Last week's post about reading lists brought Richard Peabody to my email door.
The chances are that if you’re a writer living in the DC area, you already know Richard—or will meet him soon!—because he’s such an essential part of the DC literary scene that it’s impossible not to cross paths with him either personally or in cyberspace. (He has nearly 2000 Facebook friends.) Founder of the wonderful and long-lived journal Gargoyle and the editor of many fine anthologies (see below for details), he’s also a wonderful writer and a gifted teacher. He’s smart and funny and generous and deeply passionate about books.
Anyway…his email alluded to the comment in my post about “books every writer simply should read” and said that for fun, he was sending me his list of books that would fall into that category. Great, I thought, maybe I can post it on my blog, and I opened the attachment.
The list was 25 pages long.
Truly, this was one of the most amazing lists I’ve ever seen, but it was too long to post (though I'm most definitely hanging onto this amazing resource!).
So my self-interest started churning: My knowledge of experimental literature is lacking, and maybe I could get him to cull out a few titles that I might add to my 2010 reading list (which, at the moment, is composed of Moby-Dick). Richard knows the field from top to bottom, past and present, and he teaches a very popular workshop in experimental fiction at Johns Hopkins. So I invited him to come up with the 12-15 titles he would recommend to someone like me, who wants to learn more about what’s being done out there. Here’s what he came up with, another equally amazing and wonderfully annotated list:
I (Heart) Laurence Sterne
By Richard Peabody
My job is to seduce you to the dark side of fiction writing, where as the bumper stickers say, “We have Cookies.” A mischievous mysterious place otherwise known as avant-garde, Post modern, meta fiction, magical realism, PoMo, surreal, whacked out, or the all encompassing moniker “that weird shit.”
Leslie was generous with her Blog but keeping this to 15 or so titles is nearly impossible for a list-maker like me. So I’m cheating by adding the required texts for my Experimental Writing Workshop at Johns Hopkins from this past fall:
J. Austen & S. Grahame Smith –Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
P. Geyh, F.G. Leebron & A. Levy –Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology
Cris Mazza & J. DeShell – Chick-Lit: PostFeminist Fiction
Cris Mazza, J. DeShell & E. Sheffield—Chick-Lit #2: No Chick Vics
Rusty Morrison & Ken Keegan—ParaSpheres 1: Extending Beyond the Spheres of
Literary and Genre Fiction. (ParaSpheres #2 is due out any second)
David Young & K. Hollaman—Magical Realist Fiction
The Young gives you a decent historical grounding in both the Euro and Latin American traditions. The Norton gives you a broad survey of the US scene since the 60s with William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker and the SciFi of Samuel Delaney, Ursula LeGuin and Octavia Butler, while Chick-Lit and ParaSpheres bring you up to speed to the right now. And love it or hate it, what S. Grahame Smith did to poor Jane Austen is legal (you, too, can write though any work in the public domain, as the LANGUAGE poets have been doing for eons) and has created an odd boom of off-the-wall works as writers scramble to add zombies to Huckleberry Finn, War of the Worlds, The Wizard of Oz, and so on. Smith’s work in progress is Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.
I would also add an interesting book on how to write experimental fiction. Lance Olsen—Rebel Yell: A Short Guide to Fiction Writing. Part interviews, part assignments with examples. Olsen is a master writer and thinker.
And for those with an interest in the history of women writing extreme fiction do find a copy of E.G. Frideman & M. Fuchs –Breaking the Sequence—Women’s Experimental Fiction, which gives an overview on the women who were pioneers including Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein.
My picks for a quick dip into the Experimental oceans in the Aughts race beyond the snippets by the masters in the above anthologies and would be the following:
Flann O’Brien – At Swim-Two-Birds
Who can resists a novel about a man writing a novel about a man writing a novel whose characters come alive when he sleeps and rewrite everything?
Jeanette Winterson—The Passion
One of Winterson’s irresistible books from early on in what has become a splendid career. She’s a true original. Part history, part collage, and always fun. And the musical language!
Kurt Vonnegut—Breakfast of Champions
Everybody has their own faves. When the author enters a scene in this book and breaks the fourth wall to talk directly to the reader my young mind was blown.
Donald Barthelme –Sixty Stories
Barthelme was one of the reasons people read The New Yorker in the 60’s. His stories exist sans arc. They’re flat from beginning to end and endlessly fascinating. Like Charles Addams on acid.
Juan Rios – Loves That Bind
A Spanish writer who is as inventive as he is talented. Twenty-six letters to 26 women. Each is a literary character from another author’s work. Each chapter in the style of the existing novel. D is Daisy. L is Lolita. Z is Zazie. Can you figure them all out?
David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas
Mitchell wiped out everybody with this one. A frolic through time and space and identity. Critics compare him to Philip K. Dick, Umberto Eco, and Haruki Murakami. Michael Chabon calls it, “The novel as series of nested dolls or Chinese boxes, a puzzle-book. . . .”
Octavia Butler—Bloodchild and Other Stories
Buy it for the title story alone. Butler always investigated race and sexuality and the idea of male pregnancy at the whim of another species is way out.
Mark Z. Danielewski--House of Leaves
A self-published ghost story about a haunted house with all sorts of odd typography, different colors of ink, drawings, that gathered such a following that a major house picked it up and reproduced it. Not for the faint of heart.
Eurydice – f/32
What happens when a woman is disassociated from her vagina, which runs off on its own adventures?
Kelly Link –Pretty Monsters
Absolutely one of the cleverest writers out there right now. She runs her own litmag and small press (with her husband) and writes stories that you will never forget. She’s like the second coming of Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, and all of those other Twilight Zone staffers, with a big dose of James Tiptree thrown in for spice.
Jasper Fforde—The Eyre Affair
Sort of Monty Python meets Douglas Adams meets LitCrit 101. Thursday Next, a Special Operative in literary detection, has to enter into the text of Bronte’s novel to find the absent Jane Eyre. Loads of fun. And there are sequels.
Karen Elizabeth Gordon—Paris out of hand (a wayward guide)
A completely invented guidebook to Paris, which is still somehow an emotionally connected tribute to all things Parisian.
Katherine Dunn—Geek Love
There are always rumors that this will be a movie someday but I have no idea how anybody could film it. Terry Gilliam? Maybe? I wish Dunn would write another novel but how to top this? The ultimate weird circus.
Ted Mooney—Easy Travel to Other Planets
Infamous for a scene in which a woman makes it with a porpoise but so much more than that. An alternate earth where things are coming apart.
Gilbert Sorrentino—Mulligan’s Stew
A tribute to all things James Joyce which begins with Sorrentino’s rejection letters from editors and publishers for the novel. Characters are grabbed from Dashiell Hammett and Joyce and swirled together into a brand new confection.
Hope these tickle your fancy.
But what about Borges, Calvino, Cortrazar, Garcia-Marquez, Grass, Pynchon, Keri Hulme, Rushdie? And how to resist Tibor Fischer’s The Collector Collector, told from the POV of a 5,000-year-old Sumerian pot?
Ahh. So many books out there. The above is tonight’s list. Try me tomorrow and it’ll be something completely different. ~~Richard Peabody
About: Richard Peabody wears many literary hats. He is editor of Gargoyle Magazine (founded in 1976), has published a novella, two books of short stories, six books of poems, plus an e-book, and edited or co-edited eighteen anthologies including: Mondo Barbie, Mondo Elvis, Mondo Marilyn, Mondo James Dean, Coming to Terms: A Literary Response to Abortion, Conversations with Gore Vidal, A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation, Grace and Gravity: Fiction by Washington Area Women, Alice Redux: New Stories of Alice, Lewis, and Wonderland, Sex & Chocolate: Tasty Morsels for Mind and Body, Kiss the Sky: Fiction and Poetry Starring Jimi Hendrix and Gravity Dancers: Even More Fiction by Washington Area Women. Peabody teaches fiction writing for the Johns Hopkins Advanced Studies Program. He lives in Arlington, Virginia. You can find out more at www.wikipedia.com and www.gargoylemagazine.com
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Raymond Carver: "A Persistent and Steady Glow"
From The Paris Review Interviews, Volume III—an interview with Raymond Carver in 1983.
Interviewer: How do you hope your stories will affect people? Do you think your writing will change anybody?
Carver: … Good fiction is partly a bringing of the news from one world to another. That end is good in and of itself, I think. But changing things through fiction, changing somebody’s political affiliation or the political system itself, or saving the whales or the redwood trees, no. Not if these are the kinds of changes you mean. And I don’t think it should have to do any of these things, either. It doesn’t have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it, and the different kind of pleasure that’s taken in reading something that’s durable and made to last, as well as beautiful in and of itself. Something that throws off these sparks—a persistent and steady glow, however dim.
Interviewer: How do you hope your stories will affect people? Do you think your writing will change anybody?
Carver: … Good fiction is partly a bringing of the news from one world to another. That end is good in and of itself, I think. But changing things through fiction, changing somebody’s political affiliation or the political system itself, or saving the whales or the redwood trees, no. Not if these are the kinds of changes you mean. And I don’t think it should have to do any of these things, either. It doesn’t have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it, and the different kind of pleasure that’s taken in reading something that’s durable and made to last, as well as beautiful in and of itself. Something that throws off these sparks—a persistent and steady glow, however dim.
Apply for the Norman Mailer Writers Colony
I really, really, REALLY want to go here:
The Norman Mailer Writers Colony is pleased to announce its call for applications for the Second Annual Norman Mailer Writers Colony Fellowships at Provincetown, MA.
The Mailer Fellows have been created to honor Norman Mailer’s contributions to American culture and letters and to nurture future generations of writers. In 2009 seven Fellows spent four weeks in Provincetown, Massachusetts where they wrote, discussed their work, and were visited by writers such as Don DeLillo; editors and writers from leading publications such as the New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair. In 2010 Gay Talese will visit the colony as well as other leading writers to be named.
Fiction and non-fiction writers can apply for a 28-day residency in Provincetown, Massachusetts, near Mailer’s home beginning July 5, 2010. Once again, seven Fellows will be selected. In addition, as many as 66 applicants will be offered scholarships to one week writing workshops in Provincetown during May, June, August and September, 2010.
Information about the Fellowships, including an application, can be found at http://www.nmwcolony.org/curriculumPrograms/overview/.
Applications must be received by March 13, 2009.
The Norman Mailer Writers Colony is pleased to announce its call for applications for the Second Annual Norman Mailer Writers Colony Fellowships at Provincetown, MA.
The Mailer Fellows have been created to honor Norman Mailer’s contributions to American culture and letters and to nurture future generations of writers. In 2009 seven Fellows spent four weeks in Provincetown, Massachusetts where they wrote, discussed their work, and were visited by writers such as Don DeLillo; editors and writers from leading publications such as the New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair. In 2010 Gay Talese will visit the colony as well as other leading writers to be named.
Fiction and non-fiction writers can apply for a 28-day residency in Provincetown, Massachusetts, near Mailer’s home beginning July 5, 2010. Once again, seven Fellows will be selected. In addition, as many as 66 applicants will be offered scholarships to one week writing workshops in Provincetown during May, June, August and September, 2010.
Information about the Fellowships, including an application, can be found at http://www.nmwcolony.org/curriculumPrograms/overview/.
Applications must be received by March 13, 2009.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Want a Free Box of Literary Journals?
I accumulate a number of literary journals through subscriptions and purchases and freebies, and after I’m done with them I try to find ways to pass them along, usually involved with a class I’m teaching. But my class this spring doesn’t lend itself to my usual lit journal project, and the stack is teetering and spilling over….
So, here’s my thought: I will pack as many of them as I can into one of those set-price boxes at the post office and mail it to one random reader selected from all who enter. If you’re interested, email me your name/address (U.S. only; sorry!) with the subject line BOX OF JOURNALS.
I’m not sure how many copies I can fit into one box, but I’ll have to take a moment and brag that I do an absolutely amazing job of packing a car for a road trip, so I bet it will be more than you expect. Journals include Shenandoah, Tin House, Gettysburg Review, Review, One Story, and I won’t send anything older than 2(ish) years.
Deadline to enter this exciting competition is Friday, January 29, 6 PM EST!
Legalese: Your entry email will be promptly deleted after this contest ends, and your name/info will not be added to any lists.
So, here’s my thought: I will pack as many of them as I can into one of those set-price boxes at the post office and mail it to one random reader selected from all who enter. If you’re interested, email me your name/address (U.S. only; sorry!) with the subject line BOX OF JOURNALS.
I’m not sure how many copies I can fit into one box, but I’ll have to take a moment and brag that I do an absolutely amazing job of packing a car for a road trip, so I bet it will be more than you expect. Journals include Shenandoah, Tin House, Gettysburg Review, Review, One Story, and I won’t send anything older than 2(ish) years.
Deadline to enter this exciting competition is Friday, January 29, 6 PM EST!
Legalese: Your entry email will be promptly deleted after this contest ends, and your name/info will not be added to any lists.
Workshop Your Whole Novel Ms.
Richard Peabody is a legendary DC teacher…here’s your chance to workshop your entire novel with him and a small class of peers:
Critique Your Complete Novel--
Not Just a Couple of Chapters
Peabody’s Novel Class
Limited to 5 students. We meet every two weeks on Wednesday day nights 7:30 until 10pm at my house in Arlington, Virginia. Four to five blocks from Virginia Square Metro station.
1. February 1
2. February 17
3. March 3
4. March 17
5. March 31
[afraid we have to skip 3 weeks so longest novel will be last]
6. April 28
7. May 5
Cost is $500 to be paid before the first night. Due to people dropping the class at the last minute and forcing me to cancel the entire session I now require that $125 of this fee be non-refundable and paid before the class begins.
Every participant turns in their complete novel the first night along with 5 copies for everybody else and me. That way you get handwritten notes on everything from everybody. And you should feel free to recommend cuts, improvements, make suggestions, mark the manuscripts up at will. That's what this class is all about. By meeting every two weeks each participant should have plenty of time to complete their critiques. If you can't attend every meeting (which I demand save for unforeseeable illness or death in the family as it's a question of fairness and honor) please don't bother signing up.
Why do I teach this class? Because you can go to your favorite bookshop and lift any number of contemporary novels off the shelf and read a few chapters only to discover that they fall apart at chapter four. Why? I’ve found that most MFA programs only critique the first three chapters of your manuscript. Plus, I’ve learned from the hands-on experience of teaching this course that a complete reading and critique is absolutely the best way (dare I say only way) to go.
What’s the advantage of a small class like this one? There’s nothing quite like having five people discuss your characters as though they were living people for 2 ½ hours. What sorts of novels are eligible? Generally I handle serious literary fiction (both realism and experimental works), but the class has included YA, Sci-Fi, Mystery, Horror, Thriller, and Romance novels.
If you are interested do please email me a chapter and a synopsis. I'm only considering completed novels in the 250-350 dbl. spaced page range. (That’s one-sided, double spaced, 12pt. in Courier font.) Anything longer than that is pretty much wishful thinking right now due to grim market economics and politics. Most first novels are 300 dbl. spaced pages which equals 200pp. in book form. Simply a fact of the biz. Second novels are frequently a different story.
Alumni from Peabody’s 23 years of university, Writer’s Center, and private classes with filmed screenplays, books in print (or forthcoming) include: Mark Baechtel, Doreen Baingana, Toby Barlow, Maggie Bartley, Jodi Bloom, Sean Brijbasi, Peter Brown, Robert Cullen, Priscilla Cummings, Katharine Davis, Lucinda Ebersole, Cara Haycak, Dave Housley, Alma Katsu, Catherine Kimrey, Adam Kulakow, Nathan Leslie, Eric Lotke, Redge Mahaffey, Charlotte Manning, Meena Nayak, Matthew Olshan, William Orem, Mary Overton, Carolyn Parkhurst, Sally Pfoutz, Nani Power, Lisa Schamess, Brenda Seabrooke, Julia Slavin, and Yolanda Young.
More details: (703) 525-9296 or cell (703) 380-4893
Email: hedgehog2@erols.com
Richard Peabody wears many literary hats. He is editor of Gargoyle Magazine (founded in 1976), has published a novella, two books of short stories, six books of poems, plus an e-book, and edited or co-edited eighteen anthologies including: Mondo Barbie, Mondo Elvis, Mondo Marilyn, Mondo James Dean, Coming to Terms: A Literary Response to Abortion, Conversations with Gore Vidal, A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation, Grace and Gravity: Fiction by Washington Area Women, Alice Redux: New Stories of Alice, Lewis, and Wonderland, Sex & Chocolate: Tasty Morsels for Mind and Body, Kiss the Sky: Fiction and Poetry Starring Jimi Hendrix and Gravity Dancers: Even More Fiction by Washington Area Women. Peabody teaches fiction writing for the Johns Hopkins Advanced Studies Program. He lives in Arlington, Virginia. You can find out more at www.wikipedia.com and www.gargoylemagazine.com
.
Critique Your Complete Novel--
Not Just a Couple of Chapters
Peabody’s Novel Class
Limited to 5 students. We meet every two weeks on Wednesday day nights 7:30 until 10pm at my house in Arlington, Virginia. Four to five blocks from Virginia Square Metro station.
1. February 1
2. February 17
3. March 3
4. March 17
5. March 31
[afraid we have to skip 3 weeks so longest novel will be last]
6. April 28
7. May 5
Cost is $500 to be paid before the first night. Due to people dropping the class at the last minute and forcing me to cancel the entire session I now require that $125 of this fee be non-refundable and paid before the class begins.
Every participant turns in their complete novel the first night along with 5 copies for everybody else and me. That way you get handwritten notes on everything from everybody. And you should feel free to recommend cuts, improvements, make suggestions, mark the manuscripts up at will. That's what this class is all about. By meeting every two weeks each participant should have plenty of time to complete their critiques. If you can't attend every meeting (which I demand save for unforeseeable illness or death in the family as it's a question of fairness and honor) please don't bother signing up.
Why do I teach this class? Because you can go to your favorite bookshop and lift any number of contemporary novels off the shelf and read a few chapters only to discover that they fall apart at chapter four. Why? I’ve found that most MFA programs only critique the first three chapters of your manuscript. Plus, I’ve learned from the hands-on experience of teaching this course that a complete reading and critique is absolutely the best way (dare I say only way) to go.
What’s the advantage of a small class like this one? There’s nothing quite like having five people discuss your characters as though they were living people for 2 ½ hours. What sorts of novels are eligible? Generally I handle serious literary fiction (both realism and experimental works), but the class has included YA, Sci-Fi, Mystery, Horror, Thriller, and Romance novels.
If you are interested do please email me a chapter and a synopsis. I'm only considering completed novels in the 250-350 dbl. spaced page range. (That’s one-sided, double spaced, 12pt. in Courier font.) Anything longer than that is pretty much wishful thinking right now due to grim market economics and politics. Most first novels are 300 dbl. spaced pages which equals 200pp. in book form. Simply a fact of the biz. Second novels are frequently a different story.
Alumni from Peabody’s 23 years of university, Writer’s Center, and private classes with filmed screenplays, books in print (or forthcoming) include: Mark Baechtel, Doreen Baingana, Toby Barlow, Maggie Bartley, Jodi Bloom, Sean Brijbasi, Peter Brown, Robert Cullen, Priscilla Cummings, Katharine Davis, Lucinda Ebersole, Cara Haycak, Dave Housley, Alma Katsu, Catherine Kimrey, Adam Kulakow, Nathan Leslie, Eric Lotke, Redge Mahaffey, Charlotte Manning, Meena Nayak, Matthew Olshan, William Orem, Mary Overton, Carolyn Parkhurst, Sally Pfoutz, Nani Power, Lisa Schamess, Brenda Seabrooke, Julia Slavin, and Yolanda Young.
More details: (703) 525-9296 or cell (703) 380-4893
Email: hedgehog2@erols.com
Richard Peabody wears many literary hats. He is editor of Gargoyle Magazine (founded in 1976), has published a novella, two books of short stories, six books of poems, plus an e-book, and edited or co-edited eighteen anthologies including: Mondo Barbie, Mondo Elvis, Mondo Marilyn, Mondo James Dean, Coming to Terms: A Literary Response to Abortion, Conversations with Gore Vidal, A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation, Grace and Gravity: Fiction by Washington Area Women, Alice Redux: New Stories of Alice, Lewis, and Wonderland, Sex & Chocolate: Tasty Morsels for Mind and Body, Kiss the Sky: Fiction and Poetry Starring Jimi Hendrix and Gravity Dancers: Even More Fiction by Washington Area Women. Peabody teaches fiction writing for the Johns Hopkins Advanced Studies Program. He lives in Arlington, Virginia. You can find out more at www.wikipedia.com and www.gargoylemagazine.com
.
Monday, January 25, 2010
The Funny Side of the Writing Life
Need a laugh? Here’s a daily writing-related comic that gets all the details right:
http://boscafelife.wordpress.com/
http://boscafelife.wordpress.com/
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