I have a “favorite books” shelf where I keep—duh—my favorite books. These are not necessarily the very best books I’ve read—though many are quite good. (I’m sure Joseph Conrad would be relieved to hear that Leslie Pietrzyk thinks Heart of Darkness is “quite good.”)
Often, I put books there that feel exactly right in the time I read them, which explains how both Bright Lights, Big City and Less Than Zero are still on this shelf. I will defend BLBC…I still use it as an example in classes to illustrate second person point of view (though I admit that a certain “revelation” at the end seemed pulled from virtually nowhere), but I’m not sure how LTZ would hold up upon rereading. So: I’m not planning to reread it. (An interesting aside: once I was talking to a poet about the idea of the “favorite books” shelf and how some things end up there that aren’t exactly great books but evoked a special time and place for me. He agreed—and promptly cited BLBC and LTZ as two on HIS shelf! A new parlor game for writers: what are the books on your favorites shelf that you’re most embarrassed by?)
In my obsessive quest for order and discipline, I try to limit the space of this shelf, so that if I want to add a book, I really have to take one away. (This is after the shelf is crammed tight and books are stacked sideways on top as high as possible.) So for me to add a book is a huge deal. I have to consider it a pretty seriously unflawed book to get in there. Most recently, I added Intuition by Allegra Goodman and Old School by Tobias Wolff. I thought about adding White Teeth by Zadie Smith and Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, but didn’t. In fact, as I write this, I’m reconsidering Old School. And, actually, I’m not sure I love-loved the ending of Intuition. It’s a tough thing, getting to be on this shelf and staying on, as it should be. Every reader should be so demanding; every serious writer should aspire to reach this shelf (even knowing the impossibility of the endeavor).
But what books really stand up, year after year after year? Which books would I not dare remove? Some standards—The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina, My Antonia, The Sun Also Rises—and some surprises—Monkeys, The Mezzanine, Bombardiers, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Not to discriminate, poetry—Whitman, Eliot, Mark Strand—and non-fiction—Rivethead, Poets in Their Youth, Into Thin Air, Last of the Curlews—are also represented. But by far, most of my favorite books are novels.
I’m sure a smart therapist or a cheesy personality quiz on the internet could tell me exactly what all this means, what it all adds up to: these titles, the proportion of novels to non-fiction, that I cling to Less Than Zero. But I simply like staring at these books from time to time, their haphazard titles the only true story of my life.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Work in Progress: Jane Satterfield
I met then-poet, now poet-essayist, Jane Satterfield at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference way back when; we were both scholars, I in fiction, and she in poetry. For me, anyway, it was a heady time, being at Bread Loaf, being a scholar, being with all these other writers, drinking gin and tonics with agents and Important People (along with the usual Self-Important People). I remember thinking that the group of poets was cooler in that deeply cool way than the group of fiction writers I was hanging out with (sorry, Dan, Dan, Rachel, and Joe!; we had heart!), but isn’t that often the case? Poetry is flash and quickness, capturing light, and novel writing is staying the course, putting in the hours and days and years to get to page 300 and the magical words “the end.”
But very little in writing—or life—is completely broken down into “either/or.” Here is Jane’s beautiful essay:
How I love the word slog.
With its old-country ring, it takes me back to the tidy, generative space of an English garden, the small swatch of earth my grandfather—a steel worker in England’s East Midlands—beautified with roses, petunias, pinks. It takes me back to the moments where I watched him at work in the allotments at the edge of the estate where residents kept their vegetable gardens. “Wo saw the tatty-hoakers,” he’d sing, working his way along the rows. To hoke: a word from a linguistic nether-world. To rummage, poke through, dig.
Slog—in my mind—suggests that one goes slowly, purposefully, unwittingly or unwillingly—as in a spell of hard, steady work. A colloquial word of uncertain origins, it surfaces in 1876 in the Mid-Yorkshire Glossary: “to walk with burdened feet, as through snow, or a puddle.” A secondary meaning is equally interesting: to slog away at something is to deal it heavy blows.
For all this, the word lacks the sense of excitement implicit in new beginnings; it fails to capture the frenzy of impassioned thought a writer feels at the intersection of work and inspiration. I’m thinking now of the opening lines of “Notes from the Front Line,” an essay by novelist, journalist, and cultural critic Angela Carter. Her inimitable voice--edgy, authoritative, ever questioning--shines through as she reflects on the question of how gender, and specifically feminism, influenced her writing:
"I’ve just scrapped my sixth attempt to write something for
this book because my ideas get quite out of hand the minute I try to
put them down on paper and I flush hares out of my brain which I
then pursue, to the detriment of rational discourse. To say something
simple--do I ‘situate myself politically as writer’? Well, yes of course.
(I always hope it’s obvious, although I try, when I write fiction, to think
on my feet--to present a number of propositions in a variety of different
ways and to leave the reader to construct her own fiction for herself
from the elements of my fictions. (Reading is just as creative an activity
as writing and most intellectual development depends upon new readings
of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the
pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode). "
Whatever subject Carter turned her attention to—literature, film, music, politics, fashion, or travel—her essays, collected in the 1997 volume, Shaking a Leg, all embody Hazlitt’s description of the essay as “intellectual walkabout”: a central narrative line or argument is consistently disrupted with seeming digressions and even lengthy parenthetical statements as Carter relentlessly questions assumptions along the way. The unapologetic subjectivity in her voice--its colloquial and even iconoclastic tone--creates a powerful impression of a mind at work on the page. It’s a quality I’d kept in mind while working on nonfiction the past five or so years.
My own “walkabouts,” collected in a recently completed memoir called Motherland: A Year in Britain and Beyond, are—I hope--the more-graceful end-results of slogs through varied terrain: the contradictory demands of eros, history, and motherhood against the backdrop of a year abroad and the break-up of a marriage. A dual British-American national on my first return trip to England in over a decade, I found myself an exile in what should have been my home. Jobless and confined by an unplanned pregnancy, I faced a woman’s fundamental decision: to become a mother against my will or forge a new life on my own. That the decision was not so simple was only the first of many revelations. Along the way I’ve lingered in guilty pleasures, hoping to offer readers a lighter glimpse of mid-'90's Britain with an eye toward its music (the skiffle rock of my mother’s youth, Oasis vs. Blur!), popular culture (football, stone circles!), along with literary detours on the Brontes, Sylvia Plath, as well as the late Angela Carter (for whom I served as babysitter in my Iowa grad school days). Funny, now, to think of Motherland’s unlikely genesis in that year abroad where I put the writing of my first book of poems aside.
These days, during a semester leave, I rummage, poke through, dig, walk purposefully—at least between eight and three while my daughter’s at school—in language, in lines of thought and layers of history; in forms old and new—epistle, refrain, litany, fugue, I-Tunes party-shuffle. In the face of headline news, in the horrors of Baghdad and Blacksburg, the poet’s may seem a tiny voice. Yet I remain convinced the gestures of the lyric as Plath put it, watching her infant dance in the dark of an icy winter night, are “warm and human”; their light “Bleeding and peeling/Through the black amnesias of heaven.” Thanks to a fellowship from the NEA, I’m working on a new book of poems, reflecting on how women’s lives intersect with the larger culture. I’m particularly interested in the ways that poetry can bring to life the experiences of women, whether in the domestic sphere or within environments politically or culturally volatile.
Putting old wine in new bottles, generating explosions. Not a bad way to start.
~~Jane Satterfield
About Jane Satterfield: Born in England and educated in the U.S., Jane Satterfield received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Her first poetry collection, Shepherdess with an Automatic (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2000), received the Towson University Prize for Literature; her second, Assignation at Vanishing Point (Elixir, 2003), received the Elixir Press Poetry Prize. She has received three Individual Artist Awards in poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council and is also the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Wesleyan Writers Conference. Her nonfiction has received the Heekin Foundation’s Cuchulain Prize for Rhetoric in the Essay, the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Award, and the Florida Review Editors’ Prize in Nonfiction. She teaches at Loyola College in Maryland.
Scroll down here to read one of Jane's poems.
But very little in writing—or life—is completely broken down into “either/or.” Here is Jane’s beautiful essay:
How I love the word slog.
With its old-country ring, it takes me back to the tidy, generative space of an English garden, the small swatch of earth my grandfather—a steel worker in England’s East Midlands—beautified with roses, petunias, pinks. It takes me back to the moments where I watched him at work in the allotments at the edge of the estate where residents kept their vegetable gardens. “Wo saw the tatty-hoakers,” he’d sing, working his way along the rows. To hoke: a word from a linguistic nether-world. To rummage, poke through, dig.
Slog—in my mind—suggests that one goes slowly, purposefully, unwittingly or unwillingly—as in a spell of hard, steady work. A colloquial word of uncertain origins, it surfaces in 1876 in the Mid-Yorkshire Glossary: “to walk with burdened feet, as through snow, or a puddle.” A secondary meaning is equally interesting: to slog away at something is to deal it heavy blows.
For all this, the word lacks the sense of excitement implicit in new beginnings; it fails to capture the frenzy of impassioned thought a writer feels at the intersection of work and inspiration. I’m thinking now of the opening lines of “Notes from the Front Line,” an essay by novelist, journalist, and cultural critic Angela Carter. Her inimitable voice--edgy, authoritative, ever questioning--shines through as she reflects on the question of how gender, and specifically feminism, influenced her writing:
"I’ve just scrapped my sixth attempt to write something for
this book because my ideas get quite out of hand the minute I try to
put them down on paper and I flush hares out of my brain which I
then pursue, to the detriment of rational discourse. To say something
simple--do I ‘situate myself politically as writer’? Well, yes of course.
(I always hope it’s obvious, although I try, when I write fiction, to think
on my feet--to present a number of propositions in a variety of different
ways and to leave the reader to construct her own fiction for herself
from the elements of my fictions. (Reading is just as creative an activity
as writing and most intellectual development depends upon new readings
of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the
pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode). "
Whatever subject Carter turned her attention to—literature, film, music, politics, fashion, or travel—her essays, collected in the 1997 volume, Shaking a Leg, all embody Hazlitt’s description of the essay as “intellectual walkabout”: a central narrative line or argument is consistently disrupted with seeming digressions and even lengthy parenthetical statements as Carter relentlessly questions assumptions along the way. The unapologetic subjectivity in her voice--its colloquial and even iconoclastic tone--creates a powerful impression of a mind at work on the page. It’s a quality I’d kept in mind while working on nonfiction the past five or so years.
My own “walkabouts,” collected in a recently completed memoir called Motherland: A Year in Britain and Beyond, are—I hope--the more-graceful end-results of slogs through varied terrain: the contradictory demands of eros, history, and motherhood against the backdrop of a year abroad and the break-up of a marriage. A dual British-American national on my first return trip to England in over a decade, I found myself an exile in what should have been my home. Jobless and confined by an unplanned pregnancy, I faced a woman’s fundamental decision: to become a mother against my will or forge a new life on my own. That the decision was not so simple was only the first of many revelations. Along the way I’ve lingered in guilty pleasures, hoping to offer readers a lighter glimpse of mid-'90's Britain with an eye toward its music (the skiffle rock of my mother’s youth, Oasis vs. Blur!), popular culture (football, stone circles!), along with literary detours on the Brontes, Sylvia Plath, as well as the late Angela Carter (for whom I served as babysitter in my Iowa grad school days). Funny, now, to think of Motherland’s unlikely genesis in that year abroad where I put the writing of my first book of poems aside.
These days, during a semester leave, I rummage, poke through, dig, walk purposefully—at least between eight and three while my daughter’s at school—in language, in lines of thought and layers of history; in forms old and new—epistle, refrain, litany, fugue, I-Tunes party-shuffle. In the face of headline news, in the horrors of Baghdad and Blacksburg, the poet’s may seem a tiny voice. Yet I remain convinced the gestures of the lyric as Plath put it, watching her infant dance in the dark of an icy winter night, are “warm and human”; their light “Bleeding and peeling/Through the black amnesias of heaven.” Thanks to a fellowship from the NEA, I’m working on a new book of poems, reflecting on how women’s lives intersect with the larger culture. I’m particularly interested in the ways that poetry can bring to life the experiences of women, whether in the domestic sphere or within environments politically or culturally volatile.
Putting old wine in new bottles, generating explosions. Not a bad way to start.
~~Jane Satterfield
About Jane Satterfield: Born in England and educated in the U.S., Jane Satterfield received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Her first poetry collection, Shepherdess with an Automatic (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2000), received the Towson University Prize for Literature; her second, Assignation at Vanishing Point (Elixir, 2003), received the Elixir Press Poetry Prize. She has received three Individual Artist Awards in poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council and is also the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Wesleyan Writers Conference. Her nonfiction has received the Heekin Foundation’s Cuchulain Prize for Rhetoric in the Essay, the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Award, and the Florida Review Editors’ Prize in Nonfiction. She teaches at Loyola College in Maryland.
Scroll down here to read one of Jane's poems.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Quit Your Job; Finish Your Novel!
Okay, maybe I'm going a bit overboard. But I'm quite excited about this new monetary award for a work-in-progress. What a great idea. Perhaps the primary thing that allows work to move from “in progress” to “finished” is enough time (which usually translates to enough money) to complete the work. The catch—not that it’s really a catch—is that the writer provide a community service during the time of the grant period. Yay, Dan Wickett and Dzanc Books!
Here's everything you need to know.
Here's everything you need to know.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
"I Just Don't Get It"
Slate magazine celebrates National Poetry Month in their typically and amusingly perverse way with this interesting piece, “In Praise of Difficult Poetry” by Robert Pinsky.
I was waiting for Wallace Stevens to come up in the article (though I found his poem one of the most accessible of those mentioned). I want to include an allusion to one of his poems in my novel-in-progress, Prodigal Daughters, but, frankly, I am afraid to, terrified I’ve misinterpreted the poem in some significant, embarrassing, humiliating-for-life way. Freshman poetry class all over again where someone (not me!) thought that "Leda and the Swan" by William Butler Yeats was about a pet bird.
Smart people are welcome to explain Wallace Stevens to me, so I can use the allusion (which is actually the title) with confidence: “Not ideas about the thing but the thing itself.” Doesn’t it sound Very Important?
I was waiting for Wallace Stevens to come up in the article (though I found his poem one of the most accessible of those mentioned). I want to include an allusion to one of his poems in my novel-in-progress, Prodigal Daughters, but, frankly, I am afraid to, terrified I’ve misinterpreted the poem in some significant, embarrassing, humiliating-for-life way. Freshman poetry class all over again where someone (not me!) thought that "Leda and the Swan" by William Butler Yeats was about a pet bird.
Smart people are welcome to explain Wallace Stevens to me, so I can use the allusion (which is actually the title) with confidence: “Not ideas about the thing but the thing itself.” Doesn’t it sound Very Important?
Monday, April 23, 2007
Genre Envy, Continued
And here it is, an official announcement from Dan Wickett at Emerging Writers Network that May is "Short Story Month." Boy, the power of the blogger…I hope I won’t get carried away, and, you know, declare that July is “Pay Writers Five Contributors’ Copies Instead of Two” Month or something.
Seriously, though, Dan does great work at his blog and is a tireless promoter of new literary fiction. You would be well advised to check him out and join his (free) network.
Also, glance through some of the poems that he’s been running for National Poetry Month. They were written by kids as part of Houston Writers in the Schools . Some of them are awesome!
Seriously, though, Dan does great work at his blog and is a tireless promoter of new literary fiction. You would be well advised to check him out and join his (free) network.
Also, glance through some of the poems that he’s been running for National Poetry Month. They were written by kids as part of Houston Writers in the Schools . Some of them are awesome!
Friday, April 20, 2007
Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be
While I was off seeing the sights of the central coast of California (freezing, I might add—what is with the weather this year??), I came across a “Hints from Heloise” column in one of the local newspapers that seemed appropriate for a literary blog: suggestions for how to ensure your books are returned after you lend them out.
Apparently, the column was sparked by an earlier suggestion that people ask for a monetary deposit before handing over the book. (Helpful hint of my own: If you try that at something called a “bookstore” you’ll get a book you can keep!)
So, people wrote in with less alienating suggestions than shaking down your friends for $$: for example, place an address label inside the cover, and if you don’t get the book back within a few weeks, call to say you need it because you’re going to lend it to someone else.
Another woman covers the book in a brown paper wrapper and writes in Magic Marker: “Please return this book to HER NAME.” (Like I would leave on that wrapper while reading the book on the Metro.)
Someone else takes off all the book jackets and writes the borrower’s name inside them. I love this woman because obviously she is buying hardcovers!
Finally, one woman has made up bookmarks with her photo that she includes when she lends out a book so the borrower is reminded of where they obtained the book. Or, more humbly, she also suggested that the photo could be replaced with your name and address.
My solution: The title says it all. I don’t borrow books—I buy books, passing along my meager financial support to writers. And I don’t lend them, either, unless it’s a book I don’t want to get back. Libraries are wonderful places, and they seem to have figured out a system for getting their books returned.
(“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”: sorry, but I can’t help but hear the “Gilligan’s Island” musical version of Hamlet in my head!)
Apparently, the column was sparked by an earlier suggestion that people ask for a monetary deposit before handing over the book. (Helpful hint of my own: If you try that at something called a “bookstore” you’ll get a book you can keep!)
So, people wrote in with less alienating suggestions than shaking down your friends for $$: for example, place an address label inside the cover, and if you don’t get the book back within a few weeks, call to say you need it because you’re going to lend it to someone else.
Another woman covers the book in a brown paper wrapper and writes in Magic Marker: “Please return this book to HER NAME.” (Like I would leave on that wrapper while reading the book on the Metro.)
Someone else takes off all the book jackets and writes the borrower’s name inside them. I love this woman because obviously she is buying hardcovers!
Finally, one woman has made up bookmarks with her photo that she includes when she lends out a book so the borrower is reminded of where they obtained the book. Or, more humbly, she also suggested that the photo could be replaced with your name and address.
My solution: The title says it all. I don’t borrow books—I buy books, passing along my meager financial support to writers. And I don’t lend them, either, unless it’s a book I don’t want to get back. Libraries are wonderful places, and they seem to have figured out a system for getting their books returned.
(“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”: sorry, but I can’t help but hear the “Gilligan’s Island” musical version of Hamlet in my head!)
Thursday, April 19, 2007
A Short Trip Down 95
James River Writers (JRW) is a non-profit Richmond-based group of professional writers and friends of literature promoting the art of writing and the love of books in Virginia. They’re always offering a fabulous array of programs, and here’s one that caught my attention, perhaps because I recently taught a class about effective openings and the topic has been on my mind.
The Writing Show: The First Five Pages
Do your opening sentences capture your reader's attention? Do your first five pages grab your audience so that they can't wait to read on? What makes a great beginning to a work of fiction or non-fiction? The April Writing Show, presented by JRW and the Richmond Times-Dispatch, will feature Ed Falco, Nancy Schoenberger, and David Stevens, all accomplished writers and teachers from three of Virginia's top universities, along with moderator David L. Robbins, discussing the essential features that can make your opening a page-turner.
Thursday, April 26
Eureka Theater
Science Museum of Virginia
2500 West Broad Street
6 PM Member Social \\ 6:30 PM Writing Show begins
$10 General Admission \\ $5 with valid college/university ID
Information and online registration
Important Travel Tips: While you’re in Richmond, be sure to check out one of my favorite used bookshops, Chop Suey. And you might as well have some barbecue, too; it’s not the best barbecue I’ve ever had, but it’s the first good barbecue you'll encounter on 95 heading down from DC. (In another life, I was an official barbecue judge, so I’m very fussy about my barbecue.) And by all means, don’t forget the limeade!!
The Writing Show: The First Five Pages
Do your opening sentences capture your reader's attention? Do your first five pages grab your audience so that they can't wait to read on? What makes a great beginning to a work of fiction or non-fiction? The April Writing Show, presented by JRW and the Richmond Times-Dispatch, will feature Ed Falco, Nancy Schoenberger, and David Stevens, all accomplished writers and teachers from three of Virginia's top universities, along with moderator David L. Robbins, discussing the essential features that can make your opening a page-turner.
Thursday, April 26
Eureka Theater
Science Museum of Virginia
2500 West Broad Street
6 PM Member Social \\ 6:30 PM Writing Show begins
$10 General Admission \\ $5 with valid college/university ID
Information and online registration
Important Travel Tips: While you’re in Richmond, be sure to check out one of my favorite used bookshops, Chop Suey. And you might as well have some barbecue, too; it’s not the best barbecue I’ve ever had, but it’s the first good barbecue you'll encounter on 95 heading down from DC. (In another life, I was an official barbecue judge, so I’m very fussy about my barbecue.) And by all means, don’t forget the limeade!!
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