Tony Hoagland’s New Book

As a devotee of Tony Hoagland, I am very happy that he has a new book out, (Tattered Cover better have it in stock, or I will be peeved!). And what I most love about Hoagland are the things that Joel Brouwer, in the New York Times Book Review, seems to diss on.

So Hoagland doesn’t rhyme, or write in a quantifiable cadence. He is, seemingly, a student of W.C. Williams “variable foot”–which imitates real, American, speeech. Which makes his poems read like the dramatic monologues from a weird kind of thinking Mr. Everyman. His speaker is the kind of guy who will read Baudelaire and watch the SuperBowl, perhaps even in the same day.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

–MJH

P.S. For what it’s worth, I must say here that Hoagland’s earlier book of poetry has the best title ever: What Narcissism Means to Me.

It’s okay to try this at home…

Not so "by the book" by today's standards

Rebecca Berg, who on Monday starts teaching Reading as a Writer: The Lush Novel (featuring William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice) is very gracious when you bug her on a weekend. I e-mailed her yesterday to ask, Why Styron, why now? Today she sent me this note:

Our emphasis as fiction writers is so often on creating an effect of “immediacy.” It’s gotten to the point that we almost think of narrative distance as a mistake.  Sometimes I think we see the classic “talky” novelists as imperfect pioneers of a technology that has evolved since their time–as in: now we know better. Or maybe we tell ourselves: “Well, Styron was a great writer, but don’t try this at home.” Or maybe we think: “We’re in the age of Twitter–complexity not allowed.” Disempowering stuff.  So my “Lush Novel” fascination is a little bit in the spirit of defiance: Remember, lots of people love to read those fat novels. And here’s the thing about Sophie’s Choice: it manages to speak about the unspeakable, the Holocaust. It breaks another rule, too: a lot of that unspeakable history is outside the author’s direct personal experience. The novel claims the right to do that. To exercise the imagination in that way. And one reason I think Styron brings this off is the various distancing techniques he uses. You don’t see much of the sun by looking at it directly.

Now you see why it’s always good to ask Rebecca questions. I welcome her perspective–I fall to my knees to hug it, in fact–as someone who’s genetically incapable of writing a story under 7,500 words. Nobody wants a stinking 10,000-word story! (If you doubt this, I have links.) Today’s mandate to “say it all quickly” (to mollify or at least coexist with the Twitterati, the short attention spans, the hostilely bored, the polyconnected with multiple outlets and earbuds,  etc.) makes me chafe a bit. At my most petulant, I’m reminded of those old schoolteacher sayings meant to combat peer pressure: “If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you, too?” Only now, the cliff is the 140-character Tweet. And people are jumping into it, not off of it. But still. Some of us are just long-winded, right? And maybe we even wish we lived in a world where 140-character Tweets could share the bus with 150-character Tweets.  (The poor things, brutally truncated before sense even has a fighting chance to materialize.)

 

So I vote we join Rebecca’s spirit of defiance! Write long-winded stories, complicate all the complications, write compound-complex sentences! Take on a taboo or seven, while you’re at it. (But, just a quick note from the Lighthouse Department of Disclaimers:  We don’t recommend looking directly at the sun.)

–aed

I had a nightmare, and then it showed up in print

File the following under: Terrifying in its filaments of truth.  An article in the current Mother Jones, “The Death of Fiction?,” may not introduce anything we haven’t contemplated already, but it brings some unsettling truths into sharp focus. Ted Genoways (editor of Virginia Quarterly Review) writes of the unsustainability or even death of a certain way of literary life. Here’s a sampling: 

What are we all doing, anyway?

Back in the 1930s, magazines like the Yale Review or VQR saw maybe 500 submissions in a year; today, we receive more like 15,000. This is due partly to a shift in our culture from a society that believed in hierarchy to one that believes in a level playing field. This is good—to a point. The reality is that not everyone can be a doctor, not everyone can be a professional athlete, and not everyone can be a writer. You may be a precious snowflake, but if you can’t express your individuality in sterling prose, I don’t want to read about it. 

But in academia, supply is decoupled from demand. 

Okay, there’s a lot there. But let’s start with the last sentence. We see the “decoupling” every year when we do our literary editors panel at the Tattered Cover. (Save the date: April 24, 10 AM, Tattered Cover LoDo.)  Subscriptions often comprise at most 1/100th of the number of submissions.  More often it’s less than that. This is particularly staggering when you consider this: 

Graduates of creative writing programs were multiplying like tribbles. Last summer, Louis Menand tabulated that there were 822 creative writing programs. Consider this for a moment: If those programs admit even 5 to 10 new students per year, then they will cumulatively produce some 60,000 new writers in the coming decade. Yet the average literary magazine now prints fewer than 1,500 copies. In short, no one is reading all this newly produced literature—not even the writers themselves. And with that in mind, writers have become less and less interested in reaching out to readers—and less and less encouraged by their teachers to try. 

I may be wrong, but I don’t see 60,000 academic jobs opening up in the coming decade, nor do I see even 1/10000th of these newly minted MFAs getting book deals that can sustain them financially over the long haul. The academic circuit may be alive and well, but, as a friend said to me last night on the phone: Now they want teaching applicants to have at least two published books. Put that up against the tens of thousands trying to get books (that who’s reading?) published. My friend’s no slouch, either, a former Stegner and NEA fellow published in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and VQR, among other places. He’s teaching one adjunct class at our alma mater. So a career path for writers, as Genoways says, appears more open than it really is. 

Now let’s assume some of this is just a generational tendency to see the apocalypse around the corner. That might be inevitable–change, especially at the rate we experience it, can summon our inner catastrophic thinker. With online mags and new models of publishing coming at us in waves (iPad and Kindle Books at the forefront, doing in some cases the NY Publisher Bypass), many of us are holding onto anything we can find for stability. But there’s not much to grab onto anymore.  

One of the reasons we started Lighthouse almost 14 years ago is because, if it matters to you, there has to be a sustainable way to integrate writing into your life. Perhaps it’s our thinking about what writing is or does that will ultimately evolve. We can’t expect it to give us everything, but we can and must give it everything we’ve got. Writing for most writers may never be a career in a financial sense, but in equipping us to really see the world, to probe it for its secrets, writing can be a way of life.  

Oh, and just for good karma, let’s make it a point to subscribe to some literary journals… 

–AED

Memoir vs. fiction: an article apart?

Inspiration for overdue talk on "a" vs. "the"

Not to drag James Frey back out of  the depths of repressed memory, but I was reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s review in the New Yorker of  Memoir: A History, by Ben Yagoda, and came across this wonderful little acorn:

This justification of a literary fraud on the ground that it is true to the writer’s interior world—a world that helps the author “cope” or “survive”—strikingly echoes the self-defense offered by Frey. “People cope with adversity in many different ways,” he wrote, adding that his mistake had been “writing about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience. . . . . I wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require.”

Such claims add up to a quite valid defense of a certain literary genre, but the genre in question isn’t memoir—it’s the novel.

That last part is what a lot of fiction writers already know–that in many cases you take liberally from your own life (or those of innocent loved ones) and make a better story of it. Like the proverbial fisherman, we might embellish our yarns with lots of flourishes and exagerrations and perhaps even catch a hyperbolic bass, so that we get closer to what it really felt like. Closer to the truth. One of our great nonfiction instructors, Shari Caudron, and I were e-mailing about it, and she referred to the core of Mendelsohn’s argument:

But the truth we seek from novels is different from the truth we seek from memoirs. Novels, you might say, represent “a truth” about life, whereas memoirs and nonfiction accounts represent “the truth” about specific things that have happened.

Could the difference between memoir and fiction really come down to the article before the word “truth”?

I’m not sure if there’s really such thing as “the” truth, but I do know that I most respect the memoirists and nonfictioneers who dedicate themselves to trying to reel it in. And I don’t think fiction writers get a pass when it comes to truthtelling, either. As we typically say when we get stuck on a story: Where did I lie? That’s usually the spot where the wheels came off.

–AED

Department of consolations

Landing the big fish in 2010?

Not that we already need to feel consoled, so early into the new year, but something about this I found both cheering and verging on depressing:

I believe a good story writer is a generous story writer, generous in a sort of maniacal, foaming-at-the-mouth, Dr. Frankenstein way. A good story writer expends more than is expected–more than, perhaps seems possible. She pours the full force of her intellect and energy into every paragraph, every dead end, every false start.   –Anthony Doerr in O. Henry Prize Stories 2009

We talked about this in the advanced short story class last night, because I think I’m especially good at those last two items–the dead ends and false starts. But aren’t we all, ultimately? Maybe we should embrace more dead ends and false starts in 2010, all the better to perhaps land a perfect catch?  And by perfect catch, you know I mean “almost bearable story.” I don’t ask for more! In any case, I thank Doerr for his insight, and also for this one:

“And I believe the magic of a good short story comes from the compression of so many days of thought–a thousand afternoons of its writer thinking on things, wrestling with problems, noticing how light falls through leaves, or how a man wipes his glasses with a thumb and forefinger–compressing all those tens of thousands of hours into a space that can be experienced by a reader in an hour or so.” 

See?  As William Haywood Henderson is fond of saying, “It’s easy!”

–AED

Lists, Schmists

Well, here we are, at the end of another year, and the best-of lists abound; but of course, we’ve also reached an end of the first decade of the 21st century, and everyone seems to be spouting lists.  And then the list commentary begins.

Today I read the inevitable “where are all the women?” take in the Washington Post, where Julianna Bagott looks at the Publisher’s Weekly top 100 of 2009, frets over the lack of women represented, considers the last 30 years of major literary prizes, and eventually draws the conclusion that a woman can win prizes too, so long as she writes like a man.  But looking at this slide show of the major prize winners of 2009 in the Huffington Post, there seem to be an awful lot of author photos of women- and, I daresay, women, like Alice Munro, who really do write about women.  All of this made me think of Esquire magazine’s “75 Books Every Man Should Read,” a list in ther 2008 75th Anniversary issue and not in any way a list confined to a specific decade but one that is, as one might expect from such a men’s magazine, populated almost exclusively by men.  The list is a veritable who’s who of male authors, from John Cheever to John Steinbeck, Mark Helprin to Mark Twain, with only one–one–notable exception: Flannery O’Connor’s (wait for it) A Good Man is Hard to Find.

Now, Esquire is pretty up front that the list is full of biases.  But other publications, worried, perhaps, that they may get in trouble for any perceived biases in their main list, have created many side lists. For example,  in addition to the “Best Books of the Noughties,” The Guardian offers both “Your Books of the Decade,” a compilation of blog posts from the end of each year of the past ten with hundreds of reader comments, and “The Best Unread Books of the Decade, where publishers and other literary folk talk about the ones that should not have got away.  Inclusive, no?

There are also any number of genre-specific lists out there, celebrating the Best Science Fiction Books of the Decade,  Best Comic Books of the Decade, Best Mysteries and Thrillers, and so on.  In fact, as I dug around I came across a kind-hearted blogger who has been aggregating the lists as they come out, into one master list, available here.

You might not think from this post that I approve of all this list-making; au contraire.  Lists are, quite simply, a filter, if imperfect, and I for one find them to be a good source of recommendations for future reading.  In that spirit, I thought I’d get in on the action.  A music-loving friend of mine has a tradition of sending out a list at the end of each year sharing his year in music.  It is decidedly not a “best of”: the albums need not even have been released in that year.  Instead, it is a very personal and idiosyncratic list of music that he simply liked best, or was most moved by, over the course of the preceding 12 months.  It has inspired me to similarly share a list of my own, personal, best of 2009, and I’d love to hear yours.  These are the books that really kept me turning pages this year:

Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage, by Alice Munro

Nickled and Dimed: on Not Getting by in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz

A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore

Best Creative Non-Fiction, Volume 1, edited by Lee Gutkind

Sea of Faith, John Brehm

So.  What were your favorites this year?

Why Movie Stars Don’t Write Books

This just in: apparently Hugh Grant- yes, that Hugh Grant, he of leading man status in romantic comedies on both sides of the pond- has always dreamed of a writing career.  Now, this fact alone was not so surprising- who doesn’t want to write?  What really got me was the coverage of this “news”: some dozen versions of the same little story covered in sources from the Times of India to the German Newspaper Bild am Sonntag to blogs and movie databases.  My favorite version (for its clumsiness) can be found on Thandian News (a news portal in Thailand that syndicates news stories- who knew?), and just about sums it up:

Hugh Grant has always cherished a dream to write a book. But he admits that he’d like to put that dream away until he will be more financially stable.

The Two Weeks’ Notice star started writing his first book many years ago but didn’t complete the story as new movie projects take him away from his computer. He believes that it may be because of laziness or fear of failure but he ends up thinking that it would be better if made a film, earned money and worked with beautiful women. And that’s why his novel is on the backburner, at least until he’s done more movies.

I take two important things away from this:

1) I’m rubbing elbows with movie stars in my “laziness and fear of failure” where writing is concerned, and

2) Apparently it takes more than $12.5 Million per movie (Grant’s reported pay on Two Weeks’ Notice) to reach the “financial stability” necessary to sit down and write a book.  Kudos to all you writers who do it for a little less than that.

Literary snobbery and the thrill of “discovering” something first.

I’m a self-proclaimed indie music geek. That obnoxious breed who rolls her eyes and tells you that she saw your newly discovered favorite band three years ago at the Larimer Lounge; who stopped listening to Modest Mouse the day “Float On” started playing every half hour on main stream radio everywhere; who takes pride in recognizing the hook played in a Mitsubishi commercial, and naming the artist, album, and record label before the commercial is over. I rattle off the names of obscure bands with my fellow music-head friends like some post-modern poetry bout. I donate money to Radio 1190 every year (and I don’t even have health insurance). I admit that this behavior is beyond irksome to, well, everyone, and I try to keep it in check as much as I can. But the truth is: it’s a lifestyle. I put a lot of work into finding new music: scouring blogs and message boards and college radio station playlists, talking to record store clerks, going to the Myspace pages of bands who are opening for shows I’m not even attending. I put in all of this effort because there is nothing quite like the thrill of discovering something new. Of hearing for the first time the opening chords of a song I just know will become an instant favorite.  I take a certain amount of pride in hearing those same opening chords in one of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts several months later, or catching the band who plays that song on their first ever tour through Denver in a tiny dive bar where I’m the only one paying attention. (Well, me and the tattooed, shaggy-haired dude in skinny jeans and an ironic western shirt with pearl buttons).

In addition to my neurotic music listening habits, I am also that terrible combination of bibliophile meets packrat. I have books crammed in my closet, piled on my kitchen table, and stashed in my bathroom cabinets. But I’m not a very timely reader. The Kite Runner and Life of Pi are still sitting in a neglected pile by my nightstand, unread. I discovered Tobias Wolff all of two years ago, and finally got around to reading East of Eden this spring. It was a clashing of worlds, then, when I came across NPR’s Best Debut Fiction of 2009 and saw a name that I not only recognized, but have admired for a few years now: Paul Yoon. While Yoon isn’t exactly new to the literary scene–his stories have appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, and Glimmer Train, just to name a few– it’s his debut collection Once the Shore that made it onto NPR’s list. The title story of the collection was his first published story, and was selected for the Best American Short Stories 2006 anthology, where I first encountered it.  (If you haven’t read this story yet, go find yourself a copy. It’s beautiful.) I’ve been a fan of his ever since, and it was a familiar sense of pride that I felt at seeing the nod from NPR. Who? Paul Yoon? Psssh. I’ve been reading him since Bush was president.

Thanks, Secret Santa!

Last week, Cormac McCarthy’s old typewriter (the one he’s used since 1963) sold at auction for $254,500 to an anonymous buyer who I just KNOW is my as-yet-unknown benefactor. Needless to say, I’ve never been so excited about Christmas. I’ve envisioned the exact size of the box, the color of the wrapping paper, the weight of the gift in my lap…thanks in advance, whoever you are!  You really shouldn’t have!

I’ve given it some thought, and I don’t intend to use the typewriter for actual writing–that would be like taking a champion racehorse and making it give trail rides to fat tourists!–but instead I’ll put it to pasture, letting it sit in some sunlit window, with a vase of flowers nearby.  I’ll change the flowers every few days, and I won’t let the flower-water get all reeky.  I’ll dust it with one of those feather duster things, that until now had seemed totally pointless (don’t they just stir up the dust?)  After all, this is a typewriter that deserves a quiet, dignified retirement.

And, I confess, I’m a little afraid that putting my fingers to McCarthy’s keys would inspire in me the same dark, beautiful, grotesque and haunting visions that have fueled his novels.  I mean, I love his novels.  I have an autographed copy of The Crossing, and it ranks right up there with my cat on my list of things-to-rescue-when-the-house-burns-down.  But I’m not sure I want to have some of those visions originating in my own head, where the page can’t be turned, or the front cover shut tight.  Once, I was so angry at McCarthy for his treatment of a character that I threw his book across the room–something you can’t do with your own head.  It was Outer Dark, and I’m still mad that he didn’t give Rinthy the final chapter.  I’m still wrestling with a lot of his work.  But McCarthy’s refusal to pander to readers is also what makes him so great, so visionary, so challenging and infuriating.

Whether you love his work or hate it, it’s encouraging that Cormac McCarthy–a difficult, literary writer who at several points in his career could not afford toothpaste–can sell his old typewriter for almost as much as Michael Jackson’s moonwalk glove, which sold for $350,000 a few months after his death.

And that someone would buy it for me–a person who can’t even be trusted with dry-clean-only shirts–is wonderfully unexpected.  Bless you, whoever you are.  Just as soon as you reveal your identity, I’m going to totally offer to buy you lunch.

(For more sensible news about authors of the West, check out our friend Jenny Shank’s Book Roundup)

Next Post

Last week, my husband and I flew to New York to wrap up some loose ends following our relocation to Boulder over the summer.  When we got in the cab at JFK airport, there was great debate over the best route to our house in South Brooklyn, largely because there isn’t one; after discussing the options, the cabbie ultimately let Dave type the address into his GPS system and away we went.  The default setting on most GPS devices encourages highways, and sure enough, we zipped around the Brooklyn peninsula on the Belt Parkway, and I was glad for my favorite view of the Verrazano bridge, strung across the water like a diamond necklace. But I also found myself lamenting the GPS: not too long ago, a good cab driver was distinguished from a bad one by his accumulated knowledge not just of routes but of traffic patterns and short cuts.  Now, one of the primary skills of his job has been replaced by a windshield-mount computer that can be purchased for a hundred bucks, and rather than taking us his own favorite route, he let the computer decide.

During the ride, my husband told me all about an article he had just read in the New York Times Dining Out section about a new sous-vide machine for the home cook, retailing for $449.  Sous-vide means “in a vacuum,” and these machines bathe food in an evenly heated water bath, cooking food to your specified temperature and keeping it perfectly warm all day, until you’re ready to eat: no matter what you do, as long as you set the time and temperature controls correctly, the meat is cooked perfectly.  Well, where’s the fun in that, I asked?

As we sped along, I found myself thinking that what I like so much about writing is that there will always be guesswork involved.  That as in both driving and cooking, there are established routes, but experimentation is often rewarded, both with a learning process and, sometimes, with an unexpected or even sublime result.  I was reminded of a story I wrote for my Thesis class in college about a young woman who has locked herself in her room, where she ruminates on many things, including her younger brother: I did not know until middway through the first draft that the brother was dead, and it was not until I reached the end of the draft that I understood he had accidentally drowned while on drugs, and that the sister felt responsible.  I love that the act of writing — in all forms– leads the writer on a process of discovery.  And it’s comforting to think that, those proverbial monkeys at typewriters who will eventually produce Shakespeare aside, there will never be a little mechanical device that can take the place of this thing that we love to do.