so fragile. But I would argue that it has never been more important for writers to engage with the questions literature seeks to answer.

If we are to reclaim our country from the dark forces determined to divide us, to sow discord and cynicism among us, we must first seek to understand the darkness within ourselves. That means turning to stories in which we encounter characters actively engaged in the struggle—and sometimes failing—to contain their unbearable thoughts and feelings.

The urgent question isn’t whether we like these folks. It’s whether, in coming to know them, we come to know ourselves any better.

 

Steve Almond’s book Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country is forthcoming in April from Red Hen Press.

His central offense is that he articulates the miseries of monogamy and parenthood with such tender precision. He’s hard to like, in other words, because he makes the reader feel uncomfortable.

Polite Need Not Apply: A Q&A With Mary Gaitskill

by

Joseph Master

12.11.17

Online Only

Mary Gaitskill doesn’t believe literature should have to be polite. Do a Google image search of the author and you’ll see a succession of penetrating gazes—pale, wide eyes you just can’t fend off. Gaitskill’s writing, which has earned a National Book Award nomination, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a PEN/Faulkner nomination, has a similar effect. The author whose most recent book is a collection of personal and critical essays, Somebody With a Little Hammer (Pantheon, 2017), is best known for her fiction, having previously published three novels and three story collections. Gaitskill has been labeled “The Jane Austen of sickos,” a moniker that supposes her fiction—famous (and in some circles probably infamous) for its enjambment of sexual brutality with sensuous lyricism—is debauched. While her prose can at times appear as icy as her stare, waves of empathy, soul, and B-12 shots of humor course beneath the surface. From her first book of short stories, Bad Behavior (Simon & Schuster, 1988), which became widely known for “Secretary,” a story of sadomasochism and desire that was made into the 2002 indie film starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, to her most recent novel, The Mare (Pantheon, 2015), Gaitskill’s fiction has always been ferocious, but not for the sake of brutality. The fireworks are in the vulnerability of human connection, not just the spectacle of sex. When she talks about her craft, Gaitskill’s eyes brighten and she smiles often. If you are fortunate enough to speak to her about Chekhov or Nabokov, as I was, you feel thankful for her clairvoyant insights, for her mastery of opinion—for her energizing confidence in what makes a good writer.

In an interview you once said, “Literature is not a realm of politeness.” What’s your style in the classroom? Are you the conditionally supportive teacher or the unconditionally supportive teacher?
I’m sure most people would call me conditionally supportive. I don’t really know what I’m like. I mean, I can’t see myself from the outside. People have described me as blunt. I’m not always, actually. I mean, I’m not always as blunt as I—

As you want to be?
—as I might be if I were actually being blunt [laughs]. I’m blunt if I think there is no other way to be. I think my teaching style has also somewhat changed. And again, it’s hard to see myself from the outside. But I think I’ve learned how to be critical in a better way than I used to. In the past, I was so uncomfortable in a position of authority. I had never had a job before where I had any authority at all. My generation is notoriously uncomfortable with authority. That’s why we are terrible parents. I mean, I’m not speaking personally. I am not a parent. But it’s a thing—my generation makes awful parents. Because they’re so busy trying to make their children happy and be a friend to their children and make everything in their life work out that they end up just smothering them, basically.

All unconditional! I guess psychologists would say you need one unconditional and one conditionally loving parent, right? There’s a balance.
I had a similar problem teaching. But, it didn’t show up in the same way. I was just so uncomfortable having to be the authority. And I knew that I had to be. So the things I would say would come out much more forcefully than I actually meant them. It translated into harshness. And it was actually coming from a place of real discomfort and insecurity. But I don’t think the students knew that. Maybe some of them did, some of the time.

I remember a former writing professor, Chuck Kinder, always driving home the principle of Chekhov’s smoking gun. This West Virginian drawl saying, “If there’s a gun, there had better be gun smoke.” What’s your smoking gun principle? Do you have a rule?
I don’t, actually. I think there are very few rules that can’t be broken. I think there is only one that is very difficult to break. I have seen it broken, but not very often. It’s that something has to change. From the beginning of the story to the end, something needs to be different. The only time I’ve ever seen it successfully broken was a Grace Paley story called “A Conversation With My Father.” But as a general rule, something has to change. There has to be some source of tension. And even that can be subtle. Even in the language itself. You know the Flannery O’Conner story “Everything That Rises Must Converge”?

Yes!
The blood pressure. It’s mentioned in, I think, the first or second sentence. The blood pressure is the number-one thing.

Earlier I asked you which short stories of yours I should read, and you immediately responded with “Secretary.” You said you considered it one of your best. So I started there with Bad Behavior. That was your first book. You were thirty-three when it was released. How long did it take you?
About six years.

A first book is like a band’s first record, right? You have your whole life up to that point to write that first collection of words. And you release it. And then people tell you who you are. They say, “Oh, you’re the masochism writer,” or  “you’re the next Dylan.” It can be kind of crushing. Then you have, what? A year? Five years? You have such a shorter time frame to follow it up. What was the difference between writing Bad Behavior and your second book, the 1991 novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin?
Well, there were a couple of things. I had actually started the novel before I sold the story collection. I had written maybe thirty-five pages and stopped, because I just didn’t know what to do. And the reason I picked it up again was because I was in a publisher’s office, and they didn’t know if they wanted to buy the collection or not. And the guy said, “So, do you have a novel?” And I said, “Yeah. Yeah I do.” And he said, “What’s it about?”

And I just started talking about these girls. And they were like, “Oh, ok.” And they wanted to do a two-book deal: the short story collection and the novel.

Well, that certainly worked out.
It didn’t have to do with the process, though. It was much more complicated. Because when I was writing Bad Behavior I could always say to myself, “It doesn’t have to be good. No one is going to see it.” That actually made it possible for me to go forward. I said that to myself literally every time I sat down, repeatedly. “It doesn’t have to be any good. No one will see it.”

Like The Basement Tapes. Dylan and his band didn’t mean for anyone to hear them. They were just hanging out in Woodstock, recording music they never thought would see daylight.
It’s a very helpful thing to say to yourself. And I didn’t have any expectation of how it would be received, either. Whereas with Two Girls I could not say that. I knew people were going to see it. And actually, for the first time, I was self-conscious about how it would be seen. And I felt a desire, an obligation almost, to please certain readers. Because I knew who had liked Bad Behavior and I knew why they liked it. So I was uncomfortable about disappointing those people, perhaps. I tried as hard as I could to put those feelings aside. But it was very difficult.

That had to be jarring.
It was.

Had you ever thought about your limitations as a writer when you were working on that first collection?
Oh, yeah! I thought I was terrible.

You thought you were terrible?
That was the other thing about Two Girls that was different. It was that I had never tried to write a novel before. Short stories are—some people say they are harder, but I don’t think so. And the reason I don’t think so is because it’s just a smaller space to deal with. I mean, some are quite capacious. It’s not that they are easy. I don’t find them easy. But a novel? It’s like I was a cat that had been in a house all of its life, and all of a sudden a door was flung open. And I was flooded with sights and smells and was crazily running over in one direction wondering what was going on there and getting distracted. And then running in the other direction. It was a total feeling of freedom. But I didn’t know what to do with it. It was very hard to figure out what I wanted to pay attention to and how to structure it. And stories are way more manageable that way.

Being flooded with sights and smells. Yes. So appropriate, because your fourth novel, Veronica (Pantheon, 2005), is flooded with sights and smells and senses that overlap and eclipse each other. Let’s start with the origin myth that opens the book —the dark folktale told to the narrator, Alison, by her mother. Alison revisits this story for the rest of her life. It haunts her. At one point she admits that she felt it more than she heard it. At what phase in the process of writing this novel did you write the beginning—this story that keeps coming back?
I added that later.

Was there a Lebowski’s Rug moment, when you arrived at this origin story and added it, and it really brought the whole room together?
Honestly, it was because someone who read a draft of the book said it reminded them of the tale The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf. It’s Hans Christian Anderson. And I said, “Really, what’s that?” And I went and looked it up. And I agreed. I thought it was perfect.

Those old tales are soul crushing and beautiful, but also scary as hell. It’s scary being a kid.
Right. Because everybody’s bigger than you. And they are weird! [Laughs.]

You’ve mentioned a soul-quality in writing. I’ve read interviews where you break it down to the molecular level. I guess it’s a voice quality, right? This energy. How did you find that? And how in the world do you teach that?
I don’t know. How did I arrive at the voice quality?

Yes. This energy in your writing, the music of it. The way you describe these grotesquely beautiful things. It’s your voice. What all MFA students want so badly to get, I think, is their own version of that.
I used to tell students, “I want to see it how only you can see it. I don’t want to see it how a hundred people would see it.” I was basically telling them not to rely on shared perception. There isn’t anything wrong with shared perception. It can be a beautiful thing, and I think music relies partly on shared perception, or it assumes a certain kind of shared perception, rightly or wrongly. Because you feel, in a group of people, that you are hearing it the same, although you’re probably not. You feel that commonality. Slang. Expressions. There are certain things that make shared perception beautiful. You can’t have a conversation without it. But when you’re reading a story, it’s a different thing. It’s much more intimate. It’s much more like…you’re wanting to get the pith of what that person feels and sees. It’s more like that.

Music plays a huge, great part in Veronica. What’s your soundtrack?
You mean, what music do I listen to?

Yes. When you’re writing, or on the train with your headphones. What are you listening to?
I’m really sorry to say this, but I don’t have those things. I don’t like that. I don’t want to walk around listening to music and not listening to what’s happening. It’s bad enough that I’m glued to my phone. I’m not going to go there with music. But right now I’m also at a disadvantage, because I don’t have a good sound system. So I’ve been listening to music on my computer and I just don’t like it as much. Like, when I had a good sound system, I used to put on music and just walk around, drinking a glass of wine, just listening to it.

In your writing, you slip in and out of time seamlessly. In Veronica, you’re like a time bandit. We’re talking a really adult version of Madeleine L’Engle. The book spans decades of Alison’s life—from her teenage years in Paris in the 70s to New York in the 80s, where she meets Veronica, and she’s narrating when she’s in her fifties. There are certain sentences that stretch between two different moments. Considering the amount of time the book covers, there has to be a level of trust—in your own ability to do that, but also that the reader will trust this time machine you’re driving. Was that hard to do? Did you question that?
Yeah, I did question if it was a good idea or not. I was afraid it would be too arty, or just too hard to follow. Yeah, I wondered about that.

For me, that kind of movement through time made everything move faster. It made my heart beat faster, especially as the book went on.
Well, thank you. I did it, for one thing, well, I felt like I had to blend the times because the book is focused on something in the past, and the narrator is in the present. But also because I was at an age where I felt like time was blending for me, personally, in a way that it hadn’t before.

How so?
I think when you get to a certain age, and for some people it may be in their forties or for other people it may be in their sixties—I’m not sure—but I think for everybody it happens that your relationship with time changes and you see the future or the present, and it becomes like a palimpsest for the past, and you just kind of blur things. And it’s not necessarily in a confused way, but sometimes it is. Like, you can talk to very old people and they’ll think something happened. Recently, my mother thought that her mother gave her the book, Born Free by Elsa the Lioness. And that’s not possible. My mother wasn’t alive when that book was written. But in her mind it absolutely must have been that way. She’s blending something. I think that starts to happen in middle age. Not in the sense that you’re confused, but that your connections of when things happen in time, spatially, are just different.

So, let’s talk about sexuality. Never have I read fiction regarding sexuality that made me feel quite the same way—that way I felt when reading Veronica.
When you say “that way,” what do you mean?

As a male, reading about sex—this beautifully painful account of health, illness, death, with all of this sometimes brutal sex—I felt my own mortality. I became very aware of my heartbeat and my breathing. Thinking about all the cigarettes I had smoked a long time ago. It made me anxious. It hurt. And I saw all of this through the eyes of Alison, a model, who is absolutely nothing like me. At all. I related to it. Absolutely, in the moment, related to it. And it’s hard enough for me to be in the moment, ever.
Me, too.

At one point Alison says she sees how men can look at pictures and feel things. She’s trying to see the world through the eyes of the other, and reading the book as a man, I was doing the same thing backwards, through her eyes. Have you found that the reaction to your writing has been starkly different along gender lines? That men have a different response? Like, me, how I am getting super uncomfortable talking about it with you right now?
Oh, it doesn’t make me uncomfortable at all. I don’t really know. Someone wrote an article about how horrible she thinks men are when they write about me. And it’s true that some male critics have been unusually nasty. But it’s also true that once, a long time ago, for my own curiosity, I went through all the reviews and divided them into male and female. And then I added up where the most negative ones came from. They came from women. So, I think women are more likely to relate to my writing in a superficial way, because most of my characters are women. I don’t really know if there is a predictable breakdown.

I thought my last book, The Mare, would not be read by men at all. The Mare is all female characters with specifically female issues. And there isn’t a whole lot of sex in it. Even the horses are female. But men read it and liked it. I mean I don’t know how many. I can’t really say for sure. I am thinking, though, that some men seem to view it with horror that seems gendered.

Recently, Veronica was republished in England and my editor decided to have a personal friend of hers write an introduction. I can’t remember the guy’s name. He’s an English writer whom she says is very respected, but I’ve never heard of him. And he spent a lot of time—and he was a fan, apparently—talking about the horrifying, degrading imagery that I use about men. In one of these horrifying examples, Alison was thinking about a guy, and I hope you don’t mind me using this language. She’s having sex with somebody, and she can feel his asshole tingling on the end of his spine. In the context of writing, that does not seem especially degrading or at all degrading to me. If you were saying that to someone, it might be different, depending on who they are and how you said it. But the idea of somebody thinking that, in private, in a fictional novel, I don’t understand. I scratched him doing the introduction and I did it myself. And I wrote back to [my editor] and said, “Has this guy ever read Philip Roth or Saul Bellow? What makes him so shocked by this?”

In conversation it might be a shocking remark, but not in a novel, in somebody’s head. And that’s what I mean by politeness not applying to literature. There’s a different standard than at a party. I really did wonder if he would have reacted that way if it was a male writing about a female he was having sex with.

Well, I think there is maybe a double standard when it comes to writing about sex. Men might get more of a pass, right? And I’ve never read anything about sex that was written quite like that.
Thanks. Except I would normally disagree with that. I think women get more of a pass. For sexist reasons, actually, sexuality is considered the purview of women. It’s like women’s area of authority. Women can write really dirty things without being criticized as much. Are you aware of Nicholson Baker’s book The Fermata?

No.
It’s a pretty dirty book. It’s a fantasy book. Have you read him at all?

No, I haven’t. I guess I should.
Beautiful writer. Line by line, probably the best writer in America, in my opinion.  Line by line, though, not by the whole content, necessarily. Well, The Fermata was one of his lighter books. He’s better known for Vox, because Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky read it together. Or for The Mezzanine. But The Fermata is about somebody who can stop time, and he uses it to take women’s clothes off…

Oh! Yes…he masturbates on their clothes?
He masturbates, but he doesn’t do it on their clothes. My, that book got outraged reviews. People said it was violent, degrading, disgusting. It was none of those things. It was a totally harmless fantasy. And I think if a woman had written it, it would have been different. Have you ever read Natsuo Kirino?

No. You know what? Not only have I probably not read any of the books you’re mentioning, I’m probably going to get a big complex about it. 
No. Don’t worry. I’ve hardly read anything. But Natsuo Kirino, one of her books that I really like, in one of the final scenes is this guy who has been stalking her and finally gets her tied up and he’s planning to torture her and he’s cutting her and he’s raping her. And she actually responds to him. But she’s actually tricking him. She ends up killing him. And he almost likes it. She cuts his throat and he dies slowly. I don’t remember the words, but it’s almost like he says, “I love you” in the end. If a man wrote that scene, he’d be considered the equivalent of a murderer. He wouldn’t be able to show his face in public.

Well, I guess I’ll have to read that now…
It’s true, though. I think women are allowed to be much more outrageous sexually, in general, than men. What some of the male critics, who have been nasty, are responding to—and this one guy said that reading me was like being sodomized by an icy dildo—

Um, does he know what that’s like?
[Laughs] Oh, I suspect he doesn’t. Because if he did, he would never make such a ridiculous comparison. But, in a way, it’s a huge compliment, because I have never read anyone in my life who would make me feel even remotely like that. So he must think I’m some kind of badass.

What I think makes people like that uncomfortable isn’t the level of sexual detail. I think it makes them feel emotionally uncomfortable. Because they feel emotionally exposed. Lots of people write about sex very graphically.

Switching gears, you really describe the beauty and sometimes ugliness of voices. The sound of them. And you do it visually, too. Alison will describe how something looks as a sound. Are you the kind of person who can be enthralled, or just totally turned off, by the timbre of someone’s voice?
Oh yeah. I’m really, really voice responsive. When I was very young, at home, in the other room doing homework, some guy came to see one of my sisters. And I was so revolted by his voice, I could hardly bare to listen to it. And when he left I walked in the room and I said, “Who was that?” And I said, “He’s a horrible person.”

It turned out he was, actually. He had sexually molested somebody and later he made obscene calls to one of my sisters. I’m not saying I can do that all the time, but I am very voice reactive. And I can even fall in love with somebody just by the sound of their voice. I mean, I may not stay in love with them [laughs]. And it might not mean they’re a wonderful person. Although, interestingly, when I first heard my husband’s voice, I didn’t like it. But that changed. I’m not completely wedded to that impression. But it does mean something.

I read you once say that Debbie from “Secretary” was no older than eighteen. And I thought, “Wow. What an erudite, literate eighteen-year-old.”
Really, you think?

Oh yeah. That first-person narrator in that third-person universe? Totally.
It’s pretty simple, I think.

But what we can get to here is the idea of the reliability of a narrator. In Veronica, you use the first-person narrator, and you nailed the trust—the narrator was so reliable. How do you confer that trust? What advice do you give students to find that place?
I’ve always found the concept of the reliable versus the unreliable narrator peculiar, because I think all narrators are unreliable [laughs]. People tell you what they saw or what they think or what they felt, and they may be telling you the truth, but it might not at all be what someone else saw happen. Like, people always call Humbert Humbert an unreliable narrator. He’s very reliable. He’ll tell you exactly what he thought and felt in a lot of detail. And you also get a very clear sense of what Lolita is experiencing through him. But I don’t think of it as unreliable. I think more in terms, and this sounds really corny, I think more in terms of, “Do I care what this narrator thinks and feels? Can he engage me?”

With students, the problem I see most often is that I don’t get a sense of what their narrators care about. What they want. What matters to them. That’s a bigger issue to me than whether or not they’re reliable in some way.

Would you agree if I were to say that you are hard on your readers?
I don’t know [laughs]. It probably depends on the reader. I’m sure some people read my stuff and think it’s fun. And some people might think it’s boring.

Your writing? Boring?

Sure. I think Bad Behavior is boring, quite frankly. I had to read it for an audio book. I was just like, “Oh…”

For some readers it is hard. I guess I do know that for a fact. I’ve seen complaints. I’ve seen people talk about how hard it is. So it must be. But it’s not something I set out to do.

I guess we have a theme here, of conditional versus unconditional. Reading your work, I found it very hard on the reader. Not in a pejorative sense. I found it absolutely conditionally loving. It gives me everything I need, but as you once said, there is a thin line between absolute excitement and humiliation—and you thrive on that line.
I said that?

Yep.
Where?

I think in New York Times Magazine, actually.
Wow. I never read that one.

You’re tackling incredibly emotionally intense, sexually intense, illness, health, and death…
It’s true. That line.

It’s so interesting that you bring that up because a student of mine just workshopped a story; the ending is a scene in which the male character is really ashamed of his body and his girlfriend is really beautiful and she decides she wants him to pose naked for pictures. And it’s a potentially very powerful scene because it can potentially be a very horrible experience. And he’s just so uncomfortable. It would be very much a thin line. And it could be one of those things where it could be great or just really, really awful. Or both.

I’d say great and awful at the same time would be the goal, right?
Oh, yeah. For a lot of people, yeah. Because it’s the whole picture.

I think that’s what I would say about your writing. 
Well, thank you.

 

Joseph Master is the executive director of marketing and digital strategy at Drexel University in Philadelphia. His freelance work has appeared in newspapers, magazines, television commercials, and on tiny screens across the nation. He studied creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh.

Mary Gaitskill, whose most recent book is the essay collection Somebody With a Little Hammer.  (Credit: Derek Shapton)

Where the Past Begins: An Interview With Amy Tan

by

Alison Singh Gee

10.13.17

Online Only

This past summer, while speaking on a panel at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers conference, Amy Tan surprised an audience full of aspiring authors with an admission: “There are times when I think to myself, ‘I’ve lost it completely,’” she said. “‘That’s it. It’s over. I will never write again.’” She shook her head and added, “It took me eight years to write the last novel. It seems like with every novel, it gets harder and harder.”

Tan, the author of six novels, including The Joy Luck Club (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989), as well as two children’s books, struggled with writing her last novel, The Valley of Amazement, first exploring one storyline for about five years, ditching much of it, and basically starting over, finally completing the book some three years later. Published by Ecco in 2013, the novel followed the odyssey of a young biracial courtesan as she searches for her American madam during the early twentieth-century in China.

As she grappled with her voice on the page, her public voice—on Facebook, notably—was becoming pointedly more personal and urgent, poking at topics that ranged from the whimsical (her beloved terriers and her latest sculptural haircuts) to the controversial (politicians she despises). In post after post on social media, Tan examined and confronted the world around her and the world within her. It was during this period that she began e-mailing with her editor, Daniel Halpern at Ecco, who she started working with on The Valley of Amazement, a little more than a decade after Faith Sales, her longtime editor at Putnam, died in 1999.

Halpern would send Tan a question, and the author would fire off a witty retort, or sometimes a very long missive. Once, for instance, Halpern asked the writer for a synopsis of her yet-to-be-written novel and Tan shot back a four-thousand-word response about why she hates writing synopses. All of these missives had a vital quality in common: spontaneity.

Buoyed by the vibrancy of their dashed-off e-mails, Tan decided to write a memoir, Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir, published this month by Ecco. The book collects Tan’s unguarded, free-flowing writing in response to family documents, personal photographs and journal entries she had collected throughout her life, which began in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she grew up the daughter of immigrant parents from China. The results of this personal research deeply surprised the author. In examining photographs of her grandmother and the clothing she wore, Tan discovered that her grandmother had most likely been a courtesan. In rereading letters she and her mother had exchanged before her death in 1999, the author realized they had remained close, even during the times that Tan tried to distance herself, and that her mother had felt that her daughter had truly understood her. The relationship between a mother and a daughter has formed the basis of much of Tan’s work, from The Joy Luck Club, which consists of stories about the experiences of four Chinese American mothers and their daughters, to The Bonesetter’s Daughter (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001), about an immigrant Chinese woman and her American-born daughter.

Tan, who readily admits that in writing her novels she labors over every sentence, discovered something vital about her writing process: that if she just shut out her self-conscious voice and wrote, she could capture something vital, intimate, and authentic on the page. “Writing this book was very painful,” she says. “But it was exhilarating, too.” 

I recently spoke with Tan about her approach to memoir and how this shift in process changed the way she views her fiction writing. 

You’ve written six novels, two children’s books, and one collection of essays. A memoir is a departure of sorts. Why did you decide to switch literary camps?
I would say I was lured into writing this book. It was the suggestion of my publisher, Dan Halpern, who thought I needed an in-between book—as in, between my novels. At first he thought we could put together a whole book of our e-mails. I said, “That’s a terrible idea.” But he kept insisting that it would be good. We could turn our e-mails from when we were first getting together into essays about writing. Then I looked at them and said, “This is never going to work.” And he finally agreed.

But by then this book had already been announced. And I was stuck writing it. At first I started writing something esoteric about language, but it was coming out all wrong and stiff. So I decided I was just going to write whatever comes to mind. It was going to be a memoir but it was going to be spontaneous.

But you’re known as a literary craftsperson, laboring over every sentence. How did you decide that spontaneity was the way forward?
This was one of the things I learned about creativity. You have to let go of self-consciousness. When I started thinking about this book, I knew that if I felt self-conscious while writing, it would probably come out bit by bit and it would not be as honest.

So I told Dan I would send him fifteen to twenty pages of writing every week. I imposed this crazy deadline on myself. I was just writing spontaneous sentences and not doing much in the way of revision. And this is what came out.

Throughout the writing of this book I was both excited and nervous. I didn’t know what I was going to find. It was like when you go to the circus and you’re about to see the next act. You’re looking forward to it but you’re also scared out of your mind. You’re worried that the trapeze artist is going to die. The process had a suspense to it. Even though I was writing about my life, here, I was writing about what I felt about certain experiences. There’s a difference between a narrative of facts and what happened in your life.

This was about what I felt about certain experiences and the association of that experience with another, and another beyond that. It was about who I am as an adult and reflecting on the core of these experiences.

What was your process? How did you organize the mining of these moments in your life?
I had collected all these things from my family and my own life, not ever thinking that I would write from them. I am sentimental; I have things from my high school, like my student-body card. I had like eighty boxes of this stuff in my garage. I kept them with the idea that I would one day go through them and get rid of a bunch and keep a couple of things. Then I thought, I will just pull something out of the boxes, and if it intrigues me I will write about it. So the process was: I stuck my hand in a box and what came out I wrote about.

It wasn’t as though I had it all lined up, like I wanted to write about this and this. The process was surprising, shocking. It was exhilarating, a mix of emotions. It brought about those things you get out of writing—you know, you have these epiphanies and discoveries. It was an affirmation of why we write.

How did this differ from writing your novels?
Writing fiction allows me the subterfuge of it being fiction. I can change things from real life. I can still go to an emotional core but not as intensely.

Fiction is a way to bring up emotions that I have and to get a better understanding of the situation. But I found that writing memoir brought up ten times the amount of emotion I have while writing fiction. This was truly an unexpected book. I kept telling Dan, “I hate this book.” It seems so personal, like an invasion of privacy. It’s as though I let people into my bedroom and into my darkest moments. I haven’t had time to really meditate over this as I would have liked—you know that word: process. I haven’t even had reflection time to sort out my emotions.

You seem to have lived a remarkably dramatic life and so did your mother, so did your grandmother. Your grandmother was likely a courtesan, one who committed suicide by swallowing raw opium. Your mother, in choosing to leave behind an abusive husband in China, also had to leave her daughters behind as she moved to America for a new life. And I read an article in which you mentioned that you had been sexually molested as a child, held up at gun point, experienced the death of both your father and older brother within six months of each other, and lived with a mother who threatened to kill herself on many occasions, and threatened to kill you with a cleaver on another occasion. In taking stock of this generational trajectory, did you have it in your head that you would one day make sense of all this as a writer?
Well, that’s what I was doing all along with my fiction. I was writing about things, and these moments would come up spontaneously, intuitively, naturally, as part of a narrative in which I was trying to make sense of a story.

For example, when I was writing The Joy Luck Club, I was writing to understand my mother more. But not to the extent that I did in writing this particular book—there was so much turmoil. When I examined for this memoir, in a very concentrated way, what it was like to live with my mother and her suicidal rages, it was so painful. The horror of seeing her put her leg out of a car and knowing that she might possibly die.

Is it meaningful to your memoir writing that your mother, who you’ve described as your muse, died almost two decades ago? How has that freed you to write autobiographically?
I wonder every once in a while what my mother would have thought about the things I wrote in this memoir. Would she have been upset or really happy? Would she be angry? When she was alive, anytime I wrote about her, even when I wrote terrible things, she was thrilled because it was about her. I could have written that she tried to kill me, and she would have been delighted. She’d say something like, “Now you understand how I feel.” My mother was an emotional exhibitionist.

My father, a minister, would have been wounded. In this book I wrote these things about him being sincere but shallow. He depended too much on the pat phrases of the Bible. Rather than truly feeling what somebody was going through, he wanted to solve things and be a good minister. He was so blind to what was going on in his own family. He didn’t have compassion for my little brother and me and what we might have been going through.

Was there difficult material that you left out of the book? If so, how do you feel about that decision now?
We took out about ten or twelve pieces and there was one, actually, that I debated over. Dan and I agreed that it was a little too risky. It was a letter I wrote to a minister based on having been abused when I was fifteen by their youth minister. This person I was writing to was not the minister when this happened. My point in the piece was that his church is a house of worship and it’s a continuous fellowship. I wrote that he is proud of the story of his church but he has to add this to its history. His house of worship has a stain on it.

I finally said, “We have to take this piece out. It goes off the path. It doesn’t enhance what I’m trying to write about.”

Are you happy with that decision or do you regret it?
I’m happy with the decision. Sometimes you write something and it becomes almost retribution, a desire to get even. In this memoir, I could have written about betrayal. I could have written about people who deeply wounded me, but why? I could have written about the fact that my mother went through her life feeling betrayed and that is a mark she put on me. I now have very strong feelings about betrayal and condescension. But I don’t want betrayals to be a dominant part of my life, and if I had written about them I would have given them more importance than I wanted to give them.

How did you push past your emotional blocks to include difficult information and lines of questioning?
In this book I say something about writing and honesty. And it has to do with spontaneity. If you are going to get to some emotional core and truth, you have to write spontaneously. You have to let go of that frontal lobe that says, “Oh, but my father will read this.” You can look at your writing later and say, “Oh my God, my father is going to kill me when he reads this, or he’s going to kill himself.” And then you will know what to leave in or take out. Or you wait until your father’s death. But if you start out in your writing having these concerns, maybe you are writing things that are vindictive. Or maybe you are not ready to write these scenes. Maybe you need to write them later. Maybe you need to take it from a different angle and it will come out in a different way. But I think that if you always write with compassion and understanding, then you stand a good chance of having that person understand why you are writing this. That you weren’t trying to be vindictive. Being vindictive is an automatic no.

Will you take this technique of spontaneity back to your fiction writing? How else will this foray into memoir affect your work as a novelist?
I always thought as I wrote fiction that I was making discoveries, deep discoveries. I was surprised by how much deeper these went as I was writing this memoir. How much more trouble the memories are and how much more risk I had to take to go into it.

Fiction offers us a subterfuge—I keep using this word—it’s almost similar to donning a costume when I go onstage as a ridiculous singer [as she does as a member of the literary rock band, The Rock Bottom Remainders, whose other members have included Stephen King, Scott Turow, Barbara Kingsolver, and others]. If I wear the costume, I can do ridiculous singing because it’s supposed to be in the guise of a silly person.

I am much closer to who I am when I am writing fiction, but there is still a separation. I write my fiction in the first person but writing memoir is truly first person.

I wonder if, in writing fiction, I am going to be as close to the material now, as I was as writing the memoir. With fiction I will still have that protective mechanism. For my memoir I fell into this safety zone of fiction when I wrote that memory of being in the car with my mother as she threatened to commit suicide. I had to write that in the third person. At first, I wrote it in the first person and I had to take it in the third person because it was so painful. I could only get it out in the third person.

At the same time, I think that writing fiction can be very fun. It allows you to be reflective, and at the same time and there’s the art and craft of fiction that I like. So I don’t think I would ever continue to just write memoir.

You mention that you have a “messy narrative style,” that you might start a novel using one voice speaking from a particular period of time but then you shift to another voice speaking from another period of time. Does this have to do with the dual narrative you lived with your mother?
This seems to be true about every book I’ve written. I start in the present and then go into the past. I think this has to do with an interior sense that whatever is happening in one particular time has a connection to another. I’m really fascinated by what that connection might be.

It’s not always a direct connection. For example, my father was a Christian minister and very devout. That does not mean that the connection to me was that I became a Christian minister or very devout. But what it did do for me was made me question what I do believe and why. And also that I am interested in having a purpose in life, rather than a random one. 

At Squaw Valley you said something surprising—and probably very buoying to many writers—that sometimes you face a blank page and think that you have lost the ability to write another word. But then you start to write again. What’s gets you over that hump and onto writing the next page?
I sometimes have this existential dread that I will never write again. Or, I’m not a writer, or this book isn’t going anywhere. Everyone is going to be disappointed. It makes me sick. Then I just say, “Get over it, you are not the end of the world.”

I’m not a disciplined writer at all. I would never want to convey that and make other writers anxious.

What happened with this memoir is that I gave myself a self-imposed deadline—fifteen to twenty pages a week—and I allowed myself to write bad pages. That’s the thing. Allow yourself to write bad pages and just continue to write spontaneously and in that writer’s mind. Write as much as you can without self-consciousness over bad sentences. Write knowing it’s going to be imperfect—that’s important. Just press on. You might look at it later and maybe you have to throw everything away. But there might be something in there that is valuable, that you can keep.

What three or four qualities make a “literary writer”?
Ah, that’s a terrible term. It has triggered a response equal to what the word “liberals” has attracted from Trump supporters. Being a literary writer might mean that you think you’re better than everybody else, or what literary means is that you’re incomprehensible to about 90 percent of mainstream readers.

But, okay. A literary writer is serious about craft, and doing something original, writing a story that contains an important idea. Literary writing has an important theme and it comes through naturally, logically, imperatively.

What qualities make a superstar writer?
Luck. And some kind of style. There is a great deal of luck involved. You have to get recognized and read. You’re lucky if your book falls into the right hands and if it didn’t come out the day after 9/11. Beyond that, it is having established a voice that people enjoy or want to hear from and being able to provide that.

Superstar writers are not necessarily the best writers. Some have written the same book over and over again. They may have a formula that readers want. Superstar writers have that down. They can be depended upon to deliver what readers like to read. I’m not counting myself as a superstar writer, by the way.

What’s next for you?
My new book is a novel, The Memory of Desire. It’s a book that I dreamed up. The structure, the characters and the setting—they literally came to me in a dream. It is so gratifying to get the setting down. For me, it’s a major part of starting a book. But keep in mind, what works for me may not work for you. 

 

Alison Singh Gee is an award-winning journalist and the author of the Hong Kong-India memoir, Where the Peacocks Sing, about her comical and complicated relationship with her husband’s family palace in Northern India. She teaches creative nonfiction and literary travel writing at UCLA Extension. Find her at Facebook.com/AlisonSinghGee.

Amy Tan, whose new book is Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir, published by Ecco in October. (Credit: Julian Johnson)

The Heart of the Novel: Nicholas Montemarano and Eric Puchner

11.6.17

Online Only

If you want to lose and then find yourself in stories of modern family life, look no further than the fiction of Nicholas Montemarano and Eric Puchner. Both authors peer into the beautiful messiness of contemporary America by way of its homes: the high stakes of our daily rituals, the turmoil beneath serenity, the white lies and longings that hold it all together. Puchner is author of the beloved story collections Last Day on Earth (Scribner, 2017) and Music Through the Floor (Scribner, 2005), as well as the novel Model Home (Scribner, 2010), which won the California Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Montemarano is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Book of Why (Little, Brown, 2013) and A Fine Place (Context Books, 2002), and the short story collection If the Sky Falls (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Now he’s celebrating the release of his third novel, The Senator’s Children, published this month by Tin House Books. Centered on two sisters who have never met, it is an intimate family drama about a political scandal and the personal aftermath. Puchner read an advance copy and was enthralled. “This engrossing, brilliantly structured novel takes a familiar situation—the implosion of a presidential candidate’s career—and creates a thing of heartbreaking beauty out of it,” he writes. “By asking whether forgiveness can conquer blame, and whether we might even be able to treat strangers like family, The Senator’s Children feels like exactly the kind of novel we need.”

So Eric Puchner and Nicholas Montemarano got in touch, and what started as an e-mail exchange in the fall of 2017 turned into a literary deep-dive. The two discussed scandals and second chances, finding the heart of the novel, and blurring the personal and political.

Eric Puchner: The Senator’s Children feels like a departure for you in terms of material. One of the things I admire about it, in fact, is that you take a familiar subject, one that’s sort of ripped from the history books—the infidelity of a presidential candidate and its ramifications on his career and family—and find a brand new story to tell.  What compelled you to write about a political scandal?

Nicholas Montemarano: This novel does feel like a departure in some ways—I never expected to write about a political scandal—but in other ways, it continues a preoccupation of mine. So much of what I’ve written—I realized this only after I completed The Senator’s Children—is about families, specifically how they cope with the aftermath of tragedy. My first urge to write this novel came after listening to a late-night talk show host lampoon a politician whose career and life were falling apart. I was compelled less by the fact that this man was a politician and more that he was a public figure being mocked when privately he and his family must have been in great pain. I had an especially strong reaction to the audience’s laughter. I may have been the only person in America, for all I know, who felt sorry for this man, his wife, and his children. We like to see the mighty fall, and then we love the redemption story that often follows. But this politician—the one who was the butt of so many jokes—there wasn’t going to be a second act for him. Not a chance, not after what he did. I couldn’t help but wonder what the rest of life would be like for a person who had become such a pariah.

EP: That’s another thing I admire about the book, the sympathy you show each and every character—not only David, the disgraced senator, but also “the other woman” who in some ways conspires to take David down. Was there a particular character you found hard to empathize with at first? Who was the trickiest character to write your way into?

NM: David Christie was unfaithful to his wife while he was running for president—and while she was battling cancer. Can you feel sympathy for someone who did that? Well, that was one question I set out to ask in my novel. The answer, for me, was surprisingly immediate: yes, of course. The challenge, then, was to bring out those aspects of David that might evoke empathy in readers. On the other hand, Rae, the woman with whom David has the affair—she was more of a challenge. In early drafts, she wasn’t very sympathetic. She was too interested in cashing in on the affair; she wanted to write a book about it and still hoped, years after the affair, to win over David. But she struck me as a caricature, a cultural footnote you might see on a reality TV show (in fact, I had her on a reality TV show in the first draft). So I had to dig deeper and allow her to be flawed—she can be needy and self-absorbed—but sympathetic. In her case, her saving grace is that she loves her daughter.

EP: We’ve been talking about David and the other woman, but the novel’s called The Senator’s Children. For me the emotional heart of it is the story of the two sisters, Betsy and Avery, who don’t know each other because one of them is the living proof of their father’s scandal. It’s just such a fraught, thematically rich situation. Did you know from the beginning that you would focus on David’s two daughters and their very divergent trajectories in life? And that these trajectories would eventually cross?

NM: I was just talking about this last week with my students. I showed them the pages in my notebook from 2011 when I wrote down my first thoughts about this novel. It was called The Senator. But a few weeks later, the working title became The Senator’s Daughter because I decided that its focus—and its narrator—would be Avery, the daughter born from the affair. I wrote the first paragraph—which no longer exists in the novel—and then one page later in my notes, I wrote: The Senator’s Children. I could see myself changing my mind and discovering what the heart of the novel would be. Even at that early stage, I knew who David Christie’s three children were and that his two daughters, estranged from their father to varying degrees, would collide late in the novel. I wrote pages of notes about them. It’s amazing to me that, after five years and so many drafts, much of those first notes I wrote about them remain true. Some things we know from the very beginning, and other things we have to write our way towards knowing.

EP: I wonder about that in relation to the novel’s structure. Another thing that impresses me is the way it moves so unexpectedly through time, toggling between the mid-eighties, the early nineties, 2010, and (in the final section) 1977. I found this to be the source of a lot of the book’s poignancy and power. (In some ways, it feels like the real subject of the novel is time and its irrevocability.) Was the jumping-around-in-time structure something you knew you were going to have from the beginning, or is it something that evolved during the drafting process?   

NM: I really like what you just said about time and its irrevocability—yes! If I had to choose two words that seem to capture my books thus far, they would be: time and regret. What is the life span of a terrible mistake? Can time heal even our deepest wounds? Or do those wounds fester and multiply? I’ve written three novels, and all of them move around in time. It’s difficult for me to imagine writing a novel that doesn’t; it just feels natural to me. As a reader, I’m drawn to nonlinear narratives. Many of my favorite books—The Things They Carried, Jesus’ Son, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City—jump around in time. Or skip ahead, like the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Or move backwards like Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal. Julia Pierpont’s Among the Ten Thousand Things, one of my favorite novels in recent years, includes surprising flash-forwards. Time jumps can be so powerful. We’re here, then suddenly we’ve jumped ahead, or back, and important things happen in that white space. I remember turning the page to Part Two of your novel, Model Home, and seeing that time had jumped ahead a year—even a small time jump like that excites me. I’m like, what did I miss? What happened between those two pages? The ending of The Senator’s Children, the final jump back in time—as soon as it happened, it thrilled me; I knew it was right.

EP: I want to ask you about the language in the book, which feels whittled down to its very essence—there’s a kind of spareness to it that feels evocative and hard-boiled at the same time.  Reading it, I couldn’t help thinking of Babel’s dictum that “only a genius can afford two adjectives to a noun,” except that it seems to me you’ve decided to get rid of adjectives altogether. Is this ultra-spare voice something that comes easily and naturally to you? Or, like Isaac Babel, do you “go over each sentence, time and again,” taking out anything extraneous?

NM: Eventually, I had to give myself over to sparer prose. During revision, it won me over and convinced me that it would be best for the novel. The first draft was bigger, louder, stylistically and formally explosive, multiple narrators, very voice-driven. With each draft, more of that fell away. The aspects of the first draft I was most enamored with were exposed as just that—writing I was too enamored with and attached to. The revision process was one of whittling down me, so to speak. The novel couldn’t be about me being a good writer or making some interesting moves; everything had to be at the service of the story. And so with each revision the novel became quieter and more intimate. Whenever my editor and I spoke about the later drafts of the novel, we always came back to intimacy—that was the novel’s strength, she kept telling me, and I came to believe her. It’s amazing to see how much the novel changed through revision—more than any other book I’ve written.

EP: Speaking of change, the biggest change that happened between your writing of this novel and its publication was the election of Trump. You wrote the novel before Trump’s infamous Hollywood Access tape, which—unlike David’s indiscretion—didn’t end up crushing Trump’s chances at the presidency and makes the Monica Lewinski scandal seem almost quaint. Has Trump’s ascendancy changed your perspective on the novel in any way? Would you write the same book in 2017?

NM: I would. Trump, of course, has reset almost everything when it comes to politics. But families—it seems to me that they remain the same. And I really see The Senator’s Children as a family novel more than a political novel. I set David’s run for the presidency in 1991 and 1992 mostly by necessity: I needed Avery, his daughter outside his marriage, to be in college during the present narrative in 2010. But setting the political scandal twenty-five years ago turned out to be interesting. I had a chance to revisit some of the political sex scandals around that time. In the case of Gary Hart in 1987, a photograph brought down his run for the Democratic nomination. But during the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton was able to overcome allegations of infidelity and win his party’s nomination and the White House. David Christie’s fate was closer to Hart’s. Or John Edwards’s in 2008. Some readers of The Senator’s Children have told me that the political world depicted in my novel feels, in the Age of Trump, like a throwback to a more civil time. Politics, of course, has always been a rough sport—and a fascinating one. But I’m a writer more interested in the private—what happens behind closed doors when the shit hits the fan, how families cope, how people lose each other, or hold on.

Novelists Nicholas Montemarano (left), author of The Senator’s Children; and Eric Puchner.

Craft Capsule: Find Your Voice

by

Simon Van Booy

6.27.18

This is no. 32 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Would you agree that for the past forty years, automobiles have been evolving in such a way as they now all look alike? As though created from the same, basic mold? One of the most important things you can do for yourself as a writer is to find your voice. I don’t mean tone, which is another way of referring to how writing makes you feel. The tone of this piece for Poets & Writers is very different from the tone of my latest novel, or the tone of the philosophy books I edited several years ago.  

I’m talking about voice. My voice can be squeezed into a 19th century corset for one novel, or spewed from the bowels of a werewolf for another, but it’s essentially the same underneath.  

When I realized after writing a couple of early novels, that I hadn’t found my voice—that there was even something called a voice—I was devastated.  

Had my years of labor all been for nothing? If my goal was to be published then yes. A total waste of time. But if my aim was to grow as an artist and as a person, then I had reason to be proud of myself.  

Anyway, to spare you the same kind of pain, I’ve devised an exercise that will hopefully lead you closer than you’ve ever been to the fiery core of your own, utterly unique, narrative style.  

1. Pick five books (or poems) you love, and five books (or poems) you dislike intensely, for a total of ten works.

2. Read the first page (or poem) several times, then rewrite it in such a way that you think, in your opinion, it’s better. Sometimes this means changing the order of words, or cutting them, or adding to them, or changing the tone completely. Don’t worry about offending anyone, no one knows you’re doing this except me, and I won’t tell.

3. This exercise, if done properly should take a fair amount of time. Once you’ve completed it, you’ll start to get a sense of who you are as a writer, and how your writing voice differs from the voices of others. Rewriting sections from writers you love is perhaps the most fruitful, because instead of emulating—you’re forced to be different. We each love certain writers for our own reasons. Rewriting their work will illuminate the subtle differences between your voice and theirs. 

4. Once you find your voice, it will almost certainly evolve over time, the way we evolve naturally as artists. Look at the early work of Van Gogh, compared to his later work. Dubliners vs. Finnegans Wake.  Early Beethoven sounds a little like Hayden—while late Beethoven is characteristic of the sound we associate with him. The core will always remain. Your voice is a gift to the world, so find it, nurture it, develop it, work it like a machine, give it the freedom of a vine—but above all, share it. 

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: A Form of Salvation
Craft Capsule: Tao Te Ching
Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

Craft Capsule: Infinite Distance, or The Starry Archipelagoes

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

3.6.18

Online Only

This is no. 28 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I remember being told a story when I was a student, though all these years later I wonder if it can be true. The course was in Modern Art History, and we were studying Bauhaus. My professor told us that on the first day of class, the Bauhaus teacher gave each one of his students a single sheet of paper. The assignment, he said, is to fold the paper in such a way that it can support the weight of your entire body. Some succeeded; some failed. But it is the assignment itself, the sudden and impossible challenge of it, that struck me—that one simple, blank page had to hold up the weight of your entire life. I then recognized something I’ve never recovered from, some true and awful thing about being a poet and a poet’s relationship, not to words or the beauties and meanings words offer, but to the blank space those words are written on, to the page: that one must learn to trust that its thin, near nothingness can bear the burden of a life. I realized that the poet has the simplest answer. You do not need to find the strongest method of folding, you do not need an intricate architecture of support; you just leave the page as it is and step onto the blankness.

Now I see that poetry intensifies the latent properties of the daily mundane into symbolic potency. The words on the chore list lend themselves to the desperate reverie of “Ode to a Nightingale.” A pencil makes its marks in the margins of the books I teach, and as the semester unspools day by day, and poem by poem, chapter by chapter, I sharpen the pencil and it grows shorter; I see this object of mere utility is also a mortal clock, and that the pencil’s beauty is a strange humility revealed in the seldom felt fact that it is, among all the objects I live my life among, one of the few that will disappear before I do. Walking to my Intro to Poetry course, I’ve come to realize—I hope, I fear—that the day’s lesson on some point of poetic craft is something other than what the definition in the Literary Dictionary holds, and is, instead, a complex consciousness, a vital form, a means of living a life. I know that sounds impossibly grand, but I think it’s true—that metaphor can be a philosophy, and metonymy a form of faith.

To help my students grasp such possibilities I ask them to take out a blank page of paper. The question is how to get from one corner to the opposite corner in the quickest way. The immediate reaction is to take a pencil and draw a straight line from corner to corner. But then some student figures it out and, leaving the pencil where its point stands, bends the opposite corner under its tip, letting the pencil ride across the distance without leaving a mark, for it has not “moved” at all. That is the discovery of metaphor. It helps us cross the distance we cannot imagine. And if it is as they say—those star-gazers, those physicists, those astronomers—that the earth isn’t the center of the universe, nor now is the sun, nor the Milky Way’s own black hole, but that all is in the red-shift, and flees from us in every direction at increasing speed into infinite distance, and between us and all we might love, as Emerson would have it, there is “an innavigable sea,” then metaphor becomes something other than the answer on the midterm, an implicit comparison between unlike things. It becomes a way to recognize the isolate nature of our condition, and a means of countering what otherwise could best be described as our cosmic loneliness. If the cost of the consciousness that language lends us is the inevitable sense of our separation from what it is we speak of, who it is we love, what it is we desire, then metaphor short-circuits that sad consequence and shuttles us—though we hardly feel the corner of the page slip under our feet—across the abyss of the universe. Is that hyperbole? Maybe. But sometimes the universe is just the living room. Sometimes the universe is nothing more than room A113 in Microbiology, where every Tuesday and Thursday from 12:30 to 1:45 I teach my class. That doesn’t mean the distance to cross is any less. If infinity has any lesson, it’s that every part of it is also infinite: chalkboard to student’s desk; word on a page to word in a mind. 

But that’s only one way to think, only one literary term, only metaphor. There are other terms to heap your faith inside. Like metonymy, that form of substitution of a name or attribute for something closely associated with it. Think of noble Queequeg in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Royal prince, the prophets of his tribe tattooed on his body the entire epistemology of his people; his body bore the signs and symbols that held the secrets of his tribe, prophecies and histories, facts and faith. It’s a beautiful image, the body as Holy Book—of course, Queequeg left his people before those prophets could teach him how to read what on his body was written. He was himself a book he could not open, illiterate to the answers he bore, outcast from the knowledge that marked him, unrecognizable to himself by the very marks that identified him. Queequeg gets very sick. He has the carpenter make him a coffin. Instead of resting in his hammock, Queequeg gets each day into his coffin, and looking at the symbols etched on his body, carves each one onto the wooden lid. Not knowing how to get to his people’s heaven, he trusts some divine spirit will be able to read those mystic marks on the coffin itself, and take him where he most wants to go, the starry archipelagoes. I know you’ve been told the earth is round; so have I, but sometimes I’m not so sure. Maybe Queequeg’s coffin would float out to the horizon, and there, where we assume one drops behind the curve of the earth to continue a ceaseless circumnavigation of the globe, the heavens reveal themselves as metonymic, and what seems like unbridgeable distance is actually not, but is continuous, contiguous, a near substitution for what once seemed impossibly far away, and the noble prince will find his way to heaven, not because his soul has been lifted there from the wreck of his body, but because that frigate-coffin has sailed all the way to the distant islands of those stars. Metonymy says that what seems apart is not apart at all, but is instead a part, as one tile is a part of the mosaic whole, and connected to the whole image of the world, though one can’t see the picture fully oneself.

Some other eyes can read it; some invisible hand can take you, too, to the starry archipelagoes.

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and author most recently of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017).

Craft Capsule: Hundreds of Eyes

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

2.20.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-sixth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I practice two arts—the poem and the essay—and I’m not good at keeping them apart. There are times, I admit, when poetry feels to me the primary vehicle of thinking, an epistemological experiment in consciousness itself, demonstrating line by line the way in which those wondrous wounds of the senses inform the mind, and the mind must work to find a word that fits—not recognition, but cognition. In this sense, the poem is the thinking that can happen only outside the mind, and the poet is one, so paradoxically, eavesdropping on her own innermost self (though the innermost is no longer exactly inner). It’s monstrous work. I mean it’s work akin to Mary Shelley’s monster fleeing through the woods and, bending over a puddle there, seeing the moon in reflection, hearing the wind in the branches, and seeing for the first time his own face. The poem’s thinking is fateful in just such fundamental ways: It does not recognize, it realizes.

And the essay, that mode of taking measure, that rational or reasonable weighing of a life, has become for me beauty’s own labyrinth. I suppose a maze is monstrous work, too—knowing those myths of the Minotaur. But sometimes I think the essay is a maze with no center at all; it is instead a bewildered initiation into what John Keats calls, in “Ode to Psyche,” the “untrodden region of my mind,” that place one finds only by getting lost.

Such wonderings have led me to think much on what I consider the most fundamental aspect of craft in each art: the line of the poem, the sentence of the essay. (One might argue the word is the fundamental aspect of both, and that might be true, but a word is a world of syllable and breath, of potency and chance, and carries, as Leibniz describes the monad, its complexity all within. I’m not sure I know how to think about words—a strange thing, I know, for a writer to admit.)

 

I. Lines

Ralph Waldo Emerson, though I can’t remember where, wrote down a thought I’ve never been able to shake loose: “Every line of a poem must be a poem.” I find this to be awful advice, by which I mean, advice that is full of awe—awful because it is so true. I apologize to my students when I repeat it them. I fear it could so burden every moment in a poem that the poet feels paralyzed, unable to forge any path into the wild blank of the page. But maybe that is just how it should feel, just that helpless, but a helplessness mined through with some urge to make in nothingness a world entire, a poem.

Emerson’s insight has unfolded in a number of ways in my thinking about poetry. If every line of a poem is a poem itself it must mean that every single line in a poem truly written contains within it all it can say, has exhausted somehow the resource of its perception until, by the last word, there is some silence that cannot be spoken past. It means each line of the poem possesses a knowledge and vision that is, in its way, wholly revelatory—a means by which to see the world anew, a way to grow a new set of eyes. Each line is a plank upon which the mind builds its whole edifice of reason—and for the length of the line, it holds.

But then, as Emily Dickinson offers it,

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –

That last stanza of her great poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” reads to me as the lived experience of reading a poem—that plunge through every line that is itself a world entire. And of the “Finished knowing—then—,” I’ve never known if it means she has ended in knowledge, or if knowing itself is at an end.

I suppose the answer may be both, for it reveals the most astonishing aspect of the line when every line is itself a poem: that each line of a poem makes a claim for some sense of the world entire, a sense of which that line is the primary example, and then that singular sense is subsumed into the larger vision of which it is but a part. Then the poem may be the place Emerson suggests it is, where we “stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety.” I imagine the poem also this way: a peacock with tail outspread, and the phosphorescent circle on each feather an actual eye. The poem lets us see through every eye. Then it is, as Wallace Stevens has it, that art in which “hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once.”

 

II. Sentences

Emerson’s own essays are exemplary of the next suggestion, an extension of his poetic insight: Every sentence of an essay must be an essay. It might be worth going further, and to alter Stevens’s lovely line, to make the essay that art in which “hundreds of minds, in one eye, think at once.” The bond between logos and logic that seems to drive the sentence through its argument to essay’s conclusion may be a more tenuous thread than one cares to admit. Keats knows this, as over and again he examines the fraught relationship between beauty and thought, summed up nowhere more succinctly than at the end of his letter, written in 1817, to his brothers, in which he defines negative capability. There he concludes: “This pursed through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” This obliteration of thought by beauty is something I’ve long pondered, but even more so as my own writing practice has turned to essays of lyric literary reverie and investigation. If Dickinson is right, and I think she is, that “This World is not Conclusion,” then the beautiful sentence might work to frustrate the considered logic of the essay’s larger aims, if not to obliterate them completely. I can imagine the mind as a knot trying to untie itself from within its own complexity, and though it may look from outside as if nothing’s changed, what’s inside has loosened its intricate ravel; I can see the sentences in an essay acting in just the same way.

Sometimes craft isn’t advice or technique, but simply a suggestion—a way of thinking, a method of approach. That is, craft can be revelatory of condition. When it is so, a poem teaches us what it is to think, and an essay teaches us what it is to see. We thought we’d entered into different lessons entirely when we picked up the book we’re reading, but when we put it down—whether it is essay or poem—we find both mind and eye opened. Not that it’s easy, in the end, to tell the two apart. 

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and author most recently of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017).

Craft Capsule: The Craft of Humility, the Craft of Love

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

2.13.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I’m teaching a class called Introduction to Poetry; I’ve taught it many times before. On day one, knowing many students are there not wholly willingly (a requirement, for many, for better or worse) I make the same tired joke: “Class, this is Poetry. Poetry, this is the class. I hope you’ll both be friends.” A few laugh.

But I mean it, that joke. I feel my job as a poet is to bring them into poetry in such a way that its difficulty becomes the means of admitting to and encountering their own complex lives, of finding in those nearly unspeakable reaches of mind or heart some companionship they did not hope to have—like a good friend offers. I hope the same for those easier pleasures in life—the sun-bright leaf, the bee in the bud, a rose—that a poem might offer itself to bear within it the sweet moment’s memory that otherwise might drift away into oblivion.

For those hopes to come true, the students need to learn how a poem works; inevitably, much of our delving into any particular poem requires an investigation into craft. I take something Ludwig Wittgenstein says about the nature of philosophy, and alter it toward poetic ends. I suggest that our condition is to find ourselves at sea on a craft that leaks and must be repaired as we float in it—that craft is our craft, the very thing that keeps the poem from sinking, and us along with it. For the honest poem, craft isn’t some willful choice of form, or any set of decisions binding the freedom of the poem to particular tropes; rather, craft is the helpless acceptance of what work is needed to keep the poem intact despite the extremity of its position—hovering there on the white abyss of the blank page, silence all around it, and you, riding in the thing you’re writing.

It is in such light that I want to offer the two most significant introductions to poetry and its craft that happened in my younger, proto-poet life. They are aspects of craft not typically thought of as craft at all, and yet, they opened me to poetry in ways I’ve yet to recover from—which is to say, I’m happy to still be here, fixing a leak while crossing the ocean.

 

I. The Craft of Humility

I thought myself a smart kid in high school, already something of a poet, dumb-drunk on some sense of my own “giftedness,” and out to prove it. I had the remarkable fortune then of having a teacher, Ms. Porter, who loved poetry and, just as important, could teach it. She broke the class into groups, and gave each group one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. My group was given number 173: “That time of year thou mays’t in me behold.” I lorded over the conversation, built some reading I cowed others into accepting, and when we presented to the class, of course, I was the one doing the speaking. I don’t remember—thank goodness—anything I said, or how it was I thought I saw that poem. What I do remember is the look on my teacher’s face—a teacher I loved. It wasn’t just disappointment, but a kind of anger. And I remember what she said, very loud, in front of everyone: That I had gotten the poem so wrong, I might as well have not read it.

I sat down and felt ashamed. That shame, the deep and burning sense of it, was my first true lesson in poetry. I realized that I’m not smarter than the poem I read, far from it; and that if I wanted, as I professed I did, to become a poet myself, then first I had to humble myself enough to know that I didn’t know much. I had to admit to myself my own insufficiency, that I needed a teacher to learn from, and the poem was both instructor and lesson itself.

Only years later did the true beauty of that poem find me: the bare ruined choir of those branches that, as the winter night darkens early with cold, become the fuel for the fire, those embers glowing and “consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.” Then I finally learned my lesson in craft, years after the hour in the classroom closed: that the poem is its own deepest resource, and the image it bears in the first lines, taken with all the literalness the imagination can muster, become the means of admitting to and countering crisis. For example: It is cold and dark and I’m getting old; but there’s a tree, and a fire, and a home. Even so late, the sweet birds sing.

 

II. The Craft of Love

Two years later, I had the same Ms. Porter again.

I had in the intervening years started reading and writing poems in earnest, and had started seeing a young woman, Kristy Beachy, who—. Well, who was everything to me.

We were reading John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” Humbled enough now to admit the poem made little sense to me, I was curious to see how Ms. Porter would teach it.

Stanza by stanza she led us through the metaphors, those metaphysical conceits, of lovers parting for untold time. Midway through those nine quatrains, which move from death to storm to the quaking of the planetary spheres, their gentle insistence that absence is no true remove, Donne admits to the kind of humility I’d come to recognize:

But we by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less eyes, lips, hands to miss.

Right there, at the very crux of a poem whose gentle fury of intellect seemed to cast it past my grasp, was the admission of not knowing exactly what is this thing one is in—this life, this love. I don’t know, those abashed, holy words, uttered in the very crucible of needing to know, that in their honest urgency, admit no defeat, but instead open the mind to its next vision.

That vision, Ms. Porter showed us, that “gold to airy thinness beat” of two souls that are one, depended upon gold beaten down to the micron of its leaf while remaining absolutely whole. But if these twin souls are two—and here, Ms. Porter pulled out her compass, familiar to us all from Geometry class—and demonstrated those last, astonishing lines:

If they be two, they are two so 
As stiff twin compasses are two; 
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show 
To move, but doth, if the other do. 

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must, 
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 
And makes me end where I begun.

Then she held the paper up on which she’d drawn her perfect circle. I don’t know if I gasped. I might have. For I’d learned my other earliest lesson in craft: that metaphor in poetry isn’t difficult because of its abstraction, but because of its accuracy. And I thought I’d learned something of that sense of accuracy, those feelings so poignant in their utmost singularity that they verge on the unspeakable: There was Kristy Beachy, sitting one row over and two seats ahead of me, and I was Dan Quick, mind-struck behind her, deeply, deeply, in love—with Kristy, of course, and with poetry. Not that it’s so easy to tell such matters of craft apart.

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and author most recently of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017).

Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain

by

Sandra Beasley

4.25.17

Online Only

This is the tenth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

 

***

I attended a high school geared toward professions in science or technology, so I have an active analytical streak and crave objective rubrics for understanding the wildly creative poems, stories, and essays that I read. I suspect I’m not alone in this.

One of my mentors, Gregory Orr, articulated four “temperaments” of poetry in a 1988 essay titled “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry.” You can envision these facets of craft as quadrants, positioned on an X-Y axis. To the left, limiting impulses: “Story” in the upper quadrant and, below it, “Structure.” To the right, impulses that extend limitlessness: “Music” in the upper and, below it, “Imagination.” Though designed for poetry, I find these temperaments useful for prose as well. As writers, we each typically favor two of the four in our work. Which temperaments bring you to the page? Which come easiest to you? Which do you need to consciously strengthen in your work?

This system gives us a way to articulate differences in aesthetic without ranking them. I’m relieved to set aside presumptive hierarchies. I suspect I’m not alone in this.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”

Craft Capsule: The Art of Targeted Revision

by

Sandra Beasley

4.18.17

Online Only

This is the ninth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

“Too many hours of revising—to no clear end!” my student complains. He is tired. He feels like the poem never really gets better. There’s always more work to do.

Welcome to revision: the arbitrary realm in which we debate “the” versus “an,” “this” versus “that.” Spend an hour putting a comma in. An hour later, take it out.

Part of the problem is that we complicate the revision process by making our aims abstract. One big revision, we promise ourselves, will make the poem “better.” Don’t privilege “better,” which is a meaningless term. Assign clear and objective tasks. Devote one round of revision exclusively to heightening your imagery, another to reconsidering your verb choices, a third to playing with lineation or tense.

Think of each revision as an experiment. Often these experiments will feel like evolutionary progress, and you’ll keep their results intact. Not always, especially as you near the end of the revision process. When the new version fails to appeal—when you find yourself resisting, reverting, defending an earlier choice—you are locating the poem’s true form. You are identifying what makes this poem yours, and yours alone.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Find Your Metaphor
Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”
Craft Capsule: Visual Prompts

Craft Capsule: Visual Prompts

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

Craft Capsule: The Scourge of Technology

by

Tayari Jones

1.23.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The cell phone is the worst thing to ever happen to literature. Seriously. So many great fictional plots hinge on one detail: The characters can’t connect. Most famous is Romeo and Juliet. If she just could have texted him, “R, I might look dead, but I’m not. Lolz,” then none of this would have happened.

In my new novel, An American Marriage, both e-mail and cell phones threatened my plot. Here is a basic overview: A young couple, Celestial and Roy, married only eighteen months, are torn apart when the husband is wrongfully incarcerated and given a twelve-year prison sentence. After five years, he is released and wants to resume his old life with her.

A good chunk of the novel is correspondence between our separated lovers. In real life, they probably would have used e-mail. But the problem, plot-wise, is that e-mail is so off-the-cuff, and there is so little time between messages. I needed to use old-fashioned letters. Their messages needed to be deep and thoughtful, and I wanted them to have some time to stew between missives. But who in their right mind (besides me) uses paper and pen when e-mail is so much faster and easier?

The fix was that Roy uses his allocated computer time in prison to write e-mail for the other inmates, for pay. As he says, “It’s a little cottage industry.” He also explains that he likes to write letters to his wife at night when no one is looking over his shoulder or rushing him. 

So look how this fix worked: You see that even though he is incarcerated, his is still a man with a plan. The challenge was to figure out how to avoid e-mail in such a way that it didn’t read like I was just trying to come up with an excuse to write a Victorian-style epistolary novel.

The cell phone was harder to navigate. Spoiler: Celestial has taken up with another man, Andre, in the five years that her husband is incarcerated. A crucial plot point, which I will not spoil, involves Andre not being able get in touch with her. Well, in the present day there is no way to not be able to reach your bae, unless your bae doesn’t want to be reached. Trouble in paradise is not on the menu for the couple at this point, so what to do? I couldn’t very well have him drop his phone in a rest-stop commode!

To get around it, I had to put Andre in a situation in which he would agree not to call Celestial or take her calls—although he really wants to. Trust me. It’s killing him. But he makes an agreement with Roy’s father, who says, “Andre, you have had two years to let Celestial know how you feel.  Give my son one day.” Andre agrees and has to rely on faith that their relationship can survive. The scene is extremely tense and adds suspense to the novel. I had to get up and walk around while I wrote it.

I predict that future novelists will not grapple with this quite as much as we do, as technological advances will be seen as a feature rather than a bug. But for now, you can still write an old-fashioned plot that doesn’t involve texting or tweeting—you just have to figure out a work-around that enhances the plot and understanding of your characters.

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

 

 

 

Craft Capsule: Finding Your Story

by

Tayari Jones

1.16.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-first in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Like most thoughtful people, I have noticed that the world is on fire and I want to use my skills to help extinguish the flames. To this end, I set out five years ago to write a novel that addresses the injustice of wrongful incarceration. I applied for and received a fellowship to the Radcliffe Institute and I became a dedicated researcher. I learned a lot, so much so that I got angry just watching Law & Order, my ex-favorite television show. I was informed, “woke,” and motivated, but I couldn’t write a novel because I had no story. The problem was that I was trying to write to the issue, and I can only write a story that is issue-adjacent.

I know I have a novel when I have a question to which I don’t know the moral/ethical answer. When it comes to wrongful incarceration, I am not torn. The state should not imprison innocent people. Full stop. Also without ambiguity: The prison system is cruel, corrupt, and in desperate need of reform, if not abolition.

So where was the novel?

The answer revealed itself in a food court where I spied a young couple. She was dressed in a lovely cashmere coat. He wore inexpensive khakis and a polo. They were clearly angry, and clearly in love. I overheard the woman say, “Roy, you know you wouldn’t have waited on me for seven years.” He shot back, “What are you talking about? This shit wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.”

Just then, I knew I had a novel. The reason is that I understood that they were both probably right. I didn’t know him, but I couldn’t quite picture him waiting chastely by for seven years. At the same time, I couldn’t imagine her behind bars. But did he have a right to demand her loyalty when both seem to agree she would be in no position to demand the same? Was this question moot since she would not likely face this challenge? Was this a kind of privilege? Could she mitigate this privilege by waiting like a modern-day Penelope? Should she?

So we have a couple with a conflict, and at stake between them are issues of reciprocity, duty, and love. Yes, there is the injustice of mass incarceration. And yes, this injustice is fueled by racism and prejudice. Neither of them doubt this, and neither do I. But the question of “will you wait for me” is foremost on his mind.

The result is my new novel, An American Marriage. Roy and Celestial are newlyweds, married only eighteen months, when Roy is arrested for a crime he did not commit. When he is slapped with a twelve-year sentence, the questions of desire and responsibility are at the center of the characters’ lives. As a writer, I was genuinely torn: Roy needs Celestial to be a link to the life he left behind, and Celestial loves her husband, but she has only one life. I wrote this novel not only to satisfy my heart’s curiosity as to what they would do, but to also satisfy the part of my mind that wondered what should they do.

I realized that my passion for the issue of incarceration was the reason that I couldn’t write about it directly. A novel is not me, as a writer, telling the reader what I already know. And an honest novel is not about me pretending to take on “both sides” of an issue about which I have a clear opinion. I had to start with my issue and then walk away from it until I found the thing I didn’t know. To truly challenge the reader, I had to challenge myself as well.

 

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

 

Craft Capsule: Gin and Scotch Tape

by

Sandra Beasley

5.2.17

Online Only

This is the eleventh in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Years ago a distinguished poet hosted our class’s workshops at her home in Virginia. The house was perched on an incline; down the hill was her writing cabin alongside a pond. We met at her dining room table and tried not to be distracted by the hawks swooping outside the windows.

A student brought in a draft that compared the scent of gin to Scotch tape. Setting aside all other matters of theme or craft, the discussion lingered on this comparison. The simile was bright and original. But was it accurate? That only a few in the room had ever sampled gin, and even then only of an aristrocrat variety, did not aid our analysis.

Reaching her limit, the professor sprang up from the table. “We’re settling this,” she said. She walked into the kitchen and retrieved a roll of Scotch tape. She went to a corner of the dining room, opened a cabinet, and pulled out a bottle. She walked the gin around the table so we could sniff accordingly.

Lesson one? To compare the scents of Scotch tape and gin doesn’t quite work, because the former obscures the latter’s floral qualities.

Lesson two? Always be prepared to have your simile put to the test.

Lesson three? Never let a turn of figurative language, no matter how vivid or clever, hijack what you’re trying to say. I can’t remember who wrote that poem, or where its heart lay. I only remember the gin and Scotch tape. 

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain
Craft Capsule: The Art of Targeted Revision
Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”

Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain

Craft Capsule: Real Time vs. Page Time

by

Wiley Cash

9.26.17

Online Only

This is the twentieth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Several years ago I worked with a student who was writing a novel about a guy training for a career in the sport of mixed martial arts. The novel was exciting and interesting, and the writing was strong and compelling. Until the fighting began. The minute the bell rang and the fists and feet started flying, the pace of the narrative turned glacial.

This may come as a surprise to you; it certainly surprised me. The talented author was actually a former MMA fighter, so it seemed impossible that he was unable to write an exciting fight scene. Then I realized that fight scenes are rarely exciting on the page. I believe this is true for two reasons. First, a fistfight is a process, and processes rarely make for compelling reading. Second, fistfights are exciting because they unfold in real time, which is wholly different than page time.

I want to talk about process first. Process is part of our daily lives, and many of the processes we undertake are performed through rote memory: brushing our teeth, making coffee, pouring cereal. These processes aren’t very interesting, and they don’t really need to be written about in detail. Readers may need to know that your characters drink coffee, eat cereal, and brush their teeth, but they don’t need to see this happening. Telling them it happened is enough. This is an example of when telling should be privileged over showing. But sometimes you may want to show a process, especially if it proves a level of expertise. Perhaps you’re writing about a character who is skilled with firearms, and you want to show that level of knowledge and skill. Perhaps you should have a scene in which the character goes through the process of breaking down and cleaning a firearm.

Most often, when readers start down the road of reading about process they’re not interested in the process itself; they’re interested in the outcome. The fight scenes in my student’s mixed martial arts novel are a good example. While the scenes were very technical and showed the same level of skill and mastery that I just mentioned, as a reader I quickly became bogged down in the descriptions of the movements, and I lost a sense of the movements themselves. I found myself skipping through the process of the fight in order to discover whether or not our hero won the fight. I realized that as a reader I was more interested in the outcome than I was in the process. The scene hinged on the result of the fight as an event, not on the act of fighting.

Not only were the fight scenes weighed down by process, they were also slowed down by the act of reading. Let’s step out of the ring. Think about the fights or dustups or schoolyard shoving matches you’ve witnessed. How long did they last before someone stepped in or called the parents or the teachers came running? Thirty seconds? A minute? A few minutes, tops? These events almost always unfold very quickly. The movements are fast; words are exchanged at a rapid clip. Your eyes and ears are able to take in the movements and the verbal exchanges simultaneously. Now, imagine trying to portray these events verbatim on the page. Think about how many words would be required to nail down both the movements and the dialogue. It would take much longer to read that scene than it would to witness it.

There’s an old writerly saying that dialogue isn’t speech, but rather an approximation of speech. Sometimes, this is true of action, especially in terms of process. 

 

Wiley Cash is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Last Ballad, A Land More Kind Than Home, and This Dark Road to Mercy. He currently serves as the writer in residence at the University of North Carolina in Asheville and teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program. He lives with his wife and two young daughters in Wilmington, North Carolina. His website is www.wileycash.com.

Craft Capsule: The Art of Active Dialogue

by

Wiley Cash

9.12.17

Online Only

This is the nineteenth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

When I work with new writers, one thing I often notice is their lack of faith in their dialogue: They don’t trust that it’s strong enough to stand on its own. They feel that they must add something to really get the point across. These writers add action words to their dialogue tags in an attempt to hide any flaws they fear may be hiding in their characters’ verbal interactions. In other words, they do everything they can to make certain that the reader gets the full import of what the characters are attempting, consciously or unconsciously, to communicate.

Often, and unfortunately, these action words take the form of gerunds. Let me follow this with a caveat: Gerunds in dialogue tags are not always a bad thing if they’re used purposefully and sparingly. I use them. Other writers I admire use them. But if I’ve used a gerund in a dialogue tag then I can defend it because I’ve already spent a good deal of time trying to consider whether or not to use it.

The gerunds in dialogue tags that bother me are the ones that are clearly there to underpin weakness in the dialogue. This happens when writers feel they need an action to complement a line of dialogue. Here’s an example:

“What do you mean?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders.

Let’s add an adverb and make that gerund really awful.

“What do you mean?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders nervously.

The writer (in this case, me) felt the need to add that gerund (and perhaps the adjective as well) because the dialogue itself was pretty weak. “What do you mean?” is a boring question. Anyone can ask this, but your character can’t just be anyone. He has to be a particular person with particular turns of phrase and particular movements (what are often called “beats” in dialogue) to flesh out what he means.

Let’s give it another try, and this time let’s write a better line of dialogue that essentially says the same thing as our original, just more clearly.

“What am I supposed to say to that?” He shrugged his shoulders. “What does that even mean?”

I tinkered a little with the original line and split it into two, but I divided the two lines with the beat of action. I feel like my two lines are pretty strong, and they seem particular to this person, whoever he is. Because my dialogue is strong, it doesn’t need the support of action. So my action can stand alone.

The action also does something the dialogue cannot do. It illustrates visually what the dialogue means verbally. The phrase “What am I supposed to say to that?” is a phrase of exasperation, so the action takes this a step further and shows exasperation. The follow-up question of “What does that even mean?” amplifies both the original question and the action.

If I had kept the gerund shrugging it would have combined the dialogue and the action, which crowds the reader’s mind in asking her or him to do two things at once: see and hear. Let’s focus on asking one thing of our reader at a time. The act of reading is not the act of movie watching, which often requires viewers both to see and hear at the same time. Literature and film cannot do the same things in the same ways.

The gerund shrugging is also a weak action word because it does not have a clearly demarcated time of beginning. How long has this guy been shrugging? After all, we enter the word “shrugging,” and presumably the dialogue, as the shrugging is already under way. On the other hand, when we read the line “He shrugged his shoulders” we are entering the action at the moment it begins. It has not been unfold-ing since an indeterminate moment in time. The action feels particular, as if it is caused by the line of dialogue that precedes it. It gives us a chance both to digest the dialogue and imagine the action. It does not ask us to do both at the same time with the confusion of wondering when the shrugging actually began. This is deliberate writing. We should all be deliberate writers.

I want to close with a few lines of dialogue from my upcoming novel, The Last Ballad. In this scene, a man has just come up a riverbank and met a small boy standing at a crossroad. The boy is staring down into a ditch where his injured dog is lying. The man asks the boy where they are.

The boy lifted his eyes from the ditch and looked around as if getting his bearings.

“Gaston,” the boy finally said.

“Gaston,” he repeated. He looked down at the boy. “Do you mean Gaston County?”

The boy shrugged.

“Mama just says ‘Gaston’ when she says ‘here.’”

I worked really hard on this scene. I wanted it to communicate an edge of laconic strangeness. The boy’s poverty has rendered him a bit provincial. The man’s travels have rendered him a bit wistful. I purposefully separated the actions from the lines of dialogue and cordoned them off in their own sentences.

But what if I’d used gerunds?

“Gaston,” the boy finally said, lifting his eyes from the ditch and looking around as if getting his bearings.

“Gaston,” he repeated, looking down at the boy. “Do you mean Gaston County?”

“Mama just says ‘Gaston’ when she says ‘here,’” the boy said, shrugging.

Written this way, the scene unfolds too quickly. The boy gives his answer about their location before getting his bearings. The man’s quizzical repetition of the word “Gaston” is marred by his deliberate action of looking down at the boy. The words and the actions do not go together. They must be separated and addresses and experienced on their own terms.

My advice is this: Trust your dialogue. If you don’t, make it stronger. Then, once your dialogue is strong, bring in action beats that amplify the speaker’s message, not messy gerunds that clutter it.

 

Wiley Cash is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Last Ballad, A Land More Kind Than Home, and This Dark Road to Mercy. He currently serves as the writer in residence at the University of North Carolina in Asheville and teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program. He lives with his wife and two young daughters in Wilmington, North Carolina. His website is www.wileycash.com.

 

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”
Craft Capsule: Making Conversation
Craft Capsule: Find Your Metaphor

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”
Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain

Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain

Craft Capsule: Rhyme and the Delay in Time

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

2.27.18

Online Only

This is no. 27 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

It snowed last night. Not much. Just an inch or two. But this morning there’s a strange fog in the air. It isn’t like a spring fog, thick in the vision, obscuring the trees and houses across the small field. It must be frozen crystals in the air, some breath the dormant grass gathered and sighed out, or the wedding dress a cloud took off and let drop down to the ground—a dress that is no more than texture in the air. It faintly glows, like it’s holding light inside of it, like it’s slowing light down. It’s morning when I get to see what it is to see.

I’d also like to hear what it is to hear, to listen in on listening.

Over the course of many years of working on the page as best I could, reading wherever it was bliss took me, writing to catch up to those glimmers other poems taught me to see by, I began to distrust that divide I grew up being schooled in: tradition vs. experiment, conservative or “quiet” poetry vs. the avant-garde. Reading George Herbert, John Donne, and John Keats; reading Emily Dickinson, Sappho, and Gerard Manley Hopkins; reading Homer, Virgil, and the Greek pastoral traditions; reading anonymous poems for graves and for fields—all made me think that tradition might root itself down in the very humus of experiment. And, as humus and human are cognate, I began to suspect that the age-old tropes by which poetry functions—image, metaphor, metonymy, symbol; line, meter, music, rhyme—radically include us in that tradition of experiment that poetry might be described as. Trope, after all, comes from the Greek tropos, and means a turn, direction, a course, a way; but it also means the character of a person, the peculiar temper that makes one who one is; it also means the way the strong wind might move through a pine tree; it also means the way a winter morning’s fog might pause even the speed of light. I mean to suggest a simple thing, though I’ve learned the simple is often bewilderment’s own maze, that the tropes by which a poem moves through itself are not the musty pedantries of literary dictionaries, but are themselves fundamental forms of consciousness, the very means by which a poem comes to know itself, and by extension, the very means by which we come to know ourselves as well. The trope can wake us in the way the eye open wakes us—suddenly, there is light, and the first step of the day is into vision: an image. Or, take rhyme: Rhyme can make of the mind a wind-chime. 

I have no verifiable proof, just a sense from twenty years of teaching, more of reading and writing, that rhyme has become one of those aspects of tradition most easily derided. I can understand how it happened. Teaching now a lower-level poetry-writing workshop, I notice how often the weakest poems are strongest in rhyme, and the first advice, to not let the end sound of the line drive everything the line must do, inevitably makes the poem better. One of the unintended consequences of the workshop model may well be a drift away from the power of traditional tropes. The pressure put upon a single poem to achieve itself most successfully diminishes the larger work of thinking about what the work of poetry is—a work that requires the very failures, poem by poem, that necessitate thinking across the entire span of one’s efforts. The push, or the desire, to be “original,” to have a “voice,” to “make it new,” might deafen us to the latent, collective, anonymous consciousness that resides in something as simple-seeming as rhyme. There is something in rhyme—I think I can hear it, though it’s hard to describe—that speaks to the ongoing crisis of the human condition from the dawn of mind to now. It’s like an echo. But unlike that echo in stairwell or tunnel, in cave or gorge, it doesn’t get quieter as it moves through time. In rhyme, the echo gets louder.

So it is I often rhyme my poems, though it might not be obvious. I’ve come to trust there’s something in the ear’s own intelligence that leaps ahead of the conscious, analytic mind in a poem that rhymes, as if the hidden promise of a chiming sound sets forth in the poem a fate-like assurance that what is to come, though yet unseen, will welcome you. So quietly, but so familiarly, rhyme suggests that to move forward, as one must, into what one doesn’t know, will be okay. If so, rhyme offers itself as some form of existential assurance, is tuned in, and so attunes us, to fears and hopes so entwined with the human condition, we forget we even need to speak of them: that in what feels to be the chaos of the blank future, there is a cosmos, an order, into which we’ll fit. It is not exactly a means of survival, but a trust one will survive.

Rhyme also works within and against time. I can imagine in a poem heavily end-rhymed—say a Petrarchan sonnet with its octave of ABBAABBA, or Dante’s lovely, enveloping terza rima of ABA BCB CDC—that the surety of those sounds counters the awful, inevitable flow of mortal life in one direction. Then the poem that makes its claims about love’s immortality, or memory’s eternity, is no cloying euphemism, but an enacted audacity in the poem’s very fiber. That rhyme works as does mythic time, returning us ever again to a point we’ve never truly left—the day that is all one day, world’s onset, the syllable now, sun’s instant of light—even as, line by line, we recognize too that we do not get to remain in that golden light of origin. We can hear in the poem that mythic life of eternal return, and in hearing it, live within it, even as the poem accompanies us in that other recognition, that line by line we move to what end is ours. Rhyme puts a delay in time. It makes us understand what otherwise would feel an impossible paradox: that we live in time, and time doesn’t exist. And though I’m not exactly a religious man, it gives me one version of how heaven could work. It’s just a poem, just a rhyme, a single-syllable that, scanned, has no stress and rhymes AAAAAAAA…forever.

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and author most recently of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017).           

Craft Capsule: Hundreds of Eyes
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

Craft Capsule: The Craft of Humility, the Craft of Love

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

2.13.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I’m teaching a class called Introduction to Poetry; I’ve taught it many times before. On day one, knowing many students are there not wholly willingly (a requirement, for many, for better or worse) I make the same tired joke: “Class, this is Poetry. Poetry, this is the class. I hope you’ll both be friends.” A few laugh.

But I mean it, that joke. I feel my job as a poet is to bring them into poetry in such a way that its difficulty becomes the means of admitting to and encountering their own complex lives, of finding in those nearly unspeakable reaches of mind or heart some companionship they did not hope to have—like a good friend offers. I hope the same for those easier pleasures in life—the sun-bright leaf, the bee in the bud, a rose—that a poem might offer itself to bear within it the sweet moment’s memory that otherwise might drift away into oblivion.

For those hopes to come true, the students need to learn how a poem works; inevitably, much of our delving into any particular poem requires an investigation into craft. I take something Ludwig Wittgenstein says about the nature of philosophy, and alter it toward poetic ends. I suggest that our condition is to find ourselves at sea on a craft that leaks and must be repaired as we float in it—that craft is our craft, the very thing that keeps the poem from sinking, and us along with it. For the honest poem, craft isn’t some willful choice of form, or any set of decisions binding the freedom of the poem to particular tropes; rather, craft is the helpless acceptance of what work is needed to keep the poem intact despite the extremity of its position—hovering there on the white abyss of the blank page, silence all around it, and you, riding in the thing you’re writing.

It is in such light that I want to offer the two most significant introductions to poetry and its craft that happened in my younger, proto-poet life. They are aspects of craft not typically thought of as craft at all, and yet, they opened me to poetry in ways I’ve yet to recover from—which is to say, I’m happy to still be here, fixing a leak while crossing the ocean.

 

I. The Craft of Humility

I thought myself a smart kid in high school, already something of a poet, dumb-drunk on some sense of my own “giftedness,” and out to prove it. I had the remarkable fortune then of having a teacher, Ms. Porter, who loved poetry and, just as important, could teach it. She broke the class into groups, and gave each group one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. My group was given number 173: “That time of year thou mays’t in me behold.” I lorded over the conversation, built some reading I cowed others into accepting, and when we presented to the class, of course, I was the one doing the speaking. I don’t remember—thank goodness—anything I said, or how it was I thought I saw that poem. What I do remember is the look on my teacher’s face—a teacher I loved. It wasn’t just disappointment, but a kind of anger. And I remember what she said, very loud, in front of everyone: That I had gotten the poem so wrong, I might as well have not read it.

I sat down and felt ashamed. That shame, the deep and burning sense of it, was my first true lesson in poetry. I realized that I’m not smarter than the poem I read, far from it; and that if I wanted, as I professed I did, to become a poet myself, then first I had to humble myself enough to know that I didn’t know much. I had to admit to myself my own insufficiency, that I needed a teacher to learn from, and the poem was both instructor and lesson itself.

Only years later did the true beauty of that poem find me: the bare ruined choir of those branches that, as the winter night darkens early with cold, become the fuel for the fire, those embers glowing and “consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.” Then I finally learned my lesson in craft, years after the hour in the classroom closed: that the poem is its own deepest resource, and the image it bears in the first lines, taken with all the literalness the imagination can muster, become the means of admitting to and countering crisis. For example: It is cold and dark and I’m getting old; but there’s a tree, and a fire, and a home. Even so late, the sweet birds sing.

 

II. The Craft of Love

Two years later, I had the same Ms. Porter again.

I had in the intervening years started reading and writing poems in earnest, and had started seeing a young woman, Kristy Beachy, who—. Well, who was everything to me.

We were reading John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” Humbled enough now to admit the poem made little sense to me, I was curious to see how Ms. Porter would teach it.

Stanza by stanza she led us through the metaphors, those metaphysical conceits, of lovers parting for untold time. Midway through those nine quatrains, which move from death to storm to the quaking of the planetary spheres, their gentle insistence that absence is no true remove, Donne admits to the kind of humility I’d come to recognize:

But we by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less eyes, lips, hands to miss.

Right there, at the very crux of a poem whose gentle fury of intellect seemed to cast it past my grasp, was the admission of not knowing exactly what is this thing one is in—this life, this love. I don’t know, those abashed, holy words, uttered in the very crucible of needing to know, that in their honest urgency, admit no defeat, but instead open the mind to its next vision.

That vision, Ms. Porter showed us, that “gold to airy thinness beat” of two souls that are one, depended upon gold beaten down to the micron of its leaf while remaining absolutely whole. But if these twin souls are two—and here, Ms. Porter pulled out her compass, familiar to us all from Geometry class—and demonstrated those last, astonishing lines:

If they be two, they are two so 
As stiff twin compasses are two; 
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show 
To move, but doth, if the other do. 

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must, 
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 
And makes me end where I begun.

Then she held the paper up on which she’d drawn her perfect circle. I don’t know if I gasped. I might have. For I’d learned my other earliest lesson in craft: that metaphor in poetry isn’t difficult because of its abstraction, but because of its accuracy. And I thought I’d learned something of that sense of accuracy, those feelings so poignant in their utmost singularity that they verge on the unspeakable: There was Kristy Beachy, sitting one row over and two seats ahead of me, and I was Dan Quick, mind-struck behind her, deeply, deeply, in love—with Kristy, of course, and with poetry. Not that it’s so easy to tell such matters of craft apart.

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and author most recently of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017).

Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: The Scourge of Technology

Craft Capsule: Every Novel Is a Journey

by

Tayari Jones

2.6.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-fourth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Last week I wrote about how I came to make Roy the protagonist of my new novel, An American Marriage. The decision was frustrating because I came to this tale seeking to amplify the muffled voices of women who live on the margins of the crisis of mass incarceration. So imagine how hard it was for me to make the Roy’s story the main color of the take and relegate Celestial’s point of view to a mere accent wall. It nearly killed me. I was prepared to pull the novel from publication.

Luckily, I had a craft epiphany.

Roy is a great character. He’s like Odysseus, a brave and charismatic man returned home from a might battle. He just wants to get home and be taken care of by a loving wife and sheltered in a gracious house. His voice was very easy to write because he is easy to like; his desires and decisions make it easy to empathize with him. He is a wrongfully incarcerated black man. What decent person wouldn’t root for him?

Celestial was bit more challenging. She’s ambitious. She’s kind of stubborn. And most important, she isn’t really cut out to be a dutiful wife. Back when she was the protagonist of the novel, I used to say, “I am writing a novel about a woman whose husband is wrongfully incarcerated…” and everyone would expect the novel to be about her fight to free him. And it wasn’t. It was about her decision not to wait.

On the level of craft, it just didn’t work. For one thing, you can’t write a compelling novel about what someone doesn’t do. (There is a reason why Bartelby doesn’t get to narrate his own story.) Second, as I wrote last week, Roy’s crisis is just too intense and distracting for the reader to care about any other character as much.

So, what to do?

I foregrounded Roy. He is the protagonist and readers find him to be very “relatable” (my very least favorite word in the world). I took Roy on the journey, and I invite readers to accompany him. As the writer, I came to the table understanding that the expectations put on women to be “ride or die” are completely unreasonable; furthermore, there is no expectation of reciprocity.  But rather than use Celestial’s voice to amplify my position, I allowed Roy the hard work of interrogating his world view, and the reader, by proxy, must do the same.

The result is a novel that was a lot harder to write, but the questions I posed to myself and my readers were richer, more complex, and I hope, more satisfying.

 

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

Craft Capsule: Finding Your Story
Craft Capsule: The Scourge of Technology

Craft Capsule: Finding the Center

by

Tayari Jones

1.30.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-third in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

My new novel, An American Marriage, involves a husband and wife with an unusual challenge: Eighteen months after exchanging their vows, he is arrested and incarcerated for a crime he does not commit.

I was equally interested in both their stories, but for some reason early readers of the manuscript were way more interested in him (Roy) than her (Celestial.) At first, I was convinced that this was sexism, plain and simple. Men’s stories are considered more compelling. To try and make Celestial more appealing, I tried to give her a more vibrant personality. But regardless of the details I added to embroider her, beta readers still felt that she was “undeveloped” and that Roy was the character who popped. It almost drove me crazy. Finally, I realized that Roy held the readers’ attention because his problem was so huge. (He’s wrongfully incarcerated, for goodness sake!)

Undaunted (well, maybe a little daunted), I read stories by my favorite women writers who write beautifully about women’s inner lives. I checked out Amy Bloom, Antonia Nelson, Jennifer Egan. How did they manage to make emotional turmoil so visceral? In these writers’ hands, a small social slight can feel like a dagger. Why couldn’t I do this in my own novel?

I found the answer in the work of Toni Morrison, for all answers can be found there. It’s a matter of scale. There is a scene in The Bluest Eye where the lady of the house is distraught because her brother hasn’t invited her to his party, although she sent him to dental school. By itself, this is terrible and totally worthy of a story. However, in the same frame is Pauline, the maid who has suffered all manner of indignities in an earlier chapter. In the face of Pauline’s troubles, the matter of the party seems frivolous.

With this, I discovered a fundamental truth of fiction and perhaps of life: The character with the most pressing material crisis will always be the center of the story. Although Celestial’s challenges as a woman trying to establish herself in the world of art is intense, the fact of Roy’s wrongful incarceration makes her troubles seem like high-class problems and to center them in the novel feels distasteful to the reader, like wearing a yellow dress to a funeral and fretting over a scuffed shoe.

The solution: I made Roy the protagonist. Celestial’s voice is still there, but she is a secondary narrator. It was a hard choice because I was drawn to her story in the first place, but it was being drowned out by Roy’s narrative. Finally, I had to stop fighting it. The protagonist of An American Marriage is Roy Othaniel Hamilton.

It took me five years to figure this out. Of course, every craft solution makes for new craft obstacles. I’ll talk about the fall-out from this shift in my next (and final) Craft Capsule, next Tuesday.

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

Craft Capsule: The Scourge of Technology
Craft Capsule: Finding Your Story
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

Craft Capsule: Ordering the Story Collection

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.22.19

Online Only

This is no. 38 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I always read short story collections in order. Maybe this is because my earliest infatuations happened via mix tape (and by mix tape, I mean a CD that I burned or that someone burned for me, with songs meant to convey something deep and unspeakable). Unlike with a cassette, one could, in theory, set the CD player to random, but this would break an unspoken rule. The point was to put on your headphones, lie on your bed, and think about the person who made the mix for you. You’d hold the handwritten track list and listen to the songs in their intended order, so you could figure out what this person was trying to say. You paid close attention to the lyrics, the tone, the transitions. A successful mix tape meant never forgetting about the “author.” How exactly did they feel about you? Did you feel the same way? Maybe you hadn’t before, but now, alone in your room with all those perfectly chosen songs, maybe you were charmed. 

Assembling a short story collection is a daunting process: Often the individual pieces have been written as unique, standalone works, edited by staff with varying aesthetics at different literary journals, and published over a span of years. The earliest version of my collection, Black Light, wasn’t really a collection—it was just a bunch of stories I wrote and published between 2005 and 2017. It took my terrific agent to help me see that one of the stories was actually the beginning of a novel, that two others needed to be combined into a longer piece, and that one story had a voice too abstract and confrontational to fit in with the rest. Once these decisions were made, the stories that we kept had a kind of reverberation with each other. A musicality.

In an informal poll, my friends who read collections tell me they don’t read in order. They start with the shortest story, or the title story, or they read in reverse order or at random. This is all fine—unless the stories are linked, order shouldn’t make or break a collection—but when I was putting Black Light together, sequence became very important to me. I love the way my favorite collections bend time, pull me in and out of different worlds, immerse me in a situation for thirty pages and then toss me out. 

I had three very long stories and three very short ones and half a dozen in between. I liked the idea of giving moments of reprieve, little spaces to breathe, so flash pieces often came after the longest ones. Everybody knows how important the first track of a mix tape is, and I wanted to start my collection with my most affable narrator. In the story “Guts,” Sheila is bewildered by new circumstance: She’s recently fallen for a medical student, and suddenly she sees sickness and beauty everywhere she looks. This newfound empathy overwhelms her, and in that way she’s a great proxy for a reader entering the strange world of the collection. All my stories deal with similar themes—game playing, escapism, desire—but I had strong ideas about how to move through the different voices of the remaining narrators (urban and rural, child and adult, male and female, queer and straight) in a way that felt balanced and varied to me.

On the first call with my editor, before we’d even made a deal, she talked about her vision for the collection. She liked the order, the way the stories “sang” to one another. She compared her favorite collections to music: She wanted this book to feel cohesive and unified, but never repetitive. Like a perfect mix tape, she said, a book of short stories should make the reader fall in love. I knew then that I’d found the right person for my project.

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: Oblique Strategies
Craft Capsule: Finding the Center
Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

Craft Capsule: Ordering the Story Collection

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.22.19

Online Only

This is no. 38 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I always read short story collections in order. Maybe this is because my earliest infatuations happened via mix tape (and by mix tape, I mean a CD that I burned or that someone burned for me, with songs meant to convey something deep and unspeakable). Unlike with a cassette, one could, in theory, set the CD player to random, but this would break an unspoken rule. The point was to put on your headphones, lie on your bed, and think about the person who made the mix for you. You’d hold the handwritten track list and listen to the songs in their intended order, so you could figure out what this person was trying to say. You paid close attention to the lyrics, the tone, the transitions. A successful mix tape meant never forgetting about the “author.” How exactly did they feel about you? Did you feel the same way? Maybe you hadn’t before, but now, alone in your room with all those perfectly chosen songs, maybe you were charmed. 

Assembling a short story collection is a daunting process: Often the individual pieces have been written as unique, standalone works, edited by staff with varying aesthetics at different literary journals, and published over a span of years. The earliest version of my collection, Black Light, wasn’t really a collection—it was just a bunch of stories I wrote and published between 2005 and 2017. It took my terrific agent to help me see that one of the stories was actually the beginning of a novel, that two others needed to be combined into a longer piece, and that one story had a voice too abstract and confrontational to fit in with the rest. Once these decisions were made, the stories that we kept had a kind of reverberation with each other. A musicality.

In an informal poll, my friends who read collections tell me they don’t read in order. They start with the shortest story, or the title story, or they read in reverse order or at random. This is all fine—unless the stories are linked, order shouldn’t make or break a collection—but when I was putting Black Light together, sequence became very important to me. I love the way my favorite collections bend time, pull me in and out of different worlds, immerse me in a situation for thirty pages and then toss me out. 

I had three very long stories and three very short ones and half a dozen in between. I liked the idea of giving moments of reprieve, little spaces to breathe, so flash pieces often came after the longest ones. Everybody knows how important the first track of a mix tape is, and I wanted to start my collection with my most affable narrator. In the story “Guts,” Sheila is bewildered by new circumstance: She’s recently fallen for a medical student, and suddenly she sees sickness and beauty everywhere she looks. This newfound empathy overwhelms her, and in that way she’s a great proxy for a reader entering the strange world of the collection. All my stories deal with similar themes—game playing, escapism, desire—but I had strong ideas about how to move through the different voices of the remaining narrators (urban and rural, child and adult, male and female, queer and straight) in a way that felt balanced and varied to me.

On the first call with my editor, before we’d even made a deal, she talked about her vision for the collection. She liked the order, the way the stories “sang” to one another. She compared her favorite collections to music: She wanted this book to feel cohesive and unified, but never repetitive. Like a perfect mix tape, she said, a book of short stories should make the reader fall in love. I knew then that I’d found the right person for my project.

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: Oblique Strategies
Craft Capsule: Finding the Center
Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

Craft Capsule: Oblique Strategies

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.15.19

Online Only

This is no. 37 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was getting my MFA in fiction, one of my favorite professors asked us to write a story using only single syllable words. At first this sounded awful—how could we possibly pull this off? It wasn’t easy, but very quickly it became a kind of game to me, an obstruction that brought out odd new rhythms. When we came back to class and read our stories aloud, it was a revelation. Every single student had done something striking and compelling. The sentences were strange and clipped, everyday phrases made fascinating. One student had something like “he who taught us of the past” to stand in for history professor. In my story, instead of an electrician playing checkers, “the lights guy played reds and blacks.” The formal constraint forced us to go beyond the easy, obvious choices. My professor stressed that this was a starting point, something to unlock us; there was no need to stick to these rules in subsequent drafts. Later, when I was revising, I found that because the work didn’t sound like me, I could brutally edit it. Now, more than ten years later, if something isn’t working in a story or chapter, I sometimes fall back on the one-syllable trick.

The weirdest approaches to process are the ones I find most helpful—the ones that have stayed with me the longest. There was the professor who encouraged his classes to narrate problematic scenes from the perspective of inanimate objects, animals, or the dead. A friend of mine takes the articles out of any story or chapter that’s giving him problems. He usually puts most of them back, but something about the extraction lets him see the work differently. There was another professor who forbade us from using adverbs, or giving characters first names, or starting any sentence with a pronoun—I loved his bizarre rules, even when I decided to break them.

When I’m writing I sometimes consult this strange little deck of cards called Oblique Strategies. Originally created in 1975 by painter Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno—yes, that Brian Eno, immensely talented musician, producer, and co-conspirator of the late David Bowie—each card has a single directive printed on it, a “strategy” for your creative process. These prompts are meant to assist with removing blocks, but the Zen-like aphorisms are more abstract than prescriptive (i.e., “Start at the end,” or “Emphasize the flaws,” or really strange ones like “Remember a time when you hid from something as a child.”) 

The deck my partner and I have at home is the updated 2001 edition, with a bizarre product description: “These cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, and sometimes they were formulated. They can be used when dilemma occurs in a working situation…The card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear.” These mysterious abstractions are part of the charm. There’s now a version of the strategies available for free online, although I still prefer the physicality of shuffling through a deck. Two cards I selected at random just now read: “Disconnect from desire,” and “Go slowly all the way round the outside.” It all sounds a bit wacky, and that’s exactly the point. I find the further I lean into the weird, the easier is it for me to get back to work.

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: “Unlikable” Characters
Craft Capsule: Find Your Voice
Craft Capsule: Infinite Distance, or The Starry Archipelagoes
Craft Capsule: Every Novel Is a Journey

Craft Capsule: In Praise of Writing in Longhand

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.29.19

Online Only

This is no. 39 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

This sounds made up, but in my high school you could substitute a typing class for gym. As a bookish, lazy teenager, this was perfect for me. The class was called Fundamentals of Keyboarding, and we spent all semester doing home-key practices and speed drills. Near the end of each session the teacher would hand us some random page of text—it might be instructions for building a birdhouse or a page of a novel—and it was our job to type it, print it, and staple it to the original. I wasn’t great at a lot of things in high school, but I turned out to be a terrifically fast typist who rarely made mistakes; I loved holding the papers up to the light, seeing my words perfectly overlap with those on the handout. 

As an exercise in my first fiction workshop, the professor asked us to type a short story by our favorite writer. The idea was to feel the words come through our fingers, to pound out the rhythm of those admirable sentences ourselves. I still find typing immensely satisfying—it’s relaxing, almost a form of meditation. I like the mechanics of it, the way each letter translates to a physical movement, to a clicking sound, to a shape on the screen. I also have terrible handwriting. It’s barely legible and embarrassing, like someone has dared me to use my non-dominant hand. 

When I’m writing fiction, I’m typing on my laptop into a document, using the features meant to make things easy: cut, copy and paste, backspace. It’s convenient, it’s fast, and it’s the preferred method for most of the writers I know. I do a lot of pre-work in my head, by sound, so by the time I sit down to write, I have at least a few sentences ready. In the completely new sections, I’ll get into a flow, typing as fast as I can think, then doubling back and reading each sentence aloud. I’m constantly making changes as I go: correcting errors, substituting or cutting words, shifting whole sections around on the page.

But every once in a while I’ll get stuck, hung up on some fundamental, propulsive element of the story, like I’ve reached the end of the thread. Maybe I’m insecure about what comes next, paralyzed by doubt. Or maybe there’s a problem with a sentence I can’t work out on the screen, something tangled about the rhythm or syntax. As much as I hate it, the best thing I can do in this situation is pull the problem out of the computer and write it down.

All the usual disadvantages of writing in longhand become advantages: It’s slow, it requires more mechanical effort, the words must come in order with no easy erasures. I also have rules for myself: no crossing things out or moving/inserting words. If what I’ve written is wrong, I have to skip a line and write it again. If I realize halfway through a paragraph that a sentence belongs at some earlier point, I start the whole section over. When I’m writing things down, I press too hard and my hand cramps, so I have to take frequent breaks. This slow-building repetition lets me see the work differently. Writing in longhand is also uniquely tactile—there’s the feeling of the pen in my grip, my hand drifting across the page. I’m forcing my brain and body to connect with the story in a new way. 

Once I solve the problem, I’m eager to open the document on my computer. I’ll type in the revised section and move on, fast at the keyboard, back to the easy rhythm and familiar feel, until, inevitably, I come to the next snag. 

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: Oblique Strategies
Craft Capsule: Ordering the Story Collection

Craft Capsule: Ordering the Story Collection

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.22.19

Online Only

This is no. 38 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I always read short story collections in order. Maybe this is because my earliest infatuations happened via mix tape (and by mix tape, I mean a CD that I burned or that someone burned for me, with songs meant to convey something deep and unspeakable). Unlike with a cassette, one could, in theory, set the CD player to random, but this would break an unspoken rule. The point was to put on your headphones, lie on your bed, and think about the person who made the mix for you. You’d hold the handwritten track list and listen to the songs in their intended order, so you could figure out what this person was trying to say. You paid close attention to the lyrics, the tone, the transitions. A successful mix tape meant never forgetting about the “author.” How exactly did they feel about you? Did you feel the same way? Maybe you hadn’t before, but now, alone in your room with all those perfectly chosen songs, maybe you were charmed. 

Assembling a short story collection is a daunting process: Often the individual pieces have been written as unique, standalone works, edited by staff with varying aesthetics at different literary journals, and published over a span of years. The earliest version of my collection, Black Light, wasn’t really a collection—it was just a bunch of stories I wrote and published between 2005 and 2017. It took my terrific agent to help me see that one of the stories was actually the beginning of a novel, that two others needed to be combined into a longer piece, and that one story had a voice too abstract and confrontational to fit in with the rest. Once these decisions were made, the stories that we kept had a kind of reverberation with each other. A musicality.

In an informal poll, my friends who read collections tell me they don’t read in order. They start with the shortest story, or the title story, or they read in reverse order or at random. This is all fine—unless the stories are linked, order shouldn’t make or break a collection—but when I was putting Black Light together, sequence became very important to me. I love the way my favorite collections bend time, pull me in and out of different worlds, immerse me in a situation for thirty pages and then toss me out. 

I had three very long stories and three very short ones and half a dozen in between. I liked the idea of giving moments of reprieve, little spaces to breathe, so flash pieces often came after the longest ones. Everybody knows how important the first track of a mix tape is, and I wanted to start my collection with my most affable narrator. In the story “Guts,” Sheila is bewildered by new circumstance: She’s recently fallen for a medical student, and suddenly she sees sickness and beauty everywhere she looks. This newfound empathy overwhelms her, and in that way she’s a great proxy for a reader entering the strange world of the collection. All my stories deal with similar themes—game playing, escapism, desire—but I had strong ideas about how to move through the different voices of the remaining narrators (urban and rural, child and adult, male and female, queer and straight) in a way that felt balanced and varied to me.

On the first call with my editor, before we’d even made a deal, she talked about her vision for the collection. She liked the order, the way the stories “sang” to one another. She compared her favorite collections to music: She wanted this book to feel cohesive and unified, but never repetitive. Like a perfect mix tape, she said, a book of short stories should make the reader fall in love. I knew then that I’d found the right person for my project.

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: Oblique Strategies
Craft Capsule: Finding the Center
Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

Craft Capsule: Oblique Strategies

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.15.19

Online Only

This is no. 37 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was getting my MFA in fiction, one of my favorite professors asked us to write a story using only single syllable words. At first this sounded awful—how could we possibly pull this off? It wasn’t easy, but very quickly it became a kind of game to me, an obstruction that brought out odd new rhythms. When we came back to class and read our stories aloud, it was a revelation. Every single student had done something striking and compelling. The sentences were strange and clipped, everyday phrases made fascinating. One student had something like “he who taught us of the past” to stand in for history professor. In my story, instead of an electrician playing checkers, “the lights guy played reds and blacks.” The formal constraint forced us to go beyond the easy, obvious choices. My professor stressed that this was a starting point, something to unlock us; there was no need to stick to these rules in subsequent drafts. Later, when I was revising, I found that because the work didn’t sound like me, I could brutally edit it. Now, more than ten years later, if something isn’t working in a story or chapter, I sometimes fall back on the one-syllable trick.

The weirdest approaches to process are the ones I find most helpful—the ones that have stayed with me the longest. There was the professor who encouraged his classes to narrate problematic scenes from the perspective of inanimate objects, animals, or the dead. A friend of mine takes the articles out of any story or chapter that’s giving him problems. He usually puts most of them back, but something about the extraction lets him see the work differently. There was another professor who forbade us from using adverbs, or giving characters first names, or starting any sentence with a pronoun—I loved his bizarre rules, even when I decided to break them.

When I’m writing I sometimes consult this strange little deck of cards called Oblique Strategies. Originally created in 1975 by painter Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno—yes, that Brian Eno, immensely talented musician, producer, and co-conspirator of the late David Bowie—each card has a single directive printed on it, a “strategy” for your creative process. These prompts are meant to assist with removing blocks, but the Zen-like aphorisms are more abstract than prescriptive (i.e., “Start at the end,” or “Emphasize the flaws,” or really strange ones like “Remember a time when you hid from something as a child.”) 

The deck my partner and I have at home is the updated 2001 edition, with a bizarre product description: “These cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, and sometimes they were formulated. They can be used when dilemma occurs in a working situation…The card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear.” These mysterious abstractions are part of the charm. There’s now a version of the strategies available for free online, although I still prefer the physicality of shuffling through a deck. Two cards I selected at random just now read: “Disconnect from desire,” and “Go slowly all the way round the outside.” It all sounds a bit wacky, and that’s exactly the point. I find the further I lean into the weird, the easier is it for me to get back to work.

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: “Unlikable” Characters
Craft Capsule: Find Your Voice
Craft Capsule: Infinite Distance, or The Starry Archipelagoes
Craft Capsule: Every Novel Is a Journey

Online Only

/ Aug 11, 2019 / Comments Off on Craft Capsule: Looking Elsewhere

The Transformation

“It wasn’t fair that fish could see color, / and whales could not, but I was okay: I loved my new body. / I don’t know what kind of whale I was. In the ocean / there were no mirrors.” Emily Jungmin Yoon’s poem “The Transformation,” which appears in her debut collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco, 2018), has been adapted into a Motionpoems film directed by Malin Sandberg. 

Tags: 
The Transformation | Emily Jungmin Yoon | A Cruelty Special to Our Species | Ecco | 2018 | Motionpoems | video poem | short film
/ Aug 09, 2019 / Comments Off on The Transformation

Julia Phillips

“Stuck feelings come to me in two ways: first, a story-level stickiness, when I’m working on a project but don’t know where it’s headed next, and second, a more existential stickiness, when I don’t have a project and don’t know where I myself am headed. The first one is easier to handle. In those moments where the next sentence, paragraph, or scene isn’t coming, I turn away from my draft toward the outlining exercises in John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story. I rely most on his premise exercise, where you identify your story’s conflict, basic action, character change, and moral choice; and his story structure steps, where you pinpoint your main character’s weakness, need, desire, opponent, plan, battle, self-revelation, and new equilibrium. Going through story beats via Truby’s methods renews my enthusiasm for my project and smooths the way for me to proceed.

If I’m in the second situation, I usually need to put down the pen entirely and go outside for a while. During those times, the stuck feeling is overwhelming. I feel sluggish, sad. It’s easy to sleep too much, spend hours watching cake-icing videos on Instagram, and imagine I’ll never write again. Going outside, looking at the world, and talking to people helps me shake off the malaise. Turns out, once my body moves, so does my mind. Then the words follow.”
—Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth (Knopf, 2019)

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Writer Photo Credit: 
Nina Subin
/ Aug 08, 2019 / Comments Off on Julia Phillips

Bernard Ferguson

“I wish I could tell you that they are like seeds as they wish to be.” In this video Bernard Ferguson, one of the winners of 92Y’s 2019 Discovery Poetry Contest, reads his poem “When a Grave Swells.”

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Bernard Ferguson | 92Y | 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest | When a Grave Swells
/ Aug 06, 2019 / Comments Off on Bernard Ferguson

Greetings From Detroit

Poetry

Welcome to the United States of Writing Blog! I’m Justin Rogers, and I’ll be reporting from my hometown of Detroit, Michigan. I am a poet—check out my Poets & Writers Directory profile for more on that—and I work as a youth program coordinator at InsideOut Literary Arts organizing after-school creative writing programs and coaching youth teams for regional and national poetry slam competitions.

As a literary outreach coordinator for Poets & Writers, I’ve been tasked to further engage with the literary community in my city, let folks know about the tools and resources P&W has to offer (and there are so many), and report back about all that’s happening. Already so many faces have brightened up during my conversations with them about the Literary Events Calendar (where anyone can add events for free) and minigrants offered through the Readings & Workshops program (find out how to apply here).

I’m excited to continue sharing with Detroit the information and opportunities that P&W offers and, on a personal level, to learn more about my city and the literary world at large. Check the blog weekly for my reports from the field. Looking forward to being your guide out in Detroit!

Justin Rogers (Credit: Lebrun Jackson)
 
Justin Rogers is the literary outreach coordinator for Poets & Writers in Detroit. Contact him at Detroit@pw.org or on Twitter, @Detroitpworg.
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Detroit
/ Aug 05, 2019 / Comments Off on Greetings From Detroit

Geovani Martins

Geovani Martins, author of the debut short story collection, The Sun on My Head (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches, talks about incorporating slang and the language used by different regions in Rio de Janeiro into his writing, and the new generation of thinkers and artists from the favelas of Brazil.

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Geovani Martins | The Sun on My Head | 2019 | translation | Julia Sanches | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | short story
/ Aug 05, 2019 / Comments Off on Geovani Martins

Craft Capsule: The Art of Brutal Editing

Kimberly King Parsons

This is no. 40 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Like a lot of writers, last November my friend Chad and I participated in a kind of modified National Novel Writing Month. We knew there was no way we would actually write a novel in a month; in fact, we’d already been writing our novels for years. But we decided to stick to a goal of 2,000 words a day, just to see if we could do it. Some days we ended up with a little less, and some days a little more, but on November 30, we each had close to 50,000 new words. By the first of December I’d deleted more than half of mine, but that’s okay—they were the wrong words.

Stripped down, slender novels are my very favorite kind. Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Andrés Barba’s Such Small Hands, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter—these books have a compression and intensity I find wildly appealing. Jenny Offill’s beautiful short novel Department of Speculation was borne of the ashes of something much longer. She’d been bogged down by a big project for years when a friend suggested she pull out her favorite ideas, lines, and images and start over with those scraps. Katherine Faw Morris’s brilliant Young Gods started out at 100,000 words but was published at just over 20,000. In a 2014 interview in Hobart, she talks about this brutal editing, something she did alone, before she had an agent or editor: “I was pretty sure that with every word I cut, I was making it more and more unsellable, but also that I was making it better. I was finally getting the feeling I wanted, which to me is the most important thing. This numb, cold, almost dead feeling: that’s what I wanted.” The sparse, “unsellable” version of her book sold immediately. 

My 2,000-words-a-day experiment wasn’t a failure—it’s just that I’ve learned it takes a lot of ridiculousness to get to what’s relevant, at least when I’m working on a novel. When I write short stories, I move from sentence to sentence, each one like a bead on a necklace. The smaller scale allows me to hold the entire piece in my hands at once, to see the arc in a matter of weeks or months, to only put down what is essential. For me, this isn’t possible with a novel. It’s taken years for me to realize what my book is even about, years to feel out the full story. I’m not even 100-percent certain I can see it all now—it’s still surprising to me every day. I’ll add in digressions or side plots and realize much later that they don’t matter. When I go back and read old sections, I find things I have no memory of writing. Sometimes, present-me is impressed by past-me. Good job, I’ll think. This thread has been there all along! Other times I think past-me must have been drunk or asleep or that she’s messing with me on purpose. Goodbye, ten-page monologue on Tupperware, I’ll say. Goodbye, bitter side character based on a Subway sandwich artist I slept with in 2002. It doesn’t make me feel anxious to hit delete. With every paragraph, page, scene, or chapter I cut, I feel happier with what I’ve done, more confident about what I’ve chosen to keep.

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: In Praise of Writing in Longhand

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.29.19

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This is no. 39 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

This sounds made up, but in my high school you could substitute a typing class for gym. As a bookish, lazy teenager, this was perfect for me. The class was called Fundamentals of Keyboarding, and we spent all semester doing home-key practices and speed drills. Near the end of each session the teacher would hand us some random page of text—it might be instructions for building a birdhouse or a page of a novel—and it was our job to type it, print it, and staple it to the original. I wasn’t great at a lot of things in high school, but I turned out to be a terrifically fast typist who rarely made mistakes; I loved holding the papers up to the light, seeing my words perfectly overlap with those on the handout. 

As an exercise in my first fiction workshop, the professor asked us to type a short story by our favorite writer. The idea was to feel the words come through our fingers, to pound out the rhythm of those admirable sentences ourselves. I still find typing immensely satisfying—it’s relaxing, almost a form of meditation. I like the mechanics of it, the way each letter translates to a physical movement, to a clicking sound, to a shape on the screen. I also have terrible handwriting. It’s barely legible and embarrassing, like someone has dared me to use my non-dominant hand. 

When I’m writing fiction, I’m typing on my laptop into a document, using the features meant to make things easy: cut, copy and paste, backspace. It’s convenient, it’s fast, and it’s the preferred method for most of the writers I know. I do a lot of pre-work in my head, by sound, so by the time I sit down to write, I have at least a few sentences ready. In the completely new sections, I’ll get into a flow, typing as fast as I can think, then doubling back and reading each sentence aloud. I’m constantly making changes as I go: correcting errors, substituting or cutting words, shifting whole sections around on the page.

But every once in a while I’ll get stuck, hung up on some fundamental, propulsive element of the story, like I’ve reached the end of the thread. Maybe I’m insecure about what comes next, paralyzed by doubt. Or maybe there’s a problem with a sentence I can’t work out on the screen, something tangled about the rhythm or syntax. As much as I hate it, the best thing I can do in this situation is pull the problem out of the computer and write it down.

All the usual disadvantages of writing in longhand become advantages: It’s slow, it requires more mechanical effort, the words must come in order with no easy erasures. I also have rules for myself: no crossing things out or moving/inserting words. If what I’ve written is wrong, I have to skip a line and write it again. If I realize halfway through a paragraph that a sentence belongs at some earlier point, I start the whole section over. When I’m writing things down, I press too hard and my hand cramps, so I have to take frequent breaks. This slow-building repetition lets me see the work differently. Writing in longhand is also uniquely tactile—there’s the feeling of the pen in my grip, my hand drifting across the page. I’m forcing my brain and body to connect with the story in a new way. 

Once I solve the problem, I’m eager to open the document on my computer. I’ll type in the revised section and move on, fast at the keyboard, back to the easy rhythm and familiar feel, until, inevitably, I come to the next snag. 

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: Oblique Strategies

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Kimberly King Parsons

7.15.19

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This is no. 37 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was getting my MFA in fiction, one of my favorite professors asked us to write a story using only single syllable words. At first this sounded awful—how could we possibly pull this off? It wasn’t easy, but very quickly it became a kind of game to me, an obstruction that brought out odd new rhythms. When we came back to class and read our stories aloud, it was a revelation. Every single student had done something striking and compelling. The sentences were strange and clipped, everyday phrases made fascinating. One student had something like “he who taught us of the past” to stand in for history professor. In my story, instead of an electrician playing checkers, “the lights guy played reds and blacks.” The formal constraint forced us to go beyond the easy, obvious choices. My professor stressed that this was a starting point, something to unlock us; there was no need to stick to these rules in subsequent drafts. Later, when I was revising, I found that because the work didn’t sound like me, I could brutally edit it. Now, more than ten years later, if something isn’t working in a story or chapter, I sometimes fall back on the one-syllable trick.

The weirdest approaches to process are the ones I find most helpful—the ones that have stayed with me the longest. There was the professor who encouraged his classes to narrate problematic scenes from the perspective of inanimate objects, animals, or the dead. A friend of mine takes the articles out of any story or chapter that’s giving him problems. He usually puts most of them back, but something about the extraction lets him see the work differently. There was another professor who forbade us from using adverbs, or giving characters first names, or starting any sentence with a pronoun—I loved his bizarre rules, even when I decided to break them.

When I’m writing I sometimes consult this strange little deck of cards called Oblique Strategies. Originally created in 1975 by painter Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno—yes, that Brian Eno, immensely talented musician, producer, and co-conspirator of the late David Bowie—each card has a single directive printed on it, a “strategy” for your creative process. These prompts are meant to assist with removing blocks, but the Zen-like aphorisms are more abstract than prescriptive (i.e., “Start at the end,” or “Emphasize the flaws,” or really strange ones like “Remember a time when you hid from something as a child.”) 

The deck my partner and I have at home is the updated 2001 edition, with a bizarre product description: “These cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, and sometimes they were formulated. They can be used when dilemma occurs in a working situation…The card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear.” These mysterious abstractions are part of the charm. There’s now a version of the strategies available for free online, although I still prefer the physicality of shuffling through a deck. Two cards I selected at random just now read: “Disconnect from desire,” and “Go slowly all the way round the outside.” It all sounds a bit wacky, and that’s exactly the point. I find the further I lean into the weird, the easier is it for me to get back to work.

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: “Unlikable” Characters

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.25.18

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This is no. 36 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

As writers we all have specific goals when creating our fictional worlds. Some writers value plot, others value humor. Some prioritize beautiful sentences or abstract ruminations about the state of society. When I write, my goal is to construct characters full of depth and complexity. I don’t need readers to agree with my characters, but to understand the why behind their actions. 

When I created Haemi Lee, the female protagonist of my novel, If You Leave Me, I focused on developing this complexity so that my readers would know her intimately. At the beginning of the novel, Haemi is a sixteen-year-old refugee during the Korean War, and by the last pages she is a thirty-two-year-old mother in 1967. By covering a wide swath of time, I want readers to watch Haemi survive, mature, fall in love, make mistakes, become a mother, and grapple with the difficulties of life in post-war South Korea. I want Haemi to feel as real as possible, which meant that she would have to be imperfect, flawed. As I wrote, I considered how she would behave as a daughter, sister, wife, mother, and lover. I considered her temperament. Growing up without means in a conservative time, there would be strict social and gendered guidelines placed on Haemi. I wanted her to bristle against those rules. The problem, I discovered, was that an imperfect female protagonist is often labeled unlikable. 

The first time I heard Haemi described this way was in workshop. I was surprised. It was a gendered remark, and I hadn’t been expecting it at the graduate school level. When did we ever question the likability of male characters? Complicating matters further, when did we question the likability of female characters when they were written by male writers? I simmered in silence as my classmates discussed Haemi Lee. (As the student being workshopped, I wasn’t allowed to speak.) Jisoo and Kyunghwan, my two male protagonists, were not always likable and yet the focus remained on Haemi. Why did she need to be likable when her male counterparts were not? Why were we concerned with the likability of women anyway? Who among us are always likable?

This conversation led me to consider the trope of the “unlikable female character.” I prickled at the phrase, the silly term that asserts female characters are valued for their docility and amiability. I decided that I couldn’t let other readers’ apprehensions about Haemi’s likability soften her. Haemi pushes against the social expectations of her time by not hiding her feelings, by wanting an education, and by speaking freely of the difficulties of motherhood. Haemi is giving and selfish, kind and callous. She is concerned with the welfare of everyone around her while also deeply concerned with her own happiness. If I succeeded in my writing goals, my readers will not always like Haemi, but they will feel deeply for her. They will want to guide her, argue with her, and root for her. 

When writing, our concern should not be a character’s likability, regardless of gender. As the writer, our focus should be on making the character feel true. When my students hesitate at revealing their character’s flaws, I encourage them to dig into the messy, ugly parts. Flaws are what make fiction interesting and realistic. Though we may not love our flaws, they are crucial for characters. When a student worries about the likability of their female characters in particular, this is what I tell them: We need more unlikable female protagonists to deepen the way we consider women in our society. Literature teaches us. Literature makes us question and broaden our understanding of the world. If “unlikable female” means a realistic, imperfect, complex woman, then we need to write as many of these characters as we can.

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, and Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from the Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: Multiple Narrators

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.18.18

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This is no. 35 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Before I became a writer, I was first an insatiable reader. From Curious George to Little Women to The Lover, I can mark the trajectory of my development as a writer against my reading choices. A particularly memorable turning point happened when I was eight years old. While at the library, I came across a chapter book called Morning Girl. The cover showed a young girl with dark brown hair and bare shoulders swimming in the open sea, and I picked it up because of the striking image. As I began reading, I fell for Morning Girl’s lush, bright voice as she described her fondness for waking early and searching the beach for seashells. I felt keenly for Morning Girl when her parents favored her younger brother. I had a younger sister, and I understood the mean yellow streaks of jealousy. 

The shock came when I turned to the next chapter. At the top of the page was the name Star Boy. This chapter, I realized as I read, was narrated not by the titular girl, but her younger brother. I remember the confusion I felt and how quickly it was replaced with giddy wonder. Up until that moment, I hadn’t known that a book could have multiple narrators. Morning Girl tore writing open for me: For the first time I recognized that writers were in control of how the story was told and that the possibilities were endless.

I’ve gravitated toward novels with multiple narrators ever since, so when I started writing If You Leave Me, I knew I wanted to try this format. However, I needed to make sure having multiple perspectives would serve my goals. My central character was Haemi Lee, a sixteen-year-old refugee in Busan at the start of my novel. Did I really need the voices of her best friend Kyunghwan, her suitor Jisoo, her younger brother Hyunki, and eventually, her eldest daughter Solee? Thankfully, yes. After some examination, I realized that having multiple narrators allowed me to show the secrets characters were hiding not only from each other, but also from themselves. By alternating these voices, I was able to investigate how one event could be interpreted in various ways, depending on the character’s temperament and circumstance. For example, Haemi, Kyunghwan, and Jisoo all hungered in Busan during the Korean War, and yet their resulting traumas are each unique due to differences in class, gender, and family expectations. 

If You Leave Me spans sixteen years, from 1951 to 1967. Multiple perspectives also gave me the best means of capturing the landscape of Korea during this tumultuous time. Through my five alternating narrators, I was able to write about an ROK soldier in the Korean War; a college student in Seoul in the years afterward, when dictators ruled the nation; a factory worker forced to meet with a matchmaker; a mother yearning to escape her rural community; and a young daughter growing up in post-war Korea, when the vestiges of violence took on new forms.   

When my students say they want to write a novel with multiple perspectives, I’m secretly elated. However, I always remind them of the potential pitfalls. More voices may make your story feel fragmented, which can lead to readers preferring one character over another. In order to avoid this, it’s important to value each perspective equally. If you as the writer dislike one of your characters, the reader will feel that animosity in your words. The solution? Know your characters deeply on and off the page—know their desires, tics, fears, sexual preferences, favorite foods, secret dreams, worst habits. Develop them until you know them as intimately as a friend, in all of their complexities. In the end, I hope having multiple narrators in If You Leave Me enriches the reading experience. Haemi Lee’s voice is the center, but the four characters around her provide a lens not only into the larger history of Korea, but into Haemi’s complex, difficult temperament.

In my final Craft Capsule next week, I will talk more about Haemi and the necessity of “unlikable” female protagonists. 

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from the Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: Who Are You?

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.4.18

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This is no. 33 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

“When did you start writing?” Writers are often asked this question, and I’m always curious about the story behind the answers, the paths we take to find our vocations. As a child of immigrants, Korean was my first language. When I began elementary school, I found myself mentally switching between my mother tongue and English, trying to match vocabulary words across language lines. I soon found myself gravitating toward writing; with a pencil in my hand, I could take my time and express myself more clearly. In the first grade, I wrote about butterflies hatching for my beloved teacher, Ms. Benz. The next year, I wrote about a girl with short black hair who wanted to get her ears pierced, but whose Korean parents refused. I presented the story to my mother and father, hopeful and full of glee at my cunning. (Reader, they fell for it and let me pierce my ears.) “I’ve written ever since I was a child,” I say in answer to that question. But when did I find the stories I wanted to tell? That was a more recent discovery.  

As a sophomore in college, I took my first formal writing workshop. Somehow, over the course of my teenage years, my writing had changed. I no longer wrote stories that were rooted in my desires and questions about the world. Instead, I created characters without clear identities—their race, appearance, and backgrounds were murky, undefined. These young adults frolicked and fought on misty hills, drunk with mulberry-stained lips. I was trying to shy away from what I thought was expected of me. I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as the Korean American workshopper who could only write about “Asian” issues. But I sensed that something was wrong with my characters: They were vague, flat, lifeless. “Who is this girl?” a classmate asked. “Don’t be afraid to write about what you know,” my teacher said. 

At first I resisted these suggestions, digging deeper into my no-name characters without a clear sense of home. That is, until the summer break between my sophomore and junior year. One June evening I had dinner with my parents. Over a meal of galbi-tang, rice, wine, and ice cream, my parents recounted their childhoods. My father described catching grasshoppers from his neighbors’ field, of cooking them on a skillet over an open flame. My mother told me of staining her fingers orange with bong seon hwa flowers, which I loved to do during my summer visits to Korea as well.  

The next morning, I found myself still mulling over my parents’ stories. I imagined my father as a child, his lithe body running through high grass in search of those plump green insects. I loved that the act of staining fingers with flower petals, which my sister and I did every summer in Korea, was not only a family tradition, but a Korean one. These stories stayed with me all summer and through the fall, when my undergraduate classes resumed. This time in my fiction workshop, I wrote with greater purpose and clarity. I developed characters with a culture and history behind them. Better, I thought.

The more I wrote, the more I sought my family. When I began my graduate studies, I turned to my maternal grandmother. A fierce matriarch and gifted storyteller, my grandmother shared her life with me—she lived under Japanese occupation, survived the Korean War, and forged a life for her daughters in the years afterward. I absorbed these anecdotes, sometimes taking notes and sometimes just listening. 

When I began If You Leave Me, my debut novel, I knew I wanted to write about the Korean War. More important, I knew I wanted the main character to be a Korean woman who was strong, willful, intelligent, stubborn, and full of contradictions. I wanted a female protagonist that readers would love one moment and argue with the next, someone who felt as complex as our best friends and lovers do. I created Haemi Lee, a teenaged refugee living in Busan during the war. I rooted her story in my grandmother’s experiences, but I added my own desires and questions and fears until Haemi became a character of her own. 

It took me a few wayward years, but I eventually realized that writing about my culture does not confine me as a writer. Instead, my history provides a pool of memory for me to draw inspiration from. Now, when I teach creative writing, I emphasize this process for my students. I encourage them to value every part of their identities.

“Who are you?” I ask. “Tell me what you know.”

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: Tao Te Ching

by

Simon Van Booy

6.13.18

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This is no. 30 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

The biggest little book in China is called the Tao Te Ching. One of its most famous sayings is Wu Wei, 無爲, literally, doing nothing or non-doing.

Whereas some people have used this to imbue passivity or laziness with spiritual significance, I think it has something to do with wholeheartedness.

The child at play does not stop to ask herself, “Am I playing?” She is not aware of time, nor constrained by it. Imagine you get so deep into writing, that you forget you are writing. The story just flows from you, through you, and out into the world.

How can you get to that place? Where the act of writing is so much of part of you, it’s effortless. A process of instinct rather than thought—

The first step is to give up the idea you will ever fail, or ever succeed. Prepare to serve only the needs of the story. Then move your hands, breathe.  

Have faith.  

Laugh.  

Cry.

Sleep.

Dream.

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

by

Simon Van Booy

6.6.18

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This is no. 29 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Having a writing practice is like rowing out to sea in a small boat with a typewriter and sandwiches, hoping for the arrival of some strange bird in the sky. 

After a few hours you tell yourself, “It’s only been a few hours.”  

But when days pass with not even a feather, you wonder, “Am I in the right place? I should have brought binoculars.” You keep looking though—searching the empty sky for some sign, some intervention, a tangible indication that you’re good enough to write, educated enough, wild enough, rich enough, poor enough, sober enough, drunk enough, mystical enough, existential enough.  

Months pass. You’ve been rowing out to the same deep water for weeks and weeks. You’ve lost track of days. Seasons have changed. Where your hands once bled on the oars, there are calluses. You’ve survived heaving seas, blistering heat, and torrential downpours. 

At this point most people toss their typewriters over the side of the boat, and row for the safety of land. Without the bird, they say, nothing is possible.

But you remain in the boat, listening to yourself breathe, a film of salt on your skin. You sit down and pick up the typewriter, rest it on your sore legs, and start to imagine the story you once dreamed of writing. You don’t care about the bird anymore, the words are enough, the sentences are ropes you can use to pull yourself through the narrative.

Then suddenly you look up, there’s a dazzling light, like some mystical, winged creature with blazing eyes.  

As writers, we don’t wait for inspiration. Inspiration waits for us.

Don’t ever forget that.

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: Find Your Metaphor

by

Sandra Beasley

4.4.17

This is the seventh in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

A friend of mine, a poet, was trying to figure out what bothered him about a draft of my poem. “A poem should be like a wall,” he told me. “You build it brick by brick.” He pointed out that, in his opinion, key bricks were missing.

I didn’t share his vision, but I admired that he had one. I’ve come to value developing a metaphorical model for your genre. A model can help you identify your goals, name your struggles, and proceed toward success.

Perhaps you follow the lead of “stanza,” the Italian word for “room.” You come to think of each poem as a house. How do the rooms differ in function, size, and occupancy? Where does your central drama take place? What comprises your roof?

Perhaps you come to think of your essay as a harp. Each researched fact glimmers, an available string in a golden frame. But you can’t play them all at once. Only in choosing which notes to highlight, and how to sequence them, can you create music.

Personally, I always think of memoir as an egg. I’m protective of the inspiring memory, smooth and undisturbed in its surface. But I have to be prepared to break the egg. I have to make the idea messy before I can make a satisfying meal.

Perhaps your novel is a shark. Perhaps your villanelle is a waltz. Perhaps your short story is a baseball game. Don’t adopt my metaphors. Find one of your own.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.21.17

Online Only

This is the first in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

As a project for school, my thirteen-year-old son, Will, spent several days carrying an egg around. His task was simple: Keep the egg from breaking.

The experiment was intended to show what it’s like to have a baby, to approximate the feeling of constant vigilance that never leaves you once you have a child. Ultimately, of course, it was supposed to make hormone-addled adolescents think twice before doing something stupid.

As a mother of three, though, I wasn’t convinced. A baby is nothing like an egg, unless it’s an egg that cries, wets itself, sucks on you constantly, and wakes you up four times a night. But as my son described the feeling of carrying his egg—he named it “Pablito”—I realized that it did remind me of something. “It’s always there,” Will said. “You can’t forget it or take it for granted. You feel protective and anxious all the time.”

Carrying an egg around is like writing a novel. No matter what else you’re doing, the fact of the novel is in the back of your mind. If you go too long without attending to it, you get nervous. It is always with you, a weight solid and yet fragile, in constant danger of being crushed. Like the egg, the weight of a book-in-progress is both literal and metaphorical. Within the accumulating pages, as inside the delicate eggshell, are the raw ingredients for something greater. Keeping it intact requires patience, time, attention—and, most of all, commitment. This concept applies to any stage of the process: The egg is both the idea that you nurture long before you begin to write, and the writing itself, which must be fostered and sustained.

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.7.17

Online Only

This is the third in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Jackson Pollock’s reply to an interviewer’s question about how he composed his paintings of “accidental” splatterings has stuck with me. “I don’t use the accident,” he said. “I deny the accident.”

The sheer bravado of this is thrilling, and as a writer I find it to be a useful way to think about my work-in-progress. When I’m putting words on the page it’s easy to second guess, to question the often-unconscious choices I make as I go: the trajectories of characters’ lives, shifts in direction and focus, minor characters who gain traction as the story moves forward. The editor in my head starts whispering: You’re going in the wrong direction. Why are you spending so much time on that character? You need to focus, get back to the story you originally envisioned, stick to the plan.

Over time I’ve learned to trust my impulses. Whatever else they may be, these unanticipated detours are fresh and surprising; they keep me interested, and often end up adding depth to the work. Not always, of course—sometimes an accident is just an accident. But believing that these splatterings on my own canvas are there for a reason, as part of a larger process of conception, gives me the audacity to experiment.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.28.17

Online Only

This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The problem of beginning…

The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.

On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season….

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.28.17

Online Only

This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The problem of beginning…

The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.

On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season….

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.28.17

Online Only

This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The problem of beginning…

The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.

On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season….

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Tolstoy’s Short Chapters

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.28.17

Online Only

This is the sixth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Anna Karenina is more than eight hundred pages long. So why does it feel shorter than many three-hundred-page books?

As I read this novel recently I noticed that Tolstoy cuts his long scenes into short chapters, usually no more than two or three pages. This makes sense, considering it was published in serial installments, from 1873 to 1877, in the Russian Messenger. Tolstoy often ends a chapter in a moment of suspense—a door opens, a provocative question is asked, a contentious group sits down to dinner, characters who’ve been circling each other finally begin to talk—which propels the reader forward into the next chapter.

The psychological effect of these short chapters is that this huge book is easy to get through. Reading in bed late at night (as I tend to do), I’m tempted to put it down, but then I riffle ahead to find that the next chapter is only three pages long. And I really want to find out who’s behind that door.

Three pages. I can do that—as a reader and as a writer. 

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: Visual Prompts

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.21.17

Online Only

This is the fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

For many writers, visual and tactile stimulation is an important component of the creative process. William Faulkner used to map his stories on the wall in his study. If you visit Rowan Oak, his home in Oxford, Mississippi, you can still see the notes for his 1954 novel, A Fable, in his precise, small handwriting. Edwidge Danticat has said that she has an evolving bulletin board in her workspace where she tacks up collages of photos of Haiti and images from magazines.

I, too, have a new board for each book I write. When I’m starting work on a novel I gather scraps like a magpie. My Orphan Train board was covered with postcards from the New York Tenement Museum depicting the interior of an immigrant Irish family’s cramped apartment, a black and white photograph of a young couple at Coney Island in the 1920s, a map of the village of Kinvara in Ireland. I hung a hand-carved Celtic cross on a green ribbon and a stone shamrock on a red ribbon from Galway; a Native American dreamcatcher from Maine; a silver train pin from a New York Train Riders’ reunion in Little Falls, Minnesota. I tacked up note cards: “Food in Ireland 1900s” was one (“wheatmeal, hung beef, tongue, barley”). Another listed ideas I wanted to explore (“links between misplaced and abandoned people with little in common”).

For A Piece of the World, I included a print of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World; photos I took, inside and out, of Christina’s home in Cushing, Maine; some Emily Dickinson poems (“This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me”); and postcards of other paintings Wyeth did at the Olson house, including Wind From the Sea and Christina Olson (both of which make appearances in my novel). I photocopied sketches Wyeth made for his portrait of Christina. I even included a small handful of grasses I’d plucked from the field Christina sat in.

I find these idea boards fun to assemble and inspiring as I work. My mantra, always: Find inspiration where you can.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

An outline of A Fable on the wall of William Faulkner’s study at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi. (Credit: Joe Bonomo)

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

Craft Capsule: Making Conversation

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.14.17

Online Only

This is the fourth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Dialogue is hard to get right. It should sound like natural speech, but in fact it’s nothing like it. I like to send my creative writing students out to cafés and parks with notebooks to transcribe bits of overheard conversations. Then I ask them to type up these transcripts and turn them into dialogue between characters. Inevitably their written dialogue bears little resemblance to the overheard conversations. When you write dialogue you must eliminate niceties and unnecessary patter, and cut to the core of the exchange—unless the patter is crucial to the story, conveying a dissembling, depressed, incoherent, or boring personality. At the same time, it should sound natural, like something someone would actually say. The writer George Garrett called this dovetailing—trimming for verisimilitude and impact.

In direct and indirect speech, your characters should constantly be saying “no” to each other. Most of us (myself included) tend to avoid conflict in our real lives, but conflict is crucial in fiction. It keeps the story interesting.

Richard Price, in his novel Lush Life, allows his characters to talk and talk and talk. Price maintains a delicate balancing act; his characters’ words matter. What they say changes the direction of the story. But he never burdens his dialogue with exposition or forces it to convey plot points that don’t come up naturally. In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway writes, “In order to engage us emotionally in a disagreement, the characters must have an emotional stake in the outcome.” Price’s characters are nothing if not emotionally invested.

Price’s dialogue is vital to the story because it moves the action forward. He constantly puts his characters in conflict with one another. Their conversations are full of surprises—self-revelation, inadvertent admissions, hearsay, evidence—and kinetic energy; they crackle with life. Real life.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

Craft Capsule: Making Conversation

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.14.17

Online Only

This is the fourth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Dialogue is hard to get right. It should sound like natural speech, but in fact it’s nothing like it. I like to send my creative writing students out to cafés and parks with notebooks to transcribe bits of overheard conversations. Then I ask them to type up these transcripts and turn them into dialogue between characters. Inevitably their written dialogue bears little resemblance to the overheard conversations. When you write dialogue you must eliminate niceties and unnecessary patter, and cut to the core of the exchange—unless the patter is crucial to the story, conveying a dissembling, depressed, incoherent, or boring personality. At the same time, it should sound natural, like something someone would actually say. The writer George Garrett called this dovetailing—trimming for verisimilitude and impact.

In direct and indirect speech, your characters should constantly be saying “no” to each other. Most of us (myself included) tend to avoid conflict in our real lives, but conflict is crucial in fiction. It keeps the story interesting.

Richard Price, in his novel Lush Life, allows his characters to talk and talk and talk. Price maintains a delicate balancing act; his characters’ words matter. What they say changes the direction of the story. But he never burdens his dialogue with exposition or forces it to convey plot points that don’t come up naturally. In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway writes, “In order to engage us emotionally in a disagreement, the characters must have an emotional stake in the outcome.” Price’s characters are nothing if not emotionally invested.

Price’s dialogue is vital to the story because it moves the action forward. He constantly puts his characters in conflict with one another. Their conversations are full of surprises—self-revelation, inadvertent admissions, hearsay, evidence—and kinetic energy; they crackle with life. Real life.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”

by

Sandra Beasley

4.11.17

Online Only

This is the eighth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Beware the indeterminate “it,” I often say, when fine-tuning a draft.

But that word is so convenient. “It” carries the football from the previous sentence. Whatever “it” you just defined, you’re sticking with it for another ten yards, right?

Except that you’re fumbling the play. Too often, relying on “it” dissipates your language’s energy. Circle every “it” that leads off a sentence. Revising to avoid these instances will force your verbs into action, and clarify your intent.

This is not a hard-and-fast rule. Sometimes an indeterminate “it” will remain, one that has earned its place on the field. The pronoun can be strategic—signifying not just gender neutrality but an absence of comprehension or known name, a fumbling toward meaning, the building of suspense.

In the right hands, “It” can be a potent force. Just ask Stephen King.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.7.17

Online Only

This is the third in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Jackson Pollock’s reply to an interviewer’s question about how he composed his paintings of “accidental” splatterings has stuck with me. “I don’t use the accident,” he said. “I deny the accident.”

The sheer bravado of this is thrilling, and as a writer I find it to be a useful way to think about my work-in-progress. When I’m putting words on the page it’s easy to second guess, to question the often-unconscious choices I make as I go: the trajectories of characters’ lives, shifts in direction and focus, minor characters who gain traction as the story moves forward. The editor in my head starts whispering: You’re going in the wrong direction. Why are you spending so much time on that character? You need to focus, get back to the story you originally envisioned, stick to the plan.

Over time I’ve learned to trust my impulses. Whatever else they may be, these unanticipated detours are fresh and surprising; they keep me interested, and often end up adding depth to the work. Not always, of course—sometimes an accident is just an accident. But believing that these splatterings on my own canvas are there for a reason, as part of a larger process of conception, gives me the audacity to experiment.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket
Craft Capsule: Good Sense

Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

by

Simon Van Booy

6.6.18

Online Only

This is no. 29 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Having a writing practice is like rowing out to sea in a small boat with a typewriter and sandwiches, hoping for the arrival of some strange bird in the sky. 

After a few hours you tell yourself, “It’s only been a few hours.”  

But when days pass with not even a feather, you wonder, “Am I in the right place? I should have brought binoculars.” You keep looking though—searching the empty sky for some sign, some intervention, a tangible indication that you’re good enough to write, educated enough, wild enough, rich enough, poor enough, sober enough, drunk enough, mystical enough, existential enough.  

Months pass. You’ve been rowing out to the same deep water for weeks and weeks. You’ve lost track of days. Seasons have changed. Where your hands once bled on the oars, there are calluses. You’ve survived heaving seas, blistering heat, and torrential downpours. 

At this point most people toss their typewriters over the side of the boat, and row for the safety of land. Without the bird, they say, nothing is possible.

But you remain in the boat, listening to yourself breathe, a film of salt on your skin. You sit down and pick up the typewriter, rest it on your sore legs, and start to imagine the story you once dreamed of writing. You don’t care about the bird anymore, the words are enough, the sentences are ropes you can use to pull yourself through the narrative.

Then suddenly you look up, there’s a dazzling light, like some mystical, winged creature with blazing eyes.  

As writers, we don’t wait for inspiration. Inspiration waits for us.

Don’t ever forget that.

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: Find Your Metaphor
Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”

Craft Capsule: A Form of Salvation

by

Simon Van Booy

6.20.18

Online Only

This is no. 31 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When you start thinking creatively, it’s like releasing a live animal—a new species of mischief that cannot be contained to just one area of your life. Creativity is not like a machine that can be switched on and off. And therefore it does not end when you stand up from your desk after a few solid hours of work.

Ever wondered why you feel the urge to roller skate through a shopping mall listening to Abba? Leave strange notes on the doorsteps of strangers? Eat apples standing up in the bath, naked, with the window open?

Now you know. Creativity is a form of salvation.  

If we could limit creativity to just one area of our lives—how would we ever manage to convince ourselves to climb back in the rocket, and blast off again and again and again, to those distant galaxies of unwritten narrative? 

And stop worrying about getting published. You write because you’re obsessed with telling a story in a way that no one else can. Focus on that. Only that. Everything else will take care of itself.  And, please, for my sake—don’t ever think buying a plastic skeleton from a medical supply store then holding it up to the window when people walk past is a waste of time.  

Being a writer means opening your whole life to creativity. It is a commitment to overpowering fear with imagination and compassion for yourself, as well as others. As a person who writes you’ll be a better mother, son, best friend, aunt, cousin, coach, or bank teller. Because learning to write is learning to see, and striving to see beyond is perhaps the only hope for our species.

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky
Craft Capsule: Tao Te Ching

Craft Capsule: Find Your Voice

by

Simon Van Booy

6.27.18

This is no. 32 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Would you agree that for the past forty years, automobiles have been evolving in such a way as they now all look alike? As though created from the same, basic mold? One of the most important things you can do for yourself as a writer is to find your voice. I don’t mean tone, which is another way of referring to how writing makes you feel. The tone of this piece for Poets & Writers is very different from the tone of my latest novel, or the tone of the philosophy books I edited several years ago.  

I’m talking about voice. My voice can be squeezed into a 19th century corset for one novel, or spewed from the bowels of a werewolf for another, but it’s essentially the same underneath.  

When I realized after writing a couple of early novels, that I hadn’t found my voice—that there was even something called a voice—I was devastated.  

Had my years of labor all been for nothing? If my goal was to be published then yes. A total waste of time. But if my aim was to grow as an artist and as a person, then I had reason to be proud of myself.  

Anyway, to spare you the same kind of pain, I’ve devised an exercise that will hopefully lead you closer than you’ve ever been to the fiery core of your own, utterly unique, narrative style.  

1. Pick five books (or poems) you love, and five books (or poems) you dislike intensely, for a total of ten works.

2. Read the first page (or poem) several times, then rewrite it in such a way that you think, in your opinion, it’s better. Sometimes this means changing the order of words, or cutting them, or adding to them, or changing the tone completely. Don’t worry about offending anyone, no one knows you’re doing this except me, and I won’t tell.

3. This exercise, if done properly should take a fair amount of time. Once you’ve completed it, you’ll start to get a sense of who you are as a writer, and how your writing voice differs from the voices of others. Rewriting sections from writers you love is perhaps the most fruitful, because instead of emulating—you’re forced to be different. We each love certain writers for our own reasons. Rewriting their work will illuminate the subtle differences between your voice and theirs. 

4. Once you find your voice, it will almost certainly evolve over time, the way we evolve naturally as artists. Look at the early work of Van Gogh, compared to his later work. Dubliners vs. Finnegans Wake.  Early Beethoven sounds a little like Hayden—while late Beethoven is characteristic of the sound we associate with him. The core will always remain. Your voice is a gift to the world, so find it, nurture it, develop it, work it like a machine, give it the freedom of a vine—but above all, share it. 

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: A Form of Salvation
Craft Capsule: Tao Te Ching
Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

Craft Capsule: The Art of Research

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.11.18

Online Only

This is no. 34 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I began writing If You Leave Me, my forthcoming debut novel, I settled upon the premise quickly. Inspired by my family’s history, I knew I would open with Haemi Lee, a sixteen-year-old refugee living in Busan during the Korean War. Though the story was rooted in truth, I was eager to let my imagination take over. Scenes came to me fully formed: Haemi on a hill overlooking the makeshift shacks of her village; Hyunki, her sickly younger brother, walking to the market alone; a network of aunties whispering about the front lines, fear prickling their voices raw. Through Haemi and the characters around her, I wanted to explore how years of devastating loss and violence could warp a person’s psyche, body, and view of the world.

How would I write about 1950s South Korea, when I was born in Queens, New York, in 1987? I wanted to represent this period accurately, so I began intensive research. In the library, I took dutiful notes about that critical day on June 25, 1950, when the North invaded the South. I learned about the political climate that had catalyzed the start of the war. I jotted down the different weapons each army used, the timeline of events. As I gathered these facts, I started to see a change in my writing. I was more specific, surer about the world that Haemi, Hyunki, her best friend Kyunghwan, and her suitor Jisoo were surviving in. 

In my graduate school workshops, I was pleased to find that my research created a strong foundation for my novel. The dates and facts were clear. However, a new problem arose. In my critiques I saw the same question asked in various forms: What does this refugee village look like? What is Haemi wearing? What materials are the makeshift shacks made of? Though my readers were not confused about the circumstances of the war, I wasn’t yet conveying what it felt like to live in this tumultuous time. 

On my next trip to Korea I interviewed my maternal grandmother, who had been a teenage refugee during the Korean War. With a notebook in my lap, I asked her when she fled her home, what she ate on the journey south, what she wore, where she lived, and more. Back in America, I returned to the library. This time, I read ROK soldiers’ memoirs so that I could develop Jisoo’s and Kyunghwan’s experiences. I pored over photographs of civilian refugees, of the markets that formed during the years-long stalemate, and of the shacks constructed from corrugated tin, cardboard, and plywood. My sentences became richer, laden with sensory details. I lingered over descriptions of food, clothing, the buildings in Seoul, the fields in the rural outskirts of South Korea. In workshop I was able to anticipate my classmates’ questions about the physical world. The novel was coming together, I thought. I had finally done enough.  

Or had I? The more I wrote, the more I became curious about Haemi’s psychology. I wanted to explore the way violence, gender expectations, poverty, and family circumstances shaped Haemi’s life in the years after the armistice. In order to do so, I needed to develop her interiority so that readers would empathize with her. I returned to the library, eager to read memoirs written by Korean women who had come of age in the 1950s. However, I found none. Where were all the women? The answer both frustrated and fueled me. They had not been valued during this period of history, and thus, their voices had not been preserved. 

What happens when there is no research to guide your way? Determined to continue, I got creative. I read studies about the history of social and gender hierarchy in South Korea; I watched movies and documentaries; I examined the linguistics of trauma and depression in the Korean language; I returned to my grandmother for her opinions on mental health. I also turned to fiction, reading novels about women living through conflict in other countries. Finally, I considered what would happen to me if I had experienced the trauma of Japanese colonialism, Korean independence, and war before the age of twenty. I imagined how my frustrations would manifest in the domestic sphere. I empathized until I knew Haemi completely.   

Over my journey of writing If You Leave Me, my research took many forms. From reference texts and history books to films and novels to my grandmother’s own experiences, the process was more diverse than I’d expected. My favorite part though, was ending where I began—with my writerly impulse to imagine, to create characters, to tell a story.    

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: Who Are You?

Craft Capsule: The Art of Research

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.11.18

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This is no. 34 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I began writing If You Leave Me, my forthcoming debut novel, I settled upon the premise quickly. Inspired by my family’s history, I knew I would open with Haemi Lee, a sixteen-year-old refugee living in Busan during the Korean War. Though the story was rooted in truth, I was eager to let my imagination take over. Scenes came to me fully formed: Haemi on a hill overlooking the makeshift shacks of her village; Hyunki, her sickly younger brother, walking to the market alone; a network of aunties whispering about the front lines, fear prickling their voices raw. Through Haemi and the characters around her, I wanted to explore how years of devastating loss and violence could warp a person’s psyche, body, and view of the world.

How would I write about 1950s South Korea, when I was born in Queens, New York, in 1987? I wanted to represent this period accurately, so I began intensive research. In the library, I took dutiful notes about that critical day on June 25, 1950, when the North invaded the South. I learned about the political climate that had catalyzed the start of the war. I jotted down the different weapons each army used, the timeline of events. As I gathered these facts, I started to see a change in my writing. I was more specific, surer about the world that Haemi, Hyunki, her best friend Kyunghwan, and her suitor Jisoo were surviving in. 

In my graduate school workshops, I was pleased to find that my research created a strong foundation for my novel. The dates and facts were clear. However, a new problem arose. In my critiques I saw the same question asked in various forms: What does this refugee village look like? What is Haemi wearing? What materials are the makeshift shacks made of? Though my readers were not confused about the circumstances of the war, I wasn’t yet conveying what it felt like to live in this tumultuous time. 

On my next trip to Korea I interviewed my maternal grandmother, who had been a teenage refugee during the Korean War. With a notebook in my lap, I asked her when she fled her home, what she ate on the journey south, what she wore, where she lived, and more. Back in America, I returned to the library. This time, I read ROK soldiers’ memoirs so that I could develop Jisoo’s and Kyunghwan’s experiences. I pored over photographs of civilian refugees, of the markets that formed during the years-long stalemate, and of the shacks constructed from corrugated tin, cardboard, and plywood. My sentences became richer, laden with sensory details. I lingered over descriptions of food, clothing, the buildings in Seoul, the fields in the rural outskirts of South Korea. In workshop I was able to anticipate my classmates’ questions about the physical world. The novel was coming together, I thought. I had finally done enough.  

Or had I? The more I wrote, the more I became curious about Haemi’s psychology. I wanted to explore the way violence, gender expectations, poverty, and family circumstances shaped Haemi’s life in the years after the armistice. In order to do so, I needed to develop her interiority so that readers would empathize with her. I returned to the library, eager to read memoirs written by Korean women who had come of age in the 1950s. However, I found none. Where were all the women? The answer both frustrated and fueled me. They had not been valued during this period of history, and thus, their voices had not been preserved. 

What happens when there is no research to guide your way? Determined to continue, I got creative. I read studies about the history of social and gender hierarchy in South Korea; I watched movies and documentaries; I examined the linguistics of trauma and depression in the Korean language; I returned to my grandmother for her opinions on mental health. I also turned to fiction, reading novels about women living through conflict in other countries. Finally, I considered what would happen to me if I had experienced the trauma of Japanese colonialism, Korean independence, and war before the age of twenty. I imagined how my frustrations would manifest in the domestic sphere. I empathized until I knew Haemi completely.   

Over my journey of writing If You Leave Me, my research took many forms. From reference texts and history books to films and novels to my grandmother’s own experiences, the process was more diverse than I’d expected. My favorite part though, was ending where I began—with my writerly impulse to imagine, to create characters, to tell a story.    

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: Who Are You?

Craft Capsule: Who Are You?

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.4.18

Online Only

This is no. 33 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

“When did you start writing?” Writers are often asked this question, and I’m always curious about the story behind the answers, the paths we take to find our vocations. As a child of immigrants, Korean was my first language. When I began elementary school, I found myself mentally switching between my mother tongue and English, trying to match vocabulary words across language lines. I soon found myself gravitating toward writing; with a pencil in my hand, I could take my time and express myself more clearly. In the first grade, I wrote about butterflies hatching for my beloved teacher, Ms. Benz. The next year, I wrote about a girl with short black hair who wanted to get her ears pierced, but whose Korean parents refused. I presented the story to my mother and father, hopeful and full of glee at my cunning. (Reader, they fell for it and let me pierce my ears.) “I’ve written ever since I was a child,” I say in answer to that question. But when did I find the stories I wanted to tell? That was a more recent discovery.  

As a sophomore in college, I took my first formal writing workshop. Somehow, over the course of my teenage years, my writing had changed. I no longer wrote stories that were rooted in my desires and questions about the world. Instead, I created characters without clear identities—their race, appearance, and backgrounds were murky, undefined. These young adults frolicked and fought on misty hills, drunk with mulberry-stained lips. I was trying to shy away from what I thought was expected of me. I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as the Korean American workshopper who could only write about “Asian” issues. But I sensed that something was wrong with my characters: They were vague, flat, lifeless. “Who is this girl?” a classmate asked. “Don’t be afraid to write about what you know,” my teacher said. 

At first I resisted these suggestions, digging deeper into my no-name characters without a clear sense of home. That is, until the summer break between my sophomore and junior year. One June evening I had dinner with my parents. Over a meal of galbi-tang, rice, wine, and ice cream, my parents recounted their childhoods. My father described catching grasshoppers from his neighbors’ field, of cooking them on a skillet over an open flame. My mother told me of staining her fingers orange with bong seon hwa flowers, which I loved to do during my summer visits to Korea as well.  

The next morning, I found myself still mulling over my parents’ stories. I imagined my father as a child, his lithe body running through high grass in search of those plump green insects. I loved that the act of staining fingers with flower petals, which my sister and I did every summer in Korea, was not only a family tradition, but a Korean one. These stories stayed with me all summer and through the fall, when my undergraduate classes resumed. This time in my fiction workshop, I wrote with greater purpose and clarity. I developed characters with a culture and history behind them. Better, I thought.

The more I wrote, the more I sought my family. When I began my graduate studies, I turned to my maternal grandmother. A fierce matriarch and gifted storyteller, my grandmother shared her life with me—she lived under Japanese occupation, survived the Korean War, and forged a life for her daughters in the years afterward. I absorbed these anecdotes, sometimes taking notes and sometimes just listening. 

When I began If You Leave Me, my debut novel, I knew I wanted to write about the Korean War. More important, I knew I wanted the main character to be a Korean woman who was strong, willful, intelligent, stubborn, and full of contradictions. I wanted a female protagonist that readers would love one moment and argue with the next, someone who felt as complex as our best friends and lovers do. I created Haemi Lee, a teenaged refugee living in Busan during the war. I rooted her story in my grandmother’s experiences, but I added my own desires and questions and fears until Haemi became a character of her own. 

It took me a few wayward years, but I eventually realized that writing about my culture does not confine me as a writer. Instead, my history provides a pool of memory for me to draw inspiration from. Now, when I teach creative writing, I emphasize this process for my students. I encourage them to value every part of their identities.

“Who are you?” I ask. “Tell me what you know.”

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: Tao Te Ching
Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky
Craft Capsule: A Form of Salvation
Craft Capsule: Find Your Voice

The Darkness Within: In Praise of the Unlikable

by

Steve Almond

January/February 2018
12.13.17

In Print and Online

Last summer I wrote a review of Who Is Rich? (Random House, 2017) by Matthew Klam. The novel is narrated by a man named Rich Fischer, a self-loathing husband and father who conducts an anguished and antic affair with an equally unhappy infidel.

Shortly after I turned in my review, I heard the book discussed on the radio. The segment opened on an odd note. “Rich is a hard man to like,” the host began. I sat back in astonishment—the notion hadn’t even occurred to me. But a quick survey of prepublication reviews revealed that this was, in fact, the consensus view: Rich was whiny, selfish, unsympathetic.

These complaints, it should be noted, weren’t generally directed at his adultery, about which he is so racked with guilt that he attempts to kill himself twice. No, his central offense is that he articulates the miseries of monogamy and parenthood with such tender precision. He’s hard to like, in other words, because he makes the reader feel uncomfortable.

And yet when I survey the books that inspired me to quit journalism and take up fiction two decades ago, every single one features protagonists who are “hard to like” in the exact same way: Birds of America by Lorrie Moore, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, Airships by Barry Hannah, Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, the stories of Flannery O’Connor.

My predilection for destructive and discomfiting characters arose, in part, from my years as an investigative reporter, which I spent tracking con men and corrupt cops, shady developers and sexual deviants.

In my reporting, the central danger was detection by the authorities. In literature, the danger was self-revelation. The question was why people messed up their lives and, when they got going, the lives of those around them.

This question began with the characters, but it extended to the reader. Spending time with folks who were morally flawed and ruthlessly candid, who had thrown all manner of caution to the wind, was thrilling specifically because they enacted my own repressed urges. I didn’t just want to rubberneck their misdeeds. I felt implicated by them.

As I turned all this over in my mind, I began to realize why I’d found the scolding critiques of Rich Fischer so vexing. They weren’t just sanctimonious or shallow. There was something cowardly in them, a mind-set that positioned fiction as a place we go to have our virtues affirmed rather than having the confused and wounded parts of ourselves exposed.

***

A lot of ink has been spilled over the past few years on this question of likability, as well as an adjoining anxiety: how important it is that characters be “relatable.” One of the flash points of this debate emerged from the critical reception of Claire Messud’s fierce novel The Woman Upstairs (Knopf, 2013), whose narrator, Nora Eldridge, spends much of the book railing against the forms of feminine duty she has internalized.

When an interviewer for Publishers Weekly observed that she “wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora” because of her “unbearably grim” outlook, Messud’s reply lit up the Internet. “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that?” she demanded. Messud went on to cite a dozen famously repellent male characters who are rarely, if ever, subjected to such a litmus test. “If you’re reading to find friends,” she concluded, “you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?’”

Messud was hailed for confronting what we might call the fallacy of likability, and the ways in which female authors are expected to cleave to this notion.

One of the most fascinating reactions came from novelist Jennifer Weiner. In an essay published by Slate she noted, rightly, that many readers come to fiction hoping to spend time with characters they admire. And she argued that the creators and consumers of such characters shouldn’t be looked down upon.

But Weiner’s defense of likability was undermined by her own resentments. Likable, she insisted, was a code word “employed by literary authors to tell their best-selling brethren that their work sucks.” Her response was to tell Messud that her work sucked.

“There’s no payoff,” Weiner wrote of The Woman Upstairs, “just a 300-page immersion in the acid bath of Nora’s misery, her jealousy, her lack of compassion, her towering sense of entitlement.” Weiner felt Messud had willfully crafted a character to whom no one can relate.

The irony was that Nora elicited such vehement reactions precisely because readers related to her too much. They felt implicated, both by her impotent rage and the despair lurking beneath her grievances. “Above all, in my anger, I was sad,” she confesses. “Isn’t that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying—valiantly, fruitlessly—to eradicate.”

What I’m getting at here is that the debate about likability ultimately boils down to sensibility. Nora Eldridge’s view of the world, and her place in it, is too dark and intense for some readers. When they pick up a book, they want to be transported to a sunnier precinct, or a more exotic one, with a friendlier companion. They seek a refuge from the anguish of their inner life.

There’s no right or wrong in any of this. It’s a function of what sort of experience we’re after as writers and readers.

***

There’s another unspoken factor in all this: the market. If you’re an unpublished writer seeking representation, and you submit a manuscript with an abrasive protagonist, chances are you’re going to hear from agents concerned about likability. The whole reason Lolita was originally published in France, and nearly three years later in the United States, is that Humbert Humbert’s panting hebephilia was abhorrent to American editors.

Cultural and literary standards evolve, of course. But financial anxieties are forever. Which is why agents and editors remain wary of characters they fear readers will find off-putting. In a world where reading books is itself a marginal activity, one performed in defiance of the perpetual racket of digital distraction, why risk losing sales?

I spent weeks, for instance, arguing with my editor about the section of my memoir, Candyfreak (Algonquin Books, 2004), in which I developed the irrational conviction that I had testicular cancer during a barnstorming tour of U.S. candy bar factories. My editor argued, quite sensibly, that this disclosure made me a lot less likable as a guide. What’s more, it dampened the giddy mood that prevailed elsewhere and guaranteed the book would never be adopted in school curriculums.

The reason I insisted on its inclusion was that I saw my self-diagnosis as an integral part of the story, a symptom of the depression that had reignited my childhood obsession with candy.

I don’t mean to imply that highlighting the repellent traits of a character is some shortcut to literary depth. That’s as foolish as the notion that scenes of graphic violence or sex will magically yield drama.

Some years ago I began a novel about a shameless right-wing demagogue who decides to run for president (I know). The response I got from readers was that my leading man, while fun to hang out with for a little while, was ultimately oppressive. It wasn’t that my leading man had the manners and conscience of a shark but that he had no subtext, no dreams or fears animating his outsize appetites. Nor did he hew to the path of so many unlikable protagonists, the Emma Woodhouses and Ebenezer Scrooges, who are forced to confront their flaws and wind up redeemed in the bargain. My man was self-regarding without being self-aware.

Such a figure might plausibly thrive in the world of politics (again, I know). On the page, he quickly degenerated into caricature. 

***

But what about those characters who refuse to evolve or offer up much in the way of vulnerability? I am thinking here of our most famous villains: Milton’s Satan, Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden. These figures, though not technically protagonists, dominate their given worlds.

They do so because they’re willing to violate moral norms and thus wind up driving the action of the story. They’re also fearless in apprehending the nature of the world around them, even if they deny us access to their own inner lives. Most vitally, they embrace the transgressive aspects of their selfhood, the ones we anxiously inhibit so as to appear more likable.

Consider Melville’s Captain Ahab as he stands upon the deck of the Pequod, roaring out the true nature of his mission. “If man will strike, strike through the mask. How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me,” he tells his crew. “I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and…I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

Tell us how you really feel, Ahab.

The reason readers like me gravitate toward characters like Ahab is that, not very deep down, we know ourselves to be equally charged with wrath, besieged by private doubts and grudges, and thus enthralled by those who dare to speak truth in a world overrun by personal forms of marketing.

The rise of Internet culture has only magnified the allure of such figures. Most social media platforms revolve around an elaborate effort to generate “likes” by presenting an airbrushed version of our lives and values. What grants trolls their magnetic power—whether they lurk online or in the White House—is the unacknowledged force of our own suppression.

Moral perfection is admirable, after all, but deadly dull in a literary character. I think here about the figure of Jesus Christ as we encounter him in the New Testament. He says and does all the right things. But he only comes alive as a character in those rarely cited verses when his revolutionary ire and human needs come into view.

The most shocking moment in the Gospels takes place a few days before his appointed end. On the way to Jerusalem, he stops in Bethany, where a woman lovingly anoints his head with perfumed oil.

The act angers some of those who witness it, including Judas Iscariot, who asks Jesus whether the expensive oil could have been put to better use if it was sold and the money given to the poor. “The poor you will always have,” Jesus replies. “But you will not always have me.”

It’s a moment of sensual indulgence and unvarnished pride that’s astonishingly out of character for Jesus. By my reckoning, he’s never more likable. 

***

I don’t expect this piece will do much to settle the question of likability. It’s one of those disputes into which writers will continue to pour their opinions and anxieties.

And that’s probably a good thing, if you think about it. Because we happen to be living in a historical moment ruled by unlikable characters. Take a look at our political and popular culture, at the angry voices emanating from our screens, at the seething violence in our discourse.

As writers, it can feel pointless to engage in literary endeavors when the world around us feels so combustible, so fragile. But I would argue that it has never been more important for writers to engage with the questions literature seeks to answer.

If we are to reclaim our country from the dark forces determined to divide us, to sow discord and cynicism among us, we must first seek to understand the darkness within ourselves. That means turning to stories in which we encounter characters actively engaged in the struggle—and sometimes failing—to contain their unbearable thoughts and feelings.

The urgent question isn’t whether we like these folks. It’s whether, in coming to know them, we come to know ourselves any better.

 

Steve Almond’s book Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country is forthcoming in April from Red Hen Press.

His central offense is that he articulates the miseries of monogamy and parenthood with such tender precision. He’s hard to like, in other words, because he makes the reader feel uncomfortable.

Polite Need Not Apply: A Q&A With Mary Gaitskill

by

Joseph Master

12.11.17

Online Only

Mary Gaitskill doesn’t believe literature should have to be polite. Do a Google image search of the author and you’ll see a succession of penetrating gazes—pale, wide eyes you just can’t fend off. Gaitskill’s writing, which has earned a National Book Award nomination, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a PEN/Faulkner nomination, has a similar effect. The author whose most recent book is a collection of personal and critical essays, Somebody With a Little Hammer (Pantheon, 2017), is best known for her fiction, having previously published three novels and three story collections. Gaitskill has been labeled “The Jane Austen of sickos,” a moniker that supposes her fiction—famous (and in some circles probably infamous) for its enjambment of sexual brutality with sensuous lyricism—is debauched. While her prose can at times appear as icy as her stare, waves of empathy, soul, and B-12 shots of humor course beneath the surface. From her first book of short stories, Bad Behavior (Simon & Schuster, 1988), which became widely known for “Secretary,” a story of sadomasochism and desire that was made into the 2002 indie film starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, to her most recent novel, The Mare (Pantheon, 2015), Gaitskill’s fiction has always been ferocious, but not for the sake of brutality. The fireworks are in the vulnerability of human connection, not just the spectacle of sex. When she talks about her craft, Gaitskill’s eyes brighten and she smiles often. If you are fortunate enough to speak to her about Chekhov or Nabokov, as I was, you feel thankful for her clairvoyant insights, for her mastery of opinion—for her energizing confidence in what makes a good writer.

In an interview you once said, “Literature is not a realm of politeness.” What’s your style in the classroom? Are you the conditionally supportive teacher or the unconditionally supportive teacher?
I’m sure most people would call me conditionally supportive. I don’t really know what I’m like. I mean, I can’t see myself from the outside. People have described me as blunt. I’m not always, actually. I mean, I’m not always as blunt as I—

As you want to be?
—as I might be if I were actually being blunt [laughs]. I’m blunt if I think there is no other way to be. I think my teaching style has also somewhat changed. And again, it’s hard to see myself from the outside. But I think I’ve learned how to be critical in a better way than I used to. In the past, I was so uncomfortable in a position of authority. I had never had a job before where I had any authority at all. My generation is notoriously uncomfortable with authority. That’s why we are terrible parents. I mean, I’m not speaking personally. I am not a parent. But it’s a thing—my generation makes awful parents. Because they’re so busy trying to make their children happy and be a friend to their children and make everything in their life work out that they end up just smothering them, basically.

All unconditional! I guess psychologists would say you need one unconditional and one conditionally loving parent, right? There’s a balance.
I had a similar problem teaching. But, it didn’t show up in the same way. I was just so uncomfortable having to be the authority. And I knew that I had to be. So the things I would say would come out much more forcefully than I actually meant them. It translated into harshness. And it was actually coming from a place of real discomfort and insecurity. But I don’t think the students knew that. Maybe some of them did, some of the time.

I remember a former writing professor, Chuck Kinder, always driving home the principle of Chekhov’s smoking gun. This West Virginian drawl saying, “If there’s a gun, there had better be gun smoke.” What’s your smoking gun principle? Do you have a rule?
I don’t, actually. I think there are very few rules that can’t be broken. I think there is only one that is very difficult to break. I have seen it broken, but not very often. It’s that something has to change. From the beginning of the story to the end, something needs to be different. The only time I’ve ever seen it successfully broken was a Grace Paley story called “A Conversation With My Father.” But as a general rule, something has to change. There has to be some source of tension. And even that can be subtle. Even in the language itself. You know the Flannery O’Conner story “Everything That Rises Must Converge”?

Yes!
The blood pressure. It’s mentioned in, I think, the first or second sentence. The blood pressure is the number-one thing.

Earlier I asked you which short stories of yours I should read, and you immediately responded with “Secretary.” You said you considered it one of your best. So I started there with Bad Behavior. That was your first book. You were thirty-three when it was released. How long did it take you?
About six years.

A first book is like a band’s first record, right? You have your whole life up to that point to write that first collection of words. And you release it. And then people tell you who you are. They say, “Oh, you’re the masochism writer,” or  “you’re the next Dylan.” It can be kind of crushing. Then you have, what? A year? Five years? You have such a shorter time frame to follow it up. What was the difference between writing Bad Behavior and your second book, the 1991 novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin?
Well, there were a couple of things. I had actually started the novel before I sold the story collection. I had written maybe thirty-five pages and stopped, because I just didn’t know what to do. And the reason I picked it up again was because I was in a publisher’s office, and they didn’t know if they wanted to buy the collection or not. And the guy said, “So, do you have a novel?” And I said, “Yeah. Yeah I do.” And he said, “What’s it about?”

And I just started talking about these girls. And they were like, “Oh, ok.” And they wanted to do a two-book deal: the short story collection and the novel.

Well, that certainly worked out.
It didn’t have to do with the process, though. It was much more complicated. Because when I was writing Bad Behavior I could always say to myself, “It doesn’t have to be good. No one is going to see it.” That actually made it possible for me to go forward. I said that to myself literally every time I sat down, repeatedly. “It doesn’t have to be any good. No one will see it.”

Like The Basement Tapes. Dylan and his band didn’t mean for anyone to hear them. They were just hanging out in Woodstock, recording music they never thought would see daylight.
It’s a very helpful thing to say to yourself. And I didn’t have any expectation of how it would be received, either. Whereas with Two Girls I could not say that. I knew people were going to see it. And actually, for the first time, I was self-conscious about how it would be seen. And I felt a desire, an obligation almost, to please certain readers. Because I knew who had liked Bad Behavior and I knew why they liked it. So I was uncomfortable about disappointing those people, perhaps. I tried as hard as I could to put those feelings aside. But it was very difficult.

That had to be jarring.
It was.

Had you ever thought about your limitations as a writer when you were working on that first collection?
Oh, yeah! I thought I was terrible.

You thought you were terrible?
That was the other thing about Two Girls that was different. It was that I had never tried to write a novel before. Short stories are—some people say they are harder, but I don’t think so. And the reason I don’t think so is because it’s just a smaller space to deal with. I mean, some are quite capacious. It’s not that they are easy. I don’t find them easy. But a novel? It’s like I was a cat that had been in a house all of its life, and all of a sudden a door was flung open. And I was flooded with sights and smells and was crazily running over in one direction wondering what was going on there and getting distracted. And then running in the other direction. It was a total feeling of freedom. But I didn’t know what to do with it. It was very hard to figure out what I wanted to pay attention to and how to structure it. And stories are way more manageable that way.

Being flooded with sights and smells. Yes. So appropriate, because your fourth novel, Veronica (Pantheon, 2005), is flooded with sights and smells and senses that overlap and eclipse each other. Let’s start with the origin myth that opens the book —the dark folktale told to the narrator, Alison, by her mother. Alison revisits this story for the rest of her life. It haunts her. At one point she admits that she felt it more than she heard it. At what phase in the process of writing this novel did you write the beginning—this story that keeps coming back?
I added that later.

Was there a Lebowski’s Rug moment, when you arrived at this origin story and added it, and it really brought the whole room together?
Honestly, it was because someone who read a draft of the book said it reminded them of the tale The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf. It’s Hans Christian Anderson. And I said, “Really, what’s that?” And I went and looked it up. And I agreed. I thought it was perfect.

Those old tales are soul crushing and beautiful, but also scary as hell. It’s scary being a kid.
Right. Because everybody’s bigger than you. And they are weird! [Laughs.]

You’ve mentioned a soul-quality in writing. I’ve read interviews where you break it down to the molecular level. I guess it’s a voice quality, right? This energy. How did you find that? And how in the world do you teach that?
I don’t know. How did I arrive at the voice quality?

Yes. This energy in your writing, the music of it. The way you describe these grotesquely beautiful things. It’s your voice. What all MFA students want so badly to get, I think, is their own version of that.
I used to tell students, “I want to see it how only you can see it. I don’t want to see it how a hundred people would see it.” I was basically telling them not to rely on shared perception. There isn’t anything wrong with shared perception. It can be a beautiful thing, and I think music relies partly on shared perception, or it assumes a certain kind of shared perception, rightly or wrongly. Because you feel, in a group of people, that you are hearing it the same, although you’re probably not. You feel that commonality. Slang. Expressions. There are certain things that make shared perception beautiful. You can’t have a conversation without it. But when you’re reading a story, it’s a different thing. It’s much more intimate. It’s much more like…you’re wanting to get the pith of what that person feels and sees. It’s more like that.

Music plays a huge, great part in Veronica. What’s your soundtrack?
You mean, what music do I listen to?

Yes. When you’re writing, or on the train with your headphones. What are you listening to?
I’m really sorry to say this, but I don’t have those things. I don’t like that. I don’t want to walk around listening to music and not listening to what’s happening. It’s bad enough that I’m glued to my phone. I’m not going to go there with music. But right now I’m also at a disadvantage, because I don’t have a good sound system. So I’ve been listening to music on my computer and I just don’t like it as much. Like, when I had a good sound system, I used to put on music and just walk around, drinking a glass of wine, just listening to it.

In your writing, you slip in and out of time seamlessly. In Veronica, you’re like a time bandit. We’re talking a really adult version of Madeleine L’Engle. The book spans decades of Alison’s life—from her teenage years in Paris in the 70s to New York in the 80s, where she meets Veronica, and she’s narrating when she’s in her fifties. There are certain sentences that stretch between two different moments. Considering the amount of time the book covers, there has to be a level of trust—in your own ability to do that, but also that the reader will trust this time machine you’re driving. Was that hard to do? Did you question that?
Yeah, I did question if it was a good idea or not. I was afraid it would be too arty, or just too hard to follow. Yeah, I wondered about that.

For me, that kind of movement through time made everything move faster. It made my heart beat faster, especially as the book went on.
Well, thank you. I did it, for one thing, well, I felt like I had to blend the times because the book is focused on something in the past, and the narrator is in the present. But also because I was at an age where I felt like time was blending for me, personally, in a way that it hadn’t before.

How so?
I think when you get to a certain age, and for some people it may be in their forties or for other people it may be in their sixties—I’m not sure—but I think for everybody it happens that your relationship with time changes and you see the future or the present, and it becomes like a palimpsest for the past, and you just kind of blur things. And it’s not necessarily in a confused way, but sometimes it is. Like, you can talk to very old people and they’ll think something happened. Recently, my mother thought that her mother gave her the book, Born Free by Elsa the Lioness. And that’s not possible. My mother wasn’t alive when that book was written. But in her mind it absolutely must have been that way. She’s blending something. I think that starts to happen in middle age. Not in the sense that you’re confused, but that your connections of when things happen in time, spatially, are just different.

So, let’s talk about sexuality. Never have I read fiction regarding sexuality that made me feel quite the same way—that way I felt when reading Veronica.
When you say “that way,” what do you mean?

As a male, reading about sex—this beautifully painful account of health, illness, death, with all of this sometimes brutal sex—I felt my own mortality. I became very aware of my heartbeat and my breathing. Thinking about all the cigarettes I had smoked a long time ago. It made me anxious. It hurt. And I saw all of this through the eyes of Alison, a model, who is absolutely nothing like me. At all. I related to it. Absolutely, in the moment, related to it. And it’s hard enough for me to be in the moment, ever.
Me, too.

At one point Alison says she sees how men can look at pictures and feel things. She’s trying to see the world through the eyes of the other, and reading the book as a man, I was doing the same thing backwards, through her eyes. Have you found that the reaction to your writing has been starkly different along gender lines? That men have a different response? Like, me, how I am getting super uncomfortable talking about it with you right now?
Oh, it doesn’t make me uncomfortable at all. I don’t really know. Someone wrote an article about how horrible she thinks men are when they write about me. And it’s true that some male critics have been unusually nasty. But it’s also true that once, a long time ago, for my own curiosity, I went through all the reviews and divided them into male and female. And then I added up where the most negative ones came from. They came from women. So, I think women are more likely to relate to my writing in a superficial way, because most of my characters are women. I don’t really know if there is a predictable breakdown.

I thought my last book, The Mare, would not be read by men at all. The Mare is all female characters with specifically female issues. And there isn’t a whole lot of sex in it. Even the horses are female. But men read it and liked it. I mean I don’t know how many. I can’t really say for sure. I am thinking, though, that some men seem to view it with horror that seems gendered.

Recently, Veronica was republished in England and my editor decided to have a personal friend of hers write an introduction. I can’t remember the guy’s name. He’s an English writer whom she says is very respected, but I’ve never heard of him. And he spent a lot of time—and he was a fan, apparently—talking about the horrifying, degrading imagery that I use about men. In one of these horrifying examples, Alison was thinking about a guy, and I hope you don’t mind me using this language. She’s having sex with somebody, and she can feel his asshole tingling on the end of his spine. In the context of writing, that does not seem especially degrading or at all degrading to me. If you were saying that to someone, it might be different, depending on who they are and how you said it. But the idea of somebody thinking that, in private, in a fictional novel, I don’t understand. I scratched him doing the introduction and I did it myself. And I wrote back to [my editor] and said, “Has this guy ever read Philip Roth or Saul Bellow? What makes him so shocked by this?”

In conversation it might be a shocking remark, but not in a novel, in somebody’s head. And that’s what I mean by politeness not applying to literature. There’s a different standard than at a party. I really did wonder if he would have reacted that way if it was a male writing about a female he was having sex with.

Well, I think there is maybe a double standard when it comes to writing about sex. Men might get more of a pass, right? And I’ve never read anything about sex that was written quite like that.
Thanks. Except I would normally disagree with that. I think women get more of a pass. For sexist reasons, actually, sexuality is considered the purview of women. It’s like women’s area of authority. Women can write really dirty things without being criticized as much. Are you aware of Nicholson Baker’s book The Fermata?

No.
It’s a pretty dirty book. It’s a fantasy book. Have you read him at all?

No, I haven’t. I guess I should.
Beautiful writer. Line by line, probably the best writer in America, in my opinion.  Line by line, though, not by the whole content, necessarily. Well, The Fermata was one of his lighter books. He’s better known for Vox, because Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky read it together. Or for The Mezzanine. But The Fermata is about somebody who can stop time, and he uses it to take women’s clothes off…

Oh! Yes…he masturbates on their clothes?
He masturbates, but he doesn’t do it on their clothes. My, that book got outraged reviews. People said it was violent, degrading, disgusting. It was none of those things. It was a totally harmless fantasy. And I think if a woman had written it, it would have been different. Have you ever read Natsuo Kirino?

No. You know what? Not only have I probably not read any of the books you’re mentioning, I’m probably going to get a big complex about it. 
No. Don’t worry. I’ve hardly read anything. But Natsuo Kirino, one of her books that I really like, in one of the final scenes is this guy who has been stalking her and finally gets her tied up and he’s planning to torture her and he’s cutting her and he’s raping her. And she actually responds to him. But she’s actually tricking him. She ends up killing him. And he almost likes it. She cuts his throat and he dies slowly. I don’t remember the words, but it’s almost like he says, “I love you” in the end. If a man wrote that scene, he’d be considered the equivalent of a murderer. He wouldn’t be able to show his face in public.

Well, I guess I’ll have to read that now…
It’s true, though. I think women are allowed to be much more outrageous sexually, in general, than men. What some of the male critics, who have been nasty, are responding to—and this one guy said that reading me was like being sodomized by an icy dildo—

Um, does he know what that’s like?
[Laughs] Oh, I suspect he doesn’t. Because if he did, he would never make such a ridiculous comparison. But, in a way, it’s a huge compliment, because I have never read anyone in my life who would make me feel even remotely like that. So he must think I’m some kind of badass.

What I think makes people like that uncomfortable isn’t the level of sexual detail. I think it makes them feel emotionally uncomfortable. Because they feel emotionally exposed. Lots of people write about sex very graphically.

Switching gears, you really describe the beauty and sometimes ugliness of voices. The sound of them. And you do it visually, too. Alison will describe how something looks as a sound. Are you the kind of person who can be enthralled, or just totally turned off, by the timbre of someone’s voice?
Oh yeah. I’m really, really voice responsive. When I was very young, at home, in the other room doing homework, some guy came to see one of my sisters. And I was so revolted by his voice, I could hardly bare to listen to it. And when he left I walked in the room and I said, “Who was that?” And I said, “He’s a horrible person.”

It turned out he was, actually. He had sexually molested somebody and later he made obscene calls to one of my sisters. I’m not saying I can do that all the time, but I am very voice reactive. And I can even fall in love with somebody just by the sound of their voice. I mean, I may not stay in love with them [laughs]. And it might not mean they’re a wonderful person. Although, interestingly, when I first heard my husband’s voice, I didn’t like it. But that changed. I’m not completely wedded to that impression. But it does mean something.

I read you once say that Debbie from “Secretary” was no older than eighteen. And I thought, “Wow. What an erudite, literate eighteen-year-old.”
Really, you think?

Oh yeah. That first-person narrator in that third-person universe? Totally.
It’s pretty simple, I think.

But what we can get to here is the idea of the reliability of a narrator. In Veronica, you use the first-person narrator, and you nailed the trust—the narrator was so reliable. How do you confer that trust? What advice do you give students to find that place?
I’ve always found the concept of the reliable versus the unreliable narrator peculiar, because I think all narrators are unreliable [laughs]. People tell you what they saw or what they think or what they felt, and they may be telling you the truth, but it might not at all be what someone else saw happen. Like, people always call Humbert Humbert an unreliable narrator. He’s very reliable. He’ll tell you exactly what he thought and felt in a lot of detail. And you also get a very clear sense of what Lolita is experiencing through him. But I don’t think of it as unreliable. I think more in terms, and this sounds really corny, I think more in terms of, “Do I care what this narrator thinks and feels? Can he engage me?”

With students, the problem I see most often is that I don’t get a sense of what their narrators care about. What they want. What matters to them. That’s a bigger issue to me than whether or not they’re reliable in some way.

Would you agree if I were to say that you are hard on your readers?
I don’t know [laughs]. It probably depends on the reader. I’m sure some people read my stuff and think it’s fun. And some people might think it’s boring.

Your writing? Boring?

Sure. I think Bad Behavior is boring, quite frankly. I had to read it for an audio book. I was just like, “Oh…”

For some readers it is hard. I guess I do know that for a fact. I’ve seen complaints. I’ve seen people talk about how hard it is. So it must be. But it’s not something I set out to do.

I guess we have a theme here, of conditional versus unconditional. Reading your work, I found it very hard on the reader. Not in a pejorative sense. I found it absolutely conditionally loving. It gives me everything I need, but as you once said, there is a thin line between absolute excitement and humiliation—and you thrive on that line.
I said that?

Yep.
Where?

I think in New York Times Magazine, actually.
Wow. I never read that one.

You’re tackling incredibly emotionally intense, sexually intense, illness, health, and death…
It’s true. That line.

It’s so interesting that you bring that up because a student of mine just workshopped a story; the ending is a scene in which the male character is really ashamed of his body and his girlfriend is really beautiful and she decides she wants him to pose naked for pictures. And it’s a potentially very powerful scene because it can potentially be a very horrible experience. And he’s just so uncomfortable. It would be very much a thin line. And it could be one of those things where it could be great or just really, really awful. Or both.

I’d say great and awful at the same time would be the goal, right?
Oh, yeah. For a lot of people, yeah. Because it’s the whole picture.

I think that’s what I would say about your writing. 
Well, thank you.

 

Joseph Master is the executive director of marketing and digital strategy at Drexel University in Philadelphia. His freelance work has appeared in newspapers, magazines, television commercials, and on tiny screens across the nation. He studied creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh.

Mary Gaitskill, whose most recent book is the essay collection Somebody With a Little Hammer.  (Credit: Derek Shapton)

Where the Past Begins: An Interview With Amy Tan

by

Alison Singh Gee

10.13.17

Online Only

This past summer, while speaking on a panel at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers conference, Amy Tan surprised an audience full of aspiring authors with an admission: “There are times when I think to myself, ‘I’ve lost it completely,’” she said. “‘That’s it. It’s over. I will never write again.’” She shook her head and added, “It took me eight years to write the last novel. It seems like with every novel, it gets harder and harder.”

Tan, the author of six novels, including The Joy Luck Club (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989), as well as two children’s books, struggled with writing her last novel, The Valley of Amazement, first exploring one storyline for about five years, ditching much of it, and basically starting over, finally completing the book some three years later. Published by Ecco in 2013, the novel followed the odyssey of a young biracial courtesan as she searches for her American madam during the early twentieth-century in China.

As she grappled with her voice on the page, her public voice—on Facebook, notably—was becoming pointedly more personal and urgent, poking at topics that ranged from the whimsical (her beloved terriers and her latest sculptural haircuts) to the controversial (politicians she despises). In post after post on social media, Tan examined and confronted the world around her and the world within her. It was during this period that she began e-mailing with her editor, Daniel Halpern at Ecco, who she started working with on The Valley of Amazement, a little more than a decade after Faith Sales, her longtime editor at Putnam, died in 1999.

Halpern would send Tan a question, and the author would fire off a witty retort, or sometimes a very long missive. Once, for instance, Halpern asked the writer for a synopsis of her yet-to-be-written novel and Tan shot back a four-thousand-word response about why she hates writing synopses. All of these missives had a vital quality in common: spontaneity.

Buoyed by the vibrancy of their dashed-off e-mails, Tan decided to write a memoir, Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir, published this month by Ecco. The book collects Tan’s unguarded, free-flowing writing in response to family documents, personal photographs and journal entries she had collected throughout her life, which began in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she grew up the daughter of immigrant parents from China. The results of this personal research deeply surprised the author. In examining photographs of her grandmother and the clothing she wore, Tan discovered that her grandmother had most likely been a courtesan. In rereading letters she and her mother had exchanged before her death in 1999, the author realized they had remained close, even during the times that Tan tried to distance herself, and that her mother had felt that her daughter had truly understood her. The relationship between a mother and a daughter has formed the basis of much of Tan’s work, from The Joy Luck Club, which consists of stories about the experiences of four Chinese American mothers and their daughters, to The Bonesetter’s Daughter (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001), about an immigrant Chinese woman and her American-born daughter.

Tan, who readily admits that in writing her novels she labors over every sentence, discovered something vital about her writing process: that if she just shut out her self-conscious voice and wrote, she could capture something vital, intimate, and authentic on the page. “Writing this book was very painful,” she says. “But it was exhilarating, too.” 

I recently spoke with Tan about her approach to memoir and how this shift in process changed the way she views her fiction writing. 

You’ve written six novels, two children’s books, and one collection of essays. A memoir is a departure of sorts. Why did you decide to switch literary camps?
I would say I was lured into writing this book. It was the suggestion of my publisher, Dan Halpern, who thought I needed an in-between book—as in, between my novels. At first he thought we could put together a whole book of our e-mails. I said, “That’s a terrible idea.” But he kept insisting that it would be good. We could turn our e-mails from when we were first getting together into essays about writing. Then I looked at them and said, “This is never going to work.” And he finally agreed.

But by then this book had already been announced. And I was stuck writing it. At first I started writing something esoteric about language, but it was coming out all wrong and stiff. So I decided I was just going to write whatever comes to mind. It was going to be a memoir but it was going to be spontaneous.

But you’re known as a literary craftsperson, laboring over every sentence. How did you decide that spontaneity was the way forward?
This was one of the things I learned about creativity. You have to let go of self-consciousness. When I started thinking about this book, I knew that if I felt self-conscious while writing, it would probably come out bit by bit and it would not be as honest.

So I told Dan I would send him fifteen to twenty pages of writing every week. I imposed this crazy deadline on myself. I was just writing spontaneous sentences and not doing much in the way of revision. And this is what came out.

Throughout the writing of this book I was both excited and nervous. I didn’t know what I was going to find. It was like when you go to the circus and you’re about to see the next act. You’re looking forward to it but you’re also scared out of your mind. You’re worried that the trapeze artist is going to die. The process had a suspense to it. Even though I was writing about my life, here, I was writing about what I felt about certain experiences. There’s a difference between a narrative of facts and what happened in your life.

This was about what I felt about certain experiences and the association of that experience with another, and another beyond that. It was about who I am as an adult and reflecting on the core of these experiences.

What was your process? How did you organize the mining of these moments in your life?
I had collected all these things from my family and my own life, not ever thinking that I would write from them. I am sentimental; I have things from my high school, like my student-body card. I had like eighty boxes of this stuff in my garage. I kept them with the idea that I would one day go through them and get rid of a bunch and keep a couple of things. Then I thought, I will just pull something out of the boxes, and if it intrigues me I will write about it. So the process was: I stuck my hand in a box and what came out I wrote about.

It wasn’t as though I had it all lined up, like I wanted to write about this and this. The process was surprising, shocking. It was exhilarating, a mix of emotions. It brought about those things you get out of writing—you know, you have these epiphanies and discoveries. It was an affirmation of why we write.

How did this differ from writing your novels?
Writing fiction allows me the subterfuge of it being fiction. I can change things from real life. I can still go to an emotional core but not as intensely.

Fiction is a way to bring up emotions that I have and to get a better understanding of the situation. But I found that writing memoir brought up ten times the amount of emotion I have while writing fiction. This was truly an unexpected book. I kept telling Dan, “I hate this book.” It seems so personal, like an invasion of privacy. It’s as though I let people into my bedroom and into my darkest moments. I haven’t had time to really meditate over this as I would have liked—you know that word: process. I haven’t even had reflection time to sort out my emotions.

You seem to have lived a remarkably dramatic life and so did your mother, so did your grandmother. Your grandmother was likely a courtesan, one who committed suicide by swallowing raw opium. Your mother, in choosing to leave behind an abusive husband in China, also had to leave her daughters behind as she moved to America for a new life. And I read an article in which you mentioned that you had been sexually molested as a child, held up at gun point, experienced the death of both your father and older brother within six months of each other, and lived with a mother who threatened to kill herself on many occasions, and threatened to kill you with a cleaver on another occasion. In taking stock of this generational trajectory, did you have it in your head that you would one day make sense of all this as a writer?
Well, that’s what I was doing all along with my fiction. I was writing about things, and these moments would come up spontaneously, intuitively, naturally, as part of a narrative in which I was trying to make sense of a story.

For example, when I was writing The Joy Luck Club, I was writing to understand my mother more. But not to the extent that I did in writing this particular book—there was so much turmoil. When I examined for this memoir, in a very concentrated way, what it was like to live with my mother and her suicidal rages, it was so painful. The horror of seeing her put her leg out of a car and knowing that she might possibly die.

Is it meaningful to your memoir writing that your mother, who you’ve described as your muse, died almost two decades ago? How has that freed you to write autobiographically?
I wonder every once in a while what my mother would have thought about the things I wrote in this memoir. Would she have been upset or really happy? Would she be angry? When she was alive, anytime I wrote about her, even when I wrote terrible things, she was thrilled because it was about her. I could have written that she tried to kill me, and she would have been delighted. She’d say something like, “Now you understand how I feel.” My mother was an emotional exhibitionist.

My father, a minister, would have been wounded. In this book I wrote these things about him being sincere but shallow. He depended too much on the pat phrases of the Bible. Rather than truly feeling what somebody was going through, he wanted to solve things and be a good minister. He was so blind to what was going on in his own family. He didn’t have compassion for my little brother and me and what we might have been going through.

Was there difficult material that you left out of the book? If so, how do you feel about that decision now?
We took out about ten or twelve pieces and there was one, actually, that I debated over. Dan and I agreed that it was a little too risky. It was a letter I wrote to a minister based on having been abused when I was fifteen by their youth minister. This person I was writing to was not the minister when this happened. My point in the piece was that his church is a house of worship and it’s a continuous fellowship. I wrote that he is proud of the story of his church but he has to add this to its history. His house of worship has a stain on it.

I finally said, “We have to take this piece out. It goes off the path. It doesn’t enhance what I’m trying to write about.”

Are you happy with that decision or do you regret it?
I’m happy with the decision. Sometimes you write something and it becomes almost retribution, a desire to get even. In this memoir, I could have written about betrayal. I could have written about people who deeply wounded me, but why? I could have written about the fact that my mother went through her life feeling betrayed and that is a mark she put on me. I now have very strong feelings about betrayal and condescension. But I don’t want betrayals to be a dominant part of my life, and if I had written about them I would have given them more importance than I wanted to give them.

How did you push past your emotional blocks to include difficult information and lines of questioning?
In this book I say something about writing and honesty. And it has to do with spontaneity. If you are going to get to some emotional core and truth, you have to write spontaneously. You have to let go of that frontal lobe that says, “Oh, but my father will read this.” You can look at your writing later and say, “Oh my God, my father is going to kill me when he reads this, or he’s going to kill himself.” And then you will know what to leave in or take out. Or you wait until your father’s death. But if you start out in your writing having these concerns, maybe you are writing things that are vindictive. Or maybe you are not ready to write these scenes. Maybe you need to write them later. Maybe you need to take it from a different angle and it will come out in a different way. But I think that if you always write with compassion and understanding, then you stand a good chance of having that person understand why you are writing this. That you weren’t trying to be vindictive. Being vindictive is an automatic no.

Will you take this technique of spontaneity back to your fiction writing? How else will this foray into memoir affect your work as a novelist?
I always thought as I wrote fiction that I was making discoveries, deep discoveries. I was surprised by how much deeper these went as I was writing this memoir. How much more trouble the memories are and how much more risk I had to take to go into it.

Fiction offers us a subterfuge—I keep using this word—it’s almost similar to donning a costume when I go onstage as a ridiculous singer [as she does as a member of the literary rock band, The Rock Bottom Remainders, whose other members have included Stephen King, Scott Turow, Barbara Kingsolver, and others]. If I wear the costume, I can do ridiculous singing because it’s supposed to be in the guise of a silly person.

I am much closer to who I am when I am writing fiction, but there is still a separation. I write my fiction in the first person but writing memoir is truly first person.

I wonder if, in writing fiction, I am going to be as close to the material now, as I was as writing the memoir. With fiction I will still have that protective mechanism. For my memoir I fell into this safety zone of fiction when I wrote that memory of being in the car with my mother as she threatened to commit suicide. I had to write that in the third person. At first, I wrote it in the first person and I had to take it in the third person because it was so painful. I could only get it out in the third person.

At the same time, I think that writing fiction can be very fun. It allows you to be reflective, and at the same time and there’s the art and craft of fiction that I like. So I don’t think I would ever continue to just write memoir.

You mention that you have a “messy narrative style,” that you might start a novel using one voice speaking from a particular period of time but then you shift to another voice speaking from another period of time. Does this have to do with the dual narrative you lived with your mother?
This seems to be true about every book I’ve written. I start in the present and then go into the past. I think this has to do with an interior sense that whatever is happening in one particular time has a connection to another. I’m really fascinated by what that connection might be.

It’s not always a direct connection. For example, my father was a Christian minister and very devout. That does not mean that the connection to me was that I became a Christian minister or very devout. But what it did do for me was made me question what I do believe and why. And also that I am interested in having a purpose in life, rather than a random one. 

At Squaw Valley you said something surprising—and probably very buoying to many writers—that sometimes you face a blank page and think that you have lost the ability to write another word. But then you start to write again. What’s gets you over that hump and onto writing the next page?
I sometimes have this existential dread that I will never write again. Or, I’m not a writer, or this book isn’t going anywhere. Everyone is going to be disappointed. It makes me sick. Then I just say, “Get over it, you are not the end of the world.”

I’m not a disciplined writer at all. I would never want to convey that and make other writers anxious.

What happened with this memoir is that I gave myself a self-imposed deadline—fifteen to twenty pages a week—and I allowed myself to write bad pages. That’s the thing. Allow yourself to write bad pages and just continue to write spontaneously and in that writer’s mind. Write as much as you can without self-consciousness over bad sentences. Write knowing it’s going to be imperfect—that’s important. Just press on. You might look at it later and maybe you have to throw everything away. But there might be something in there that is valuable, that you can keep.

What three or four qualities make a “literary writer”?
Ah, that’s a terrible term. It has triggered a response equal to what the word “liberals” has attracted from Trump supporters. Being a literary writer might mean that you think you’re better than everybody else, or what literary means is that you’re incomprehensible to about 90 percent of mainstream readers.

But, okay. A literary writer is serious about craft, and doing something original, writing a story that contains an important idea. Literary writing has an important theme and it comes through naturally, logically, imperatively.

What qualities make a superstar writer?
Luck. And some kind of style. There is a great deal of luck involved. You have to get recognized and read. You’re lucky if your book falls into the right hands and if it didn’t come out the day after 9/11. Beyond that, it is having established a voice that people enjoy or want to hear from and being able to provide that.

Superstar writers are not necessarily the best writers. Some have written the same book over and over again. They may have a formula that readers want. Superstar writers have that down. They can be depended upon to deliver what readers like to read. I’m not counting myself as a superstar writer, by the way.

What’s next for you?
My new book is a novel, The Memory of Desire. It’s a book that I dreamed up. The structure, the characters and the setting—they literally came to me in a dream. It is so gratifying to get the setting down. For me, it’s a major part of starting a book. But keep in mind, what works for me may not work for you. 

 

Alison Singh Gee is an award-winning journalist and the author of the Hong Kong-India memoir, Where the Peacocks Sing, about her comical and complicated relationship with her husband’s family palace in Northern India. She teaches creative nonfiction and literary travel writing at UCLA Extension. Find her at Facebook.com/AlisonSinghGee.

Amy Tan, whose new book is Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir, published by Ecco in October. (Credit: Julian Johnson)

The Heart of the Novel: Nicholas Montemarano and Eric Puchner

11.6.17

Online Only

If you want to lose and then find yourself in stories of modern family life, look no further than the fiction of Nicholas Montemarano and Eric Puchner. Both authors peer into the beautiful messiness of contemporary America by way of its homes: the high stakes of our daily rituals, the turmoil beneath serenity, the white lies and longings that hold it all together. Puchner is author of the beloved story collections Last Day on Earth (Scribner, 2017) and Music Through the Floor (Scribner, 2005), as well as the novel Model Home (Scribner, 2010), which won the California Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Montemarano is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Book of Why (Little, Brown, 2013) and A Fine Place (Context Books, 2002), and the short story collection If the Sky Falls (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Now he’s celebrating the release of his third novel, The Senator’s Children, published this month by Tin House Books. Centered on two sisters who have never met, it is an intimate family drama about a political scandal and the personal aftermath. Puchner read an advance copy and was enthralled. “This engrossing, brilliantly structured novel takes a familiar situation—the implosion of a presidential candidate’s career—and creates a thing of heartbreaking beauty out of it,” he writes. “By asking whether forgiveness can conquer blame, and whether we might even be able to treat strangers like family, The Senator’s Children feels like exactly the kind of novel we need.”

So Eric Puchner and Nicholas Montemarano got in touch, and what started as an e-mail exchange in the fall of 2017 turned into a literary deep-dive. The two discussed scandals and second chances, finding the heart of the novel, and blurring the personal and political.

Eric Puchner: The Senator’s Children feels like a departure for you in terms of material. One of the things I admire about it, in fact, is that you take a familiar subject, one that’s sort of ripped from the history books—the infidelity of a presidential candidate and its ramifications on his career and family—and find a brand new story to tell.  What compelled you to write about a political scandal?

Nicholas Montemarano: This novel does feel like a departure in some ways—I never expected to write about a political scandal—but in other ways, it continues a preoccupation of mine. So much of what I’ve written—I realized this only after I completed The Senator’s Children—is about families, specifically how they cope with the aftermath of tragedy. My first urge to write this novel came after listening to a late-night talk show host lampoon a politician whose career and life were falling apart. I was compelled less by the fact that this man was a politician and more that he was a public figure being mocked when privately he and his family must have been in great pain. I had an especially strong reaction to the audience’s laughter. I may have been the only person in America, for all I know, who felt sorry for this man, his wife, and his children. We like to see the mighty fall, and then we love the redemption story that often follows. But this politician—the one who was the butt of so many jokes—there wasn’t going to be a second act for him. Not a chance, not after what he did. I couldn’t help but wonder what the rest of life would be like for a person who had become such a pariah.

EP: That’s another thing I admire about the book, the sympathy you show each and every character—not only David, the disgraced senator, but also “the other woman” who in some ways conspires to take David down. Was there a particular character you found hard to empathize with at first? Who was the trickiest character to write your way into?

NM: David Christie was unfaithful to his wife while he was running for president—and while she was battling cancer. Can you feel sympathy for someone who did that? Well, that was one question I set out to ask in my novel. The answer, for me, was surprisingly immediate: yes, of course. The challenge, then, was to bring out those aspects of David that might evoke empathy in readers. On the other hand, Rae, the woman with whom David has the affair—she was more of a challenge. In early drafts, she wasn’t very sympathetic. She was too interested in cashing in on the affair; she wanted to write a book about it and still hoped, years after the affair, to win over David. But she struck me as a caricature, a cultural footnote you might see on a reality TV show (in fact, I had her on a reality TV show in the first draft). So I had to dig deeper and allow her to be flawed—she can be needy and self-absorbed—but sympathetic. In her case, her saving grace is that she loves her daughter.

EP: We’ve been talking about David and the other woman, but the novel’s called The Senator’s Children. For me the emotional heart of it is the story of the two sisters, Betsy and Avery, who don’t know each other because one of them is the living proof of their father’s scandal. It’s just such a fraught, thematically rich situation. Did you know from the beginning that you would focus on David’s two daughters and their very divergent trajectories in life? And that these trajectories would eventually cross?

NM: I was just talking about this last week with my students. I showed them the pages in my notebook from 2011 when I wrote down my first thoughts about this novel. It was called The Senator. But a few weeks later, the working title became The Senator’s Daughter because I decided that its focus—and its narrator—would be Avery, the daughter born from the affair. I wrote the first paragraph—which no longer exists in the novel—and then one page later in my notes, I wrote: The Senator’s Children. I could see myself changing my mind and discovering what the heart of the novel would be. Even at that early stage, I knew who David Christie’s three children were and that his two daughters, estranged from their father to varying degrees, would collide late in the novel. I wrote pages of notes about them. It’s amazing to me that, after five years and so many drafts, much of those first notes I wrote about them remain true. Some things we know from the very beginning, and other things we have to write our way towards knowing.

EP: I wonder about that in relation to the novel’s structure. Another thing that impresses me is the way it moves so unexpectedly through time, toggling between the mid-eighties, the early nineties, 2010, and (in the final section) 1977. I found this to be the source of a lot of the book’s poignancy and power. (In some ways, it feels like the real subject of the novel is time and its irrevocability.) Was the jumping-around-in-time structure something you knew you were going to have from the beginning, or is it something that evolved during the drafting process?   

NM: I really like what you just said about time and its irrevocability—yes! If I had to choose two words that seem to capture my books thus far, they would be: time and regret. What is the life span of a terrible mistake? Can time heal even our deepest wounds? Or do those wounds fester and multiply? I’ve written three novels, and all of them move around in time. It’s difficult for me to imagine writing a novel that doesn’t; it just feels natural to me. As a reader, I’m drawn to nonlinear narratives. Many of my favorite books—The Things They Carried, Jesus’ Son, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City—jump around in time. Or skip ahead, like the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Or move backwards like Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal. Julia Pierpont’s Among the Ten Thousand Things, one of my favorite novels in recent years, includes surprising flash-forwards. Time jumps can be so powerful. We’re here, then suddenly we’ve jumped ahead, or back, and important things happen in that white space. I remember turning the page to Part Two of your novel, Model Home, and seeing that time had jumped ahead a year—even a small time jump like that excites me. I’m like, what did I miss? What happened between those two pages? The ending of The Senator’s Children, the final jump back in time—as soon as it happened, it thrilled me; I knew it was right.

EP: I want to ask you about the language in the book, which feels whittled down to its very essence—there’s a kind of spareness to it that feels evocative and hard-boiled at the same time.  Reading it, I couldn’t help thinking of Babel’s dictum that “only a genius can afford two adjectives to a noun,” except that it seems to me you’ve decided to get rid of adjectives altogether. Is this ultra-spare voice something that comes easily and naturally to you? Or, like Isaac Babel, do you “go over each sentence, time and again,” taking out anything extraneous?

NM: Eventually, I had to give myself over to sparer prose. During revision, it won me over and convinced me that it would be best for the novel. The first draft was bigger, louder, stylistically and formally explosive, multiple narrators, very voice-driven. With each draft, more of that fell away. The aspects of the first draft I was most enamored with were exposed as just that—writing I was too enamored with and attached to. The revision process was one of whittling down me, so to speak. The novel couldn’t be about me being a good writer or making some interesting moves; everything had to be at the service of the story. And so with each revision the novel became quieter and more intimate. Whenever my editor and I spoke about the later drafts of the novel, we always came back to intimacy—that was the novel’s strength, she kept telling me, and I came to believe her. It’s amazing to see how much the novel changed through revision—more than any other book I’ve written.

EP: Speaking of change, the biggest change that happened between your writing of this novel and its publication was the election of Trump. You wrote the novel before Trump’s infamous Hollywood Access tape, which—unlike David’s indiscretion—didn’t end up crushing Trump’s chances at the presidency and makes the Monica Lewinski scandal seem almost quaint. Has Trump’s ascendancy changed your perspective on the novel in any way? Would you write the same book in 2017?

NM: I would. Trump, of course, has reset almost everything when it comes to politics. But families—it seems to me that they remain the same. And I really see The Senator’s Children as a family novel more than a political novel. I set David’s run for the presidency in 1991 and 1992 mostly by necessity: I needed Avery, his daughter outside his marriage, to be in college during the present narrative in 2010. But setting the political scandal twenty-five years ago turned out to be interesting. I had a chance to revisit some of the political sex scandals around that time. In the case of Gary Hart in 1987, a photograph brought down his run for the Democratic nomination. But during the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton was able to overcome allegations of infidelity and win his party’s nomination and the White House. David Christie’s fate was closer to Hart’s. Or John Edwards’s in 2008. Some readers of The Senator’s Children have told me that the political world depicted in my novel feels, in the Age of Trump, like a throwback to a more civil time. Politics, of course, has always been a rough sport—and a fascinating one. But I’m a writer more interested in the private—what happens behind closed doors when the shit hits the fan, how families cope, how people lose each other, or hold on.

Novelists Nicholas Montemarano (left), author of The Senator’s Children; and Eric Puchner.

Craft Capsule: Find Your Voice

by

Simon Van Booy

6.27.18

This is no. 32 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Would you agree that for the past forty years, automobiles have been evolving in such a way as they now all look alike? As though created from the same, basic mold? One of the most important things you can do for yourself as a writer is to find your voice. I don’t mean tone, which is another way of referring to how writing makes you feel. The tone of this piece for Poets & Writers is very different from the tone of my latest novel, or the tone of the philosophy books I edited several years ago.  

I’m talking about voice. My voice can be squeezed into a 19th century corset for one novel, or spewed from the bowels of a werewolf for another, but it’s essentially the same underneath.  

When I realized after writing a couple of early novels, that I hadn’t found my voice—that there was even something called a voice—I was devastated.  

Had my years of labor all been for nothing? If my goal was to be published then yes. A total waste of time. But if my aim was to grow as an artist and as a person, then I had reason to be proud of myself.  

Anyway, to spare you the same kind of pain, I’ve devised an exercise that will hopefully lead you closer than you’ve ever been to the fiery core of your own, utterly unique, narrative style.  

1. Pick five books (or poems) you love, and five books (or poems) you dislike intensely, for a total of ten works.

2. Read the first page (or poem) several times, then rewrite it in such a way that you think, in your opinion, it’s better. Sometimes this means changing the order of words, or cutting them, or adding to them, or changing the tone completely. Don’t worry about offending anyone, no one knows you’re doing this except me, and I won’t tell.

3. This exercise, if done properly should take a fair amount of time. Once you’ve completed it, you’ll start to get a sense of who you are as a writer, and how your writing voice differs from the voices of others. Rewriting sections from writers you love is perhaps the most fruitful, because instead of emulating—you’re forced to be different. We each love certain writers for our own reasons. Rewriting their work will illuminate the subtle differences between your voice and theirs. 

4. Once you find your voice, it will almost certainly evolve over time, the way we evolve naturally as artists. Look at the early work of Van Gogh, compared to his later work. Dubliners vs. Finnegans Wake.  Early Beethoven sounds a little like Hayden—while late Beethoven is characteristic of the sound we associate with him. The core will always remain. Your voice is a gift to the world, so find it, nurture it, develop it, work it like a machine, give it the freedom of a vine—but above all, share it. 

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: A Form of Salvation
Craft Capsule: Tao Te Ching
Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

Craft Capsule: Infinite Distance, or The Starry Archipelagoes

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

3.6.18

Online Only

This is no. 28 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I remember being told a story when I was a student, though all these years later I wonder if it can be true. The course was in Modern Art History, and we were studying Bauhaus. My professor told us that on the first day of class, the Bauhaus teacher gave each one of his students a single sheet of paper. The assignment, he said, is to fold the paper in such a way that it can support the weight of your entire body. Some succeeded; some failed. But it is the assignment itself, the sudden and impossible challenge of it, that struck me—that one simple, blank page had to hold up the weight of your entire life. I then recognized something I’ve never recovered from, some true and awful thing about being a poet and a poet’s relationship, not to words or the beauties and meanings words offer, but to the blank space those words are written on, to the page: that one must learn to trust that its thin, near nothingness can bear the burden of a life. I realized that the poet has the simplest answer. You do not need to find the strongest method of folding, you do not need an intricate architecture of support; you just leave the page as it is and step onto the blankness.

Now I see that poetry intensifies the latent properties of the daily mundane into symbolic potency. The words on the chore list lend themselves to the desperate reverie of “Ode to a Nightingale.” A pencil makes its marks in the margins of the books I teach, and as the semester unspools day by day, and poem by poem, chapter by chapter, I sharpen the pencil and it grows shorter; I see this object of mere utility is also a mortal clock, and that the pencil’s beauty is a strange humility revealed in the seldom felt fact that it is, among all the objects I live my life among, one of the few that will disappear before I do. Walking to my Intro to Poetry course, I’ve come to realize—I hope, I fear—that the day’s lesson on some point of poetic craft is something other than what the definition in the Literary Dictionary holds, and is, instead, a complex consciousness, a vital form, a means of living a life. I know that sounds impossibly grand, but I think it’s true—that metaphor can be a philosophy, and metonymy a form of faith.

To help my students grasp such possibilities I ask them to take out a blank page of paper. The question is how to get from one corner to the opposite corner in the quickest way. The immediate reaction is to take a pencil and draw a straight line from corner to corner. But then some student figures it out and, leaving the pencil where its point stands, bends the opposite corner under its tip, letting the pencil ride across the distance without leaving a mark, for it has not “moved” at all. That is the discovery of metaphor. It helps us cross the distance we cannot imagine. And if it is as they say—those star-gazers, those physicists, those astronomers—that the earth isn’t the center of the universe, nor now is the sun, nor the Milky Way’s own black hole, but that all is in the red-shift, and flees from us in every direction at increasing speed into infinite distance, and between us and all we might love, as Emerson would have it, there is “an innavigable sea,” then metaphor becomes something other than the answer on the midterm, an implicit comparison between unlike things. It becomes a way to recognize the isolate nature of our condition, and a means of countering what otherwise could best be described as our cosmic loneliness. If the cost of the consciousness that language lends us is the inevitable sense of our separation from what it is we speak of, who it is we love, what it is we desire, then metaphor short-circuits that sad consequence and shuttles us—though we hardly feel the corner of the page slip under our feet—across the abyss of the universe. Is that hyperbole? Maybe. But sometimes the universe is just the living room. Sometimes the universe is nothing more than room A113 in Microbiology, where every Tuesday and Thursday from 12:30 to 1:45 I teach my class. That doesn’t mean the distance to cross is any less. If infinity has any lesson, it’s that every part of it is also infinite: chalkboard to student’s desk; word on a page to word in a mind. 

But that’s only one way to think, only one literary term, only metaphor. There are other terms to heap your faith inside. Like metonymy, that form of substitution of a name or attribute for something closely associated with it. Think of noble Queequeg in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Royal prince, the prophets of his tribe tattooed on his body the entire epistemology of his people; his body bore the signs and symbols that held the secrets of his tribe, prophecies and histories, facts and faith. It’s a beautiful image, the body as Holy Book—of course, Queequeg left his people before those prophets could teach him how to read what on his body was written. He was himself a book he could not open, illiterate to the answers he bore, outcast from the knowledge that marked him, unrecognizable to himself by the very marks that identified him. Queequeg gets very sick. He has the carpenter make him a coffin. Instead of resting in his hammock, Queequeg gets each day into his coffin, and looking at the symbols etched on his body, carves each one onto the wooden lid. Not knowing how to get to his people’s heaven, he trusts some divine spirit will be able to read those mystic marks on the coffin itself, and take him where he most wants to go, the starry archipelagoes. I know you’ve been told the earth is round; so have I, but sometimes I’m not so sure. Maybe Queequeg’s coffin would float out to the horizon, and there, where we assume one drops behind the curve of the earth to continue a ceaseless circumnavigation of the globe, the heavens reveal themselves as metonymic, and what seems like unbridgeable distance is actually not, but is continuous, contiguous, a near substitution for what once seemed impossibly far away, and the noble prince will find his way to heaven, not because his soul has been lifted there from the wreck of his body, but because that frigate-coffin has sailed all the way to the distant islands of those stars. Metonymy says that what seems apart is not apart at all, but is instead a part, as one tile is a part of the mosaic whole, and connected to the whole image of the world, though one can’t see the picture fully oneself.

Some other eyes can read it; some invisible hand can take you, too, to the starry archipelagoes.

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and author most recently of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017).

Craft Capsule: Hundreds of Eyes

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

2.20.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-sixth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I practice two arts—the poem and the essay—and I’m not good at keeping them apart. There are times, I admit, when poetry feels to me the primary vehicle of thinking, an epistemological experiment in consciousness itself, demonstrating line by line the way in which those wondrous wounds of the senses inform the mind, and the mind must work to find a word that fits—not recognition, but cognition. In this sense, the poem is the thinking that can happen only outside the mind, and the poet is one, so paradoxically, eavesdropping on her own innermost self (though the innermost is no longer exactly inner). It’s monstrous work. I mean it’s work akin to Mary Shelley’s monster fleeing through the woods and, bending over a puddle there, seeing the moon in reflection, hearing the wind in the branches, and seeing for the first time his own face. The poem’s thinking is fateful in just such fundamental ways: It does not recognize, it realizes.

And the essay, that mode of taking measure, that rational or reasonable weighing of a life, has become for me beauty’s own labyrinth. I suppose a maze is monstrous work, too—knowing those myths of the Minotaur. But sometimes I think the essay is a maze with no center at all; it is instead a bewildered initiation into what John Keats calls, in “Ode to Psyche,” the “untrodden region of my mind,” that place one finds only by getting lost.

Such wonderings have led me to think much on what I consider the most fundamental aspect of craft in each art: the line of the poem, the sentence of the essay. (One might argue the word is the fundamental aspect of both, and that might be true, but a word is a world of syllable and breath, of potency and chance, and carries, as Leibniz describes the monad, its complexity all within. I’m not sure I know how to think about words—a strange thing, I know, for a writer to admit.)

 

I. Lines

Ralph Waldo Emerson, though I can’t remember where, wrote down a thought I’ve never been able to shake loose: “Every line of a poem must be a poem.” I find this to be awful advice, by which I mean, advice that is full of awe—awful because it is so true. I apologize to my students when I repeat it them. I fear it could so burden every moment in a poem that the poet feels paralyzed, unable to forge any path into the wild blank of the page. But maybe that is just how it should feel, just that helpless, but a helplessness mined through with some urge to make in nothingness a world entire, a poem.

Emerson’s insight has unfolded in a number of ways in my thinking about poetry. If every line of a poem is a poem itself it must mean that every single line in a poem truly written contains within it all it can say, has exhausted somehow the resource of its perception until, by the last word, there is some silence that cannot be spoken past. It means each line of the poem possesses a knowledge and vision that is, in its way, wholly revelatory—a means by which to see the world anew, a way to grow a new set of eyes. Each line is a plank upon which the mind builds its whole edifice of reason—and for the length of the line, it holds.

But then, as Emily Dickinson offers it,

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –

That last stanza of her great poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” reads to me as the lived experience of reading a poem—that plunge through every line that is itself a world entire. And of the “Finished knowing—then—,” I’ve never known if it means she has ended in knowledge, or if knowing itself is at an end.

I suppose the answer may be both, for it reveals the most astonishing aspect of the line when every line is itself a poem: that each line of a poem makes a claim for some sense of the world entire, a sense of which that line is the primary example, and then that singular sense is subsumed into the larger vision of which it is but a part. Then the poem may be the place Emerson suggests it is, where we “stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety.” I imagine the poem also this way: a peacock with tail outspread, and the phosphorescent circle on each feather an actual eye. The poem lets us see through every eye. Then it is, as Wallace Stevens has it, that art in which “hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once.”

 

II. Sentences

Emerson’s own essays are exemplary of the next suggestion, an extension of his poetic insight: Every sentence of an essay must be an essay. It might be worth going further, and to alter Stevens’s lovely line, to make the essay that art in which “hundreds of minds, in one eye, think at once.” The bond between logos and logic that seems to drive the sentence through its argument to essay’s conclusion may be a more tenuous thread than one cares to admit. Keats knows this, as over and again he examines the fraught relationship between beauty and thought, summed up nowhere more succinctly than at the end of his letter, written in 1817, to his brothers, in which he defines negative capability. There he concludes: “This pursed through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” This obliteration of thought by beauty is something I’ve long pondered, but even more so as my own writing practice has turned to essays of lyric literary reverie and investigation. If Dickinson is right, and I think she is, that “This World is not Conclusion,” then the beautiful sentence might work to frustrate the considered logic of the essay’s larger aims, if not to obliterate them completely. I can imagine the mind as a knot trying to untie itself from within its own complexity, and though it may look from outside as if nothing’s changed, what’s inside has loosened its intricate ravel; I can see the sentences in an essay acting in just the same way.

Sometimes craft isn’t advice or technique, but simply a suggestion—a way of thinking, a method of approach. That is, craft can be revelatory of condition. When it is so, a poem teaches us what it is to think, and an essay teaches us what it is to see. We thought we’d entered into different lessons entirely when we picked up the book we’re reading, but when we put it down—whether it is essay or poem—we find both mind and eye opened. Not that it’s easy, in the end, to tell the two apart. 

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and author most recently of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017).

Craft Capsule: The Craft of Humility, the Craft of Love

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

2.13.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I’m teaching a class called Introduction to Poetry; I’ve taught it many times before. On day one, knowing many students are there not wholly willingly (a requirement, for many, for better or worse) I make the same tired joke: “Class, this is Poetry. Poetry, this is the class. I hope you’ll both be friends.” A few laugh.

But I mean it, that joke. I feel my job as a poet is to bring them into poetry in such a way that its difficulty becomes the means of admitting to and encountering their own complex lives, of finding in those nearly unspeakable reaches of mind or heart some companionship they did not hope to have—like a good friend offers. I hope the same for those easier pleasures in life—the sun-bright leaf, the bee in the bud, a rose—that a poem might offer itself to bear within it the sweet moment’s memory that otherwise might drift away into oblivion.

For those hopes to come true, the students need to learn how a poem works; inevitably, much of our delving into any particular poem requires an investigation into craft. I take something Ludwig Wittgenstein says about the nature of philosophy, and alter it toward poetic ends. I suggest that our condition is to find ourselves at sea on a craft that leaks and must be repaired as we float in it—that craft is our craft, the very thing that keeps the poem from sinking, and us along with it. For the honest poem, craft isn’t some willful choice of form, or any set of decisions binding the freedom of the poem to particular tropes; rather, craft is the helpless acceptance of what work is needed to keep the poem intact despite the extremity of its position—hovering there on the white abyss of the blank page, silence all around it, and you, riding in the thing you’re writing.

It is in such light that I want to offer the two most significant introductions to poetry and its craft that happened in my younger, proto-poet life. They are aspects of craft not typically thought of as craft at all, and yet, they opened me to poetry in ways I’ve yet to recover from—which is to say, I’m happy to still be here, fixing a leak while crossing the ocean.

 

I. The Craft of Humility

I thought myself a smart kid in high school, already something of a poet, dumb-drunk on some sense of my own “giftedness,” and out to prove it. I had the remarkable fortune then of having a teacher, Ms. Porter, who loved poetry and, just as important, could teach it. She broke the class into groups, and gave each group one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. My group was given number 173: “That time of year thou mays’t in me behold.” I lorded over the conversation, built some reading I cowed others into accepting, and when we presented to the class, of course, I was the one doing the speaking. I don’t remember—thank goodness—anything I said, or how it was I thought I saw that poem. What I do remember is the look on my teacher’s face—a teacher I loved. It wasn’t just disappointment, but a kind of anger. And I remember what she said, very loud, in front of everyone: That I had gotten the poem so wrong, I might as well have not read it.

I sat down and felt ashamed. That shame, the deep and burning sense of it, was my first true lesson in poetry. I realized that I’m not smarter than the poem I read, far from it; and that if I wanted, as I professed I did, to become a poet myself, then first I had to humble myself enough to know that I didn’t know much. I had to admit to myself my own insufficiency, that I needed a teacher to learn from, and the poem was both instructor and lesson itself.

Only years later did the true beauty of that poem find me: the bare ruined choir of those branches that, as the winter night darkens early with cold, become the fuel for the fire, those embers glowing and “consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.” Then I finally learned my lesson in craft, years after the hour in the classroom closed: that the poem is its own deepest resource, and the image it bears in the first lines, taken with all the literalness the imagination can muster, become the means of admitting to and countering crisis. For example: It is cold and dark and I’m getting old; but there’s a tree, and a fire, and a home. Even so late, the sweet birds sing.

 

II. The Craft of Love

Two years later, I had the same Ms. Porter again.

I had in the intervening years started reading and writing poems in earnest, and had started seeing a young woman, Kristy Beachy, who—. Well, who was everything to me.

We were reading John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” Humbled enough now to admit the poem made little sense to me, I was curious to see how Ms. Porter would teach it.

Stanza by stanza she led us through the metaphors, those metaphysical conceits, of lovers parting for untold time. Midway through those nine quatrains, which move from death to storm to the quaking of the planetary spheres, their gentle insistence that absence is no true remove, Donne admits to the kind of humility I’d come to recognize:

But we by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less eyes, lips, hands to miss.

Right there, at the very crux of a poem whose gentle fury of intellect seemed to cast it past my grasp, was the admission of not knowing exactly what is this thing one is in—this life, this love. I don’t know, those abashed, holy words, uttered in the very crucible of needing to know, that in their honest urgency, admit no defeat, but instead open the mind to its next vision.

That vision, Ms. Porter showed us, that “gold to airy thinness beat” of two souls that are one, depended upon gold beaten down to the micron of its leaf while remaining absolutely whole. But if these twin souls are two—and here, Ms. Porter pulled out her compass, familiar to us all from Geometry class—and demonstrated those last, astonishing lines:

If they be two, they are two so 
As stiff twin compasses are two; 
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show 
To move, but doth, if the other do. 

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must, 
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 
And makes me end where I begun.

Then she held the paper up on which she’d drawn her perfect circle. I don’t know if I gasped. I might have. For I’d learned my other earliest lesson in craft: that metaphor in poetry isn’t difficult because of its abstraction, but because of its accuracy. And I thought I’d learned something of that sense of accuracy, those feelings so poignant in their utmost singularity that they verge on the unspeakable: There was Kristy Beachy, sitting one row over and two seats ahead of me, and I was Dan Quick, mind-struck behind her, deeply, deeply, in love—with Kristy, of course, and with poetry. Not that it’s so easy to tell such matters of craft apart.

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and author most recently of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017).

Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain

by

Sandra Beasley

4.25.17

Online Only

This is the tenth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

 

***

I attended a high school geared toward professions in science or technology, so I have an active analytical streak and crave objective rubrics for understanding the wildly creative poems, stories, and essays that I read. I suspect I’m not alone in this.

One of my mentors, Gregory Orr, articulated four “temperaments” of poetry in a 1988 essay titled “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry.” You can envision these facets of craft as quadrants, positioned on an X-Y axis. To the left, limiting impulses: “Story” in the upper quadrant and, below it, “Structure.” To the right, impulses that extend limitlessness: “Music” in the upper and, below it, “Imagination.” Though designed for poetry, I find these temperaments useful for prose as well. As writers, we each typically favor two of the four in our work. Which temperaments bring you to the page? Which come easiest to you? Which do you need to consciously strengthen in your work?

This system gives us a way to articulate differences in aesthetic without ranking them. I’m relieved to set aside presumptive hierarchies. I suspect I’m not alone in this.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”

Craft Capsule: The Art of Targeted Revision

by

Sandra Beasley

4.18.17

Online Only

This is the ninth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

“Too many hours of revising—to no clear end!” my student complains. He is tired. He feels like the poem never really gets better. There’s always more work to do.

Welcome to revision: the arbitrary realm in which we debate “the” versus “an,” “this” versus “that.” Spend an hour putting a comma in. An hour later, take it out.

Part of the problem is that we complicate the revision process by making our aims abstract. One big revision, we promise ourselves, will make the poem “better.” Don’t privilege “better,” which is a meaningless term. Assign clear and objective tasks. Devote one round of revision exclusively to heightening your imagery, another to reconsidering your verb choices, a third to playing with lineation or tense.

Think of each revision as an experiment. Often these experiments will feel like evolutionary progress, and you’ll keep their results intact. Not always, especially as you near the end of the revision process. When the new version fails to appeal—when you find yourself resisting, reverting, defending an earlier choice—you are locating the poem’s true form. You are identifying what makes this poem yours, and yours alone.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Find Your Metaphor
Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”
Craft Capsule: Visual Prompts

Craft Capsule: Visual Prompts

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

Craft Capsule: The Scourge of Technology

by

Tayari Jones

1.23.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The cell phone is the worst thing to ever happen to literature. Seriously. So many great fictional plots hinge on one detail: The characters can’t connect. Most famous is Romeo and Juliet. If she just could have texted him, “R, I might look dead, but I’m not. Lolz,” then none of this would have happened.

In my new novel, An American Marriage, both e-mail and cell phones threatened my plot. Here is a basic overview: A young couple, Celestial and Roy, married only eighteen months, are torn apart when the husband is wrongfully incarcerated and given a twelve-year prison sentence. After five years, he is released and wants to resume his old life with her.

A good chunk of the novel is correspondence between our separated lovers. In real life, they probably would have used e-mail. But the problem, plot-wise, is that e-mail is so off-the-cuff, and there is so little time between messages. I needed to use old-fashioned letters. Their messages needed to be deep and thoughtful, and I wanted them to have some time to stew between missives. But who in their right mind (besides me) uses paper and pen when e-mail is so much faster and easier?

The fix was that Roy uses his allocated computer time in prison to write e-mail for the other inmates, for pay. As he says, “It’s a little cottage industry.” He also explains that he likes to write letters to his wife at night when no one is looking over his shoulder or rushing him. 

So look how this fix worked: You see that even though he is incarcerated, his is still a man with a plan. The challenge was to figure out how to avoid e-mail in such a way that it didn’t read like I was just trying to come up with an excuse to write a Victorian-style epistolary novel.

The cell phone was harder to navigate. Spoiler: Celestial has taken up with another man, Andre, in the five years that her husband is incarcerated. A crucial plot point, which I will not spoil, involves Andre not being able get in touch with her. Well, in the present day there is no way to not be able to reach your bae, unless your bae doesn’t want to be reached. Trouble in paradise is not on the menu for the couple at this point, so what to do? I couldn’t very well have him drop his phone in a rest-stop commode!

To get around it, I had to put Andre in a situation in which he would agree not to call Celestial or take her calls—although he really wants to. Trust me. It’s killing him. But he makes an agreement with Roy’s father, who says, “Andre, you have had two years to let Celestial know how you feel.  Give my son one day.” Andre agrees and has to rely on faith that their relationship can survive. The scene is extremely tense and adds suspense to the novel. I had to get up and walk around while I wrote it.

I predict that future novelists will not grapple with this quite as much as we do, as technological advances will be seen as a feature rather than a bug. But for now, you can still write an old-fashioned plot that doesn’t involve texting or tweeting—you just have to figure out a work-around that enhances the plot and understanding of your characters.

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

 

 

 

Craft Capsule: Finding Your Story

by

Tayari Jones

1.16.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-first in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Like most thoughtful people, I have noticed that the world is on fire and I want to use my skills to help extinguish the flames. To this end, I set out five years ago to write a novel that addresses the injustice of wrongful incarceration. I applied for and received a fellowship to the Radcliffe Institute and I became a dedicated researcher. I learned a lot, so much so that I got angry just watching Law & Order, my ex-favorite television show. I was informed, “woke,” and motivated, but I couldn’t write a novel because I had no story. The problem was that I was trying to write to the issue, and I can only write a story that is issue-adjacent.

I know I have a novel when I have a question to which I don’t know the moral/ethical answer. When it comes to wrongful incarceration, I am not torn. The state should not imprison innocent people. Full stop. Also without ambiguity: The prison system is cruel, corrupt, and in desperate need of reform, if not abolition.

So where was the novel?

The answer revealed itself in a food court where I spied a young couple. She was dressed in a lovely cashmere coat. He wore inexpensive khakis and a polo. They were clearly angry, and clearly in love. I overheard the woman say, “Roy, you know you wouldn’t have waited on me for seven years.” He shot back, “What are you talking about? This shit wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.”

Just then, I knew I had a novel. The reason is that I understood that they were both probably right. I didn’t know him, but I couldn’t quite picture him waiting chastely by for seven years. At the same time, I couldn’t imagine her behind bars. But did he have a right to demand her loyalty when both seem to agree she would be in no position to demand the same? Was this question moot since she would not likely face this challenge? Was this a kind of privilege? Could she mitigate this privilege by waiting like a modern-day Penelope? Should she?

So we have a couple with a conflict, and at stake between them are issues of reciprocity, duty, and love. Yes, there is the injustice of mass incarceration. And yes, this injustice is fueled by racism and prejudice. Neither of them doubt this, and neither do I. But the question of “will you wait for me” is foremost on his mind.

The result is my new novel, An American Marriage. Roy and Celestial are newlyweds, married only eighteen months, when Roy is arrested for a crime he did not commit. When he is slapped with a twelve-year sentence, the questions of desire and responsibility are at the center of the characters’ lives. As a writer, I was genuinely torn: Roy needs Celestial to be a link to the life he left behind, and Celestial loves her husband, but she has only one life. I wrote this novel not only to satisfy my heart’s curiosity as to what they would do, but to also satisfy the part of my mind that wondered what should they do.

I realized that my passion for the issue of incarceration was the reason that I couldn’t write about it directly. A novel is not me, as a writer, telling the reader what I already know. And an honest novel is not about me pretending to take on “both sides” of an issue about which I have a clear opinion. I had to start with my issue and then walk away from it until I found the thing I didn’t know. To truly challenge the reader, I had to challenge myself as well.

 

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

 

Craft Capsule: Gin and Scotch Tape

by

Sandra Beasley

5.2.17

Online Only

This is the eleventh in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Years ago a distinguished poet hosted our class’s workshops at her home in Virginia. The house was perched on an incline; down the hill was her writing cabin alongside a pond. We met at her dining room table and tried not to be distracted by the hawks swooping outside the windows.

A student brought in a draft that compared the scent of gin to Scotch tape. Setting aside all other matters of theme or craft, the discussion lingered on this comparison. The simile was bright and original. But was it accurate? That only a few in the room had ever sampled gin, and even then only of an aristrocrat variety, did not aid our analysis.

Reaching her limit, the professor sprang up from the table. “We’re settling this,” she said. She walked into the kitchen and retrieved a roll of Scotch tape. She went to a corner of the dining room, opened a cabinet, and pulled out a bottle. She walked the gin around the table so we could sniff accordingly.

Lesson one? To compare the scents of Scotch tape and gin doesn’t quite work, because the former obscures the latter’s floral qualities.

Lesson two? Always be prepared to have your simile put to the test.

Lesson three? Never let a turn of figurative language, no matter how vivid or clever, hijack what you’re trying to say. I can’t remember who wrote that poem, or where its heart lay. I only remember the gin and Scotch tape. 

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain
Craft Capsule: The Art of Targeted Revision
Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”

Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain

Craft Capsule: Real Time vs. Page Time

by

Wiley Cash

9.26.17

Online Only

This is the twentieth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Several years ago I worked with a student who was writing a novel about a guy training for a career in the sport of mixed martial arts. The novel was exciting and interesting, and the writing was strong and compelling. Until the fighting began. The minute the bell rang and the fists and feet started flying, the pace of the narrative turned glacial.

This may come as a surprise to you; it certainly surprised me. The talented author was actually a former MMA fighter, so it seemed impossible that he was unable to write an exciting fight scene. Then I realized that fight scenes are rarely exciting on the page. I believe this is true for two reasons. First, a fistfight is a process, and processes rarely make for compelling reading. Second, fistfights are exciting because they unfold in real time, which is wholly different than page time.

I want to talk about process first. Process is part of our daily lives, and many of the processes we undertake are performed through rote memory: brushing our teeth, making coffee, pouring cereal. These processes aren’t very interesting, and they don’t really need to be written about in detail. Readers may need to know that your characters drink coffee, eat cereal, and brush their teeth, but they don’t need to see this happening. Telling them it happened is enough. This is an example of when telling should be privileged over showing. But sometimes you may want to show a process, especially if it proves a level of expertise. Perhaps you’re writing about a character who is skilled with firearms, and you want to show that level of knowledge and skill. Perhaps you should have a scene in which the character goes through the process of breaking down and cleaning a firearm.

Most often, when readers start down the road of reading about process they’re not interested in the process itself; they’re interested in the outcome. The fight scenes in my student’s mixed martial arts novel are a good example. While the scenes were very technical and showed the same level of skill and mastery that I just mentioned, as a reader I quickly became bogged down in the descriptions of the movements, and I lost a sense of the movements themselves. I found myself skipping through the process of the fight in order to discover whether or not our hero won the fight. I realized that as a reader I was more interested in the outcome than I was in the process. The scene hinged on the result of the fight as an event, not on the act of fighting.

Not only were the fight scenes weighed down by process, they were also slowed down by the act of reading. Let’s step out of the ring. Think about the fights or dustups or schoolyard shoving matches you’ve witnessed. How long did they last before someone stepped in or called the parents or the teachers came running? Thirty seconds? A minute? A few minutes, tops? These events almost always unfold very quickly. The movements are fast; words are exchanged at a rapid clip. Your eyes and ears are able to take in the movements and the verbal exchanges simultaneously. Now, imagine trying to portray these events verbatim on the page. Think about how many words would be required to nail down both the movements and the dialogue. It would take much longer to read that scene than it would to witness it.

There’s an old writerly saying that dialogue isn’t speech, but rather an approximation of speech. Sometimes, this is true of action, especially in terms of process. 

 

Wiley Cash is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Last Ballad, A Land More Kind Than Home, and This Dark Road to Mercy. He currently serves as the writer in residence at the University of North Carolina in Asheville and teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program. He lives with his wife and two young daughters in Wilmington, North Carolina. His website is www.wileycash.com.

Craft Capsule: The Art of Active Dialogue

by

Wiley Cash

9.12.17

Online Only

This is the nineteenth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

When I work with new writers, one thing I often notice is their lack of faith in their dialogue: They don’t trust that it’s strong enough to stand on its own. They feel that they must add something to really get the point across. These writers add action words to their dialogue tags in an attempt to hide any flaws they fear may be hiding in their characters’ verbal interactions. In other words, they do everything they can to make certain that the reader gets the full import of what the characters are attempting, consciously or unconsciously, to communicate.

Often, and unfortunately, these action words take the form of gerunds. Let me follow this with a caveat: Gerunds in dialogue tags are not always a bad thing if they’re used purposefully and sparingly. I use them. Other writers I admire use them. But if I’ve used a gerund in a dialogue tag then I can defend it because I’ve already spent a good deal of time trying to consider whether or not to use it.

The gerunds in dialogue tags that bother me are the ones that are clearly there to underpin weakness in the dialogue. This happens when writers feel they need an action to complement a line of dialogue. Here’s an example:

“What do you mean?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders.

Let’s add an adverb and make that gerund really awful.

“What do you mean?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders nervously.

The writer (in this case, me) felt the need to add that gerund (and perhaps the adjective as well) because the dialogue itself was pretty weak. “What do you mean?” is a boring question. Anyone can ask this, but your character can’t just be anyone. He has to be a particular person with particular turns of phrase and particular movements (what are often called “beats” in dialogue) to flesh out what he means.

Let’s give it another try, and this time let’s write a better line of dialogue that essentially says the same thing as our original, just more clearly.

“What am I supposed to say to that?” He shrugged his shoulders. “What does that even mean?”

I tinkered a little with the original line and split it into two, but I divided the two lines with the beat of action. I feel like my two lines are pretty strong, and they seem particular to this person, whoever he is. Because my dialogue is strong, it doesn’t need the support of action. So my action can stand alone.

The action also does something the dialogue cannot do. It illustrates visually what the dialogue means verbally. The phrase “What am I supposed to say to that?” is a phrase of exasperation, so the action takes this a step further and shows exasperation. The follow-up question of “What does that even mean?” amplifies both the original question and the action.

If I had kept the gerund shrugging it would have combined the dialogue and the action, which crowds the reader’s mind in asking her or him to do two things at once: see and hear. Let’s focus on asking one thing of our reader at a time. The act of reading is not the act of movie watching, which often requires viewers both to see and hear at the same time. Literature and film cannot do the same things in the same ways.

The gerund shrugging is also a weak action word because it does not have a clearly demarcated time of beginning. How long has this guy been shrugging? After all, we enter the word “shrugging,” and presumably the dialogue, as the shrugging is already under way. On the other hand, when we read the line “He shrugged his shoulders” we are entering the action at the moment it begins. It has not been unfold-ing since an indeterminate moment in time. The action feels particular, as if it is caused by the line of dialogue that precedes it. It gives us a chance both to digest the dialogue and imagine the action. It does not ask us to do both at the same time with the confusion of wondering when the shrugging actually began. This is deliberate writing. We should all be deliberate writers.

I want to close with a few lines of dialogue from my upcoming novel, The Last Ballad. In this scene, a man has just come up a riverbank and met a small boy standing at a crossroad. The boy is staring down into a ditch where his injured dog is lying. The man asks the boy where they are.

The boy lifted his eyes from the ditch and looked around as if getting his bearings.

“Gaston,” the boy finally said.

“Gaston,” he repeated. He looked down at the boy. “Do you mean Gaston County?”

The boy shrugged.

“Mama just says ‘Gaston’ when she says ‘here.’”

I worked really hard on this scene. I wanted it to communicate an edge of laconic strangeness. The boy’s poverty has rendered him a bit provincial. The man’s travels have rendered him a bit wistful. I purposefully separated the actions from the lines of dialogue and cordoned them off in their own sentences.

But what if I’d used gerunds?

“Gaston,” the boy finally said, lifting his eyes from the ditch and looking around as if getting his bearings.

“Gaston,” he repeated, looking down at the boy. “Do you mean Gaston County?”

“Mama just says ‘Gaston’ when she says ‘here,’” the boy said, shrugging.

Written this way, the scene unfolds too quickly. The boy gives his answer about their location before getting his bearings. The man’s quizzical repetition of the word “Gaston” is marred by his deliberate action of looking down at the boy. The words and the actions do not go together. They must be separated and addresses and experienced on their own terms.

My advice is this: Trust your dialogue. If you don’t, make it stronger. Then, once your dialogue is strong, bring in action beats that amplify the speaker’s message, not messy gerunds that clutter it.

 

Wiley Cash is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Last Ballad, A Land More Kind Than Home, and This Dark Road to Mercy. He currently serves as the writer in residence at the University of North Carolina in Asheville and teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program. He lives with his wife and two young daughters in Wilmington, North Carolina. His website is www.wileycash.com.

 

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”
Craft Capsule: Making Conversation
Craft Capsule: Find Your Metaphor

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”
Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain

Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain

Craft Capsule: Rhyme and the Delay in Time

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

2.27.18

Online Only

This is no. 27 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

It snowed last night. Not much. Just an inch or two. But this morning there’s a strange fog in the air. It isn’t like a spring fog, thick in the vision, obscuring the trees and houses across the small field. It must be frozen crystals in the air, some breath the dormant grass gathered and sighed out, or the wedding dress a cloud took off and let drop down to the ground—a dress that is no more than texture in the air. It faintly glows, like it’s holding light inside of it, like it’s slowing light down. It’s morning when I get to see what it is to see.

I’d also like to hear what it is to hear, to listen in on listening.

Over the course of many years of working on the page as best I could, reading wherever it was bliss took me, writing to catch up to those glimmers other poems taught me to see by, I began to distrust that divide I grew up being schooled in: tradition vs. experiment, conservative or “quiet” poetry vs. the avant-garde. Reading George Herbert, John Donne, and John Keats; reading Emily Dickinson, Sappho, and Gerard Manley Hopkins; reading Homer, Virgil, and the Greek pastoral traditions; reading anonymous poems for graves and for fields—all made me think that tradition might root itself down in the very humus of experiment. And, as humus and human are cognate, I began to suspect that the age-old tropes by which poetry functions—image, metaphor, metonymy, symbol; line, meter, music, rhyme—radically include us in that tradition of experiment that poetry might be described as. Trope, after all, comes from the Greek tropos, and means a turn, direction, a course, a way; but it also means the character of a person, the peculiar temper that makes one who one is; it also means the way the strong wind might move through a pine tree; it also means the way a winter morning’s fog might pause even the speed of light. I mean to suggest a simple thing, though I’ve learned the simple is often bewilderment’s own maze, that the tropes by which a poem moves through itself are not the musty pedantries of literary dictionaries, but are themselves fundamental forms of consciousness, the very means by which a poem comes to know itself, and by extension, the very means by which we come to know ourselves as well. The trope can wake us in the way the eye open wakes us—suddenly, there is light, and the first step of the day is into vision: an image. Or, take rhyme: Rhyme can make of the mind a wind-chime. 

I have no verifiable proof, just a sense from twenty years of teaching, more of reading and writing, that rhyme has become one of those aspects of tradition most easily derided. I can understand how it happened. Teaching now a lower-level poetry-writing workshop, I notice how often the weakest poems are strongest in rhyme, and the first advice, to not let the end sound of the line drive everything the line must do, inevitably makes the poem better. One of the unintended consequences of the workshop model may well be a drift away from the power of traditional tropes. The pressure put upon a single poem to achieve itself most successfully diminishes the larger work of thinking about what the work of poetry is—a work that requires the very failures, poem by poem, that necessitate thinking across the entire span of one’s efforts. The push, or the desire, to be “original,” to have a “voice,” to “make it new,” might deafen us to the latent, collective, anonymous consciousness that resides in something as simple-seeming as rhyme. There is something in rhyme—I think I can hear it, though it’s hard to describe—that speaks to the ongoing crisis of the human condition from the dawn of mind to now. It’s like an echo. But unlike that echo in stairwell or tunnel, in cave or gorge, it doesn’t get quieter as it moves through time. In rhyme, the echo gets louder.

So it is I often rhyme my poems, though it might not be obvious. I’ve come to trust there’s something in the ear’s own intelligence that leaps ahead of the conscious, analytic mind in a poem that rhymes, as if the hidden promise of a chiming sound sets forth in the poem a fate-like assurance that what is to come, though yet unseen, will welcome you. So quietly, but so familiarly, rhyme suggests that to move forward, as one must, into what one doesn’t know, will be okay. If so, rhyme offers itself as some form of existential assurance, is tuned in, and so attunes us, to fears and hopes so entwined with the human condition, we forget we even need to speak of them: that in what feels to be the chaos of the blank future, there is a cosmos, an order, into which we’ll fit. It is not exactly a means of survival, but a trust one will survive.

Rhyme also works within and against time. I can imagine in a poem heavily end-rhymed—say a Petrarchan sonnet with its octave of ABBAABBA, or Dante’s lovely, enveloping terza rima of ABA BCB CDC—that the surety of those sounds counters the awful, inevitable flow of mortal life in one direction. Then the poem that makes its claims about love’s immortality, or memory’s eternity, is no cloying euphemism, but an enacted audacity in the poem’s very fiber. That rhyme works as does mythic time, returning us ever again to a point we’ve never truly left—the day that is all one day, world’s onset, the syllable now, sun’s instant of light—even as, line by line, we recognize too that we do not get to remain in that golden light of origin. We can hear in the poem that mythic life of eternal return, and in hearing it, live within it, even as the poem accompanies us in that other recognition, that line by line we move to what end is ours. Rhyme puts a delay in time. It makes us understand what otherwise would feel an impossible paradox: that we live in time, and time doesn’t exist. And though I’m not exactly a religious man, it gives me one version of how heaven could work. It’s just a poem, just a rhyme, a single-syllable that, scanned, has no stress and rhymes AAAAAAAA…forever.

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and author most recently of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017).           

Craft Capsule: Hundreds of Eyes
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

Craft Capsule: The Craft of Humility, the Craft of Love

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

2.13.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I’m teaching a class called Introduction to Poetry; I’ve taught it many times before. On day one, knowing many students are there not wholly willingly (a requirement, for many, for better or worse) I make the same tired joke: “Class, this is Poetry. Poetry, this is the class. I hope you’ll both be friends.” A few laugh.

But I mean it, that joke. I feel my job as a poet is to bring them into poetry in such a way that its difficulty becomes the means of admitting to and encountering their own complex lives, of finding in those nearly unspeakable reaches of mind or heart some companionship they did not hope to have—like a good friend offers. I hope the same for those easier pleasures in life—the sun-bright leaf, the bee in the bud, a rose—that a poem might offer itself to bear within it the sweet moment’s memory that otherwise might drift away into oblivion.

For those hopes to come true, the students need to learn how a poem works; inevitably, much of our delving into any particular poem requires an investigation into craft. I take something Ludwig Wittgenstein says about the nature of philosophy, and alter it toward poetic ends. I suggest that our condition is to find ourselves at sea on a craft that leaks and must be repaired as we float in it—that craft is our craft, the very thing that keeps the poem from sinking, and us along with it. For the honest poem, craft isn’t some willful choice of form, or any set of decisions binding the freedom of the poem to particular tropes; rather, craft is the helpless acceptance of what work is needed to keep the poem intact despite the extremity of its position—hovering there on the white abyss of the blank page, silence all around it, and you, riding in the thing you’re writing.

It is in such light that I want to offer the two most significant introductions to poetry and its craft that happened in my younger, proto-poet life. They are aspects of craft not typically thought of as craft at all, and yet, they opened me to poetry in ways I’ve yet to recover from—which is to say, I’m happy to still be here, fixing a leak while crossing the ocean.

 

I. The Craft of Humility

I thought myself a smart kid in high school, already something of a poet, dumb-drunk on some sense of my own “giftedness,” and out to prove it. I had the remarkable fortune then of having a teacher, Ms. Porter, who loved poetry and, just as important, could teach it. She broke the class into groups, and gave each group one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. My group was given number 173: “That time of year thou mays’t in me behold.” I lorded over the conversation, built some reading I cowed others into accepting, and when we presented to the class, of course, I was the one doing the speaking. I don’t remember—thank goodness—anything I said, or how it was I thought I saw that poem. What I do remember is the look on my teacher’s face—a teacher I loved. It wasn’t just disappointment, but a kind of anger. And I remember what she said, very loud, in front of everyone: That I had gotten the poem so wrong, I might as well have not read it.

I sat down and felt ashamed. That shame, the deep and burning sense of it, was my first true lesson in poetry. I realized that I’m not smarter than the poem I read, far from it; and that if I wanted, as I professed I did, to become a poet myself, then first I had to humble myself enough to know that I didn’t know much. I had to admit to myself my own insufficiency, that I needed a teacher to learn from, and the poem was both instructor and lesson itself.

Only years later did the true beauty of that poem find me: the bare ruined choir of those branches that, as the winter night darkens early with cold, become the fuel for the fire, those embers glowing and “consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.” Then I finally learned my lesson in craft, years after the hour in the classroom closed: that the poem is its own deepest resource, and the image it bears in the first lines, taken with all the literalness the imagination can muster, become the means of admitting to and countering crisis. For example: It is cold and dark and I’m getting old; but there’s a tree, and a fire, and a home. Even so late, the sweet birds sing.

 

II. The Craft of Love

Two years later, I had the same Ms. Porter again.

I had in the intervening years started reading and writing poems in earnest, and had started seeing a young woman, Kristy Beachy, who—. Well, who was everything to me.

We were reading John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” Humbled enough now to admit the poem made little sense to me, I was curious to see how Ms. Porter would teach it.

Stanza by stanza she led us through the metaphors, those metaphysical conceits, of lovers parting for untold time. Midway through those nine quatrains, which move from death to storm to the quaking of the planetary spheres, their gentle insistence that absence is no true remove, Donne admits to the kind of humility I’d come to recognize:

But we by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less eyes, lips, hands to miss.

Right there, at the very crux of a poem whose gentle fury of intellect seemed to cast it past my grasp, was the admission of not knowing exactly what is this thing one is in—this life, this love. I don’t know, those abashed, holy words, uttered in the very crucible of needing to know, that in their honest urgency, admit no defeat, but instead open the mind to its next vision.

That vision, Ms. Porter showed us, that “gold to airy thinness beat” of two souls that are one, depended upon gold beaten down to the micron of its leaf while remaining absolutely whole. But if these twin souls are two—and here, Ms. Porter pulled out her compass, familiar to us all from Geometry class—and demonstrated those last, astonishing lines:

If they be two, they are two so 
As stiff twin compasses are two; 
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show 
To move, but doth, if the other do. 

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must, 
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 
And makes me end where I begun.

Then she held the paper up on which she’d drawn her perfect circle. I don’t know if I gasped. I might have. For I’d learned my other earliest lesson in craft: that metaphor in poetry isn’t difficult because of its abstraction, but because of its accuracy. And I thought I’d learned something of that sense of accuracy, those feelings so poignant in their utmost singularity that they verge on the unspeakable: There was Kristy Beachy, sitting one row over and two seats ahead of me, and I was Dan Quick, mind-struck behind her, deeply, deeply, in love—with Kristy, of course, and with poetry. Not that it’s so easy to tell such matters of craft apart.

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and author most recently of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017).

Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain
Craft Capsule: Good Sense
Craft Capsule: The Scourge of Technology

Craft Capsule: Every Novel Is a Journey

by

Tayari Jones

2.6.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-fourth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Last week I wrote about how I came to make Roy the protagonist of my new novel, An American Marriage. The decision was frustrating because I came to this tale seeking to amplify the muffled voices of women who live on the margins of the crisis of mass incarceration. So imagine how hard it was for me to make the Roy’s story the main color of the take and relegate Celestial’s point of view to a mere accent wall. It nearly killed me. I was prepared to pull the novel from publication.

Luckily, I had a craft epiphany.

Roy is a great character. He’s like Odysseus, a brave and charismatic man returned home from a might battle. He just wants to get home and be taken care of by a loving wife and sheltered in a gracious house. His voice was very easy to write because he is easy to like; his desires and decisions make it easy to empathize with him. He is a wrongfully incarcerated black man. What decent person wouldn’t root for him?

Celestial was bit more challenging. She’s ambitious. She’s kind of stubborn. And most important, she isn’t really cut out to be a dutiful wife. Back when she was the protagonist of the novel, I used to say, “I am writing a novel about a woman whose husband is wrongfully incarcerated…” and everyone would expect the novel to be about her fight to free him. And it wasn’t. It was about her decision not to wait.

On the level of craft, it just didn’t work. For one thing, you can’t write a compelling novel about what someone doesn’t do. (There is a reason why Bartelby doesn’t get to narrate his own story.) Second, as I wrote last week, Roy’s crisis is just too intense and distracting for the reader to care about any other character as much.

So, what to do?

I foregrounded Roy. He is the protagonist and readers find him to be very “relatable” (my very least favorite word in the world). I took Roy on the journey, and I invite readers to accompany him. As the writer, I came to the table understanding that the expectations put on women to be “ride or die” are completely unreasonable; furthermore, there is no expectation of reciprocity.  But rather than use Celestial’s voice to amplify my position, I allowed Roy the hard work of interrogating his world view, and the reader, by proxy, must do the same.

The result is a novel that was a lot harder to write, but the questions I posed to myself and my readers were richer, more complex, and I hope, more satisfying.

 

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

Craft Capsule: Finding Your Story
Craft Capsule: The Scourge of Technology

Craft Capsule: Finding the Center

by

Tayari Jones

1.30.18

Online Only

This is the twenty-third in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

My new novel, An American Marriage, involves a husband and wife with an unusual challenge: Eighteen months after exchanging their vows, he is arrested and incarcerated for a crime he does not commit.

I was equally interested in both their stories, but for some reason early readers of the manuscript were way more interested in him (Roy) than her (Celestial.) At first, I was convinced that this was sexism, plain and simple. Men’s stories are considered more compelling. To try and make Celestial more appealing, I tried to give her a more vibrant personality. But regardless of the details I added to embroider her, beta readers still felt that she was “undeveloped” and that Roy was the character who popped. It almost drove me crazy. Finally, I realized that Roy held the readers’ attention because his problem was so huge. (He’s wrongfully incarcerated, for goodness sake!)

Undaunted (well, maybe a little daunted), I read stories by my favorite women writers who write beautifully about women’s inner lives. I checked out Amy Bloom, Antonia Nelson, Jennifer Egan. How did they manage to make emotional turmoil so visceral? In these writers’ hands, a small social slight can feel like a dagger. Why couldn’t I do this in my own novel?

I found the answer in the work of Toni Morrison, for all answers can be found there. It’s a matter of scale. There is a scene in The Bluest Eye where the lady of the house is distraught because her brother hasn’t invited her to his party, although she sent him to dental school. By itself, this is terrible and totally worthy of a story. However, in the same frame is Pauline, the maid who has suffered all manner of indignities in an earlier chapter. In the face of Pauline’s troubles, the matter of the party seems frivolous.

With this, I discovered a fundamental truth of fiction and perhaps of life: The character with the most pressing material crisis will always be the center of the story. Although Celestial’s challenges as a woman trying to establish herself in the world of art is intense, the fact of Roy’s wrongful incarceration makes her troubles seem like high-class problems and to center them in the novel feels distasteful to the reader, like wearing a yellow dress to a funeral and fretting over a scuffed shoe.

The solution: I made Roy the protagonist. Celestial’s voice is still there, but she is a secondary narrator. It was a hard choice because I was drawn to her story in the first place, but it was being drowned out by Roy’s narrative. Finally, I had to stop fighting it. The protagonist of An American Marriage is Roy Othaniel Hamilton.

It took me five years to figure this out. Of course, every craft solution makes for new craft obstacles. I’ll talk about the fall-out from this shift in my next (and final) Craft Capsule, next Tuesday.

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

Craft Capsule: The Scourge of Technology
Craft Capsule: Finding Your Story
Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

Craft Capsule: Ordering the Story Collection

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.22.19

Online Only

This is no. 38 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I always read short story collections in order. Maybe this is because my earliest infatuations happened via mix tape (and by mix tape, I mean a CD that I burned or that someone burned for me, with songs meant to convey something deep and unspeakable). Unlike with a cassette, one could, in theory, set the CD player to random, but this would break an unspoken rule. The point was to put on your headphones, lie on your bed, and think about the person who made the mix for you. You’d hold the handwritten track list and listen to the songs in their intended order, so you could figure out what this person was trying to say. You paid close attention to the lyrics, the tone, the transitions. A successful mix tape meant never forgetting about the “author.” How exactly did they feel about you? Did you feel the same way? Maybe you hadn’t before, but now, alone in your room with all those perfectly chosen songs, maybe you were charmed. 

Assembling a short story collection is a daunting process: Often the individual pieces have been written as unique, standalone works, edited by staff with varying aesthetics at different literary journals, and published over a span of years. The earliest version of my collection, Black Light, wasn’t really a collection—it was just a bunch of stories I wrote and published between 2005 and 2017. It took my terrific agent to help me see that one of the stories was actually the beginning of a novel, that two others needed to be combined into a longer piece, and that one story had a voice too abstract and confrontational to fit in with the rest. Once these decisions were made, the stories that we kept had a kind of reverberation with each other. A musicality.

In an informal poll, my friends who read collections tell me they don’t read in order. They start with the shortest story, or the title story, or they read in reverse order or at random. This is all fine—unless the stories are linked, order shouldn’t make or break a collection—but when I was putting Black Light together, sequence became very important to me. I love the way my favorite collections bend time, pull me in and out of different worlds, immerse me in a situation for thirty pages and then toss me out. 

I had three very long stories and three very short ones and half a dozen in between. I liked the idea of giving moments of reprieve, little spaces to breathe, so flash pieces often came after the longest ones. Everybody knows how important the first track of a mix tape is, and I wanted to start my collection with my most affable narrator. In the story “Guts,” Sheila is bewildered by new circumstance: She’s recently fallen for a medical student, and suddenly she sees sickness and beauty everywhere she looks. This newfound empathy overwhelms her, and in that way she’s a great proxy for a reader entering the strange world of the collection. All my stories deal with similar themes—game playing, escapism, desire—but I had strong ideas about how to move through the different voices of the remaining narrators (urban and rural, child and adult, male and female, queer and straight) in a way that felt balanced and varied to me.

On the first call with my editor, before we’d even made a deal, she talked about her vision for the collection. She liked the order, the way the stories “sang” to one another. She compared her favorite collections to music: She wanted this book to feel cohesive and unified, but never repetitive. Like a perfect mix tape, she said, a book of short stories should make the reader fall in love. I knew then that I’d found the right person for my project.

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: Oblique Strategies
Craft Capsule: Finding the Center
Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

Craft Capsule: Ordering the Story Collection

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.22.19

Online Only

This is no. 38 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I always read short story collections in order. Maybe this is because my earliest infatuations happened via mix tape (and by mix tape, I mean a CD that I burned or that someone burned for me, with songs meant to convey something deep and unspeakable). Unlike with a cassette, one could, in theory, set the CD player to random, but this would break an unspoken rule. The point was to put on your headphones, lie on your bed, and think about the person who made the mix for you. You’d hold the handwritten track list and listen to the songs in their intended order, so you could figure out what this person was trying to say. You paid close attention to the lyrics, the tone, the transitions. A successful mix tape meant never forgetting about the “author.” How exactly did they feel about you? Did you feel the same way? Maybe you hadn’t before, but now, alone in your room with all those perfectly chosen songs, maybe you were charmed. 

Assembling a short story collection is a daunting process: Often the individual pieces have been written as unique, standalone works, edited by staff with varying aesthetics at different literary journals, and published over a span of years. The earliest version of my collection, Black Light, wasn’t really a collection—it was just a bunch of stories I wrote and published between 2005 and 2017. It took my terrific agent to help me see that one of the stories was actually the beginning of a novel, that two others needed to be combined into a longer piece, and that one story had a voice too abstract and confrontational to fit in with the rest. Once these decisions were made, the stories that we kept had a kind of reverberation with each other. A musicality.

In an informal poll, my friends who read collections tell me they don’t read in order. They start with the shortest story, or the title story, or they read in reverse order or at random. This is all fine—unless the stories are linked, order shouldn’t make or break a collection—but when I was putting Black Light together, sequence became very important to me. I love the way my favorite collections bend time, pull me in and out of different worlds, immerse me in a situation for thirty pages and then toss me out. 

I had three very long stories and three very short ones and half a dozen in between. I liked the idea of giving moments of reprieve, little spaces to breathe, so flash pieces often came after the longest ones. Everybody knows how important the first track of a mix tape is, and I wanted to start my collection with my most affable narrator. In the story “Guts,” Sheila is bewildered by new circumstance: She’s recently fallen for a medical student, and suddenly she sees sickness and beauty everywhere she looks. This newfound empathy overwhelms her, and in that way she’s a great proxy for a reader entering the strange world of the collection. All my stories deal with similar themes—game playing, escapism, desire—but I had strong ideas about how to move through the different voices of the remaining narrators (urban and rural, child and adult, male and female, queer and straight) in a way that felt balanced and varied to me.

On the first call with my editor, before we’d even made a deal, she talked about her vision for the collection. She liked the order, the way the stories “sang” to one another. She compared her favorite collections to music: She wanted this book to feel cohesive and unified, but never repetitive. Like a perfect mix tape, she said, a book of short stories should make the reader fall in love. I knew then that I’d found the right person for my project.

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: Oblique Strategies
Craft Capsule: Finding the Center
Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

Craft Capsule: Oblique Strategies

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.15.19

Online Only

This is no. 37 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was getting my MFA in fiction, one of my favorite professors asked us to write a story using only single syllable words. At first this sounded awful—how could we possibly pull this off? It wasn’t easy, but very quickly it became a kind of game to me, an obstruction that brought out odd new rhythms. When we came back to class and read our stories aloud, it was a revelation. Every single student had done something striking and compelling. The sentences were strange and clipped, everyday phrases made fascinating. One student had something like “he who taught us of the past” to stand in for history professor. In my story, instead of an electrician playing checkers, “the lights guy played reds and blacks.” The formal constraint forced us to go beyond the easy, obvious choices. My professor stressed that this was a starting point, something to unlock us; there was no need to stick to these rules in subsequent drafts. Later, when I was revising, I found that because the work didn’t sound like me, I could brutally edit it. Now, more than ten years later, if something isn’t working in a story or chapter, I sometimes fall back on the one-syllable trick.

The weirdest approaches to process are the ones I find most helpful—the ones that have stayed with me the longest. There was the professor who encouraged his classes to narrate problematic scenes from the perspective of inanimate objects, animals, or the dead. A friend of mine takes the articles out of any story or chapter that’s giving him problems. He usually puts most of them back, but something about the extraction lets him see the work differently. There was another professor who forbade us from using adverbs, or giving characters first names, or starting any sentence with a pronoun—I loved his bizarre rules, even when I decided to break them.

When I’m writing I sometimes consult this strange little deck of cards called Oblique Strategies. Originally created in 1975 by painter Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno—yes, that Brian Eno, immensely talented musician, producer, and co-conspirator of the late David Bowie—each card has a single directive printed on it, a “strategy” for your creative process. These prompts are meant to assist with removing blocks, but the Zen-like aphorisms are more abstract than prescriptive (i.e., “Start at the end,” or “Emphasize the flaws,” or really strange ones like “Remember a time when you hid from something as a child.”) 

The deck my partner and I have at home is the updated 2001 edition, with a bizarre product description: “These cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, and sometimes they were formulated. They can be used when dilemma occurs in a working situation…The card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear.” These mysterious abstractions are part of the charm. There’s now a version of the strategies available for free online, although I still prefer the physicality of shuffling through a deck. Two cards I selected at random just now read: “Disconnect from desire,” and “Go slowly all the way round the outside.” It all sounds a bit wacky, and that’s exactly the point. I find the further I lean into the weird, the easier is it for me to get back to work.

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: “Unlikable” Characters
Craft Capsule: Find Your Voice
Craft Capsule: Infinite Distance, or The Starry Archipelagoes
Craft Capsule: Every Novel Is a Journey

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