When I am struggling to write a short story, I often elect to take it for a walk. I’m like, “Come on Story, let’s get some fresh air.” So the story and I go meandering through Central Park, where my story can inhale the pure-bred piss of other stories, where it can take huge dumps in the grass, dumps which I can then pick up and discard in labeled shit receptacles, where it can try to hump the legs of more attractive stories, and sometimes novels. Occasionally I let the story off the leash, letting it charge across the meadow, kicking up dirt and cigarette butts, delighting me with its freewheeling ways, but then an urban park ranger fines me $100 ($5 for every curse word, $10 for every inapt metaphor), and my story and I return home, both of us tired, demoralized, and hungry for bacon scraps.
Fairy porn for neurotic geniuses
Tonight my sister-in-law JT sent me a link to Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on creativity, and when I got done cyber-stalking an author I’m jealous of and then messing around on Facebook, I gave it a listen. Gilbert proposes that instead of thinking of ourselves as island artists who are solely responsible for our work, we should envision creative spirits who flit in and out, periodically inspiring us. Maybe true genius isn’t interior, but exterior. In ancient Greece, when a daemon visited a writer in the night, he took some of the heat off the writer’s sensitive ego. Whether the finished product turned out brilliant or embarrassing, the writer himself was only an accessory to the creative act. To quote Liz Gilbert, your original work is accomplished not by you alone, but also by “the divine cockeyed genius assigned to your case.”
Because I just finished Betsy Lerner’s book The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, the emotional fragility of the average artist has been on my mind. The more neurotic I feel and the more erratic my sense of self-worth, the more I want to rebel against these stereotypical character traits. In Lerner’s book (which I loved, by the way), authors are delicate creatures who frequently need to be coddled and reassured. But according to Gilbert, if we could just reconceptualize our creative bursts of energy as generous fairies who fly in and out of our windows to feed us clever lines and plot points, we wouldn’t be such unrelenting egomaniacs. Sounds good to me!
Although my fairies are stupider and have a weaker vocabulary than most peoples’, I am still hopeful that I can bribe them with the spare change I keep next to my computer. But where do my fairies get their ideas? Maybe there’s another whole tier of fairies, higher-up fairies, who hate my fairies because they’re ugly and dumb, and so the dominant fairies stopped talking to them in middle school and refuse to share any of the hot brainstorms going around. So with or without fairies, I am basically screwed. If the devil stopped whispering in my ear every five minutes, I’d be completely out of the writing game.
Originally I wanted to blog tonight about Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s pornography article in The Atlantic, and to congratulate my friend Lang Fisher on the success of The Onion’s new show, but now Jesus is telling me to get in bed with my husband. Sweet dreams.
This thing still works
Even without me, the internet goes on. In fact, several of my friends have been writing on it. I give you:
Casey Plett! Dai George! Herpreet Grewal! Mary South! Barry Hannah (not actually my friend, but he seems like a wonderful man and I wish I had known him. Plus he scores major points in this interview by defending John Grisham, also not my friend (yet))!
For all the times when I can’t directly endorse the web’s existence with my bloggings, at least you have these other fine people to read online. No one said anything about second best. No one said that. That was just something you were thinking to yourself, but that’s really uncool of you. When, one day, god willing, I mature enough to be able to balance work and play, you will have your blog back. In the meantime my work is going down the toilet. This holiday break I’ve become so paranoid that I will never write fiction again that when I was sick in bed yesterday I refused to think about my novel for fear that I’d start associating it with my nausea and then whenever I wrote in the future I’d throw up. So that’s work. Play, on the other hand, seems equally doomed. On New Year’s Eve, play amounted to drinking wine with my mom until I tried to tickle her feet while she did floor exercises and she promptly kicked me out of her room (at 10:30PM). Last night I lay in bed listening to my 21-year-old brother and his friends play Monopoly for hours and the game sounded incredibly pure and wholesome until I decided that the whole posse must be on drugs. But then one has to wonder which drugs could possibly make Monopoly so fun? Methamphetamines? Steroids? It could be that I have lost touch with what is fun, which, come to think of it, people have been telling me forever. But I’d like to challenge my little brother to live a day in my shoes, to sit alone in front of a window, thinking about bon mots, sipping iced coffee because it contains less stomach-upsetting acid than hot coffee, periodically checking the internet for emails that never arrive, with no access to dice or plastic hotels or meth. HE WOULD BE CRIPPLED BY BOREDOM. And then I would . . . win?
See, this was fun. I should do this more often. Unfortunately I now have to figure out how to make a living as a writer, i.e., how to collect my $200 without having written a good novel, which is going to require more hard-looking out this window, maybe some lunch, definitely some websites.
MFA writing programs: an exposé
In May I completed my first year of a two-year MFA fiction program, and so concluded the best and worst year of my life. If someone close to you has the nerve to die, I recommend surrounding yourself with sensitive writer-types. They will email you with words of comfort, they will hold your hand when you’re trembling, and most importantly, they will go out drinking with you any night of the week. I had heard that being part of a writing community was one of the main reasons to pursue an MFA, but the truth of this didn’t fully register until I was at a bar with members of my tribe, drinking and discussing workshop submissions. For nerds, it doesn’t get much better than arguing POV and authorial intent over cocktails. When you take away all the cigarettes and whiskey and general bad behavior, we were just little kids who had finally found simpatico playmates. For instance, I was not the only one who played “Library” and “Office” as a child.
But MFA programs have their ugly side as well. One’s ego is constantly being either battered or inflated. Competition, gossip, raging insecurity, and overweening ambition all form part of the MFA gauntlet. Our words often become fighting words, and our self doubt often mutates into criticism of other writers. It’s hard to maintain your sense of self worth when you feel like everyone else is more talented, more brilliant, and more published than you are. There are moments when you feel like a total fraud. There are moments when you feel that you were a much better writer before you joined the program. The burn of one bad workshop can undo the glory of three good workshops. Many of us have never had our skill, or lack of skill, tested and exposed to such an extent. It’s completely terrifying.
But it’s not life and death. Our egos are petty creatures, and learning to rein mine in this year, even just an inch or two, has been one of the most edifying lessons of the program. Huge egos aren’t equipped to deal with failure or with success; they’ll crash from both a scathing review and from an NYTimes bestseller. The writers I most admire in the program are those who remember where their values lie. Books are less important than people. Books are written by people, for people. Our books might outlive us, but they don’t define us. Unless you’re someone like Nora Roberts who seems to write books in lieu of eating and sleeping and updating her Facebook wall.
My dad was a writer, but he was never published. He was too busy being a doctor. But when he died, he left behind decades of handwritten journals, letters to his loved ones, and stories written on the backs of prescription pads. He never wrote so that he could see his name in print; he wrote because he was moved to record the stuff of life. That man could describe the rain in a million different ways. He could describe how much he adored you in a million and one. I don’t think he would’ve had much tolerance for an MFA program, but he would’ve been crazy for the after-hours conversation.
I remember my first day back at school after the funeral. I was sitting in one of my favorite literature classes, barely aware of my surroundings, and instead of scribbling notes I was writing down everything I could recall from the week before: every flower from a friend, every visitor to the house, every embrace from a fellow mourner. I had filled up three pages when my pen ran out of ink. My classmate saw me struggling, and she pulled an extra pen out of her backpack. She said I could keep it. Someone told me later that she hadn’t known what to do for me or what to say about my dad, so she was grateful that she could at least keep me writing.
Notes from the margins of the NYC literary world
This August I have been traipsing all over Manhattan with the intention of touching famous writers in person. Here is a quick summary:
1) Richard Russo and Pat Conroy at Barnes & Noble. I didn’t have a seat which made me nervous about fainting from excitement and having to sweat it out on the floor like a sensitive Victorian lady. I was stationed behind the velvet Barnes & Noble rope and I knew that my swoon would distract the audience from the authors so I held it together as best I could. Russo sat in the chair meant for Conroy and vice versa, throwing me into a brief confusion because neither one of them looked like they did in my mind or, more importantly, on their book jackets. Also I discovered that famous authors really do wear khakis and loafers and blazers just like they’re supposed to.
2) Nick McDonell at McNally Jackson on Prince Street. I had to see this guy as a way of proving to myself that I’m not a jealous person, that all my ego deflating work has been successful. I got to the bookstore early, hungry, thirsty, nervous, sweaty, and thankfully all the chairs were empty so I could sit down and read a magazine. Ten minutes later I took an inventory of the room and saw 100 new arrivals, all young and attractive and fashionably clothed. I pretended not to see them and instead focused on the elderly man next to me because his neglected breath and raggedy plastic bag felt more my style. I hung out with him after the show, and it turns out he’s writing a book about who really killed the Lindbergh baby. He brought some newspaper clippings to show McDonell.
McDonell seemed just as nice and smart and self-deprecating as described in the recent New York Times article. He had artfully floppy hair with blonde highlights probably acquired naturally in the African sun. He used delightfully unexpected verbs like “leaven.” He dog-eared his own book. He admitted to planting friends in the audience. He wore khakis like the other guys but he tucked them into haphazardly laced boots that have probably been on safari. I didn’t once think about him with his shirt off even though I could have because he reminded me of a Holister model. At Barnes & Noble Richard Russo had joked about losing his train of thought while trying to make effective eye contact with the audience “like Obama,” but McDonell was a born public speaker who could read from An Expensive Education and stare into your soul at the same time. I wasn’t one bit jealous of his success but I think if he had been a female version of himself I would’ve been because my ego is sexist. Also, some people in New York City are so far out of your league that it wouldn’t cross your mind to compete with them. You’re happy enough just sitting in their proximity while you discuss Lindbergh baby conspiracies with someone more relatable.
3) Literary Death Match at Bowery Poetry Club. Todd Zuniga of Opium Magazine created the Literary Death Match because I gather he enjoys both literature and boxing and the LDM is the nearest he could get to making writers fight each other. At these events celebrities from the bookish world judge four contestants over the course of two rounds on literary merit, performance, and intangibles. Some of the authors at Bowery read from published work, some told stories, and some did stand-up. I thought the assembled talent – judges included – was phenomenal. I actually touched some people at this one, but not with their permission.
4) Mid-Manhattan Branch of New York Public Library. This doesn’t mean that I will stop buying books, but it does mean that I will start paying overdue fines. The trouble is you have to walk through Midtown Manhattan to get to the library so by the time you reach the stacks you’re so pooped from the visual and bodily assault of crossing streets in a pack that you just want to sit in the quiet stairwell and practice deep breathing exercises. But I’m thrilled to have my NYPL card at last even though I can’t believe they just give these things to anybody. But the joke’s on them! I’m not going to use the card to educate myself in order to be a better citizen of this democracy. I’m going to use the card to gain access to the bathrooms whenever I’m in Midtown.
George Saunders makes me want to be a better woman
I’m more of an Esquire girl myself, but last night I read George Saunders’ 2007 GQ travelogue about visiting the Dominican Republic and Africa with Bill Clinton, and I was shaken in my boots. I’d read some of Saunders’ fiction, but not his essays, and this one reminded me of a less tangential David Foster Wallace, like a pared down version of the latter’s Straight Talk Express McCain chronicle from 2000 (unabridged in Consider the Lobster as “Up, Simba”), which I also loved. Unfortunately Saunders’ “Bill Clinton, Public Citizen” is not available online (I found it in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008), but you can read the accompanying interview here. I mean, I didn’t, but you can.
The “Public Citizen” piece is nominally about Bill Clinton, ostensibly about the good works of the Clinton Foundation, and essentially about what individual human beings are capable of accomplishing through empathy and diligence. At the end of the essay, Saunders is flying on a private jet back to the States, luxuriously bypassing customs and long lines and bland airplane food. He contemplates his “undeserved good luck.” He writes:
A friend’s grandmother, on her deathbed, said: I should have forgiven more.
What I’m afraid I’ll say on my deathbed is: I should have done more to help other people and less to feed my own ego.
Up here, my ego has been good and fed.
Looking down at the mountaintop, I say a little prayer that all this luck will make me more compassionate instead of more full of shit.
I’m a sucker for any author who performs a moral function through writing, who somehow – with or without an agenda – inspires us to think bigger, think more lovingly. And one who has the insight to know that he’s not always authentic or above fault himself. In this interview with Vice Magazine, Jeff Johnson asks Saunders who sees the first drafts of his work. “My wife,” he answers.
She has great judgment and honesty and, of course, knows me completely, all my tricks and falsenesses. And she has a brilliant impatience with the Merely Artsy—she wants stories to do very high-level moral work (as do I) and she reminds me of this, and forces me to go back to this higher-ground when I’m feeling tired and self-satisfied too early.
So now, thanks to George Saunders, not only do I want to go out and heal sick children, I also want to be a better writer. And find myself a wife. There goes my summer.
“If today is opposite day, I’m happy.” –Paul Legault as Emily Dickinson
In local lit news, UVA poetry graduate Paul Legault has “translated” all of Emily Dickinson’s poetry into straight-up English. Charlottesville’s new Try & Make blog has excerpts from the book. I will reproduce the excerpts here because I like them so much and because I am a poem burglar. Lock up your poems, people.
7. If you’re a flower, I’m kind of like your zombie-gardener.
8. Dig up my grave, would you? I’m a zombie, and I’ve got some flowers for you!
9. If today is opposite day, I’m happy.
11. If you pick a rose, it can no longer access water and other vital nutrients that it needs to live.
201: Because of your absence, I have turned into a feral cat. Finally.
204. I saw the sunrise this morning. Let me tell you about it. It was fantastic.
Sometimes you read the right thing at the right time
On Sunday I attended a family memorial service for the dimpled, red-headed baby that my uncles lost this fall to Type 1 Spinal Muscular Atrophy. I can’t put words to their experience, but last night I read the following passage from Edward P. Jones’ story “In the Blink of God’s Eye,” found in the collection All Aunt Hagar’s Children, and it seemed to speak to Sunday morning and to my little cousin’s life.
In Jones’ story, a Washington, D.C., preacher has just returned from burying his mother. “I’m next,” he realizes, “in that long death line that started with our Daddy Adam. And with Mama Eve.” But in the cemetery he “blinks” and suddenly he is not afraid, even though he has now lost both parents, “the whole fortress” between himself and death. He returns to D.C. knowing what a “good human bein my mama was, and how heaven was lucky to have her.” He no longer fears, and he says to his congregation, “I tell ya I just blinked and it was all laid out to me.” Here is the conclusion of his sermon:
“So we forgive you, Mama Eve. God did that for you, so how can we do less? I stand next in the long death line under that eternal gaze of a just and fair God who just blinked, just blinked a few times, I tell ya, and in that little bit of blinkin my mama had lived her seventy-nine good years. Just a blink in God’s eye. But O what a wondrous blink!”
Fantastic Mr. Fox spoiler alert
I’m reading The Fantastic Mr. Fox to a four-year-old. She’s covering her face with her hands, trembling, terrified of the guns pointed at the fox burrow, asking me, “Is he going to be okay?” I want to say, “Wait and see! Who knows how the story might unfold?” I’m reluctant to set a bad precedent for giving away the ending, no matter how desperately needed. Instead I see the fear in her eyes and I say, “Oh he’ll be FINE. He’s fantastic, remember? He’s the GOOD guy.” But I was thinking, would I have been such a voracious reader in my youth if someone had always reassured me that everything would be okay? Why read to the ending when there’s nothing at stake? Maybe I should’ve refused to comfort her and instead let her experience the thrill of not knowing what the next page would bring. “No matter what we do,” I could’ve said, “we can’t save the fox.”
The library is never open long enough – see you in 2010
Today we say goodbye to this year’s Virginia Festival of the Book. If someone had told me way back in the last century that I would be guest blogging for a major festival in 2008 and 2009, I would have said, “Blogging. That must be something you do from a flying car.” Turns out that this year’s festival coincided with the maiden flight of the world’s first car/airplane hybrid, which I don’t think was chance.
So we are living firmly in the future. And yet still reading books, a medium older than peanut butter, even while people all around us are predicting that these are end times for books. But to my surprise and delight, yesterday’s “What About My Book? Navigating the Industry Now” panel was optimistic. Although Ron Hogan of GalleyCat and Beatrice (and the author of The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane! American Films of the 1970s, which must have won some kind of title award) described the New York publishing industry as being “in freefall,” the panelists all agreed that a good book always has a future in the business. Authors might not receive the $5 million advances they’ve come to expect, but a commercially successful book will award them royalties above and beyond a small advance. According to the panelists, the recession has forced big publishing houses to stop overpaying for projects, or issuing “bad bank loans” to authors, which is a positive change to their business models, even if it might cost jobs in the short-term.
The big publishing houses are still going to rely too heavily on books like the latest celebrity memoir or fad diet book that don’t require massive promotional budgets (these things sell themselves), so mid-size houses like Algonquin that don’t need to answer to stockholders might be a better fit for new authors, even if they can’t provide the coveted six-figure advance. Does that make sense? Did I get that right? Is anyone else falling asleep? Ha – that’s actually a fun game. Let’s keep playing. Is anyone else eating her first ever box of Cracker Jacks, wondering what the big deal is? Is anyone else biting her nails to shreds? Is anyone else kind of liking Keith Gessen’s novel All the Sad Young Literary Men even though their friends gave it bad reviews? Is anyone else easily distracted?
Returning to this idea of the celebrity memoir being a surefire, no-brainer hit, I went to my last Festival of the Book panel this afternoon, entitled Francois Coty: The Perfume Magnate. Skipping over the variegated history of this French billionaire turned fascist who founded the Coty fragrance company, it interests me that the Coty company, although now out of the Coty family’s hands, is still hugely profitable because it sells celebrity perfumes almost exclusively. J.Lo, Sarah Jessica Parker, the Beckhams, and Celine Dion all have their own smells in the Coty catalogue. Even Tim McGraw and the Olsen twins are in on the action. Do people even buy perfume anymore if it’s not affiliated with some superstar? Mary-Kate and Ashley are the new rose and lilac. And are certain celebrities perceived to be better smelling to the general public? I bet Obama smells good. Can someone put that in a bottle? And then pour the bottle all over the back of my neck three times a day? What?
I sense that I’m losing you again. Let me conclude by bragging about the other fabulous thing I did as part of the Festival of the Book: scored a free ticket to the Authors’ Reception. Because I came by myself, I subjected numerous people to my mingling skills. Fortunately novelist Sarah Collins Honenberger was lovely as usual (you can find her blog here) and I met Robert Stilling, an English Ph.D candidate who co-authored What Should I Read Next?, a book of recommended reading from UVA professors. Then I decided the party was too grown-uppy so I sat down with a first-grade girl and got to talking about frogs until I lost track of time and security ushered us out of the Special Collections Library. I don’t know what it is with me and hanging out with little girls at literary soirees, but I seriously need to find some writer friends my own age.